Comprehensive online marketing guide. Day 1. Three ways to scale a business
The day before yesterday, I wrote an article in which I promised to publish a cycle of 60 publications on marketing and more. But as always, for some reason I postpone all the most important things to the last moment, so the fulfillment of the promise once again fell at night.
Under the cut, you will find an introductory, but extremely important concept that I was introduced to during my internship at a small American consulting company. And despite the fact that it is based on 3 methods for scaling a business (and not marketing), I am convinced that good marketing should be formed around it.
Oh, and one more thing: in the last article I was blamed for the portrait of Stalin. It seemed to me that Stalin was better than all these seals, but you yourself asked.
')
PS Since this publication is introductory - links to all published articles from this cycle will be published in the footer.
PPS Under the cut a lot of pictures.
This extremely simple concept is practically not used in Russian realities, but is very coolly used by many American companies. But before moving on to this simple life hacking, let me make a small remark about American business in general, because some representatives of the info business very often mislead their viewers, telling about how everything is rosy and sunny in America and what super-breakable chips are here. This is not true!
In the US, business can be divided into 2 conditional categories: large corporations — real whales of unbelievable sizes — for example, when you talk about a department store, you mean Macy's, when you talk about a pharmacy, you most likely mean CVS or Walgreens, when you talk about major retailers, you remember Walmart or Target, and there are plenty of such examples. That is, these are companies that were actually able to secure an association with entire product categories. And they are all very cool. In the literal sense, they have multimillion marketing budgets and in fact often do not think about the effectiveness of certain advertising channels. They even lift airships with their ads!
At the same time, there is a large number of small, small and medium-sized businesses, which in fact often do not have much. The head of the small business in the United States, in contrast to our realities, is usually not the most educated person. Judge for yourself: in America, unlike in Russia, a university graduate can easily receive from 80 thousand dollars a year. Instead of going into a nervous and stressful business, many choose quiet work from 8 am to 4 pm for quite good money. The approach to the development, promotion and optimization of small and medium-sized businesses in the United States is much worse than in most post-Soviet countries. Therefore, when you are told about the incredible breakthroughs of American entrepreneurs, treat such statements with caution.
But we, in turn, will focus on the most successful and successful examples. Returning to the announced methods of scaling virtually any business, I would like to draw your attention to just 3 very simple but effective ways that are constantly used by major companies:
It looks simple, but the majority of entrepreneurs in Russia, Ukraine, and any country in the former Soviet Union, as a rule, are focused only on increasing the flow of new customers.
I will not even focus on the fact that in most cases attracting new customers is much more expensive than optimizing internal business processes. I just want to show you that by increasing each of these categories by only 10 percent - which is absolutely little and certainly easier than increasing any one by 30 - your incomes increase by 33 percent ! And what if you can increase each of the items by 30-50 percent?
Unfortunately, most believe that good marketing should be responsible only for increasing new customers, while I am sure that good marketing should always focus on EACH of these categories. A marketer, and indeed any good internet promoter, is not a person who can click on the correct sequence of buttons - we can teach you this in a few weeks. A good promoter is one who has a vision and understanding of both the target audience and the business processes of the company with which he works.
In this article I will not consider the methods of attracting customers - we still have time to talk about all these “Vkontakte”, “Instagram” and “Facebook”. Instead, let's look at a few examples that relate to the other two tools.
First, you can always offer the customer an improved / more expensive version of the product. And it can be done in any niche. Airlines offer you to buy luxury seats, hotels - to improve rooms. By the way, here is an example of a letter from the Hilton, which I regularly receive a few days before arriving at the hotel:
You can improve your room from just $ 6. And in fact - what is $ 6, when you have already paid $ 100-300 per night? But suddenly the hotel realizes that by the date of your arrival it has free rooms of the same category that have direct access to the pool, why not sell them to you for conditional $ 6? Or maybe you decide to add a room or move to a suite? No problem, we have options for you. These numbers may seem insignificant - what is 6 bucks for the Hilton? - but in the long run, all these efforts pay off with interest.
With this proposal, Hilton solves 2 problems: firstly, it tries to maximize the profit from each customer, secondly, it manages its inventory, the number of rooms, more efficiently, trying to ensure the most complete occupancy of the most profitable rooms for the company.
By the way, with regard to improved rooms or plane tickets with more comfortable seats, this is a separate interesting topic, which is highlighted in a huge block of pricing in any good textbook on microeconomics, about which we will talk more about in the future.
Returning to the asells (this is what they call the approach to selling a more expensive or advanced version of the product at an increased cost), I mentioned fairly large players like hotels or airlines, but the point is that almost any business can use such equipment, especially if it is presented in the Internet. Here is another example from Hulu, which is a kind of Netflix analogue that allows you to stream TV shows and movies for a fixed monthly price.
As you can see, Hulu offers you to pay only $ 4 per month in order to get rid of annoying ads or add premium movies and TV shows for 8.99. And this is just one of the options. There are thousands of such examples, and I very much hope that together we will soon find suitable options for your specific field of activity.
The second possibility of increasing the size of the purchase are the so-called Crosells. From an economic point of view, we are talking about complementary products - products that can in any way complement your basic offer.
If you sell a camera or camcorder - offer to buy an additional lens, battery or conditional kit for cleaning. Virtually every gas station, the main task of which is to sell gasoline, at the moment also has a small store where you can always buy coffee with a bun and some other snack. Despite the fact that the main task of such a store is to reduce the costs associated with the cost of servicing refueling personnel, this is also a Crosssell, as well as additional services, such as changing the oil in your car.
Amazon.com is a great example to get acquainted with all sorts of options for crosssell in various product categories. Perhaps you should learn more about this site. And yet, we still talk about him later.
Speaking of increasing the size of the purchase, we will focus on the third paragraph, although this list is endless. Formation of sets.
Very often, in order to increase sales and get rid of low-liquid products in our supermarket, we combine various goods into different sets. Actually
This technique can be considered as a kind of crosscell when you combine a bottle of champagne with a box of chocolates in order to sell this set cheaper (or often even more expensive) than with a single sale. Many online and offline retailers use this technique. There is a wonderful coffee shop in Lviv, where you can buy incredibly delicious freshly roasted coffee. But as soon as you ask to buy one bag of a certain sort, you will be offered to choose one of the sets for 5-6 bags in order to feel the full bouquet of flavors and decide on your favorite type of coffee. By the way, these sets are constantly updated (so that you can try NEW SETs as often as possible).
We mentioned attracting new customers and increasing the size of transactions. The last point of this magic triangle is an increase in the frequency of purchases, which can also be talked about endlessly, but I will give just a few very quick and clear examples so that you can easily find a use for your company or product.
Take Amazon.com, which offers a discount of $ 8.62 on a $ 50 purchase, in honor of winning the company in the prestigious Harris Pool survey:
Thus, an additional information point and trigger for a new purchase is the situation that occurs with the company. To various nominations and victories in contests (especially if they are not available), you can safely add all sorts of “Celebrate 5 years on the market” and other birthdays of directors or the good mood of Tamara’s secretary.
Boxed is a service that delivers large boxes of products at low prices, offers to use Pancakes Sunday promotional code to get minus $ 5 from a purchase, or Waffles promotional code for those who woke up only by Monday but for a 3-dollar discount.
The company not only offers a situational discount, but it also, in fact, skillfully works with the objections of those who did not see this message on time, but still got the opportunity to get a discount, although not so big.
Similarly, you can use any holidays, which are not only in the celebration of the New Year, birthday, March 8 and February 23. Take a look at the calendar, and you will find there a huge number of holidays that occur literally every week. Moreover, you can even try to gather around your company a certain HYIP, regularly acquainting customers with various holidays and dates, which they had no idea.
Below are examples of e-mails from hotels that offer to earn 2,000 miles for each night spent in April at the Hilton:
The IGM network offers its users a monthly challenge with increasing bonuses for each next step:
SPG offers extra points for the first and second night for a certain period of time.
Someone may argue, they say, it is easy to give examples of hotels and airlines - they have super budgets. But in fact, I show them on purpose, because in these niches there is an extremely large competition, and in fact all these hotel chains, airlines and other major players are forced to take such steps in order not to take off from the market.
That is why each of these proposals is the work of calculation and reflection of many economists, marketers and other decision makers. I am deeply convinced that they should not only be taken into account, but also taken into account for their projects.
Summarizing : there are 3 main ways to scale a business: attracting new customers, increasing the size of purchases and increasing the frequency of purchases. A gain of 10 percent of each of the above methods leads to an overall increase in revenues by 33 percent (Which is easier? Is it to increase one category by 30 percent or 3 by 10?). Attracting new customers is the most expensive, but necessary method. The increase in the size of purchases is promoted by the active introduction of asells, crosssells and the grouping of products / services into specific sets. Increasing the frequency of purchases can be achieved through well-established communications with customers. Do not forget to congratulate them on the next holiday, to offer a situational discount or just to wish you a good mood!
Tomorrow we will talk about retargeting.
Under the cut, you will find an introductory, but extremely important concept that I was introduced to during my internship at a small American consulting company. And despite the fact that it is based on 3 methods for scaling a business (and not marketing), I am convinced that good marketing should be formed around it.
Oh, and one more thing: in the last article I was blamed for the portrait of Stalin. It seemed to me that Stalin was better than all these seals, but you yourself asked.
')
PS Since this publication is introductory - links to all published articles from this cycle will be published in the footer.
PPS Under the cut a lot of pictures.
This extremely simple concept is practically not used in Russian realities, but is very coolly used by many American companies. But before moving on to this simple life hacking, let me make a small remark about American business in general, because some representatives of the info business very often mislead their viewers, telling about how everything is rosy and sunny in America and what super-breakable chips are here. This is not true!
In the US, business can be divided into 2 conditional categories: large corporations — real whales of unbelievable sizes — for example, when you talk about a department store, you mean Macy's, when you talk about a pharmacy, you most likely mean CVS or Walgreens, when you talk about major retailers, you remember Walmart or Target, and there are plenty of such examples. That is, these are companies that were actually able to secure an association with entire product categories. And they are all very cool. In the literal sense, they have multimillion marketing budgets and in fact often do not think about the effectiveness of certain advertising channels. They even lift airships with their ads!
At the same time, there is a large number of small, small and medium-sized businesses, which in fact often do not have much. The head of the small business in the United States, in contrast to our realities, is usually not the most educated person. Judge for yourself: in America, unlike in Russia, a university graduate can easily receive from 80 thousand dollars a year. Instead of going into a nervous and stressful business, many choose quiet work from 8 am to 4 pm for quite good money. The approach to the development, promotion and optimization of small and medium-sized businesses in the United States is much worse than in most post-Soviet countries. Therefore, when you are told about the incredible breakthroughs of American entrepreneurs, treat such statements with caution.
3 methods for scaling a business
But we, in turn, will focus on the most successful and successful examples. Returning to the announced methods of scaling virtually any business, I would like to draw your attention to just 3 very simple but effective ways that are constantly used by major companies:
It looks simple, but the majority of entrepreneurs in Russia, Ukraine, and any country in the former Soviet Union, as a rule, are focused only on increasing the flow of new customers.
I will not even focus on the fact that in most cases attracting new customers is much more expensive than optimizing internal business processes. I just want to show you that by increasing each of these categories by only 10 percent - which is absolutely little and certainly easier than increasing any one by 30 - your incomes increase by 33 percent ! And what if you can increase each of the items by 30-50 percent?
Unfortunately, most believe that good marketing should be responsible only for increasing new customers, while I am sure that good marketing should always focus on EACH of these categories. A marketer, and indeed any good internet promoter, is not a person who can click on the correct sequence of buttons - we can teach you this in a few weeks. A good promoter is one who has a vision and understanding of both the target audience and the business processes of the company with which he works.
In this article I will not consider the methods of attracting customers - we still have time to talk about all these “Vkontakte”, “Instagram” and “Facebook”. Instead, let's look at a few examples that relate to the other two tools.
So how can I increase the size of the purchase?
1. Asells
First, you can always offer the customer an improved / more expensive version of the product. And it can be done in any niche. Airlines offer you to buy luxury seats, hotels - to improve rooms. By the way, here is an example of a letter from the Hilton, which I regularly receive a few days before arriving at the hotel:
You can improve your room from just $ 6. And in fact - what is $ 6, when you have already paid $ 100-300 per night? But suddenly the hotel realizes that by the date of your arrival it has free rooms of the same category that have direct access to the pool, why not sell them to you for conditional $ 6? Or maybe you decide to add a room or move to a suite? No problem, we have options for you. These numbers may seem insignificant - what is 6 bucks for the Hilton? - but in the long run, all these efforts pay off with interest.
With this proposal, Hilton solves 2 problems: firstly, it tries to maximize the profit from each customer, secondly, it manages its inventory, the number of rooms, more efficiently, trying to ensure the most complete occupancy of the most profitable rooms for the company.
By the way, with regard to improved rooms or plane tickets with more comfortable seats, this is a separate interesting topic, which is highlighted in a huge block of pricing in any good textbook on microeconomics, about which we will talk more about in the future.
Returning to the asells (this is what they call the approach to selling a more expensive or advanced version of the product at an increased cost), I mentioned fairly large players like hotels or airlines, but the point is that almost any business can use such equipment, especially if it is presented in the Internet. Here is another example from Hulu, which is a kind of Netflix analogue that allows you to stream TV shows and movies for a fixed monthly price.
As you can see, Hulu offers you to pay only $ 4 per month in order to get rid of annoying ads or add premium movies and TV shows for 8.99. And this is just one of the options. There are thousands of such examples, and I very much hope that together we will soon find suitable options for your specific field of activity.
2. Crossela
The second possibility of increasing the size of the purchase are the so-called Crosells. From an economic point of view, we are talking about complementary products - products that can in any way complement your basic offer.
If you sell a camera or camcorder - offer to buy an additional lens, battery or conditional kit for cleaning. Virtually every gas station, the main task of which is to sell gasoline, at the moment also has a small store where you can always buy coffee with a bun and some other snack. Despite the fact that the main task of such a store is to reduce the costs associated with the cost of servicing refueling personnel, this is also a Crosssell, as well as additional services, such as changing the oil in your car.
Amazon.com is a great example to get acquainted with all sorts of options for crosssell in various product categories. Perhaps you should learn more about this site. And yet, we still talk about him later.
3. Formation of sets / sets
Speaking of increasing the size of the purchase, we will focus on the third paragraph, although this list is endless. Formation of sets.
Very often, in order to increase sales and get rid of low-liquid products in our supermarket, we combine various goods into different sets. Actually
This technique can be considered as a kind of crosscell when you combine a bottle of champagne with a box of chocolates in order to sell this set cheaper (or often even more expensive) than with a single sale. Many online and offline retailers use this technique. There is a wonderful coffee shop in Lviv, where you can buy incredibly delicious freshly roasted coffee. But as soon as you ask to buy one bag of a certain sort, you will be offered to choose one of the sets for 5-6 bags in order to feel the full bouquet of flavors and decide on your favorite type of coffee. By the way, these sets are constantly updated (so that you can try NEW SETs as often as possible).
How to make buy more?
We mentioned attracting new customers and increasing the size of transactions. The last point of this magic triangle is an increase in the frequency of purchases, which can also be talked about endlessly, but I will give just a few very quick and clear examples so that you can easily find a use for your company or product.
Use company related news
Take Amazon.com, which offers a discount of $ 8.62 on a $ 50 purchase, in honor of winning the company in the prestigious Harris Pool survey:
Thus, an additional information point and trigger for a new purchase is the situation that occurs with the company. To various nominations and victories in contests (especially if they are not available), you can safely add all sorts of “Celebrate 5 years on the market” and other birthdays of directors or the good mood of Tamara’s secretary.
Offer situational promotions / discounts
Boxed is a service that delivers large boxes of products at low prices, offers to use Pancakes Sunday promotional code to get minus $ 5 from a purchase, or Waffles promotional code for those who woke up only by Monday but for a 3-dollar discount.
The company not only offers a situational discount, but it also, in fact, skillfully works with the objections of those who did not see this message on time, but still got the opportunity to get a discount, although not so big.
Similarly, you can use any holidays, which are not only in the celebration of the New Year, birthday, March 8 and February 23. Take a look at the calendar, and you will find there a huge number of holidays that occur literally every week. Moreover, you can even try to gather around your company a certain HYIP, regularly acquainting customers with various holidays and dates, which they had no idea.
Below are examples of e-mails from hotels that offer to earn 2,000 miles for each night spent in April at the Hilton:
The IGM network offers its users a monthly challenge with increasing bonuses for each next step:
SPG offers extra points for the first and second night for a certain period of time.
Someone may argue, they say, it is easy to give examples of hotels and airlines - they have super budgets. But in fact, I show them on purpose, because in these niches there is an extremely large competition, and in fact all these hotel chains, airlines and other major players are forced to take such steps in order not to take off from the market.
That is why each of these proposals is the work of calculation and reflection of many economists, marketers and other decision makers. I am deeply convinced that they should not only be taken into account, but also taken into account for their projects.
Summarizing : there are 3 main ways to scale a business: attracting new customers, increasing the size of purchases and increasing the frequency of purchases. A gain of 10 percent of each of the above methods leads to an overall increase in revenues by 33 percent (Which is easier? Is it to increase one category by 30 percent or 3 by 10?). Attracting new customers is the most expensive, but necessary method. The increase in the size of purchases is promoted by the active introduction of asells, crosssells and the grouping of products / services into specific sets. Increasing the frequency of purchases can be achieved through well-established communications with customers. Do not forget to congratulate them on the next holiday, to offer a situational discount or just to wish you a good mood!
Marketing 101. Comprehensive Marketing Guide
General concepts
Social networks
- In contact with. Customize ads on users of certain sites using the VK authorization widget.
- In contact with. We give advertising on visitors to FOREIGN forums and websites.
miscellanea
- Preparatory work to help conquer Kickstarter
- Startup on a note. A cozy book post for you and your project.
Tomorrow we will talk about retargeting.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/329516/
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