Tag Archives: marketing

July 23, 2014 · 10:19 am

How Do You Like My Tie?

There is an old joke about an egocentric sales guy rambling on and on about his life and success.  He sees the recipient of his boastful rant glazing over and says “But enough about me.  How do you like my tie?”  I was reminded of this as I read about a study conducted by the Online Marketing Institute, who teamed up with Forrester Research and the Business Marketing Association to understand how well B2B marketers gauge their content development skills and maturity.  The headlines aren’t so wonderful:

While 51% of B2B marketing leaders rate their content marketing practices as very mature, an overwhelming 85% fail to connect content activity to business value — and, as a result, fail to retain customers or win their long-term loyalty. In fact, when asked to look back at the past 12 months and rate the effectiveness of content marketing efforts, only 14% of those surveyed gave their content practices high marks for delivering value back to the business.

One wonders sometimes who exactly is in charge at these companies.  If 86% of the executives surveyed think they’re sucking at content marketing, what are they doing about it? 71% of surveyed marketers say their content features case studies or customer stories, but only 3% admit this is a primary focus of their efforts.  Hello?  How is this any different from the sales guy in the joke?

All marketing is about adding value and solving problems.  Hopefully everything you produce does both but it must do one or the other.  Obviously, as the study concludes, B2B marketers have more work to do when it comes to using content to consistently deliver a valuable exchange of information with prospective buyers.  That starts with a mindset to do just that and part of the process is evaluating what you’re producing in that context.  This last bit is the clearest indicator of that.  The study talks about how the content these businesses are producing:

Focuses on closing the deal, not on building relationships. While more than three-quarters of respondents say they frequently communicate to their customer base, only 5% make this a priority, proving that marketers are too focused on acquisition rather than long-term loyalty.

That’s the issue.  What are they (and you!) going to do about it?

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, Huh?

Tagged as , , , , ,

July 2, 2014 · 8:34 am

Missing The Measuring

I guess there is generally good news with respect to marketers and how they’re measuring social media.

English: A business ideally is continually see...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The”generally” qualification, however, means that there’s still some work to be done. As you’ll see from the data below, while many organizations are getting better about measuring the effectiveness of what they’re doing, what they’re using as key performance indicators could use a lot of fine tuning.

According to the results of a survey put out by the folks at Ipsos OTX for the Association of National Advertisers, 80% of US client-side marketers measured the effectiveness of their social content, with social media metrics such as “likes” the most common.  That’s the good news.  The bad? Metrics that could identify business ramifications were not used nearly as much, with financially based measurements such as return on investment and sales landing near the bottom.

What did the study find that these companies are measuring?  “Likes” leads the list.  Putting aside that it’s an easy number to fake (you can buy thousands of likes for not much money) if you had a reason to do so (your bonus is tied to the number perhaps?), it’s a quantitative factoid that has very little to do with results.  It’s very likely that a brand would make more revenue from a couple of thousand highly interactive fans who post one comment each, than from one million fans who rarely interact with the brand.  Something as basic as follower counts or likes might have importance but it’s a relational importance – how many do we have vs. our competition – rather than being important in and of itself.

Some of what the study found is encouraging.  “Advocacy” is being measured by 27% of brands and “conversation volume” by 52%.  Those are engagement numbers.  It’s good to measure how many people see a post.  It’s better to measure how many are talking about it.  It’s way better to understand what they’re saying and the best is when you can measure all of that along with seeing and reporting what actions they took.  Hopefully that action rang a cash register or brought you a new customer.

Does that make sense?

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, digital media

Tagged as , , , , , ,

June 12, 2014 · 12:07 pm

Branding Badly

The folks over at Millward Brown Digital conducted a survey of marketing executives to assess how well digital media are doing with respect to satisfying brand objectives.

English: A business ideally is continually see...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The results are less than encouraging:

According to a 2014 Millward Brown Digital study, current digital advertising spending trends show that digital marketers fairly evenly allocate budget across ad formats.  However, the majority of digital marketers say that digital advertising hasn’t lived up to its promise and feel that branding ads bought via programmatic methods raise concerns.  They are searching for the best way to connect with consumers on an emotional level to bridge the delta between the branding promise of digital and real-world success.

In fact, 50% say they somewhat/strongly agree with this statement:

“Digital held promise for brand marketers, but for all its promise, it has never delivered as a branding vehicle.”

I see data like that and I wonder sometimes if they’re not like the person who complains about how bad a shoe is at driving nails into a wall to hang pictures.  Maybe you’re using an excellent tool for an incorrect purpose.  Let’s dig into the data a bit.  You have 88% of the respondents saying that making emotional connections would encourage them to spend more on digital branding ad formats. So in order to do that, 37% spend money on “in-game, emotionally-targeted ads.”  These would be ads that run when the player achieves something.  Yep, nothing like feeling good about having the game experience interrupted by a branded message, especially when you’re seeking help or just did something great.  43% run just plain in-game ads.  48% run SMS/text ads.  You see where this is heading?

If you want to establish emotional connections, behave as if you have respect for the customer’s emotions.  77% report running social media ads.  One can’t help but wonder if these paid efforts undermine the good work many brands do in social by transforming what can be a conversation between friends into an intrusive selling experience.

The study also talks about programmatic buying.  30% think that ads bought through programmatic methods negate customer experiences, brand loyalty or branding objectives yet they continue to use it.  So is it the media which are at fault or those who use it incorrectly?

For all the money being spent in digital, it’s still relatively new and that spending to brand may not be optimally done.  I don’t like statements such as the one above which places digital’s promise as  branding media in the past tense.  Am I off base here?

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, digital media

Tagged as , , , ,