Marketing Tactegy

Haiti and Twitter - Interesting analysis

As I have mentioned to many of you we are close to completing our book project on the ROI of social media and we decided to take a quick look at trending topics and thought about what the response was in the Twitterverse.

Below is a chart from Trendistic.com – I think you’ll like this application.  Anyway, this chart shows the level of 'Haiti' activity once the earthquake hit.  It hit about 4:30PM local time or 2:30 PM EST.  

 

It took about 2 hours for news of the event to hit the Twitterverse (this is our estimate), because you can see when CNN latched on to the catastrophe story they, too, became a major topic in the Twitterverse.  So within the time CNN (here, used as a proxy for all news sources) picked up the story, about 3% of the tweets had a mention about Haiti.  The next day, they continued with the story and it was obvious how big of a disaster it was.  Haiti traffic exceeded 6% and then generally has leveled off to the 6% level for the last few days, with various ups and downs.

 

Also, of course is the incredible response using mobile donations (Text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross).  Already, the 90999 text message has delivered millions of dollars to relief for those in Haiti.  I hope you, too, will also contribute.  In the near future I will look at this 'campaign' as well to discover some interesting insights.

Check us out here for some upcoming events.

Let me know what you think

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.

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. 

Measuring the effectiveness of social media

One of the hotter topics right now in metrics is how to measure the success of social media.  Many social marketers are looking for the answer to this seemingly simple question.  The good news is that there is a lot going on here.  As I’ve become involved in metrics and have spoken around the world on this topic I’ve learned that there are no easy answers.  There is however a framework with which to develop an answer.  (If you’d like, please visit www.marketing-calculator.com for information on a generalized marketing effectiveness framework.)

At one level the number of visitors to a social site can be one measure of success.  At the next level we have to measure the level of engagement.  Time spent on site, the number of comments, videos or other content submitted can be an indicator of success in the social media space.  Unfortunately, these measures don’t determine how successful these social marketing activities are at delivering sales in the stores.  Just like there is an indirect link between TV and in-store sales, so too, is there an indirect link between a consumers’ social media activities and sales in the store.

So we need a measure of transforming this emotional engagement into brand awareness/consideration and preference/purchase intent.  Once we’ve done this, there are a number of tools that we can use to actually calculate the effectiveness of a social marketing activity.

But this is only backward looking.  As marketers, we want to look forward into the future.  How well will this next social marketing activity drive awareness, engagement and sales in the store?  For this we need to use a number of different tools (not complex) and then put the pieces together.  However I will address this in my next post.  In the meantime if you’d like more information or discussion on this topic, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/guyrpowell) or at www.DemandROMI.com.

 

Excuses, excuses, excuses...

I just read this article and I loved the quotes (uhh, I mean excuses)

Here are a few relating to the early success (or better termed ‘results’) of mobile marketing campaigns (Texting by the numbers, Steve Smith, MediaPost, 12/16/2008, http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.san&art_aid=96827):

"It is early days."
"The learnings will be invaluable moving forward."
"But these folks who did opt-in are our core customers with a great multiplier effect."
"The user feedback loop alone was worth the effort."

These are great.  If you have others I would love to hear them.

Is there an inverse relationship between the ferocity of the excuses and the level of response?

In any case, the real issue is how do you measure response to determine true marketing ROI and ROMI?  Is it just those that responded or was there a brand value for those that saw the ad, were moved by the ad, but just didn’t respond through texting?  It’s all these effects that we need to measure and at some point correlate to sales.  Then the excuses can turn into, “it’s the early days, but we did increase revenue by 14% and we can prove it…”

Let me know if you have some great excuses.  I know I’ve heard them all, but that was when I was just trying to get a date….

Last Touch Attribution

DemandGen Report just published an article of mine on Last Touch Attribution (The first word on Last Touch Attribution, DemandGen Article).  This term clarifies one of the key areas of marketing measurement and accountability.  A related term has to do with marketing contributions from an Integrated Marketing Campaign which I will talk about in my next post.  Last Touch Attribution was coined a year or so ago to help marketers communicate some simple steps relating to marketing ROI. It refers to attributing all of the weight of the results to a single marketing activity.  It disregards all other touches, whether they are prior or parallel touches using other media.  Synergies, halo and cannibalization are ignored.  So if a single direct mail piece is dropped all of the responses to that piece are attributed directly to that direct marketing activity.  All brand effects are ignored as well as all other components of other marketing campaigns.

Last Touch Attribution

I just spent a day at a ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) session with a major high tech company that is actually pretty advanced for their ability to track marketing costs and results.  Marketers have been struggling for a long time to finally differentiate and communicate this type of measurement with the measurement of response to an integrated marketing campaign, where all of the direct results can’t be directly measured.  In my example above, response codes clearly delineate where the specific attribution came from (ignoring all other unmeasured effects.)   In an integrated marketing campaign, each of the campaign elements contribute to the overall response, both in the short term and in the long term (e.g., brand value). 

Integrated Marketing Campaign Contribution

So the IMC Contributions represent the value that each of the campaign media elements contribute to the final result.  There are a few other terms that must be covered to deliver the final picture.  But those, I will talk about in my next blog.

If you have any comments, please let me know.

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.

Multiple airings, interesting statistics and marketing ROI

I read with interest the article on Nielsen’s new measurement statistics (MediaDailyNews, Nielsen Sings New Ratings Tune: 'We Can Be Heroes, Not Just For One Day', September 26th, 2007) and I was surprised to think that the new numbers to be provided will be the unduplicated reach for the new show “Heroes” on NBC.  This will certainly be very important but some additional research will also be enlightening:

It would be interesting to know:

• How many viewers will watch it twice
• How many households will be counted only once, even though different family members will view it during the first airing and others the second airing

Since we know that every impression received by a viewer adds additional value and marketing ROI to the brand and their advertisers, just providing the unduplicated reach won’t tell the whole story.  Secondly it will be interesting to see how this will work when we finally get commercial viewership which is what the advertisers really care about.

Product Sampling and Marketing Analytics

I was recently involved in an interesting discussion on the use of sampling which I will attempt to repeat (in a disguised fashion) here.  Certainly sampling can be a great way to seed the market with to induce trial and hopefully repeat consumption.  But the question is how do we account for the results from the sampling?

Multi-step marketing

Let’s say that we offer samples of a new product at some major event.  Let’s assume it is a food product costing less than a dollar per serving.  The assumption is that after the sampling event, the consumer will go home and then purchase it again (and again) in the traditional outlets of food, drug or mass.  As opposed to a typical television commercial, this is a two (or more) step process begun with the initial sampling event leading to further purchase actions.

Sampling and marketing mix modeling

The traditional marketing analysis technique, marketing mix modeling (MMM) has difficulty capturing the results from a sampling event, because it doesn’t capture the true purchase dynamics.  MMMs try to correlate the bumps and wiggles in the marketing inputs with the bumps and wiggles in the outputs, sales to determine the relative impact of each of the marketing activities.  In the case of sampling, a multi-step marketing tool, the follow-on purchases can’t easily be determined because the increases in the output bumps and wiggles don’t easily correlate back to the inputs, although some synergy elements can be tried.

Because of this, attribution back to the sampling activity is potentially misrepresented and in the usual case under-attributed.  Smart marketers know this and continue to use sampling knowing that the traditional analytics don’t correctly account for these types of multi-step marketing tools.

Agent-based modeling and multi-step marketing

In order to measure these results or those of other multi-step marketing activities, we need to use other analysis techniques.  Survey techniques can determine the propensity to repeat immediately following the initial trial and deliver reasonable results, although they may not be able to include all of the nuances of synergy and other surround-sound marketing effects.

In order to properly account for sampling amidst all of the other marketing activities, a consumer-centric approach is required and agent-based modeling can be one of those methods.  Because agent-based modeling can accurately represent the impact of this multi-step trial and repeat process it can easily deliver the necessary analytics to determine the true impact of sampling on the marketing mix.

There are many other examples of multi-step marketing.  Certainly in the business-to-business marketing environment where marketing delivers leads to a sales force is one.  Catalytic marketing also has elements of a multi-step approach.

If you have other examples of multi-step marketing that fall into this discussion please let me know.

Long Term versus Short Term Marketing ROI

The President of IRI Global Services, Sunil (Sunny) Garga was mentioned in an article on Forbes.com, ‘IRI Long-Term Drivers Consortium Study(SM) Releases First Wave of Top-Line Results and Launches Second Study’.  It will certainly stir up some interesting discussion on the choices brand managers have in either making the numbers this month versus delivering long term brand value next year and beyond.

Short versus Long Term Focus on Marketing Effectiveness

With the short term focus impressed on companies by the financial markets, brand managers must continue to look for marketing vehicles that drive marketing results this month and this quarter at the sacrifice of the brand value for next quarter and next year.  Combined with the fact that many lower level brand associates only have tenure of about six months before they are moved to their next assignment, there is little to no incentive to even think about the long term.

Interestingly many of the tools used to determine marketing effectiveness have a short term focus.  Last touch attribution and marketing mix modeling try and connect the dots between today’s marketing actions and their impact over the following few weeks.  The indirect impact of a coupon drop or a TV commercial over the next two years is generally not analyzed.

Comparing Marketing Effectiveness of Two Media Types

Let’s assume for the moment that we just determined the marketing ROI for TV and coupons and both of them had exactly the same ROI as measured in short term sales, ignoring incremental brand value effects.  On the other hand if it was determined that coupons deliver a higher marketing ROI than TV, (ignoring incremental brand effects) which would the brand manager choose?  Given their short term focus brand managers would inevitably choose coupons over TV.

What is needed then is a valid and objective measurement of both the incremental revenue for each media and the incremental brand value of each media for marketers to be able to make an improved decision between short term sales and long term value.

Risk and Marketing ROI

In an ideal world the value of the brand would be worth some quantifiable value in the future.  Unfortunately, even though a particular media may deliver a higher brand value than other media, that brand value may not be able to deliver incrementally equal amounts of value at some point in the future.  There is uncertainty, there may be diminishing returns or all sorts of effects may come into play.  So a risk component and potentially other non-linearities must be added to the equation to provide some estimate of the incremental future revenue that incremental brand value may deliver at some point in the future.

There are tools and research methodologies coming on line that can deliver estimates of this long term brand value.  And it will be interesting to hear about the results of this upcoming IRI study.  If you have any comments or would like to learn more, please let me know.