Marketing Tactegy

Social Media Metrics & PR Camp Atlanta

inally getting a chance to put down my thoughts from PR Camp Atlanta.  It was billed as the un-conference and that’s what made it very interesting.

There were four teams, each working through a number of similar questions and that led to some good discussion and learning.  The key session topics were:

1. Get clients and bosses to extend their interest in new media
2. Help senior professionals tap the social media experience of junior colleagues
3. With PR and marketing blurring, determine the best ways to measure success

The biggest insight for me was the concern for marketing ROI and metrics.  In social media, there are quite a few metrics.  Certainly Facebook isn’t delivering everything that’s needed, but there are some early signs of good metrics.

Social Media Metrics

Overall there is definitely some (to put it kindly) confusion as to the use and purpose of metrics.  Applied generally to marketing and to social media specifically metrics have two purposes:

• Measuring and optimizing the use of the site and actions in the community.  For example, Twitter now has a strong following of third party metrics and analytics software providers to help Twitter users grow their follower base and to follow others.  These include TweetBeep.com, TweetDeck.com, Tweepular.com and many others.
• Measuring and optimizing the use of the site to drive revenue, profit, brand and share (These I define as the true measures of ROI).  There are a number of tools that provide the kinds of outputs that can be analyzed to determine the net effect of social sites on critical ROI measures.  In order to make the connection with revenue or other ROI measures.  For example, how many click-throughs were received from Facebook or MySpace?  As for sentimentality and other important metrics Scoutlabs and Radian6 offer some interesting capabilities that can be used to analyze social media at a deeper level.

Once you have these numbers and with some intelligence you can then measure and analyze how each of these communities are delivering on the business goal of revenue, profit, brand and share.
If you have any thoughts or questions, please let me know.  You can also follow me on Twitter at @GuyPowell.  Please tag with #ROMI.

Is BANT dead?

BANT & Marketing ROI

I was talking with a friend in B2B marketing and we were working through the issues with BANT.  In particular the ‘A’ of BANT.  ‘A’ stands for Authority.  That is, does the lead contact have the authority to make a decision on the item being promoted?  And, how can this lead classification improve marketing ROI?

Target Marketing and Corporate Decision Making

In selling business-to-business (B2B) products & services, the question has to do with the decision making process within the target organization.  In large organizations and depending on the value of the capital good being sold, there is usually a committee.  Certainly, there are specific individuals in the organization that have more sway in the decision than others.  Certainly it is better to have VP or C-level backing for your proposal.  But do they truly have the authority to make the decision?  Most efficient managers have a vision and the proposed solution has to fit within that vision.  But there are always competitive solutions and there are almost always others involved to some extent in the decision.  And smart VPs and C-Level executives are going to want to delegate the decision into the organization so that they can own the choice and further enhance the success of the implementation.
The decision making group is either a formal or informal committee.  The committee can be made up of just direct reports in the department or it can be a multi-departmental group across all of the key departments in the organization.  These can include:

Finance
HR
IT
Marketing
Operations
Purchasing
Research & Development
Sales
Security

Some of these individuals can’t say ‘yes’ to a particular investment but they can say ‘no’.  Some of them are just worried about how the solution is going to affect their jobs.

B2B Purchase Authority

The definition of Authority needs to be expanded to now include terms, such as:

Individual is a ‘member of the committee’
This solution needs his/her blessing
This individual will be the prime mover in the implementation
This solution will impact my/my department’s daily workflow

Further, how should an inbound call be classified when the administrative assistant or a low level manager asks for information about your product/service?  Are they gathering information for the VP?  Are they just trying to learn about a topic?  Are they providing informational materials for the purchase committee?  Will they be recommending the solution to their boss based on their research?  Are they a member of an informal or formal purchase committee?

Enterprise Marketing

This has clear implications for how services are marketed to prospective customers.  For enterprise sales the primary objective for marketing is to support the sales team in developing and expanding their key relationships with each of the members of the purchase committee.  Without these relationships, sales will be at a significant disadvantage versus the competition. Using this new definition of contact and authority classification, marketers can improve their targeting to better support the sales team in accelerating sales and growth.

Here is another great post on this topic.  It compares BANT to SCOTSMAN and another mnemonic, but in each case we need to further detail out the Authority term:

(http://blog.market2lead.com/blueprint/2009/03/the-scotsman-vs-bant-for-effective-lead-management.html)

Let me know what you think.

 

The long term value of advertising – The dark side

As I gather notes on the long term value of advertising one of the things that also needs to be considered is the negative value that advertising can have on the brand.  The biggest negative advertising effect is in email, but it can also apply to Facebook and other social media channels.

The negative value of email advertising is the unsubscribe and the junk/spam mail designation by prospective customers.  The problem with any of these is that the junk/spam/unsubscribe designation can last forever. 

Let’s take a simple example.  Let’s assume that a brand executes a monthly email to 100,000 prospects and has an 3.3%  junk/spam rate and a 3% unsubscribe rate for each mailing (See Center for Market Research ).  By the end of the year, after 12 emails, the list will have the following breakdown:

	Active recipients (from 100,000 after 12 drops)	45,801
	Unsubscribe’s (@ 3% per drop)	25,809
	Junk/Spam (@ 3.3% per drop)	28,390
	Total	100,000

The point is not to calculate the number of active recipients, but to show the loss in long term value that occurs due to advertising.  This takes place with email, but can also take place with other media, such as Facebook® fan page subscribes/unsubscribes, Twitter® followers and others.  And, especially with email, once the email lands in the junk/spam or unsubscribe list it can take a lot of effort to reverse the designation by the prospective customer.

Let me know if you have any comments.  I look forward to your feedback.