Are you wondering why some products sell better even when they’re largely similar? What makes a single product stand out, especially in a saturated market? The first thing you have to know is that marketing plays a huge role. It doesn’t matter how good your product is; you need to learn how to attract people, make them stay, and finally purchase from you. There are several experts that can make marketing sound complicated, but go back to the basics.
Stay simple and focused. Solve your bottlenecks first before considering any complicated campaign.
In this episode, Todd Staples joins us to talk about how marketing and products go hand-in-hand. He shares the key principles and benchmarks to look for when improving conversion rates and how research is at the heart of solving bottlenecks. You need to use both quantitative and qualitative data to understand how your customers think and behave. Simple but effective changes can double sales and generate revenue you’d only ever dream of.
At the end of this episode, you’ll get a clear understanding of how to consistently improve your marketing with simple but proven strategies!
About Luke
Todd Staples is an executive leader with over 15 years of experience helping businesses grow by utilizing strategy and data-driven marketing plans. He has a proven record of innovative business development, database marketing, and e-commerce marketing. He is currently the Head of Healthcare Innovation at ACTO and was previously the Regional Vice President of Business Strategy at Stream Companies.
Three Reasons to Listen to the Podcast:
- Discover why having a good product is one part of business success and why you need to back it up with strong marketing.
- Learn the key principles of marketing and how you can apply both quantitative and qualitative research to grow your business.
- Understand why simple strategies are often the most effective but most overlooked by business owners.
Essential Marketing Tools for any Business and Franchise
Todd’s Experience with E-Commerce
- Todd created a light bulb for the automotive industry and found that having a website is useless if you don’t know how to market and drive traffic.
- He then set up a Yahoo store and sold 2 to 3 bulbs a week. Todd shared that it felt more like a hindrance rather than a business at that point.
- However, this experience taught him that he enjoys marketing more than product development.
Marketing and Products Go Hand-in-Hand
- Remember that your product should have marketing. You can’t have one without the other.
- For any business to survive, you need three people to focus on the product, operations and finance, and marketing.
- Most entrepreneurs start off filling all three roles. Over time, you need to find the role that fits you the most.
- The most profitable thing you can do for your business is marketing.
Key Principles of Marketing
- You don’t need to do everything at full speed all at the same time.
- Focus on the bottleneck. Your product or business is only as good as the weakest link.
- Your highest impact action will always be about solving your biggest bottleneck.
Benchmarks to Look for
- Todd recommends fixing your funnel through research, finding out why people are not doing what you want them to do, and fixing it.
- Don’t assume answers and create solutions that don’t solve the problem.
- You can research by gathering both quantitative and qualitative data.
- Qualitative data can be simply asking people why they bought from you or not. This is where you get a better understanding of emotions, thoughts, feelings, and syntax.
- Meanwhile, quantitative research can utilize site or Google analytics and heat maps.
Effective Quantitative Research
- Todd recommends having heat maps that can track clicks and scrolls. Mapping can help you find out where people don’t click or scroll.
- With analytics, you don’t need to understand every single metric. Todd recommends looking for outliers.
- Understand your pages that perform the best and worst, and figure out how to improve the latter using the former’s success.
- The metric depends on where your business is. You can measure through the number of sales or visits.
Match Qualitative Research with the Quantitative
- Todd shares that it’s not enough what pages do well or not. You need to figure out the reasons behind them.
- Invite people to do usability testing and figure out where problems occur.
- Owners are so familiar with their products that it’s easy to forget the misunderstandings other people may have since they’re not as familiar with them.
Think Simple and Be Curious
- Todd shares that simple strategies often work well, but people want to make complicated strategies instead.
- Don’t skip the basics. Make sure your marketing has a strong foundation first before considering big marketing campaigns.
- Utilize your customer list and ask them to fill out a survey. Find out how your business stands out or why people almost did not purchase from you.
- There is a function to ask customers why they didn’t purchase anything before leaving. Even if you think no one answers this, those that do will give you valuable information.
- Don’t underestimate gathering information. You will never know if you never ask.
Conversion Optimization
- Even if your product has a conversion rate of 1%, utilize these people and find out why they’re converting. This can easily lead to doubling your sales.
- Todd also suggests risk reversal, where you take away risks from customers and put them on yourself instead.
- He also shares how changing one word in the menu bar generated $8 million in revenue.
Create Discipline
- Todd shares using Trello for himself to create focus, down to the smallest detail.
- He shares that part of his daily checklist is seeing if anything needs to be done from yesterday and adjusting its schedule.
- He also takes the 2-3 most important tasks and blocks 60-90 minute chunks on his calendar.
- Checklists are important because they make sure you don’t miss anything, especially for complex projects.
Split Testing Design
- If your split testing does not have a significant sales conversion rate, check the click rate instead.
- This metric is the step before conversions and can help you redesign better.
- However, remember that sales conversion is still the most important metric for growth.
Todd’s Involvements
- Todd shares that he’s at a point in his life where he is working for an agency instead of owning his own business.
- When looking for the right company, he did not depend on job boards. Instead, he looked for companies with good core values, successful, and still growing.
- If you have experience, you can find a company that best fit for you and even negotiate your terms.
- He also started Luminary Dinners which is similar to focused mastermind groups.
- Even when people are successful in certain aspects of life, it doesn’t mean they’re successful in everything.
Two Powerful Quotes
“You run three or five people from your site [and] you will absolutely radically change your business that you never thought of because you're so familiar with what you do, you forget some of the problems that people have understanding your site or navigating.”
“I have learned to test on a menu bar where I changed one word and it was worth $8 million in revenue for the year for that client. It's insane. Never in a million years would I have known to change that if I didn't do the research, the polling, the heat maps, and all that stuff.”
Resources
- User Testing
- Heatmaps and behavior analytics tool: Hot Jar
- The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt
- Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
- Trello
- Check out Stream Companies for a conversion assessment!
- You may connect with Todd on LinkedIn, Twitter, Luminary Business, and ACTO.
P.S.
- Do you already have a successful business, meaning you're up, running, and paying your bills with some profit left over?
- Are you interested in growing your business, automating/streamlining things, and staying one step ahead of your competition?
- Visit https://www.members.bestbusinesscoach.ca/problems-we-fix/ to see if we can fix what's holding you back.
📨 If you can answer YES to all three questions, please reach out to me through Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/daryl.urbanski, and describe your situation, goals, and the best time/way to contact you.
