I was speaking to a CEO of global publishing company recently. He was exasperated with his team’s knee-jerk reactions to sales. ‘Hit the database’ would be the chorus line in the weekly figure’s meeting. The CEO was a big advocate of targeted messaging, building trust and reducing churn. However, when it comes to getting the Sales Managers to narrow the communication spread at month end, it takes a strong marketing manager to stop the rot. And without any quantitative proof, how do you even start to argue your position? So, at times like this, it is always good to go back to basics and build your case from the ground up.

So, you sent your latest email campaign and you have reported excellent results to your CMO and the board. 20% opens, 25% CTR and £30,000 sales value. Big tick! Now comes the hardest part of the exercise – looking at a successful campaign and seeing where improvements could be made.

By concentrating on the series of non-clicks you can start establishing a pattern for future communications. Just like the sales executive moving contacts between hot, warm and cold lead pots, a marketer can set up dynamic groups which work in the same way. To keep it simple, these groups and objectives could be as follows:

1) Group of non-opens – get them to open the message (split testing different subject lines, personalised subject lines, check the message spam score, check the reputation of you sending IP address).

2) Group of opens but no clicks – aim for 100% open and then encourage clicks (dynamic content, research concerning previous purchases, obvious discounts/offers)

3) Group of clicks but no sales – get that sale (targeted discounts, more purchase channels – web, phone – a personalised message from their sales executive, discounts/offers)

4) Group of sales. If they have bought your service already, why tell them about it again? Probably best to follow up with an educational piece, an affirming message concerning their purchase or a customer service questionnaire.

The great thing about modern email systems is creating the above groups which update dynamically is fairly easy and after the initial setup will, need very little work from you to maintain. You can then concentrate on breaking them into sub groups which can be used for highly targeted messages based on purchase behaviour, geo-location, number of products owned, customer service complaints, event attendance just to name a few.

One further thing – Don’t be afraid to set KPIs against each group to assess your performance. And remember; if you are now able ascertain good leads sent to the Sales Team, it is not only you the KPIs apply to.

So, go forth, create your groups, have confidence in your actions and change the conversation in the weekly figures meeting.

After meeting Neeraj Sharma who works with Badgeville I realised I wasn’t alone in my understanding that behaviour is the key to understanding user engagement and holds the answers to hitting key business objectives.

This is a joint post we’ve curated in response to an article that went up on the We Are Social blog following a survey run by McKinsey Global. The results are quite alarming. You would ‘assume’ in a world where digital technology is at the forefront of all marketing activity, that brands and their employees would be actively embracing the opportunity to get a deeper understanding of their consumers and really work out what makes them tick. You know what they say about assumption though. Let me breakdown some of the excerpts in said article.

“less than a quarter of those surveyed are using analytical tools to refine their decision-making processes, even though 39% have increased access to data and insights. This reflects an important imbalance: while companies believe that social media are valuable to their brands, their ability to use analytics to better understand their ‘digital customers’ is hindering their ability to use online channels as effectively as they’d like.”

So even though 39% have ‘increased access to data and insights’, less than a quater (that’s less than 25% to those with no Mathematical ability or 1/4 for those who remember fractions in school) are using readily available concrete user data and customer insights to assist their decisions.

“32% of marketers agree that being able to generate and leverage deep customer insights is central to effective marketing, but they also say that this poses the greatest challenge to them. Interestingly, 11% of marketers stated that they face difficulty in assessing the effectiveness of their digital marketing because of the difference between traditional and online metrics.”

Why does being able to leverage deep customer insights pose the greatest challenge? Is it lack of training? Is it bad hiring? Are you not good enough for the job? Have these simple insights not yet been aired in the office? Or are people just lazy? Does your employer not care about their KPIs? Do they even have KPIs? Do they not know how to make any ROI? Is there to much focus on vanity metrics like Facebook likes? Or is it as simple as they just don’t care about the customer?

The post continued…

“Marketers are struggling to assess the impact of digital marketing because of their inability to translate analytic results into insight, or identify the right metrics in the first place. 31% of marketers feel that online metrics do not adequately quantify the financial impact digital marketing has generated for their companies. Alarmingly, 24% can’t even understand what these metrics actually measure.”

24% can’t even understand what these metrics actually measure. Does anyone else know how stupid that sounds?

Lack of leadership

“27% of respondents said they feel that they lack internal leadership on analytics. Meanwhile, one-quarter face difficulty in finding internal talent, and one in ten thinks that their HR department is ill-equipped to identify candidates with analytic skills. The greatest challenge, unsurprisingly, lies in funding. As a result of all these issues, only 4% of McKinsey’s respondents believe that they possess the necessary capabilities to effectively manage their business.”

The last quote in this post and probably the most important. 27% feel there is a lack of leadership. 10% think that the HR department can’t find adequate candidates. Numbers and analysis are for nerds right? The majority of you don’t need to know numbers because you can get by creating mildly engaging campaigns and pumping thousands into Facebook advertising. After all, Facebook is a business metric right?

Stop assuming and guessing

Lots of behavioral data surrounding the actions of your audience and your customers is right there in your analytics system screaming at you to use it. This would clearly allow you to deliver far more engaging and rewarding contextual content. If you are not using these insights to influence your marketing activity then you are just assuming the information, products and messages that you are serving are what your audience are looking for. How can brands keep making assumptions when all this incredibly valuable data is available and they have commercial business objectives to meet?

Lead don’t follow

All of this lack of understanding tends to lead brands to focus less on their website and business objectives and more on the social web. However, Facebook and the social web are actually causing brands more problems that acting as any form of solution. The social web is confusing. It’s more work. It needs far more resources than brands think. It’s unknown and it is always moving. On your website, the content and the data on it is owned by you, whereas on sites like Facebook you have the complete opposite, but nonetheless brands assume it is the answer to all their commercial problems and flock for a number of reasons;

a) Everyone else is on Facebook so we have to be there

b) There is 900 million users, jeez

c) You believe it will assist your brand reputation by being ‘transparent’

d) Your intern said it was where all the cool kids are

e) You read too much Mashable

or most likely,

f) Because you just don’t know enough about your customers and Facebook allows you to gain that level of insight you crave.

Let’s keep this simple; how many brands have made money from Facebook that they can measure? And if Facebook is used as a loyalty and influence tool, how many people know how to migrate the engagement within Facebook back to their own websites?

Unless you are a HUGE brand, it’s unlikely the referral traffic from Facebook to your online shop will make any real impact on your sales figures. Social media is; the stories that you create, leading to conversations and ultimately, transactions. Those who understand their data, know their customers and in return create the best stories (content).

A wake up call

“The time is coming when employers are going to be forced to walk around their offices and fire the people or their agencies who are not quantifying and providing real results.” (Neeraj Sharma – Badgeville) If you don’t understand your data, you don’t understand your customer. You can create as many engaging campaigns as you like but they will always lack the buy in that leads to advocacy, loyalty and long term engagement.

It’s time to stop assuming, making broad assumptions and estimating everything and time to learn the principles of data analysis and understand your users. Keep things simple, focus on the key business objectives and the behaviours you are trying to drive. Use this framework to to make a real difference rather than spending clients media budgets. If you don’t have the knowledge or tools, which is understandable as it takes time to both understand and apply the right principles – find the right experts who can, before you pay the price for your ignorance and are deemed to be arrogant by your users for not listening!

I arrived at the event and was greeted by some very young-looking professionals at the door, hosting the night. Those in attendance were, in simple terms, a bunch of young men and women in suits. Every profession was represented; there were solicitors, lawyers, chartered surveyors, accountants and even a fashion merchandiser and planner. I have to confess, as I gave the welcoming young ladies my coat on arrival, I did start to feel a bit nervous about walking into a room with a whole bunch of strangers trying to talk to each other; I could  sense the apprehensiveness of some people mingling. I couldn’t help but doubt myself for a second and think what am I going to bring to this social.

I am not really one for small talk, but I have to say after a few drinks, the environment became so much more relaxed and then the chat just started to flow. By the end of it, I had worked the room and had been involved in some fun and interesting conversations. I took away with me a boost in self confidence, a ‘satisfied with myself’ kind of feeling and even 5 new business cards, so may have even made a couple of new friends out of it. I emailed my new contacts the next day and we have already planned our next meet!

I learned from this event, however clichéd this might sound, that it’s sometimes not just the taking part that counts, but however much you put in, you do get out!  You need to believe in your self and just bite the bullet sometimes. Try to embrace every opportunity that comes your way!

It just goes to show, if you don’t give new opportunities a chance you don’t know what you could be missing…

So, when’s the next networking event and are you going?

Factors of the modern world are having a serious, measurable impact on the way we like to take information. In the age of Twitter, with its ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ approach to communicating key stories, clever use of characters is everything. Suddenly, those of us who once struggled with keeping to a 12,000 word limit for a dissertation or a 1,000 word limit for a column are staring perplexedly at a 140 character limit in terror. For the hardworking web copywriter and the equally diligent offline copywriter, it’s become more of a challenge to keep peoples’ interest.

But enough about Twitter – I’m on a 500 word limit here. And I’m impressed if you are still reading after that random aside, though only around 16 percent of you read every word and the remainder only read the highlighted words. A web story will (according to research by the Poytner Institute) experience a 2% drop-off for every additional paragraph the story adds after the traditional length of between 1 and 4 paragraphs.

The web is designed as a speedy, easy reference tool. Our patience with the content we find on it is considerably limited compared to a hardcopy piece of content, such as a magazine. For dedicated online copy that is primarily designed to inform, in the way that a hardcopy press release might, the information is communicated in a way that is both easily digestible and perfectly tailored to the new reading habits adopted by tech-savvy humans. (See this example for a perfect demonstration of how to optimise content for the web.)

Arguably, the web has offered those who write a greater challenge, the chance to write in a completely different way and to broaden their skill-set and portfolio as a copywriter, and also to say more, more often, and more freely. Gone are the days of padding out a piece in order to fill a booked space offline, along with the need to justify the paper the content is printed on. By contrast, a blog produced quickly and concisely is current, and before it becomes irrelevant another piece of copy has sprung up in its place. Rather like a conversation, the web has allowed for copywriters and copy to become more fluid, a more accurate representation of how real-time conversations occur.

As everyone can acknowledge, Christmas is a children’s’ festival, centred on the birth of a child, and all marketing is aimed at promoting the idea of joy in celebrating with loved ones. But from the moment the curtain goes up on this year’s Littlewoods ad, it’s quite clear what a terrifying change has taken place. Far from carol singers and snowman builders, this year the ads have turned the nation’s children into walking, talking brand advocates.

Yes, I know they are actors, rather like the lesser-of-two-evils gift-giving child in the universally adored John Lewis advert is just an actor. And since Christmas is all about the children, it was the next logical step in the advertising story to make children the focus of the advert.

But there’s something a little creepy (very creepy if you’ve actually seen the Littlewoods advert) about the idea of a group of children who shouldn’t, by rights, know how to operate a smartphone singing joyously about the one Mum bought Uncle Kev while clutching the latest lump of battery-operated pastel-coloured plastic that they just HAD to have. There’s something entirely unrealistic about a child desperate for Christmas Day because then he can give his parents a present, and while it is conveying a sweetly selfless message as opposed to the ‘cash for compliments’ exchange in the Littlewoods advert, it is still pushing a message that is both unsettlingly material and in violation of the spirit of Christmas. Indeed, with such strict rules about marketing to children, is it even legal? According to rules set out by the EU, it is illegal for an advert to encourage children to persuade their parents and older relatives to buy certain items. The Littlewoods ad has a song and dance number dedicated to flouting this law.

But ‘tis the season to blow the budget and flout the rules, after all. Encouraging a family to bankrupt itself to keep the kids cheery is what modern consumerist Christmas is all about.

*END OF RANT*

One of the truisms of the old world is that companies are still focused on crafting and engineering products to satisfy consumer demand.

Not that there is anything inherently wrong with this approach, after all if you’re in the software business your whole commercial model is based on upgrades, enhancements and new releases.

Most technology companies have a roadmap for their product that reassures customers and is a perfectly sensible way to focus development time and resource.

However, it’s the very logic in this approach that undermines a companies ability to distance itself from the product it makes in order to seek out true innovation inspired by the real needs of its customers.

In the main, companies who make things have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. They have deep commitments to R&D and lots of capital tied up in machinery and labour. They are (whether they like it or not) committed to a certain way of doing things, predicated by an inflexible business model.

My point is this. There is always a point of ‘disutility’ in most mature industries; cars, printers, insurance, washing powders. The annual upgrades and improvements offer little real difference to the end consumer. And to be honest we get easily fatigued with advertising messages that over promise and always seem to under deliver.

Do we really need printers that keep getting faster and faster? Do we really need toothpaste that gets our teeth whiter than ever before?

The answer is NO.

What we want is for companies to be more inventive, more revolutionary in their thinking, to break free from the traditional products they offer and re-think how they would shake-up the market if they were a new start-up.

What we want is for them to be loyal to our needs and not their own.

Maybe I am asking for the impossible. And maybe lots of companies are out there doing amazing things but they are few and far between.

It’s a simple formula. Don’t love your product. Love your customers.

Now go spread the word

1). If you sell Pet insurance, how do you turn it from an annoying necessity  into a ‘feel good’ experience?

2). If you sell Bubble bath, how do you turn it from soap & suds into a cultural movement?

3). If you sell Printers, how do you turn it from a paper spitting machine into a platform for family fun?

4). If you sell Broadband, how do you turn it from a boring old pipe into a gateway to amazing experiences?

5). If you sell Datacenters, how do you turn them from racks of boring old servers into intelligence centers that generate cash?

Whatever you have to sell, thinking simply about the form and function of your product, will never inspire the masses to adopt it.

In order to make your brand a part of peoples live you need to think in radically different ways.

You need to take your core product and wrap around it a useful, inspiring and engaging set of ideas and services that turn your core product into something remarkable, something unique, something worth talking about, something worth sharing.

And what you’ll find through this process is that you begin to start earning the attention of your target audience rather than having to buy it.

Orange is far more than just a mobile operator. Animal Friends is far more than just a pet insurance company. Zappos is far more than just an online retailer. Brew Dog is far more than just a brewery.

In this socially connected world, the power of earning attention is the gateway to untold riches.

For those brands that have a remarkable story (Animal Friends, Innocent, Zappos), the fans, followers, customers and advocates control the sharing of this. Not a bad thing if you haven’t got gazillions to spend on traditional advertising.

Final thought

Don’t get lost on your brand journey by thinking social media is the answer. Think first about transforming your brand into something amazing and then let the social landscape become your playground.

“There are no marketing experts left on the planet. None.”

Anybody who says otherwise needs a bullet in the head.

Fact: we are living in crazy times when everything we thought we knew is being made obsolete or redundant.

Fact: the only way to get back in the game is to recognise that we need to start learning all this new and shiny stuff. And not just in a superficial ‘read-a-blog post’ kind of way, but also in a roll-up-your-sleeves, get-your-arms-elbow-deep kind of way.

There is stuff to learn all around us. And it’s the people who are prepared to start learning again that will reap the biggest rewards. And no, I don’t mean a big fat pay-cheque (although that comes in handy) I mean a job that you love, a job you can talk passionately about. A job that inspires others around you.

If you’re over 38 and reading this you know exactly where I am coming from.

There are no freebies in life or business. Nobody is going to give you credit for sitting on your ass while the world passes you by. You literally have to be the change. You have to be hungrier than the next guy and smarter than the one chasing your job.

In marketing and business, the rule book got ripped up when the social media revolution collided with the global recession. Nothing will ever be the same again. The quicker you accept that, the quicker you’ll get on.

Marketing today is about embracing the craziness, the unknown and the unpredictable and trying to assimilate it with data and insights, and commercial nous. It’s about something we call ‘inspired logic’ – that rare balance between what we know and what we don’t.

Brands that get it right manage to use that mix of irreverence, entertainment and insight and create compelling brand platforms and experiences on which to market their products and services. The success of Cadbury’s Gorilla, Compare the Market’s Meerkats, Unilever’s ‘Smile activated’ vending machine and Izzy’s RFID ice cream scoopers are testament to this.

Today’s brands are quickly moving past just creating content to become creators of experiences, of tools, of applications, of value. In short – of amazing stuff. This is happening at a rapid pace – today’s technology is more mashable, flexible and adaptable than ever, and today’s social networks mean that great ideas and experiences spread like wildfire.

It’s not about buying attention any more it’s about earning it. And earning it is ten times harder than paying for it!

However, whatever the brand experience that you are trying to create is, you need to make damn sure your products and services stack up. No point shouting about a shit product.

The modern day Marketing Director or CMO has it pretty tough. All that old world knowledge becomes your competitive advantage, but only if you can fuse it with all the new world wizardry.

If we were to create a bucket list of 101 things Marketing Directors need to be able to do before they die, this is how it would begin to shape up:

1). Learn how to do wireframes for a mobile optimised site.

2). Use Facebook insights to analyse a recent campaign.

3). Set up your own blog on Tumblr and begin to tell your own story.

4). Conduct a video interview with a customer using your FLIP or iPhone and publish to video platform.

5). Learn how to design your own infographic.

6). Be able to give a presentation on Gamification and actually know what you’re talking about.

In the Crazy Age you have to get your hands dirty. You have to learn to make things, build things, create things and not just focus on value propositions and marketing communications. You have to be an inventor and an analyst as well as a visionary and a leader. You need more than just a theoretical understanding of how things work, you need a practical one.

The pain you will endure through this marketing metamorphosis will be akin to the kind of pain only parents with kids know about, when after a wild night on the beers they jump on your head at 6am.

But I promise you this: when you get to the other side it will make a lot more sense than it does right now. You will be better prepared, better equipped and most importantly fired-up by the endless possibilities that the new world presents.

So, be prepared to make learning part of life’s adventure and don’t sit back and think about the good old days. Well, not for too long anyway.

If you wanted an honest review of, say, the iPhone, you wouldn’t ask an iPhone store representative, you’d ask your peer group – individuals whose opinion you trust. And to trust someone’s opinion, you do have to know them at least a little. Have any of us out there ever said to a friend, when showing off our latest gadget, ‘yes, I bought it purely based on the recommendation of Xanadude82, a reviewer on Amazon’ over ‘yes, I bought it based on a comment about it tweeted by a key social media advocate I follow’. Though it still remains to be seen how well you can ever really know someone over social media, an individual with no agenda other than communication who tweets a positive product review on a public, easily searchable site is often a far more reliable source than a one-off ambiguous user on a single branded site.

But it does raise an interesting point about how important peer, over expert, recommendation has become. We Google our medical problems before seeing a doctor, and we ask Twitter to recommend restaurants, software downloads or for places to live as opposed to consulting expertly researched, written and edited sources. Social media is more convenient, faster, and there’s safety in numbers.

When I opened the discussion on Twitter, @Whatleydude recommended that I take a look at the following presentation. As a history student and university, I got a little excited at the words ‘church, state and monarchy’ and got my conspiracy hat, my analytical historian hat and my doom-and-gloom stick-it-to-the-Man hat on all at once. But it is interesting to see that, once free speech and open communication channels got opened up for the rest of society, the tables have turned completely. Now the previous tastemakers and taste dictators have to fight not only against each other to get their products out to the consumer, but also against consumers themselves. Don Draper’s biggest problem was McCann Erickson or Cutler Gleason and Chaough, not the man on the street. ‘60s consumers were out to be sold to by the smart ad man. I wonder how Don Draper would have faced the challenge of not only turning a consumer off another agency’s message, but off his next-door-neighbour’s opinion. Far from a country ruled by church and state, in the modern connected world of consumers, anarchy reigns supreme.  And as a consumer, whose view is most important to you – a strange ad’s or a trusted friend’s?

According to Social Bakers, there are to be four new offerings that will no doubt assist brands and page owners in their quest for social domination; or at least encourage them to up their marketing spend.

Incidentally at Hurricane, we have just launched a new crazy German fun social campaign for one of our clients; German consumer electronics brand, Medion.

With all the management, monitoring and measuring that comes with running social campaigns, we decided to take the first of these four new Facebook additions (people talking about this) and see how the ‘new metric’ compares against some of our clients competitor brands’ pages. The metric sits on each Facebook page, directly underneath how many people ‘like’ your page.

As an overview, here is a snippet from Search Engine Land regarding this metric:

People Talking about this” counts ‘stories” – structured content that people choose to share through Facebook that is eligible to appear in a user’s news feed. Such as: liking your Page, posting to your Page’s Wall, liking, commenting or sharing one of your Page posts (or other content on your page – like photos, videos, albums), answering a Question you posted, RSVP-ing to one of your events, mentioning your Page, photo-tagging your Page or liking or sharing a check-in deal, or checking in at your Place.

Ok groovy. Using Medion UK as our case study, we took the metric being presented on the page today (17th Oct) and took that same metric for nine other competitor pages. We then took the total Facebook page ‘likes’ for these brands and stuck that alongside the new metric. With a flick of a wand (excel formula) we appear to have a very basic ‘engagement’ score.

Well isn’t this interesting. The Medion UK Facebook page, while having only 2,507 people like the page (go easy, it’s been one week) has more ‘people talking about’ the page than Samsung UK which boasts 87,855 likes. The Medion UK page has fewer fans/likes that any of it’s fellow competitors in this chart but has a higher number of ‘people talking about this’ score than any of the other UK pages, and a staggeringly high ‘engagement percentage’ if you divide the number of ‘people talking about this’ by the total number of ‘likes’ the page has.

Skeptics will call it ‘way too fluffy’, but it will definitely be interesting to see how other brands and marketing managers use this metric (and the other new Facebook additions) to determine campaign success and failure. From our point of few, this shows that the Facebook ‘like’ figure will not be the definitive metric within Facebook from now on, therefore it’s imperative that page owners focus on creating a much richer and appealing experience for their audience.