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There are thousands of resources on new product development online and offline. Most recommend the classic (or its variants) development process: Idea Generation, Screening, Concept Development, and Testing, Marketing Strategy Development, Business Analysis, Product Development, Market Testing, And Commercialization. And if well executed, the process is most effective. They all end at commercialization.

But because new product development is not exact science, no amount of preparation and research can predict with absolute certainty that a product will succeed in the market. Which invariably means that some products will bomb (New Coke is always a good example).

How do you know your newly launched product is bombing, why is it bombing? Can it be salvaged and how? Should it be salvaged or shelved?

In other words, you need to do a post-launch review. This is a model I developed for a client. Hope you find it useful:

TWO LEVELS

The product review will be performed on two levels:

• Performance vs. projection measurement
• Market feedback

 

Performance Vs Projection

Compare actual performance with projection as regards: Volume, market share, and revenue

• Volume: Has the product been able to meet the projected volume of sales within a stipulated time?
• Market share: Has the product captured the projected market share?
• Revenue: Has it met its revenue targets?

 

Data and information sources:

Volume: sales and accounting; Market share: external industry sources; Revenue: accounting; Product Concept Document, PCD

GRADING METRICS

• 100% +  =Surpass expectations
• 100% = meet expectations
• 75-99% = good
• 50-74% = fair
• 40-50% = poor
• Below 40% = disastrous

Calculate the cumulative score and use score to make decision

DECISION KEYS:

• 100+ score: Retain the product without changing any variable
• 75-99%: Retain the product but make changes to some variables( as identified in the market feedback)
• 50-74%: Major changes in both marketing and product concept if the product is to be retained
• 40-50%: Drop except market feedback show a strong product relevance and positive market perception
• Below 40%: Drop

MARKET FEEDBACK

Use review channels to gather feedback on:

• Customer Satisfaction—to gauge how satisfied customers are with the product

And to know whether the product performed to its promise

• Product Relevance—to gauge whether the product meets a need gap in the customers lives
• Attitude—to measure customers dispositions to the product–positive or negative and to what degree
• Product Awareness—to measure (product and its benefits) awareness level in the market

In my last post, I wrote about the need for marketers to segment the market and focus (target) their effort on the ones (segments) they can serve most effectively. A lot of people disagreed with me and accused me of expounding textbook theories that have no relevance in the Nigerian business environment.

To these marketing experts, the best strategy in an undeveloped and data-poor market like Nigeria is to market to the mass market. They cited examples to buttress this point. They also pointed out the absence of real-life example in my write-up.

This post is my response to them. And no theory

One of the most truly competitive markets in Nigeria is the FM radio industry. The competition is particularly stiff in Lagos. This was the market Brilla FM entered a few years ago. Within a year the station became the toast of listeners and advertisers.  Why this instant success? The answer is simple: Brilla FM is not just another radio station; it is a sports station targeted at sports enthusiasts!

This naturally differentiates Brilla FM from other stations and provides it with a potent USP. The implication? Well, if I am a marketer of men’s targeted products, where do you think I will advertise?

Also, into this same very saturated FM market came WAZOBIA FM two years ago and their success is even more profound than that of Brilla FM. The reason is also not farfetched. Half of Lagosians just don’t understand your Queen’s English but most, if not all speak pidgin. And the good WAZOBI FM people (God bless them) understand this. They established a pidgin-only radio station.

The result, WAZOBIA FM is arguably the most listened-to radio station in Lagos.

Anybody still in doubt about the importance of segmentation and targeting in effective marketing in Nigeria

Last April, I was at a British Council Management Express event where a marketing expert was brought to Lagos from the UK to speak on “how to thrive in an increasingly competitive business landscape”. After his lecture, the audience was given the opportunity to ask questions on any [marketing] challenge they were facing. There was this question by a lady who said she was in the business of selling packaged powdered milk. She said her problem was that despite the fact that her milk offered greater value than those of the established brands, people still don’t buy her milk.

A lot of suggestions were given to her, both by the guest speaker and the members of the audience. She was advised to:

• Price cheaper
• Package better
• Employ direct marketing
• Advertise more

Personally, I believe the prescriptions (even though given with good intentions) were all wrong. Why? Because they all ignored a fundamental requirement for marketing success—segmentation and targeting. She just can’t compete with the big brand in an undifferentiated way. The big brands have more marketing resources and they can easily out price, out advertise and out package her.

Does that mean she cannot successfully market powder milk in the Nigeria? No. But her marketing success will not come by marketing to the mass market – it will only come by her targeting and focusing on a segment of the market. For instance, she can focus on selling healthy milk to people with weight problems. By doing this she would have calved a niche for herself and captured a valuable position in the market.

The point is that you cannot connect with all customers in large, broad, or diverse markets (except your marketing budget is limitless). But you can divide such markets into groups of consumers or segments with distinct needs and wants. And experience has demonstrated that firms that specialize in meeting the needs of one group of consumers over another tend to be more profitable.

Segmentation and targeting are a two-stage process. 

 You first 

(1) determine which kinds of customers exist, then

 (2) select which ones you can serve effectively. 

Suppose you are into selling music. You could sell hip hop, Yoruba, classical, gospel or Islamic music. But you have a higher chance of market success if you focus only on say, Christian music. And the reason for this is not farfetched; it simply makes your marketing more efficient and effective. Everything, from message design, to medium of delivery, and even actual customer interaction will be greatly enhanced by effective segmentation and targeting. As Drayton Bird wrote in his book Commonsense Direct Marketing, even the worst message sent to the right people will do better than the most brilliant message sent to the wrong people.  And Gary Halbert put it even more succinctly when he said the most important advantage in marketing if you were running a hamburger joint was to have a starving crowd.

In my last post, I promised that the next post will be discussing in details how to go about setting up a professional digital marketing campaign for your brand, from strategy formulation to performance evaluation. This blog post is geared towards doing just that. Even though the title says digital marketing in Nigeria, I belief this approach will work in any market.

 IT ALL STARTS WITH A STRATEGY

Of late, I have been having a series of meetings with prospective clients and one of the first questions I ask at the discovery stage is: “what internet marketing strategy do you have in place”? The commonest answers are “we advertise on Facebook”, “we have employed somebody to manage our Twitter and Facebook account”, “We have banner ads on XYZ sites”…….Little wonder virtually all of these companies are reporting little or no ROI from their online marketing activities.

There are several internet marketing channels that you can utilize to market your business online but, selecting the right one(s) “depends”. Depends on what? That question can only be tackled on the strategic level . But first, let us define what a strategy is:

WHAT, MR MAN, IS STRATEGY? 

A plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim. A strategy helps you answer the question, “What are we trying to accomplish?” As can be inferred from this definition, you can see that you can not say you have a strategy if you do not have a clear objective.

Strategy is different from “tactics” which help you answer the question, “How are we going to accomplish our goal?”. A commentator on Jeremiah Owyang blog puts this most succinctly when he said:

“One helpful trick to check if you have a strategy (usually timeless) or tactic (tools/technology dependent in your hand is changing the tools and see if it still applies. For example, a timeless strategy is- “Connect with customers while in our store and increase sales.” If you this is 1901, you’d post large posters and have employees running around and talking with customers. If it is 1987, you’d have electronic boards with specials, if it is 2012 you’d have an HTML5 page or an app that helps you connect to customers and in 2015 you’d fully support Google glasses. The strategy never changed, the tactics did“. 

So, without a clear strategy, your online marketing effort is doomed to failure.   

DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS

After choosing your strategy, the next step is to review the range of channels available to you for realizing the strategic objectives. For Digital marketing, the available channels include:

Pay Per Click Advertising 

This involves bidding for placement on search engines. It is keyword-based; meaning your ad appears when relevant searches are made. E.g. Google Adwords and Bing Ads.

Display Advertising

This involves the placement of ads (banners, video, etc) on third-party websites.

Email Marketing

This is the process of collecting email addresses from people and marketing to them via email messages.

Search Engine Optimization

This is the process of earning in the free/organic results of major search engines like Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex,  etc.

Social Media Marketing

This is the process of leveraging social media platforms (like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn etc) to market to your target audience.

Affiliate Marketing

This involves incentivizing other sites to promote your products in exchange for a share of the revenue they drive.

The list above is by no means exhaustive. 

DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS COMPARED

To also help you in putting the digital marketing channels in proper perspectives and have a framework for understanding the cost and benefit advantages of each channel, we will employ a POE media model  ( which is a slight modification of the POEM model).

The POE model classifies all digital marketing channels into three distinct subgroups: Paid Media, Owned Media and Earned Media.

 

	Paid Media Outbound Marketing	Earned Media Inbound Marketing	Owned Media Nurture, Retention, Advocacy
Core Elements	Money = Traffic, no money, No traffic   Channels are optimized individually   Landing pages are distinct from main site	Cost is effort   Visibility continues when effort stops   All pages are landing pages	A person is “known” Email address, customer file, etc.   Move person to initial sale recurring revenue to advocacy
Advantages	Immediate results Scalable Highly measureable Ease of testing	Cost effective Higher quality visits Helps build trust	Cost effective Longevity Ease of targeting Loyalty & advocacy
Channels	PPC Display Ads Affiliate Email List Buying Daily Deals Mobile	ORM Natural Search (SEO) Social Media Referrals (Links) Public Relations	Website Email, Newsletters, RSS, Autorepsonder Lead Nurturing Re-targeting Transaction Emails
Necessary Resources	Media budget Campaign management expertise	Content Creator Publishing Platform Social Media expertise PR & Blogger	Email Technology Customer Database Content creator Social Monitoring tools

 

 

KEY STRATEGIC CONSIDERATION SELECTING DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS

• Your Company Goal: What are the top objectives of your company’s online marketing effort?
• Brand Awareness: Your objective is to achieve greater brand visibility and increase the likelihood that consumers recognize the existence and availability of your company’s product or service.
• Boost Sales: Your objective is to make more sales. Period.
• Market Education: Your product and service are new (or have new features) and potential customers are yet to realize the problem they need to solve.
• Available Resources: This could be material or human;
  – Budget: How much do you have to spend on your digital marketing activities?
  – Human and Intellectual: What personnel with what range and level of competence do you have available? This includes Development personnel, Creative personnel, Writers, etc.

Lastly, there are two other primary variables that can be added to the selection process that falls under the realm of strategic market analysis. Namely an understanding of your customers and the competitors. 

If your company has (or develops) a strong understanding of customer needs and behavior, then it will be better able to target those customers to achieve the company goals.

Two years ago, I wrote a blog post titled “Why Most Nigeria E-businesses Fail”. A lot has changed in the Nigeria e-commerce space since then.   For one, the Nigeria ecommerce space has experienced phenomenal growth with the influx of millions of foreign capital  into the sector. 

While this has deepen the industry in terms of scale, operational sophistication, visibility etc, one rarely talked about effect of this growth is the increasing cost of customer acquisition.

Getting customers to your e-commerce site is now a whole lot more difficult now than it was two years ago. For example, I ran several Adword campaigns in 2011 for a couple of Nigeria e-commerce sitesand my average CPC was never above 30 cent – even for competitive keywords. Now you pay almost a dollar for the same keywords. 

The case with organic search is even worse. In 2011, I remember that with just a little On-Page optimization, you could easily start ranking for your target keywords (and lots of long tailed keywords). Fast forward to 2013 and SEO result is a whole lot more difficult.

Now, with the relatively high cost of getting visitors to your site, it becomes imperative for you to get the most from your site visitors. And for e-commerce sites, that means getting more of your site visitors to buy from you.

The process of getting more result from your site visitor is called Conversion Rate Optimization, CRO. 

CRO is a complex subject that cannot be covered in one blog post. So, I have created  a series of blog posts on Conversion Rate Optimization Tips For Nigeria Ecommerce Sites. 

Below are areas of e-commerce touch point optimization that if implemented, will help your Nigeria e-commerce site eliminate the core conversion roadblocks of usability, friction or anxiety factors.

STARTING POINT

The first step in optimizing your ecommerce website for conversion is to first of all break the entire user experience into unique experiences delivered at several of the touch points on your websites. Here you will be asking questions like:

• What is the impression that a user gets when he or she arrives at your online store?
• What kind of result do users see when they type something in your  product search box?
• What do you say in your communication to your users when they register, reset password, subscribe or place an order?
• What happens if a user lands on an ‘out of stock’ product page?
• Where a user searches for a product that doesn’t exist or out of stock, what happens?
• What does a user see if he enters an invalid email address during registration?
• How simple is your checkout process
• What trust building elements are on your site to reduce cart abandonment ?

FIFTEEN QUICK CRO TIPS FOR NIGERIA ECOMMERCE WEBSITES

1) Promote Your Top-Selling Products On Your Home Page 

Use a blend of sales report and analytical tools like Google Analytics to determine your best performing products & categories. Once these are identified, give them more visibility by promoting them in banner sliders and recommended products.

2) Offer Multiple Payment Options

This has been one of the main reasons for high shopping cart abandonment in almost all the Nigeria ecommerce store I have worked on. The answer is simple, clearly show all the different ways in which a customer can pay for an order on your site. I will strongly recommend that you have “Pay On Delivery” and, to make it the most conspicuous payment option on your site. This is especially important at this stage of ecommerce in Nigeria when most customers are still sceptical about the credibility of online shopping.

3) Arrange Category Structure By Popularity

The category links in the navigation should be in the ascending order of their popularity. That is the most effective arrangement. The second option is to arrange them alphabetically. 

4) Ensure Site Search Accuracy

Nothing is as frustrating to your customer as searching for a product on your site and getting totally irrelevant result. To avoid this, below are some suggestions: 

• Implement intelligent search to cover singular, plurals, mis-spells etc. For example, a search for ‘shoe’ & ‘shoes’ should return the same results associated with shoes(s).
• Implement Auto-Suggestion to help user search for relevant keywords. This is one of the commonest search functionality wherein as the user types his search query in the search box, suggestions are shown. This feature makes it easier for them to find the desired product more quickly.
• Enable category search option

7) Use High-Quality Product Images

Studies after studies have shown that image is always the first thing that a visitor will notice as soon as he lands on your site.  The quality product image will help your store convert better. Another side to this is that, apart from using quality product images on your site, you should also show as many as we can – from different angles.

8) Pay Attention To Product’s Description

This is one area almost all Nigeria eCommerce sites are guilty. It is wrong to just copy and paste the manufacturer’s description on your product page. The product description is a sales copy and it should be seen in that light. 

Let your description present the product in the most appealing (functional or emotional appeal) way to your site visitor and somehow, also anticipate and address their reservations/apprehensions. A few tips:

• Use bulleted points to make the information easier for the visitors to digest.
• Arrange the product features in order of importance.
• Even though I said earlier that you should write see your product description copy as a sales copy, you should not oversell.
• users will know if our claims aren’t genuine.

9) Clearly Show The Product’s Delivery TRUE Time

One of the main complaints about Nigeria’s eCommerce sites is the failure to deliver within the promised time. While I understand the temptation to over-promise, it is much wiser to under-promise and over-deliver. This is one of the best ways to build positive word of mouth and referrals about your eCommerce site. 

Not only should you give realistic delivery time, but users should also know when they can expect to receive the product if they order. 

10) Encourage users to leave reviews

You should do this for two reasons:

• Good product reviews add a lot of content on a product page which is very good for SEO (post-Panda and Penguin updates)
• Positive customer reviews also make your store more credible and thus improve your conversion rate. 

11) Checkout Page

A lot of cart abandonment happens during check-out. This should not be because, for a user to get to your check-out page, it means he or she is really interested in buying. To stem this, your check out page should:

–Security: Make it clear to users that your site is secure and that their privacy will never be compromised.

–Transparency: There should not be any hidden charges. VAT, shipping cost, etc should be stated clearly.

-Payment Methods:  I talked about this earlier. All payment methods users can use to make payment for goods bought on your site should be clearly stated (Mobile Money, Credit Cards, Bank deposit, Pay On Delivery, etc.).

12) Simply You Information Forms

Users want the buying process to be over as soon as possible. So, anything you can do to shorten the amount of work they need to do will increase your conversion. start by removing ALL fields that are not absolutely necessary on your forms. It’s not a good idea to make them enter the same information twice.

Also, if a customer has already provided some information in an earlier step, don’t ask for it again in the next step. Automatically pre-fill the fields so that the user doesn’t have to enter them again

It is important you do not confuse your site users. One way he can be frustrated is  if he is not able to proceed because he is missing out filling some information which has not been marked as a mandatory field.  It is important you use asterisk (*) to clearly mark optional fields.

13) Create An Impressive About Page

One of the lesser know factors for conversion rate improvement of e-commerce sites is the “About Us”. A surprisingly large number of users actually go to the About page before they make a purchase from an online store. This is especially so if they are visiting the store for the first time. 

It goes without saying then that you should have a rich About Us page. A few tips on how to do this: 

• Give a bit of information about why your company was started. Please note that this is the place to showcase your “Mission, Vision” or whatever value. Take abstraction out of it 
• Highlight people behind your company, preferably with pictures
• Be Authentic

14) Conspicuous Support/Contact Page

It is very important that you have a phone number prominently displayed on your home page. And, your physical office address should be featured on your site as well.  your customers must know that real people are available to help if they’re lost or confused. It is also a trust builder, especially in Nigeria where there is still apathy about online shopping. 

15) Offer A Good Return Policy

If our store’s returns policy isn’t clear, visitors might get apprehensive when buying from our store. Your returns policy should be visible, clear, and buyer-friendly so that people feel safe while shopping with you.

In the second part of this series, I will try to go into the advanced stuff- Split testing, design, information architecture, colour science, etc

There are millions upon millions of business advice. But, beyond the convoluted theories, the best business advice ever can be reduced to a few short sentences:

• Customers are the most important people in the business- whether they come in person, write to us or telephone.
• Customers are not dependent upon us- we depend upon them for our living.
• Customers are not an interruption of our work- they are the purpose of it. They are doing us a favour  by giving us the opportunity to serve to serve them.
• Customers are not people with whom to argue or match our wits. No one ever won an argument with a customer.
• Customers are people who come to us because they need certain goods or services. It is our job to provide them in a way profitable to them and to ourselves.
• Customers are not cold statistics- they are flesh and blood human beings, with emotions and prejudices like our own.
• Customers are the most important people in this business- without them, there would be no business.

       Very simple set of advice but. the potency is in the simplicity

SOURCE:

John Fenton, 101 Ways To Boost Your Performance