The man in the commercial is focused on getting his morning coffee and nothing else.  He dismisses everyone, including the cashier at McDonald’s, until he is presented with his coffee. The coffee guy represents everyone you want to talk to, whether you are targeting consumers or businesses.  He doesn’t want to hear anything else until he gets his coffee, just like prospects don’t hear anything from you that isn’t relevant either.

Marketing and sales people often approach people in all the wrong ways.  They only think about themselves and what they want to accomplish, rather than thinking about what is going on in the mind of their prospect.   People in general mostly care only about what is going on in their life, how they feel, what they need to accomplish and what they need in order to do that.  In order to reach people and present what you have to offer, you first have to try to understand those things for them.  After you determine that, in order to get their attention, you need strong value propositions.

Here are a couple of examples of bad approaches.  In this voice mail rcvm128_2010082508395100, Jennifer doesn’t clearly articulate what company she’s with and simply says she “has a couple of questions.”  She’s only thinking of herself, what she wants to know to move her sales process forward, and doesn’t state any compelling value proposition to entice me.  In this voice mail rcvm128_2010082515292500, Kirby says what he specializes in, lead generation and appointment setting, and does give somewhat of a value proposition but it is very weak: to “expand your client base in getting clients.”  Again, it’s mostly focused on himself.  So what can we do to better position ourselves, and not be a Jennifer or Kirby?  Take the time to do your market research and be thoughtful in the way you present your information.

If targeting consumers, you can read secondary research or do a custom survey to find out what’s important to them so you can be relevant.  You can also test your marketing messages before investing a ton of money in various media  (as aside, I work in market research at C.A. Walker if you need assistance in this area).

If targeting businesses, you can evaluate the people you are trying to reach by studying job postings for all the titles.  Print a bunch of them (Indeed.com works great for this) and create profiles for each.  You need to understand their responsibilities, their involvement in decision making, who else may be involved (target them all), their measures (metrics) of success, and their business drivers.  Then study the company looking at their website, articles, investor reports and presentations.  You should be able to pick up from these resources their current plans and issues in order to craft relevant messages.  You may also want to conduct your own survey to better understand these people and test your messages as insurance that you’re doing the right thing (as aside, C.A. Walker can also target specific business titles in surveys).

To create marketing ROI, you have to have the mindset that you are there to serve others.  The more you can understand your targets’ current needs and stop focusing on yours, the better.  Like the coffee man, you must try to insert yourself at the moment that they have a need (“I can give you coffee!”).  Good value propositions help people see that you understand them and can help them achieve their measure of success or fulfill their need, while focused on their issue (“I know you really need your morning coffee.  I can give it to you cheaper than Starbucks and it’s convenient!”).

It is a bit of a guessing game, but if you did a good job on your research it is likely you found many issues that you can address.  I suggest trying to find 10 things you can talk about.  You can then contact your target with 10 different value propositions over a period of 4 to 6 weeks.  If you did this right, something should “hit” because it’s what they are dealing with.  If none do, then you can move on and come back to them in a month or so when you have something else you can talk about.  You may also come across articles that relate to them, which you can share to help them stay on top of trends in their industry.  The best part of this technique is that you never have to feel like you’re bothering someone, contacting them multiple times, because you are offering them value that is targeted to what you’ve learned about their needs.

Your Turn:

What are your ideas for marketers and sales people to be more engaging?

Related posts:

1. The Rise of Engagement Marketing

At Digiday Social, a case study was presented by imc2 for Secret deodorant, a brand they have been working with since 2003.  The first type of cause marketing is finding something of marketing interest that resonates with the core values of the brand.  For example, Secret’s core brand value is “empowering women” so imc2 latched on to Lindsey Van’s petition to allow women to participate in ski jumping in the 2014 Olympic Winter Games (visit LetHerJump.com to sign the petition).  The commercial, which can be seen here on YouTube, resonated with the Digiday audience and received a round of applause, to which the speaker was unabashedly flattered.  Although the YouTube video has only received 1,500+ views, the company forwarded the LetHerJump domain to their Facebook page, which was smart.  The Page has nearly 40,000 Facebook Fans, which can be marketed to repeatedly (although this should be done well, which is a whole other challenge).

As a side note, another speaker at DigiDay pointed out how the advent of social sites such as Facebook has created the opportunity to constantly market to an audience, which on the plus side can increase Lifetime Customer Value (discussed in a previous post) but on the down side makes it harder to evaluate the affects of a particular marketing campaign.

In order to effectively implement the brand-alignment kind of cause marketing, several steps need to be achieved through primary research (if you need assistance, the company I work with, C.A. Walker, does this).  First, you must know what values you would like the brand to stand for, then you can use surveying to evaluate your brand’s values currently in the mind of the target markets (if any), and whether the values you would like to have associated with the brand would be acceptable in the mind of the target(s).  You can also ask what nonprofits, if any, they donate their time to so you can determine those you may want to evaluate if their brand values are in-line with yours.  From there, you need to create opportunities to attach the brand value to a particular nonprofit objective and market it.  Lastly, you should then re-test the market post-campaign to see what lift was created in terms of brand value awareness, brand loyalty, likelihood to purchase/switch from a competitor, etc.

In the instance of the Secret campaign, although I was one of the persons clapping for the video’s message at Digiday, if they were to ask me I would tell them it did not move the needle much towards me purchasing their product (this is why it’s always good to test campaigns!).  While it had some positive lift in my understanding and appreciation of the brand’s objectives,  there are other factors at play when it comes to my decision to purchase deodorant that, if I became a Facebook Fan based on this campaign, would still not be communicated.  The campaign needs to be reinforced by standard product feature marketing, including price, whether it goes on clear, effectiveness and possibly also scent.  Ways they could swing my vote are:

1. Allow me to buy a sample size before committment of the next several months of my armpits to their product, or send me a free trial in the mail or via in-store handout.
2. Package trial-sized versions of different scents together, so I could determine which of several options I prefer.

The second type of cause marketing is the more typical “sponsorship,” expected to grow 6% over the next year to $1.61 billion, according to a recent IEG Sponsorship Report.  Much marketing discussion recently has centered on the increase in “microsponsorships,” which is the giving, by a company/brand, of a few hundred or few thousand dollars to consumers to fund pet projects.  There are pluses and minuses to the trend, specifically (numbers correspond to sources at bottom):

Pluses:

• Well-conceived programs can be priceless, both in terms of the value they provide society and the business benefits they bestow on the corporations and brands that undertake them.1
• They can be a truthful, sustaining, committed approach to improving the environment and people’s lives.1
• More marketers are latching on to this, and rightfully so, because there is more transparency in where the money is going.2
• For some marketers, microsponsorships present a much-needed icebreaker in social media.2
• Sponsorships may be more market research than marketing campaign.2
• They build databases of those consumers applying for grants or voting…so marketers can reach out to them in more meaningful ways.2
• 79% of consumers say they would be likely to switch from one brand to another (when price and quality are about equal) if the other brand is associated with a good cause.2

Minuses:

• Too often we see marketers adopt causes just for the sake of having one, which often results in a mismatch between the cause’s purpose and the marketer’s [reason for being].1
• Causes appear to be a convenient charity upon which a brand can piggyback to goose its Facebook friend count or incite some quick blogger hits.1
• Just as consumers quickly saw through the rampant green-washing of the past decade, brand beware: They’ll see through your cause-washing, too.  And even if they don’t, they’ll forget about you and what your brand stands for when you move onto the next shiny marketing idea.1
• Too often companies view cause efforts as a tax they must pay.2
• Even tiny sponsorships have to be closely associated with your brand…whatever you decide to pursue can’t be an isolated campaign.  It has to tie into a bigger program that attracts people with similar values and those have got to be clearly stated.2
• Microsponsorships make it easy to “lose control of the brand,” especially when doling out small sums to far-flung strangers.2
• One downside of these programs is that they are “just pecking away” at big problems.2
• For people to be more engaged is generally a good thing, but what are the tradeoffs if people think, “I’ve voted for this; I’ve spent half an hour online looking at these projects and signing petitions, so I’ve done my civic duty.”2
• Often microsponsorships lack focus, and it’s difficult to determine ROI.  The most successful sponsorships are long-term, sustained sponsorships. Microsponsorships fly in the face of that. It’s the equivalent of unfocused granting. You want to have an impact on a cause and be given credit for that impact.2

One of the largest and well-known microsponsorship campaigns currently is Pepsi Refresh.  In order to address the issue of hard-to-define ROI, “Pepsi is employing a battery of diagnostics, including gauging of brand-equity measures that correlate with volume. The brand has also partnered with Good, Global Giving and Do Something, third parties that are on-board to ensure quality and credibility. As for getting the word out about the brand’s impact, there are plans to profile the grant winners and highlight what they’ve accomplished with the money later this year.”2

An upcoming microsponsorship campaign by Prilosec OTC is one to keep your eyes on also.  Read Prilosec Works to Become ‘Sponsor of Everything’ for more on their efforts.

1 AdAge -  Cause Campaigns Must Benefit Brand and Greater Good

2 AdAge – Cause Effect: Brands Rush to Save World One Deed at a Time

Related posts:

1. Evaluating the ROI of Your Online Friends
2. Email Marketing Provides BEST Marketing ROI?

They give several examples of how their products have been used:

• Pre-paid scratch cards used to drive traffic to a client’s website.
• Informing students of an sms competition (using cell phone texting to enter).
• Mini-brochure folds out to the size of a 40″ TV screen, to visualize how the TV would fit into a person’s home.
• A pocket-guide to a cholesterol-lowering eating plan.
• A mini-guide to shopping and experiences about town.

It’s not just about how the marketing tool is designed, but how it is distributed as well.  Z-CARD handles some that too, but it seems from case studies on their website they only provide this service in the UK.  Some of their ideas are worth noting, however, for US marketing:

• Dispensers or display stands at airport pre-security areas and departure lounges, including exclusive club lounges.
• Dispensers or display stands at railway concourses.
• Placed brochures on meal trays during outbound flights.
• “Tipped” into a mailer and sent out to potential clients, or newspapers.
• “Tipped” into airline publications.

Ways to track response include: having them enter a unique number off the card on the website to obtain their prize or discount, increase in call volume and online inquiries, and number of attributable orders.

I really like this concept because you can fit a lot of information in a small design, it’s easily portable in a pocket, purse or billfold, it doesn’t take up a lot of room at the distribution site, people like samples of products to try before they buy, and a lot of people are strangely excited by small things.

No related posts.

One good way of arriving at social media metrics is postulated by Heidi Sullivan of Cision Blog: “There are two basic types of ways to measure your impact on the Web: passive and active.” Furthermore, she attempts to break it down into the five senses: sight (where are you seen), sound (who’s talking about you), scent (do they stick around to “smell what you’re cooking”), taste (can they taste what you’re offering through search engines) and touch (are they taking the next step to touch others with your information).

Going back to the passive vs. active concept, here are metrics she suggests as well as from other sources (numbers refer to sources at bottom):

Passive

• Number of unique visitors to your blog.1
• Monthly site views aka page views.1 – Definition: Request to load a single HTML page.  Page views are only important to the degree they play a part in a site’s revenue model. If a site earns much of its revenue from advertising, then page views are important because of their contribution to ad inventory. If a site only earns revenue on sales, then page views are not a key statistic.
• Number of page views per visit.6 – Try landing people on an engaging page that funnels them through a messaging sequence that builds your brand and escalates sales. Measure the results and optimize the path that gets people to the end of the sequence. Also, measure the lift in total page views of your site’s high-value product pages.
• Monthly unique sessions.1 – Definition: In tabulating statistics for Web site usage, a user session (sometime referred to as a visit) is the presence of a user with a specific IP  address who has not visited the site recently (typically, anytime within the past 30 minutes). The number of user sessions per day is one measure of how much traffic a Web site has. A user who visits a site at noon and then again at 3:30 pm would count as two user visits.
• Number of return visits.6
• Search trends.7

Active

• Number of influencers (track who they are for targeting) that share your content through inbound links, citations, tweets, viral videos or other forwarding of information that result in transactions.1,4,6 – put a call to action in your campaign that will lift this metric.
• Number of company/brand mentions in blogs, on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter, as gauged by a social media monitoring solution, especially when supplemented with sophisticated sentiment analysis that discerns positive brand mentions from the negative. 1,7
• Number of people clicking on your images, watching your videos, using your widgets, and spending significant amounts of time on your site.1 – by tagging videos and applications, companies can track each occurrence of sharing and estimates frequency of exposure to particular media.6
• Number of and which keywords/other sites referring visitors to your content.1
• How much money social media has saved or created for your brand: How many issues that you solved, questions that you answered, leads that you created, products that you sold, call volume that you decreased, etc., through social media engagement versus traditional resources.2
• Time spent across an entire campaign.3
• Click rate [on an ad].3 – not the best metric to use.  People can accidentally click and then drop off, or they can click and see it’s not for them and drop off.
• Interaction rates [with an ad].3 – may be influenced by the creative and not a true representation of their interest.
• Conversion rates – doesn’t take into account return conversions or other offline results, e.g. visit to a store for further research.
• Time spent throughout cross channel engagement with the brand – forecast the number of touches a customer can have with a brand and the resultant amount of time spent with the brand, e.g. total number of exposures, visits you’ll drive to the site, increase in total mentions that can be measured with social media monitoring tools.3
  • Once you understand the total touches, you can either measure directly or assume through general patterns what the time spent is across each of these vehicles, and then create a cumulative time spent for the campaign. When you break down the individual media vehicles, time spent is actually quite easy to report on.3
• Lifetime value of customers based on their purchasing activity, which could be higher depending on their level of social media influence, e.g. if a customer is worth $9 dollars alone, but that person has 500 Facebook friends, and is able to drive even 1% of them (5) to make a purchase, that individual’s value could be as high as $54 dollars.4
• Number of people who you capture data from – Eyeblaster has found that the ability to capture data within a banner is nearly eight times more effective at addressing conversions than click-through rates (CTR), revealing that consumers are more likely to fill in a banner than click on it.5
• Number of people who opt into your e-newsletter/email updates (e-newsletter metrics to be discussed under separate, future posting).6
  
• Number of people who download materials from your site.6
• Number of phone calls you receive and source.6
• Number of people that share comments and opinions.6
• The impact individuals exert on wider audiences – a combination of data obtained from buzz-tracking with data from surveying (see below), to determine the probability of viewing buzz by taking into account the volume of relevant posts and amount of time spent by panelists on a website.7

And there are also metrics that can only be obtained via surveying, which is what the company work with, C.A. Walker, does:

• Awareness.
  
• Interest.
• Desire.
• Lifts in brand awareness and attitudes attributable to a social media campaign.
• Various actions taken throughout engagement with the brand.
• Usage – may be of a particular website or of a product.
  
• Consideration – may also be inferred from measuring the things that drive people into your (or your client’s) stores.  Actions like store locator queries and rep searches should always be measured and are clear indicators that a future purchase may be imminent.6
• Intent to purchase – may also be inferred from Time spent throughout engagement with the brand. If consumers spend more time than the average, they must be interested in your product or service — and if they are interested, that is a measure of intent.3

If I’ve missed any applicable metrics, please let me know so I can grow this list.

Sources:

1Cision Blog: Five Senses of Online Measurement

2Mashable: Twitter Brand Best Practices

3MediaPost: Time Spent Is The Right Metric To Measure Engagement

4MediaPost: Marketers Search For Social Media Metric

5Eyeblaster: Conversions Remain Important Metric

6ClickZ: 11 Things to Measure Besides Clicks and Conversions

7MediaPost: Media Metrics: Let’s Get This Party Started

Related posts:

1. Tracking Return Conversions
2. Email Marketing Provides BEST Marketing ROI?
3. How To Do Sponsorship Marketing

“53% of marketing budgets for US companies have increased in the past year, in the face of slow economic conditions. This extra budget is being used to fund high-return Online Lead Generation campaigns, with Email Marketing the top area of spend, with 75% of organizations using it.”

Furthermore, they share a few open-ended responses, one of which is:

“Better comparability between online and offline Cost per Lead has enabled us to shift budgets from off- to online.”

In Email – the most accountable marketing going? the author claims that out of all the marketing channels available, PPC and email are the best to evaluate ROI.  Their reasoning is that other channels only show you the good – when someone takes an action to buy – but with PPC and email you can see who clicked but did or did not buy.  Furthermore, they say with email you can re-target those who did not open, who opened but did not buy, etc., which the author claims gives it an edge over PPC.

Here is the problem I have with these articles’ claims – both were authored by companies who stand to profit from their statements.   This is an important point.

The first article, a press release, includes research from two companies who specialize in and profit from eMarketing.  What is their relationship?  A search reveals that Econsultancy pays Clash-Media nearly $2,500 a year for a Platinum Level listing in their online vendor directory.  Furthermore, they are the ONLY marketing consultant/supplier with expertise in email marketing who is at that paid level.  Does this mean that Econsultancy might be able to be strong-armed by Clash-Media into publishing the parts of the study that best supports their position?  It’s not unheard of for a client to try that sort of tactic, but it’s not something that the company I work with, C.A. Walker, would ever allow.  We certainly welcome companies to commission studies that could be used for press, but facts are facts.  If study results do not support the client’s desired outcome, they know going into the study that this could happen and we will not change or tweak results to suit their intended purpose.

I’m not saying that the research in the first article isn’t accurate, however, the relationship of the two companies raises a red flag.  The other issue I have with this particular study is their statement that “Email Marketing the top area of spend, with 75% of organizations using it.”  The implication is that the most amount of money is being spent on email marketing, which is not what 75% using it means.  75% of the people in my office may be wearing sneakers right now with shoelaces in them, but that doesn’t mean that shoelaces are a top area of spend for any of us.

Lastly, regarding this study, I found online the results from their same study from last year, 2008, which states that “over 50% of marketers’ budgets now spent online.”  That would mean that online marketing is now equal to the size of ALL the money spent combined for broadcast and cable TV, outdoor advertising, direct marketing, magazines and newspaper, specialty advertising, events, and sports sponsorships.  Logically, it doesn’t make sense.  Once again, it seems they used a figure where 50% of the companies checked off that they are participating in online marketing, and they extrapolated that to mean that 50% of their budget is spend online.  Unless the survey asked respondents to share their BUDGET SIZE with them and how that was broken out, which is highly unlikely that marketers would share, this claim does not hold up.

The second article was written by Pure360 who sells email and mobile marketing solutions.  I thought it in poor taste for the author to say that TV advertising is his “pet peeve” because of its lack of accountability.  Television advertising is still one of the most successful marketing channels that there is.  More people *still* watch TV than are online.  The fact that it is difficult to evaluate ROI in no way diminishes the power of television advertising.  Granted, with the increase in use of DVRs the effectiveness of TV ads drops, but advertisers simply have to get more creative to overcome the desire to flip past a commercial.  The problem is not DVRs – the problem has been, still is, and probably will continue to be – bad and overly repetitious TV advertising.

The author really needs to have a larger view of engagement metrics across all channels before he could possibly ever argue that email is the best.  That’s actually why I put this blog together, because it takes a serious study of these matters,  over a great deal of time, to be able to draw any conclusions about which is best and what metrics to use for what channel.  What I plan to focus on next is exactly this – how do we best measure engagement across different channels?  What is the latest thinking from the top thinkers (including the researchers who I work with) in these areas?

Related posts:

1. Evaluating the ROI of Your Online Friends
2. New Marketing Program May Increase ROI for Retailers

So how are marketers doing?  I reviewed this morning a press release that caught my interest from Alterian Partners in London Customer Engagement Agencies shaking up the Marketing Industry and, from there, their research study 2008 Annual Industry Survey.  A few interesting key findings from their study:

• Marketers are using multiple applications to run a campaign from creation to execution.
  • 51% are using 3-6 applications
  • 25% are using 7+ applications
  • 13% are using 9 or more applications

• Less than half (47%) of respondents use analytics, and a quarter of those surveyed cite analyzing results as the hardest part of any campaign.

• The application most used when running a campaign was Campaign Management (32%) followed by Email Marketing (23%) and Web Content Management (10%).

Alterian’s solution to this problem, according to their materials, is “analytically-led software” to facilitate the entire online and offline customer engagement process:

“The Customer Engagement Cycle is driven by Customer Engagement Personas. These Personas are the captured data and intelligence of an individual customer which constitute the quantifiable, current and future value of that customer, increasing in accuracy and completeness over time through patterns of engagement, predicted future revenues and loyalty.

A typical engagement cycle would include the delivery of a message to a known or unknown recipient, the capture of the recipient’s reaction and analysis of the collected insights into the individual. Treatments and recommendations would then be applied to the next communication based on the learning that has taken place, and any content that is served up to the individual will be optimized and delivered based on metrics such as channel, frequency, probability or location. If the customer is returning to the website, for example, the website itself will be customized to the individual in terms of the messages delivered – based on their location, time of day and the engagement life cycle stage they are at.”

How their product translates into marketing ROI:

• Integration of the people, processes and applications of marketing.  Start with managing a single channel or use the entire suite of integrated applications.
• For a website, it will analyze number of visits to the site, keywords used to arrive at the site, navigation preferences, etc., look for site trends at an aggregate level and then tie aggregate web activity back to the individual for a custom website view.
• Greater management influence based on fuller customer insights, predictability of future campaigns success, and shared risk/reward models.
• CRM analytics that interact with customer-facing systems: call centers, campaign management systems, and sales force automation tools.
• Topical analysis automatically delivered to management.
• Easily handles ad-hoc analyst questions, reducing data preparation costs and need to increase headcount in order to increase client services.
• Intimate knowledge about the sequence of events to create marketing communication programs.

Although I have not demoed Alterian’s products, they seem worth looking into further as a way to strengthen a company’s relationship marketing program.

No related posts.