Category: marketing

Social Media Marketing is About Quality, Not Quantity

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social_media_qualityCame across this interesting take on the value of traffic brought in by a mention in a popular blog like TechCrunch. Apparently, social media consultants Simply Zesty don’t think the over 400 referrals, 70 new RSS subscribers or 30 new Facebook friends was terribly impressive after their TechCrunch mention the other day.

But for many web-properties—especially B2B companies—those numbers are very real and quite actionable. How long would it take your biz dev guy to run down all those 30 Facebook profiles and what do you bet he’ll uncover a few sales prospects?

The thing about those 70 RSS subscribers is that they aren’t just hits, they’re new additions to your marketing database. Every repeat visit is another touchpoint, another chance to build a customer relationship.

Sure, these aren’t the greatest numbers for behemoth marketers like Coca-cola or Amazon, but for many, many online marketers, forging a place for your company in social media isn’t just “me too” marketing anymore. If you’ve got the right business savvy to make use of what’s out there, social media can yield some real gems.

A Brief History of Optimization

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cardsThe practice of marketing optimization is founded upon a number of disciplines – some old, some new, and some emerging. Like marketing optimization, many of its foundation disciplines are sciences that have historically been developed to reduce risk while maximizing the chances for success.

Whether ‘success’ is winning at cards, winning a war or maximizing conversion in a PPC campaign, ‘optimization’ put simply is the practice of finding optimal methods for driving objectives. Probability theory, management science, statistics, economic theory, experimental design and technology all converge in marketing optimization to provide marketers with the tools and processes for finding optimal methods for executing the marketing function such that risk is reduced and the chances of success are maximized.

Probability Theory
Some of the first excursions into probability theory sprung from the study of gambling and games of chance. Thought to be the first mathematician to study gambling more than 500 years ago, Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576) took the first steps toward developing predictive models for risk reduction. Like us, our optimization predecessors sought to understand the relationships between all the possible outcomes and the favorable outcomes.

Probability theory today includes the study of all sorts of phenomenon (including the way consumers make choices) in which some initial starting point is known, there are many possible paths for the process to take, but that some possibilities are more probable than others. In our to quest to find the most probable paths to increased conversion and long-term customer loyalty, we marketers rely on probability theory more and more each day.

Management Science
The practice of optimization of course owes a great deal to developments in management science, or the discipline of applying analytical models like mathematics to make better business decisions. From Frederick Taylor’s famous time and motion studies to the strides in operations research made by the British and US military during the war years, the search for process improvement plays a significant role in marketing optimization.

Experimental Design
The discipline of marketing optimization includes a strong emphasis on rigorous experimental design and owes a great dealt to Fischer’s groundbreaking work in the Design of Experiments. Fischer was the first statistician to adopt a formal mathematical methodology for experimental design in order to study the effect of a process (AKA: message) on an experimental unit (AKA: consumer). Today’s multivariate testing discipline does exactly that, studying the effects of various creative treatments on consumer purchase behavior.

Economic Theory
We hear a lot about various methodologies used to develop the algorithms for automated marketing optimization. A good methodology is rooted in economic theory, or models that analyze the way people purchase decisions in certain contexts (on the Internet, in a direct mail campaign) and study the relationships between the creative messages and treatments and life time customer value.

Technology
It’s nearly impossible to overstate the impact of technology on the modern marketing function. The arrival of the Internet especially has made an indelible mark on the way we hawk our wares and has forever changed the way consumers interact with business.

Rapid growth in deeper understanding of consumer choices as well as the rapid dissemination of new technologies has impacted the marketing function in two critical ways:

  • It’s given consumers more avenues – more channels – for interacting with business, and
  • It’s given marketers more tools and technologies to inform their marketing decisions.

Technology enables and automates the application of the sciences described above such that today’s marketing problems are solved much faster and more reliably. Technology now automates the process of structuring experiments (experimental design), optimization algorithms automate the process of finding the most probable paths to success (probability and economic theory), and analytical tools provide a dearth of information to help us make better business decisions (management science).

The art of marketing began as the simple practice of getting more folks to open their wallets more often – perhaps nothing more complicated than placing a charismatic speaker on a soapbox in the town square. Today’s marketing discipline has evolved into the practice of properly combining the increasing number of levers at your disposal to find optimal methods for driving complex objectives. Optimization in today’s context requires us as marketers to understand and leverage the foundation disciplines described above and to apply those disciplines to more effectively manage profitable customer relationships.

Social Media Marketing Best Practice: Add Value

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add_valueWhat I like about marketing through social media is that it forces marketers to remember their marketing fundamentals. Find a gap and fill it. Add value.

In 75 years of broadcast media, the function of the marketer has moved away from adding value and toward 1.) making an impression with brand marketing, and/or 2.) moving inventory with direct marketing. Even product marketers, tasked with guiding product evolution are often wholly removed from the market, spending most of their time with development time lines instead of customers.

In all of the examples above, the mission of the marketer revolves around the product. In the social media marketplace, the mission of the marketer revolves around the market. Social media marketing forces us to ask ourselves, how can I add value to the marketplace? How can I connect my customer base so that it becomes its own customer support network? What complaints do my customers have, why do they have them and how can I fix their problems? What product features does the marketplace wish I offered? In pursuit of the answers to these questions, marketers add value to the marketplace.

Len Kendall says it nicely here in Marketing Profs Daily Fix. The bottom of the article gives a few dos and don’ts about social media marketing which first and foremost revolve around adding value.

Surfing Social Media

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surfing_social_mediaBack when Zuckerberg was a but a tween and Twitter was yet a twinkle in anyone’s eye, the customer of a multivariate testing SaaS vendor ran an interesting promotional test: 20% off any purchase against buy one refrigerator and get another free. To everyone’s surprise, refrigerators flew out the door. Turns out, the Joneses found out about the deal and told the Smiths who came in on it with them. Each family went home with a half price fridge.

What a testament to the power of testing, we all said. Who knew you could move such a large item with such a promotion? What we all thought we learned was that you never know what you don’t know. And you’ll never know unless you test.

What we didn’t talk about was what this test revealed about our audience: that it is networked and collaborative. Fast forward a few years to the rise of Facebook and Twitter and the social web is the biggest shiny object to hit marketing since TV. Yet social media marketing ROI remains unproven for many.

What the testing anecdote above reveals and what’s important to note about social media is that it has a life of it’s own, whether marketers like it or not. Smart social marketing is the deft leveraging what is already there. Like surfing. Navigating social media works best when marketers start returning to the basics: Find an unmet need and fill it. Social media marketing is observant, responsive and adaptive more than it is engaging and impressive. The success of your social media strategy will be measured by how useful your audience declares it to be.

(Marketers? Useful?)

As marketers scramble to unravel the knot of social media, their frustration mounts each time they apply old marketing expectations to the new consumer organism. (Old: Build market share. New: Build relationships.) Many marketers hate the whole idea of social media, as noted by Matt Jones in his Why I Hate Social Media for AdAge.

Not only must marketing expectations adapt to the social marketplace, but the entire business model must also. The last 100 years have rewarded the quest for scale (Ford, Tide, Clorox). But like a wave folding over on itself, that scale has turned into commoditization, razor thin margins and enslavement to the retailer. Walgreen’s distributes 60% of all the Tide in the US. Retail owns the relationship with the Tide customer, not P&G. Not as great a business it was in say, 1962.

Letting go of old marketing expectations and embracing the social marketplace is not only smart marketing, it’s smart business. Most are convinced that the history writers will credit mostly lack of adaptability to the extinction of the great 20th century behemoth brands.

It’s not a stretch to see the potential folly in, “Who cares what it is? Just dive in and we’ll all figure it out later.” But this is the early adopter’s chief maxim. And if marketer’s return to their core purpose of finding unmet needs and filling them, they too will find themselves again at the forefront of adaptability.

The Future of Digital Marketing

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future_digital_marketingNotes from a great panel discussion from Twist Image on the future of digital marketing. Featuring Charlene Li, author of Groundswell – Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, and Seth Godin among others.

  • Interruption marketing is over.
  • Ubiquitous brand building is over.
  • Marketers need to stop clinging to building brand value and return to the basic marketing function: find a need and fill it.
  • Television was designed after radio – as a mechanism for building large-scale national brands. The Internet was not.
  • The translation of value into wealth online is elusive.
  • Marketers may not know what the Internet is, but they need to be of it, by it and for it.
  • The confused, organic structure of the Internet should be embraced, not feared. If corporate governance is too hard to change, the entity will die. Culture matters.

 

Twitter Value Prop: Addiction?

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addictionI’ve been wondering what the Twitter value proposition to me is for some time. I get what Twitter is, and yes, I Tweet, but I’ve never been entirely sure why Twitter should matter to me. Apparently, many share in my quandry, says Silicon Valley, The Harvard Business Review, Nielsen and others.

By a number of measures, Twitter’s metrics look pretty dismal. User engagement is low and customer retention even lower. Numbers like these beg the question, what is the real and compelling value to a business or consumer in using the Twitter application?

Even the CEO says what he’s shooting for in a relationship with his audience is addiction.

The Utility of Social Media

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oprah_facebook

Facebook’s arrival as a lifestyle brand was cemented the moment Zuckerberg appeared on Oprah. Having been on Facebook for several years as an Internet marketing professional, one can’t help but notice the sudden barrage of old high school friends (stay at home moms) having suddenly found me on Facebook. A noticeable shift in the FB demographic has taken place in the last six months.

Which makes the brand now part of popular culture, properly cited by Steve Rubel as the key motivation for recent advertiser interest in Facebook. Advertisers from Palm to Sprint are plugging Facebook in TV spots, aligning themselves with the social media icon that touches 200 million everyday.

But even brands who cozy up to Facebook in TV spots don’t promote their own page in the spot. They give no compelling reason to visit them on Facebook, no call to action, in fact no instructions on how or what to do it even if the viewer wanted to connect with them on Facebook. Which infers that that the advertiser isn’t so interested in having folks visit them on Facebook. Which infers that they have yet to realize, quantify or otherwise evaluate the benefit of Facebook interactions.

Again, the social media ROI dilemma.

Social media is difficult to quantify and always will be because it’s a brand play. A positioning play. A PR play. Twitter, Facebook and media-sharing sites are places to listen (market research) make impressions, join and steer conversations, publish information, and drive brand image. Every day, social media looks more and more like broadcast media, facilitating one-to-many interactions.

Because “online marketing” including SEM, SEO, email and affiliate marketing, has grown up as a direct marketing discipline, it doesn’t know what to make of Facebook and Twitter. Neither are demonstrated lead gen or new traffic generating vehicles. Yet as emerging web-based, interactive channels, social media responsibility often falls to the “online marketer”, who ROI-driven by nature, is skeptical (ahem).

Online marketers who are responsible for the total online presence from AdWords to social media often leave the company Twitter profile to an afterthought. A wise friend said to me back in 2005 when the whole of the Internet was surging toward investments in direct, data-driven marketing, that in the total mix, “there will always be a place for brand, there will always be a place for direct and it’s a mistake to divest entirely in brand marketing online.”

The Irony of Social Media

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twitter_sentiment

What a week it’s been for our little blue friend. Everywhere I look, all my favorite sites and blogs are bashing the poor creature. Admittedly, I’ve done a bit of Twitter bashing myself (although I prefer to think of it as critical thought).Like what Mitch Joel has to say about the inherent “volume contradiction” in all social media. Once the volume of any given network (your Facebook friends or Twitter followers) gets to significant levels, the network is no longer “social”. (Check out what I had to say about that a few months ago in ‘Twas the Night Before Twitter Got Monetized.) What may have once been a set of one-to-one interactions by necessity becomes a series of one-to-many broadcasts.

And as a communications channel for would-be marketers, how is that any different from, say, display advertising – also a one-to-many broadcast model?

While marketers clamor to get their social media strategies in place, the irony of social media is that in order for it matter as a channel, it has to start looking like all the others.