Tag Archives: Digital marketing

August 13, 2012 · 9:25 am

Stop Behaving Like A Brand

A research study I read last week got me thinking about how I work with my clients on their use of Facebook and other social media.

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Wildfire, a company that makes software for social media interaction (Facebook contest pages, for example) conducted an analysis of 10,000 social media campaigns over the last 9 months and focused on the top 10% of performing efforts.  The point was to identify strategies that seemed to work well.  If you’re interested you can get the report (registration required) here.   As reported by The RealTime Report:

Wildfire finds that for each person who shares content from a campaign on Facebook, 14 new people will learn about that campaign in their news feed. In addition, for every 10 advocates (those who are capable of bringing new followers to a campaign) a brand gets to join its social campaign, they’ll get 13 other people to interact with the campaign in some way. Overall, brands that are highly effective in engaging with advocates and content-sharers via campaigns see three times the interaction (Likes, shares, comments) on their Facebook pages when compared to other brands.

Impressive although I wonder how the transition to Timeline and the inability to set a contest or other Wildfire-type tab as the default on a brand page has impacted the results.  Even so, only 17% of fans share brand activity.  Then again, why should they?  Too many brands are focused on building a bigger audience (generating “Likes”) and not on any sort of collaboration among the fan base.  The companies who use Facebook and other social media well aren’t using those platforms as glorified broadcast channels.  Ask yourself what brands you follow (if you follow any) engage you.  I don’t mean they keep you coming back looking for discounts but they almost seem to be people.  You’re interested in what’s going on with them.

One of the strategies suggested in the report is to provide clear calls to action.  I don’t disagree, but how many of your friends ONLY post messages asking you to sign a petition or do something else that they feel is important but might have little relevance to you?  Providing exclusive content is a great strategy but not if that content only has value to the brand.  What’s the user benefit?

Social media isn’t like other media.  As a company, it’s less about you than it is your consumer.  That can be a hard change of perspective but it’s one companies need to make.  Stop behaving like a brand and start behaving like a friend.  I know of companies that do this well – tell me which ones you think are on that list.

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July 11, 2012 · 8:38 am

An Audience Of One

I was catching up on my podcasts the other day when one of the marketing gurus

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Image via CrunchBase

used the phrase “an audience of one.”  It resonated with me because it seems a concise expression of everything we’re trying to achieve in marketing and media:  reaching exactly the right individual at exactly the right time via the exact channel with the unique message that will get them to use our product or service.  The Holy Grail, right?

To a certain extent, search marketing comes closest to that.  The user is expressing intent – where can I get a pizza around here?  What’s the best replacement hard drive for a PC?  We don’t know always know for certain if the search is for themselves or on behalf of another nor do we know where they are in the purchase cycle.  On the other hand, when they click on a search ad – not just on a search results listing – my thinking is they’re indicating that they’re nearly ready to buy since one generally conducts research with neutral sources and not something as obviously prejudiced as an ad.  Maybe that’s wishful thinking.  But whether it’s search or some other form of audience targeting, the ability to gauge intent and anticipate a reply is at the core of digital marketing technology.

I’m raising this today because of the record fine levied against Google yesterday.  As you probably know, they were caught bypassing some privacy controls to snoop on iPhone and iPad users.  I’m sure in some engineer’s mind, being able to use all the data made available by this tracking would help improve a user’s search experience and bring them (and Google’s advertisers) closer to the nexus of intent and message.  But it was, and is, a nasty invasion of privacy.

That issue – how to balance the quest for the audience of one and the rapidly disappearing concept of privacy – is big and getting bigger.  I think it may invoke the law of unintended consequences – as we try to make advertising better and more relevant we end up making it less so due to the imposition of strict controls by folks who don’t understand technology.  Not only won’t we get to the audience of one but the audiences we currently can distinguish will become less clear.  That helps neither the marketers nor the recipients of the messages.

Any ideas?

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July 10, 2012 · 9:56 am

Marketing From A New Perspective

IBMconducts a survey of marketing professionals each year and the results are put out in a document called “The State Of Marketing.”

Image representing IBM as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

If you want to see a presentation about it, you can click through here to read 28 very interesting slides.  Generally, the document talks about how the role of marketing has expanded to let marketing take a lead role in the entirety of the customer experience but the part that I found most interesting was this:

More must be done to link insight to action for online visitor data…high performing companies leverage their online data in other channels.

Yet we still see the silos in place that are limiting the effectiveness of what activity is out there:

  • Only 22% currently run social tactics as part of integrated campaigns
  • 79% run social marketing in silos discretely and on an ad hoc basis
  • 51% marketers don’t use social media data to inform decision about marketing offers and messages.

The document goes on to talk about the need to integrate systems, budgets, and alignment.  Hard to argue with any of that and as companies change their marketing tactics from push to pull, they’re going to encounter another barrier:  time.  Whether we call it content marketing, inbound marketing, or something else, the purchase cycle is different for these types of messages and this kind of media.  The expansion of platforms from one main screen (the TV) to multiple screens (computers, mobile devices) is a huge contributor to the complexity of not just the message but also form factor.  As eMarketer stated in their summary of the report:

The continued fracturing of the media landscape has made it increasingly difficult for marketers to reach customers in large numbers. The poll found that the largest percentage of respondents, 41%, named the growth of marketing channels and devices as the top challenge to their company over the next few years.

It’s hard to change perspective, particularly when what we’re trying to hit is a changing and moving target.  This report is proof of that.  The thing we can all try to do as marketers is to keep an open mind, focus on the customer and not our own internal power bases, and look on this as a huge opportunity, not as a massive pain in the rear.  It’s a new perspective – I think those are always exciting.  You?

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