|
|
Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing (Hardcover) (Hardcover)
by Bryan Eisenberg, Eisenberg, Lisa T. Davis
| Category:
Business, Market, Customer, Persuasion |
| Market price: ¥ 228.00
MSL price:
¥ 208.00
[ Shop incentives ]
|
| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
This book lays out a clear methodology on how to attract and pull customers through each step of their buying process. |
| If you want us to help you with the right titles you're looking for, or to make reading recommendations based on your needs, please contact our consultants. |
Detail |
Author |
Description |
Excerpt |
Reviews |
|
|
|
Author: Bryan Eisenberg, Eisenberg, Lisa T. Davis
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Pub. in: June, 2006
ISBN: 0785218971
Pages: 240
Measurements: 9 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00897
Other information: Har/Com edition
ISBN-13: 978-0785218975
|
|
Rate this product:
|
|
- MSL Picks -
"We tripled our online marketing budget and it is not yielding the returns anticipated"
"We have $250,000 to spend on marketing, what advertising programs should we spend it on?"
"We need you to "optimize" our marketing campaigns and make us more money with the same budget!"
If you've worked in online marketing at an agency, in-house you've probably had internal or external clients make these declarations or requests. You may succeed in delivering the desired outcome once in a while but simply spending more money and expecting to keep generating an ever increasing (or sometimes even the same) ROI doesn't often work now and will simply not work in the future.
"Waiting For Your Cat to Bark" addresses these issues and many more. Bryan & Jeff have been getting cats to bark since the late 90's while lots of marketers looked at them with amusement. Many marketers still seem to think they can broadcast their messages to consumers who "should" listen to them. Financial folks may be used to simply spending more money to make more and wondering why this doesn't always work online. (Yet companies still have fixed budgets that run out mid-day, mid-month or before the end of the fiscal quarter or year for campaigns that are clearly profitable!)
E-commerce is a strange game because it requires a global perspective; frequently a change in communication strategy and design, tech, copywriting, strategy (both online and off), budgeting, pricing and targeting must all converge to focus on selling products & services to consumers they way they want to purchase them.
Have you even thought about who your consumers are beyond general demographics? What are their concerns? What do they need to know to feel comfortable making a purchase or providing personal information? Does a massive branding, media or SEM campaign do any good if your website doesn't close sales? Do you know what the conversion rate of your site is? Have you thought about the intermediate steps (micro conversions) consumers may take on your site before they purchase?
When you start to wonder why you are seeing decreasing returns on your online marketing campaigns, start asking yourself these questions. Stand there, think, address these issues and then watch your conversion rates start to tick up, and your ROI start to increase. Imagine how much more money you could make and how much more competitive you could be if your conversion rate increased from 1% to 2% - an increase of 100%.
You've probably also noticed that the battle for search placements (organic & paid) is heating up. Think of the search arena as a decorative vase that will eventually be filled. First you "fill" the vase with some rather large precious stones. Since they are all different sizes and shapes, there is a lot of space between them and still more room in the vase. You proceed to put in smaller and smaller decorative stones until finally you fill out the vase with sand and maybe even water to completely fill it.
As first you started targeting very general keywords in your SEM campaigns and didn't bother with the ones that only got a few hundred searches per month. Marketing was about mass advertising, why waste time on something that relatively few people search for? Now that everyone and their grandmother knows there is gold in the search results, you need to start pouring in the sand, get more granular and focus on the specific keywords that represent exactly what consumers are looking for and present them with the products, service, or information on your site that match what they are looking for. Before you can do this and generate the highest ROI, you need to understand who your consumers are, what needs they express through search and how they want to buy.
Read this book. Stop, think, brainstorm, and plan. Upfront. It may take a while. You'll be glad you did when you see the returns start coming in. You'll probably feel better when you start to do it right, reduce your stress level and feel you're doing something that will actually have a positive affect on your business instead of just going along with the herd.
Target readers:
General readers, especially the shoppers, the retailers and the marketers.
|
|
- Better with -
Better with
Never Cold Call Again: Achieve Sales Greatness Without Cold Calling
:
|
|
While there is no shortage of open-source and "new" marketing gurus willing to describe the importance of customer-centric marketing, or advertising gurus ready to tell you that traditional advertising is broken, this is the first book to tell business owners how to:
1) engage customers on their own terms
2) overcome the fragmentation of media, and
3) **Still reach their business's objectives.**
Specifically, the Eisenberg's Persuasion Architecture allows business owners to map/match customers' buying processes to their business' sales process in order to maximize both sales and customer loyalty.
By acknowledging both the importance of sound sales AND the new "age of the customer," Jeff and Bryan Eisenberg have written a wonderfully synchretistic work well worth your time and money.
Quote from J. Sexton
|
| View all 8 comments |
D. L. Barnett (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-15 00:00>
Marketing is all about turning consumers into Pavlov's dogs, salivating at even the mention of a brand name. That's a stereotype, but even among marketers themselves the received wisdom was that the most heavily promoted brands would have the most loyal following.
If that was ever true, it is less true today with the advent of the Internet. On the Web, consumers have access not just to the "big" brands but to all brands, all equally a click away. It turns out consumers are not dogs after all, but cats. How do you get a cat to stick around?
That's the question a new book for marketers sets out to answer. "Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?" ($19.99 in hardcover from Nelson Business), by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa T. Davis, is subtitled "Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing." The authors write that "increasingly, customers are associating brand not with a message but with their entire experiences surrounding the product or service." The central message of the book is that customers, like cats, have a "what's in it for me?" attitude, and good marketing works when it attempts not to manipulate but ("within the confines of profitability and integrity") to delight the consumer. Why? "Delighted customers become repeat customers."
But how does a business provide this delight? The authors have developed a set of conceptual and software tools they call "Persuasion Architecture," which they present in detail in the book. I found the first half of the book quite helpful in understanding how the democracy of the Internet has changed marketing; the latter part of the book seemed to indulge in more and more jargon ("masks," "wireframing," "waypoints," "persuasion entities") with more and more mentions of Persuasion Architecture. The Eisenberg brothers veer awfully close to wanting professionals in their field to salivate at the mention of their brand.
Yet I think the authors genuinely want to be helpful. The CD packaged with the book includes an 80-minute question-and-answer session video and the Eisenbergs are clear they don't have all the answers. The CD also features a PDF file of the entire book. A delightful touch!
The book is unified around an examination of three questions.
First, "who are we trying to persuade to take the action?" This involves the creation of "personas" on the part of the business so marketers can develop empathy and anticipate questions. "Personas are stand-ins for the various angles from which your customers view their problems and your solutions." As an example, the authors offer Best Buy. One of the company's personas is "Jill," "a soccer mom who is motivated to please and care for her family. She doesn't want an intimidating experience when she shops for appliances or electronics. She needs to feel she has a friend along to help." Empathizing with "Jill," Best Buy can develop ads that talk about "Hassle- and fear-free electronics shopping."
Second, "What is the action we want someone to take?" Imagine a Web page that gives product information but offers no way for the user to make a purchase.
Finally, "What does that person need in order to feel confident taking that action?" This involves answering relevant questions in a timely fashion. Imagine someone about to order a product online who wonders how much the shipping is. Does the site make the consumer complete the transaction before providing that information?
We cats value our time. So delight us!
Dan Barnett teaches philosophy at Butte College. Copyright 2006 Chico Enterprise-Record. Used by permission. |
Marco Din(MSL quote), Italy
<2007-06-15 00:00>
I'm still reading it but since the first chapter I found it enlightening. Like many others I think this book is a milestone. If you manage sites it's a good idea to read it. I've already discovered and fixed some subtle mistakes on my site.
I previously read also "Call to Action" and "Persuasive Online Copywriting" and all of them worth consideration, but they seem rather a collection of articles.
|
Dr. Heat (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-15 00:00>
Waiting for Your Cat to Bark hits home. I have been trying to understand the new marketplace and our company's place in it for quite some time. I now have a clearer understanding on how to answer my customers needs when I market to them.
This book was also helpful in identifying how to answer our potential client's questions. It does not matter if their contact with us is on the phone, email, web site, direct mail, or even our trucks- we have to make sure that our message and image is consistent with their expectations. Otherwise we both loose. Thanks Bryan and Jeffrey.
Steve Sorenson Owner-One Hour Heating and Air Conditioning Oshkosh, Wisconsin
|
Craig Arthur (MSL quote), Australia
<2007-06-15 00:00>
Every man and his dog teach how to sell but very few teach how customers buy and how to marry the two processes. Waiting for Your Cat to Bark does just that. It teaches you how to open up multiple sales piplines. If you want to make more sales and grow your business you need to buy this book. |
View all 8 comments |
|
|
|
|
