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

The death of cookies or just some overdure regulation

We’ve been using behav­ioural tar­get­ing for a num­ber of years. It opti­mises media spend and ampli­fies cam­paigns to the peo­ple who count. And, if done well, your prospects won’t realise it’s hap­pen­ing. But the EU believes con­sumers need to be pro­tected and made aware of the meth­ods used to tar­get them. That’s why there’s new leg­is­la­tion com­ing into effect on 25th May.

So, what to do? Well, the gen­eral con­sen­sus out there is the fol­low­ing: If you’re adver­tis­ing through pub­lish­ers and affil­i­ate net­works you need to make users aware that you’re track­ing their behav­iour to serve tai­lored adver­tis­ing. But what’s the best solu­tion? It could get messy with mul­ti­ple alerts, pop-ups and overlays.

Well, there’s an indus­try ini­tia­tive led by the IAB seek­ing to pro­vide an ele­ment of self-regulation, with a sym­bol like this appear­ing on behav­iourally tar­geted ads.



When clicked the user will be advised on the data being cap­tured, how it is used to serve adver­tis­ing and asked for their explicit con­sent. They’re hop­ing to have this in place by the end of 2011. It seems like a sim­ple solu­tion that could work for the whole industry.

Mat­ters get a bit more com­pli­cated when you’re using cook­ies on sites that you own and admin­is­ter. The direc­tive seems to imply that you still need to makes users aware of what you’re doing. But there’s a view out there that if you’re using cook­ies to improve the user’s expe­ri­ence e.g. shop­ping cart, remem­ber­ing log-ins, pre­ferred con­tent, etc, then you don’t need to get explicit consent.

So, with the end of May loom­ing, here are a few things to start planning:

• When adver­tis­ing after May, con­sider using the enhanced notice (icon) to gather con­sent or opt-out.
• Appor­tion respon­si­bil­ity for data pri­vacy within the con­text of behav­ioural adver­tis­ing with pub­lish­ers and ad networks.
• Ensure your pri­vacy pol­icy on your web­site suf­fi­ciently dis­closes the use of cook­ies and how they will be used.
• Pro­vide a sim­ple means for users to pro­vide explicit con­sent or opt-out.
• Con­sider mak­ing “do not track” func­tion­al­ity com­pat­i­ble with the lat­est incar­na­tions of browsers from Microsoft, Google and Mozilla.

Whilst it’s highly unlikely that the leg­is­la­tion is going to be enforced any­time soon, as respon­si­ble mar­keters, we all need to have a posi­tion on the direc­tive and a plan to ensure we don’t fall foul of the law. So, if you need a bit of advice, get in touch and we’ll point you in the right direction.

The death of creativity

I came across this quote from George Lois and it got me think­ing…”Cre­ativ­ity can solve almost any prob­lem. The cre­ative act, the defeat of habit by orig­i­nal­ity, over­comes every­thing.”

I’ve got a nag­ging feel­ing that mar­ket­ing automa­tion is giv­ing today’s mar­keters a num­ber of bad habits. Don’t get me wrong, I’m truly bought into the tan­gi­ble ben­e­fits of auto­mated plat­forms — com­mu­ni­cat­ing at the right time based on expressed and behav­ioural data, iden­ti­fy­ing qual­ity leads and rout­ing them appro­pri­ately to sales. And once the mar­keters have got to grips with the plat­form, they deliver greater effi­cien­cies, speed­ier exe­cu­tion, more con­trol and in-depth measurement.

But, at what cost?

When talk­ing to mar­keters, their approach to cre­at­ing a new cam­paign is often to repli­cate a pro­gram, swap out the header graph­ics and change the calls to action.  Really, is that what’s going to engage their tar­get audi­ence? Surely one lead gen­er­a­tion pro­gram can’t sim­ply be re-purposed. What about audi­ence insight and under­stand­ing? Who are they, where are they in the buy­ing cycle, what are their needs from your con­tent and what’s your unique propo­si­tion that’s going to excite them?

We need to get back to the fun­da­men­tals of defin­ing the cre­ative and busi­ness require­ments of a cam­paign. Only then do we develop cre­ative con­cepts that will sup­port these require­ments and deliver the best piece of mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion pos­si­ble, whilst at the same time defin­ing the opti­mal con­tact strat­egy for imple­men­ta­tion through mar­ket­ing automa­tion. It’s my belief that effec­tive cam­paign exe­cu­tion can only be realised through a com­bi­na­tion of left– and right-brain thinking.

So, if you find your auto­mated cam­paigns are deliv­er­ing less value for you over time, maybe it’s time to take a step back and breath some cre­ativ­ity back into your cam­paigns. You never know, it might just work…

Guaranteed leads. Publishers should try harder...

So here’s me think­ing that pub­lish­ers have really missed an oppor­tu­nity when it comes to pro­vid­ing guar­an­teed leads from their web properties.

Admit­tedly, whitepa­per pro­grammes work well when you’re try­ing to gen­er­ate a list of names. But, some­times that’s all they are – a list of names who are often unre­cep­tive when followed-up by tele­mar­ket­ing. Surely all of these “names” are active on the publisher’s web­site – they’ve been vis­it­ing, review­ing con­tent, con­tribut­ing in forums, etc. But all of this infor­ma­tion isn’t cap­tured when they fill-in a form and the data is passed on to the client.

Surely pub­lish­ers should be able to pro­vide some­thing that looks more like a lead than a name. Yes, they’ve reg­is­tered for a piece of high value con­tent, but there’s also so much more infor­ma­tion that can be appended to their pro­file e.g. how many times they’ve been on the web­site, areas of inter­est, lev­els of inter­ac­tion and con­tri­bu­tion, etc.

So, give me a score for each per­son that shows a com­bi­na­tion of “Pro­file Fit” and “Interest/Activity Fit”. And, as time is of the essence when hand­ing over leads (think of it as an atomic half-life of oppor­tu­nity), don’t give me a list of names once a week. Find out how to auto­mat­i­cally pass leads to our CRM sys­tem in near real-time. That’s why open APIs were invented.

In my hum­ble opin­ion, if pub­lish­ers can’t pro­vide this speed of ser­vice and level of infor­ma­tion, then guar­an­teed lead pro­grammes will become obsolete.

Social Media - Fire, Aim, Ready

Dur­ing a meal with a client the other day, she men­tioned that a divi­sion in her com­pany was deploy­ing a task force to develop a social media strat­egy. Whilst I under­stood the sen­ti­ment, I explained that this seemed like the wrong thing to do. I was obvi­ously accused of heresy and ignor­ing the most impor­tant trans­for­ma­tion in mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions since Johannes Guten­burg devel­oped the print­ing press in 15th Cen­tury. After all, which self-respecting com­pany doesn’t have a fully defined social media strategy?

Let me explain. Back in the bub­bly days at the end of the last mil­len­nium, every­body was talk­ing about how to define and adopt a new media strat­egy. These days, nobody would con­sider a new media strat­egy, but instead how dig­i­tal should be used as part of a broader mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions plan. It’s the same with social media.

Don’t think about engag­ing with your cus­tomers in social silos or hav­ing a knee jerk reac­tion to your CMO say­ing “we need a Face­book fan page”. Look at first under­stand­ing your tar­get audi­ence and what you want to achieve through your com­mu­ni­ca­tions. This should then help you to define your com­mu­ni­ca­tions strat­egy. It’s only at this point that you’ll be able to define which mar­ket­ing chan­nels to use and whether social plat­forms are even rel­e­vant within this plan.

Reas­sur­ingly, a work­shop at our recent Social Media Hud­dle made me realise that we’re now at a point where many of our tech­nol­ogy clients are truly start­ing to inte­grate social media into their mar­ket­ing plans. By doing this, they’re now able to add higher lev­els of engage­ment, col­lab­o­ra­tion and cre­ate dia­logue with their prospects, cus­tomers and chan­nel through social plat­forms. With­out los­ing sight of the fact that these activ­i­ties are part of a broader mar­ket­ing mix, involv­ing paid media, search and more tra­di­tional com­mu­ni­ca­tion vehicles.

How Salesforce.com do social

The final pre­sen­ta­tion at last week’s Social Media Hud­dle was from Xabier Ormaz­a­bal. He’s Senior Man­ager, Prod­uct Mar­ket­ing over at Salesforce.com. His 25 minute slot was filled with a huge amount of insight and action­able advice. Here’s a quick sum­mary of the points I took from it.

Salesforce.com build their social media strat­egy around three pil­lars of online com­mu­nity. Seems like a pretty straight for­ward model:

• First ensure that your cor­po­rate site and other owned web prop­er­ties are work­ing hard for you. Focus on build­ing engage­ment through knowl­edge shar­ing, user groups, blogs and ideas sharing.

• Sec­ondly, cre­ate your own branded chan­nels on exist­ing social plat­forms. Use lis­ten­ing tools like Radian6 to under­stand what peo­ple are say­ing and where they’re say­ing it. Engage with peo­ple where they spend their time and dis­trib­ute your con­tent across YouTube, Twit­ter, Flickr and Slideshare.

• Finally, cre­ate con­ver­sa­tions across the web on sites where you don’t have branded chan­nels e.g. Twit­ter, third party blogs, forums and part­ners sites. And, make sure your social media guide­lines are up to date and dis­sem­i­nate the poli­cies to your con­tent creators.

A good sug­ges­tion that came out of this last pil­lar was how to cal­cu­late a rough ROI for your social activ­i­ties. For exam­ple, first cal­cu­late how much a video costs to cre­ate and to upload to YouTube. Then, ascer­tain the £/$ value of a video view (that’s the tricky bit, but any media buyer should be able to give you a fig­ure). Mul­ti­ply this value by the num­ber of views and divide by the cost. Easy!

There was also a debate about whether peo­ple should have mul­ti­ple accounts on Twit­ter e.g. their “work” pro­file and their “per­sonal” pro­file. The audi­ence seemed split on this topic. I per­son­ally pre­fer a sin­gle account @Wrigsy where I Tweet about a broad range of top­ics (from climb­ing moun­tains to our lat­est new busi­ness wins). But, I sup­pose I’m lucky that I can also Tweet through our Ban­ner account @BannerCorp when the topic is purely focused on work.

If you’re a salesforce.com user, start using Chat­ter. It’s their most suc­cess­ful prod­uct launch to date and gives users the sort of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion they expect from plat­forms like Facebook.

POWNAR - the power of news and recommendation

CNN have cer­tainly pushed the bound­aries when it comes to explor­ing the power of rec­om­men­da­tion and the value of shared con­tent. Their global research ini­tia­tive Pow­nar, illus­trates why peo­ple share con­tent, how they share it and the type of con­tent they pre­fer to share. In the US and Europe, peo­ple tend to share con­tent for altru­is­tic rea­sons, whereas in Asia, shar­ing con­tent is more about broad­cast­ing your sta­tus. As you might sus­pect, arti­cles with embed­ded video and images are most likely to be shared. And, Face­book is the pri­mary plat­form used for sharing.

Most inter­est­ing from the research is the effect that shar­ing has on the per­son who is shar­ing the con­tent and those receiv­ing it. Peo­ple are 3.7 times more engaged with con­tent that has been rec­om­mended. And, those who share the con­tent are 2 times more engaged.

There’s also an inter­est­ing uplift in brand met­rics. Shared con­tent increases brand con­sid­er­a­tion by 12%, brand rec­om­men­da­tion by 19% and brand favoura­bil­ity by an astound­ing 19%.

The key actions to take from this research are to assess your con­tent to ensure it’s opti­mised for rec­om­men­da­tion and make it share­able. And, find a lady in Paris to be your indi­vid­ual broadcaster…

Take a look at the attached press release to under­stand how semi­otics, con­tent arche­types and bio­met­rics can be used to under­stand the effect that shared con­tent can have on your brand.

CNNI POWNAR — the power of news and recommendation

Getting the most out of LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an unde­ni­able force when it comes to B2B social net­works. Henry Clifford-Jones showed us some fas­ci­nat­ing sta­tis­tics – over 80 mil­lion pro­fes­sion­als view­ing 1.5billion pages per month across 600,000 pro­fes­sional groups.

When you want to build a group on LinkedIn, it’s only going to be a suc­cess if you build it around a com­mon inter­est and pur­pose. An empty LinkedIn group can be a very lonely place…

So, the more focused and well-defined the group is, the higher the level of par­tic­i­pa­tion and engage­ment. Also, don’t get too dis­ap­pointed if most peo­ple aren’t con­tribut­ing. LinkedIn reckon that for every per­son that con­tributes on the site, nine will com­ment and inter­act, whilst 90 will just sit back and con­sume the content.

The new inPages Platform

 

We were also lucky to take a sneak peak at the brand new inPages Plat­form. Our Hud­dle saw it just ahead of its global launch in New York. So, a bit of a scoop for our company.

So, what does inPages enable mar­keters to do?

Well, it does seem that LinkedIn has picked up on a well known fact – rec­om­men­da­tions from per­sonal acquain­tances are the most trusted form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion – and intro­duced a new tab on the com­pany pro­file page called Prod­ucts & Ser­vices. This areas of the site enables com­pa­nies to fea­ture infor­ma­tion about their prod­ucts, with onward links to their cor­po­rate sites.

LinkedIn Com­pany Prod­ucts and Ser­vices Page

But the clever bit here is that the new plat­form enables mem­bers to fea­ture in their pro­files the prod­ucts and ser­vices they use and to rec­om­mend them. This gives rec­om­men­da­tions a new level of cred­i­bil­ity – because they’re directly linked to a person’s pro­file. Thereby over­com­ing the con­cerns that many com­pa­nies actively “mas­sage” prod­uct rat­ings and rec­om­men­da­tions on other third party sites. I sus­pect that many tech mar­keters are already in a mad rush to get their prod­ucts and ser­vices listed.

How­ever, on reflec­tion, this new plat­form does raise a num­ber of inter­est­ing questions:

• Will com­pa­nies need to update their social guide­lines to encom­pass their employ­ees rec­om­mend­ing their own prod­ucts or those from other companies?
• If your pro­file fea­tures a large num­ber of prod­ucts and ser­vices, does this just open you up as a tar­get for sales guys? You’re clearly a per­son who influ­ences the pur­chase and based on the num­ber of prod­ucts, you’ve clearly got the budget…
• Look­ing at the demo of the plat­form, there doesn’t seem to be the func­tion­al­ity to pro­vide neg­a­tive feed­back. Surely these are often more impor­tant than pos­i­tive recommendations?

I’d be inter­ested to hear your thoughts on this topic.

Creating content for pancake people

Look­ing back on my youth, I used to pride myself on my abil­ity to remem­ber all of my friends’ tele­phone num­bers and every uni­ver­sity lec­ture that I had over the course of a week. Now, such feats of mem­ory are no longer required of my brain – my mobile devices and online ser­vices remem­ber and man­age these tasks for me.

I also used to enjoy get­ting stuck into long arti­cles and curl­ing up with an 800 page novel. Truth is, these days I find it chal­leng­ing to read a lengthy online arti­cle with­out fol­low­ing the mul­ti­ple links embed­ded within the page, the lure of check­ing Twit­ter, my netvibes news feeds and my mul­ti­ple email accounts. Appar­ently, I’m not alone – there is a per­cep­tion out there that the inter­net is chang­ing our brains (and not always pos­i­tively), how we con­sume infor­ma­tion and retain knowl­edge. In effect, Google is becom­ing a replace­ment for our long-term mem­ory and almost as quick at retriev­ing infor­ma­tion (take a look at the new Google Instant).

Pan­cake People

Back in 2005, the play­wright Richard Fore­man wrote a piece about ‘Pan­cake Peo­ple’, and it’s even more per­ti­nent today than when he wrote it:

“I see within us all (myself included) the replace­ment of com­plex inner den­sity with a new kind of self – evolv­ing under the pres­sure of infor­ma­tion over­load and the tech­nol­ogy of the ‘instantly avail­able’. A new self that needs to con­tain less and less of an inner reper­tory of dense cul­tural inher­i­tance – as we all become “pan­cake peo­ple” – spread wide and thin as we con­nect with that vast net­work of infor­ma­tion accessed by the mere touch of a but­ton.“

Ear­lier this year, a client told me that peo­ple don’t read web pages any­more and that much of the beau­ti­fully crafted copy that we had pro­duced was a waste of time. Instinc­tively, I fought back against this state­ment and zeal­ously defended our work. After all, pro­duc­ing con­tent and pub­lish­ing web pages is one of the rea­sons we’re in busi­ness. How­ever, there have been a num­ber of arti­cles lately that have re-ignited the dis­cus­sions and changed my mind as to how the inter­net is alter­ing the way our brains work and, there­fore, the way we con­sume information.

Have we reached a point pre­dicted back in 1985 by Max Head­room where blipverts will be the most effec­tive way of get­ting our mar­ket­ing mes­sages across to our tar­get audi­ence; where high-speed, con­cen­trated, high-intensity com­mer­cials last­ing about three sec­onds are used to sub­lim­i­nally brain­wash the masses?

We may not have reached that point yet, but chang­ing trends in media con­sump­tion must have some real impli­ca­tions for mar­keters. Is the long copy ad dead? Will tech­nol­ogy decision-makers no longer have the time or incli­na­tion to value whitepa­pers? Do we need to fun­da­men­tally address the tax­on­omy and con­tent hier­ar­chy of our web­sites? And, do we need to estab­lish new mea­sures of audi­ence engage­ment? After all, a page view doesn’t mean a page has actu­ally been read…

Bite-sized pay­loads of mar­ket­ing gold

 

If the answer to any of the above is “Yes”, then we need to ensure that we’re pro­duc­ing con­cise mar­ket­ing mes­sages that are laser-targeted at our audi­ences. Let’s not cre­ate reams of writ­ten con­tent that lan­guish on our cor­po­rate web­sites. Instead, let’s embrace the notion of cre­at­ing more engag­ing for­mats of con­tent and dis­trib­ut­ing it in bite-sized pay­loads to the plat­forms where our audi­ences are spend­ing their time. So that means fea­tur­ing con­tent on ser­vices like Scribd and Slideshare and find­ing new ways to fea­ture con­tent on pub­lisher web­sites. It also means mak­ing your blog one of the pri­mary des­ti­na­tions for your mar­ket­ing mes­sages. After all, the con­tent changes reg­u­larly and is gen­er­ally mer­ci­fully short.

Thank you for read­ing to the end of this post. It must have been dif­fi­cult not to fol­low any of the embed­ded links or check­ing the sta­tus on your social uni­verse… I’d be inter­ested to hear your thoughts.