a strategic approach to your online footprint - part 1

A Strategic Approach to Your Online Footprint

Part 1

Presented by

Sridhar Sunkara

How to grow my business

Strategy is the Key

Strategy is choice

The challenge for management is to pick the right game to play and play to win

5 important questions to build a strategy

What is our Winning aspiration?

Where will we play?

How will we Win?

What capabilities must be in place?

What management systems are required?

The motivating factor, aspiration

what area of products, customer segmentation, channels

– Value proposition, competitive advantage

The resources, the activities that need to happen, etc

Integrated Approach

Source: Playing to win – How strategy really works: Harvard Business Review Press

What is your aspiration

Purpose of a company is to create a Customer

There should be a deep understanding of the

Customer

Serve & Win with Customer

Don’t put Product Lens - marketing blinded by products and not see the larger pictures or true market dynamics

Where to Play There should be a deep understanding of the

consumer, competition analysis, and

capabilities

Need to understand what business you are really in

Where to compete and where not to compete

Some of choices:

Geography, Product or service type, Consumer

segment, distribution channel, vertical stage of

production or service you engage

Where to PlayImportant things to avoid

Refuse to Choose

Buy your way out of an unattractive game

Accepting an existing choice as immutable

How to winTo provide better value proposition than competitors do, and

providing it on a sustainable basis

Two generic ways:

Cost Leadership – Cost reduction is relentlessly pursued

• Does not always mean charge lowest prices

• Have option of under pricing

•Can reinvest margin to creative competitive advantage

Differentiation – Brand is relentlessly built

• Distinctively more valuable

• The more a product or service is differentiated along a

dimension consumers care about, there can be premium price

How to win Loyalty emerges where there is a match between what

the brand distinctively offers and the consumer

personally values

Sustainable Winning Strategy

To have both cost leadership and differentiation

Capabilities Companies activities that when perfumed at the highest level

will enable the company’s to bring its where to play and how to

win choices to life

Capabilities should reinforce one another and should make

stronger than they would be alone.

Create an Activity System – Visual representation of company’s

competitive advantage, capturing on a single page the core

capabilities of the company

Capabilities When articulating activities think about:

Generic Strength

Critical Strength

Mutually reinforcing activities

Management Systems

Management is what is most neglected in companies

To be successful a company need robust process for creating, reviewing,

and communicating about strategy

Need structures to support its core capabilities

Need specific measures to ensure its strategy is working

All 5 Questions need to be answered

Strategy is Iterative process

Organization has Multiple levels of nested cascades

No one perfect strategy; find the distinctive choices that work for you

Methodology

Business Model Canvas

Each component contains a series of hypotheses that you need to test

Lean Startup Model

Each component contains a series of hypotheses that you need to test

What is your online strategy

Customer Discovery

What should I do first?

Too much to thing aboutToo many channels

Your Website should be your first step to online presence

The website is the hub of your integrated marketing effort.

The website is the hub for your various audiences.

sustainable growth

What do you want?

What is more important

Time on your site online assets Conversion Rate

or

Stickiness?

• Increasing Conversion

• Not More Time on Site

• User Experience - Careful of Distractions

How To Increasing Stickiness to the site

Website navigation and content should help to facilitate decision, not calculate persuasion

• Increase number of results per page• Visuals (images, map)• Suggest alternatives

Return Relevant Results

Encourage Use of Filters

• Dynamic• Sliders when possible• Retain all filters and

sorts• Add option to clear

selected fields

Clear Price Displays• Bigger is better• Highlight promotional rates• Remain consistent through funnel • Create transparency• Allow customers to modify

Create Urgency• Highlight 5 or less items

• Number of times booked

• Show what they can save now

Easy to Find Content

• Limit tabs• Don’t make customers

search• Show thumbnails on main

page• Include guest reviews

Details Photo Layout convert quickly

2 . 28%Increase in conversion

Streamline Checkout

• Remove Unnecessary fields and steps

• Test one-page flow

• Provide phone number

• Remind customer what they ‘re buying

• Stickiness should focus on increasing conversion. Not on the amount of time on site.

• It’s about creating a great user experience. Make it easy for users to accomplish their goal and they will stick around.

• Be original and authentic to the value you are providing

• Be transparent about what you are offering.

Content Strategy

The important challenge now

Content & Design for different outlets, different devices and languages

Creating Adaptive Content

Put more effort into creating content in such a way that it can be reused effectively.

Create Once,Publish Everywhere

Content

Future of Adaptive Content

Content Goals

Sharable (Viral): Content that is designed to spread organically. Usually, it has little substance beyond the initial spark that makes viral content unique; thus, it has a fairly short shelf life.

The main goal with viral content is to get your consumer to click the social share buttons and build awareness of you, your product or your company.

Discussion: Content that is designed to spark a conversation within a community. unlike viral, its shelf life is much longer.

The content can play on the same extremes as viral, but it's more thought-provoking.

The main goal with discussion content is to get its consumer to leave comments and to interact with other readers.

Lead: Content that is designed to draw people into some sort of opt-in. This content exposes a gap in the consumer's knowledge and hints at a promise of closing that gap if the user enters his email address or fills out a lead form.

Conversion : Content similar to lead content, but with one important difference. This content convinces consumer into making a decision to alleviate whatever problem they need help with

Call to Action Strategy

Fast Thinking

Slow Thinking

Stylized Text Memes

InfographicsPhotos

Visual note-taking

Video

Build the right CMS

Why Quality Custom CMS Work

• EASY TO USE• INTELLIGENT• HELPFUL• FLEXIBLE• POWERFUL• INTUITIVE• STABLE• SECURE• PLEASANT• SIMPLE

Flexible Content – WINNER

Design Responsive Web Design

Custom Mobile Web Design

Why Mobile

Why Mobile

Why Mobile

How people Really Use Mobile

Mobile does not mean on the go

68% use at home

Most common use is

ME TIME

Why Mobile

Mobile Ads or Apps?Mobile ad budgets in the U.S. are expected to increase from $2.3 billion in 2012 to almost $11 billion in 2016

New media require new methods of advertising, and those evolve over time.

3 reasons why mobile ads don’t work

People Don’t Like Them

There’s No Right Side

The “Fat Finger” Effect

Mobile Apps will trump

Consumers- don’t perceive them as advertising- they value them for their functionality

Marketers- more cost-efficient than traditional ads- sometimes create entirely new revenue streams

Users spend on average,

82% of their mobile minutes with apps

18% with web browsers

Smartphone apps fall into five categories:

1. Games and entertainment, 42% of time spent2. Social networks (especially Facebook), 31% 3. Utilities, including maps, clocks, calendars, cameras, and e-mail;4. Discovery, including apps for Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Flixster;5. Brands, such as Nike and Red Bull.

1. Add convenience

2. Offer unique value.

3. Provide social value

4. Offer incentives

5. Entertain.

Five strategies that can help Apps succeed

Five strategies that can help Apps succeed

Add convenience Offer unique value.

Provide social value

Offer incentives

Entertain

Mobile Best Practices KEEP IT QUICK

SIMPLIFY NAVIGATION

BE THUMB-FRIENDLY

DESIGN FOR VISIBILITY

MAKE IT ACCESSIBLE

MAKE IT EASY TO CONVERT

MAKE IT LOCAL

MAKE IT SEAMLESS

USE MOBILE SITE REDIRECTS

Measure

Experiment – The Lean WayTo Win – Set Metrics >> Build Hypothesis >> Experiment >> Action

Step 1 – Pick what key metrics you want to improve

Step 2 – Form assumptions by 1. With existing data 2. Without Data

Step 3 – Create an experimentWho is your audience?What do you want them to do?Why should they do it?

Step 4 – Measure

Experiment – Results

If1. Success >> Next Metric to improve

2. Failed spectacularly - revisit hypothesis. It’s time to identify a new who, what, and why, based on what we’ve learned.

3. Marginal success - but not close enough, try another experiment. The hypothesis might still be valid, and we can try again, adjusting based on what we’ve learned.

Experiment – The Lean Way

Sridhar SunkaraFollow Me: sssunkara

Call Me901.270.4397

Email Mesunkara@thinkebiz.net

Thank You