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Posted on by Louis Gudema

If you’ve been watching the World Series (Go Red Sox!) you cannot have missed the annual Taco Bell “Steal a Base, Steal a Taco” promotion. If any player on either team steals a base during the World Series, people can go into a Taco Bell for a free Taco on November 1. Although base stealing is far less popular than 20 or 30 years ago, fans didn’t have to wait long as Boston Red Sox player Mookie Betts stole a base in the first inning of the first game. Tacos on!

The promotion includes frequent mentions during all of the Series games, ads, social media posts to Taco Bell’s 1.9 million Twitter followers and followers on other social networks, and so on. Beyond the tacos, the promotional elements for sale include Steal a Taco baseball caps, and Topps baseball cards of all past players who stole the World Series base that triggered the free taco.

The results from the promotion last year were down from the highly rated 2016 seven-game World Series, when the Chicago Cubs ended a 108-year drought of World Series championships against the Cleveland Indians, who have not won since 1948. While more people definitely were coming into the Taco Bell stores during the promotion, in 2017 it was 17% less of a bump than 2016.

Results may be even worse this year because TV ratings for the five-game World Series were down 23% from last year. Ho hum, another Boston team winning a championship. Haven’t we seen this show before?

 

Taco Bell also runs a similar “Steal a Game, Steal a Taco” promotion during the NBA championship series in which the free tacos are triggered if either team wins a game on its opponent’s home court. 

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

Last week I mentioned my guest blog post for OpenView in which I say that inbound marketing has passed its expiration date and Bullseye Marketing is a more useful successor.

I got a lot of positive feedback to that piece. But a few people contacted me to say “no, no, no!” They all had the same story: they had created one or two pieces of content that had been very effective in attracting new, qualified leads.

This is a great strategy: rather than attempting the traditional inbound approach of (in basketball parlance) flooding the zone with hundreds of pieces of content – HubSpot has a chart that shows that results usually start to improve when you have posted over 100 blog posts — focus on creating just one or two outstanding pieces that really answer the questions of your prospects and promote the hell out of that.

Similarly, instead of tweeting and posting broadly to social media to try to get attention, do what Evan Kirstel describes in my interview with him (on this website and in my book): use social media to gain the attention of the influencers in your industry, and narrowcast with the hashtags of specific events.

 

Unless you have a massive budget and can afford to go big, hyper-focusing with fewer, higher quality interactions may be how to break through to the people that really matter to you. 

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

Last week, OpenView Partners, a growth stage venture capital firm in Boston, published a new piece by me entitled “Inbound Marketing Has Passed Its Expiration Date. What Now?” Please check it out.

In the piece I discuss how inbound marketing, one of the dominant marketing approaches of the last 12 years, has become inefficient for most companies. I specifically call out HubSpot and its CEO Brian Halligan who continue to evangelize for inbound like it was 2006 – when it had a lot better chance of working. Inbound has become so inefficient for HubSpot itself that in just five years their customer acquisition cost – the average cost to gain a new customer – has more than doubled.

In doing so, I was hunting elephants: going after a market leader. In his excellent memoir, Behind the Cloud, Salesforce CEO and founder Marc Benioff, describes how they aggressively, publicly, and repeatedly attacked the then-CRM market leader in very creative ways. (If you haven’t read it already, check out the book. It’s a terrific read.) It got them a lot of attention in the trade press and really differentiated them from every other CRM company. Their sales exploded.

In writing that post, of course I wanted (valid) attention. I also wanted to build awareness for my Bullseye Marketing approach which I positioned as a successor to inbound.

I chose to offer it to the OpenView Partners blog because I knew that many area business and marketing thought leaders read their posts (judging from what they had commented on and shared in the past). OpenView may not have a huge national presence, but it could help me build my brand regionally.

And it had that result. People I wanted to reach got in touch with me about the post and shared it with their connections and followers. For example, one local business leader contacted me via Twitter, said “Loved your post on Openview!”, and asked to connect on LinkedIn “for a possible future collaboration.” Sounds good to me.

Don’t be shy, or nibble around the edges. If you’re going to do competitive marketing, go after the big guys. That’s what can get you attention and results.

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

Part of the premise of Bullseye Marketing is that companies that have been around for a few years have marketing assets, such as email lists and website traffic. But sometimes companies have been so inattentive to their marketing that, even after many years, they may not have these assets. Their website traffic may be very low (and half of that may be bots), and much of their contact list may be out of date.

What do they do then?

From a marketing point of view, companies in that situation are similar to a startup. They can expect that it will take some times to generate significant website traffic, and results from it, and their lists are so small that their email marketing may not produce much in results for some time, either.

They still can focus on understanding their customers better: interviewing them, and working on improving the customer experience. A superior CX is a true competitive advantage. Retaining and growing existing accounts may be even more important than ever.

A customer reference program could be very effective in this situation. The company has customers, the customers like the company’s work, use them to open doors to new accounts.

Focus on direct sales. Choose target accounts and work with marketing on gaining access to them, creating custom content to move the deal forward, and closing them.

Search ads may also be effective since they can get the company in front of people who are in serious search mode for a purchase. These companies may find that purchasing third-party intent date is worthwhile, too.

To make sure that these programs are as effective as possible, you still need to make sure you have your website messaging, calls to action, and conversion experience optimized. Otherwise you’ll be wasting a lot of your effort.

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

A minimum viable product (MVP) is a key element of the lean startup approach. The idea is that, rather than spending years creating a full product only to find out it’s not really what the market wants, you quickly create a product with enough features to go to market with and get feedback. Then you can iterate and improve on that without risking an all-in failure.

In an interview with WeWork co-founder Miguel KcKelvey for the terrific “How I Built This” podcast, though, we hear that WeWork never had an MVP. They had an idea for the kind of experience that they wanted to provide and they built out their very first space to reflect that. And it was very successful. No doubt over time they’ve added to and refined it, but it was far more than an MVP.

Similarly Tesla never had an MVP – a cheap, economy car that would let them get their toe in the electric car market, and later move up market. The first Tesla was a sporty roadster priced at $109,000. Then they released the Model S sedan which cost around $80,000. The Model 3 was supposed to cost around $35,000, but tricked out as you’d want it it costs more like $50,000-55,000. Instead of starting minimal, they started high end and worked down. (When Japanese car manufacturers entered the U.S. market 60 years ago they started small and inexpensive. Hard though it may be to believe today, there was a time when “Made in Japan” meant, to most Americans, that an item was cheap and poorly made. But the Japanese companies consistently improved their products and today they’re more reliable than most cars from U.S. manufacturers.)

 

An MVP is a good idea in some markets, like software, but if you’re selling a high end experience or product, you need to deliver that to even your earliest customers. Doing that also establishes yours as a quality brand.