Marketing | Demand Creation Blog

Barcode This!

2011-06-09T10:10:00.002-04:00

Back in December my company, Logarithmic IMPACT, did a little fortune telling with our "Top 10 Marketing Predictions for 2011," looking at some trends we believe will take hold this and in coming years.

One of our picks was a trendy new thing called called a 2d-barcode, which is really not new at all since barcodes revolutionized product manufacturing, distribution and package tracking and have been around for years in places like Japan.

I don't know if I've just become more aware of them of late, but in the first few months of 2011 it seems like their use has exploded beyond anything I saw last year. Certainly magazine advertisers are picking up on the power of the barcode to connect the print and online worlds -- it's a logical fit and lends some real numbers to the generally squishy measurability of print advertising.

As we've become an ever mobile-ized society I've noticed codes popping up on everything from theater promotional mailers, food packaging, plastic seedling tags (so you can scan the code and learn more about the flora you're about to put into the ground) to business cards. Back at the beginning of 2011, pharmaceutical industry magazine PharmaVoice surveyed over 500 people in healthcare and 48.15% in this famously cautious industry were at least somewhat familiar with QR codes (12.28% were Very Familiar). That sounds promising and suggests a bright future for the barcode in the marketing and demand creation mix.

Will 2d barcoding really be the ubiquitous marketing tool of the future? All I know is they seem to be great way to easily provide value-added information to busy clients and prospects on the go -- and all that extra engagement can't be a bad thing for the bottom line.

BTW, if you'd like to check out the rest of the "Top 10 Marketing Predictions for 2011," feel free to download a copy.

Image Sources:
http://qrmedia.us/petunias-have-their-own-qr-codes-at-home-depot/
http://funbeach.com/qrpress/portfolio/dune-grass-qr-code/

Technorati Tags: advertising, b2b, branding, business, demand creation, leads, marketing, mobile

Dazed and Confused

2010-02-02T18:19:00.002-05:00

Dear friends, I opened my emails this morning to find a distressing message from Twitter:

Of course I do not believe my account was hacked in any way and have not seen any suspicious Tweets posted in my name, but regardless since just after midnight last night and throughout today my account at @JosephMann has been in a state of suspended animation.

I won't bore you with the gory details of how much time I've spent trying fruitlessly to get any kind of resolution from Twitter -- I'm sure plenty of people out there have had to deal with the same issues. Reflecting on this -- still ongoing -- experience I suddenly realized how dependent I've become on Twitter for my business (and occasionally personal) information. From a sense of apathy bordering on abandonment nearly 3 years ago when I first tried it, Twitter has become an indispensable feed of business information and conversation from and with like-minded professionals.

It is with a strange mixture of loss, anger, fear, resentment and some confusion that I've stumbled through this Twitter-less day. You might be tempted to say I'm addicted to it, but that's not quite it. In fact, when my account was working, although I regularly posted I usually only popped on 2-3 times per day to read, reply and post. I sometimes skipped a day or two of logging in without a second thought and I never checked it on the weekends.

So what's going on here? Maybe it's a sign of how far Twitter has come as a business tool, insinuating itself into the daily routine (for some anyway). And though it's still got a long way to go (hello? is my account working again yet?), I can't imagine how I would easily replace it with some other form of interactive, information-gathering communication. Google Wave? Interesting -- promising even -- but still a long way to go. My blog is whispering seditiously in my ear that I should update it more often instead.

Here's hoping I won't have to learn to be without Twitter for long!

Technorati Tags: blogging, business, social media, twitter

Twitter to Business Users: You are now on Double Secret Probation

2009-10-16T08:19:00.011-04:00

As far as business use I have always seen and used Twitter as an information gathering tool with an allowance for just a smidge of promotion. I am deeply appreciative of the valuable links and insight posted by those I follow and try to return the same in kind. I've also endured plenty of Twitter spam, as a whole probably no worse than the amount of email spam I get. I do appreciate Twitter's desire to reduce spam.

But their Terms of Service revised on October 12 brings into question the long-term value of the service for legitimate business use (if the TOS stays as it is), ironically as Twitter claims to have an eye on offering premium corporate services. Here's a snip:

If you have followed a large amount of users in a short amount of time;
If you have followed and unfollowed people in a short time period, particularly by automated means (aggressive follower churn);
If you repeatedly follow and unfollow people, whether to build followers or to garner more attention for your profile;
If you have a small number of followers compared to the amount of people you are following;
If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates;
If a large number of people are blocking you;
The number of spam complaints that have been filed against you;
If you post duplicate content over multiple accounts or multiple duplicate updates on one account
If you post multiple unrelated updates to a topic using #
If you post multiple unrelated updates to a trending or popular topic
If you send large numbers of duplicate @replies
If you send large numbers of unsolicited @replies in an attempt to spam a service or link
If you repost other user’s content without attribution.
If you have attempted to "sell" followers, particularly through tactics considered aggressive following or follower churn.

I think the real problem here, particularly for business, is with numbers 5 and 7.

"If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates"
I actually WANT businesses and Twitter users I follow to provide links. Aside from it being pretty much impossible to provide perspective in 140 characters, I think contributing links to tweets promotes the ideal of sharing and adds value to the service that keeps me coming back. Without them, Twitter is sure to return to the kind of vapid, navel-staring that initially hurt its credibility for business (and to some would say this is still the case. I don't know - I don't follow navel-watchers). Maybe they mean you can't post a tweet that consists ONLY of a link. If they do, the TOS should be more clear about it. As it stands, the wording is too vague.

"If you post duplicate content over multiple accounts or multiple duplicate updates on one account"
I don't spend 24/7 on Twitter scanning updates so it's easy to miss tweets that I might want to see but was not online at the time to catch. As both a sender and recipient of business tweets it's helpful to have some tweets rebroadcast once in a while. Provided it's not daily, I'm all for it. Maybe once a month or every two weeks. And if Twitter is able to spot these Tweets and punish people for posting them, why can't they give users an toggle to selectively block or allow them. Why the Draconian approach? Let the people decide!

It also makes sense to be able to post some of the same content across accounts. Many people and corporations manage multiple Twitter accounts and while it would be simpler if each was compartmentalized from the other, the truth is there are times when it makes sense to post the same tweet to multiple or all of your accounts if there is some overlap in the kind of tweets the followers of each account like to see. We should not be punished for trying to tailor content to fit our audiences. I've heard it rumored that so far only tweet text that is EXACTLY the same as recently tweeted text is being blocked and that duplicate links are so far unaffected, but haven't tested this myself.

There is the bright spot in Twitter rolling out the "Report as spam" button and I've read there are humans behind the review process to avoid abuse by someone with an axe to grind. I just wish the terms of use were a little more specific in all areas. As it stands, it feels a lot like being on double secret probation!

Sources:

"Rumors Abound as Tweet Scheduling Services are Targeted by Twitter" (Jesse Stay)

Twitter TERMS OF SERVICE: http://help.twitter.com/forums/26257/entries/18311

"Twitter Starts to Talk Up Corporate Account Plan"

"Twitter Confirms Paid Pro Accounts On The Way" (Silicon Alley Insider)

"Surveillance Cameras" image by Quevaal. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Technorati Tags: business, marketing, social media, spam, twitter

Sideswiped by Sidewiki

2009-10-06T13:14:00.004-04:00

Reading through posts to the Web 2.0 Marketing Group I belong to on LinkedIn recently, a question came up about the implications of Google's Sidewiki for pharmaceutical/medical device brands. In an industry as heavily regulated as pharma, I can understand just how nervous this is going to make the lawyers (once it's on their radar)

While dipping its toes tentatively into the social media waters more and more, by and large the industry sees all sorts of beasts and monsters lurking in it's uncharted depths. Rightly so — implying acceptance of off-label uses of drugs or medical devices could mean legal headaches and fines the size of a Kraken.

As a social media user, I like the concept of Sidewiki and see significant value it can add to web sites. At the same time, with the current toolset (none) available to companies/brands/site owners, this is incredibly scary — anybody with a mean-spirited agenda can post a comment that pops right out next to any page on your web site. This is not some dark corner of Cafe Pharma message boards or a third-party rating site. For the majority of people who don't know any better, it looks like it's part of your site, endorsed by you.

Here's my comment (and recommendation) about the situation posted to the Web 2.0 Marketing Group:

"Working in pharma/healthcare I know what you mean about regulatory concerns. I'm sure many of my clients will be nervous about this once it's on their radar. Until (and if) Google gives some measure of control or comment moderation to the site owners, my suggestion is for companies to pre-emptively post the first Sidewiki entry to their sites making clear their policies about off-label use and perhaps including links to the appropriate site terms of use policy. As the site owner, a comment can be set to always appear at the top of the listings."

Although I posted regarding pharma regulatory concerns specifically, there's no reason why any company in any industry can't be the first to set some expectations or policy outlines for those who view Sidewiki comments on their site. It might not be as good as comment moderation, but for those in highly regulated industries it might put a little more control back in the company's hands (and make the lawyers less nervous!)

For more about this topic as it relates to the pharma industry, John Mack has posted quite a bit on his Pharma Marketing Blog about it. And a related post by Magnus Nillson "Google Sidewiki-Power to the People" provides a little more background about Sidewiki.

Sources:
Magnus Nillson. "Google Sidewiki-Power to the People." Sep 25, 2009.
John Mack. "3rd Party Dissemination of Altered Rx Drug Information on Social Media Sites. Survey says.."
John Mack. "Google's Wacky Wiki is Whack! Pharma Should Demand Ability to Block It!"
Public Domain Image "Colossal octopus" by Pierre Denys de Montfort. 1810. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Technorati Tags: advertising, branding, marketing, medical device, pharmaceutical, wiki, social media

All That Twitters Is Not Gold

2009-09-09T19:46:00.000-04:00

The talk about how the majority of the traffic on Twitter is pretty much junk is nothing new. Back in March 2009 Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the crowd at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference that Twitter is a "poor man's e-mail system." David Letterman called it "a waste of time" (although he apparently only found out about it on his July 21, 2009 show, so let's give him some time). It even took a comparatively non-famous gnat like myself a while to warm up to Twitter: I signed up in July 2007 and tweeted barely 17 times between July and October that year. Then I got bored and forgot about it for 8 months. In all, it took nearly a year and half for me to come back and discover how useful Twitter can be to learn more about subjects that interest me, can help me do my job better and connect with like-minded professionals.

Despite Twitter's popularity, the perceived problem with Twitter being a waste of time has not really abated much in the media or on the web: in August 2009 Pear Analytics released an interesting report simply called "Twitter Study" that sampled 2,000 tweets and classified them into six categories: News, Spam, Self-promotion, Pointless Babble, Conversational and Pass-Along Value. (I originally saw the post on the WebProNews blog) The Pear report found that over 40% of its sample was "Pointless Babble" ("Self-promotional" and "Spam" posts falling in at 5.85% and 3.75% respectively)

And almost from the beginning of my Twitter explorations it was very clear to me just how spammy Twitter could be. Sure, there were plenty of tweets in the public timeline trying to sell get rich quick schemes as well as the not surprising number of porn-related tweets. What I discovered early on was Twitter's potential for a more subtle form of spam: Follower Spam. Initially excited to get alerts of all kinds of new people following my tweets, I would look at my Follower list and be surprised to find nearly all were the same multi-level marketing, dating/porn and other unwanted accounts I had no interest in seeing. I suppose I could have just left them alone and hoped that over time these accounts would stop following, but at the same time I became concerned that others viewing my public list would see all these "questionable" accounts following and get the wrong impression of me (am I the only one who thinks like this?). I had to do something about it, so I devised a plan to clear these out on a regular basis ("Twitter-Blocked: It's Nothing Personal, Just Business" January 19, 2009), but at the same time being a metrics guy, I was curious to see how many of my followers would turn out to be spam if I just tracked it for a while.

So beginning in March 2009 I saved all of my new follower notification emails and classed them into 6 buckets:

Follower & Following: people who followed me and whose content I value enough to follow back — I don't as a rule follow back everyone

Following Only: people whose tweets I like enough to follow but who did not follow me back

No Follow: those I did not object to following me but who I could not find any common ground to justify a follow back

Follower Unfollowed: those who followed me but had unfollowed before I got a chance to review the request. I don't lose much sleep over these since I suspect many are using auto-follow/unfollow bot services like SocialToo.

Blocked: followers that once I reviewed them I found the content of their tweets, their profile, etc. to be objectionable. I often block those that don't have a profile photo or a URL n their profile. Overtly salesy tweets that predominate the timeline (vs. a good mix of informational vs. promotional) I also usually block.

Twitter Suspended: Twitter has suspended the account before I get a chance to review the follower.

After 6 months of capturing the alerts, representing 578 follow requests, I was surprised to find that my tracking of follower spam was not really that far off from the Pear study of individual tweet spam: 33.73% of the follower requests I received I ultimately blocked compared to 40.55% Pointless Babble tweets in the Pear study (see the pie chart "Follow Request Composition Mar-Aug 2009"). It's a bit of an Apples to Pears (!) comparison, but if you consider that ultimately the Pear study and my informal tracking are trying to assess value, we're pretty close. I see the Pear study "Pass along", "Conversational" and "News" categories as representing my categories of "Follower & Following" with "Following Only" thrown in — the kinds of tweets I usually find valuable.

Despite the challenges of maintaining a clean and vibrant follower list in an atmosphere of increasing noise, I tend to agree with Scott Bishop of Real Time Marketer Blog who said in a post "There is no Twitter spam, there is no such thing as a bad Tweet, there is no Twitter 'pointless babble.' Why? Because Twitter is only and exactly how you make it." And I choose to make my own corner of the Twitterverse as interesting and valuable as I can.

If you enjoy talking about this kind of thing like I do, please follow me on Twitter from the sidebar. If you're a spambot, web-cam porn star, MLM schemer or "life coach," don't bother — I'll block you soon after :)

Sources:
Scott Bishop. "Most Twitter Statistics Are Worthless." Real Time Marketer Blog. August 19, 2009.
Ryan Kelly. "Twitter Study Reveals Interesting Results About Usage – 40% is 'Pointless Babble' " Pear Analytics. August 12th, 2009.
Mark Glaser. "How 'Follower Spam' Infiltrated Twitter - and How to Stop It." PBS MediaShift. October 23, 2008.

Technorati Tags: metrics, spam, social media, tips, twitter

Peace, Love and New Age Metrics

2009-06-22T22:11:00.001-04:00

It seems that with the popularity of Twitter these days everyone is trying to figure out how to make a buck with the service that has famously yet to figure out how to make money for itself. Every day I receive a few follower notices that turn out to be people hawking their "How to make [insert dollar amount here] per month from Twitter" plans that I'm convinced are the tip of some multi-level marketing ponzi scheme supporting a cult group. Of course, I promptly block these followers.

Today, however, I became aware of something different: a tweet from @EONpr tipped me off to an article about one company that has developed a system (as I understand it) to let advertisers buy brand-specific marketing "leads" as a list of Twitter users that have apparently opted-in to communications from the brand targeting them (huh?). The Cost-per-lead advertising concept is not a new one but the application of it to Twitter seems to be. While I'm a fan of measurement and applaud a company trying to find a legitimate way to build its own business and also serve the needs of advertisers, to my mind this example misses the point by grafting old media advertising concepts (CPL display advertising) onto Twitter. (Note: I hesitate to even call Twitter "new media" because I think the term underplays its potential power as a communication, conversation and engagement platform, but that is another discussion!)

The model also seems to fall into the same trap as marketing list firms claiming to sell "leads." I wouldn't call an address/email list of names "leads" and I wouldn't call a list of even opt-in Tweeps "leads." At best they are targets, people who might have mentioned a brand by name in a tweet and might like the brand (or not), or might have purchasing intent or influence. For something sold as "leads" that's a whole lot of mights and maybes — the kind of stuff salespeople hate and the stuff they bounce back to Marketing for qualification (and rightly so).

Even if the cost is minimal, how do you assign a value to an individual Tweep bought from a pay-per-lead list? Is it the number of people who follow them? But who says THOSE people are a value measurement? I think in the end it is wrong to try and apply measurements of certainty to Twitter (at least at the present time). The value of Twitter is probably more akin to the traditionally "squishy" concepts of branding that are hard to quantify: increased awareness, preference, loyalty and customer "delight" delivered through superior customer service — something Twitter can excel at. Maybe its okay for now to call it what it is and let Twitter do it's touchy-feely, new age thing. The hard numbers can come later.

Sources:
@EONpr "Is Cost Per Twitter Lead the next sales metric?" 6/22/2009
Peter A. Prestipino. "Cost Per Twitter Lead?" Website Magazine. Jun 17 2009
Tie-dye shirt (without Twitter bird) by MpegMan via Wikimedia Commons. Used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license

Technorati Tags: branding, demand creation, leads, marketing, metrics, social media, twitter

Brand Threat Management in the Age of Cyberscamming

2009-05-12T23:20:00.002-04:00

Is the soft global economy eroding brand value? A new study by the CMO Council seems to say so. Their global audit of 306 marketers titled "Protection From Brand Infection" reports that trademark infringement and brand knockoff artists are moving increasingly online.

According to Frederick Felman, chief marketing officer of MarkMonitor, a brand reputation protection solutions company, “The immediate impact of a brand attack through online scams, phishing or cyber squatting is on the integrity and reputation because such activities are customer-facing and go right to the heart of what contributes to underlying brand value, customer attitudes and interpretations.”

Yet ironically, the study reports that those typically with the most intimate understanding of brands and their value — the marketing department — are being left on the sidelines in the war to maintain brand reputation. Indeed only 15% of marketers lead brand protection programs, with 42% of those surveyed assigning this role to legal, finance or IT.

Although marketers in some of these companies may have been officially cut out of the picture, there may still be hope to leverage marketer skillsets for brand protection in less formal ways. "Older" Web communication tools like blogs can help put valuable brand protection information in front of customers while newer tools like Twitter have already been famously used in customer service and help ensure that consumers receive the right communications from the brand owners — not knock-off competitors. While many of the brand erosion threats seem to be focused on business-to-consumer brands and less so on business-to-business sales, these and other customer communication tools still have a valuable education role to play.

The CMO Council for its part is leading the charge by teaming with AVG Technologies and launching a consumer notification and education center to boost brand threat detection, called "Slam the Online Scam" at http://slamtheonlinescam.com.

Source:
The CMO Council and MarkMonitor. "Protection From Brand Infection." May 11, 2009 http://slamtheonlinescam.com

Technorati Tags: b2b, brand equity, branding, marketing, social media, twitter

Does Twitter Make You Dumbr?

2009-03-12T19:23:00.002-04:00

Blogs are dead, so said Wired Magazine back in October — a casualty of Twitter and other micro-blogging platforms serving the short attention span generation (Flickr and Facebook were also named as blog-killers). But as I was catching up on the magazines that have been piling up in my [real world] inbox I saw an op-ed piece reassuring me the blog's demise has been greatly exaggerated: micro-blogging may be great for short-form content, trading links, etc. But having genuine conversation in 140 characters is practically impossible. And I think this is true — Twitter has its niche as a place to get out quick thoughts and blogs are great for having the space to develop those thoughts. Integrating the two can be a perfect match.

The sad realization I suddenly came to is that my addiction to reading and (to a lesser extent) posting tweets has made me remember how much I've been neglecting my blog. It's a relatively painless process to flit through the dozens of mail lists in my [digital] inbox, pick out interesting tidbits and links to share and post them on Twitter. I can do it while waiting for a big file to download or a Final Cut video to render. And skimming through the tweets of those I follow (please don't ask me to call them 'tweeple') is just as quick and easy. But ask me to sit down and plan out a blog post - oy veh! Of course I enjoy the end product of blogging and like the fact that blogs are so much less ephemeral than tweeting, but the process is much like working out at the gym: like the end result, hate the steps it takes to get there.

And worse than than neglecting longer form writing, with limited hours in the day all this tweeting does tend to take time away from sitting down and reading anything not delivered in short bursts. So then does Twitter make you dumber? Uhhhhhh....dunno.

Oh by the way, you can follow my ongoing Tweetaholism here twitter.com/josephmann

Sources:

Paul Boutin. "Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004" Wired Magazine. October 2008.

Tony Byrne. "Blogs are Dead! Long Live Blogging!" EContent Magazine. Jan/Feb 2009. p.22

Photo "Dunce Cap" by citizen_smith58 used under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported license. Twitter bird added.

Technorati Tags: blogging, social media, twitter

Twitter-Blocked: It's Nothing Personal, Just Business

2009-01-19T12:19:00.001-05:00

It's been more than a year since I first logged into Twitter and blogged about my early experiences and thoughts for turning the service towards business use. I walked away for a while and came back late in 2008 and found myself hooked in a serious way. I now find Twitter to be an indispensable source of information, interesting links and conversation with like-minded colleagues around the world. I've even been surprised to find a growing number of Twitterers interested in following my own postings.

But all this has come at a price — my attention seems more and more divided trying to keep up with a growing stream of posts from those I follow. I admit a twinge of anxiety creeps in when I'm NOT scanning through tweets, wondering what I'm missing. My Twit-addiction is probably not unique — I've recently read about more and more people claiming to "take a vacation from Twitter." I don't think this is a viable option for me so I've decided to try to tame and organize the beast rather than slay it in three steps:

Step 1
Decide what is the "mission" of your Twitter account — and stick to it. Perhaps one of the reasons Twitter has gotten a (semi-deserved) rep as a forum for the inane minutia of people's lives is that not enough Twitterers have figured out exactly what they want to do with it before they start tweeting away. I decided I wanted to try and keep my tweets on track by making my mission to seek out and share conversation on b2b marketing, social media and demand creation. This also necessitated creating a second Twitter account for keeping up conversations with friends and as a conduit for easy posting to my personal Facebook account. I've seen some create a separate Twitter account just for posting links and bookmarks (Great idea, RoboChris!)

Step 2
Filter tweets. If you spend any time with Twitter you realize that viewing the tweets of those you follow with the web interface is a chore at best. You need to be able to easily filter your friend's postings into categories to prioritize reading. My organizational tool of choice is TweetDeck. While it's still billed as a beta, it is just about the sweetest tool I've seen on any platform, thanks in part to it's development as an Adobe Air application. Organize friends into different groups, filter within groups, tweeting directly from the application and short link integration make it a joy to use.

Step 3
Actively manage follows and follow-backs. This is where it can get sticky. There seems to be an unspoken rule of "twittiquette" that says if someone follows you, you should follow them back. But what if their postings and use of the service don't mesh with your mission for using Twitter? Do you really want their postings junking up your timeline, or worse their replies that every one of your followers can see? Some people seem to use Twitter to try and get as many followers as they can and follow everyone. Others seem only interested in pushing their latest product. Then there are those who I can't understand why they want to read my tweets, like the guy who writes in his profile "I like to sit on my couch and drink beer."

Don't get me wrong, I'm genuinely thrilled to see that someone is interested in what I post, but if I'm going to keep on mission and stay efficient I'm afraid I sometimes have to get out the scalpel and occasionally do some culling — quality over quantity. First, when I see a new follower I file the notification in an "Evaluating" folder. When I have a chance I take a look at their profile to view things like their Follow to Follower ratio, their profile and whether there is a picture and a web address to go to for more info. Finally I look over their tweets a bit to see if they mesh with the mission I've set for my own tweets.

In the best of cases (and most often), I move them to a "Follower and Following" folder and initiate a follow-back as well as a thank you for following me. For the ones I'm a bit on the fence about, I move to a "No Follow" folder for ongoing evaluation. In extreme cases where I think there is a glaring incongruity between a follower's postings and my mission I do go as far blocking them from following. These are honestly few and far between and usually Twitter has flagged and removed these accounts as "suspicious" (violating their terms of service) before I ever get to.

So just in case I ever Twitter-block you, please keep in mind that I just don't think we have the same goals and it would be best to part ways. It's not you, it's me. It's nothing personal — it's just business!

Technorati Tags: b2b, demand creation, marketing, social media, twitter

Seasons Tweetings

2008-12-24T12:24:00.001-05:00

Wordle is nothing new, but I couldn't resist playing around anyway to present this holiday word cloud card today on the 4th anniversary of my blog. It represents the past year of tweets from my Twitter stream with sizes relative to the number of times each word was used.

Happy Holidays & New Year to All!

Technorati Tags: art, twitter, wordle

Transparent about Transparency

2008-12-16T21:31:00.000-05:00

Just last week during the FutureLab LiveBlog a fair amount of the lively conversation turned to the need for greater transparency in how marketers work with their clients (you can still read the thought trail here http://liveblog.futurelab.net). The challenge of companies and brands building trust with their customers has never been greater now that the economy has tanked and budgets for 2009 are in flux.

Mulling all these things over, I was pleasantly surprised to find a new issue of BtoB Magazine in my mailbox a few days later with the timely front page article "Recession forces marketers to be more frugal. Emphasis on trust and transparency among key trends to watch in the new year."¹ Beyond the need to cultivate trust as a brand attribute, success in 2009 will require leveraging social marketing, deeper use of analytics and new kinds of metrics to measure Web 2.0 and even broader use of video.

A BtoB Magazine survey found that almost 70% of marketing budgets will either be flat or reduced in 2009 ² — on the surface a grim picture indeed. But the "new frugality" will also open opportunities to leverage other marketing tech: social networks, viral marketing, home grown video, podcasting and more. Where less money is going into traditional advertising and print projects next year, more is expected to go into online initiatives.

A shift away from launching new ad campaigns, for example (see chart above), will see customers scrambling for other ways to generate leads and awareness to meet their marketing objectives in 2009.

When less than half of those surveyed say they use social media as part of their overall marketing strategy, this is perhaps a historic opportunity to nudge along customers who might have been reticent about delving into new marketing media when budget was available for the perceived "tried and true" methods. And in these new and uncharted waters, marketers will need to take care to respect the fragile trust that is earned through the honest, transparent customer communications demanded by social media. It's going to be an interesting year indeed.

Sources:

¹ Kate Maddox. "Recession forces marketers to be more frugal" BtoB Magazine. December 8, 2008. p1

² BtoB's "2009 Marketing Priorities and Plans" Survey

Technorati Tags: advertising, b2b, demand creation, leads, marketing, podcast, social media, web video

In-Game Ads? No Problem!

2008-12-08T21:38:00.000-05:00

Being a marketer and also a relatively serious gamer in my down time, I usually take notice when I read things about the business of games and in-game advertising. Of course in-game ads are nothing new but as I've put my XBOX 360 through its paces I've come to notice ads embedded within game content more and more. And apparently this is an OK thing: according to a recent survey 82% of gamers have no problem with in-game ads ¹

It's fine with me too. I first really became aware of it back with the Ubisoft release of Tom Clancy's tactical shooter Rainbow 6 Three: Black Arrow in 2004. Sneaking around a subway station and catching a glimpse of a station platform billboard for another Clancy game, Splinter Cell. "Isn't that interesting..." I thought as I stared at the ad "Maybe I'll have to check that one out too." Of course while ogling the ad, I was also promptly shot by a terrorist I was supposed to be hunting in the game. That ad never changed in the game.

But just this summer, not quite 4 years later, I realized how much in-game ads had matured. Playing the Electronic Arts/DICE game Battlefield: Bad Company I noted many of the ads change each time I play. I'm not sure I've even seen the same ad twice. As far as I can tell they still all reside on traditional billboards in the various environments/locales where the game takes place and there doesn't seem to be any behavioral targeting of me that I can discern, but still the fact that they change and I that know they WILL change gets me to stop and check them out almost every time — and then I am promptly shot by an opponent.

I find myself wondering why I'm not bothered by the ads (other than the fact that I get killed every time I stop to look), but maybe it's because in our media and advertising saturated real world, the same display ad metaphor translated into bits and bytes feels so familiar it goes unnoticed. There's some interesting psychology going on there and I suspect the game publishers know it, too. When 72% of the population age 6-44 played videogames in 2007 — up from 64% in 2006² — it seems certain that game publishers and brand marketers alike have only just begun to tap into a lucrative channel even as traditional display ad revenue has declined.

Sources:

¹ Nielsen BASES, commissioned by IGA Worldwide. Summer 2008

² NPD

"Battlefield: Bad Company" screen capture by Matt Brett. Accessed 12/8/2008. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license

"Rainbow 6 Three: Black Arrow" screen capture by Vandal. Accessed 12/8/2008.

Technorati Tags: in-game, marketing, videogame, advertising

Marketers Face Steep Web 2.0 Learning Curve

2008-11-26T14:51:00.000-05:00

According to a new Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) report mentioned on MarketingCharts and in the CMO Council's "Marketing Magnified" most marketing execs are not surprisingly still in the early, experimental phases of using and measuring social media. According to the report:

67% of respondents consider themselves beginners at using social media for marketing purposes.

More than 87% of respondents are not regularly measuring the ROI of their social media marketing efforts.

Though marketers are paying attention to social media and see a future in it, they still consider the social media world akin to the “Wild West.”

I like that last point about the "Wild West." The thing about the Wild West was that someone had to tame it, so why not your company? In these challenging economic times being the last person to the frontier, being the last one to dig into social media for marketing your company will probably be far worse than doing some trials and making a few mistakes along the way.

It's at least heartening that 67% of those in the report say they plan to increase their social media advertising budget in 2009 and see some benefits to using social media. But even without advertising on social networks there are alot of simple things business-to-business companies can do to get their feet wet without spending much at all: blogging, Twitter, YouTube are just a few.

"Marketing Executives Networking Group Survey Finds
Social Media Practices Still in Infancy Stages." Marketing Executives Networking Group. November 6, 2008

Technorati Tags: b2b, demand creation, marketing, metrics, social media

FutureLab's Blog Nominated for Webby Award

2008-04-16T16:09:00.000-04:00

Got a note a little while ago that the FutureLab Marketing Strategy & Innovation blog (which also syndicates some of this blog's postings) has been nominated as one of the 5 blogs in the Business Blog Category for a Webby Award.

Congrats to Stefan Kolle, Alain Thys and my fellow FutureLab bloggers for their hard work!

Twitterific: Expand Your Multi-Channelverse

2007-08-05T23:36:00.001-04:00

After hearing all the Twitter talk in recent months I decided it was finally time to give it a try and see what microblogging is all about. I figured I've been blogging for a while, so doing even smaller, quicker posts would be easy. Even so, I thought it probably wouldn't last long with me - I barely ever use the texting features on my mobile phone and hardly ever IM anyone (no one ever seems to be online when I am).

Still feeling a little self-conscious about broadcasting the mundane details of my daily life to the world, I decided to sandbox my musings for the time being and sent invitations to a dozen friends.

Well, it's been about 18 days now and not a single person has accepted an invitation to view my twitters. But oddly enough I keep sending pings to my Twitter account. I'm a little addicted. I even sent mobile text messages while I was away on vacation. Which leads me to the existential question: If you twitter and no one is there to read it did it really happen?

Who knows? I'm pretty sure it happened. But the experiment got me thinking about the nature of microblogging and how my immediate fascination with Twitter might be put to business use. Twitter defines itself as "a global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?" But this is obviously too trite to fly with business users. I think it boils down to this: Twitter is about instant communication with everyone (or just a targeted audience) in the way they want it. That is something business can latch onto: after all, driving business growth depends on communicating with your target audiences. For those who have shied away from building and maintaining a company blog due to the time commitment, a Twitter microblog may be the next best thing, or at least something else to add to your multi-channelverse.

Here are a few ideas I came up with (I'd love to hear more):

News Alerts - new product/service announcements, acquisitions, business wins, etc.
Crisis Communications - perhaps as part of a web site media center
Customer updates - the ultimate microtargeting of content
Web site update alerts - a new podcast, video clip, article quip linking to more meat

While the 140 character maximum message length can be a challenge, it does force you to focus on concise messaging. The ability to embed URLs means interested "followers" of your twitters can be directed to more detail on a landing page and then tracked. As with a blog, however, I think using Twitter in this semi-promotional way requires that you be upfront with what you're doing or risk being called out as a phony. Provide value-added microblog content and you'll be a hero.

Lastly, by way of the Twitter Fan Wiki here are a few more uses and mashups using the tool that I thought might be useful in Twitter microblogs for business:

Twitterment is a Twitter search engine that also provides trend graphs and identifies buzzy and fading terms.
Twitter Groups! From creator of Twitter Mosaic. Put your followers into groups and send messages to them instead of individually.
MobiFeedLive.com Receive Keyword Based Email Alerts so you can see who is saying what about you - buzz and competitive tracking, micro-scale. It also has search, link metrics, and trend analysis.

Sources:
Thompson, Clive. "How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense" Wired Magazine. June 26, 2007

What is the Measure of an Email Campaign?

2007-06-28T10:52:00.000-04:00

The answer is apparently a resounding "I don't know." JupiterResearch/e-Rewards, Inc. recently reported that when business-to-business and business-to-consumer email marketers were asked which of a fairly straightforward number of success metrics they use at least once a month, 50% of B2C and 56% of B2B respondents responded "none of the above"!

Click-to-conversion rate, Aggregate clickthrough rate, Aggregate open rate, Revenue per mailing, Average order size, Profit/margin per mailing, Revenue per subscriber — none were used by any more than 19% of the respondents.

Among email marketing providers there were also large inconsistencies in the meanings of delivery, open and clickthrough rates. According to the Email Experience Council, only half of email service providers measured open rates by dividing "unique opens" by total messages delivered, yet 73% of mailers defined unique opens that way. What's going on here? Why all the lack of standards? Some have attributed it to the relative newness of email as a marketing channel. RSS-as-marketing channel seems to suffer from some of the same measurement murkiness as well. Hopefully things will improve. But even if they don't I'm not sure it matters.

I recently started using VerticalReponse for some email services and I like how easy it is to build and send a campagin, but lets face it — the metrics available are pretty basic: Emails sent, opened, bounced, unsubscribed. You can see which links have been clicked too, and a few other measurements. I imagine the options are much the same with other providers. Of course, I'm a data junkie and I'd love to track more but my feeling is in business-to-business what matters most is whether the people who receive my email marketing respond and eventually convert to new business (though it might not happen right away). That may be saying the clickthrough metric is the most important since its how they get to the next stage of engagement, but with ever-shrinking budgets and cries for greater accountability, what the boss really cares about is "did I get any new business for my efforts?" Sometimes that can be answered relatively quickly, but in the B2B world more often its a long-term process requiring prospect nurturing through a variety of channels.

So are we confused with all this metrics murkiness? Yes. Will it stop us from continuing to expand the use of the email channel? No way.

Sources:
Magill, Ken. "E-mail's Metrics Mess." Direct Magazine. May 2007 p.49,52
The Email Experience Council. www.emailexperience.org
JupiterResearch. "Email Marketing Measurement: Making Metrics Meaningful" March 6, 2007.

Technorati Tags: b2b, email, lead generation optimization, leads, marketing, metrics

Take Me to Your Lead Generation Optimization Leader!

2007-05-23T23:42:00.001-04:00

In case you missed the news, the top priority for marketers in 2007 is to quantify the value of marketing programs and investments, according to the CMO Council's Marketing Outlook 2007 survey. 44% of respondents said this was their primary goal in 2007, a change from 2006 where the emphasis was on building sales.

I agree that it is critical to be able to quantify the value of marketing investments and certainly that methodologies need to be put in place to do that, but is it possible that the pendulum has shifted too far in the opposite direction? After all, without lead generation and sales you won't be around long to enough to worry about quantifying the value of your investments.

Perhaps the point is that seeking to quantify marketing ROI, if done well, gives senior leadership and the marketing team the decision-making tools to adjust initiatives in mid-stream — potentially saving a troubled program and driving even better performance from programs that are already doing well. It ensures that all marketing programs are lead generators and (ultimately) sale closers. And there is evidence of other compelling reasons to optimize the lead generation process with marketing ROI measurement: in companies that are "lead generation optimization leaders" — companies characterized by the tight integration of sales and marketing groups in which high-quality leads are delivered to the sales force and higher conversion rates of leads to first calls — there are higher win rates, more sales people making quotas and faster ramp-up for new sales people than in other companies

What's the bad news? Most companies do not fall into this group. In fact, one report found that only about 8% of companies are defined as "Lead Generation Optimization (LGO) Leaders." I guess we all need something to shoot for!

Sources:
Levey, Richard H. "Walking the Walk: Measurement tops marketer's to-do lists" Direct Magazine. May 2007. pg 15.

“Optimizing Lead Generation: What’s the payback?” CSO Insights (via BtoB Magazine). July 10 2006 p1

Technorati Tags: b2b, demand creation, lead generation optimization, leads, marketing

Dissecting Marketing Forensics

2007-05-04T00:01:00.001-04:00

I just came across an intriguing banner ad offer for a webinar titled "Multichannel Forensics: Understanding How Customers Interact with Advertising, Products, Brands and Channels" being given by Kevin Hillstrom and it made me think - what exactly is multichannel or marketing forensics? The marketer in me likes the phrase - it has a very scientific ring to it - and perhaps some clients might even think it sounds good when they pitch to their bosses for budget money for a "multichannel forensics initiative." After registering for the webinar (yes, I signed up to see what it's all about), I decided to do a little research into how this term is being bandied around the Web.

As far as search engines go, Google had 933 hits for the quoted term "multichannel forensics" and most seemed related to marketing data mining. The use of "marketing forensics" was somewhat less common with only 170 hits and one of them for a company of that name doing marketing-ish things to increase product sales. In the blogosphere, Technorati lists 27 posts mentioning "multichannel forensics," and only one relevant post for "marketing forensics" (as of this writing), so the coinage of these phrases is probably relatively new and/or obscure. In most instances it seems the terms are used merely as a sexier alternative to customer intelligence.

But what should "marketing forensics" mean, especially if we hope clients have a more understanding response to its use than a quizzical 'huh?'
Paraphrasing somewhat from Kevin Hillstrom's whitepaper "An Introduction to Multichannel Forensics" a place to start might be:

Multichannel Forensics are the methods, made up of a series of analyses, that are applied to a multichannel environment to help us understand the complex behavior of how customers interact with products, services, brands, and channels.

That seems pretty much in line with how The American Heritage Dictionary defines forensics:

The art or study of formal debate; argumentation.

The use of science and technology to investigate and establish facts in criminal or civil courts of law.

The use of "science and technology" to uncover customer insight is key - the importance of having a method and means to measure how customers interact with your business cannot be overstated. The next trick is maintaining and integrating these processes across multiple channels so that a comprehensive picture of the customer can be captured. And don't forget about the "argumentation" part: there needs to be plenty of upfront discussion and agreement about what needs to be measured as well as what those measurements are. Everyone defines success differently.

Technorati Tags: b2b, demand creation, leads, marketing, marketing forensics, multichannel

2007 The Year of B2B Video?

2007-04-03T18:43:00.000-04:00

Just as consumer Web video exploded last year with Google Video, YouTube, JumpCut, etc., is this the year Web video will take off in business-to-business usage? An article in BtoB Magazine seems to say so:

"Online video is becoming the killer application of the Internet as b-to-b marketers embrace it as an integral part of their marketing programs, using it in such disparate formats as 15-second banner ads and long-form documentaries..."¹

Though the article tends to talk about video's potential as an advertising platform (citing projected growth from $US 775.0 million to $US 2.90 billion in 2010 - some enticing numbers to chase), In the B2B sector, I see it more as a medium for businesses to enhance dialogue with their customers. When streaming video segments are produced within the framework of a discussion of customer pain points and industry dynamics, companies - and the executives who represent them - can position themselves as thought leaders in their marketspace while moving prospects along the sales adoption curve - without the eye-rolling that often happens when prospects realize they're not going to get any information of substance from a video clip but are about to be subjected to yet another sales pitch (albeit in a slick wrapper!)

According to the BtoB article, more than just using video to enhance Web banner ads, some companies like IBM are creating "long-form documentaries" to segment and use in variety of ways as a demand creation tool. I believe that's a good approach.

If 2007 is the "Year of B2B Web Video," it is more of a quiet revolution. Many companies have been leveraging video on the Web for the past few years, learning best practices, subject matter and the balance of substance-to-sales pitch to drive lead generation in marketing initiatives. Since 2003 I've been doing it too. The difference from a few years ago is that business-to-business companies are beginning to see this stuff as mission critical: a recent McKinsey survey found that nearly two-thirds of the respondents who were investing in Web 2.0 technologies (including video and podcasts) think they are important for maintaining company market share, creating competitive edge or meeting customer demand. 35% of those surveyed were either using or planning to use podcasts/video in 2007.² Those aren't huge numbers yet, but its certainly worth testing the waters - before the competition beats you to it.

¹ Maddox, Kate."Picture this: Online video generating excitement" BtoB Magazine. April 2, 2007. page 1.
² McKinsey & Co."How businesses are using Web 2.0: A McKinsey Global Survey" McKinsey Quarterly. March 2007.

Technorati Tags: b2b, demand creation, leads, marketing, podcast, web video

Off Topic: Cheesed About "Demand Generation Certification"

2007-02-24T23:30:00.001-05:00

I don't post too many op-ed pieces, preferring instead to keep with themes and metrics of real business importance, but I have to make an exception to say I'm a bit cheesed by an (unsolicited) email I received recently from a company-which-shall-remain nameless that sponsored a webinar I listened to a few months ago. It starts off:

"I would like to invite you to get certified in Demand Generation Marketing. Please join me...for the Marketing Effectiveness Summit, a boot camp for marketing professionals. This intensive two and one-half days workshop covers 12 key areas of marketing to optimize demand generation."

Certified in Demand Generation? In two and a half days? Are they kidding? I think its a bit silly and even misleading to pitch a seminar in this way. Call me crazy, but I happen to believe it's ridiculous to expect one seminar is going to make you a demand generation/creation expert. I'm not saying I or someone else might not pick up some good ideas from such a seminar (I often do), but seriously would a client be more likely to hire me if I showed them piece of paper saying I was certified to help them generate leads? They'd be laughing as security escorted me to the padded wagon! The real proof will always be in what kind of metrics, case studies and real success results I have to show them to PROVE I can grow their business. That's worth more than any piece of paper (in this case, a $US 1,500.00 piece of paper!)

But wait there's more!

"Our Professional Certification Program is a way to recognize marketing professionals who have met and surpassed high standards of education, experience, and knowledge in demand generation marketing."

Who appointed the seminar company the stewards of these high standards of education, experience and knowledge? Well, no one of course. It's just an unfortunate bit of copywriting that promises too much and, if anyone is silly enough to wave one of those pieces of paper in front of a potential client, ultimately damages the credibility of every professional who does an amazing job growing their clients' business every day without need of a gold-leafed, stamped and embossed paper.

Technorati Tags: b2b, demand creation, leads, marketing

Upwardly Mobile

2007-01-17T15:36:00.000-05:00

Does your business have a mobile version of its client-facing web site? If not, are you ready to go mobile in 2007? You'd better be, if a survey and article by Information Week late last year is any measure:

"Eighty-five percent of businesses anticipate that the number of their employees accessing enterprise apps via mobile devices will increase next year"¹

"Three out of four businesses will increase spending next year on mobile devices such as smartphones, rugged handhelds, and Pocket PCs."¹

"More than eight of 10 respondents cite improved productivity and access to critical information as the biggest benefits of mobile computing. More than one out of three cite increased sales."¹

Of course, since bandwidth (and the cost of its use) and screen size is still an issue for non-PC devices accessing the Web, the tricky part is creating a "mobile-ized" version of your site that is lean, mean and provides high value to clients and prospects on the go. And that means you can't just post what they can already access from a PC in the office.

According to the W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices, developers should assume a screen width of 120 pixels and less than 20 kilobytes for the size of the page.² That doesn't allow for much excess, so here are a few suggestions to test the waters of mobile b2b marketing:

"Mini Case Studies": create one or two ultra-brief extracts from larger case studies you may have on your main client site. These should consist largely of teaser text highlighting results achieved. Ends with a linked email address for the mobile user to request more info.

Alerts: give clients the option to sign up to receive mobile alerts about their projects. Sign-up should be available on the main client-facing site as well as on a mobile-ized site.

Simple Newsletters: busy clients and prospects may appreciate being able to receive useful information from you on their Web-enabled phone or other mobile device. It may be industry stats, new service launches or a teaser to download a whitepaper from the main site the next time they are in the office.

These are just a few ideas to help get started leveraging mobile technology to drive revenue for companies in the b-to-b sector. Just remember - any mobile initiative you undertake has to be permission-based. Because most mobile users are paying for every bit of mobile access, the fastest way to alienate your potential customers is to start sending them mobile spam. Push-initiatives are critical to promoting your mobile presence to target audiences, but they should be done through non-mobile channels: direct mail, banner ads on your main site, word-of-mouth, etc. And don't forget to track your mobile web pages just as you would your main web site!

¹ Elena Malykhina."Mobile Devices Are Ready To Take Their Place Alongside PCs In Businesses" Information Week. Oct 30, 2006

² "Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0" W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). Jun 27, 2006

Technorati Tags: b2b, demand creation, leads, marketing, mobile

5 Tips for Shaking the Demand Creation Doldrums

2006-12-25T22:21:00.000-05:00

Maybe it's fatigue induced by the diminished daylight hours, but of late I've just had a heck of a time bringing myself to write. No ideas, no energy, and no desire to change the pattern. It made me think — how often are marketers afraid or unwilling to change the demand creation methods they've relied on for fear of unknown territory?

Of course change is a necessary part of life. So too, for a business to stay healthy, we must embrace the new. How do we go about shaking off the "demand creation doldrums"? Make a New Year's resolution to try something different as 2007 looms large on the horizon:

1) Pilot a demand creation initiative incorporating streaming video. B-to-B users were big on web video in 2006 and it's an area that's sure to grow. A Knowledgestorm survey said 78% of b-to-b executives believe video makes online content more compelling.¹

2) Consider mobile marketing. While still nascent in the business-to-business sector, tactics like video on phones are becoming more common: an October study by Horowitz Associates reported 8% of Internet users watching video on a handheld device at least once a month and 19% interested in service that provides streaming video on their mobile phone.² Email, IM and other phone features open up new possibilities for marketing to business prospects.

3) Go Web 2.0: Test blogging, social media, wikis, customer/prospect advisory panels, whatever. Even if you're not sure how to measure them — just get started. Larry Weber, CEO of W2 Group says "The future of b-to-b marketing is about aggregating customers and potential customers to your community."³ I agree.

4) Measure something you've never measured before. Simply.

5) Pick six publications, blogs or e-zines from outside your industry and read them regularly for at least a few weeks. You'll probably find some new ideas and sources of inspiration you can apply to your sector.

¹ "Emerging Media Series: Online Video, Social Networks and Wikis" Knowledgestorm. Nov 9, 2006.

² Maddox, Kate. "Mobile Marketing Making a Move" BtoB Magazine. October 9, 2006. pg 1. Study by Horowitz Associates of over 1,000 Internet users.

³ Krol, Carol. "Web 2.0: Join the Revolution" BtoB Magazine. November 13, 2006. pg 34.

Technorati Tags: demand creation, leads, marketing, social media, tips, web video

Of Focus Groups, Marketing and Social Influence in B2B

2006-12-03T13:59:00.000-05:00

I recently re-read a post on Paul Dunlay's Buzz Marketing for Technology blog about social media's impact on marketing. He cited a study in Science magazine by Columbia University¹ on how 'social influence' — people reacting to the recommendations of others — can drive consumer demand. And the study suggests what you might expect — the most recommended products (in this case certain music bands and songs) continue to accumulate positive reviews to a degree because readers see the positive reviews of others and are influenced to skew their own perceptions to the positive as well.

On the business side this reminds me of the "group think" mentality that can creep into focus groups and cause their purpose to be corrupted: in group situations people tend to want to agree with the group, to get along, and may (consciously or un) change their responses to be more in line with what the group is saying. As a participant in focus groups in the past, and despite my desire to keep my responses as genuine as possible, I became aware that I, too, was falling into that trap. Perhaps it's just human nature as social animals to try not to "rock the boat." As far as focus groups go, though, it makes accepting group "conclusions" as rock-solid guidance potentially dangerous.

But the Columbia study was basically about consumer related social response. Does any of this apply in the business-to-business world? Maybe. But consider this: if I drop $US 17.00 (okay $9.99 on the iTunes Store) and get a crummy album because I believed a deluge of positive reviews, it's no life shattering event. In B2B, however, the stakes are higher. According to some studies "the average B2C transaction value is $75 [$US]; the average B2B transaction value is $75,000,"² and in some industries reaches into the millions — especially IT services. Following bad advice could cost me and others their jobs. While I don't think this reality cuts social media and the phenomenon of social influence entirely out of the B2B world, I do think it will blunt its effect.

If social influence is to play any role in business-to-business purchasing, I think it will be in a controlled, step-by-step manner: the decision making process would begin with individual research into the available solutions to meet the business challenge at hand. Ideally, following this would be an outreach to known and trusted colleagues. Only later would the process expand outward to gather a wider perspective in potentially riskier waters, tapping business networks of unknown individuals such as connections through LinkedIn and other forms of social media with a business focus. And in many companies where big money is involved, once a short list of recommended solutions providers is completed, the final decision is not left to one individual anyway — it's up to a committee review (in 2005 an average of 3.5 people were required to make a typical purchasing decision³). Uh-oh. Now that sounds a lot like the makings of a focus group!

¹ Matthew J. Salganik, Peter Sheridan Dodds, Duncan J. Watts. "Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market." SCIENCE. Feb 10, 2006. Vol. 311. no. 5762, pp. 854 - 856

² Jalal Feghhi. "Trust in Business-to-Business Marketplaces." Addison Wesley Professional. Mar 30, 2001.

³ Allison Enright. "It Takes a Committee to Buy into B-to-B." Marketing News. Feb 15, 2006 p.11. Study by Sirius Decisions 2005.

Photo reproduced from the Encyclopaedia of Informal Education www.infed.org

Email Creative: B2B is from Mars, B2C is from Venus

2006-11-13T17:36:00.000-05:00

It's no secret that marketing to a busines-to-business audience is very different than marketing to a business-to-consumer one. A recent Silverpop study¹ on the clickthrough effectiveness of various email marketing creative seems to bear that out: in their study of 612 emails sent by 430 companies, consumers had a clickthrough rate of 7.1% on image-rich messages vs. 4.7% for all-text. On the b2b side, all-text emails pulled 5.4% vs. 3.5% for image and text emails.

What does this mean? Are b2b buyers nothing more than aesthetically-challenged suits, unable to appreciate the combined power of word and image? Or perhaps they are business sophisticates who are above persuasion by eye-candy (just the facts, ma'am)?

And consider this: the study also found that for b2c buyers, emails with a newsletter-style layout bested a postcard-style format in clickthroughs. Business-to-business buyers preferred the opposite. I suspect that while consumers are somewhat conditioned to receiving visually-rich communications (e.g. TV), in many cases businesspeople have come to see rich email as too promotional and are just looking for the information they need to get their jobs done. The b2b aversion to a scrolling e-newsletter format in favor of an "at-a-glance" postcard layout further suggests this audience is too busy to be bothered having to scroll down a page (and what does this portend for b2b-targeted web sites?)

I gained some similar insights when running a pilot campaign testing several ad placement formats in an opt-in pharmaceutical industry e-newsletter. The strongest ad click-throughs and offer response came from text-based “advertorial” placements in-line to the feature stories versus graphic ads in traditional banner or skyscraper formats. At first I expected a visual, [tastefully] animated banner ad situated at the top of the viewing screen would perform better than the text ad set in the middle of the newsletter content.

In reality the average number of click-throughs per all-text insertion was 1.6 times greater than a banner ad run. More importantly, the text ads drove greater than 6 times the number of qualified leads from the landing page but required just a little more than half the number of insertions to do so.²

This is only one example, but definitely something to think about when developing a "leadvertising" campaign for a business-to-business audience.

¹"Email Creative That Works." Silverpop. August 2006.
²Internal client study of an e-mail newsletter campaign over a 4-month period with 14 animated banner ad insertions and 8 in-line text advertorials, approximately one per week.

Web video: More than regurgitated cockroaches

2006-10-26T12:00:00.000-04:00

Back in June 2005, more than 94 million people in the U.S., or 56 percent of the domestic Internet population, viewed a streaming video online according to Comscore Networks.¹ Web video has come a long way in the year since: in July of this year Comscore data confirmed reports of 100 million worldwide daily video streams viewed from YouTube.com alone.² With growth like that it's no wonder Yahoo! and Google were interested in JumpCut and YouTube. Don't be thrown off by the public's interest in "Man Eats Regurgitated Cockroach" videos — the growth trend extends to serious content with news video downloads outpacing other subjects at 72%.³

With this in mind, a web video component should be built into every company's demand creation strategy. Admittedly video production requires a more expensive investment than podcasting, but as the interest in popular (and low-budget) consumer-generated media demonstrates, it doesn't have to be Hollywood production-quality either.

Even a conservative web video release schedule can drive large month-to-month viewing increases on a company's web site. This traffic spills over naturally to other areas of the site (or can be directed there by careful linking).

The chart showing analysis of one client's video usage data demonstrates that even increasing the number of clips on a web site by only 2-3 per month results in a strong viewing increase curve. In fact, data indicated that for each 1 video clip added, views/downloads of the video clips on the site increased by about 8% and page views on the site increased an average 36% each month. Of course, results will vary from company to company but it is clear that making web video a part of the opportunity pipeline web site and the overall demand creation strategy positively impacts interest in the company. Why is this the case? Most people have a basic desire for immersion and interactivity. While I don't think clicking the play button on a video clip truly qualifies as 'interactive,' when leveraged properly the medium does make a company seem more approachable. Combined with other channels, including face-to-face, this helps make a customer's entire experience with a company interactive and immersive. Creating that kind of connection can only help drive demand.

Sources:

¹ CMO Magazine. "June Statistics Reveal Online Video Popularity." Oct 26, 2005. Data from Comscore Networks. June 2005.

² Comscore Networks Data. Oct 11, 2006.

³ Booker, Ellis. "Do you see video in your future? I do." BtoB Magazine. Oct 9, 2006. Data from Associated Press and America Online report released in September 2006

Podcast Pill

2006-10-03T20:53:00.000-04:00

It's no picnic being in the pharmaceutical industry these days: manufacturers are experiencing the pressure of delivering double-digit growth in the face of a more stringent FDA approval process, the worst press in their history and a diminishing return on the ROI of their field forces — to name a few challenges. One of the things that's been lacking is a real attention to what their customers — doctors — want, which is educational content, delivered on their terms, that helps doctors treat patients more effectively. But there is a hint that the U.S. Pharmaceutical industry may finally be getting customer experience religion — at least if the appearance of more pharma podcasting stories in trade pubs is any measure. With sales representative access to physicians continually eroding, the use of time-shifting technologies like podcasting to reach this busy, elusive and increasingly wired audience with customer-centric marketing techniques and education makes perfect sense. In 2005 alone the number of physicians who said technology is essential to the way they practice medicine increased 52% from the previous year [to 380,000].¹

An article on pharma podcasting that ran in the September issue of Pharmaceutical Executive magazine presented some thought-provoking ideas on the potential uses of podcasts by pharma manufacturers to enhance customer experience and communication with physicians. With the industry's traditionally glacial pace of innovating the marketing process its not surprising that its taken more than 3 years since the first podcast "aired" for the industry to take notice of the medium's potential!

Funny thing is, pharma execs have been on the receiving end of "podmarketing" for some time now. Industry conferences often make some event coverage available in audio format. Some publications like PharmaVoice are even integrating podcasts and webcasts into their product mix targeted to industry executives. Nice! And for my own healthcare industry clients podcasting has formed an integral part of every business-to-business Demand Creation Strategy to reach pharma executives for at least the past two years. I can't say for sure if a podcast has been directly responsible for a sale, but in an industry where the B2B sales cycle can range from one year to several, the data has borne out that podcasts are in demand and are one of multiple integrated channels needed to support the business development team, nurture long-term leads and ultimately drive sales.

So far most of the podcast adoption studies I've seen have dealt with consumer use and most of the rosiest are probably inflated, but with companies like Mass Mutual (insurance), General Motors, and IBM in very different industries already embracing and reaping benefits from internal and external podcasts, it's high time the pharmaceutical industry took their cue. Though not from pharma, IT industry executive Max Hopper summed up the situation well: "People are used to using consumer technology. Customers will want to deal with their suppliers in the same vein and someone will have to offer that way."³ Tough medicine perhaps, but it's a pill the industry will have to swallow (or at least chew on for a while).

Sources:

¹ Ladley, Eric. "Online Training Increase." MedAd News. June 2005 pg. 72

² Burkette, Scott. "The Download on Podcasting." Pharmaceutical Executive. September 2006. pg. 152-153

³ Gibson, Stan. "Podcasting: An enterprise hit" EWeek. October 2, 2006. pg. 24

Oh, Man, I Knew There Had to be at Least One

2006-09-21T10:15:00.000-04:00

This is exactly what I meant when I railed against some business dashboards in an earlier post. While using a car dashboard graphic for a sales & marketing dashboard may seem like the obvious choice, critical business data may be obscured in the chartjunk of an interface that is too cute to be taken seriously. To be honest, it seems almost intentionally designed to distract executives from what's really going on by hiding the measurements in plain sight. Not sure what they were thinking over at AdTrack.

While there probably is no such thing as a perfect marketing dashboard, I like Phoenix Marketing's take on it much better with their Marketing Pi Dashboard. It's a simple, clean layout that employs Excel-like chart designs business people are used to seeing. The Creative Executions tab is a nice touch I haven't seen integrated before. What would be really interesting is to see how (or if) they manage to connect campaign creative to the sales metrics in a meaningful way. That would be a great benefit to marketers looking to get the most from their creative development and even apply a little measurement science to an area that has traditionally been too "squishy" to connect to revenue-generating numbers.

Blood on the Dashboard

2006-09-02T23:14:00.000-04:00

With marketing accountability paramount, business dashboards are everywhere these days. It makes sense to have the necessary dials to tell us how fast we're going (to make sure we're putting enough distance between ourselves and the competition) and to have the marketing equivalent of an in-dash GPS system to keep from turning down the wrong alley in a bad neighborhood, so to speak. The problem is, just as all the fancy-schmansy gadgets appearing in our cars today are enough to confound drivers who should be paying attention to the road, the glitz of marketing dashboards can be dangerous in the hands of otherwise intelligent executives, driving them and the business toward a head-on collision.

I once received an email from a former client bubbling with excitement at the latest canned monthly report from their web analytics provider. "We're doing great - page views and hits are up for the third month in a row!" gushed the client. In fact, a deeper look at the underlying data showed that while overall page views and hits were up, visits from their target demographic declined precipitously. I'm also reminded of protracted wrangling with another client over their decision to rely solely on stock Nettracker reports versus an integrated analytics methodology to truly get a pulse on their business growth (I ultimately lost this battle).

It's not the clients' fault nor can we really blame well-intentioned web analytics providers. Those pretty charts and graphs just put too much unfiltered data in front of people whose job is not to interpret it in a meaningful way. So much of what we get from stock solutions is what information design guru Edward Tufte calls "chartjunk" - visual overstimulation that only obscures the true meaning of the data (sometimes with very real and deadly results). While they tell us a lot about the technical aspects of running a web site, these standardized packages do not go far enough towards determining how well we are impacting the opportunity pipeline by driving demand within a business’ target audiences. They keep a site up and running, but don’t provide true marketing and business development insight.

And I don't believe it is possible for even the best software package to do so. Web sites and other components of the marketing mix must be backed by a solid methodology for tracking and analyzing prospect traffic and behavior and then presenting it in a way for business stakeholders to take away actionable information. That's the job of the professionals in today's marketing department...when clients and bosses let us do it.

Unfortunately no single solution provides a complete picture or tracks the Key Performance Indicators relevant and unique to every business. The challenge is to link anonymous traffic to real people, determine if those people are qualified targets, track those targets through their many visits to an Opportunity Pipeline Web Site, and analyze behavior to determine the depth of interest and readiness to buy. Find a way to accomplish that, and not only will the business grow, but there will be a whole lot less blood on that marketing dashboard.

Web 2.0 / Demand Creation 2.0

2006-08-17T19:26:00.000-04:00

Web sites have been an important part of the lead generation process for business-to-business companies for some time. Those who have been doing it correctly left behind "brochureware" sites long ago and learned to leverage the Web to engineer the creation of demand (sales) through integrated marketing activities and customer-focused content. I call these “Demand Creation Websites,” and they go hand-in-hand with the first iteration of the Web.

With all the talk about "Web 2.0" being the second coming of interactivity on the Internet and the overdue transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to the next "generation of Internet-based services that let people collaborate and share information online in a new way," perhaps it's high time to reengineer the business-to-business web site within the context of Web 2.0.

The next evolution of the business web site must go a step beyond demand creation: it must not only create short-term demand but also to seed the opportunity pipeline with new business opportunities that will mature over time. Let's call it Demand Creation 2.0. At its core is an Opportunity Pipeline Web Site: a platform for continually fueling interest in a business’ offerings and providing critical intelligence for future growth. And it should be developed with an eye for integrating the "participatory Web" aspects of Web 2.0 into its functionality.

A small number of B-to-B companies are beginning to embrace Demand Creation 2.0, testing the waters with corporate blogs, wikis, podcasts and video clips, RSS technology, social media aspects - even posting content to Flickr - and wrapping it all together with a solid methodology for tracking and analyzing prospect behavior. But the medium is not the message. It's not about the technology. It is about using tech to connect customers and prospects with the content they want and to a large extent acknowledging that the power is no longer solely in the hands of the company or marketing department.

Ultimately this is a good thing, especially in B2B where the sales cycle is long, involves many decision makers and big dollar amounts. A wealth of prospect-driven content using technology as an enabler can only help build prospect interest, commitment to buy and raise barriers to competitive intrusion.

Please Enter Your License Plate Number in the Box...

2006-07-25T23:49:00.000-04:00

As if people aren't skittish enough about providing their email address to businesses for marketing purposes, imagine a future where your license plate number is just as sought after. It seems that may not be so far off: Wired News says the same infrared license plate reading (LPR) technology used by the police to read the plates of crime suspects is poised to enter the private sector and become a tool to track individual motorists' comings and goings.

Privacy concerns aside, this has interesting implications for business marketers who one day will not only be able to purchase the hardware but gain access to the databases linking a plate number to a specific person and (presumably) tailor messages and offers to them based on their driving behavior. The article says Andy Bucholz of G2 Tactics, one of the designers of the technology, believes LPR will be instrumental in everything from "helping insurance companies find missing cars to letting retail chains chart customer migrations."[my emphasis]

Wow. Such an application would enable the ultimate in behavioral targeting — after watching customer driving behavior for a bit, computer algorithms a la Amazon's Recommendations might send a personalized offer to a store in advance of my arrival (of course welcoming me with the appropriate amount of fanfare as an LPR scans my plate upon pulling into the parking lot!). Who knows? Some might even use it to try to stop me from visiting a competing store. Consumer applications seem a little more obvious. How business-to-business marketers might find use for it are still murky.

But even if yet-to-be drafted privacy laws prevent marketers from buying access to truly personal data or companies from misusing the tech to spy on employees, the $US 25,000 price tag for G2's PlateFinder won't stop someone from buying a few to place in key locations and start building their own database of prospects to track based on license plate numbers instead of anonymous web cookies. Funny that we may soon be able to use technology to provide relevant, targeted marketing messages even to the Luddites who refuse to use the Internet.

Making Lemonade From Lemons: Buzz Provides Unexpected Boost

2006-07-09T13:31:00.000-04:00

It was great being nominated for MarketingSherpa’s Blog & Podcast Reader’s Choice Awards last week, and though I didn’t win in the B2B blog category (that honor going to Brian Carroll’s excellent B2B lead generation blog), Marketing & Graphic Design ROI was 1 of only 8 blogs nominated in the category. As the old saying “Make lemonade from lemons” goes, while it would have been nice to win, I can’t be too sour about it — the experience actually provided some great data on the power of word-of-mouth to boost site traffic and connecting with a target audience.

Setting Up the Lemonade Stand – er - Study
At the time of the nominations, I had just posted “Taken Your Metrics Multivitamin Today?”, which included a link to download a lead scorecard tool. Since the link clicks through to a summary page followed by a download form, it seemed like a good opportunity to track not only the buzz value of MarketingSherpa’s link to this blog, but also to gauge interest in the tool and any drop-off as a result of having to supply some information to download the free tool. Since visitors to the MarketingSherpa voting page were not required to vote in every category, or even to view the blogs featured (though they ought to have done so before casting a vote!) I was even more curious to see if there would be much of a response.

Sweet Results
For an impromptu buzz marketing campaign, I was fairly impressed with the results. For the week the voting lasted, I tracked roughly a 10x increase in daily unique visitors to the blog. Of those visitors — most of whom were first-timers — more than 11% clicked through to the lead scorecard summary page. 100% of the clicked-through visitors followed the link to the download form.

At this point it got more interesting. These days most people do not like to give out “personal” information if they don’t have to and I wish I didn’t need to ask for it, but its just too hard to give away all the time put into developing tools with no sense of who’s downloading them. I always recommend requiring the minimum amount of information from prospects to reduce form abandonment, so I decided to only ask for a name and email address. I provided a clear explanation that I had no intentions to use the information for nefarious purposes and included an opt-out to never receive future emails (yes, a double opt-in procedure would be best, but there was little time to put one in place for the test). Despite all the precautions, I was prepared for some pretty serious abandonment.

In the end, 31% of unique visitors had their interest piqued sufficiently to consider handing over a few bits of information to get the lead scorecard and less than half chose to opt-out of future emails. Of course, with this permission comes tremendous responsibility: to evaluate whether the content of the next communication is relevant to the needs of the audience that has entrusted their information to me. I don’t take that lightly.

I don’t know if the results measure up to the return one should expect from a buzz marketing campaign intentionally set up as such, but this example does provide some benchmark of what’s possible. Best of all, the impact has been sustained: traffic levels continue to track well above the levels seen before the “campaign.” Proof that it really does pay to make lemonade from lemons — even when the lemonade is free!

Don’t Put the Metrics Cart Before the Strategy Horse

2006-06-27T01:08:00.000-04:00

In a recent post I pontificated on the importance of having a systematic approach to lead generation by employing a formal lead scorecard to qualify leads prior to sending them on to the sales team. With only 50% of respondents in a survey this year by VisionEdge saying they have a process in place to track the market share growth they are trying to attain, I realized that starting with the lead scorecard was like putting the metrics cart before the strategy horse: we should first have a good picture of what demand we want to create before we try to score it. After all, whether you have a tracking process or not, how can you determine if your demand creation initiatives have been successful without some tangible pre-determined target to hit?

I thought about devising my own tool to assist in this, but then remembered a widget I came across during MarketingSherpa’s BtoB Lead Generation Summit a few years back — a simple marketing lead calculator created by one of the Summit’s well-known speakers, Mac McIntosh. While its parameters may not exactly fit every business, the fact that its stupid simple and free — two of my favorite points in any tool — make Mac’s calculator a must-have in my planning arsenal.

The third piece of a systematic, closed-loop approach to lead generation is a lead nurturing process — but that’s a topic for another post…

Taken your Metrics Multivitamin Today?

2006-06-15T21:27:00.000-04:00

Can it be that 72.4% of direct marketers have no marketing dashboard or performance measurement system? So says a new survey by the CMO Council. While general purpose marketers (those with broad responsibility, not just direct marketing) at big companies probably have and can afford these systems, I would guess that the vast majority of small-to-medium sized businesses share the plight of the direct marketers in the survey. Scarier still, 36.1% have no formal system for evaluating and scoring leads — a recipe for marketing malnutrition that ultimately leads to an anemic opportunity pipeline.

Having a systematic approach to lead generation is simply too important to a business’ long-term health to be put off by the seeming enormity of the task and it need not be an expensive endeavor — especially if you’re chasing quality and not volume (although encountering both is a happy problem to have). Assuming you’ve already done your homework and know your value proposition and understand who your customers are, you can get a good deal closer to a “formal” system to evaluate leads by creating a basic lead scorecard. The lead scorecard can always be embellished, dumped into databases and made sexier later, but for starters keep it simple so it’s easy to use every day.

Do this part right and not only will you have a better sense of how well your marketing initiatives are driving qualified leads (you are already tracking qualified vs. unqualified leads, right?), but your sales people will love the Marketing Department for sending them leads primed and ready to follow up on — and that’s a pill just about any marketer can swallow.

Sources:

Survey: “Select & Connect: Strategies for Targeted Acquisition and Retention.” CMO Council. April 2006.

Transform 20th Century Prospecting into 21st Century Results

2006-06-12T00:05:00.000-04:00

It might be surprising to hear in our “new media” age that marketers would largely turn to traditional offline media to build their email prospecting lists, but that’s what a recent survey by Silverpop found. 64% said offline advertising and direct marketing were their primary email list growth tactics. ¹ The constraints created by anti-spamming legislation probably have a good deal to do with it.

Considering that the average business-to-business response rate for direct mail hovers around 2.04% (postcard mail is about 1.59%)² and that the other shoe is poised to drop in 2008 with a 9% rate increase for standard US mail postage,³ it’s pretty clear that we’re going to have to come up with new, innovative ways to convince prospects to provide their contact information — especially email addresses — in some way other than unsolicited email outreach or direct mail.

But this might not be such a bad thing. As the costs of printing and mailing increase, marketing and C-level management may begin to realize that its time to move beyond the low hanging fruit of sending brochures and flyers to large numbers of businesspeople who may be interested and focus instead on generating fewer but highly targeted leads.

Event marketing may be one of the best places to play, but not in the way most people have come to think about it — from the ubiquitous “trade show” (trade shows were also at the top of the Silverpop survey). Gone should be the days of setting up a booth at a trade show and giving away tchotchkes to passersby in exchange for a business card. In most cases this is no better than mass mailing — and a lot more expensive.

Instead, arranging opportunities for company leaders to present or participate in roundtables and panel discussions at highly targeted events on topics of intense interest to the audience (no us-centric sales pitches) over time helps build a thought-leadership position for the company in its industry. More than what is communicated to the attendees, real return emerges from the opportunity to speak with fellow panelists on a personal level behind-the-scenes as peers and free of the usual gatekeepers. The strategy shifts from targeting event attendees to subtly marketing to the top-decision makers. It requires pre-, during-, and post-event actions in multiple channels to fully leverage an event and it can claim a big chunk of already stretched marketing budgets to participate in these events. But it works. In fact, one such strategy opened doors to $US 60 million in potential business that had previously been closed — far more than the total cost of the program — simply because the company (via the CEO) came to be perceived as a partner who understood their world and not as a vendor trying to sell something.⁴ That’s a sea change worth striving for.

Sources:

¹ Silverpop survey of 321 email marketers from B2B and B2C companies

² Direct Marketing Association 2005 Response Rate Survey; Stevens, Ruth P. “Reaching Out.” Direct. June 1, 2006. pg. 25

³ Schultz, Ray. “More Postal Misery.” Direct. June 1, 2006. pg. 7

⁴ Internal study, 2004-2005.

I’m Blitzed

2006-06-01T00:54:00.000-04:00

FeedBlitzed, that is. Yes, I finally got around to enabling visitors to subscribe to new Marketing & Graphic Design ROI posts via email instead of (or in addition to) the RSS/ATOM feed. While I’m an unabashed proponent of RSS and its potential — I prefer to manage my daily information overload via NetNewsWire each morning over coffee — Fred Wilson was right a few months back when he said on A VC that RSS would have to be drop dead easy before it could replace email — and we’re not there yet. I don’t care about the intricacies of how an internal combustion engine works when I want to run out and get a movie from the video store. I just hop in the car and go. As someone who has struggled firsthand with troubleshooting a flaky RSS file, it would be nice to just “get in the car and go” as far as feeds are concerned. With only 12% of users claiming awareness of RSS — 6% if you use numbers from Forrester Research (via Rok Hrastnik’s MarketingStudies blog) — and 4% knowingly using it ¹, it’s abundantly clear that even with the ever rising tide of spam, email isn’t going away anytime soon. If, possibly, it’s no longer the Internet’s killer app, email is still the Net’s workhorse. In fact, many (54%) would like email to replace telemarketing, direct mail to a postal address (40%) and even to replace retail offers and coupons (33%).²

This doesn’t mean we should give up on RSS, but it does underscore the need to provide information in as many different formats as possible so that in the ever-fragmenting marketplace we can reach and build relationships with as many prospects as possible. The frequency with which I see FeedBlitz-enabled RSS feeds appearing seems to indicate more marketers (including, apparently, me) are getting the message — we need to do things more on our prospect/customer’s terms.

Sources:
¹ Yahoo! & Ipsos Insight. “RSS—Crossing into the Mainstream.” October 2005
² Dawn Anfuso. “Excellent Email.” DoubleClick Consumer Email Study. October 20, 2004.

Show Me The (Podcasting) Money

2006-05-26T00:39:00.000-04:00

While some marketers are finding ways to gain podcasting revenue through advertising (Brandweek & eMarketer/New York claim ad revenue for podcasting will reach $80 million in 2006), in the B2B services sector I believe that the most valuable revenue will not come from selling (or buying) podcast ad space but will come instead through developing a podcasting strategy that cultivates a thought-leadership position for the company among its customers and influencers. With the proper messaging and tone, podcasting in this way adds another dimension to the marketing and brand channel mix that will ultimately lead to a tangible, financial return on investment.

I discovered this first hand while helping launch a new business unit for a client. As one component of a multi-channel demand creation strategy, we used podcasts of the company leaders speaking about industry dynamics and some of the pain points experienced by customers to subtly let them know we understood their world — and without a single salesy message in the podcast itself. A consistent release schedule of at least one podcast episode per week not only rapidly boosted downloads of the podcasts, but over two and a half months played a role in growing the sales opportunity pipeline from $US 23 million to $US 112 million. Worth noting, is the fact that when management halted support of the overall demand creation strategy (including podcasting) at the end of November, the podcast download traffic showed an immediate and extreme sensitivity to the lack of new content, dropping by more than 62% in less than 1 month. That downward trend continued even though the same number of audio files continued to be available on the web site — there was just nothing new to listen to.

I believe this means that for most B2B companies (especially those in industries with tech-savvy customers and where there is a complicated sell), there is tremendous long-term value potential in integrating a podcasting strategy into the marketing mix — as long as the content is positioned properly to address customer pain points. It should not become an exercise in chest beating to broadcast how great the company is at providing this and that and it needs to be given long-term commitment by senior management to reach that potential.

Sources:
Anderson, Diane. “Podcasting Ads Reel in $80M” Brandweek. March 6, 2006. pg 16
eMarketer – Market Research on E-Business and Online Marketing
Chart: client data

The Rise and Fall of a Demand Creation Strategy: A Case Study

2006-05-18T10:18:00.000-04:00

Marketers know a successful demand creation strategy requires a commitment not only financially but of support from senior management. Unfortunately, while the benefits of an integrated, multi-channel demand creation strategy for a business are enormous, building an opportunity pipeline typically takes more time than many companies have the stamina for. I’ve enjoyed seeing challenging lead generation work pay off and I’ve also been on the receiving end when a short-sighted management team pulled the plug. Many times I wished I had some data on hand as ammunition for discussions with the CEO when the future of the plan (and business!) was on the line. The following case study tracks the lead growth of Company A, a healthcare sales & marketing services company, over the course of two years with business-to-business prospects. It demonstrates how continuous support and funding of a demand-creation strategy builds momentum over time while a cut-off of support quickly and dramatically erodes growth gains.

In the Beginning
The chart shows that it takes some time to sort out the right marketing channel mix and build momentum. During this phase many resources were put into building awareness along with targeted initiatives to seed a long-term pipeline. Over the course of 1 year, a multi-channel integrated demand creation strategy increased lead volume from an average of 3 to 20 leads per week. At the same time, unqualified leads (magenta trend line) were reduced and qualified leads (green trend line) rose from 57.5% to 89.8% of all leads.

Still, particularly in the early stages, momentum is fragile. The yellow bar shows the effect on lead generation of halting journal advertising and reducing multi-channel initiatives for 4 months due to sudden budget cutbacks. When all available demand creation channels in the integrated plan were restored, lead generation rebounded and grew exponentially.

The Great Crash
Unfortunately, despite the high volume of qualified leads turned over to business development, an opportunity pipeline of over $US 60 million for the year and a visibility of 2-3 years on future prospects for lead nurturing, senior management ended support and funding of resources for the integrated plan in mid-December (red line). The dropoff was more catastrophic than I could ever have predicted. With a decimated lead pipeline and stock price that ultimately lost more than 55% of its value, two years later the company still struggles to recapture what was lost. It is a cautionary tale worth sharing with management: cut marketing at your own peril.

Note: This post is a portion of an expanded article I’m preparing on marketing momentum. If you’d like to be notified when it is available for download contact me.

Source: Internal Study Sept 2003 – Feb 2005

Dunkin Donuts is Watching You

2006-05-07T13:59:00.000-04:00

Recently Brandweek reported a February 2006 licensing agreement between Dunkin Donuts and in-car GPS manufacturer TomTom allowing customers to download Dunkin Donuts and Baskin Robbins logos onto their in-car GPS systems so the chains show up on the driving map when a store is in the vicinity. ¹ This is a convenience for the driver to be sure, but an even greater boon for Dunkin Donuts’ marketing execs: the act of downloading leaves an electronic trail of breadcrumbs (or is it donut bits?) to observe how many people on the system have accessed the brand signposts. I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t some sort of agreement that lets advertisers like Dunkin Donuts access GPS data to see whether someone actually drove to one of the sponsored stores, maybe even how long they were at that location. And its probably worth some expense for marketers to use this channel to gain further insight into the lucrative demographic that typically buys the $US 699.00 systems: 45% earned $75,000+ yearly and 34% earned between $100,000 and $150,000 each year.² The smart advertisers would then use behavioral triggers to send additional targeted offers to these subscribers.

TomTom would like to ink similar licensing agreements with other brands and I’ll bet other GPS manufacturers have started looking at supplementary revenue streams in this area as well. And so it seems we’re yet another step closer to the kind of intrusive advertising I posted about over a year ago and seen to the extreme in the 2002 movie Minority Report.

On the other hand, such advertising may not be so “intrusive” if it targets my needs with relevant offers at the right time. The challenge is that most advertisers aren’t so adept at delivering on that promise yet. And with all the beeping and flashing logos soon to populate these GPS devices it won’t be long before municipalities start legislating when and how you can use your distracting GPS device in a car, much like the situation in many U.S. states where hand held mobile phone use while driving is banned.

Oh yeah…TomTom also provides GPS solutions for PDAs and mobile phones, so I gather marketers will soon be able to target customers as they’re walking around town. So your PDA/phone suddenly chimes to life with a new message: ‘Why not stroll into the corner Starbucks for a cup before your 11 am meeting, Mr. Anderton?’

Sources:
¹ Hein, Kenneth. “Marketers Map Out Their GPS Ad Plans.” Brandweek. April 24, 2006. pg 4.
² NPD 3-month Survey
Joseph Mann “Behavioral Targeting, Morphing Taxis and the World of Minority Report.” Marketing & Graphic Design ROI Blog. March 20, 2005.

Lousy Customer Satisfaction-It’s a Global Phenomenon!

2006-04-28T15:08:00.000-04:00

Digging around a bit after my earlier post on the Net Promoter Score methodology (“Customer Satisfaction Rates are Like So Last Week”) I found some more information on the application of the NPS and consumer attitudes toward company efforts at customer satisfaction and was amazed to discover just how poorly companies around the world – not just in the U.S.A. — are satisfying the needs of their customers. I was intrigued enough to track down NPS ratings of companies from other parts of the world. Apparently the average Net Promoter Score for US companies varies between +11% and +16%. The UK was the next highest at +3%, followed by Australia at –5%. Some research by Profusion International of 5,000 Western European consumers weighing in on the matter provided ratings over a much wider range and more tied to an industry: -6% NPS for the automotive industry and a whopping –48% for telecomm. At first glance, one could look at those numbers and say ‘wow most companies are doing a better job at meeting the needs of customers in the US than anywhere else’ — until you remember that with the Net Promoter Score any number below 50% means you have a lot of improvement to make!

On an individual basis, some of the big name companies you’d expect to have phenomenally avid word-of-mouth promoters based on traditional customer satisfaction ratings systems and good press (such as Southwest Airlines) were only slightly above average on the NPS scale: 51% for Southwest, according to a table of high performers on the Netpromoter.com web site. Even famously evangelized Apple Computer only scored 66%!

From my B2B standpoint it's equally distressing that only two of the 19 “top performers” listed could be considered pure B2B companies and neither one had an NPS greater than 66%. What does all of this mean? Are B2B companies not as good at creating brand advocates? Are they less concerned about cultivating strong corporate brands than B2C companies? While I've hardly put together a comprehensive world summary, if nothing else all of this does give the sense that there is ample room for improvement the world over. I’d love to hear if anyone has Net Promoter Score data for some other countries or continents not mentioned here.

Sources:

Chief Marketer Interviews Fred Reichheld
Walter Carl. "Measuring WOM: Advocacy Drives Growth in UK Companies" Word-of-Mouth Communication Study Blog
NPS Top Performers
CEO Forum Australia
The European Centre for Customer Strategies

RFID Dreams or How Google Will Take Over the World

2006-04-15T00:21:00.000-04:00

Anyone working in the high-tech industry can’t help but be aware of Radio Frequency ID (RFID) Tagging. Despite a marketing and creative background, I’m also a closet IT aficionado, which means I’ve read enough of these RFID stories in EWeek and InformationWeek in recent years to make anyone’s eyes glaze over. This might be why I found myself daydreaming about what the trickle down benefit might be for the rest of us — after the shipping companies (for whom the benefit of knowing where the customer’s stuff is at any given time is obvious) are done with their implementations, once the cost of infrastructure upgrades comes down. Beyond business operations improvements, can any of this be turned to improving the results and tracking of b-to-b marketing initiatives so we can get a better grip on our customers?

Let’s say someday they’re able to increase the tag reader range by a huge leap from its current 20 feet. On that day I’d envision running out to my commercial printer to do a direct mailer using integrated circuit printing technology to lay a microthin (and nearly invisible) RFID tag right on the mail piece. I’d send the piece via snail mail to my prospect — some things don’t change, after all — but unlike my colleagues from the dark old days of ROI-challenged marketing, I’d be able to track exactly when (or if) my future customer opens the piece, because the RFID transmitter would be triggered to start radioing a unique serial number at the very instant the wafer seal on the mailer is broken. Of course, I’d be able to pick up that radioed serial number (and the latitude & longitude of the prospect) because the GoogleSat geolocation service (fresh out of beta from Google Labs!) would be able to read it from its constellation of satellites in orbit and relay it to my GoogleCRM account (Google Analytics after it eats Salesforce.com). Within minutes, a sales exec would be calling Joe Prospect up on his videophone to talk about how our services can help him with this or that. The only thing Mr. Prospect won’t be able to do is pretend he didn’t get the piece or that he isn’t in the office: the resolving power of Google Earth will let me zoom down to 3 feet and see that he’s trying to hide under his desk.

Can any of this fancy come to pass? Although they’re probably nice enough people, I don’t think I want Google to rule the world, but I sure would like to have the tools for such direct and immediate impact on building the opportunity pipeline at my disposal. Now if I could just get that flying car that’s been on backorder…

Sources:
Ferguson, Renee Boucher. “RFID Loses Reception.” Eweek. March 6, 2006. pg 11
The RFID Journal FAQ

Measuring the ROI of Social Networking for Business

2006-04-02T17:38:00.000-04:00

Social networking sites like Friendster and Yahoo 360 are all the rage, but is there a business application lurking in there? Well maybe not with these consumer services, but some like LinkedIn and Ryze have been built specifically to cater to the needs of business people to connect with colleagues, prospects and customers. With a network of 5 million subscribers (slated to reach to 8-10 million by the end of 2006) and subscription rates of $20 to $200/month for an account that allows introductions outside one’s network, LinkedIn seems to have the potential for a successful business model. As a user of LinkedIn who has tested the site for prospect and competitive research, I was curious about the ROI possibilities of integrating it into the marketing mix as another channel for sales lead generation.

Using the data from my own LinkedIn Network and some quick math I performed an informal experiment. LinkedIn’s basic Business subscription costs about $239.40 per year and allows 15 simultaneous introductions per month (180 per year). Based on this, if I wanted to get introduced to all 11,000 of my contacts two degrees away, it would take me 61 years to reach them all — and $14,603.40! Even on the most robust Pro plan that allows 480 concurrent introductions per year (about $2400), it would still take almost 23 years to get introduced to everyone. Clearly this is not the most efficient way to reach a broad-based audience (and no, I don’t seriously believe anyone would think it was).

But kidding aside, as a targeted channel, LinkedIn and other business social networks like it may ultimately have some of the best ROI around: one closed business-to-business deal is likely to bring in sales worth many times the $2400/year LinkedIn’s Pro plan costs. That potential alone is worth the effort and small investment to pilot a business social networking tool’s use as part of a company’s marketing plan. As always, such an experiment will be most effective working in concert with business development — and preferably with account executives who already use and understand how to make the most of the tools.

Sources:
Claburn, Thomas. “Social Networks Go Pro.” Information Week. March 27, 2006. pg. 55

Fun with Branding – What’s Your Sign?

2006-03-26T11:19:00.000-05:00

It’s hard to stay good at your job if you don’t stop to have fun with it once in a while. That’s why I love the “better than guessing” series of tools periodically released by the Mud Valley Branding Community — they’re simple, useful and don’t take themselves too seriously — exactly what you’d expect from a group whose goal is “integrating business strategy, brand marketing and Six Sigma to make you sharper than the clothes you wear!”

So after getting a little behind in reading my Mud Valley newsletters, I just discovered a cool Excel application called the “Star Signs Definition Enrichment” tool. The tool is based on the premise that most brand definitions stay on the safe side and consequently fail to differentiate themselves from their competition in a compelling way. The Star Signs tool is an exercise in examining your brand as it is currently defined using characteristics of the twelve astrological archetypes that have evolved as a general segmentation of human nature to brainstorm new ways of looking at your brand.

As the folks at Mud Valley describe it “you have twelve rich portraits of people which address their inner-most needs and motivations, and when you refer to them, people will relate to what you are saying at a deep, even subconscious, level. In branding terms, this is hugely valuable. If your brand has a tendency to be biased towards the coldly rational, here is your chance to balance it out, and warm it up, by injecting into it some powerful emotions.”

I tested the tool myself and while skeptical at first, I’ve come around to the fact that if nothing else examining your brands this way once in a while can provide some surprising insights — and is lots of fun. It’s probably even more relevant for examining and revitalizing your “personal brand.”

(By the way, joining the MV Branding Community to receive the newsletters and tools costs a measly £9.99 a year less than $US 19.99. It’s worth a look.)

Customer Satisfaction Rates Are Like So Last Week

2006-03-12T16:30:00.000-05:00

Nobody doubts how important it is to get a pulse on how customers perceive your company, products and services — the sum total of these perceptions in the mind of the customer is the essence of a brand and directly impacts future growth. This is why an article on customer satisfaction surveys I tore out of Business 2.0¹ a few months ago caught my eye when I finally had time to go back and read it.

From my own experiences working inside companies I know that properly crafting a customer satisfaction survey to gain relevant, actionable metrics is frequently the bane of marketing departments with many other equally important priorities on the plate. How many questions to ask? How should they be phrased to avoid leading the response? And then how to quickly review the mountains of data received into process improvement guidance? Not to mention how easy it is to drink your own cool-aid when analyzing the results.

The article¹ put me on to a new concept being popularized by Bain consultant Fred Reichheld: the Net Promoter Score. Throw away everything else on your customer satisfaction survey and boil it down to one key question: Would you recommend this company/product/service to friends and colleagues? The model says to collect responses from at least 60% of your customers and is based on a 1-10 scale with 10 being most likely to recommend and 1 the least likely. Scoring is such that:

9-10: These are your “Promoters” - Very satisfied customers who will promote your product or service any chance they get. They are users who actively market your product by getting behind it
7-8: They are your “Passively Satisfied” customers
1-6: Are the “Detractors” - fairly unsatisfied with you - Most likely to leave you for a competing product or service

Your Net Promoter Score equals the negative responses subtracted from positive ones.

Simple. Certainly the fewer variables there are to track in any benchmark the better, but more to the point, Reichheld’s research seems to show a strong correlation between a high NPS and high growth. For example, most U.S. Airlines show both low Net Promoter scores and low (or negative) revenue growth — with the exception of Southwest Airlines, long a poster child in high customer satisfaction. Apparently the average NPS of American companies is an abysmal 5-10%, but Amazon, eBay, Harley-Davidson, Vanguard, and Dell are some of the exceptional performers, operating at NPS efficiency ratings of 50 - 80% (and with the profits to show for it). Now what I’d really like to see is how well the NPS metric applies to the business-to-business sector where buying drivers are often more complex and the sales cycle is typically longer.

Sources:
¹Darlin, Damon. “The Only Question That Matters.” Business 2.0. Sept 2005. pg 50
Net Promoter Site
Satmetrix, the research company that co-developed the NPS with Fred Reichheld
Bain.com “Measuring Your Net Promoter Score.” Accessed 3/12/2006.
McGregor, Jena. “Would You Recommend Us.” BusinessWeekOnline. 1/30/2006

Mouthing Off

2006-03-05T22:40:00.000-05:00

According to research from GfK NOP, while 67% of U.S. consumers in 1977 called Word-of-Mouth (WOM) one of the best sources for new product information, that number exploded to 92% in 2005.¹ The consumer marketing world has been interested in the power of buzz to influence sales for some time and while WOM strategies may be different on the business-to-business side, I suspect a poll of B2B buyers would reveal similarly strong faith in the power of word-of-mouth marketing – after all people tend to trust the word of other people more than companies. Tracking all this to some quantifiable measure of its ability to increase brand awareness and drive revenue growth turns out (as always) to be the hairy part.

However, tools to do just that are emerging: advanced search engines utilizing automated linguistic legerdemain to monitor the blogosphere, message boards and other online places consumers congregate. Of course, these snazzy new tools are also fairly expensive. According to BtoB magazine the average contract for Intelliseek’s new Brandpulse Internet monitoring service is about $75,000² — likely out of reach for most small-to-medium sized businesses and budget-strapped corporate marketing departments.

But knowing what’s being said (good or bad) about your company and brands is too important to give up on just because the budget is lacking for formalized tools. Since a focus of this blog is on applying grass roots methods of measurement, in a moment of insanity I thought I’d take a stab at piecing together a “simple” B2B WOM measurement tool myself to track brand reach and perception online. I’ll be mentioning more about that effort in the weeks to come. In the meantime, I discovered you can actually tease quite a bit out of Intelliseek’s Blogpulse search tool for free, as well as find out what’s being said about you using Boardreader to search comments posted to message boards. Give it a try.

Sources:
¹Jonathan Carson. “Are You Reading Into the Chatter?” OMMA Magazine. December 2005. pg 27
²Paul Gillin. “How to Monitor the Blogosphere” BtoB Magazine. January 16, 2006. pg 17

Corporate Blogging is an Imperative…But Get It Right

2006-02-06T13:43:00.000-05:00

I tend to blog about marketing topics that are more quantitative. That’s my nature: I’m a fusion of creative-oriented graphic design & marketing with a business-driven return-on-investment imperative — what I like to call a “visual strategist.” Once in a while, though, it’s important to remember that not all marketing ROI is so numbers-oriented, at least not the kind of numbers finance people prefer think about. I’m talking about the value of a good company reputation.

Corporate Blogging is one of the newest-but-ever-growing-in-importance tools in the marketer’s arsenal for building a good company reputation (read: strong corporate brand). The ranks of company-supported blogs and company executives who blog officially continues to grow, whether you’re talking about the well-known Bob Lutz GM FastLane or Jonathan Schwartz Sun Microsystems blogs or the increasing number of relatively new CIO bloggers like Will Weider. In fact, according the Washington Post there are now well over 100 official corporate blogs.¹ From top-executives to rank-and-file employee bloggers, the idea is beginning to take hold at progressive companies that being blogophilic has great opportunity to build loyalty (and thereby long-term revenue) through honest give-and-take with customers.

There is also the very real potential to wreck your company/product reputation royally if you do a bad job of corporate blogging. A good reputation and strong corporate brand are the direct result of a maniacal focus on customer satisfaction. Blogs by nature are designed to enable the kind of 1-to-1 customer communication that builds that satisfaction. But if care is not taken to manage the blogging process through guidelines/policies as well as a commitment to honesty and transparency, a corporate blogging effort will not only be seen as disingenuous marketing blather disguised as “communication” but can be used by competitors or others with an axe to grind as a means to destroy a brand’s credibility.

Only one of the latest examples is the Cialis blog fiasco recently discussed on John Mack’s Pharma Marketing Blog post “Cialis Blog - Shame on Lilly ICOS”. Regardless of whether the Cialis blog was officially sanctioned or just another example of “brand hijaking” by a blogger unconnected with Lily ICOS, it’s a good example of what you don’t want a blog to do to your company reputation, particularly at a time when Number 2 Cialis is working hard to chip away at Viagra’s dominant 54% share of the ED market in new prescriptions and the pharmaceutical industry in general is suffering from poor reputation with consumers and physicians.²

To sum up, corporate blogging can be a great tool to add to the marketing arsenal for reaching, speaking frankly with and retaining customers…but you better make sure you get it right the first time.

Sources:
¹ The Washington Post 6/5/2005
² Cialis 30% share of NRx written by Urologists to Viagra 54%. Source: IMS NPA Plus™, April 2004. IMS data represent aggregated pharmacy sales, reflecting what is filled at the pharmacy including new prescriptions for continuing users and prescriptions called in by phone

It's Official - I'm a Wiseguy

2006-01-24T11:02:00.000-05:00

Or so says MarketingSherpa: I just discovered “wisdom” from one of my case studies was included in MarketingSherpa’s recently released report of real-life experiences of marketers from 110 organizations. The 4th annual report entitled “Marketing Wisdom for 2006: 110 Marketers & Agencies Share Real-life Tips” includes test results and lessons-learned stories from such marketers and agencies as: American Red Cross, CompUSA, Cox Communications, Deloitte & Touche, Palo Alto Software, and The Motley Fool. Sounds like I’m in pretty heady company. Now if I could just find someone to shrink this enormous head of mine!

Download the free and freely distributed report here: http://www.mannpowerdesign.com/pdf/wisdom2006b.pdf

…And be sure to visit MarketingSherpa, one of my longtime favorite marketing resources.

Corporate Brands Have Mid-life Crises Too!

2006-01-19T22:00:00.000-05:00

As I write this, the news of both Intel and AT&T’s revamping of their respective corporate brand marks is no longer new. I hadn’t even planned on giving the topic voice here, except as the story received more media coverage and I saw the new logos repeatedly, it began to bother me that two of the biggest corporate icons in America had ditched their, well, icons for something newer and flashier. Moreover, since discussion of graphic design return on investment is part of this blog’s mission, I thought it was worth mentioning.

How much is that logo in the window [worth]?
The logo is a company’s visual signpost of recognition for all of its stakeholders and is the embodiment of what the company stands for: it is a promise of expectations. It takes scant seconds for my young kids to recognize the trademark silhouette of Cinderella’s castle on a blue field as one of their favorite Disney DVD movies about to begin. Such is the power of a well-recognized mark. It takes years of consistent application to build that kind of recognition and changing a well-known mark has far-reaching financial implications. There is the often cited figure that while the net assets of the Coca-Cola company total about $7.3 Billion,¹ the intangible value of the Coke name (and all it represents) is estimated at $72.2 Billion dollars ² — strong evidence that it is unwise to lightly mess with corporate identity.

Of the two, I fault AT&T less for twiddling with their classic Saul Bass-designed mark than Intel. AT&T has been in a long slump, the sad culmination of which is being gobbled up by one of the companies it sired when Bell was broken up in 1984. In the wake of the merger with SBC, the rationale probably included the desire to have a logo that, while not breaking completely with the name equity of the past, jazzes the old mark up a bit with early 21st century tech flair. That said, the designer in me thinks the new mark debases the crispness of the Bass original with its lowercase type rendering in a childish homage, perhaps, to e.e. cummings. The symbol is needlessly complicated by the angled strokes on a semi-transparent “marble.”

On the other hand, Intel — a company whose brand value was more than 4 times its net income of $7.5 Billion in 2004 ³ and whose 2005 brand value rose 6% ⁴— has little reason to cast off so completely the mark that served it so well for 37 years. It seems the designers of the new mark finally convinced the Intel board that a logo created by the company founders simply wouldn’t do for a company seeking to expand its market beyond that of the world’s best known chipmaker (apparently there was something wrong with that position). Too bad the new mark is not so much logo-nouveau as it is retro. The canted ellipse was design element du jour during the dot-com boom. I lament the loss of the original distinctive Intel logo, but at least it will have plenty of like-styled marks to keep it company today (see below)

Sources:
¹ Coca-Cola Company Consolidated Balance Sheet - January 31, 2001 (About.com)
² Interbrand, 2000. 2005 Brand Value estimated by Interbrand at $67.5 Billion
³ Edgar Online. Period ending 12/25/2004
⁴ Interbrand & BusinessWeek.com

One Year of Marketing & Graphic Design ROI: Looking Forward & Back

2005-12-26T15:52:00.000-05:00

Well, it’s the one year anniversary of launching this blog and since we’re also on the cusp of a new year, it seems the right time for both an introspective of the past year as well as a look at what lies ahead.

Over the past year I’ve blogged about multi-channel marketing, podcasting, RSS feeds, web video, and more. I think the importance of these channels will only increase in 2006, especially as we find better ways to measure their effectiveness. Greater budget percentages will likely be pushed into web-based channels over print, although print and other offline outlets are still an important part of a well-rounded marketing plan. Conferences and other in-person events, if executed right, still have some of the best ROI and demand creation potential you can find in the business-to-business space. BtoB Magazine (one of my favorite reads) also sees Vertical Search and Direct Marketing on the rise¹, although it remains to be seen how much the U.S. postal rate increase for first class mail will put a damper on the latter starting in January 2006.

Underlying nearly all of my blog topics in 2005, of course, were measurement, analytics and ROI. A 2004 poll by the Silicon Valley American Marketing Association (SVAMA) found that while 88% of respondents measured their marketing activities, only 52% of them measured at least half their activities.² In the second quarter of 2004, only 38% of U.S. executives polled by Blackfriars said their companies measured the results of their marketing.³ This was scary stuff at the time, at least for someone like me who hates the marketing equivalent of driving at night with the headlights off, but I wonder how much these numbers really improved in 2005? Certainly increased budget for measurement and marketing operations management are called for in the year ahead.

In any case, I remain committed to studying and blogging on strategies and techniques to improve marketing ROI and measurement in 2006.

Sources
¹ Maddox, Kate. “New Media, ROI, Deliverability Key to Success in ’06.” BtoB. December 12, 2005. pg 1
² Taylor, Suzanne. “Five Fundamentals for Useful Marketing Metrics.” MarketingProfs.com. November 2, 2004.
³ Patterson, Laura. “If you don’t measure, You can’t manage.” MarketingProfs.com. November 23, 2004.

How much should PR contribute to your web site?

2005-12-23T16:00:00.000-05:00

A few days ago I posted two case studies I captured on how press releases can be great tools to drive targeted traffic to your web site. The next most obvious question is “how much traffic should PR be driving?” Although it is somewhat of a subjective determination, one benchmark I dug up comes from a project commissioned by Kodak and Shandwick Interactive PR after 53-day beta measurement project to determine how PR and other traffic driving tools affect web traffic. This study says 5% of weekly traffic and 4% of page views should come from PR.¹

I tend to think this number is a little low, even for the time the study was done. Today, as the internet and electronic tools have become even more firmly entrenched in business and put into use by the media, I’d expect a good PR strategy and consistent release schedule coupled with frequently updated relevant site content should drive double the traffic, if not more.

I’d love to hear some of the metrics others are capturing out there on press release contribution to site traffic, and of course there is the larger world of activities that fall under the PR umbrella beyond just press releases. These also have the opportunity to drive site traffic.

Sources:
¹ Sterne, Jim. Web Metrics. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2002. p. 91

You Call That Analytics?

2005-12-22T14:27:00.000-05:00

In it’s December 12, 2005 issue, BtoB Magazine highlights Google’s latest freebie: Google Analytics. Don’t get me wrong: I love free and this would be a great way to get some stats for a low/no-budget web site, but for the sake of precision I have to take issue with the name Google chose for the services formerly offered by Urchin. Calling it Google Analytics is a misnomer because this offering has little to do with true analytics.

Let’s back up a bit. Web servers produce log files of raw data based on site hits — the who, what, where and when of visits to a web site. Reporting tools crunch those huge log files — lines and lines of obscure code — and group the data into related sets for human consumption (often with eye-catching charts and graphs). Most of the companies out there calling their software products “analytics” packages stop at this stage.

True analytics are the end result of human professionals examining the computer-generated reports (and quite often going back to the raw logs) to look for trends, unusual spikes, and other nuances of intuition that computers can’t duplicate (yet anyway). This is the Why of visits to the web site. Without the Why, everything else is useless. Combined with offline market, customer and competitive knowledge, web analytics forms a greater whole of business insight to enable company leadership to make informed decisions.

Call me a marketing curmudgeon, but Google should have called their tool “Google Reporting” instead. The chosen name sounds more like slick marketing rhetoric than truth.

“Podcast” Chosen as Word of the Year

2005-12-21T22:50:00.000-05:00

If ever there was an indication that something has transcended fad-ism it is to be included in the dictionary. “Podcast” has been chosen word of the year by the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary. According to Erin McKean, editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary: “Podcast was considered for inclusion last year, but we found that not enough people were using it, or were even familiar with the concept. This year it's a completely different story. The word has finally caught up with the rest of the iPod phenomenon.”

I’ll say. With more than 6 million MP3 player owners having downloaded podcasts¹ and Apple Computer reporting more than 15,000 podcasts are available through its iTunes Music Store² alone, we’re not exactly at the critical mass stage yet, but those are still no metrics to dismiss. The numbers are sure to climb steadily as more businesses realize the value of podcasts in branding and demand creation and figure out how to integrate them into their communications.

Sources:
¹ Pew Internet & American Life Project
² Apple Computer
CMO Magazine

Get Thee a PR Strategy: Two Case Studies for Driving Web Site Traffic with Press Releases

2005-12-17T22:27:00.000-05:00

You may already be saying “PR? Doesn’t that mean an expensive Public Relations firm on retainer month after month?” Well, maybe. I’m not a PR guy and there are probably many good firms out there that are worth the money, but if resources are tight you can start small on your own and still see measurable results while working up to a full service PR firm.

If your goal is to drive increases in qualified web site traffic, a PR strategy in general and press releases in particular contribute significantly to web site traffic, which when combined with robust and continuously updated site content leads to greater brand understanding and ultimately greater demand creation for the business.

Two case studies illustrate the traffic building potential of news releases, one for a “material” (financial) press release and one for a non-material announcement of participation in an industry conference:

Two days after the material press release, traffic to one section of the web site showed a 185% increase over normal traffic ¹
After the non-material press release, two different sections of the site measured 260% and 271% increases in traffic ²

It’s important to note that these traffic gains will be short-lived if you constantly dump un-newsworthy fluff on the wires or if your site is not kept fresh with content of interest to your target audience (and the media). Achieving both of these goals is not easy, but well worth the effort.

What is Press Release-Worthy?
Press Release-worthy Topics can include:

New contracts & extensions
New business acquisitions & alliances
Additions and promotions of senior management
Important additions, upgrades or changes to business functions
Industry awards and recognitions
Speaking engagements and media exposure
Participation in media forums
Business milestones (when appropriate)
Positive industry milestones that can be commented on by senior management

Keep in mind that although there is an art to writing a good release, if you have decent writing skills and a thorough understanding of your company and its value proposition to its various constituencies you can write and submit a decent release on the newswire. The site PRWeb.com not only provides good tutorials on how to write a release, but also allows you to send out releases for FREE (there are fees for certain value-added packages).

Sources:
¹ Internal Study, August 2004
² Internal Study, June 2004

Podmarketing is the Future

2005-11-22T09:29:00.000-05:00

I recently saw a case study from BearingPoint that using podcasts tripled their response in getting prospects to download a white paper (CMO Magazine 10/3/2005 ). Add to that some estimates that anywhere from 12.3 to 56 million people will be listening to podcasts by 2010 (CNET News) and those are some compelling stats (no matter which numbers you choose to believe). It certainly looks like now is the time to add podcasting to almost any company’s marketing mix — before the competition does. In fact, by some estimates 35% of companies are either using podcasts or planning to use them in their marketing. (CMO Magazine 10/12/2005).

My own experiments with podcasting are still new. Technically, creating a good podcast is not difficult and not nearly as hard as streaming video. The challenge as I work with clients is to not only develop content that will be considered compelling to a business audience, but also to determine how to accurately track return on investment for the endeavor. After only a month, though, I’m pretty impressed with some early numbers:

Requests to listen/download podcast episodes (the .mp3 files themselves) for one client increased more than 3.5x over the course of the month
Visitors accessing the RSS feed for the podcasts increased more than 22x

For the moment, these first steps into podcasting are intended largely for branding purposes: to educate the target audience about the client’s business model, but I definitely see the potential to link podcast feeds to demand creation initiatives and draw prospects in further.

Leveraging an Event Through Multiple Channels Gets Unexpected Results

2005-10-03T21:09:00.000-04:00

Every so often I like to include real case studies of multi-channel marketing and ROI at work. Despite a typically more expensive price tag to particpate, Conference and Event Marketing can have some of the highest ROI in marketing, especially where big ticket products and services need in-person interaction to push a sale over the top. In this example, the type of "return on investment" wasn't what I originally expected, but proved valuable nonetheless.

The Challenge

The company CEO was due to moderate a high-level industry panel with plenty of visibility. As part of the event marketing team, I wanted to maximize lead generation potential from the event and position the CEO and company as a thought-leader in its space. However, due to the nature of the event, an overtly promotional message would have been inappropriate for the audience.

The Multi-channel Solution

To make the most of the conference, the following tactics were employed:

Conference handouts were developed to provide information resources and tools to attendees
Permission was obtained to videotape the CEO's panel discussion, providing video content to develop into additional attendee tools
An informational CD-ROM was developed based on the event
A Microsite was built to capture traffic from multiple calls-to-action as well as to provide a home for online content linked to the informational CD-ROM

Planned Results

Through several different calls to action on both printed materials and the online microsite, we attempted to provide enough educational content to create a favorable impression of the company and hopefully generate leads.

Unexpected Results

The microsite received many visitors, however, actual qualified leads were elusive. This might have been disappointing except for the fact that each microsite visitor who requested the value-added CD-ROM was required to complete a detailed online questionnaire about their market needs and experiences. These questionnaires allowed us to gain valuable insight into the buying behavior of the market. In addition, the effort of developing the CD-ROM eventually paid off in being able to modify the content minimally to use as a pull-through offer in other marketing initatives. We also found a good deal of "accidental" traffic to the microsite from search engines.

A flood of viable new business leads would have been ideal, however, as the Rolling Stones said "You can't always get what you want." And once in a while, even in marketing, you get what you need.

Links

Promo Magazine Event Marketing

Event Marketer Magazine

Trade Show/Event Marketing on MarketingToday

One Free Tool For Better Prospect Lists: The Flip Side of Marketing Measurement

2005-09-13T23:46:00.000-04:00

Sometimes in the quest for improving our techniques for measuring marketing effectiveness, it’s easy to forget that without a good prospect database any marketing initiative is dead in the water. MROI, MRM, Marketing Dashboards; these are the things that have received all the focus and glory in recent years while the decidedly unsexy side of the equation — data cleansing and database maintenance is the poor cousin toiling in obscurity.

In case you can’t tell, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately doing marketing database upkeep and one of the persistent problems I’ve found with bought lists from publications, and to a lesser degree prospect lists obtained from event organizers, is that people lie. Maybe it’s because they want to feel more important when they register for a conference, or sometimes they just don’t want to supply the information asked of them, but don’t they think I know there is only one CEO of Pfizer?

The more difficult problem in keeping a clean database is when a prospect does not supply a business address for mail delivery. Maybe they like receiving work mail at home, but for Business-to-Business mailings I don’t like sending stuff there. To combat this, I recently discovered a new tool: Google Maps . Mapquest has been around for a long time, but what I like better about Google Maps is the combination of illustrated map lookups with an overlaid satellite photo. Type in that suspect mailing address, zoom down as close as you can and see if that’s a residential or business address. Hmmm…no large parking lot…and is that a pool? Let’s fix that record and send the mailer to the company address instead. For fun, click and drag on the map and you can scroll around the area too.

It’s not a perfect tool, especially if there are many records to reconcile and there might be some reasons to send a piece to a prospect’s home, but in a B2B environment I can’t think of one. It’s at least one small step towards cultivating better prospect target lists — and getting better results (leads) to measure on the other side of the process and isn’t that what it’s all about?

How Successful is that Web Page? A Benchmark

2005-08-14T14:37:00.000-04:00

Well, I've been away for too long - so much work to do this summer. While I was away from this blog, I was tasked with trying to determine an objective measure of how "effective" a particular web page is in relation to others. The result is a new benchmark: the Weighted Performance Score. First, some background:

I recently built a "work in progress" web site for a client who needed a basic presence while the full version of the site was in development. Even though this was a "no frills" couple of pages, it occurred to me that a small site presented a good opportunity to stage a test to see which messaging would be most effective to launch on the full site.

Plan the Test
For the test, an A/B/C methodology was devised for the "work in progress" version of the web site. The limited number of pages made for a manageable number of branching links to track. Upon entering the main URL of the site, visitors were randomly connected to one of three home pages. All aspects of the home page were the same on the A, B, and C version with the exception of some bulleted copy. Subsequent pages linking from the home page were exactly the same across all three versions. Group A contained bullets heavy in "marketing speak," which I considered my "control" group. Group B offered a bulleted profile of sales team experience. Group C consisted of several bullets of data on the results achieved for clients.

Measure the Test
After collecting data from site visitors, several metrics were compiled. These included how many visitors followed links from the home to other pages and how long they viewed each page. I called these the Followed Link Rate and Average Read Time.

Analyze the Test
To analyze and understand the data, I created the Weighted Performance Score (WPS). It was designed to objectively measure and compare the performance of a web page against itself or other pages on a site. The Weighted Performance Score looks at the percent of visitors following a link to a new page together with the average amount of time they spend viewing the new page to arrive at a performance score. The most scientific approach is to only compare slightly different versions of the same page to score a "winner," You could also use the Weighted Performance Score to compare different pages within a site, but this is somewhat like adding oranges to your apples for comparison - you won't be measuring exactly the same thing.

In the test, the results borne out by the WPS matched my hypothesis that the site version containing hard data would do the best job of getting visitors to dig deeper into the site and spend more time viewing pages. In this case, I had a good gut sense going in what the result would be, but it was helpful to have the validation of data - like most of our visitors, I like solid facts too!

Behavioral Targeting: Serendipity Lost?

2005-07-02T00:59:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I was able to listen in to a very informative webinar presented by Marc Silverberg of Claria and the American Marketing Association on the Future of Behavioral Marketing. As a marketer, it was exciting to look at the possibility of finally getting to hard-to-reach prospects using technology to track them (without using any personally identifying information - PII - of course!) and talk to them when they are ready to buy, instead of expending marketing resources at earlier stages of the buying cycle on customer segments less likely to deliver superior financial returns. Marc mentioned where he thought some of the technology was headed: the personalization of content to site visitors based on their web-wide surfing behavior so that, for example, if you had been to a travel site, an auto site and a family-oriented site recently, your portal site using behavioral targeting technology might only show you content related to family vacation options and the associated travel arrangements.

I thought this sounded great at first - you know, to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the content I view - until I considered what we might be missing as consumers if this became the norm on the web. If my favorite information site is using its sophisticated tracking and content-serving programming to show me only the things related to what I've been doing lately, am I missing anything important that may not be related to my recent surfing behavior? Both online and offline I think there's something to be said for the serendipity of discovering something wonderful that you weren't looking for in the first place. The nearest analogy I can think of is how shopping for books on Amazon changed everything. While I like and use Amazon a lot, unlike wandering through a physical bookstore (Starbucks cappuccino in hand, of course), using Amazon, I've never unearthed a "must-have-but-really-wasn't-looking-for-it-and-I-only-found-it-because-someone-absent-mindedly-dropped-it-on-top-of-the-bargain-pile" book. I guess the question I'm pondering is will our computer algorithms ever be 'smart' enough to reliably give us those chance discoveries that make life more enjoyable? Time will tell.

Watch your back: Five Criteria for a Competitive Threat Benchmark

2005-06-10T21:53:00.000-04:00

I think you can never have too many tools for keeping an eye on the competition. One benchmarking tool I developed to do this I like to call the “Competitive Threat Index” and with it you can plug in values based on certain criteria and then charting them to provide a quick visual overview of whom you need to be watching at any given time.

Basically the Competitive Threat Index (CTI) is an assessment of the strength of competition relative to your own based on 5 criteria, each criteria having a 0-5 rating (five is the strongest), and then averaging them all together to arrive at a chartable CTI number. You could really use any criteria that are important to your business and have more than five criteria, but it seemed that much beyond that just became a needless exercise in complexity.

The five criteria I use are:

Stability (How well funded are they?), based on earnings. I prefer net earnings since I think it’s a better indicator of how much free cash they have on hand to reinvest in the business rather than gross sales
Similarity of Offering (How closely do their services match ours?)
Critical Mass (How big are they?), based on number of employees
Longevity (How long have they been in business?)
Media Presence (How well is their brand saturating the mediaspace?) This category can get a little murky and subjective, but do the best you can to individually rate and then average media presence for subgroups such as: Print Advertising, Electronic Advertising, Press Releases, TV/Radio, Web Site, Search Engine Placement, Conferences, Speaking appearances, etc.

The formula for calculating each company’s CTI then is:

(S+O+M+L+P)/5 = Competitive Threat Index

Simple. After this, enter the CTI numbers for your company and all competitors into a spreadsheet and some really interesting things can happen. If you chart the CTI’s against Annual Sales, for example, you get a chart like that shown below. The sizes of the spheres represent the CTI for each. Interestingly this chart also shows, as you might expect, that sales volume alone does not necessarily make a close competitor. Competitor C, while far outshining Your Co. in sales, does not have a close competitive match, all things considered. Competitors A & B are far greater threats by this chart.

So test your own version of the Competitive Threat Index, track it over time to see whether the competition (and you) are trending up or down…and don’t forget to sleep with one eye open.

Beyond the Right Brain: Success through Graphic Design Analysis,

2005-05-18T23:08:00.000-04:00

A brand’s ‘identity’ is analogous to a person’s identity: it consists largely of their values, personality and beliefs. The public-facing aspect of a brand reflects its core essence in a tangible and graphic way to audiences. While Marketing seeks to define the vision, strategy and structure of a brand, Graphic Designers are the visual professionals who have the responsibility of translating and marrying the positioning concepts of the brand with its identity into visual media. The more designers are involved in developing the strategy of the brand in synergy with marketing and senior leadership, the more successful the visual identity will be in enhancing customer recognition, acceptance and adoption of the brand.

It is ironic that the skilled activities of graphic designers to join brand positioning, identity and marketing strategy into a cohesive visual representation is exactly what has led to the misperception among the general public that a brand is a logo or advertising or packaging. Advertising and logos are soon forgotten, but the true essence of a brand is what stays with the customer after the visual reminder is no longer present.

Where graphic design (and to a lesser extent, marketing) has been criticized in the past is the lack of business discipline with which it seems to be practiced — it’s always been a “right-brained thing” — I believe differently. I believe there is a need to blend creativity with structure in a whole-brain approach. Going further, the most effective design is created through graphic design analysis based on attributes such as color theory, customer profiling and current trends. This takes the form of a developed research and design methodology to ensure that the necessary reference foundation is established for visual development including:

Understand the background of the company/product/service as well as customer perceptions of it through market research
Gain a sense of the overall marketplace and competitive universe
Develop a profile of the typical customer(s) to understand their lifestyle needs and wants in relation to the company/product/service
Conduct color and stylistic preference research on the target demographic groups to ensure that the graphic directions that are developed gain acceptance with the target groups

Far from restricting creativity, it is within a properly constructed scientific and business-oriented framework that breakthrough creativity and innovation can flourish.

Practicing Audience-driven Marketing Program Design

2005-05-08T14:13:00.000-04:00

In a world crowded with brands all vying for the ever shrinking attention span of the consumer (and on the B2B side, the business buyer), it only makes sense that the way brands rise above the noise is by 1) exuding the attributes that matter to the customer and continuing to delight them with each interaction and 2) leveraging technology to reach the buyer wherever they may be. While tighter budgets have meant more marketing resources have been pushed into lead-generation initiatives (a short-term focus) over brand-building activities (a long-term focus), marketing program design that is truly driven by audience needs can serve both ends. A well-engineered, process-driven marketing strategy connected with the company’s brand values, consistent visual execution with innovative graphic design and an almost maniacal focus on delighting the customer means the building blocks of future reputation will be set while near-term financial goals are achieved.

In fact, in companies where brand reputation is valued, the company’s leadership strives to maintain that reputation through practices that help create a unique identity and project a consistent and cohesive set of images and values to their audiences and customers. These practices include:

Develop ad campaigns that promote the company as a whole, not just its products, services or “brands”
Complete ambitious programs that champion quality and customer service with a focus on not just keeping the customer happy, but delighting them at every turn
Maintain control systems to screen employee activity for their positive and potentially negative impact on the company reputation
Demonstrate environmental sensitivity, because it is both socially responsible and because these actions mesh with marketing programs to drive sales
Hire internal staff and use specialized PR agencies to cultivate communications through the media
Continually demonstrate “corporate citizenship” through sponsored philanthropy, pro-bono work and other community involvement

These practices are essential to long-term reputation building as well as reflecting short-term self-interest and create economic value for the corporate brand by reinforcing the company’s position and differentiation versus the competition.

It’s Alive! Frankenfeed

2005-04-17T01:09:00.000-04:00

What do you get when you cross an electronic news syndication format with radio broadcasting and an ex-MTV VJ? And what does it have to do with marketing? The answer is 1) Podcasting and 2) potentially a lot.

The new-ish format for the online publishing of files evangelized by former MTV VJ Adam Curry has been growing quickly in popularity, due largely to the success of Apple Computer’s iPod digital music players at capturing the hearts (and marketshare) of today’s on-the-go person. Wikipedia defines podcasting as a “subscription-like syndication and distribution of files as they become available. Most podcasts are audio in MP3 format, syndicated through the RSS protocol. Other formats and other types of files, such as video, can also be podcasted, though these are limited by common bandwidth constraints.”

Bandwidth issues aside for a moment, this is where the marketing opportunity steps in. Consider the “personal touch” value of having audio addresses from your CEO available to employees, the media and customers easily available for on the go consumption—on the commuter train or bus, at the gym or on the airplane. No longer dependent on a live Internet connection for streaming audio, analysts and investors can subscribe to the company’s quarterly results podcasted to listen to anywhere. So why Podcast?

Podcasting liberates the audience from the shackles of their computers so that instead of reading the new content on a computer screen, they listen to the content on any capable mp3 player on the computer or hardware player such as the iPod. This can potentially mean capturing a greater portion of the audience’s ever shrinking attention span
The syndication format ultimately drives listeners back to the web site for more information while providing a means to track interest in specific content and use the data to fine tune marketing campaigns
RSS effectively bypasses spam filters since content is requested by the recipient, not foisted upon them
The timely delivery of relevant company information with a personal touch will help position the company and its people as thought-leaders in their space, ultimately creating evangelists for the brand
The newness of Podcasting still confers a “coolness” and first-mover advantage to those companies using this channel versus their competition

And as bandwidth availability and the capabilities of standalone player devices improves (eg: iPod Photo, Archos' PMA400, Sony Giga and the next generation of wireless devices) the integration of photos and video along with audio streams provides some exciting and unique opportunities to test market building potential through “viral podcasting” (using podcasting and its RSS underpinnings for viral advertising). With more than 6 million people already listening to a form of communication that only emerged last year¹, this seems more than just a remote possibility.

Sources
¹Pew Internet and American Life Project research (Reuters 4/3/ 2005)

Blogs for Business: Walking the Thin Line of Credibility

2005-03-28T00:31:00.000-05:00

For a while now the topic of blogs and bloggers has been a mainstream media favorite. Perhaps its attraction is the freedom of speech it seems to have unleashed. Or maybe its the way this “disruptive technology” has overturned the traditional ways we used to get the news: bloggers are scooping traditional reporters and bringing a special uncensored perspective from the frontlines of world trouble spots — from first hand Southeast Asia Tsunami blog reporting to the Iraq “warblogging” of Kevin Sites. Or maybe its allure is simply that it has enabled our “inner-publisher” to emerge. This is all great stuff, but what’s really exciting to me as a marketer are the untapped possibilities to use blogs in business.

Some forward-thinking companies are beginning to realize the business potential of blogs. In these early days, while there are legal, compliance and intellectual property challenges only just coming to light regarding the use of blogs, industry heavyweights from Bob Lutz (Vice Chairman) at GM to Randy Baseler (VP Marketing) at Boeing, to Werner Vogels (CTO) at Amazon are nevertheless launching their own business blogs. Of course, the true value of blogs in business is as another tool in the marketer’s kit to form stronger relationships with customers and other company stakeholders. But there’s a thin line to walk, as the now infamous Dr. Pepper “Raging CowGate” story tells. Efforts to subvert the medium to simply hawk a new product will eventually be exposed. At best these missteps will be viewed as the actions of clueless corporate suits and at worst they could be seen as deliberate attempts to deceive the consumer — either way causing more harm than good to the brand.

To add value, any medium from print, to broadcast, to a webblog, must have its unique properties fully leveraged. In the case of blogs, it’s the immediacy and 1-on-1 candor that make it such a powerful tool for talking to customers like regular people rather than company to customer. A well-executed business blog has the potential, as part of a multi-channel marketing and communications plan, to position the company as a thought-leader in its space, to set it apart from the competition, and in times of crisis put a human face on communications. Nevertheless, an online poll by BtoB Magazine says that 56% of companies have not launched a weblog and only 24% plan to do so in 2005. It seems the landscape is ripe for companies to distinguish themselves in this area by taking a calculated risk to walk the thin line of credibility and launch a business blog. I look forward to watching what develops.

Sources:
Nash, Jim. “Look Who’s Blogging.” Information Week. March 7, 2005. pg. 47-52
Foley, John. “The Weblog Question: BL©GS” Information Week. January 31, 2005. pg.39-42
“Has Your Organization Launched a Weblog?” BtoB Magazine. January 17, 2005. pg 10

Behavioral Targeting, Morphing Taxis and the World of Minority Report

2005-03-20T14:48:00.000-05:00

In my 1/19/05 post, “Marketer’s Dream, Privacy Wonk’s Nightmare: IPTV Coming Soon…ish,” I talked about the marketing promise and associated privacy fears of Internet-enabled, truly targeted TV advertising. Now it seems we’re just a little closer to the advertising future depicted in the movie Minority Report with the February 2005 issue of CMO Magazine reporting Clear Channel’s rollout of “Smart Tops” — Flash animated ad boards starting to appear atop some metro taxi cabs. At first, the LCD ad displays sound just like splashy updates to the printed standard, but what the article goes on to reveal is the system’s ability to integrate GPS technology, allowing ad targeting to the cab’s home base area demographics. This is pretty amazing stuff, opening the potential to serve a customized ad to a particular sales territory, neighborhood profile or local dialect. Its just one example of behavioral targeting (using technology to show advertising triggered by a user’s recent online web surfing habits) that is spilling over from the online to the real world.

Another article, “Location, Location, Location” (March 2005 CMO Magazine) touched on the back end tracking mechanisms of behavioral targeting, explaining how geolocation software is being used by the likes of online retailers, banks and other businesses to discern the geographic location of their online visitors. Privacy fears aside, in a world where we’re visually assaulted daily by thousands of ad impressions of little relevance to us and when more than 90% of email in the next 5 years is projected to be spam, overall this technology and behavioral targeting practices in general could be a good thing for marketers and consumers alike. I know I certainly don’t mind smart promotions properly targeted to my interests and needs.

With some media companies claiming only 8 to 10% of the total ad impressions they deliver are behaviorally targeted, there’s a lot of untapped potential for this technology to better serve customers and optimize marketing investment in campaigns to drive new business.

Sources:
Moore, Meg Mitchell. “Location, Location, Location.” CMO Magazine. March 2005, pg 13
Shein, Esther. “Wherever You Go, There They Are.” CMO Magazine. March 2005, pg 59
Caggiano, Christopher. “These Taxis Hail You.” CMO Magazine. February 2005, pg 14

Online Video Ads Can Drive Brand Awareness AND Support Lead Generation

2005-03-06T00:01:00.000-05:00

A recent study by Internet research company Dynamic Logic shows that ads using audio and video create greater brand awareness with less frequency of exposure than other online ad formats. This is not surprising considering that learning professionals have long understood the power of video content in combination with other media to aid in message retention and learning. What is surprising is that according to the study, a single exposure to an audio/video ad increased brand awareness by 10 percentage points versus a 468x60 “leader board” banner ad’s ability to gain 6% only after 10 exposures. When one also factors in video’s significant increases in Message Association, Brand Favorability and Purchase Intent, as indicated in the report, it is surprising that more companies are not pushing more of their budgets into video advertising over other media buys.

However, in today’s business environment where executives are demanding greater marketing accountability, boosting the intangible aspects of a brand’s performance — its Touchpoint Metrics — while important, are no longer enough. In order to influence financial results, true value needs to be delivered to the target audience to move prospects further along the sales cycle. Just as in the early days of the internet “brochureware” business sites did little for the bottom line and were eventually replaced by customer-centric web sites that leveraged the interactive advantages of the Web, repurposing existing 30 second TV spots for playback on the web does not provide much added value.

The real potential for success lies in combining video custom shot and edited for the Web with interactive landing pages and microsites as part of integrated, multi-channel marketing campaigns. My own experience in this area included the creation of a series of segments produced for my former employer on outsourced pharmaceutical sales & marketing services called “PDI TV.” Short, interview-format segments with senior company executives on industry topics were developed for Web delivery and integrated not only into the public Web site but also nearly every other landing page built for a specific marketing campaign.

Each PDI TV clip received nearly 1,000 views during a 6-month period and more than 92% of the visitors viewed at least one clip. Clearly not only was brand awareness being built, but during this time lead volume increased from 3 per week to an average of 23 leads per week. I believe the key to this success is due at least in part to ensuring that video on the Web is less about promotional advertising and more about showing prospects information they can use to move their businesses forward. Providing this information not only positions you as a thought-leader in the industry, but also builds trust, laying the foundation for the long-term success of your customer relationships.

Let’s Get Integratin’

2005-02-20T00:04:00.000-05:00

Microsoft recently restructured its entire marketing organization to create a global integrated marketing communications group to better manage its more than $1 billion in 2005 marketing expenditures when previously individual functions had been split among different groups. Speaking about the reorg in a B-to-B Magazine article¹, Steve Petitpas, GM-Worldwide Advertising, Microsoft said: “By building an integrated marketing communications capability, our customers will see better message management and more consistent, cohesive marketing communications.”

Well, one certainly should hope so after causing such a disruption. What’s perplexing to me is that the marketing behemoth of Microsoft is only just now realizing the value of a strategic, integrated marketing capability. Working at a healthcare sales & marketing company several orders of magnitude smaller than Microsoft, I initiated an integrated, multi-channel strategy last year where previously the sum of “marketing” was equated to running trade journal ads. Under the single umbrella of the Corporate Marketing & Communications department, the team invested the course of the year in creating advertising (print and online), direct marketing, conference & event and other channel tactics linking and integrating initiatives through specially developed microsites and landing pages. More importantly, we built back-end tracking systems, including a prospect database and lead tracking systems into the lead and sales cycle loop so that early stage leads could be properly nurtured to new business wins while capturing valuable segmentation data for future marketing efforts.

What our home-grown systems were able to tell us was not only that our methods were starting to pay off in lead growth but that, startlingly, over time a multi-channel integrated approach could deliver at least 3 to 5 times the growth potential versus a single channel approach — in only one year!

If Microsoft is doing it, other companies are sure to follow. The lesson to be learned is that the sooner companies get started, the sooner powerful results can begin to happen when the right people and processes are in place to hit the ground running. Time to get integratin'.

¹Maddox, Kate. “Integrated Departments Promise Efficiency.” B-to-B Magazine. February 14, 2005. pg 1, 49

More than Lead Generation: Multi-channel Communications Ease a Transition

2005-02-12T10:02:00.000-05:00

When IBM announced on Dec 7, 2004 that the company was selling its historic PC business to the Chinese maker Lenovo Corp., it could have been a disaster of epic brand proportions. With a brand value estimated at over $51 Billion in 2003, there is a lot at stake and the company clearly did not want nervous customers jumping ship to go to competitors because of the sale.

IBM did the right thing in launching an extensive multi-channel outreach campaign for its customers following the buyout press conference, as reported in the January 10, 2005 issue of eWeek. Rather than allowing jittery customers to “connect the dots” on their own, IBM took the proactive step of applying integrated multi-channel marketing techniques to external communications creating a campaign that included:

2,400 IBM representatives taking to the roads to meet with thousands of top customers and business partners
Launching a massive online campaign
Contacting still more customers by telephone and email
Hosting a web conference for customers and partners to air their concerns to IBM executives

The results were nothing short of amazing with only 5% of surveyed customers saying they would change vendors immediately and almost 50% saying they were either completely or somewhat at ease with the deal. This underscores the importance of being proactive in marketing communications to affect the kind of change desired, leveraging as many channels as possible to reach customers and realizing that multi-channel integration can be a powerful tool in areas beyond lead generation.

Sources:
Interbrand Annual Top 100 Global Brands ranking, 2003
Jeffrey Burt. “IBM troops pave path for Lenovo.” eWeek Magazine. January 10, 2005, pg 9-10

To Kill A Marketing Channel

2005-02-05T09:56:00.000-05:00

When it comes to marketing, not all channels are created equal. Despite our best efforts at success, sometimes nothing we do seems to generate the necessary return. It may be time to kill off that channel and allocate the marketing resources elsewhere. Now before you run to get that fat trimming knife, let's be clear: this is an entire channel at stake, not just a single initiative, so you'd better be sure you've got some measurement tools in place and have been tracking data for some time to make an informed decision.

Not too long ago I was asked to make a recommendation along these lines with a channel we call "Conferences." The company had participated in at least 6 major industry conferences during the course of the year and at an average of $15,000 — $20,000 to attend/sponsor each, the question became "are these giving us the bang for the buck we want?"

Thankfully, we had been tracking employee development time on each initiative so that this measure plus the cost of the event sponsorship gave us the data we needed for a fairly straightforward Expenses metric. Next, because we captured lead data according to prospects, qualified leads and opportunities, we could determine a cost-per-prospect, cost-per-lead or cost-per-opportunity (with the latter being the most important). While we did a decent job of bringing in prospects, our cost-per shot up dramatically for qualified leads and opportunities because very few initial prospects converted into true new business opportunities.

From a numbers standpoint, it was clear — our Conferences channel was not a good spend of marketing dollars this year and therefore it would likely get little or no resources in the next year. This brings up an interesting point: while it's easy to get caught up the numbers game, we also must consider other less tangible value that a channel may bring. In the case of our Conferences channel, because of the high-level attendee audience in our key demographic, there was value to being seen at such events. It helped position and credential company management as thought-leaders in the industry. Because of the brand positioning value of some of these events, we ultimately chose to attend only one or two of the conferences in the next year.

In the end, be certain you've adequately examined all of the benefits and returns of a channel — both tangible and intangible — before you let the knife fall.

Confessions of a Number-Loving Designer

2005-01-26T16:47:00.000-05:00

I admit it. I love numbers. Please don't tell anyone. I know as a Creative Director/designer I'm not supposed to — so the stereotype goes. I suppose I should clarify: I love numbers that relate to the performance of marketing initiatives.

One of the selling points of a creative career used to be not having to crunch calculus or attack algebra (we weren't so lucky when it came to geometry). We could work up a killer creative concept, blend it artfully with copy and, violá! — an award-winning piece would emerge, dazzling the client (an oversimplification, but you get the idea). Today, where corporate accountability is at the forefront of business consciousness, it should come as no surprise that it's no longer enough to have great creative strategy & execution that the client loves (though that's still part of the equation). CEOs and CFOs are demanding more accountability from the marketing organization: they want to see that every dollar spent on marketing initiatives is generating an [insert number here]-fold return on their investment.

That's a good thing. Before measurement systems were developed and put into place I never had any idea why a campaign that was well designed, beautifully executed and flawlessly distributed brought in no leads — zippo. You're left scratching your head and hoping the next one does better. In a recent multi-month e-newsletter advertising campaign with the measurement systems I designed in place, I noticed barely 1 month into the campaign that we were in trouble: the campaign simply wasn't pulling any leads.

Armed with our measurements, we were able to have a productive discussion with the media provider and hash out changes on both sides that could be implemented quickly to turn the campaign around: we revised creative and messaging, provided an enticing and clear call-to-action in the form of a white paper download, and created an extensive pull-through microsite built with visitor tracking mechanisms in place.

The result? On the first new ad placement we saw a 200% increase in click-throughs to our microsite. 40% of those visitors were also willing to provide basic contact information to download the white paper. Suddenly a foundering campaign had been rescued from the trashbin because of near-realtime tracking. Subsequent ad insertions were adjusted after each run to incorporate new insight and maximize lead generation with the next run. Over 200 prospects were gained for future marketing outreach and lead nurturing by the time the campaign was over.

I still don't like to calculate my taxes and I don't do math brain teasers, but this marketing and creative professional is convinced. We need numbers in marketing & graphic design.

Yes, I love numbers — when they help me do my job better.

Marketer’s Dream, Privacy Wonk’s Nightmare: IPTV Coming Soon…ish

2005-01-19T01:57:00.000-05:00

As far as measurable return on advertising spend is concerned, marketers have had little more than Nielsen’s viewership tracking studies to guide their buying decisions. It stands to reason that with only 14% of marketers surveyed by B-to-B Magazine saying their 2005 budgets will increase and only 17% saying “Brand Awareness” is their primary objective in 2005, a shrinking percentage of dollars would be allocated to a difficult to track mass market media vehicle like TV. For those who are beholden to the almighty ROI (and who isn’t these days?), TV is dead as a viable channel…or is it?

I read with interest an article titled “The End of TV as We Know It,” by Frank Rose in the December 2004 issue of Wired Magazine. He talks about IPTV – TV over Internet Protocol — as poised to be the next big thing. No mere jerky video over the Internet, but totally on-demand TV at broadband speeds on private networks engineered for reliable video delivery. He talks about Hi-def TV, high-speed broadband and even caller ID on your TV (I’m not quite sure what that means). But here’s the part of most interest to this blog — the system will supposedly be able to track viewing habits “as effectively as Amazon tracks its customers,” so ads will be incredibly personalized and targeted with military precision. If you’ve seen Minority Report in which ubiquitous retina scanners immediately ID passersby and serve up ad messages based on their interests, past buying behavior, etc., that’s what I imagine this could become — all served up in the comfort of your own home.

As a marketer I love the idea of being able to know if my intended target audience is watching my ad, perhaps it’ll even be able to tell me the ages of those in the room, or if they are multi-tasking at the computer while watching (like I often do), or when they get up and leave — there’s a wealth of potential real-time demographic and psychographic information to be found there to improve the effectiveness of future marketing initiatives. Perhaps it won’t be as intrusive as all that, but in any case privacy advocates can hold off worrying just a bit longer — there’s a lot of infrastructure upgrading needed for the bandwidth providers and consumers will need to get IP-addressable set top boxes. It seems to be at least 5 years out. Start the countdown…

Grokking Multi-channel Marketing: The Multi-channel Imperative

2005-01-14T01:04:00.000-05:00

The Internet “evolutionized” interactions between businesses and their customers. Customers have greater control in defining the type of relationship they have with companies and find greater competitive options to meet their needs. Smart businesses are creating new opportunities to relate to their customers, communicate with them wherever they happen to be and whenever the buying need arises. Smart businesses take mind share away from competitors, leveraging the power of the Internet to deliver superior buying experiences over the lifetime of their customer relationships.

The Multi-channel Imperative means that businesses must face the challenge of serving customers through many channels to realize this ideal. There is a tremendous opportunity to maximize profitability through multi-channel marketing. Moreover, companies with a formal, comprehensive Marketing Performance Measurement system significantly outperformed those companies who lacked an MPM system in sales growth, market share and profitability (with mean performance ratings of 29%, 32% and 37% higher, respectively).¹ To complicate matters, enterprise-wide knowledge management and CRM technology are required to remain competitive and provide superior service. Having the marketing communications professionals in-house who can leverage and integrate this data to create actionable marketing strategies for the business is equally critical.

Companies must ask ‘what are the strategies to reach and connect with the customer or prospect wherever we can find them?’ Across all industries, the Web Site has certainly developed into one of the key channels for reaching customers and increasing marketing impact — when it is made an integral component of a broad-based, demand creation strategy that also includes advertising, trade shows, sales support, customer satisfaction programs and other appropriate channels to reach customers wherever they are most likely to purchase. It’s a daunting task to integrate multiple channels and track them all together to measure whether or not the expected return on investment is being achieved, but it’s worth it: in many cases I’ve been able to squeeze 3-5x the returns from a multi-channel campaign versus single-channel campaigns.²

¹ CMO Council “Measures & Metrics: The Marketing Performance Measurement Audit” June 9, 2004
² Thompson, Thompson, McLaughlin. “Thinking It Through.” Informing Arts. 1996. Pg. 19,20

The Devaluation of Marketing and Graphic Design (Part II) – Damocles Sword

2005-01-12T01:52:00.000-05:00

In the first post of this blog, I lamented the devaluation of in-house graphic design and marketing in the C-Suite of many companies. That seems to have come closer to home than I’d prefer as I’ve discovered Damocles’ sword hanging above the collective heads of my own internal group in our latest corporate restructuring. We find ourselves pitching for our own jobs, ironically, on the heels of arguably one of the most successful and organized marketing years in the history of the company and that despite major budget cutbacks: we increased our volume of qualified leads 390%; we positioned the company strongly as an industry thought leader through authored articles, TV, radio and “webisodes”; we increased pipeline opportunity dollar volume 316% from $12 million to $50 million; and we built a lead nurturing process and marketing relationship management system tailored to the needs of our business development team.

Given how long it takes to grow a steady lead pipeline in this industry (the sales cycle typically ranges from 10 months to 2 years), it’s perplexing how top management could be willing to walk away from the momentum that has been created — particularly at a time when the competition is making gains, symbolic and real, in nearly every corner of the marketplace. But there it is.

Useful Metrics: How Hot is that Lead? (Part II)

2005-01-08T14:11:00.000-05:00

Calculating the Lead Interest Index (LIX)
In my previous post I mentioned a Lead Interest Index as one useful metric. Here is the methodology I use for calculating a LIX for each new lead: Wanting to keep things simple, I composed the Lead Interest Index of three factors: The Opportunity Launch Date (OLD), the Call-to-Action Date (CTA) and a Contact Channel Adjustment (CCA).

The OLD is the estimated time, as supplied by the prospect, when the they believe they will have a need to launch an opportunity (ie: have a sales team in the field, start a research project, launch a new product, etc.).

The Call-to-Action Date is how soon the prospect has requested some return action on our part (ie: send information, set up a meeting, return an RFP, etc.). Initially this would be from the date of the original inquiry, but would later adjust to the date from the most recent contact as further lead development actions take place.

The Contact Channel Adjustment is a bonus score I apply depending on which inbound channel the prospect used to reach us. You can create CCAs that are appropriate to your business, but in our case, we ascribe a lower bonus score to someone who has called or emailed based on a campaign we did versus someone who visited the web site and completed a Request For Information (RFI) form on the site. The reason for this is that with most of our marketing campaigns we drive prospects to landing pages or microsites with more indepth information and value-added interaction to further qualify their interest. If they have already taken the extra step of visiting a landing page based on a campaign, they have a more informed view of our services prior to contact. At my company we place the highest CCA value on prospects that tell us they came to us based on a referral. By their nature, referrals from a trusted source represent a highly qualified lead channel, since the prospect is already positively disposed towards us and has an interest (cultivating these “brand evangelists” who refer others to our company should be key to a lead generation/cultivation strategy in corporate marketing, but that could be the topic of a whole other series of posts!).

The formula for calculating the Lead Interest Index is as follows:

OLD + CTA + CCA = LIX (%)

Table 1 below describes how the values for each factor are obtained.

You may choose to use the Lead Interest Index metric to look at a lead for the date it enters the lead generation pipeline, the percent change month-to-month or a variety of other ways, depending on the needs of your business. And of course, the time frames and inbound channels you use need to be aligned to the specific sales cycle of your business.

In the next post in this series I’ll describe a real use example of calculating the Lead Interest Index to follow a lead over time.

Useful Metrics: How Hot is that Lead? (Part I)

2005-01-08T01:34:00.000-05:00

One of the challenges I have in my job is how to get a sense of where we stand with each lead not only from the moment it came in house (ie: how “hot” it was), but at various points in the lead life cycle.

I created the Lead Interest Index (LIX) to provide an objective measure of a lead’s priority as well as to gauge the interest level of a lead relative to other leads. If sales rep resources to investigate leads are scarce, it may also serve as a guide for prioritization of lead follow-ups. Because interest level may change over the course of the lead development lifecycle, this metric can be seen as a snapshot of a particular lead on a given date.

Since the Lead Interest Index for a single lead event gauges how “hot” a lead is at that moment, a series of LIX data points over time will give a sense of how the lead is progressing (ie: is it “cooling off”?). It can also provide some predictive intelligence to address fall-off in interest of initially “hot prospects” before the lead is lost to a competitor.

Next: One Way to Calculate the LIX

Strategic Graphic Design: Think Business

2005-01-03T23:27:00.000-05:00

In the business world, graphic design is frequently an afterthought, considered decoration to be added once the strategy has been set. This can be minimized if graphic designers learn to integrate process, incorporate research and speak to their audience in business terms. I learned how effective this approach could be in developing the brand identity for the new wound care product of a medical devices company. Effectively positioning the product to stand out in a crowded category of well-established competitors was only possible because the client believed in taking a strategic design approach from the outset.

I requested to review the market research and clinical studies of the product and studied the competitors' approaches. When designs were presented to the client, positioning each in terms of the business need allowed the client to understand how the identity and packaging would drive the success of his product and made the presentation less about the subjective attitudes each person has about color, type and other graphic choices.

Ultimately, a strategic graphic design approach based on research enabled rapid development (4 days from concept to presentation), made the client happy and launched a brand identity that energized the marketplace.

Planning for 2005 – Lead Generation Tops the Mandates

2004-12-31T15:49:00.000-05:00

Well, it’s the eve of 2005 and I find myself pondering again what the next year’s marketing and design initiatives will bring. One thing is clear (at least from my corner of the woods) — brand awareness, though not dead, has taken a back seat to lead generation and customer acquisition in marketing departments this year and will continue into 2005, with only 17% of marketers saying brand awareness will be their primary marketing goal (BtoB’s 2005 Marketing Priorities and Plans Survey, December 13, 2004).

With the pressure to have more marketing programs drive sales results measurably and demonstrate ROI, the lion’s share of whatever budget we have will be devoted to lead generation and customer acquisition. In a recent study, 61% of marketers say their role is to generate leads or demands (Patrick Marketing Group, Trends in Marketing – Autumn 2004 in the November 8, 2004 issue of BtoB Magazine). So, come January 3 we have to be ready to hit the ground running. But the real bit of crystal ball gazing going on is how to determine the number of leads that have to be generated to meet (and hopefully exceed) the financial targets…

For a quick idea, I suggest a gem of a tool I discovered back in October when I was fortunate to be able to attend MarketingSherpa’s Business-to-Business Lead Generation Summit (Read the summit wrap up here). Aside from an excellent presentation, Mac McIntosh of Sales Lead Experts graciously pointed us to a free Marketing Lead Calculator he created and posted on his site. It’s good for a sanity check to help focus your efforts (or give you heartburn, depending on how big a gap you discover the need to fill).

Happy New Year!

Web Metrics-Book

2004-12-28T20:22:00.000-05:00

I've been spending a lot of time reading and re-reading Jim Sterne's excellent "Web Metrics: Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success" lately. It's easy to read, suggests many useful metrics and measurement techniques for understanding your web site traffic and has many links to related web resources. Even though it was originally published in 2002, most of it is just as relevant today. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to make the most of their web site.

Developing Methods and Benchmarks (Part I)

2004-12-27T01:10:00.000-05:00

“If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
— W. Edwards Deming

According to the CMO Council's July 2, 2004 report "Measures and Metrics: The Marketing Performance Measurement Audit," the measurement of marketing performance and marketing's return on investment is a high priority. But few companies — less than 20% to date — have developed meaningful, comprehensive measures and metrics for their marketing organizations. And over 80% of the companies surveyed expressed dissatisfaction with their ability to benchmark their marketing programs' business impact and value. Scary stuff indeed. Yet those companies who have established a formal, comprehensive measurement program are said to achieve superior financial returns and have higher CEO confidence in the marketing function.

Corporate accountability and fiscal responsibility are impossible without developing processes and methods for capturing marketing effectiveness data, creating benchmarks over time to guide future efforts, and having a clear understanding between sales and marketing what’s being measured and why. There is power in knowing which efforts have been most effective and this can only be accomplished through a strong focus on measurement at all levels of the company.

The ability to measure the performance of marketing initiatives is critical. Measurement allows the Corporate Marketing group to:

Ensure that the marketing strategy laid out in the annual Marketing Plan is on target
Track and improve the lead generating effectiveness of individual marketing tactics
To examine how the greater sum total of marketing tactics is a contributory factor to the revenue growth of the business
To ensure a steady “lead pipeline” is maintained to Business Development/Sales, thereby buoying the organization with new business wins in good times and insulating it from falloffs in difficult times with a more diverse and deep customer pool

I'd like to explore some of the methods and benchmarks available in later posts, but for now continuing on with some related thoughts and a brief case study from personal experience...

A Case Study for Real-Time Marketing Measurement
In my own experience, on more than one occasion, having measurement strategies in place has not only allowed us to examine a troubled marketing initiative while still underway, but enabled us to work with media partners to redirect the campaign mid-stream and realize an almost 190% increase in leads — a strong argument for the value of "real-time" marketing measurement. Of course this was only possible because of our measurement-driven internal marketing and design team who understood the issues, the needs of the brand and was skilled enough to address the technical and creative challenges. Multiply this over all of the ongoing marketing initiatives of the company and you can begin to see the kind of unparalleled return on marketing investment that is possible and the flexibility to turn on a dime to meet business opportunities or competitive challenges.

Addressing the Devaluation of Marketing and Graphic Design

2004-12-26T02:08:00.000-05:00

A Creative Director and Director of Multi-channel Marketing by profession, I've worked across diverse industries in both B2B and B2C environments. I've made a mission of blending graphic design expertise with marketing and business sense. Over time it's bothered me to see how graphic design (and to a lesser extent, marketing) has been devalued in many corporations to the point where we're seen mainly as the "make pretty people".

I've come across this issue fairly consistently in the pharmaceutical industry where, being part of an in-house design & marketing group and despite frequent communication with the C-suite, the value of graphic design to drive brand equity (in the long-term) and generate leads (in the near-term) is not well understood. In some cases, I think this stems from an organization with senior executives brought up mainly from the sales ranks. Unless an organization is marketing-driven, where the execs understand that value that marketing brings to the table to drive sales, marketing (and hence graphic design as a tactic of marketing) will be devalued. It also hasn't helped that the industry as a whole has had alot of money to throw around. In a $50 million (or more!) launch budget spending $1 million on an ad campaign is a small piece of the overall pie.

I also tend to think marketers and graphic designers have brought some of this on ourselves. When we talk the traditional talk of branding and "touchy-feely" concepts like customer loyalty and nurturing to the C-suite, it all seems too soft for the needs of fast-paced, hard hitting business today (despite its importance in the ultimate success of the company). Compounding the problem is that for a good deal of what we've done as marketers we've been resistant to measure and communicate back to our bosses in ways that matter to the business: where is the business positioned today? What does our opportunity pipeline look like in the near-term? Long-term? How is what we're doing today aligned to corporate objectives and moving the vision forward?

Maybe such measures have been elusive because of cost, lack of knowledge or other resource challenges. In any case I firmly believe in measuring the results of all marketing initiatives to provide concrete Return on Investment metrics to the executive suite--even down to messaging and creative execution. That's what I'd like this blog to be about -- exploring methods and ideas for providing measurable, repeatable results, particularly from a "grass roots" perspective relevant to "resource light" organizations. In so doing perhaps we can not only increase revenues for our organizations but also improve the standing of marketing and graphic design in the business world among senior management.