Marketing Tactegy

The top 3 Marketing Inventions/Innovations

Guy R. Powell — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:19:29 -0400

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

Historical (not listed in historical order)

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

Market modeling related

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

Great marketers

Steve Jobs
Guy Kawasaki
Mark Cuban

Technology and tools

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

Marketing Concepts

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

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

The 3Cs (Customers, Channel, Competition)

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

+3Ps (People, Process, Physical evidence)

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

The 16Ps

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

Blatant self-promotion

(none repeated here)

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 I also like the historical references which make it all possible.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

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

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

Interesting read on the marketing effectiveness of commercials…

Guy R. Powell — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 10:54:02 -0400

At the 2009 Joint Statistical Meetings in Washington, DC, August 1st – 6th there was an interesting presentation about the effectiveness of advertising and commercial viewership. (as summarized by Laura Sanders in Science News, August 29,2009). I was unable to find the original article electronically, but here are a few summary points.

Advertising Effectiveness of commercials

For example, during the research period the cooking reality television show Hell’s Kitchen drew 2.96% share as measured by the cable box, but its commercial audience was 2.42% for a drop of 18%. On the other hand, high retention took place for NUMB3RS drawing 1.90% and 1.78% during the commercials.
David Schweidel of the University of Wisconsin – Madison did the research and looked at the drop off rates based on:

Audience size
Genre
Network
Time of day

Some conclusions:

People were less likely to avoid a commercial late at night.
The length of the commercial break
Whether there were other channels with simultaneous commercials
Dramas did better than reality TV

This is an interesting initial research based on a regional analysis (a large West Coast metropolitan area.) Losing up to 20% of an audience during the commercial break is a big difference and clearly will have an impact when the commercial ratings system starts to be implemented.

Let me know if you have any other research along these lines. Or if you attended the presentation, and have any other insights, I would love to see it.

Social Media - To measure or not to measure? That is the question

Guy R. Powell — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:48:10 -0400

I've been following a number of blogs and other posts and thoght I would put this out there. Obviously, I think you know where I believe the answer to the title question lies, but it also shows the trepdidation that many marketers have in measurement and ROI, especially when it comes to a new media channel.

Measuring Social Media ROI

It's very interesting to read these discussions about ROI when it comes to social media. They are very similar to the discussions from 10 years ago when it was also 'impossible' to measure ROI from a website. Now Internet ROI is measured everyday and generally very accurately. ROI needs to be thought of as a tool to not necessarily get approval, but as a method to do better. We may not know how much incremental revenue social media marketing is going to deliver, but we know that it is worth the risk.

Companies that have never done TV advertising before, set up their first spots so they can test to see if they worked. If they do, they invest more. If they don't they tweak their plan to make it work. We need to think of social media in the same way.

1) Take the risk and take the plunge
2) Measure results to see where we can improve
3) Determine whether it's making a difference and keep measuring.

No one disagrees with the fact that social media is the place to be and that it will be a major place to be for a very long time.

Our company has been measuring the impact of social communities for a few years now. It isn't that hard. You just need to want to do it and have the measurement know-how. Please reach out to me on twitter at @GuyPowell or go to my book site at http://www.marketing-calculator.com

Social Media Metrics & PR Camp Atlanta

Guy R. Powell — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 11:49:34 -0400

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

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

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

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

Social Media Metrics

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

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

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

Is BANT dead?

Guy R. Powell — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:32:51 -0400

BANT & Marketing ROI

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

Target Marketing and Corporate Decision Making

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

Finance
HR
IT
Marketing
Operations
Purchasing
Research & Development
Sales
Security

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

B2B Purchase Authority

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

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

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

Enterprise Marketing

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

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

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

Let me know what you think.

The long term value of advertising – The dark side

Guy R. Powell — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 09:40:00 -0400

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

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

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

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

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

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

A round up on marketing metrics activities around the world

Guy R. Powell — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 09:20:00 -0400

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

Malaysian marketing ROI

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

Social media marketing metrics

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

B2B marketing metrics and marketing success

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

Social Media

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

If you have any thoughts please let me know.

Direct and indirect marketing response, social media and Facebook Insights

Guy R. Powell — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 15:14:51 -0400

Last Touch Attribution

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

Last Touch Attribution and Social Media

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

Facebook Insights

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

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

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

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

Long Term Value of Advertising for B2B Marketers

Guy R. Powell — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:41:22 -0400

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

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

I would love to get your feedback.

The long term value of advertising

Guy R. Powell — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:00:30 -0400

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

Click now: Long Term Value of Advertising.pdf

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

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

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

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