Successful Marketing Jobs

by mheo soriano

Paypal is one of the most popular methods to accept payment online. Paypal allows people and companies with email addresses to send and receive payments over the internet. It is also one of the most trusted in online transactions, for what reason? Paypal AFFORDABLE, SECURE and QUICK.

Just recently, PayPal dramatically improved its service making it an even better payment alternative for your online business. Paypal has made up for one of its biggest limitations in the past wherein customers would need to set up a PayPal account before making payments.

Paypal is now made more accessible and easier to use.

Marketers have seen the customer service process evolve from an area that received only marginal attention into a primary functional area.  In response to customers’ demands for responsive and reliable service, companies are investing heavily in innovative methods and processes to strengthen their service level.  These innovations include:

Increased Customer Self-Service

A major trend in customer service is the move by companies to encourage customers to be involved in helping solve their own service issues.  This can be seen in retail industries where self-service ranges from customers placing their own grocery products in shopping bags all the way to having customers do their own checkout including scanning products and making payment.  Also, as we will soon discuss, customers needing information are being encouraged by companies to first undertake the effort themselves often by visiting special company-provided information areas (see Website and Phone Accessible Knowledge Base below).  Only after they have explored these options are customers encouraged to contact customer service.

Revenue Generators

Companies that maintain a customer service staff have found that these people not only can help solve customer problems but they may also be in a position to convince customers to purchase more.  Many companies are now requiring sales training for their customer service personnel.  At a basic level customer service representatives may be trained to ask if customers are interested in hearing about other products or services.  If a customer shows interest then the representative will transfer the customer to a sales associate.  At a more advanced level the representative will shift to a selling role and attempt to get the customer to commit to additional product purchases.

Out-Sourcing

One of the most controversial developments impacting customer service is the move by many companies around the world to establish customer service functions outside of either their home country or the country in which their customers reside.  Called out-sourcing, companies pursue this strategy to both reduce cost and also increase service coverage.  For instance, having multiple customer service outlets around the world allows customers to talk via phone with a service person no matter what time of day.  The ability to move service to another country is only viable in large part due to technological developments (see Internet Telephone below).  But such moves have raised concerns on two fronts.  First, many see this trend as leading to a reduction of customer service jobs within a home country.  Second, customer service personnel located off-shore may lack sufficient training and often lack an understanding of the conditions within the customers’ local market both of which can affect service levels.  At the extreme a poorly managed move to out-source customer service can lead to a decrease in customer satisfaction which in the long-run could affect sales.

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Understanding customers and examining their role in the marketing process is very important.  We will see that for most organizations understanding customers is necessary not only because of their effect on marketing decisions but because customers’ activities influence the entire organization.

Yet, understanding customers is a never-ending challenge.  One reason is that not all customers are the same and, consequently, benefits sought by one customer may differ from those sought by another.  Because of this marketers must continually conduct marketing research to evaluate customers and to determine what they want.  And uncovering what customers want is made significantly easier if a company establishes methods designed to manage their customers.

In this tutorial we explore the techniques marketers use to manage their customers.  We begin by defining what a customer is and why they are important to an organization.  We then look at what tools and strategies must be in place to skillfully manage customers including the crucial requirement that marketers build relationships with their customers.  Finally, we conclude with a discussion of how servicing customers is often just as critical as selling products to them.

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What Are Patents, Trademarks, Servicemarks, and Copyrights?

Some people confuse patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Although there may be some similarities among these kinds of intellectual property protection, they are different and serve different purposes.

What Is a Patent?

A patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Generally, the term of a new patent is 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed in the United States or, in special cases, from the date an earlier related application was filed, subject to the payment of maintenance fees. U.S. patent grants are effective only within the United States, U.S. territories, and U.S. possessions. Under certain circumstances, patent term extensions or adjustments may be available.

The right conferred by the patent grant is, in the language of the statute and of the grant itself, “the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling” the invention in the United States or “importing” the invention into the United States. What is granted is not the right to make, use, offer for sale, sell or import, but the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention. Once a patent is issued, the patentee must enforce the patent without aid of the USPTO.

There are three types of patents:

1) Utility patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof;

2) Design patents may be granted to anyone who invents a new, original, and ornamental design for an article of manufacture; and

3) Plant patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers and asexually reproduces any distinct and new variety of plant.

What Is a Trademark or Servicemark?

A trademark is a word, name, symbol, or device that is used in trade with goods to indicate the source of the goods and to distinguish them from the goods of others. A servicemark is the same as a trademark except that it identifies and distinguishes the source of a service rather than a product. The terms “trademark” and “mark” are commonly used to refer to both trademarks and servicemarks.

Trademark rights may be used to prevent others from using a confusingly similar mark, but not to prevent others from making the same goods or from selling the same goods or services under a clearly different mark. Trademarks which are used in interstate or foreign commerce may be registered with the USPTO. The registration procedure for trademarks and general information concerning trademarks is described on a separate page entitled “Basic Facts about Trademarks” (http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/tac/doc/basic/).

What Is a Copyright?

Copyright is a form of protection provided to the authors of “original works of authorship” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works, both published and unpublished. The 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to reproduce the copyrighted work, to prepare derivative works, to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work, to perform the copyrighted work publicly, or to display the copyrighted work publicly.

The copyright protects the form of expression rather than the subject matter of the writing. For example, a description of a machine could be copyrighted, but this would only prevent others from copying the description; it would not prevent others from writing a description of their own or from making and using the machine. Copyrights are registered by the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress.

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Here are words and acronyms you may see in the search marketing literature or hear in conversation.

Affiliate Marketing – A marketing revenue sharing arrangement by which an affiliate site refers potential buyers to a merchant’s site in return for payment.

Baseline Metrics – Typically, web site data from a specific point in time, often just before the inception of an Internet marketing campaign, which can be compared to similar types of data from a later date to assess the effectiveness of the marketing campaign.

CPA – Cost Per Acquisition. The total cost of an ad campaign divided by the number of conversions.

CPC – Cost Per Click. The price that a search engine charges an advertiser for every click sent to the advertiser’s web site.

CPM – Cost Per Thousand. The cost per one thousand impressions, typically charged by context-based networks for online search ads

CTR – Click-Through Rate. The number of clicks that a search ad gets, divided by the total number of impressions for that ad.

Conversion Rate – The percentage of prospects take a desired action, such as downloading a white paper, or buying a product

DKI - Dynamic Keyword Insertion. A search advertising technique that involves placing the exact keywords that a searcher uses in the title of the ad served

Geo-Targeting – A service offered by some search engines whereby a search ad is shown only to searchers from a specific geographic location, such as a city or state or selection of states.

Impression – One display of a search ad. If an ad has 1,000 impressions in a week, it has been served or shown to one thousand searchers during that period.

Keyword – A single word used by searchers to find information about a topic, such as “football.”

Keyword Phrase – Two or more keywords relating to a specific topic, such as “college football,” or “USC football.”

Keyword Stemming – The process of expanding a keyword list by going back to the root of the word and adding prefixes and suffixes, or the plural form.

KPI - Key Performance Indicators are key metrics used to quantify the success of a marketing campaign.

Landing Page – The page that a web searcher is taken to after clicking on an ad. Advertisers create these pages in such a way as to maximize the chance that the searcher will take the desired action (convert) after seeing the page.

Long Tail – Keyword phrases will three of more words in them. These keyword phrases are searched on less frequently, but often by more serious searchers.

Meta Tags – Information imbedded in the code for a web page that is intended for search engine robots to help them index a site. Human visitors can only see the meta tags by examining a page’s source code.

Organic Results – Listings on search engine results pages that are not paid for; listings that are served because the search engine presumes their content is relevant to a given search.

PPC - Pay Per Click. In search advertising, a revenue model whereby an advertiser pays an agreed amount every time someone clicks on an ad.

Paid Listings – Listings that search engines sell to advertisers.

Personas – Refers to an online marketing technique developed by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, whereby marketers plan web site content and advertising around specific personas, or types of people, who may visit the site.

ROAS – Return on Advertising Spending, calculated by dividing the profit generated by an ad campaign by the cost of that campaign.

ROI – Return on Investment. Expressed as a percentage; if a search campaign costs $150,000 and the return is $200,000, the ROI would be $200,000 - $150,000/ $150,000 or 33%.

SEM – Search Engine Marketing.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization. The process of editing a site’s content to make it more visible to the search engines.

SERP – Search Engine Results Page. The page served by a search engine when a search is done on a keyword.

Search Engine – A database of web pages.

Tier I Search Engines – The most important search engines, as judged by the number of searches conduced, currently includes Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live Search.

Tier II Search Engines – Smaller search engines, such as Ask.com and AOL, as well as more vertical search engines, as well as web meta-crawlers that display the results of many search engines.

Tier III Search Engines – Usually, networks that display contextual ads, usually on a Cost per Thousand (CPM) basis.

Unique Visitor – A critical web analytical measure that tracks each visitor to a site by the originating computer’s IP address, so that, for example, one person’s multiple visits to a site from the same computer over a given period of time will be counted as just one Unique Visitor.

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Before you learn more about marketing, you should get a basic impression of what marketing is. See What’s “Advertising, Marketing, Promotion, Public Relations and Publicity, and Sales?”. Basically, you might look at marketing as the wide range of activities involved in making sure that you’re continuing to meet the needs of your customers and are getting appropriate value in return. Think about marketing as “inbound” and “outbound” marketing. (In the following, consider “product” to be either a tangible product or a service — nonprofits often refer to these as “programs”.)Inbound Marketing Includes Market Research to Find Out:

1. What specific groups of potential customers/clients (markets) might have which specific needs (nonprofits often already have a very clear community need in mind when starting out with a new program — however, the emerging practice of nonprofit business development, or earned income development, often starts by researching a broad group of clients to identify new opportunities for programs)
2. How those needs might be met for each group (or target market), which suggests how a product might be designed to meet the need (nonprofits might think in terms of outcomes, or changes, to accomplish among the groups of clients in order to meet the needs)
3. How each of the target markets might choose to access the product, etc. (its “packaging”)
4. How much the customers/clients might be willing pay and how (pricing analysis)
5. Who the competitors are (competitor analysis)
6. How to design and describe the product such that customers/clients will buy from the organization, rather than from its competitors (its unique value proposition)
7. How the product should be identified — its personality — to be most identifiable (its naming and branding)

Outbound Marketing Includes:

1. Advertising and promotions (focused on the product)
2. Sales
3. Public and media relations (focused on the entire organization)
4. Customer service
5. Customer satisfaction

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“Guerrilla Marketing,” was coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his popular 1984 book Guerrilla Marketing, as an unconventional system of promotions on a very low budget, by relying on time, energy and imagination instead of big marketing budgets. The term has since entered the popular vocabulary to also describe aggressive, unconventional marketing methods generically.

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