Archive for the ‘Engagement Metrics’ Category
The Future Is Now
After a long week at FutureM 2010, many professionals and young people came together to share new insights and experiences around the future of technology, marketing and business. New innovations maybe on the way for mobile carriers to having their own credit cards, or partnering with others to help better facilitate the exchange of goods and build loyalty. Additionally, new movements are forming to better understand how to measure the behaviors of the audience to strategizing your next step for engagement. All in all, it’s about listening to your audience, identifying the community and contributing to it, by providing useful resources in a manner that is not selling and yelling, but rather creating and curating the conversation. The importance of mapping out the touch points of your audience both online and off-line to establishing the right message, at the right time, using the right medium.
Although everyone wants to learn what’s new on the horizon and social media is the rave, don’t forget to neglect traditional means of marketing to your audience, as Victor Lee, SVP of Marketing and Branded Entertainment of Digitas suggested an integrated approach. “Think of the analogy of the leaky bucket and make sure to balance the information across other channels between traditional and online. If you have too much in one area and not the others, you’ll run into leaks.” I’ve promoted that same notion time and time again to others. As one monitors the different channels of information to reach audiences, consider this as guidance to planning your next steps to engaging them:
- Define the goal
- Map out engagement across different touch points
- Review behavior: Where they came from and where are they going?
- Build rapport and sense of community by creating a personal experience
- Listen and address customer service
How about measuring the results?
One needs to review such metrics as to what keywords are people typing to learn about your brand and competitors, how many website visitors are you attracting based on those keyword searches, where else is the audience going once they left your website or complementary mobile apps, and how many of those visitors took action that may have converted into real results based on your goal? I’ve been noticing the amount of likes, sign-up now, check-ins there and every where to eventually turn into another form of SPAM for the customer. The brands that are authentic, listen, reach out and provide value to the audience over time, are the products and services that will prevail.
- Listen
- Curate
- Contribute
- Activate
As Victor mentioned as well, “don’t just look at the amount of ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ one brand has, but look at the action one takes after a certain marketing campaign or promotion that positions the customers ‘in market’ to finding something valuable about your business to take action.” If it takes multiple clicks before getting a conversion, see if you can better streamline the process, or avoid that medium altogether with your product and/or service.
- Build community to create advocacy
- Focus on content strategy
- Follow people that follow you back
- Ask people to invite three more friends to join your cause
If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again
Despite the multiple challenges along the way, Tom First certainly tried and tried again to keep his business alive and pursue what he loved. As one of the founders of Nantucket Nectars, he offered entrepreneurs and marketing professionals advice on his keys to success with no formal business background of his own at FutureM.
Go with your gut and be real with your customers. What we know today as best practices for social media is what Tom was doing before the phenomenon existed online. He would make a point to pound the pavements of Boston to DC and speak with people to find out what they were saying about his new juice concoction.
When the radio guys said you need a catchy script to sell your product, he said to his partner Tom, we’ll just make something up on the spot. Tom & Tom created a real conversation on the radio telling their story about their product. People listened and it built trust in the brand.
The industry said you have to do something a certain way to find success. Tom First figured out on his own to break the rules conducting taste tests across the country out of the back of his car, dropping into local restaurants to “do lunch” at multiple mom and pop stores to increase his distribution, and learned how to define a new way of doing business.
Mom was always right – SAY PLEASE, THANK YOU and BE POLITE!
Being real, connect with your audience online and off-line, listen, put a face behind your product and be polite. These were some of the tactics that Tom First adopted at the different stages of his business. Today, many marketers are trying to put more flashy sales tactics, use bait and switch tactics to generate leads to up-sell products and services, or gain a following of fans through Facebook and Twitter to sell and not tell an honest story. As Tom First said, “Regardless of marketing in this market, if your product sucks, doesn’t matter how much you do to grab someone’s attention.”
Success Measuring Social Media
Boston’s Social Media Butterflies
Meet to Discuss Social Media Measurement Success
Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO & Founder of KDPaine & Partners wants to encourage others to kick butt in the social media space! Katie, alongside a panel of other successful social media experts started the conversation off with that statement at last night’s Social Media Club Boston event. Attending were some of the top social media butterflies in the city all seeking to share new insights and grasp new ways to measure this new social phenomenon through different means.
Consider social media as one important “spoke” on a large marketing wheel which includes using other channels both online and offline to reach your audience. As Jamie Pappas, Social Media Strategy Manager for EMC mentioned, “I like to think we are doing the butt kicking,” but it’s important as a marketer to make sure that you are integrating your marketing efforts and continue to prove the value of each initiative to the executives.
Finding Out Where The Buzz Goes
Bill Carlson, Editor-in-Chief of CIO.com mentions how much social media can provide a window of opportunity to connect better with the audience where you can react to something in real-time, while Holly Allison, VP of Marketing for Vico software was pleased with the success of her guest blogger campaign. She was able to attract new thought leaders to write blogs and shared Vlogs of individuals on Youtube as each became a spokesperson to champion her brand.
Go out there and listen to what people are saying, rely on such sites as Trackur, Social Mention and Twendz to see what all the chatter is about your brand and react appropriately. Start responding to questions, identifying new keywords being searched to find your product, or make changes to your campaign instantly. As marketers, we need to discover the best ways to interpret the results of social media so companies realize it’s sticking around and believe it’s not just for free. It takes support, time, and creative ingenuity just as any other department to be effective, but more importantly social media can save costs to a company that opens a new means to conduct focus groups, improve customer service, and empower the audience.
Where’s The ROI?
As new technology emerges, marketers can better quantify results of social media to generate potential leads that convert to sales. Chris Penn, VP of Strategy and Innovation of Blue Sky email marketing has been successful aligning a baseline each quarter between the goals set within Google Analytics and the percent of quality leads generated into Sales Force. Chris shared his formula (Earnings – Spent/ # of Leads) for gathering the amount of money earned across different digital marketing efforts and comparing it to the amount of money spent as a percentage of the number of leads generated to drive sales. He can further examine the ROI of each tweet, blog post, PPC campaign, email and more by using Google Analytics URL Builder. Set a unique URL to track instances of where people are learning more about your product or service and how it can help to measure your overall conversion. Mike Proulx, VP of Interactive Marketing at Hill Holiday relies on Meteor Solutions to embed a tracking code that can be associated with different incidences of traffic sources coming in from Twitter, Facebook, or other mediums.
What about the people that live outside of social media and how does one measure their impact on your brand? It’s very important to validate not only the discussions online, but make a point to be engaged with your audience in other ways through face-to-face encounters, customer service calls, and keep track of other interactions where people that form impressions around your brand. Keep abreast of not only the top influencers in your market, but don’t neglect the people creating a buzz in smaller communities. Over time people come together to form their own community and you don’t want to risk not paying attention to the messages, nor miss a new business opportunity to your competitor.
Not everyone is immersed in the online social scene and there are many other audiences that are not accounted for when you quantify results. However, you can establish a dashboard unique to your business comprised of the different touch points the customer is engaged prior to a purchase of product. Carry that information forward followed by the actions after that purchase.
Mike offered his thoughts around creating a dashboard that reflects the goals of marketing and how to evaluate its impact on the overall strategy. There are many ways to look across both the qualitative and quantitative measurements to comprise a picture for management that makes sense of your business and can help marketers prioritize their efforts.
