Social ROI part 4: Designing a conversion strategy

by Mark Cameron ON 19 March 2013

In this instalment of our series on measuring the return on your social media marketing efforts, Mark Cameron discusses how to use the data you have collected to design a conversion strategy and ensure that social activity is aligned with customer and business needs. In case you missed them, you can still catch up with Parts One, Two and Three, before Mark wraps up the series in Marketing‘s April-May issue on sale next month.

Over the course of this series on social media ROI, we have summarised many aspects of social media marketing and brand management. In this instalment, we will be looking at what to do once you are running campaigns and collecting data. Specifically, we’ll be exploring how to extract insights out of your data and then how to effectively apply those insights. In other words, this article is all about social media conversion.

Conversion activity doesn’t exist in isolation, so before we dive into the details, we need to go back and summarise the progression of this series.

We started our journey by looking at how to define success and the techniques for measuring social media activity. We discussed a variety of techniques for designing metrics that get beyond the near meaningless numbers that many social media analytics tools can generate. There is no ‘right way’ to build a metrics framework, as it must be tailored and aligned to the business needs of the brand in question. However, having a handle on the options from the outset is essential.

After measurement, we examined the subject of influence. The concept of identifying influencers, such as celebrities, and recruiting them for marketing campaigns is far from a new idea. The difference with taking the approach on social networks is that anyone can be a potential influencer. As Malcolm Gladwell said in his book The Tipping Point, “There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.” Social media gives you the ability to look for influencers, see popular topics and identify where people who may influence your brand are located. This is all key information that is needed to turn influencers into brand advocates.

At this stage in our journey we looked at how to grow your audience. Many brands have social profiles, but the success of those profiles can vary. Often the reason for poor performance is that the brand doesn’t clearly state the purpose of the Facebook page or Twitter account. People join a social profile if they see value in doing so. If a person joins a page with the intention of it being a customer service channel, but gets only marketing messages, then the value proposition is rapidly eroded.

It is important for brands to focus obsessively on the needs of their customers and align their social channels to these needs. Avoid setting up a Facebook page that offers a little bit of everything (customer service, marketing, corporate communication and branding, for example), but does none of them very well.

One way to ensure that a social channel remains focused is to develop a content plan and engagement framework. An engagement framework is essentially a model that details how your brand should engage with your audience and, importantly, what to do if something goes wrong. It also looks at the different platforms your brand is participating in and what they are designed for, allowing you to optimise the content for each of them.

The content plan is less about managing the conversation, and more about what the brand will be saying. What topics will you focus on? Which channels will have which pieces of content? What will the mix of text, video and images look like? Who is responsible for putting it live? Like anything in the business world, sticking to a well-designed plan is a recipe for success.

The most recent stop in our social media ROI journey was looking at getting social media apps up and running. Apps, like Facebook apps for example, provide benefits that simply engaging with your audience does not. They allow you to collect vast quantities of data (such as demographics, contact information and behavioural trends) that can be used to inform future campaigns and contact your customers directly. It is important not to ask for too much data at once when you promote an app to your market. It may be tempting to do so, but the drop-off rate is roughly 10% for each field you ask for. Try staging the process instead, offering up another value proposition at each stage.

That brings us up-to-date with the journey as a whole, so we can now move on to discuss how we use the data that we have collected to design a conversion strategy.

Converting social media engagement is not a matter of simply putting the data collected into an email list and spamming the hell out of your audience. As you may expect, that is the fastest way to undermine all of the hard work that has gone into your activity so far. Email may be a part of the picture, but so may SMS, landing pages, mobile apps, search marketing and messages via social networks. Conversion is less about an individual channels and much more about a personalised and targeted multi-channel, or omni-channel, approach.

In a study called ‘Multichannel Consumer Research’ published in 2011 by Monash University’s Australian Centre for Retail Studies, the research showed that Australians aged between 18 and 44 were increasingly being influenced by brand messages from a wide variety of channels. In fact, the more channels the consumer interacted with, the more they were likely to spend. The study also revealed that the market is now consulting an ever-increasing number of channels for important purchases.

This change in online behaviour points to the way in which consumers’ mindsets are evolving. Not so long ago, consumers knew what wanted when they went online. They already had a good idea of what they were looking for; they searched for products or services and made purchase decisions quickly. Now people take much more time browsing online, discussing what they have found and looking for referrals. With consumers moving more of their

browsing and product discovery time online, it become possible, and necessary, to focus on personalised communications. Most people don’t like being marketed to. Trust in advertising messages is currently way down and generic messages are increasingly getting ignored. Showing that you have spent time creating a message that is as relevant to the individual as possible creates cut-through.

While this may sound like a huge undertaking, it’s actually not all that difficult. It is possible to automatically segment your database, design messages for each channel and use dynamic content to customise the experience all through one interface. Tools like ExactTarget, for example, one software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketing automation suite, are designed to do just that.

All of what has been discussed in this series is based on the model my company has designed called ‘People to Purchase’. While the social web and the technology associated with digital marketing can be complex, generating success relies on keeping things simple. This framework is designed to do just that (see diagram ):

grow and engage: build awareness by any means necessary and have a social data collection point,
analysis and insights: use the data to develop insights, build segments and work out how to communicate effectively, and
action and conversion: develop the conversion pathway that delights the audience and produces success.

There is no magic bullet in marketing. To really see a return on your social media effort, it needs to be part of a much broader digital marketing strategy. In isolation you may get an engaged audience, more efficient customer service and positive brand mentions. But when it is part of a much bigger strategic approach, it can easily be tied back to dollars – and, ultimately, this is what every brand is looking for.

In case you missed them, you can still catch up with Parts One, Two and Three, before Mark wraps up the series in Marketing‘s April-May issue, on sale next month.

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Social ROI part 3: Keeping your audience engaged

by Mark Cameron ON 21 February 2013

So now that you know how to define ROI in social media and how to grow your audience, this month Mark Cameron looks at how to engage an audience on the various social platforms and the trick to extracting valuable information from users. And in case you missed them, you can still catch up on Parts One and Two.

In the first article in this social media ROI series we outlined how to define the return on investment through social media, while in the second article we discussed growing an audience using a variety of strategies and tactics and how to define a digital value proposition. In this article, we will examine what is involved in engaging an audience, how to use this engagement to obtain data, and what you can do with that data once you have it.

The earlier articles have primarily focused on Facebook, but it’s worth knowing how to plan for each of the platforms available. They all have strengths and weaknesses. Here is a quick rundown:

Facebook: over 55% of the Australian population is now on Facebook, and they view it as personal. For communication to work, it needs to talk to the audience at a personal level. Find ways of expressing the area of overlap between your brand and the lives of the audience members. Graphics and photographs tend to work well and using the segmentation tools that the platform provides is highly recommended.

Twitter is great for customer engagement, but you’ll waste time and money if you just post links to your web-site or to items for sale. Twitter is about providing value, and building trust in the process. Engage in conversations, post links that are truly valuable and you can build a community. Spam and you will build nothing.

Google Plus has had a technical, male-oriented slant for some time, but that is beginning to change. It is growing quickly. Take advantage of this to build your reputation and position your brand as a thought leader by utilising Hangouts.

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, after Google. Some brands have managed to launch well-crafted videos that taking a very short time to reach millions. But ‘going viral’ is not easy. Plan to use YouTube videos in targeted ways to engage your audience. It is very effective, but don’t expect miracles.

Pinterest, the ‘breakout’ social platform of 2012, is essentially an image scrapbook online. Like other platforms, it can be effective as long as you think through how it will be used. If you are selling something that lends itself to imagery, then it is really worth considering.

Of all the platforms, Facebook has the most long-term strategic potential if used properly. That’s because you can obtain user data, called Facebook Permissions. The type of data that can be collected ranges from basic demographic information to information that can make up more of a psychographic profile (e.g. the groups a user belongs to, or their interests). These data points can generate deep insights.

All of this data can help you create segments and be used for direct marketing efforts such as email marketing. The most common way to obtain Facebook Permissions data is through a customised Facebook app. To be successful, you really have to think carefully about what you are asking for and what you are offering in return.

Rather than using ‘cookie-cutter’ Facebook apps, like competitions, a far better approach is to devise a strategic approach that looks at where the user’s life intersects with your brand, and develop an interesting way of expressing that through software. This type of project requires a larger investment, but it will have longevity and, if thought through correctly, will demonstrate value that will induce your audience to engage. Remember that your audience doesn’t like to give away personal information, so make the offer compelling!

Getting the art of data collection and utilisation right can be extremely beneficial for your brand. But even though your audience members have provided you with their data, it does not mean they have given you permission to spam their email inboxes. You need to keep up the process of demonstrating value and use creatively the data you generate.

That means designing a conversion strategy. And this is what we will look at in the next part in the series.

In case you missed them, you can still catch up with Parts One and Two, before going on with Part Four.

Mobile will take 50% of budget in 2017, but held back by skills gap: study

by Marketing ON 10 December 2012

Marketers will spend 50% of their budgets on mobile by 2017, but for the moment are hampered by their lack of understanding of the medium and difficulties in quantifying return on investment, according to Experian Marketing Services.

Only 4% of the 320 marketers involved in Experian’s mobile marketing study are regularly implementing mobile marketing activities, despite a widespread belief it will be one of the most important ways to communicate with customers in the future.

Head of research and consulting at Experian, Dave Audley, puts the slow uptake of mobile down to three key reasons: a skills gap in the industry, difficulty in demonstrating ROI and the tug of war for budgets between traditional and new channels.

“There’s some confusion and difficulty when it comes to budget allocation,” Audley says. “Marketers are finding its quite difficult to quantify return on investment by channel. Organisations are reluctant or not committing to investing in the [mobile] channel just yet until they fell confident that they can measure the return that they get.”

Mobile has also added another layer of the complexity to the tug of war for budget between traditional channels and new, Audley adds. “Rather than out with the old in and with the new, organisations are looking at retaining old channels; traditional offline channels are also becoming increasingly important.

“Finding the priority to put the focus that’s needed into making a successful mobile strategy come to life is quite a challenge.”

As a result, almost six in 10 are yet to test the waters with mobile, while 41% have created a strategy but haven’t started implementing it.

When asked to rate the importance of marketing channels, 53% of marketers said face-to-face communication was one of the top three most important channels. Email was rated by 50% of marketers as a top-three channel, and social media mentioned by 42% of marketers as a top three channel.

Early adopters of mobile report good results, the study found. The vast majority of respondents believed the various mobile techniques asked in the study to be effective, with mobile-optimised websites, m-commerce and MMS emerging as the most likely to be perceived as ‘highly effective’.

Email ranked down the list slightly, while custom apps were the most likely to be perceived as ineffective.

Search, display and video pre-roll were not asked as part of the study.

Perceived effectiveness of mobile techniques among marketers

experian

“In the next five years Experian predicts more than 50% of marketing budgets will be associated with mobile, particularly as traditional, above the line channels, such as TV and billboards become more interactive and entwined with mobile,” Audley predicts.

“Clever companies will integrate mobile with existing channels, without compromising other activity. Because mobile is cost effective, easy to implement and is nimble, it creates a dynamic platform where brands can create a two-way dialogue.”

Social ROI part 2: Growing you social audience

by Mark Cameron ON 3 December 2012

In the second instalment of this five-part series on measuring return on investment of your social media efforts, Mark Cameron looks at an important step in the process: building an audience (and how to deal with the inevitable trolls). In case you missed it, catch up with Part One here.

The first article in this social media ROI series discussed how to develop metrics for social media activity and measure whether you are achieving successful outcomes. This second article looks at how to grow your audience.

Social media marketing can be very effective if the strategy is sound and the execution is well managed. But that is not enough. There are now over a billion Facebook users worldwide and over 55% of the Australian population now has a Facebook account. That doesn’t mean they will all ‘like’ your page. Growing your social media following takes time and effort. Having a lot of followers on Facebook doesn’t necessarily translate into sales either, but it is a very important step along the conversion journey. There are a number of now well-defined principles for ensuring you effectively engage your audience and, by doing so, see it grow.

It’s not about you

The key to developing a high quality community is understanding that your audience is your most valuable asset. Yes, they have connected with you to find out more about your brand – but for the brand to remain relevant it needs to fit into people’s lives. The saying ‘the customer is always right’ is especially true in social media. Your brand is entering social media to engage with your audience. If you simply talk about yourself or try to sell, sell, sell, you’ll end up like looking like the boring guy at the party.

Inclusion

It is important to make your audience feel respected and tell them they are part of something that’s fun. The audience members are not ‘fans’ – they have influence.

Everyone wants to belong to something fun and exciting. So make it that way.

Invite conversation

Some brands have been slow to adopt social media. They have been afraid that their audience may express negative views. The problem with that perspective is that, by failing to provide your customers a forum to have their say, you are, in effect, censoring them. This is not a great idea if you want to build relationships and grow your customer base. You are much better off inviting conversation and dealing with negative opinions openly and honestly.

Be clear on the rules

Engaging with your audience doesn’t mean that you have to put up with the inevitable trouble makers that online media seems to successfully attract. In your brand community, irrespective of the social media platform you are using, it pays to be up front and clear about what is acceptable and what is not. If you have to remove a comment, let everyone, including the person who wrote it, know why you took it down.

Use apps

If you are not using apps on your Facebook page you are missing out on a big opportunity to generate value. The ‘Big Data’ that apps can generate is really the start of the conversion process and a key determinant of the ROI. We’ll discuss this point in more detail in the next article in this series.

Develop a content plan

Growing your social media audience requires that you to publish content. Approaching this in an ad hoc way is a formula for failure. There is nothing worse than seeing the Facebook page of a brand that has been ignored because a clear plan was not in place. In the end, growing your audience really boils down to common sense, proper planning, clear strategy, good execution and the willingness to spend some time and money. But the really clever part comes next – once you step back, look at the data that you have collected from your audience and work out how to use it to generate sales. That’s for my next article.

In case you missed it, you can catch up with Part One here, or continue to Part Three, ‘Keeping your audience engaged‘.

Facebook seeks to put advertising concerns to rest with ROI tool

by Marketing ON 20 November 2012

Facebook will attempt to put to rest questions over the value of its advertising solutions with the launch of a tool to help marketers track return on investment on their campaigns.

The company, which went public in May, is testing a tool that it claims will help marketers track ROI from ad campaigns on its platform, Marketing UK reports. The tool will track conversions or responses to Facebook ads that take place outside of the social network, such as click throughs and sales on ecommerce sites.

Since floating, pressure from marketers to prove the ROI of its advertising has mounted, forcing it to bow to the “highly requested” demand for definitive proof of ROI.

Marketing UK (no relations to this Marketing magazine) reports:

“Facebook claims the tool, which is available via its Ads Manager, will help marketers optimise future campaigns for better ROI. It also enables advertisers to use optimised cost per impression (CPM) bidding, to show ads to people more likely to convert on their off-Facebook site.”

The social network plans to roll out the tool globally at the end of this month. While it will focus on click attribution responses for etailers, the tool is aimed at helping all direct response marketers, according to Marketing UK.

One of the trial cases for the tool, designer items retailer Fab.com, has dropped its cost per acquisition by 39% after optimising its CPM using the tool, Facebook claims.

Facebook has come under heavy scrutiny since going public, with a number of sources calling the value of its network as a marketing tool into question and accusations of cherry picking data in an attempt to put to rest such questions. Advertisers, including General Motors, pulled their ad spend from Facebook amid claims it was ineffective.

Social ROI part 1: Marketing’s broken, it’s time to fix the problem

by Mark Cameron ON 24 October 2012

Mark Cameron kicks off the first article of a five-part series on social media ROI by taking a look at a few ways of measuring digital interactions.

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review entitled ‘Marketing is Dead’ refers to research that indicates CEOs have lost confidence in and patience with CMOs. That research shows 73% of CEOs think CMOs lack business credibility and the capability to generate sufficient business growth, and 72% are tired of being asked for money without explaining how it will generate increased business.

In this environment, the massive audience participation in and high level of measurability of social media platforms make them a very attractive option for marketers. But any strategy to engage consumers in cyberspace needs to recognise that people behave very differently within social platforms than they do in other places online. People are not looking for products in social networks, they are looking to connect with people. Thus the Google model of serving an offer based on the online action the user is taking is not working that well for Facebook.

So the race is on to develop strategies, methods and metrics that actually work in the social media space.

For example, the media interaction rate (total interactions with asset ÷ total views of asset) measures how many users agree to interact with an asset out of the total people that viewed the asset. This measurement allows us to determine how compelling any online value proposition is to an audience. The cost-per-interaction rate (total campaign spend ÷ total interactions across assets) measures the cost of each interaction with a campaign asset. The cost-per-view ratio (total campaign spend ÷ total asset views) defines the cost required to drive a user to view a digital campaign asset, such as a Facebook page, YouTube video or landing page. But even these calculations are little more than softer brand exposure metrics.

On the journey to better qualifying social media ROI, we must look at the raw numbers these platforms generate, such as Facebook likes and Twitter followers. It is reasonably simple to measure the cost of each social acquisition (total campaign spend ÷ total campaign acquisitions), which can then be used as an engagement score for a social media campaign. It tells you how well the creative concept is working at capturing people’s attention.

We can also look at social media more broadly to determine what people think of your company and if they are helping spread a positive perception of the brand. One example of developing metrics for an advocacy strategy is the number of brand advocates that have been active in the last month. The calculation to determine the active advocate ratio is simply: number of active advocates in 30-day cycle divided by total advocates.

Ultimately, what businesses are interested in is sales. The metrics discussed above are an important part of that journey, but there is still a big gap between these metrics and directly linking that online activity to conversions. Traditional thinking says that if you create greater awareness, then some of that will work its way down the funnel to produce an uplift in sales. But the effectiveness of this approach has progressively declined as the media landscape has become more fragmented. And this trend shows no signs of abating. This is what underlies CEOs’ doubts about CMOs’ credibility.

The big leap in digital marketing will be driven by user data. There is a massive amount of information held about each online user and social media gives us an avenue to access it. The next articles in this series will address how brands go about developing a strategy that allows them to make the most of this opportunity, then turn that into measurable sales.

Now continue to Part Two, ‘Growing your audience’.

Facebook to enable promotion in news feeds of non-fans

by Marketing ON 16 August 2012

Facebook has announced that brands may soon be able to pay to have page posts shown in the news feeds of non-page fans, extending their reach beyond users who have ‘liked’ the brand.

Tests of the new ‘ad unit’ will begin soon, Facebook wrote in an email to Marketing:

“Starting soon, we are beginning a very small test that will allow marketers to promote page posts to people beyond their fans in the news feed… These ads will look like other page post ads in news feed and be labelled as sponsored. We think this will make it easier for businesses to reach more people.”

The ads will appear in both desktop and mobile versions of the social network. It is another extension of ‘sponsored stories’ which Facebook made available in the news feed of page fans in March. Described as a ‘reach generator’ product, it allowed brands to pay for a guaranteed reach of 75% of their fan’s news feeds. The new ad product will allow brands to take reach a step further by targeting people who are yet to ‘like’ their page.

Facebook says they will gather feedback from participants in the test to help improve their ad experience.

Infographic: Online display advertising effectiveness and use in Australia

by Marketing ON 21 July 2012

Long dominated by execution performance metrics, the measurement of online ad effectiveness is shifting towards brand measures such as awareness, favourability or purchase intent, as advertisers seek to be more definitive about ROI.

So which form of display ads deliver? Research from Millward Brown found that rich display and video ads can be up to four times more effective at building brand measures than other formats. When combined, the two formats can be even more powerful, boosting brand favourability by 4.7% and purchase intent by 4.3% in tests conducted.

Video rated as the strongest stand-alone performer for three of the four brand metrics analysed, but for online ad awareness rich formats was the most effective generating a 5.6% uplift among the exposed group compared to the control group in the study.

The frequency of exposure to display ads also plays an important role, with higher frequency not a positive thing in all cases, the study found. Video formats were found to be stronger performers at lower rather than higher frequencies, particularly for brand favourability and purchase intent measures. In fact, over-exposure to high impact formats can drive down attitudes toward a brand, particularly purchase intent.

A constant brand and message presence in the ads showed clear benefits, with awareness, favourability and purchase intent measures more than double for those with 100% logo presence over those with only partial presence. A similar trend was noted for ads with 100% message presence compared to partial message presence.

The days of solely measuring online campaign success on a cost per click or lead-generation basis are fading, says director of Millward Brown’s media and digital solutions, Mark Henning, with these measures indicating engagement with the ad itself rather than its success in improving brand metrics.

The below infographic, developed by Marketing, sources data from Millward Brown case study analysis, PricewaterhouseCoopers’ IAB Online Advertising Expenditure Report, March 2012, analysis of MediaMind’s ad network and Mi9.

Click image for full size

BBC punches holes in Facebook with virtual bagel stunt

by Marketing ON 17 July 2012

The BBC has conducted a test to show that Facebook ‘likes’ generated from sponsored ad placements within the social network may be of little value unless tightly targeted.

The experiment, in which technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones bought ads for a fictional ‘virtual bagel’ company, found that many likes received from the global campaign appeared to be from fake accounts or users from Egypt that liked thousands of pages.

With so much of the value of the social networking giant based on its potential ad revenue, and questions over the efficacy of advertising in its tightly controlled ecosystem circling, the exercise speculated that global activity in particular, whether it be number of ‘likes’ or clicks on ads, may be of little or no value.

The page for the virtual bagel company was set up with very little information apart from a brief, vague description so that it would be of little interest to Facebook users. However, through an ad in the right hand sidebar that prompted users to like the page with the text “We send virtual bagels, just click to enjoy”, Cellan-Jones received 2999 likes in just a few days.

The ad was set to display in the UK, US, India, Egypt, Indonesia and the Philippines to users aged 13-45 years with an interest in health and wellbeing, cooking and early adoption of technology, exposing the ad to a potential audience of 66 million people.

Almost all of the likes came from users in India, Egypt, Indonesia or the Philippines, according to Cellan-Jones, with few coming from the US and the UK. Facebook’s analytics show where a page is most popular, which in this case emerged as Cairo among 13-17 year olds. Cellan-Jones made the point that some of his page’s fans looked to be fake accounts which had liked over 3000 pages.

“All of this raises questions in my mind and probably in advertisers’ minds about the real value of untargeted advertising on Facebook,” he says in a video showing his approach to the experiment. “What seems to be happening is that people in certain parts of the world are incredibly keen to click on random adverts for no apparent reason. That generates a lot of money for Facebook in the short term, but may have an impact on the long term perception of its value.”

Facebook responded to the test by saying it had “not seen evidence of a significant problem”. You can see the company’s full response to the test here.

The exercise was conducted using an untargeted campaign and in doing so makes the point that global pages of large brands may have likes from users with limited value, but it also speculates over the value of pages and Facebook ads generally using a single methodology flawed by its lack of targeting. However, Facebook in its defence of the efficacy of its system has also been guilty of cherry-picking data to paint a positive picture in the past. Meanwhile, the industry is still yet to see the full picture of the social network’s effectiveness from an independent point of view.

CEOs find marketers untrustworthy, unimpressive and disconnected

by Marketing ON 11 July 2012

Four in five CEOs have trust issues with their marketing team and claim to be unimpressed by their work, a study by Fournaise Marketing Group has revealed.

The marketing services provider surveyed more than 1200 CEOs in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific finding that 80% admit they don’t really trust and are not very impressed by the work done by marketers, while trust and value in the work of CFOs and CIOs was dramatically higher at 90% of the sample.

The negative opinion of marketers appears to be driven by a perception that they’re disconnected from financial imperatives. Over 70% of chief executives believe marketers to be disconnected from business results and focus on the wrong areas.

Jerome Fontaine, chief executive of Fournaise, had harsh words for the marketing profession, calling on his peers to ‘cut the rubbish’ in order to improve their reputation. “Marketers will have to understand that they need to start ‘cutting the rubbish’ if they are to earn the trust of CEOs and if they want to have a bigger impact in the boardroom,” Fontaine says.

“They will have to transform themselves into true business-driven ROI marketers or forever remain in what 65% of CEOs told us they call ‘marketing la-la land’.”

The study went on to investigate the reasons that CEOs felt less than positively about marketers, finding that the proliferation of new tools, marketing jargon and the ‘creative bubble’ impacted on perceptions.

Most (69%) chief executives from consumer-facing firms asserted that communications teams live too much in their “creative and social media bubble” and criticised metrics like Facebook likes and Twitter buzz for being difficult to tie to sales. The gamut of new tools and the jargon associated with them has proved a distraction to marketers, the CEOs believed.

Three in four of the interviewees thought marketers were too focussed on new techniques and jargon to understand terms like ‘results’, ‘return on investment’ and ‘performance’ in the business context. The group wants their marketers to focus on more tangible results, with 74% expressing a desire to see greater demonstration of return on investment.

The study also found 78% of respondents reported that marketers too often lose sight of what their real job is – increasing demand for goods and services in a quantifiable manner.

In the business-to-business sector, CEOs feel marketers have been so desperate to prove their worth that they’ve started to (wrongly) focus on performance indicators that are actually not theirs, such as prospect conversions and revenue. These marketers have lost sight that these are primarily sales force-related performance indicators and should focus instead on the customer demand-related indicators directly linked to their job and for which they have 100% control, the study found.

B2B marketers were also criticised for their efficacy. 71% of CEOs agreed they were prioritising the latest technologies – such as lead management, automation and customer relationship management – but added they were not delivering incremental growth. 85% of those questioned emphasised prospect volume and quality rates, and how effective communications were in attracting potential customers.

Experts wary as Facebook spruiks ‘cherry-picked’ ad effectiveness data

by Marketing ON 22 June 2012

Facebook has launched a concerted PR effort to bolster opinion of its ad products and marketing effectiveness, releasing research on the performance of its solutions for businesses.

But while the research shows positive results for marketing activity including Pages and its ad products, the amount of data released has been limited and mostly related to a few select brands. Accused of cherry-picking evidence of its effectiveness in the past, the real story could be less positive than Facebook’s analytics show, according to comments from a local Facebook adman.

Last week, the newly public company’s PR agency contacted Marketing with the findings and an offer to interview a spokesperson based in their Californian headquarters about a report conducted using comScore social media analytics, and its own research into return on investment.

comScore’s report demonstrates how different steps in the social media marketing process work, evaluating the combined impact of owned (a brand’s Facebook Page), earned (amplification of a brand’s content from fans to friends of fans) and paid (ad placements in the right hand column of Facebook’s layout) techniques. The report, dubbed ‘The Power of Like 2’ calls the three techniques, when used together, “a virtuous cycle of brand impact”.

To illustrate rates of amplification, comScore looked at the “leading brands on Facebook”, reporting that most achieve a monthly amplification, or earned media exposure to friends of their fans, of between 50 to 200%, expressed as a ratio of 0.5 to 2.0. This amplification was driven by optimising fan reach and engagement and by supplementing with paid advertising strategies, which for the top ten brands, shown below, resulted in an average amplification ratio average of 1.05.

The report then goes on to look at how Facebook campaigns impact on sales, using an analysis from the American 2011 holiday season examining the social media presence of four leading retailers: Amazon, BestBuy, Target and Walmart. During this period “most of these retailers were highly active with their social marketing programs on Facebook, in some cases soliciting customers and potential customers to become a Fan in order to get a sneak peak at their Black Friday ‘door-buster’ deals,” the report reads. Amplification rates rose by two to four times what they normally were as a result of this activity, and resulted in higher spend levels for fans and friends of fans, compared to the general public, according to an index where a score of 100 represents what a member of the general public spent.

Starbucks was also used as an example, with a control group and test group compared over a four week exposure period, showing a 38% lift in purchase incidence among the exposed group.

Commenting on the results, Facebook’s advertising communications manager, Elisabeth Diana, told Marketing that the findings support the idea the Facebook fans and advertising drive sales to brands: “comScore used a ground-breaking methology to show there is a causal link between seeing a branded message from a brand on Facebook or seeing an ad for that brand on Facebook and driving sales.”

Facebook’s own research into ROI, which was conducted across more than 60 brands, claims a return on investment per advertising dollar of three-fold for most campaigns, and for some a return of five-fold. For “campaigns using a variety of third party methodologies like panels and mix media models, all client initiated, we have seen that, in all the studies run on ROI to date – not cherrypicked – all of the studies we have run” a return on ad spend of three times or better in 70% of cases and a return of five times or better in 49% of cases.

With highly publicised cases of big brands pulling out of advertising on Facebook, such as General Motors, and criticism over their ad formats, the newly public company is under increasing pressure to display a stronger monetisation strategy.

Ben Willee, general manager and media director of STW Group’s Spinach Advertising, which runs Facebook campaigns for a number of local clients, agrees with criticisms of the social networks ad approach. “The Interactive Advertising Bureau has a number of standard formats that have been developed over the last ten years to suit advertisers and to suit the industry and Facebook doesn’t operate in that space,” Willee says.

“Facebook’s formats tend to be in a position and a size that are less eye-catching than other digital formats. In a medium that’s super cluttered, it’s really hard to cut through at the best of times, let alone when you’ve got one hand tied behind your back with a format that is perhaps not as good as it should be.”

Willee’s comments support the notion that Facebook has been ‘cherry-picking’ the data it releases to give a positive impression of its products for marketers. “Stronger brands will always perform better in any research because they’re much more salient,” Willee says. “Here you’re talking about a bunch of big American brands that have very sophisticated social media campaigns. We haven’t necessarily seen any big brands go to that level of sophistication within Facebook in Australia.”

Where Facebook can be the most powerful is in sponsored stories, which Facebook is yet to release any data on, or any sponsored ad that uses friends’ likes to promote engagement, according to Willee. “What we’re seeing is that’s enormously powerful and absolutely working it’s socks off, because people want to operate in communities and think if that person likes it then I will like it as well because that person and I are quite similar. We know that little things like that are enormously powerful. Imagine what we could do if we had bigger formats and access to richer data.”

Google Analytics to measure social ROI

by Marketing ON 22 March 2012

The curly task of measuring ROI from social media initiatives may have just gotten a whole lot easier with Google Analytics.

The website tracking arm of Google announced new analytics features yesterday that will enable webmasters to track users who arrive from social sources and if they are converted towards a desired goal, such as a purchase, or move on without converting.

The new social reports will enable marketers to determine which social channels actually drive value and which tactics are most effective. Google claims they bridge the gap between social media and business metrics, allowing marketers to measure the full value of the social channels by helping with three things:

Identifying the full value of traffic coming from social sites and measuring how they lead to direct conversions or assist in future conversions,
Understanding social activities happening both on and off of your site to help optimise user engagement and increase social key performance indicators (KPIs),
Make better, more efficient data-driven decisions in social media marketing programs.

The social reports will allow marketers to define goals and measure which are achieved as a result of or with assistance from social channels. Marketers will also be able to measure the value of each individual social channel by seeing the conversion rates of each social network and the monetary value they drive to your business.

Engagement and conversion metrics for each social network will be tied into the same reports to show how people are interacting with content and whether it’s leading to a desired outcome.

The new reports will be available for all users over the next few weeks under the standard reporting tab of Google Analytics accounts.