We Asked. You Told Us Your Wishes for 2011

Cross-posted from the Google Small Business Blog:

Two weeks ago, the Small Business Marketing team asked about your aspirations for the coming year. You told us the biggest wish for your business, and the wish for expanding your business’ online presence. Today, we’d like to share what we heard.

We combined your responses from our blog, Facebook and Twitter and organized them into three main themes and then sub-themes. Of course, not all wishes fell neatly into these themes, so we did create a Miscellaneous category.

Before the drum roll, thanks to everyone that took time to share and participate. Some wishes were big and audacious and others more practical, but all with an underlying tone of passion for what you do and a focus on delighting your customers. On with the results…

Theme 1: Move my business online
Not surprisingly, you’re passionate about the business products you’re using and made very specific feature requests. Rest assured if they were Google product related, we’ve shared your wishes with our product teams. Additionally, you said you want more online resources to help your business grow. Your comments acknowledged that referrals are now happening online through social media channels and, as such, you want to understand how to use these online tools. You also want more out of your websites. Ultimately, you said you want to do more online to run your business more efficiently and spend more time concentrating on your customers.

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Theme 2: Grow my business
We heard that you want to continue to grow your business with increased profits, more customers, or more people. Lots of wishes for more marketing tools to increase your business’ visibility – the range included the entire marketing mix. You want simple tools made specifically for you. There were wishes for funds to buy equipment, spend more on advertising, build e-commerce into your offering, and lease real estate – to name a few.

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Theme 3: Love my business
Many resounding wishes to continue fueling your passion because you love what you do. You’d love to learn more – from social media, AdWords and Places to creating marketing plans. You prefer support face-to-face with people and training at a relatively low cost. Many of you want more opportunities to network and support your fellow business owners. Whether it’s help getting the most out of applications and tools, or navigating a healthcare plan, you’d like some expertise to assist.

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We thank you again for telling us your wishes for the coming year. Stay tuned as we will use these wishes to build upon our plans to to help small businesses succeed in 2011.

Posted by Leslie Hernandez, Product Marketing Manager, Google Small Business Team

Worldwide Response to the Importance of Cross-Selling

Last July, I posted a question on the Retail Banking Network Group on LinkedIn asking how the goal of cross-selling is prioritized in relationship to the goal of new customer acquisition at banks today. Since my posting, I have had more than 80 comments from bankers representing large and small financial organizations all over the world.

For instance, Lance van Wyk, Regional General Manager at Nedbank Ltd in South Africa believes that education, reward and recognition of employees is needed to improve cross-selling. In addition, he believes the timing of cross-selling is important and states, "Proactive investments in cross-selling at the acquisition stage could prove highly rewarding".

An ongoing contributor, Serge Milman from Optirate in San Francisco believes that smaller community banks and credit unions can only compete with the much larger financials that provide both a more innovative product set and greater convenience if they expand their view of their marketplace beyond their own back yard. He also believes that in addition to better cross-selling, these smaller organizations need to pursue more aggressive growth and strategies. In later posts, he emphasizes the importance of marketing products nationwide by smaller institutions but acknowledges that the skills needed to effectively gather customer insights and build segmentation strategies may be beyond the skill sets (and budgets) of a smaller bank or credit union.

He further believes that differentiation is needed to achieve cross-sell growth objectives. Serge states, "Why is it that a typical bank has a portfolio of 60%+ customers with just one product? It is not because customers are unaware that Bank XYZ offers other banking products; it is because Bank XYZ has not convinced customers that its products are in any way differentiated from the 16,000 other banks and credit unions".

Nikhil Datar, a management consultant from the U.K., agreed with Serge that an understanding of the customer is needed in order to be effective in cross-selling. He further emphasizes that a bank can't only cross-sell when the bank has product needs. According to Datar, this type of effort becomes unsustainable. "Many customers are irritated when they are contacted only when the bank wants to sell something".

As a training specialist from Australia and a frequent contributor to the Linkedin discussion, Simon Offer suggests that a key to effective cross-selling begins with a well trained staff. Simon states, "A life cycle is used to help identify at what stage the the customer is at and what is the main priority for that customer. This technique enables the staff to target their discussions to customer. Using different channels, the techniques and targets will be different depending on the communication needed. To be effective, the education needs to be reinforced on a regular basis and tools made available to the staff such as desk charts, manuals etc."

Jay Kassing, the owner of Dallas-based financial services solution provider Marquis reminded his fellow bankers that achieving growth of 12-15% annually is made exceedingly difficult when annual attrition rates for most firms average 15% or more. He believes the focus should also be on stemming attrition, thereby reducing the level of sales needed just to break even. Bob Isola from Content Critical, LLC. in New York also reminds bankers of the power of the monthly statement to reinforce sales messages on a personalized basis.

Probably the most active contributor to the cross-selling discussion was Bob Critchfield from RLC Performance Management in Detroit. One of his ongoing themes has been that most current customers are not fully served by any particular bank and that we should not confuse product sales with providing solutions to customer needs. As he mentions, each of these needs provides the opportunity for sales, revenue and even enhanced customer satisfaction. In addition, he provided a real life example of where secondary business signers on an account are not normally pursued for personal relationships.

Finally, a dose of reality was provided by Jan Floyd-Douglass, a Director from The 9 Situations in the UK, who reminded us that many of the internal sales policies and targets can actually result in artificial 'sales' that divide a customer's relationship to the disadvantage of the customer. This type of activity also has a negative revenue impact on the bank.

I encourage you to visit and participate in the Linkedin discussion around cross-selling within the Retail Banking Network Group. Or you can visit my original Bank Marketing Strategies Blog entry.

Custom Variables For Your Android Applications

With the power of the Google Analytics Mobile SDK, you can track activity within your mobile applications the same way you track activity on websites. In fact, this SDK turns Google Analytics into a great tool for analyzing mobile application usage, with the option to use many of the same great features like advanced segments, goals, and custom reporting. However, you could not apply custom variables to the pageviews and events you sent from your mobile application to Analytics... until now. Get ready for a holiday present.

We’re pleased to announce the addition of custom variables to the Mobile Analytics SDK for Android. Using the same simple interface, you can now apply custom variables to your mobile usage data, making for dead-easy segmenting of that data when it comes time to analyze usage and optimize your mobile application.

How, you ask, can custom variables be used to optimize an Android application? The same way they help you optimize web applications: by providing actionable context. Some starter ideas for how to segment your Android application users:

• Free vs Paid users: What percentage of users went from demo to full version? How long did it take them?
• Application Version: What version of your app gained the most users? Which version lost some users? Look at where things went wrong and fix them. Fast.
• Platform version: Would bumping up the minimum version of your application cost you some percentage of your user base? Should you stay backwards compatible with cupcake, or focus on the juicy new features?

You can also use custom variables to tell how users interact with your application:

• Modes of interaction: UI-wise, do your users use menu-items or long-presses more often?
• Help/Tutorial: How many features of your application are explored by users who finished the built-in tutorial? How many get used by those who didn’t? What’s the conversion rate to paid users?
• Portrait vs landscape: What mode are people in during most of their interaction with your application?

Thanks to the flexibility of the Google Analytics platform, this information is now available to include in your Android applications. And because it’s Google Analytics, you still have the advantage of analyzing all this data with our web interface, as well as all the data analysis and visualization tools provided by our ridiculously awesome community.

From all of us on the Google Analytics team, we hope you enjoy!

Posted by Alexander Lucas, Google Analytics API Team

Shop Around...

It’s the holiday season and everyone has shopping on the mind. But what about shopping your competition - have you shopped them lately?

Touching base with your immediate competition on their advertising, products, access, and customer service is something your financial institution should consistently be doing in order to ensure you are maintaining your competitive advantage.

It may be time to take a look at the competition and see how you stack up in the following areas:

• Advertising: What products/messages are your competition promoting and how does your financial institution stack up?
• Products: Do gaps exist in your competitions’ product lines or within product features?
• Access: What are the features of their websites and is the website interactive and resourceful? Also, what other technologies can customers/members use to interact with the bank/credit union or access their accounts?
• Customer Service: Communicate with your competition in a variety of ways (email, phone, in person, etc.) to see how they stack up. Are there ways that they excel or fall behind?

Competitive research equips you with the information that you’ll need to uncover where your financial institution excels and may lags behind. Once complete, you will better be able to identify your strengths, correct any weaknesses, and capitalize on opportunities!

Happy shopping!

Jamie

Expand your business - Chrome fast

Editors note: This is a guest blog post from the Chrome Web Store team, presenting you a new opportunity to grow your business on the web.

Growing revenue and traffic are important goals for most online businesses. The Chrome Web Store that we made available a few days ago can help you with both.

By distributing your web content and applications through the store, you can connect with more than 120 million people who use Chrome regularly. You can also earn revenue both by selling your apps to Chrome users and by showing ads within them. And the best part? Creating an app is quick and easy.

To learn more about how to take advantage of this opportunity and how you can build your app, check out our new website at www.google.com/chrome/CreateAnApp or watch the video below.



Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

Learn more about Quality Score from our live online course

To help you understand more about Quality Score, we’ll be hosting a free, live course in the AdWords Online Classroom (UK) on Wednesday, December 15. The key to a successful AdWords account is the relevancy of your ads, keywords, and website. Having a better understanding of Quality Score can help you improve your AdWords performance.

The interactive course will be delivered by two AdWords Specialists and will take approximately one hour including some time for Q&A. It will take place on Wednesday, December 15 from 3pm - 4pm BST / GMT+1 (London), 10am-11am EST (New York), 7am-8am PST (San Francisco).

If you’re interested, make sure to sign up now!

To learn more about Quality Score you can also visit our Help Center.

Posted by Jason Shafton, Inside AdWords crew

Think Inside the Box #4

Well...it finally happened.  I am actually inside the box!!

Actually...this is a favorite shot of mine.  Helps me reflect on the importance of staying within our reach.  Don't get me wrong-- staying INSIDE the box does not mean NOT being CREATIVE or expanding ideas!  Quite to the contrary...it is ALL ABOUT being creative--and realizing that you have a lot of what you need close at hand.

However, let's list the top 4 items that you will need to add to what is at hand...for the most complete planning and analysis:

• Customer insights
• Staff insights
• Marketplace insights
• The competitive assessment

These items will help provide the information to fill the gaps of what you know and provide "voice" of the customer in your planning.

Cheers!

Bruce