Marketing

5 minute CNBC video about successful marketing with Rob Frankel.
Clients such as Disney, Burger King and US Forrest Service

Listen at Rob Frankel being interviewed by CNBC's Liz Claman.

Rob's answer to - What is the key to successful branding?

• "The key is to understand how misunderstanding branding really is!
• Become the only alternative for your customer
• Branding is not about you! Brand from outside in.

I will elaborate on Optimalprint’s decision related to online marketing via Pay Per Click, a perfect complement to Direct Mailing. For Optimalprint’s commercial launch we evaluated costs and benefits related to Affiliate Online Marketing Programs versus setting up a Pay Per Click Campaign ourselves.

Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is the advertisement used on websites, advertising networks, and search engines. Your company pay when a potential customer clicks on your ad. You enter into an auction by bidding on the keywords promoting your ad, called "sponsored links" or "sponsored ads". Such ads appear next to, and sometimes, above the natural or organic results. The placement you get depends on your bidding price.

Online Affiliate Marketing Programs
Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses (merchants/advertisers) in which an affiliate (publisher) is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts. In short - you pay a middleman for assisting you in displaying your ads on the right websites for the type of traffic that you set out to reach.

Optimalprint’s Situation
Such affiliate marketing services usually have a payment model consisting of a non-refundable fixed fee for setting up the affiliate online marketing solution and then a pay per click cost. These two cost parameters vary widely between industry, country and competitors. Large markets and industries with more competitors typically render higher PPC cost. The affiliate online marketing tool evaluated by Optimalprint would cost € 2000 in a non-refundable set up fee per country, followed by a pay per click between € 1,5 - 4,5. On top of the PPC cost, the middleman added a 30% commission on all clicks.

Decisions and Benefits of Running our own PPC Campaigns
Optimalprint did not enter into an affiliate program. For Optimalprint, now launched in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, with France and UK soon to follow, our set up fee for the affiliate marketing programs would be €10.000. In addition, implementing PPC by ourselves render a significantly lower PPC cost. We pay € 0.1 to € 1 per click, which is roughly 5-15% of the Internet affiliate marketing program. If your company have 1.000 clicks, executing the PPC campaign by yourself would render roughly €2.000-3.000 in lower PPC cost per month. Furthermore, by running our own PPC Campaigns we have full control over Click Through Rate (CTR), i.e. the % of people that actually click on your ad divided by the number of impressions that your ad gets. Tweaking and improving the structure and text of your ad depending on the CTR is very effective.

Considerations before implementing your own PPC-Campaigns

1. Time – Implementing your own PPC Campaigns for a country is very time consuming. In addition it requires a lot of tweaking related to structuring your ad and adapting text and keywords depending on how your customers interact. We spend more or less 5-7 hours per week and country performing follow-up and continuos adoption. An affiliate program would save us a lot of time.
2. Countries, Languages and website structure – Launching Optimalprint in France is a challenge for us since we do not know the local conditions and website structure. Meaning that the quality of the websites, how effective they are in terms of converting the traffic, and the quality of that traffic, is not known to us. With an online affiliate marketing program, that knowledge is accessible via the supplier. A business partner that knows the local market and the country’s websites. Knowing the local website landscape will give support to your online marketing campaigns.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Effective PPC Campaigns require that you also link your Keyword campaigns to your SEO activities. The most effective PPC Campaigns arise when your selected keywords are found both in the organic search result and the sponsored links / ads. An affiliate marketing program can provide powerful placement of your ad on websites that rank high in terms of CTR and conversion.

CONCLUSION: Limited financial resources required us to implement PPC Campaigns ourselves, rendering important learnings and understanding about conversion, CTR and PPC Campaign structure. As Optimalprint grows we will most likely enter into some Affiliate Internet Marketing Program. However, with the knowledge related to PPC activities that we have now pursued, Optimalprint's procurement of Affiliate Marketing Services will be performed with much more accuracy. I strongly recommend all of you to get started with your first PPC Campaign before entering into an Affiliate Marketing Program.

Good luck!

When launching Optimalprint we tried direct mail marketing. Customer respons was poorer than anticipated so we started to dig into the questioning of what actually we could have done better. Here is a short summary of our findnings, read full version - Effective Direct Mail Marketing Guide

Direct Mail Marketing – Primary Advantages with Direct Mail Marketing

1. Target Advertising - targeting a specific group of customers.
2. Personalization of Marketing Message to customers specific needs based on previous transactions and gathered customer data.
3. Optimization of Marketing Message - Because of its direct accountability, direct mail marketing can be tested to find the best address list or customer target group; the best product offer; the best timing for your sales or marketing campaign (and many other factors). Then the winning tests can be rolled out to a wider audience for optimal results.
4. Specific data collection on customers - Responses (and non-responses) can be added to the database, allowing future mailings to be better targeted.

Successful Direct Mailing Campaign in 8 steps:

1. Define primary purpose of your Direct Mail Marketing Campaign (see ex below)

• Information regarding launch of your newly established company
• Increase sales and customer contacts
• Decrease customer churn
• Increase profitability from existing consumers

2. Marketing decisions based on customer knowledge
Message, Total cost for the campaign, Sales targets, Effect on churn levels on existing customer base, Hit rate, Break even.

3. Consider existing customers purchase history and demand before testing
Most important aspects of effective direct mail marketing is which customers to contact. Logical starting point for understanding how to construct your customer target group is to analyze your current customers. When you understand existing customer base you can effectively expand your customer target group by identifying similar companies that are not your customers today.

4. TEST your direct mail marketing assumptions – GO LIVE
Collect approximately 500-600 customer addresses and divide these customers into 2-3 customer target groups, test different marketing messages and observe customer response, hit rate, number of sales and effect on revenue

5. ANALYZE the Direct Mail Marketing Test, draw your conclusion and Decide
a. Did you reach your primary purpose defined under section 1.?
b. If your objectives where not reached find our why?
c. What communication message and was most effective?
d. What print material (flyer, brochure, postcard etc) and was most effective?
e. What sales channel was most effective?
f. When and how did the customer contact you?

6. Take care of contacting customers
The more response alternatives your give your customers the higher the hit rate. Assign responsible contact people and plan for peak of incoming traffic. Secure mail server access and proper storage of the incoming customer mails. If you work with coupons plan how to administrate and store the coupons.
Make sure your company’s telephone can handle simultaneous calls, a “call back” solution perhaps?

7. DECISIONS for the full Direct Mail Marketing Campaign!
What message shall be communicated? What product offerings or services should be in focus? and much more....

8. IMPLEMENT Your Direct Mail Marketing Campaign
Think through cost of distribution, competitor respons... etc

FOLLOW UP and draw learning’s from your direct mail marketing campaign!
Which customers did respond and which did not repsond and why? What did the customers purchase? Average Order Value compared to estimations and a lot of other

GOOD LUCK WITH GROWING YOUR BUSINESS AND REVENUES

Please help me improve this Direct Mail Marketing Guide further and do correct me if you believe that my conclusions need improvement.