I spend so much time these days talking about social media that I sometimes forget that these are relatively new channels. The most common question I get these days is “how do I get started”? Facebook? Twitter? Blogging? I know it’s a cop out but the answer is a big “it depends”. Without exactly answering the question, here are a few things to consider when thinking about a social media program for a business that primarily serves other businesses (is B2B).
Your goals: What do you hope to achieve? Is it about awareness building? Maintaining relationships with existing customers? Being a part of the general conversations about your brand? Selling more product?
Your audience: Are they using social media? How frequently? How big is your audience?
Level of engagement with your brand: How important is your product or service to your customers? How interested are they in interacting with other customers?
Where they congregate online today: Which sites? What level of technology adoption/comfort?
Internal drivers: Who will represent your company? Who is using social media today? What is the commitment level from management/the organization?
Content: Who will seed the conversations? Do you have content to share/syndicate?
Regulatory: Are there any compliance or regulatory issues to consider? Do you have an approval processes?
Resources: How much budget? How many people will be involved?
Measurement: How will you know if you are successful? What are your KPIs?
Like the game of poker, social media takes minutes to learn and a lifetime to master. There are many options and strategies. As I have advocated in the past, the best way to identify the right media is test many, kill off the losers and scale up the winners.
Good luck and let me know if I missed any other things to consider.
Regular readers of the ‘slice know that I frequently rant about the need for marketers to be more accountable. Given the challenge of measuring the direct impact of PR, I could take the easy position that you should kill your PR program because you can’t measure it. In the past year, however, I’ve entered this debate in the unusual position of a defender of PR as a growth driver. My experience in turning PR on and off in companies has shown me the lift (and drop) that comes from a well crafted program.
What? Mr. Tangyslice is going to recommend investing in a program with limited direct measurement? The answer is yes and here is my logic.
Old media is not dead (yet). I know that the prognosis isn’t great for old media but the national TV nightly news still has millions of viewers and depending on your product or service, you may need all of those eyeballs.
Traditional press still has online outlets to syndicate your content.
PR is about telling your story. Without editorial outreach you are missing a powerful way to get a third party to validate your message.
It isn’t just about traditional media. Social media is an important part of any integrated PR plan.
Content is still king. A well formulated PR plan will generate fresh content for all of your channels. I know this is a very “push” view of the world, but sharing is one part of joining the social media discussions and there just isn’t that much new content out there these days.
There are still many opinion makers in “old media”. Have you checked out the number of followers the “old media” reporters and news anchors have on Twitter?
They still writing about you. Whether you formally participate or not, the press is still writing or talking about your space. It is pretty much always better to be involved.
If you have news. If you have a new product or service, PR and word of mouth remain really powerful and leveraged ways to get the word out.
PR is cost effective. On a pure cost per impression basis, PR can be a really cheap way to get your message out. The bigger question is whether or not you reach the right people with you message.
So how do you avoid falling into the accountability trap?
In a perfect world, we would all have spare budget to measure awareness before and after our campaigns. Absent that, you can start with clear and measurable goals. You probably have a sense of your baseline sales, traffic and lead flow and can look at your lift from those levels. Your referrer logs can tell you alot about your traffic sources. And finally, look for those rare times when you get a big press hit and nothing else is going on.
OK, this is your chance to blast me. Take your best shot. Mr Accountable Marketing has let his guard down. Anyone want to take the other side of this argument?
I’d like to share a story about a time when I thought I was measuring the right thing (but wasn’t).
I had decided that paid search was the right answer for my business. Many of my competitors were buying keywords and there was plenty of traffic in the space. The popular terms were bid up to the $2-3 dollar price range and based on my conversion assumptions, I thought I could get the customer acquisition cost tuned to the point where we would have a strongly positive ROI.
After about six weeks of adjusting bids, killing off bad ad creative, inserting new ads, and reorganizing ad groups, BINGO, the cost per customer landed within about 5% of my target. Needless to say, I felt pretty good and was thinking it was time to “pour some gasoline on the fire” by making a big budget request. It seemed like a sensible thing to do given the acquisition cost and conversions rate.
Before making the “big ask” for budget I decided to take one more look at the numbers. I wanted to make sure these new sign ups would become productive long term customers. My back-of-the-envelope estimates prior to the campaign had assumptions for the average revenue per customer. The real data, however, showed that these customers yielded 75% less revenue than our “typical” customers, pushing this campaign into the red. I was relieved to discover this before dropping a large sum of money into this medium.
The moral of the story: make sure you are measuring the right things and they are connected to real results. In most businesses, activity-based measures like leads or traffic are directional indicators. In the end, revenue and sales are what really matter.
So, what are you doing to connect your marketing activity to bottom line results?
Did you know that the word gullible is not in the dictionary?
Bah, dum, bum, crash. Thank you very much. I’ll be here all week. Don’t forget to tip the waitresses.
I knew it was going to be one of those days when my 7 year old started the day with her own April fools joke. I hope that she sticks with her strength which is sales rather than marketing. Her delivery was good but her creative strategy was flawed.
After about the 10th fairly obvious gag campaign of the day, I started to think about what makes a truly great April Fools promotion (I’m not calling them jokes as they are often well planned online marketing campaigns)? Here is my list:
Consistency with brand - The best ones are “on brand” making them truly believable.
Good enough – Some of the promotions are just too “over the top”. Think about the Google CADIE application listed on their homepage. Not only did it stick out like a sore thumb but it was just too clever even for Google.
Easy to share – It is simple for the person getting “conned” (I believe the technical term here is sucker) to forward it quickly before he/she has time to realize it is bogus.
Has a great payoff when forwarded – The person who forwards it will suffer great humiliation from friends and coworkers when the obvious hoax is discover. This also gives the embarrassed a strong incentive to try to “get” someone else (think viral spread).
Mainstream media picks it up – You get bonus points if the media first report it as real news but in the end, this is a PR/viral marketing exercise so any mainstream coverage is a big win.
Just think of it as a viral campaign with a twist. More than just getting a simple laugh, you need to make sure the forwarder also feels the pain.
I think marketing people get a bad rap and often think that accountability is the root cause. Too often we use words like “brand building” to mask the fact that we can’t connect some of our activities with tangible results.
Here are some questions to assess how accountable you are as a marketer.
Do you do everything you can to track the results of a program (ie coded URLs, special offers, etc)?
Do you freely admit when a program was a complete bust even if all the data is not in?
Do you create a back of the envelope estimate for the campaign before you start with the creative?
Have you sensitivity tested your campaign assumptions based on past program results?
Do you ruthlessly remove the worst performing programs from your budget each year?
Are you always looking for something that can outperform your tried and true programs?
Is your CFO an ally?
Does your CEO offer you more budget if you can find positive ROI programs?
As I saw firsthand at SXSW last week, many companies are still trying to figure how to make money in a market where online customers expect to get everything for free. Here are a couple of interesting points from a keynote featuring Guy Kawasaki and Chris Anderson (author of the book “the Long Tail”).
Question: How has the economic crisis changed things for online businesses?
Two years ago companies were operating in a monetary and non-monetary economy
The business model went something like this: raise money, sell company, if not try Google Adsense
Today: need you a freemium business model right out of the gate
The magic number they cited was 5% of users need to upgrade to a premium service for a business to be viable. I can’t recall if a source was identified for the number. To be honest, this felt a little high to me. In a previous life marketing downloadable shareware software that had a premium upgrade path, we had very profitable products if we could get 1% of the users to upgrade. The challenges back then (as they are today) were getting enough users to install the free version and creating a strong enough value proposition for upgrading. In the end, we keep coming back to the basic needs of a large customer base and strong revenue model, right?
Busy week so I didn’t have time for any opinion pieces. Here are some highlights from the week and what is on my mind.
WebInno21 – Amazingly this was my first time at the event. I’ve signed up before but each time it just never happened. If you in are in Boston, it is a must. Almost 500 entrepreneurs and service providers filled the room. Unlike other “networking events”, this one was packed with people actually trying to build stuff and change the world.
Adroit Interactive - They received the most votes from the crowd at WebInno. I really like the idea of dynamically driven ads, but I am also wary of any business working on a CPM basis when the aftermarket prices for online ads are under $1 these days.
BravoCart – I am sucker for boring (sorry guys but shopping carts are not sexy) technologies that make a big difference. I know, I know, shopping carts are so 1998 but I would bet these guys have the most success of the the main dishes at Webinno. In the end, their core customers will “get it” and the ROI will be easier to demonstrate.
Dropcard – I handed one guy my business card and he immediately typed it into his iPhone. It wasn’t until I returned to my office the next day that I discovered he had sent me an electronic business card. Pretty cool.
Dapper – Adriot’s competitor in the dynamic ad market gets bonus points. I was among the compulsive tweeters at WebInno and Dapper smartly responded to one of my tweets. They are now on my radar. I guess social media really does work.
I am off to SXSW (that is South by Southwest for the rest of us) next week. I should have lots of tasty morsels to blog about.
As I shared earlier this week, I’ve been experimenting with social media advertising on Facebook. The results to date have been, how do i say this politely, appalling. I knew from my prior research that the clickthroughs would be lower than paid search on Google but given the lower expected cost per click and and larger number of impressions, I figured we might “make it up in volume”.
Here some interesting articles I’ve compiled while I try to assess the effectiveness of this campaign and my future with social media advertising.
