Erich Stauffer

Tag: Product Marketing

  • What is Digital Marketing?

    Digital marketing is the promotion of products or brands via one or more forms of electronic media. A digital marketer is someone who focuses on customer acquisition and who has a passion for increasing conversions. Digital marketers drive new customer growth through the creation and hands-on execution of strategies across multiple channels like the website, social media, and paid advertising.

    The best digital marketers are the ones who focus on the customer. Why not focus on the company? Because the more the digital marketer knows about the customer, the more successful the conversions will be. The best digital marketers become an expert on their customers.

    Digital marketers work with a variety of marketing channels, which means they not only have to manage multiple platforms, but also relationships with internal staff and external agencies.

    The best digital marketer is a results-oriented person who has the analytical skills to break down complex problems, creativity to identify and develop new, scalable programs, and the skills to lead rigorous testing, measurement and iteration to improve results continuously. So what skills are needed?

    Digital Marketing Skills

    • Self-management – be able to manage your day-to-day tasks in order to achieve long-term and short-term goals.
    • Communication – sounds cliche, but here it’s important. Things need documented and communicated constantly.
    • Business analysis – the ability to distill information and present it in a way that other people understand it.
    • Domain knowledge – analytics, email marketing, paid advertising, retargeting, SEO, direct mail, video, and podcasting.
    • Curiosity – seek out and test innovative opportunities to expand visibility and customer acquisition through new channels.
    • Leadership – be able to lead a small team to help meet acquisition objectives by hiring, training, inspiring, and coaching.
    • Vendor management – be able to manage relationships with external agencies who specialize in various marketing domains.
    • Agile/Lean – a person of continuous optimization who develops and implements a strong framework for iterative testing.
    • Planning – be able to develop and manage long-term plans to meet long and short-term business objectives.
    • Technology – digital marketing and technology are inescapably intertwined. Be able to support the marketing technology.
    • Excel – you must have the ability to turn empirical data into insightful, strategic decisions for decision makers.
    • Strategy – the ability to think strategically and plan the overall direction of the company’s marketing strategy.
    • Google Analytics – you must understand how to read and interpret web analytics and testing/optimization techniques.

    Using the skills above you will be able to develop and execute the marketing strategy to meet the goals established for your company regardless of the budgeting constraints. You will perform weekly, monthly, and quarterly analysis reports across all marketing channels, which will report on your progress towards the stated goals. Are you up for the challenge? I am.

    My name is Erich Stauffer and I’m a digital marketer who is passionate about customers, conversions, and collaboration. One of my favorite things to do is to “check my stats”, which means logging into the e-commerce dashboard and Google Analytics to review conversions. I’ve managed Google Adwords, Twitter and Facebook ads, and helped run and train teams of other marketing specialists.

    I love to document what I do, which means I’m either updating a spreadsheet, an Evernote note, or a Dropbox folder. When new staff are brought on board, I’m the guy who trains them how to use the marketing systems and when there is new marketing technology, I’m the one trying it out. I love marketing, technology, and how it all works together. That is what I’m passionate about and that’s how I can help.

    How can I help you with your digital marketing needs?

  • Mixer Sales Hits Page One of Google

    Mixer Sales asked Erich Stauffer to help them get better search engine rankings for their primary keywords, best mixers and mixer sales – and now Mixer Sales is ranking on the first page of Google for ‘mixer sales’!

    While Mixer Sales ranks #6 for the keyword ‘mixer sales’,  they currently don’t rank in the top 100 for ‘best mixers’, which means we still have some work to do, but we believe in celebrating the small victories.   We also helped them setup what we call a ‘sticky page’ which is a page that stays on top of WordPress blog post listings. This is named after ‘sticky posts’, but uses a page instead of a post to prevent double posts on the front page. Going forward we’re going to recommend on product marketing sites like this a “start with sticky” policy because it provides a kind of launching pad for all of the other posts, which can sometimes get lost. Users can still find posts using categories or tags, but for the most important posts, they should be linked to from the sticky page and possibly even through the top navigation bar.  Most of the time we will start off with allowing WordPress to automatically display pages, but as the site ages and becomes more concrete, we’ll go back and manually manipulate the page navigation to add posts and other keywords for SEO reasons.

    Overall we see good things for Mixer Sales and wish them well in their endeavor to help people find the best deals on kitchen stand mixers, which have become more and more popular over the last several years.

  • Sell the Hole

    Merchants who sell drills are in fact selling pieces of mechanized metal, but the actual reason for the drill’s existence is to make holes. What the merchant is really selling is the hole.  The person buying the drill either wants to make a hole or drive a screw.  That’s it.  If they didn’t need one of those two things, they wouldn’t need the drill.

    So how can we relate that to our customers? Are we trying to sell our customers “the drill”? Are we helping our customers sell the drill or sell the hole? Why are our customers customers buying their product? Is it because of the product or the result they get from the product? Of course it is the latter.  We help customers identify what the “holes” are, what the end results of their products are and sell the solution, not the tool.