the Clikk – Today: marketing in the world of COVID-19, government aid for freelancers, and lead generation equipment

If the majority of your team is working remotely (and we hope y’all are), their log-ins can seriously skew your data. “Your typical filter won’t catch workers working remotely, unless they are possibly using a VPN or other remote network connection,” advises Siteimprove’s digital analytic lead Brett Patterson. “This means your employees might be counted in your analytics metrics, even though you had previously created a filter for this.” Mark your anomalies as “shady at best.”

We’re not going to even count the number of truly tone-deaf press releases we’ve been seeing here at theCLIKK during this crisis. The current pandemic offers companies the opportunity to be seen as helpful partners that truly care about their customers—or as crass opportunists. People will reward companies offering compassion and helpful, on-target content. Don’t go “viral” for all the wrong reasons with messaging that reads as selfish or just plain stupid. So forget about making your free shipping code “COVID19.”

Live events are, for the near future, dead. But virtual “live” events allow brands to entertain and inform customers and prospects who are probably stuck at home and bored anyway. Sell small kitchen appliances? Get a camera and start streaming cooking classes. Operate a spa? Offer some DIY tutorials—and link to the products that you carry in your online store. Don’t have an e-commerce channel? Puhleeze. Allocate some of the resources for paid search that might be presently ineffective (unless your product is essential) and build it now!

Don’t let your organic rankings slide just because traffic is down. When searches resume, your content needs to be strong, fresh, and SEO-focused. Now is a great time to focus on creating and refreshing content that will draw new and returning customers back to your site, while keeping you on top of your Google game.

There’s a lot to worry about—but a lot of good work to do, too. See ya on the videoconference. (Don’t forget to hit mute!)

SHARED SOLITUDE 2.0: Instagram has launched a feature called Co-Watching, which is basically the Instagram love child of FaceTiming and screen-sharing. While users are Co-Watching, they can browse Liked and Saved posts as well as feeds recommended by Instagram—all while video-chatting in real-time. Instagram started testing Co-Watching about a year ago (especially once screen-sharing chat app Squad became popular), but with social-distance protocols in place, now is an excellent time to launch this feature. As a bonus: it’s likely to lengthen usage sessions (potentially by a lot), which means more ad inventory.

AID FOR FREELANCERS:  If you’re a contractor who’s out of work due to this crisis, you might think that you’re ineligible for aid because you’ve not been employed in the traditional W2 sense of the term. Fortunately, out-of-work freelancers and contractors are becoming eligible for more and more aid programs—largely because of responses to this crisis, and tacitly out of a recognition that the American workforce has changed. AdWeek has a pretty sharp rundown of different aid programs and how non-W2 workers are becoming eligible for benefits in each case. They even include the links you need to look up specific details and get things rolling where possible.

WEST ELM’S GIFT TO WFH: Bougie home brand West Elm (which is owned by Williams-Sonoma) just made a genius marketing play: given the surge in WFH and Zoom usage, particularly, they released a set of video-conference background photos designed for Zoom’s Virtual Background feature. All the pics are beautiful spaces that (naturally) feature their furnishings and luxury homewares. Here’s their post with all the images and an explanation of how to set up your Virtual Background of choice.

1. Lead magnet (We talked lead magnets yesterday. Read that here.)
2. Landing page
3. Reliable traffic source

Now, look at this landing page (sometimes called a ‘squeeze page’) from the same company.

Notice how focused this landing page is. There is only one call-to-action. Zero navigation or outside links.  Zero distractions.

A solid lead magnet offer will convert 40% to 70% of traffic into a lead or subscriber on a focused landing page like this.

So, how do you create a focused landing page?

Easy peasy. Use landing-page-building software. Landing-page software is worth its weight in gold because it makes it dead simple to build proven, high-converting landing pages and publish them to your website. 

Seriously, do not try to cobble together a landing page in WordPress or anything else. Use good landing-page software.

We use Instapage and Unbounce to build landing pages at theCLIKK. They are both fantastic and fairly priced.  

Ok, if you have a great lead magnet offer and a focused landing page, there’s just one more component you need: traffic. We’ll chat about that tomorrow.

Solve this word problem, young grasshopper. Acme sells three versions of its signature product, the Doohickey: the Classic retails for $50, the Lite for $30, and the Pro for $100. That’s the entire product line, and customers order one at a time (in any case).

(A) If half of Acme’s customers buy the Classic and the other half splits between Lite and Pro, what is Acme’s average order value (AOV)?

(B) What is Acme’s AOV if they discontinue the Lite version and customers split 70/30 between Classic and Pro (respectively)?

(C) What is Acme’s AOV if (after Part B) they price-drop the Pro to $90 and the split becomes 60/40?

‘DEAR MATH I HATE YOU’ ANSWERS: (A) $57.50, (B) $65.00, and (C) $66.00

Starting with Part A: the question tells us that 50% of customers buy the Classic, 25% buy the Lite, and 25% buy the Pro. Captain Obvious points out that those percentages add up to 100%, which will be important in a sec.

As the term “average order value” suggests, we’re trying to find some kind of average between the three products’ prices (made simpler here by the fact that people only ever buy one). A simple mean average would work if the customers were split into perfect thirds, but they’re not—so we need a weighted average.

Fortunately, we already know the appropriate “weights”: half, quarter, and quarter. As an equation:

(0.5 x $50) + (0.25 x $30) + (0.25 x $100)
= $25 + $7.50 + $25
= $57.50

Parts B and C follow the exact same logic, but with fewer parts. Here’s the math for Part B:

(0.7 x $50) + (0.3 x $100)
= $35 + $30
= $65.00

And Part C:

(0.6 x $50) + (0.4 x $90)
= $30 + $36
= $66.00

To wrap up, an important distinction: increasing AOVs are usually a good thing. Higher AOV’s often mean you can spend more money to acquire customers, service the ones you have, or line your pockets with cash. 🙂

But this isn’t always the case. Acme’s AOV went up when it discontinued its cheapest product, yes—but it also severed a source of revenue. This might be a smart decision or a terrible one, depending on the Lite’s margins and how well it sold (among many other factors).

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