Marketing Tactegy

Building a business case for social media marketing

I will be moderating a panel discussion at the upcoming Measure Up Conference in Chicago March 10 - 12, ( http://bit.ly/4zkuuD ) on this topic. If you have any thoughts or questions you would like to ask the panelists, please let me know. It would be great to start a LinkedIn Discussion on this and use the issues brought forward here as input for the conference. 

Actually, there are also a bunch of sessions on WOM and social media, and measuring results so this will be a great way to start the discussion ahead of the actual physical conference. 

The panelists include the VP of Marketing at the San Diego Zoo and the CMO of Atlanta Gas Light. 

It should be pretty interesting. 

The top 3 Marketing Inventions/Innovations

Last week I kicked off a short survey of what the top 3 marketing inventions/innovations are.  The answers break down into a few categories.  You may disagree with my classifications, but here are the results:

Historical (not listed in historical order)

• The Internet
• Television & radio
• The Gutenberg printing press
• The wheel
• The microprocessor
• Fire

Market modeling related

• Predictive modeling/churn modeling
• ROMI/ROO, MMM, Return on Brand Investment

Great marketers

• Steve Jobs
• Guy Kawasaki
• Mark Cuban

Technology and tools

• Internet (also mentioned above)
• LinkedIn
• Spell Check
• Personalized broadcast Integrated email and CRM
• Internet
• Social Media
• Twitter
• Online advertising
• Infomercials
• FSIs

Marketing Concepts

• Understanding consumer behavior
• Value appropriation
• Adaptation to new technologies
• Fully integrated Marcom processes
• SPIN
• Unique Selling Proposition
• Lead nurturing
• Strategy
• Retention
• Innovation
• SWOT Analysis
• Ansoff’s Matrix
• The art of differentiation
• Become part of the customer’s life
• Continuous product innovation
• Listen to the customer
• Alphabet soup:

The 4Ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion)

The 3Cs (Customers, Channel, Competition)

The 4Cs (Customer needs, Cost to customer, Convenience to customer, Communication)

+3Ps (People, Process, Physical evidence)

The 4Rs and a P (Referrals, Retention, Repeat business, Reactivation, Prospecting)

The 16Ps

• AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action)
• Changing people’s attitude

Blatant self-promotion

• (none repeated here)

It’s great to see the diversity of input on various marketing terms and techniques.  I also like the historical references which make it all possible.  It is also a pretty good list of different concepts that marketers feel strongly about.

As for the three top marketers offered, they represent sources of great ideas and to stay abreast of hot new topics we should be following their blogs and other writings.

Thanks to everyone that provided feedback.  Let me know if you have any other thoughts.

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.

The long term value of advertising

I put together a white paper on the long term value of advertising.  It was kind of interesting, because it represents some of the software we have used to determine the real value of marketing.
The key question to ask in refining this paper is:  ‘What is the incremental or decremental, long term effect of advertising if advertising were halved or advertising were doubled?’  Here is the link:

Click now:  Long Term Value of Advertising.pdf

The paper differentiates between short, medium, long and very long term effects of advertising but focuses on the medium and long term value.  The key items in determining the long term value of advertising is broken down into:

1. Purchase funnel and emotional effects (e.g., awareness, consideration and purchase intent)
2. Brand imagery – the value of the brand attributes in the minds of the consumer
3. The ‘memory of the web’ (e.g., cross-links that drive SEO and social media clouds)
4. Brand equity – e.g., any advertising this year drives value in the following years
5. Customer equity – a newly won customer is more likely to re-purchase from you than a non-customer
6. Consumer preferences – the education of the consumer that leads to higher preferences for certain brand and functional attributes
7. Creative concept – there are some great creative concepts (“Two scoops of raisins in a box of…”- Kellogg’s Raisin Bran or ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing..” – Coca Cola)

The definitions are currently defined for consumer packaged goods, but can be applied to just about any industry.  I will be writing a separate paper including the differences in the long term value of advertising between consumer and business-to-business marketing.

If you get a chance, let me know your feedback.  If there is anything I left out of the framework to analyze the long term effects of advertising, please let me know.

MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2009

I just got back to my desk after a week of vacation and 2 days of conferencing at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum and I must say, the conference was one of the best I've been to. I haven't figured out what the underlying reasons were for this reaction, but it was nevertheless a great opportunity to network and change the way you think.

Top events at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum

Here are a few things that absolutely stood out:

1. Sandy Carter's talk (from IBM) on the actions they are taking in the social media space. What a great set of examples. (http://www.booksbysandy.com/)
2. Amy Africa's website optimization 'family feud'. The format was put on as a family feud instead of the typical PowerPoint and speech with case studies. It was filled with facts and ideas that might not even fit into Santa's gift bag. What a great, invigorating way to get key concepts across.  (http://www.eightbyeight.com/)
3. The 20 minute one-on-ones put on by experts in different fields. These included web usability, SEO, social networking and others. These were free and certainly give you some great ideas to get you out of your rut.
4. he keynotes were great.  Steven Johnson certainly made clear how he has been successful at social media and the effects of being of the cover of Time magazine.  Barry Schwartz had some interesting points about bringing forth a new moral order.

Key B2B marketing problems

But the interesting question was the difficulty B2B marketers have in determining marketing effectiveness.  Especially since they are trying to improve their marketing mixes, deliver better on corporate objectives and finally prove marketing’s contribution to sales. The key areas still looking for answers include:

• Last touch attribution
• Objectives-based budgeting v. media-based budgeting
• Sales and marketing alignment and collaboration
• The definition of a lead
• An inward-looking view of marketing as opposed to a consumer-centered approach

I’m sure there are many others.  If you have any thoughts, I would love to hear from you.

Marketing Effectiveness and ROI – now in Malaysia

It looks like my calendar is filling up for the summer.  After the June conference in Boston, in July I have been invited to speak and present a full day marketing ROI workshop in Melaka, Malaysia at the INCOMAR 2009 (2nd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE on MARKETING and RETAILING 2009) conference put on by the Chartered Institute of Marketing Malaysia and the Universiti Teknologi MARA.  I’ve spent a lot of time in Malaysia recently and it should be fun to be able to put on this presentation and workshop with this group. 

Many of the concepts from my book, Marketing Calculator:  Measuring and managing your return on marketing investment.

For more information, please go to:  www.marketing-calculator.com.

I hope you can attend. 

New marketing effectiveness blog in Singapore

Marketing Institute of Singapore

I wanted to let you know that I have been invited to blog on the Marketing Institute of Singapore’s site (Marketing Institute of Singapore ).  If you’re interested in learning about general marketing conversations and about marketing in Asia, take a look.

Marketing Calculator

With my new book out (Marketing Calculator ) and the general level of discussion in this marketing ROI area, the discussion should be pretty lively.

I do have a question for you and that is, what do you see your marketing investments to be for the next two quarters (Q408 and Q109)?  Will spending be made to gain share in a down market, or will the finance team win and marketing will be cut to maintain margins?

I look forward to your views.

Sneak preview of my new book

My new book, Marketing Calculator:  Measuring and managing return on marketing investment is about to be published and should be available shortly.  It has been exciting but also time consuming to actually go through the publishing process.  Nevertheless it will be available in the next few weeks, initially in Asia and then in September in the US.

New marketing effectiveness concepts

There are a number of new concepts that I think you will find valuable, namely:

• The Marketing Effectiveness Framework
• The Marketing Effectiveness Continuum
• The Marketing Effectiveness Culture
• Last Touch Attribution(TM)
• 4P3C1E Framework

Drive Marketing ROI

Each of these will help marketers to prove and improve their marketing effectiveness to increase ROI and drive revenue profit and market share.

Stay tuned.  I will have a bunch more to say in the coming weeks.

Some Interesting Survey Results on Marketing Effectiveness

I recently fielded an ad hoc survey of European marketers (Northern Europe) on their impressions of how successful they perceived themselves at driving improved marketing effectiveness and support corporate sales objectives.  There were some interesting results that I wanted to share with you.  On the whole the respondents showed reasonable results in terms of their current tracking and measurement of their marketing effectiveness and ROI. 

The bad news on marketing effectiveness and marketing management

There were however 17.9%, just less than 1 in 5 that didn’t measure their marketing effectiveness.  Of these, they were clearly no in the critical path to corporate success.  This is evident in how they answered the question, “How do you set your marketing budget?”  The answers broke down as follows:

• Just less than half of them can’t describe their budgeting process
• Just more than one third claim they do it based on objectives
• Just less than one third set their budgets based on what’s left in the corporate plan

All of these marketers claim that their marketing is not successful at supporting the achievement of the corporate revenue plan.  All of them also claim they are doing even to a little bit worse than their competition.

The good news on marketing effectiveness and marketing management

The good news is that over 80% of marketers can measure some or all of their marketing results.  They do this by measuring direct response, connecting revenue directly to each marketing activity or doing it across the entire marketing mix.  Of these marketers, 70% set their budgets based on marketing objectives.  The other 30% split about evenly to setting their budgets based on a percent increase over the prior year or a fixed percentage of plan revenue.

This means that just more than 50% do some measurement and use specific objectives to set their budgets.  Unfortunately, just less than 50% don’t measure their results and don’t use objectives to set their budgets.  It is these marketers that are simply seen as an expense as opposed to a critical component of the revenue generation process.

If you’d like to hear more about the results from this survey let me know.  Or if you would like to read about this, get ready for my upcoming book specifically on this topic.  Go to www.DemandROMI.com/EvenMoreROMI.html for more information.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Negative ROMI. How can that be possible?

I was speaking with a bank campaign marketing team and they had a very unusual question for me:  How is it possible that if we’ve set up an test-control group marketing experiment correctly that our response in the test group (which received the promotional offer) could be worse than the control group (which didn’t receive the promotional offer).  This lead to a negative calculated ROMI.  How could that be possible?

Checking the experimental design of your marketing test

Certainly the first thing to check is whether the experiment was properly designed.  Was the test timeframe correct?  Could it have been possible that some holiday or seasonal anomalies crept into the test?  Did the direct mail piece get accurately produced?  Was there a typo or some other error in the design?  Was the sample size properly determined?  Was the test sample properly selected?  All of these are good questions to start off with, but what if the experimental design still passed muster?

Uncompetitive advertising

Then it is possible you did something that most marketers dread and that is to advertise a promotion that consumers don’t find competitive.  That is, interest in the offering was awakened but because the offer wasn’t competitive, those persons receiving the offer checked with the competition and purchased from them.  The competitive offer was better than your promoted offer and upon further consideration by the consumer they decided to purchase the competitive offering.  Whoops - nothing worse than advertising an uncompetitive offering.

The greatest thing about measuring the response to all your marketing activities is that you can go back and now have a way to diagnose what went wrong and what went right. 

If this ever happened to you please let me know.