Why historical Quality Score matters

by Roland Irwin ON 20 May 2013

When all of the search publisher metrics available are considered, Quality Score always seems to receive the most attention; yet it’s also the metric which search marketers have the least amount of visibility into. It’s difficult to know how to effectively improve it and assess its impact on performance. What we do know, however, is that every time a user conducts a search that triggers ads, a Quality Score is calculated based on a number of factors, including:

• The keyword’s historical click-through rate (CTR)

• The display URL’s historical CTR

• The account history

• The quality of the landing page

• The keyword/ad relevance

• The keyword/search relevance

The first three factors here on Google’s list reference performance history, despite the history of a keyword’s Quality Score being unavailable within the AdWords interface. Rather than showing different Quality Scores across time, Google displays a single Quality Score that provides an estimate of that keyword’s overall quality.

For the most part this is adequate – search marketers analyse Quality Score at specific moments in time to understand keyword relevance and performance issues. However, this one-off-style approach to analysing Quality Score fails to provide insight into how search marketers’ ongoing efforts to optimise campaigns impact upon Quality Score, either positively or negatively.

Whether it’s testing brand new creative or introducing additional negative keywords, improving a keyword’s Quality Score can lead to a lower cost-per-click (CPC) and a higher ad position. Changes in these two metrics can subsequently impact upon CTR, costs and return on investment (ROI), among other things. Unfortunately, the influence each of these best practices has on keyword Quality Score is frequently lost with time, especially within larger accounts. Imagine having to record the daily Quality Score for two million keywords affected by new creative messaging.

To understand the impact of optimisation efforts on Quality Score, search marketers need the ability to trend historical Quality Score, against other performance metrics, over time.

For example, by trending Quality Score and average CPC over a 3-month period, search marketers can understand the exact impact on cost that comes from an increase in Quality Score from 6 to 8. Trends that include other metrics like ROI and conversion rate highlight the indirect impact that Quality Score has on conversion and revenue goals.

Social media ROI: What’s next?

by Mark Cameron ON 16 May 2013

Over the course of this social media ROI series, we have moved from theory and strategy to the practical implementation of a social media plan. We looked at metrics and measurements in Part One, discussed the art of growing your community in Part Two and developed real world guidelines for the different social media platforms in Part Three. The fourth and most recent article in the series examined the utilisation of social media data for lead nurturing and conversion. In this final article, we will look at where social media marketing is heading and discuss why your company should be prepared to capitalise on this rapidly- evolving space.

Before gazing too far ahead, one needs to understand that social media has forever changed the market and, as a result, the advertising industry is in the middle of major disruption. The thematic trend in these types of articles is backed up by an Econsultancy report, which shows that 71% of businesses worldwide are planning on increasing their spend on digital marketing this year.

What’s going on? Why is the marketing industry increasingly going digital? In Part One of this series, I referred to an article titled ‘Marketing is dead’, published on the Harvard Business Review website in August 2012, which can again provide further insight. It cited research showing that 73% of CEOs think that, “CMOs lack business credibility and the ability to generate sufficient business growth,” and 77% of the same CEOs have, “had it with all the talk about brand equity that can’t be linked to actual firm equity or any other recognised financial metric”.

These damning statistics suggest that in the current post-GFC world, the traditional ‘soft’ metrics so often used to justify marketing spend are failing to deliver. Business leaders want each dollar spent on marketing linked directly back to sales figures. The need for accountability is part of the attraction of digital marketing. Every activity can be measured, in real time, down to a single click.

A far more important factor is consumers driving real change in the market, forcing brands to interact in new ways. Social media and the consumption of content through digital channels has now reached near ubiquity. While this will not spell the end of TV, radio and newspapers, digital is capturing an increasingly larger proportion of market share. Today’s consumer is sophisticated. When she wants something, she wants it personalised and she wants it right away.Only the online environment can meet these kinds of demands.

Additionally, businesses are looking to invest in new talents and people experienced in the digital field. The majority of businesses do not have the skills required to keep up with the pace of change. An IBM study, ‘Fast Track to the Future: the 2012 IBM Tech Trends Report’, found that across four technology areas – mobile, business analytics, cloud and social business – only one in 10 organisations had all the skills it needed.

Within each area, roughly one-quarter reported major skill gaps and 60% or more reported moderate to major shortfalls. An integrated approach to digital marketing would address all of these areas, so it makes sense to invest wisely.

With all of this budget upheaval, the one thing we can be sure of is that the marketing industry is undergoing a transformation. When it emerges from this phase it will be permanently altered – and this is a really big deal.

As the famous management author Peter Drucker once said, “Business has only two basic functions: marketing and innovation.” Digital communication gives the brands of today the ability to address both of these functions at once. But it is going to take a drastically different approach to digital marketing to do this effectively. Banner ads and landing pages are no longer enough. The future of digital marketing needs to have social media, and the data it generates, at its core.

BUSINESSES ARE LOOKING TO INVEST IN NEW TALENTS AND PEOPLE EXPERIENCED IN THE DIGITAL FIELD. A 2012 IBM STUDY FOUND THAT ACROSS FOUR TECHNOLOGY AREAS, ONLY ONE IN 10 ORGANISATIONS HAD ALL THE SKILLS IT NEEDED.

What will be happening in the next few months? What are the trends that brands need to be aware of? How can we see beyond the complexity of technology and find the opportunity that really exists? You can be sure that any strategy that is not focused on data-utilisation won’t get off the ground. As The New York Times stated in an article titled ‘Marketers celebrate glimmers of recovery’ in 2011: “Data rules… content may be king in media, but, in advertising, it is data.”

While I don’t have a crystal ball, providing commentary on the digital space in publications across the world allows me to take a step back and see how things are evolving. Below is what I see coming.

CONTENT WILL START TO TAKE CENTRE STAGE

Marketing professionals are quickly moving beyond understanding digital and social platforms and are now focusing on how to make their chosen digital communications channels come alive. A recent study by Econsultancy found that only 38% of companies surveyed had a developed content strategy in place, but 90% believed it would come into focus over the next 12 months. In the TV-centric advertising world, the creative firepower of the storyteller for the 30-second spot became the hero. Similarly, the skilful weaver of the digital narrative will be what every brand is looking for.

AGENCIES THAT CAN DEMONSTRATE ROI WILL LEAD THE WAY

The advertising industry is currently going through disruption. One of the major factors driving this change is the huge volumes of unstructured data available. Unlike having a set of predefined fields that fill a database, such as old style CRMs or competition entry forms, unstructured data is conversations, interactions and preferences such as Facebook ‘Likes’ that will be different for each customer.

The forward thinking companies are now firmly focused on generating conversion-focused insights out of unstructured social media data.

BRAND DATA PLATFORMS WILL COME INTO FOCUS

In mid-January, Nike quietly released a framework for developers to connect to its Nike+ platform. For those of you who don’t know, Nike+ lets you put sensors in your shoes and track how you are using your trainers.

In doing this, Nike has managed to build a data platform that extends its connection with its customers for the whole life of the trainers, creating much deeper relationships and new opportunities to sell product. With the release of the new developer framework, Nike is making a transition from active clothing product brand to active technology brand. It wants to effectively own the active lifestyle data space.

COMPANY INTERNAL INVESTMENT WILL INCREASE SIGNIFICANTLY

Not so long ago the terms ‘community manager’ and ‘social data analyst’ didn’t exist. Now every major brand is investing in resources with titles like these. Companies have learned, some the hard way, that community building is not only important, but requires well-developed skills.

BRANDS WILL WORK OUT HOW TO USE FACEBOOK

Most businesses have been lost when it comes to Facebook. There has been a lot of hype, many mistakes and the occasional spectacular success. The lessons from this experimentation have been learned and brands are looking to drive real business results from the communities they have invested in. There is no one ‘Facebook formula’, but there is a right way for each brand.

It is not only the brands who have been learning. Facebook itself has been trying to get its offering to businesses right. This year, we’ll see the social media giant step up its game and offer a range of enterprise- oriented tools and training to help brands realise the potential of the platform.

MARKETERS WILL BEGIN TO THINK ABOUT ‘CLOSING THE LOOP’

It’s interesting to look at the spectrum of data available from a marketing perspective. Facebook knows what people are doing, Google knows what people want, companies like Amazon know what people are buying and brand platforms like Nike+ will make it possible to know how product is used. Pulling all of that information together will be extremely powerful for marketers. Better products and services, combined with more relevant communications, equals happier customers who spend more.

Each of these developments illustrates the importance of making social media marketing techniques more accessible to the business community. It is far too easy to get lost in conversations about the technology in an industry that is moving at breakneck speed.

The technology is important, but it will only ever be a method for delivering a brand story. Storytelling is in our cultural DNA. Great stories capture the imagination and help us relate to the underlying message. For your business, compelling storytelling is essential for one simple reason – people do not really care about brands. It’s easy to forget that the business you live and breathe is not as interesting to your market as it is to you. And real customer loyalty is difficult to maintain. Developing a good story helps to make your brand interesting and attractive. The story about the business’ origins, for example, can help to put a human face on your brand.

Social media gives you the ability to tell stories in a new way. While no technology can help you construct a narrative, knowing how to use each platform correctly helps you be more effective in its telling. Finding out what sort of content your audience will engage with can be tested, and refined, quickly through social media. It’s then a matter of utilising social media data to refine and personalise your story.

There is no magic bullet when it comes to social media ROI. Of course you need to know how to use the tools, but what is more important is how you use them to engage your market. Invest in engaging your audience, and they will return the favour.

Senior marketers at a loss to measure trade show ROI

by Marketing ON 22 April 2013

A study by the CMO Council, together with the Exhibit and Event Marketers Association (E2MA), has found that senior marketers still need to find effective methods to measure and prove ROI around events and trade shows.

Findings from the ‘Customer Attainment From Event Engagement’ study have highlighted the fact that events and trade have been neglected as part of the overall business strategy, with 19% of those polled believing they were even lacking a strategy to act on the leads in the first place.

While 89% of marketers still thought that events continue to hold some level of importance and value for their organisations, only 31% considered them essential, instead opting to host their own events (44%), or go for a more targeted effort (40%).

Cutting back on promoting at the bigger shows is a brave call, considering the revenue-driving opportunities, ability to source new prospects, cultivate leads and set up face-to-face meetings, but it’s a cultured call based on the ineffective ROI measures.

“What this study demonstrates is that marketers’ attention is shifting, and now is the time to begin moving down this road of defining and tracking the value of event and experiential marketing,” says Liz Miller, vice president of marketing programs and thought leadership for the CMO Council.

With measurement being critical, there remains an absence of visibility into the conversion pipeline in terms of how it has impacted sales and revenue. Put simply, marketers can’t measure what they don’t know, according to Jim Wurm, executive director for the E2MA.

“The exhibit and event marketing medium needs to develop generally accepted practices for measuring outcomes from face-to-face marketing efforts,” he says.

Exhibit and event marketing analytics are desperately needed to inform the value of marketing spend and secure future investments, admits Wurm.

“This study is the first step in a process meant to make exhibit and event marketing measurement a fundamental component of every marketers program.”

So vital an issue, the E2MA and CMO Council will hold a symposium at the Hyatt McCormick in Chicago in July for marketers and event organisers to help address concerns. On the agenda will be the emergence of new technology to measure ROI, attention and engagement around their event exhibits in the hope of assisting the overall marketing strategy.

Marketing’s lucky number is one

by Aden Forrest ON 28 March 2013

Marketing has always been about numbers – how much you spend on advertising versus the returns it gives you. It’s always suffered, of course, from the Wanamaker syndrome: ‘I know that half of my advertising doesn’t work. The problem is, I don’t know which half.’

Wanamaker’s problem was a symptom of mass marketing. It just wasn’t possible to identify which sales resulted from a specific media campaign. If you spent a lot you’d hope sales would go up, but how could you be sure that you couldn’t have spent half the amount and still get the same result?

Direct response marketers tried to solve the problem by tracking a prospect’s activity from go to woe. They’d promote different phone numbers so they could identify the source of a sale. They’d stick codes on coupons and offer discounts for shoppers who helped to pinpoint what had driven the purchase.

Of course, while this concept of one-to-one marketing made sense, the philosophy was full of holes. Not least was the underlying question of whether you chose a particular medium because you could track it, even if it wasn’t the most effective at delivering results. And, when a customer says they decided to buy after reading a brochure through the door, what else had influenced them subconsciously beforehand?

The real issue was that marketers were still trapped close to the point of sale. In reality, our purchase decision is driven by influences over many weeks, or years. Sometimes a lifetime. Sure, some FMCGs can be bought as an impulse purchase, but for most goods and services we’d like to think we, as consumers, have a little more control. That means there are a myriad of factors that influence our decision making, at different stages through the sales cycle.

The good news for the analytical, process-driven marketer, is that a lot of that influence is happening online. Whether it’s on Facebook pages, company websites, campaigning landing sites or purpose-built apps, we’re now able to follow our prospects behaviour and interactions.

We started to call this direct response marketing, but the term was really focused on simple email campaigns. Today we’re monitoring behaviour and segmenting customers to determine how we engage with our customers. It can be a long journey, but increasingly we can trace all the interactions back to the first point of contact and see what factors are influencing the ultimate outcome. Was it a strong initial campaign ruined by poor follow through? Was there a process loophole that provided a poor experience? These days we can track more of this than ever before.

Today the process is as important as the campaign. If someone visits a specific webpage page, or reads a white paper, it might be time for a phone call. If they log a complaint it’s certainly time for an apology and some sort of incentive to keep them sweet.

It means nobody follows the same process, from initial contact to sale. Everyone is unique. It’s true one-to-one marketing.

The downside is, it’s complicated. Every eventuality needs to be considered, with an element of automated marketing sitting behind it. The wealth of data created by tracking behaviours and responses to communications allows the marketing approach to be continually refined. Ignoring the data is missing an opportunity. Following it through helps to identify Wanamaker’s wasted half of the marketing budget.

All this requires a very different marketing person from yesteryear, when a day’s work was looking at some agency creative and flicking through a media schedule. Today it’s all about understanding the process and ensuring everyone is treated as an individual.

When a company gets it right, there’s a big prize waiting. A company that personalises how it deals with a customer will help to develop an ‘earned reputation’. In other words, ‘I’ll buy from you because of the way you treated me’, rather than a bought reputation, which basically involves spending big on mass media campaigns. An earned reputation will always stand the test of time, particularly as consumers trust mainstream advertising less and less.

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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.

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.

See how all your online marketing works together

by Mark Cameron ON 25 January 2013

John Wanamaker, one of advertising’s early pioneers and often described as the father of modern advertising, famously said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Wanamaker died in 1922, well before the internet and social media started to change the game. The rapid adoption of this technology in recent years has created much more focus on delivering tangible results. Wanamaker would be amazed by the level of measurement and accountability that can be generated online. But are we seeing the whole picture, and the right numbers?

At first glance accurately attributing which online marketing initiative is resulting in conversions doesn’t seem all that difficult a task. People either choose to click on a marketing message or they don’t. The messages that get interacted with are the ones that work. This is why search marketing has become the powerhouse it has.

However, to get a full picture of return on investment, it is necessary to think through other scenarios. For example a Facebook ad can trigger a search activity leading to a site visit where finally the consumer interacts with a banner ad that has been placed through ‘re-marketing’ (targeted ads on other sites based on your search patterns). In this case how does one assign credit? Is it the Facebook ad? A search message? The re-marketing message? It can get complicated very quickly.

In truth it’s the whole journey that is important and this is where cross-channel analytics come into play. Cross-channel analytic tools are used to understand and optimise the journey that your customers take through multiple digital touch-points. You can understand where people came from before they took the final conversion action, and this means you can work out how to shorten that path. These are the kinds of tools that US brands like Macy’s, Gap and Netflix are now using to help them manage their online sales funnels.

As the online marketing space continues to evolve the range of places that a marketer can spend their budget is growing exponentially. Nobody wants to throw good money after bad so getting a good handle on analytics is vital. Better information allows better decisions. Decisions that can create important competitive advantages.

John Wanamaker had a vision for a world where it was possible to understand the value of every marketing touchpoint. Somehow I don’t think he could have imagined just how complicated it would become to fulfil that vision. It is fortunate that there are clever people out there developing ways to help tame this complexity and give marketers the tools and insights they need.

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.

70% of CEOs admit responsibility for marketers’ poor performance, but…

by Marketing ON 16 November 2012

While the above headline is an actual finding by The Fournaise Marketing Group, it comes with quite a large asterisk.

But first, some background. Earlier this year the marketing measurement company found that 80% of CEOs were “not very impressed” by the work done by their marketing department, believing them poor business performers. CEOs believed marketers could not satisfactorily prove the business case for their activities, that marketers had lost sight of their real job (to generate demand), and were not concerned enough with business performance.

In Fournaise’s latest research, as part of its ’2012 Global Marketing Effectiveness Program’, it surveyed more than 1200 corporate and enterprise CEOs and decision makers in Australia, Europe, Asia and North America to analyse the CEO-CMO tension, leading to the statistic in the headline of this article.

This is where the ‘but’ comes in.

The finding that 70% of CEOs felt somewhat responsible for marketers’ perceived performance shortcomings and reputation was largely as a consequence of them having lost faith in marketers’ business abilities and having given up on holding marketing accountable.

Only 20% of CEOs considered their marketing staff to be ‘ROI marketers’, defined by Fournaise as focusing on:

generating more customer demand,
tracking, optimising and reporting the impact of their marketing activities on the business’ P&L, and
minimising wastage.

“Whether we like it or not, what CEOs are telling us is clear cut: they don’t trust traditional marketers, they don’t expect much from them. CEOs have to deliver shareholder value. Period. So they want no-nonsense ROI marketers, they want business performance, they want results,” says Jerome Fontaine, Fournaise’s Global CEO and chief tracker.

And Fontaine has some curt advice for marketers:

“At the end of the day, marketers have to stop whining about being misunderstood by CEOs, and have to start remembering that their job is to generate customer demand and to deliver performance. This is business. When is the last time you heard CFOs whine about being misunderstood by CEOs?”

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’.

Marketers: sales ROI secondary to engagement on social media

by Marketing ON 5 October 2012

Australian marketers see social media as an engagement tool before a medium for generating sales, a new study suggests.

The survey of more than 100 senior Australian marketers, conducted by digital marketing conference iStrategy, indicates that for all the talk of ROI, being able to attribute actual sales to social media activity is secondary to building engagement.

Metrics used to measure social media success among the sample were more commonly focused on engagement and community building than sales, with 47% measuring engagement only and 20% measuring both ROI and engagement. A further 28% did not have any targets in place.

In terms of marketing strategy, 50% see social media’s role as community building, 11% a campaign based activity and 39% an even split.

The survey results provide a gauge on the marketing priorities of experienced marketers that the industry can learn from, marketing manager for iStrategy Conferences, Helen Hawkins, says.

The study also provides insights into the future of traditional media, senior management priorities, digital’s impact on operations and the impact of social on brand.

Among senior management, social media sits down the pecking order with other marketing areas perceived as more important, according to the sample. Slightly fewer believe social media boosts the dominance of major brands than believe it levels the playing field, with 25% of the opinion they’ll become more dominant and 30% that they’ll become less dominant. A further 36% were unsure while 10% believe it won’t affect brands.

The study also found that four in five believe traditional media won’t die, but will become a hybrid of new and old media.

iStrategy Melbourne will be held on the 22-23 November, 2012 and the conference’s ‘Digital Directions Survey’ report will be made available in late October 2012.