Who is in control of your brand?

You’d think a mobile company like Optus would understand how people use mobiles, they’d also know what devices their customers use. Somehow they seem to have forgotten these two key pieces of information when doing today’s SMS campaign.

Here’s how it went

1. I’ve got an iPhone.

2. They just sent the following SMS promoting their iPad plans.

3. Good concept…

4. They promoted a webpage to view the plans

5. The webpage wasn’t compatible for mobile

6. Good concept but Optus DM Fail!

A simple solution & lesson for us all.

When sending an SMS to your database with a URL make 1 or 2 pages compatible for mobile.

And not to mention…

The SMS doesn’t even make sense, although I guess that’s what telecos do well… complicated bills and apparently now strange iPad plans too.

“…Get Unlimited Data within Australia for $50 recharge…”

When you look at the plan webpage there’s nothing about $50 or Unlimited Data.

I’m confused.

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

Moving away from the tech crowed, Twitter has become THE buzz word of marketing managers over the last two months – and I mean old skool marketers, who haven’t used any form of social media before…

One of many reasons why Twitter isn’t going to solve your marketing problems is that of the definition of followers… It might sound fantastic that I, some guy from Melbourne, have 920 followers and that I have the power to reach 920 people with any given tweet – right?

If it was an email database, which achieves 20-25% open rate, you’d expect to reach 230 people at most.

If you’re talking about a Facebook page you might get 1-2% interacting with your page after a message, so 10-20 people.

But with Twitter, due to its nature and the speed at which it moves, you’re only going to reach anyone who is on Twitter at the moment that you post the message, which could be from 0.1-0.2%. Which varies massively depending on the day of the week and time of the day. However, 920 followers might result in 5-10 people viewing your Tweet. (This all assumes you’re posting boring content, that those 5-10 people wont ReTweet on to their followers – which is the true power of spreading your message on Twitter)

Now if you’re not focusing on reaching lots of people, then good, great, you understand social media and the importance of building strong connections, however, if you’re looking to reach thousands of people, Twitter aint for you.

On top of that I would estimate that 20-30% of my and everyone’s followers are spammers, they’re people who follow anyone and everyone and don’t really care about you…

There are a few reasons why people might follow you on Twitter, TwiTip thinks there’s 6:

1. Because they’re a follow whore! Meaning they follow anybody in the hopes they will get a follow back.

2. You just might actually have something interesting to say…that’s a big might!

3. You either have Internet fame or you’re some form of celebrity outside of Twitter.com

4. You’re one of the people that Twitter automatically recommends an user adds when they first sign up for Twitter. Basically meaning your one of the “Toms” of Twitter.com

5. You were tagged in the #FollowFridays train. Which in this case you probably have internet fame and just joined Twitter.com or either have something VERY interesting to say or your friends were tired of you stealing all their followers and/or watch your follower count lingering below the double digit count

6. Because you used a Twitter spammer site like twitterfollower.com or the others. If you don’t understand that refer to “Real” reason number 1.

All this means, is that 10,000 people following you on Twitter isn’t the same as 10,000 people on your email database or Facebook group.

UPDATE (20/5)

Jack Dorsey comments on the difference between Facebook & Twitter users here, including this comment from O’Reily

The feature has skyrocketed the popularity of users who get that endorsement — netting an average of 53,000 new followers in an account’s first week since being featured, O’Reilly writes. But it’s not the ideal solution for the user retention problem, Dorsey said.