Marketing according to... Is the funnel dead?

Marketing according to... Is the funnel dead?: I was at Econsultancy’s Fun­nel event a few weeks ago. A good event with some inter­est­ing speak­ers, but one thing seemed clear – all at...

Effective attribution is the route to marketing success

Image source: Voice — http://www.voice.be/blog/?p=1138

Here’s a prob­lem with a lot of tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies: they have ter­abytes of mar­ket­ing met­rics but they’re just not under­stand­ing the true value behind the data and how to best allo­cate their mar­ket­ing dol­lars. One of the key rea­sons is their out­dated approach to mar­ket­ing attri­bu­tion (i.e. the meth­ods used to credit mar­ket­ing chan­nels like PPC, SEO, dis­play, email, etc. and the role they play in con­vert­ing cus­tomers to sale).

It’s too often the case that our clients use “last click” attri­bu­tion, whereby they give the last mar­ket­ing touch all of the credit. In addi­tion, they give all con­ver­sions the same level of value, ignor­ing the source of the sale, the pro­file of the buyer, the prod­ucts pur­chased and good old Life Time Value (LTV). All this has led to mar­keters focus­ing on the bot­tom of the fun­nel  (i.e. those activ­i­ties that are near­est to the point of sale) and ignor­ing those aware­ness activ­i­ties nearer the top of the fun­nel. In real­ity, last click attri­bu­tion effec­tively elim­i­nates attri­bu­tion at the top and deval­ues cer­tain types of mar­ket­ing activ­ity e.g. online dis­play and SEO.

So, what to do? Well, first you need to adopt an ana­lyt­ics plat­form that can lever­age and join-up tags and cookie-level infor­ma­tion to get bet­ter insight into online cam­paign per­for­mance. These plat­forms pro­vide a real pic­ture of the impor­tance of first, sec­ond and third touches and cal­cu­late their true con­tri­bu­tion to mar­ket­ing and sales con­ver­sion. And, by look­ing at the paths cus­tomers typ­i­cally take through our mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions, we’ll be able to attribute the bulk of our rev­enue to a spe­cific num­ber of well-performing mar­ket­ing channels.

To ensure you’re effec­tively imple­ment­ing mar­ket­ing attri­bu­tion, you need to estab­lish how it’s cur­rently being done within your organ­i­sa­tion. You must then decide the value of spe­cific oppor­tu­ni­ties, the dif­fer­ence between cus­tomer types, bud­get allo­ca­tion, etc. Then based on this research, you can change the way you assign value to spe­cific mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties. Finally, you’ll need to ensure that you have a plat­form that can track all of the required touch points and build an accu­rate attri­bu­tion model. Good exam­ples are Con­vertro and Mar­ket­Share.

A great attri­bu­tion model is one thing, but imple­ment­ing change within your organ­i­sa­tion is another. Form our expe­ri­ence with tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies, change can be fraught with dan­ger. There are a num­ber of per­son­nel respon­si­ble for spe­cific mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties. Some of these activ­i­ties might be based in Europe, whilst oth­ers might be man­aged glob­ally from head­quar­ters in US or Asia. It’s a dif­fi­cult polit­i­cal exer­cise to get them to accept the changes to the per­ceived value of their mar­ket­ing con­tri­bu­tion. But, by adopt­ing a more ana­lyt­i­cal approach, the proof will be there to imple­ment change and replace that out­dated last click attri­bu­tion with a more bal­anced approach.

Once you get attri­bu­tion work­ing smoothly across all of your online activ­i­ties, you’ll then be able to look at ways to encom­pass offline met­rics e.g. event atten­dance, print in the form of QR codes and out­door advertising.

IMHO — Effec­tive mar­ket­ing attri­bu­tion will mean you can recog­nise the fol­low­ing improve­ments to your marketing:

• Greater vis­i­bil­ity and effi­ciency across all of your online mar­ket­ing activities.
• Shift­ing bud­gets between mar­ket­ing chan­nels to ensure an opti­mal mix
• Give less focus on mar­ket­ing chan­nels that get the last click.
• And, give more focus to those that con­tribute at ear­lier points in the funnel
• Finally, you’ll be able to prove per­for­mance and the role mar­ket­ing plays in Rev­enue Per­for­mance Man­age­ment (RPM)

Google's single privacy policy. Calm down dear!

So, 1st March 2012 saw Google imple­ment its sin­gle pri­vacy pol­icy across all of its ser­vices. And, you can under­stand why they did it. They go from over 60 sep­a­rate poli­cies to a sin­gle one that enables them to track user data and web activ­ity gath­ered on one Google ser­vice and use it across a num­ber (but not all) of their other ser­vices. So, the stuff that I search for on Google will affect the adver­tis­ing that I’m shown on YouTube.

Image source: http://www.valuewalk.com/2012/02/how-to-stop-google-from-collecting-your-web-history

 

Google’s posi­tion is that it sim­pli­fies every­thing and it’s in the cus­tomers’ best inter­ests. After all, they are given con­tex­tu­ally rel­e­vant adver­tis­ing and pro­mo­tions based on their pro­file, brows­ing his­tory and implied inter­ests.  But, the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion have a markedly dif­fer­ent view and sug­gest the sin­gle pol­icy is in breach of Euro­pean law. The EU’s jus­tice com­mis­sioner Viviane Red­ing is on record as say­ing that the “trans­parency rules have not been applied”.

In an obvi­ous response to this, Google’s coun­tered with the fol­low­ing state­ment – “We are con­fi­dent that our new sim­ple, clear and trans­par­ent pri­vacy pol­icy respects all Euro­pean data pro­tec­tion laws and prin­ci­ples.” It’s up to you to decide who to believe…

The only way to opt-out is to not use Google ser­vices. But this is not real­is­tic for most peo­ple given the per­va­sive­ness of Google – Search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, Blog­ger, etc. Even harder if you have an Android phone – as signing-up and agree­ing to Google’s poli­cies are a require­ment to switch­ing the phone on.

You can delete your brows­ing his­tory on Google or view­ing his­tory on YouTube. But, in real­ity, how many peo­ple are going to do this and remem­ber to keep doing it? Given we are talk­ing about over 60 sep­a­rate ser­vices, I would wager, the major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion would never bother.

An eye-opening exer­cise is to check out your pro­file on Google Dash­board. If you add your online his­tory to this data, Google have an increas­ingly pow­er­ful propo­si­tion to us mar­keters. For exam­ple, YouTube seems to be the only Google ser­vice that knows my age and gen­der. Now all of their ser­vices know this and can mar­ket to me accordingly.

Inter­est­ingly, there are some spe­cific Google prod­ucts that aren’t shown on the Google Dash­board. And, while I care lit­tle about the defunct Google Wave, I’d like to know what level of detail they hold in Google AdWords and Google Places.

IMHO — Let’s keep things in per­spec­tive. Yes, Google is richer than Croe­sus, but this type of activ­ity pays for the ser­vices we all love to use for free. And, I frankly don’t see the real prob­lem. We are always going to be exposed to adver­tis­ing, why not have them rel­e­vant to my per­ceived inter­ests. We’ve also been doing it for years with the likes of the Tesco Club­card, where all of our shop­ping activ­i­ties are used to pro­file offers and promotions. I guar­an­tee Tesco use this data to cross-sell other prod­ucts like insur­ance, mobile phones and inter­net access.

And, yes, the sci­ence isn’t per­fect yet, but it will get there (espe­cially now that Google can use the infor­ma­tion across mul­ti­ple ser­vices). A case in point, I was recently look­ing at Saga hol­i­days for my par­ents. Now Google is con­vinced I’m over 60, plan­ning for my retire­ment and in need of incon­ti­nence pants. Had they used my age and gen­der from data held at YouTube, this would not have happened.

If we look a lit­tle into the future, there’s some good things that could come out of this sin­gle pol­icy. For exam­ple, based on your cur­rent loca­tion and the cur­rent traf­fic con­di­tions, Google will let you know that you might be late for that meet­ing you’ve arranged via Google Cal­en­dar and sug­gest an appro­pri­ate alert to send to your client via Gmail. Nice

Being a mar­keter, this is the type of activ­ity that has lead to a resur­gence in dis­play adver­tis­ing. We’ve been work­ing exten­sively with our part­ners at The MIG and the their Zap Trader plat­form to effec­tively tar­get web users based on their behav­iour and pref­er­ences. This means we can achieve greater effi­ciency and improved per­for­mance for our clients, at the same time as pro­vid­ing rel­e­vant pro­mo­tions to their cus­tomers. It will now get even bet­ter with Google’s sin­gle pri­vacy policy.

But, if you’re still wor­ried about Google’s sin­is­ter inten­tions, check out the Elec­tronic Fron­tier Foundation’s com­plete guide to pro­tect­ing your pri­vacy.

Is the funnel dead?

I was at Econsultancy’s Fun­nel event a few weeks ago. A good event with some inter­est­ing speak­ers, but one thing seemed clear – all atten­dees and ven­dors were totally bought into the con­cept of the tried and tested Fun­nel. For many agen­cies present, it actu­ally seemed to be the basis of their busi­ness mod­els and their pitch to the market.

Com­pare this with Forrester’s mar­ket­ing event at The Grove, where the ral­ly­ing cry seemed to be “The Fun­nel is dead”.  Appar­ently, it’s now all about cus­tomer engagement.

So, were the appar­ently mis­guided Fun­nel atten­dees bas­ing their busi­nesses on a flawed metaphor? Will the event be called “Fun­nel” next year? Is the Fun­nel really obsolescent?

Or, are these new ways of think­ing just a reflec­tion of the ongo­ing require­ment for ana­lyst firms to develop new mod­els where they can re-package exist­ing prin­ci­ples to sell more white papers and ana­lyst hours? After all, you have McK­in­sey push­ing the Con­sumer Deci­sion Jour­ney (a cir­cu­lar process) and For­rester pro­mot­ing their Cus­tomer Life-cycle model (another cir­cu­lar process). To my mind, as long as you under­stand the changes in the mar­ket­ing land­scape, you can eas­ily map the phases from these new mod­els on to good old Funnel.

The con­cept of the sales Fun­nel has been around for over 100 years, and as a metaphor it has worked well to illus­trate the need to deliver a large num­ber unqual­i­fied prospects into one end of the fun­nel to get a smaller num­ber of qual­i­fied sales-ready leads out of the other. When there were fewer mar­ket­ing chan­nels and touch-points, it served us mar­keters pretty well.

But there’s a prob­lem. One of the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples behind the Fun­nel is that it is lin­ear, and until recently, it was a rea­son­ably good model for the sales process: you’d buy a TV or press ad (Aware­ness); you’d send an email or DM to those who might be likely to be inter­ested (Con­sid­er­a­tion); once you get a response you’d get on the phone and tele-market (Pref­er­ence). Finally, you’d get those qual­i­fied prospects in front of a sales­man (Pur­chase). So, as long as you had effec­tive con­tent for each phase, the flow of ever-more qual­i­fied prospects through the Fun­nel was straightforward.

These days things are dif­fer­ent. With the pro­lif­er­a­tion of mar­ket­ing chan­nels, mul­ti­ple screens and social media, our tar­get audi­ences are no longer mov­ing uni-directionally between our pre-prescribed phases or con­sum­ing our beau­ti­fully crafted mar­ket­ing mes­sages in the order that we intend. In real­ity, prospects are no longer pas­sively con­sum­ing paid media thrust at them by big brands. Instead they’re engag­ing with con­tent on their own terms — often on social net­works — far out­side the direct con­trol of us marketers.

In my hum­ble opin­ion, mar­keters need to change the way they pro­mote their prod­ucts to prospects and con­vert them to sales. And, maybe it’s just eas­ier to adopt a new cir­cu­lar sales model touted by an ana­lyst firm. What is most impor­tant, is that mar­keters have to under­stand that the land­scape has fun­da­men­tally changed and that they need to:

1. Become more involved in the con­ver­sa­tion beyond the con­fines of the cor­po­rate web­site. Don’t have social media and mobile strate­gies. Instead, have a mar­ket­ing strat­egy, of which social and mobile are part.
2. Man­age con­tent effec­tively and cater for the fact that it needs to be used across mul­ti­ple phases of the sales cycle (what­ever model you use) and dis­trib­uted in an array of for­mats to cater for the ever-growing demand for con­tent on the customer’s terms.
3. Focus on mar­ket­ing intel­li­gence by inte­grat­ing mul­ti­ple sources of data to build a con­sol­i­dated view of what’s work­ing and ensure the most effec­tive use of scarce mar­ket­ing budgets.

The gamification of B2B

Image cour­tesy of http://www.adpulp.com/gamification_se/

There is a grow­ing opin­ion in the dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing com­mu­nity that the con­struc­tion of the social layer of the web is now com­plete, espe­cially with the dom­i­nance of Face­book. The next phase will move from estab­lish­ing social con­nec­tions to the devel­op­ment of game dynam­ics that encour­age long-term brand engage­ment and loyalty.

It’s cer­tainly easy to see how game the­ory has already been applied in con­sumer mar­ket­ing e.g. building-up points on FourSquare to get a free cof­fee at Star­bucks. But, the big ques­tion is how will it work for B2B?

Well, it’s already hap­pen­ing on sites like LinkedIn, where users feel a sense of achieve­ment if they have more con­nec­tions than their peers, are rec­om­mended more and have a more com­plete pro­file. Users are dri­ven by their need for sta­tus and influ­ence and the fact that pro­gress­ing to a new level is rel­a­tively straight­for­ward e.g. adding spe­cial­i­ties gives you and addi­tional 5% on your pro­file com­plete­ness. The same applies to Twit­ter updates and followers.

I believe that we’ll see a num­ber of game-based expe­ri­ences on web­sites and mobile appli­ca­tions devel­oped specif­i­cally to engage the busi­ness audi­ence. Whilst they will ini­tially be focused on train­ing and edu­ca­tion, over time they will moti­vate prospects and cus­tomers to pro­vide lev­els of cus­tomer insight that would be impos­si­ble to obtain through tra­di­tional meth­ods – it’s eas­ier to get infor­ma­tion from peo­ple if they get an imme­di­ate reward for doing it.

But, by cre­at­ing game-based con­nec­tions with our cus­tomers, we need to ensure we align their moti­va­tions with deliv­er­ing real busi­ness value to your organ­i­sa­tion. In this way, we’ll iden­tify indi­vid­u­als and groups who are gen­uinely inter­ested in our prod­ucts and ser­vices and who will be long-term advocates.

Image cour­tesy of The Pow­er­Point Alchemist

Here’s a good exam­ple from Microsoft Office Labs. Rib­bon Hero 2 teaches peo­ple to use the fea­tures of Microsoft Office (Excel, Pow­er­Point and Word) by play­ing a series of themed games. They can then com­pete against friends and col­leagues while becom­ing pro­fi­cient with the soft­ware and emerg­ing as loyal users. Try it out here.

Image cour­tesy of IBM

And finally, IBM City­One innov8 is a long-term play to pro­mote Big Blue’s sus­tain­abil­ity and con­sult­ing cre­den­tials around smart city plan­ning. The core mes­sage is that IBM wants users to dis­cover how busi­ness process man­age­ment, col­lab­o­ra­tive tech­nolo­gies, and ser­vice ori­ented archi­tec­ture enable com­pa­nies and indus­tries to adapt to new demands and build a sus­tain­able advan­tage. Nancy Pear­son, IBM vice pres­i­dent of SOA, BPM and Web­Sphere says “Seri­ous games allow pro­fes­sion­als to inher­ently com­pre­hend sys­tem inter­ac­tions, and accu­rately model the poten­tial busi­ness out­comes that can result, in a way that no other medium can do.” You can find out more here.

So watch out for the gam­i­fi­ca­tion of your next B2B mar­ket­ing cam­paign. If done right, your prospects may not even notice how their behav­iour is being influ­enced. They’ll be too busy build­ing their online sta­tus and scor­ing points.

Never pay for an exhibition stand again

I was at a WPP Dig­i­tal Day last month and one of the pre­sen­ters was King Yiu Chu from Layar. He took us through some great exam­ples of Aug­mented Real­ity and how it can be applied to our mar­ket­ing efforts.

One case study was the Unin­vited DIY Exhi­bi­tion at MoMA New York, where vis­i­tors to the art gallery were able to see a num­ber of addi­tional “unof­fi­cial” exhibits through their iPhone and Android hand­sets. A nice way of blur­ring the lines between phys­i­cal and vir­tual environments.



Well, this got me think­ing. The price of a stand at CeBIT or Mobile World Con­gress will cost many thou­sands of pounds. So, why not geo-tag an area in the event e.g. meet­ing zones, and set-up a vir­tual exhi­bi­tion stand. Just have some com­pany rep­re­sen­ta­tive man­ning the area, hand out some fly­ers with the loca­tion of the stand and a QR code to down­load your Layar plug-in. And, you’re good to go. A nice guer­rilla way to get some stand-out and save lots of money.

Image cour­tesy of Layar

Making mobile work for B2B

I was speak­ing at a B2B mar­ket­ing event the other day about mobile. For many of us it’s a very hot topic. What amazed me at the event, how­ever, was how few peo­ple in the room are actively con­sid­er­ing mobile mar­ket­ing for their organ­i­sa­tions. And, more impor­tantly, how mobile could form an inte­gral part of their cus­tomer engage­ment strat­egy. For me the biggest prob­lem seems to be a per­cep­tion gap between what mar­keters think and the actual mobile usage amongst their B2B tar­get audiences.

The real­ity is that mobile is fast becom­ing the pri­mary screen and com­mu­ni­ca­tions tool for busi­ness peo­ple. But many mar­keters are under the false impres­sion that their prospects won’t be recep­tive to busi­ness mes­sages when they’re in a mobile frame of mind. They think they’re more inter­ested in catch­ing up with the news, con­sum­ing enter­tain­ment and updat­ing their sta­tus on mul­ti­ple social net­works. This means there’s no oppor­tu­nity for com­mer­cial mes­sages and that nobody wants a rela­tion­ship with a com­pany through their most per­sonal of devices. Or, do they?

Well the answer is a resound­ing “YES”. Mobile is all-pervasive and the de facto way peo­ple com­mu­ni­cate, do tasks, socialise and con­duct busi­ness. So it is the obvi­ous chan­nel to reach the peo­ple that mat­ter. But before you run head­long into devel­op­ing a shiny new mobile app, here are are few point­ers to ensure you don’t fall at the first hurdle:

1. Don’t treat mobile like tra­di­tional online com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Dri­ving your prospects to down­load­ing a whitepa­per just isn’t going to work. So, con­sider the screen real estate that you have to work with and the way peo­ple con­sume con­tent. Atten­tion spans aren’t what they used to be, so a series of 5 minute pod­casts will prob­a­bly work bet­ter than a 50 page For­rester report.
2. If you thought pri­vacy was impor­tant on the desk­top, with mobile you ain’t seen noth­ing yet. It’s as per­sonal as the com­puter is ever going to get. So push­ing out unin­vited mar­ket­ing mes­sages and SMS just won’t work. Ensure you use a phased approach to engage with the prospects at an intrin­sic level – appeal to their intel­lec­tual side, their need for rela­tion­ship and pro­vide enter­tain­ment. Only once you’ve estab­lished this can you mix in a layer of com­mer­cial promotion.
3. Think about how you’re going to get them engag­ing via their mobiles. So con­sider how you’ll con­vert from email to mobile, off the printed page with QR codes and through social net­works. After all, you can build a clever app but it doesn’t mean that peo­ple will use it (most apps are only used once).
4. If you can’t make doing busi­ness with your com­pany over mobile devices bet­ter, faster and eas­ier, don’t even bother. Don’t try to squeeze your com­pany web­site onto a mobile device. Instead think what peo­ple need from you when they’re on the move and pri­ori­tise that con­tent and func­tion­al­ity. So, stuff that’s loca­tion spe­cific, sup­port ori­ented and socially share­able should come to the fore.

The above are just a few point­ers. If you’d like to dis­cuss how mobile can be used to enhance your media strate­gies or extend your mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions, drop me a line at wrigley@gmail.com