Who is in control of your brand?

Anita over at Small Business Trends asked a bunch of marketing experts a simple question “Please share one of your best kept marketing secrets” and got a bunch of great responses.

Here are a few that rung true to me and may be relevant to you too.

1. Seth Godin, SethGodin.com – “Make promises and keep them. So obvious, it’s become a secret.”
2. Jackie Huba, Church of the Customer – “Attracting is the new selling. It is the least-visible, and least-examined principle behind most companies today that are growing quickly through word of mouth.”
3. Andy Birol, Author of “The 5 Catalysts to 7 Figure Growth” – “In striving to please their customers, too many marketers believe they must exceed expectations. Better yet, marketers should just ask and listen, for what they will learn and hear is often a different, more modest need, which when fulfilled, will profitably delight the customer.”
4. Siamak Taghaddos, GotVMail Communications – “People don’t like to be sold. If they did, they would spend all their free time in car dealerships. Instead, people want to be informed, they want to be educated. You’ll find your best customers are those you educate about your product or service and who then decide to purchase it because it is a good fit for them.
   Prospects who buy your product/service but are not educated about your offering will be disappointed. They will not be return customers. Worse, they will tell others how they got ‘sold’ by you. In the Internet age, this can quickly be very destructive to your business.”
5. John Battelle, Searchblog – “The best kept secret in marketing is to invest your time in eliciting and responding to your customer’s feedback, even if it’s negative. It’s the secret to building a network of evangelists who keep on giving back to your business ….”
6. Guy Kawasaki, Truemors – “Do the opposite of what bloggers think you should do.”
7. Matt McGee, Small Business SEM – “SEO is just like traditional marketing. In the “real world,” you want to create a great product and get people talking about it. Online, you want to create great content and get people linking to it. Same theory, and often the same techniques. Develop relationships with journalists offline; do the same with bloggers online. Engage with customers offline; engage in social communities online. Give people something to talk about (and link to), join the conversation, and you’re on the road to SEO success.”
8. Dharmesh Shah, Hubspot – “The power of second-order Internet Marketing: Small businesses should consider the positive marketing impact of “second order” effects in Internet marketing. A second-order effect is when you do not promote yourself directly, but help promote others who have mentioned you, linked to you or referenced an idea or concept that you agree with. The simplest example is when a blogger mentions your business in an article they write (even if you are mentioned only incidentally). If you like the article, you should help promote the article in the social media sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.). This is better than trying to promote yourself and can often create significant traffic, PR and marketing good-will.”
9. Ivana Taylor, Strategy Stew – “Target those markets and customers that you love that love you back. In other words don’t work with jerks or people you don’t like. There are enough customers out there for everyone and the ones that love you value what you do and see so much value that working with you is literally priceless. The first step in doing this is knowing your strengths and special gifts that make you irresistible to your target audience. The next step is to love them enough to know what they want and then just give it to them lovingly and from the heart.”
10. Tim Berry, Planning Startups Stories – “One of the most expensive myths in marketing is that lower price produces higher volume. That might be true for coal or gasoline, but not for most businesses. Lower price means, well, ask yourself: do you always eat at the lowest price restaurant? Buy the lowest price clothes? Do you drive the lowest priced car? Pricing is your best statement of value.”

They’re all so simple, but I think they’re often forgotten in the day-to-day chaos.

AdAge has just posted a story discussing a big Nielsen study on Facebook advertising. The study of 800,000 people illustrated the benefits to brand recall and purchase intent. They look at the combination of Earned Media and Paid Media.

The study of more than 800,000 Facebook users and ads from 14 brands in a variety of categories shows a marked increase in ad recall, awareness and purchase intent when home-page ads on the social network mention friends of users who’ve become fans of the brand in the ad.

For standard paid media they found a 10% increase in ad recall, a 4% increase in brand awareness and a 2% increase in purchase intent, compared to a control group. And where it get’s interesting is the impact of having both Earned and Paid which resulted in an increase of recall to 16% when ads included mentions of friends who were brand fans, and 30% when the ads coincided with a similar mention in users’ news feeds.

But the increase in recall jumped to 16% when ads included mentions of friends who were brand fans, and 30% when the ads coincided with a similar mention in users’ news feeds. Brand awareness saw similar bumps: up 2% from just a home-page ad, 8% with a “social ad” bearing mentions of friends who were brand fans and up 13% when a home-page ad appeared along with a mention of friends who were brand fans in the users’ news feeds.

The most powerful outcome from this study was their ‘other’ finding, that purchase intent increased in similar ways.

Purchase intent was 2% higher among viewers of home-page ads vs. nonviewers, but got a four-times-bigger bump, up 8% either from social ads or when ads appeared alongside organic mentions of the brand in the news feed.

And to all you digifolk, clicks only made up a small proportion of the whole picture. (Digifolk are those that have grown up in a world of focusing on click throughs, not good old fashioned reach.)

Only around 130,000, or less than 1%, “engaged” with them by clicking on them

And why’s this so important?

For years we have worked hard to get in front of our audience for 30 seconds, or half a page, with pretty profound results, reaching millions, building great brands and generating revenue. Sure now, with social media, we try to get consumers to tell each other about our message, but that’s still the same outcome – REACH.

As I’ve discussed in other posts our growing addiction to clicks is taking us away from the very valuable outcome of reaching our audience. Yes, if they click it’s great, but we all know how few do, so studies that discuss and highlight impact of digital reach – be it display, search or otherwise – on brand awareness, purchase intent and other metrics add value to our good old friend REACH. It’s not the first study of it’s kind, Nielsen released one last November – funny to see I reacted in a similar way…

Thoughts?

Some good research from Nielsen came out recently as you may have read in B&T and Digital Media that argues the value of online advertising in terms of recall, recommendation & purchase influence.

The research also revealed intention to purchase increased by 4.9% following exposure to an online advertising campaign, with brand sentiment increasing by 5.3%.

Display advertising also correlated with a rise in awareness, with top-of-mind awareness jumping 3.1% while prompted awareness increased by 3.5%. The likelihood of a consumer recommending a brand following exposure to an online advertising campaign also increased by 4.4%.

This leads me to 2 main thoughts

1. How does this compare to TV, print & radio? (using the same benchmarks & research approach)

Without context these numbers might be under or over valued as it could smash or be smashed by these other channels? It would be good to put them side by side to see how they interact. And what’s the impact when multiple touch points occur, say TV & Online, does it improve, reduce, increase, change the impact of the communication?

2. More importantly can marketers drop their addiction to clicks?

Clicks, performance & data are both the power and the Achilles heel of digital media. Thanks to many publishers, like Google, you can buy a visitor to your website. This is great because it reduces the risk, it’s not so great because the value of the exposure to media (banner, search result, edm, etc) is missed, all the focus is on the click.

So what?

I recommend clients establish an ROI (return on investment) calculator, where you add up all the outcomes from a campaign and compare it to the cost of the communication. This helps you learn & evaluate performance in a more balanced and reasonable manor. (I’ve explained how to create an ROI calculator here)

One piece of the ROI puzzle should be exposure, it may not be as valuable, but it has to be considered.

This kind of research helps us understand the value, however, we (marketers) need to assign value to it first, both rationally and in our guts.

An ROI (Return on investment) calculator can help you evaluate the performance of your communications spend. Not many of my clients have thought about it, and it’s an important place to start when getting into digital marketing.

The basic premise is that you can add up all of the outcomes from a campaign and compare it to the cost of the communication. This helps you learn & evaluate performance in a more balanced and reasonable manor.

The numbers themselves are not particularly meaningful and are arguable, however, the value is when you COMPARE one campaign to another.

Here’s an example of using an ROI calculator

The Apple Co. ran two campaigns at separate times of the year. The goal of an apple company is to sell apples on their website (who’d have thought).

Campaign 1 achieved 10,000 visitors to the website, 200 orders, 12 enquiries & 500 email sign-ups. It cost $50k to run & delivered $13k of value, which equates to an ROI of $0.27.

Campaign 2 achieved 9,000 visitors, 400 orders, 50 enquiries & 500 email sign-ups. It cost $50k to run & delivered $24k of value, which equates to an ROI of $0.49.

Now you can more easily compare the performance of each campaign. Campaign 1 returned $0.27 and campaign 2 returned $0.49, so campaign 2 was nearly twice as effective.

How to create a digital marketing ROI calculator

Step 1. Create the measures

- Visit to your website
- Subscription to email database
- Enquiry
- Online order (or booking, or request)
- New facebook friends

Step 2. Assign values to the measures

For example, a visitor might be $0.10 and an order might be $50. (Or the value of the order might actually be the sale value, or profit margin. Google Analytics can report on this, read their blog here).

Step 3. Track & add the values

Collect all the data, how many visits, orders, enquiries etc and multiply them by the value you assigned in step 2. For example, 500 orders would be 500 X $50 = $2500. (Based on example above). Then add all of these values together, this is your Outcome Value.

Step 4. Divide that value by the cost

If your final outcome value is $2500, then divide that by the media spend, assume it was $4000, that would be $2500 divided by $4000 = $0.62.

Step 5. Compare campaigns

As I mentioned earlier, the ROI value you come up with is kinda meaningless, unless you compare it to other campaigns.

Step 6. Get sophisticated

If you want to take it to the next level, you should have different calculators for different campaign objectives. For example the above is very sales focused, however, your objective might actually be awareness of a new product or service. Have an ‘awareness’ calculator would put more value on the reach & visitors, less on the orders. Then you can fairly compare awareness campaigns separately to conversion campaigns.

Also, you can apply this methodology to each piece of activity, for example, you could compare the ROI of search to the ROI of banner, EDMs or Social Media.

Here’s a template

This template should get you well on your way:  http://www.box.net/shared/i6x105jfil

Respect to Oliver from Brand Builder (@thebrandbuilder) for this charming and no-bull preso.

I totally support this approach, and glad that he’s articulated it so well. Social media isn’t about followers, twits, comments or visitors, it’s about achieving marketing outcomes, generally SALES – directly or indirectly.

It’s sometimes hard to find valuable, insightful and new information online. If you’re into marketing like I am, these blogs should all be regular reads. Whether they’re an industry voice, thought provoking or factual, each of these blogs/news sites will help you stay at the forefront of marketing. (Some are organisations and some are individuals)

These are my top 14 marketing thought leaders:

• A Digital Perspective – Jye Smith on social media, marketing and the internet
• a shel of my former self – Blogging at the intersection of communications & technology
• acidlabs – Conversation. Collaboration. Community.
• Ad Age – CMO Strategy
• Chris Brogan – Solving business strategy challenges with social media
• Laurel Papworth – The business of being social
• Marketing Charts – Charts and data for marketers in web and Excel format
• Marketing Magazine
• Mumbrella – Everything under Australian media & marketing umbrella
• Servant of Chaos – A blog by Gavin Heaton
• Seth’s Blog – A blog by Seth Godin
• The Steve Rubel Lifestream – Daily links, insights, photos, videos and more on emerging technology.
• Web strategy by Jeremiah Owyang – Social Media, Web Marketing
• Love Digital – A weekly interview podcast – digital marketing
• Come Together – Thoughts on community and conversation

Is there something you read regularly that you would add to this list? Or do you disagree with one of my recommendations? Post a comment.

I visited a site where lots of people are able to contribute content about Twitter. I posted the content below on the 14th of April and to my surprise there haven’t been any since.

1. Twitter should be an extension of your social media communications plan, and a connector throughout the plan

2. Just because you’re followed by 45,052 people, it doesn’t they all want to buy your product

3. Aim to be followed by ONLY people who could buy or influence to buy your product/service

4. Twitter is becoming more populated, everyday there is more quality content for you to compete with

5. It won’t be the marketing magic you’ve been looking for, but it will extend your current activity