Marketing Tactegy

A round up on marketing metrics activities around the world

I thought I would give an update on some of the activities from the last few weeks.  It has been incredibly busy and I am finally able to start to gather some of my thoughts.

Malaysian marketing ROI

I spent about a week and a half in Malaysia, giving a keynote speech at and participating in the INCOMAR 2000 conference; teaching an executive MBA and DBA course on marketing ROI; doing my first radio interview on my book and doing a print interview.  It was fascinating to see how a different culture conducts a major marketing conference. 

Social media marketing metrics

One of the findings that I learned was that social media is definitely on the rise throughout the globe.  Just about everyone I ran into in Malaysia is active on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  This says a lot about how we need to put together global campaigns and then measure their results.  I guess one question is whether a brand can execute a global social media program, or does it have to be targeted either regionally or nationally.  Given the local regulations and culture it would be difficult to see a global program be successful outside of the US.

B2B marketing metrics and marketing success

The next thing was that B2B marketing continues to suffer at the hands of the ‘lead’.  It was clear to me that even for major brands lead count instead of lead quality is still considered the primary marketing success metric.  There is still a lot of work to do here.

Social Media

I will also be talking more about metrics in social media.  Facebook has started to make some great changes and hopefully over the next few months, we will see a lot of great innovation in this area.

If you have any thoughts please let me know.

Direct and indirect marketing response, social media and Facebook Insights

Last Touch Attribution

I’ve been wrestling with one of the biggest misperceptions I see in marketing metrics and especially how it relates to social media.  The misperception has to do with the directly measurable response as opposed to the indirect value you get when your consumer receives any impression from you.  This is especially the case on the web.  Many web marketers attribute conversions to clicks using click-source URLs.  Unfortunately, just as with multiple touches across multiple media this provides only a partial story.  It totally disregards the value all other touches, both concurrent and prior.  The term Last Touch Attribution defined in previous posts describes how this metric works.

Last Touch Attribution and Social Media

This misperception is going to get worse as more marketers engage in social media tactics, where engagement with the brand takes place online, either on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube or elsewhere.  This brand engagement generally leads to positive brand reinforcement, although there can also be negative reinforcement as well.  The issue for marketing metrics professionals is to put a framework together that can start to measure the value of the engagement with the social media site. It’s not just about how many unique visitors come from the social media site.  A more accurate measure of success is the total level of engagement users generate while engaging with the site.  Social media metrics currently include the number of fans, time on site and other behavioral metrics.  But as metrics professionals we need to determine how these metrics can be connected with overall incremental brand engagement and then connect incremental brand engagement with incremental sales.

Facebook Insights

Facebook recently launched a new metrics framework (Facebook Insights) with a new metric called ‘Post Quality’.  The metrics include enhanced demographic and behavioral information and also this new indicator of page engagement.  It is described as:

“Your Post Quality is determined by the percentage of your fans that engage when you post content to your Page. It is calculated on a rolling seven-day basis. The number of stars depends on how your Post Quality compares to similar Pages (for example, Pages that have a similar number of fans),”
(Inside Facebook, Facebook Upgrading “Insights” Metrics Dashboard for Page Managers Tonight, May 5th, 2009).

This is a first step in the right direction, but it will be interesting to see how this correlates (probably with some lag) with brand sales, or unique visits to the brand website.  Over time the question that needs to be answered is whether this metric measures fan engagement with the page and the brand, not just the post.  This metric appears to be a good step in helping marketers improve their posts, drive incremental engagement and then deliver incremental brand engagement and revenue.

If you have any experiences in this area I would love to hear from you.

Long Term Value of Advertising for B2B Marketers

I wanted to let you know I just finished a new version of our last whitepaper:  The Long Term Value of Advertising for B2b Marketers.  If you are a B2B marketer, you can download it here:

 http://www.Marketing-Calculator.com/Files/LongTermValueofB2BAdvertising.pdf

I would love to get your feedback.