Marketing Results

I look forward to sharing the experience with you in a future post.

Thanks so much, and for more info on InOneWeekend, visit http://inoneweekend.org/ 

---

R.O.Why! Marketing is a Cincinnati marketing firm that helps you grow your business faster with great marketing.  We study your business, identify your marketing goals, build effective marketing strategy, and translate that into marketing communications programs that create demand and capture leads and customers.  As your Cincinnati Marketing Firm, we execute your programs with precision, measure results, and keep you informed every step of the way.  

Strategy  |  Design  |  Execution  |  Results

How do I take advantage of the new social media tools?

First things first:  Social Media Isn't New

 In all of the hype about social media, it's easy to overlook the simple fact that social media isn't new at all all.  If we agree that social media really is about listening to, engaging with, adding value to and deriving value from networks of like minded individuals, then social media has been around since the dawn of time.

So why is now the time when everyone is running around worrying about doing simple things like relationship building?

What's changed?

The tools have changed.  The old tools don't work the way they used to.  Interruption marketing is dead; we must now create interactive relationship marketing with pull effects - great content, big ears for listening, and a commitment to responsiveness.

Social Media Cincinnati Question #5:  How do I integrate effort?
 
Operating in the social media and treating those programs like silos is a common mistake.  Through your listening efforts you may find that Twitter is an effective service channel while Facebook makes more sense for content distribution.  But don't assume that your consumers won't get the information from multiple sources.

Integrate. Integrate. Integrate.

Launch your promotion on Twitter, but consider asking participants to share feedback on your Facebook wall.  Use your company blog as the hub of all content creation, and promote Twitter & Facebook as channels for additional resources from your company.  Share the best blog comments on Twitter or ask your customers to post them as recommendations on your LinkedIn page.  

Even better, automate your content creation & distribution.  Use a feedback form on your site to collect great stories - then post them to the blog.  Use the free tools from other social media sites to syndicate content to different services.

Involve as many people in your company as you can, and spread the content workload.  If you trust them to answer the phone, you should be letting them blog, respond on Twitter, or write on the company Facebook wall.

Email newsletters need to promote your social media presence, and, why not use social media to grow your email list?  

But don't forget...

Promises are not easily forgotten in the social web.  If you promise to reply on Twitter to customer service questions within 3 hours, you had better never miss.  

 Cincinnati Social Media Question #4:  How to I measure effectiveness?

Social media measurement efforts begin by aggregating conversational volume, quantity and tone.  We hope to identify conversations on a benchmark date and then measure how communications from the company, competitors and other environmental factors impact overall buzz.  As previously mentioned, we also use what we learn to categorize the buzz into actionable groups - customer questions, praise, complaints, competitor mentions, etc.  We then orchestrate an engagement strategy that delivers the value our consumers want and need.



You really can measure social media.
Once you've managed those initial metrics, however, you can, and should progress to quantifiable indicators of success and work to monetize those outcomes.

For example, what is your cost to reach a consumer today?  We know we can use social media to reach consumers at a much lower price point, but are we creating interactions that lead to purchase behavior?

You should be building a model that shows, for example, that Twitter @replies translate into X number of website visits to a landing page.  What's your conversion rate for promotions launched on Twitter?  You're using unique landing pages for each network, right?  So how's Facebook performing in comparison?  Your blog?

This is where integrating social media marketing efforts with your other programs, leveraging your search marketing keywords to drive traffic, build links, and focus on conversions gains relevance.  Hopefully you're following an internet marketing model.  Marketing over the internet should follow a sales process in the same way your offline efforts do.  

Hopefully you've laid out a clear conversion path that begins with conversations and ends with sales.  If you've done a good job of that, and you're taking advantage of the free and paid monitoring tools out there, you will easily be able to monetize social media results and tie them to revenue producing customer activity.

Social media is an effective marketing strategy, but it requires the same diligence you'd apply to any other program.

How do I manage the social balance?

This is one of the biggest interactive marketing challenges. How do we deliver what our audiences want and need in the social web while at the same time advancing corporate marketing objectives?

Translation:  I need to sell more stuff to more people...yesterday.  How long do I have to carry on the social media marketing "kumbaya" before I can get down to pushing product?

Tough job.  You're managing brand development, traditional marketing & SEO programs, event marketing, and interactive marketing communication efforts - all designed to sell more, and here comes this Cincinnati advertising agency telling you to slow down and listen.  

If we learned anything from this video, it's that we need to do a little more listening and realize that when we give our consumers what they want, they will buy more!




The good news is that we really can do both.  If you focus on answering customer questions, adding value to conversations about your products, services and industry, consumers will reward you.

A 2008 Cone Business is Social Media study found the following:

• 93% believe companies should have a social media presence
• 85% believe companies should interact with consumers via social media
• 56% feel a stronger connection with companies that do

If you believe that people buy from people they like, then forming strong connections is what your social media marketing programs ought to be all about first.

 Social Media Marketing Cincinnati Question #2:  What are the best social media tactics to use?

The answer to this question, as you might guess, is highly subjective.  Once you've found your target audiences in the social web, how you will engage them depends on what you learn from your listening efforts.  

Should we use social media to...

• Announce news?
• Sell products?
• Gain customer feedback?
• Monitor competitors?
• Build a mailing list?

The answer is yes to all of those questions, but how and where you begin in social media marketing is entirely up to what your consumers want and need.

For example, Comcast found that their customer base needed an easier way to log support requests and fix their cable TV problems.  In response, Comcast launched @comcastcares on Twitter.  The complaints over response times were piling up and so the company found that using Twitter to listen and respond actually raised customer satisfaction scores.  Now, we all hope that our customer service issues aren't such that we need to launch a new effort to calm the natives, but what's important here is to see how Twitter can become a valuable feedback loop for just about any company.  Other firms use Twitter to announce time sensitive promotions, launch contests, or simply to engage in conversations around the brand.

Dell, on the other hand found that through its early social media and blogger outreach efforts, customers were passionate about sharing ideas.  In response, the company launched IdeaStorm, and has given its consumers a voice in new product developments.  They've also used @DellOutlet to sell over $1 million of product on Twitter.  

So, best tactics?  Listen, test small and let your customers tell you.

I gave a presentation last week on the business value of social media marketing for brands, and there's some good discussion to be had around the topic.  I'll be sharing some of the points I made in this and some future posts and thought I'd get started with some of the top questions this Cincinnati marketing firm hears from marketers about social media.

Question #1:  How do I find my target audience in the social media?

There are many ways to find your customers and prospects in the social web, many of which are free or nearly free.  But before you begin, it helps to start with a plan for what you're actually listening for.  How about some goals?

• Are you monitoring competitors?
• Do you want to monitor buzz about your company and products or create it?
• Is your objective to use interactive search marketing tactics to drive traffic?
• What interactive marketing conversion strategies will you employ to turn traffic into customers?

I could go on, but again, before you start listening, decide what you're actually listening for and what you intend to do with what you learn.

The easiest way to get started is to begin with a list of your company's product and service names.  Then pull out those search marketing keywords you used for your search engine optimization efforts.  Plug those terms into Google alerts and Twitter search.  Try BackType to stay up to speed on blog comments.  Google Trends is a great free tool, Trackur has a lot going for it, and I also like Trendrr.  You can subscribe to the RSS feeds with the results and do a decent job of staying on top of what's being said.  

With the right effort, you can do a great job of staying on top of the conversations.  You can also start to identify spheres of influence, key blogs, and the notable people that are driving big conversations.  These are the folks you'll want to engage with.

If you want to get more sophisticated, aggregate conversations into a dashboard, and implement methods for interacting one-on-one with the people talking about your brands, a paid social media monitoring tool like Radian6 might make sense.  Talk to your Cincinnati marketing firm before you sign up - they may have an agency relationship in place that would allow you to avoid significant startup costs with your own contract. They can get it set up and start tracking in about an hour.

Once you're listening effectively, work to segment these social media conversations into key categories:

• Customer praise
• Customer complaints
• Product mentions
• Category mentions

Once you group these conversations, you'll find it much simpler to craft an engagement strategy with each one, making sure that each individual receives the type of response that adds the most value.




 

This little Cincinnati marketing firm has had an enjoyable set of meetings recently to talk about helping a client with their SEO, PPC marketing and a variety of other efforts.  This particular company has been investing in PPC for some time and feels pretty strongly that it has made a positive difference in their business.  However, after a look under the PPC hood, I found vague keywords, bid prices that weren't competitive enough and ad copy that could be greatly improved.

Those conversations led us to talk about search engine optimization ( SEO ), and I explained to the client my approach to search marketing.

The purpose of search marketing is to get found and CONVERT.
That's it.  Traffic means nothing if it doesn't convert and buy.  Blog readers, RSS subscribers and page views mean nothing if it doesn't lead to a conversion that you can measure.  It's about online advertising ROI.  Are you getting some?

Spending pay per click dollars to send traffic to a home page with no calls to action is a bad idea.  So is spending pay per click dollars with no plan for achieving organic search rankings.

Here's the approach I will use with this client:

1. Restart the PPC program with an aggressive effort to determine once and for all if it can profitably create new business opportunities.  
2. Revise search marketing keywords, ad groups, advertising copy, and bids to optimize the program's ability to drive clickthroughs.  Test small changes & isolate the winners.
3. Build targeted marketing landing pages that lead visitors to take action.
4. Test landing page modifications to images, copy, forms and layout and again, isolate the winners.
5. Measure results in short timeframes and document the ROI.
6. Take the insights gained from the pay per click program and fold them into an organic search engine optimization effort (we will now know what keywords, copy and calls to action work)
7. Target key pages on the site, isolate search marketing keywords into groups for each page, modify page code and content appropriately, create new content and begin the link building effort.

What's going to happen over time is this:  

• We will execute the PPC effort with precision and measure new business leads and ROI.
• The search engine optimization program will build momentum and organic rankings will improve measurably.
• At the right time, organic search rankings will be high enough to warrant turning off the pay per click program - we just won't need it - unless it's just too profitable to ignore.

Why pay for clicks (and stop getting them when the budget dries up) when you can put in the work and get significantly more traffic and conversions with great organic search results?  

This is one of the most enjoyable aspects of working in a Cincinnati marketing firm - leading a local client into territory that's unknown to them and showing them the results of exploring a better way.

Great call just now with Doug and Sara over at Compendium.  We were talking about the marketing ROI of blogging for business.  It goes like this.

1. I blog about the things I think and do.
2. I try to blog a lot.
3. I use the search marketing keywords that I know people search on.
4. I use a platform that automatically positions my content for maximum search engine love.
5. I get ranked in Google for terms like Cincinnati Marketing (#3 in local results) Cincinnati Marketing Firm (#1), Cincinnati Advertising Agency (#10), Social Media Marketing Cincinnati (#10), and about 45 others.
6. People search using these search marketing keywords b/c that's what the research tells me.
7. They find my blog.
8. They read and click on a call to action.
9. They get some value, and we have a great marketing strategy conversation.
10. Some of those people choose to engage us and help them build their business.

The recent results?

• 10 new leads
• 4 well-qualified opportunities
• 2 new clients
• 566% ROI

Not bad.  

If your Cincinnati marketing firm delivered $5.66 for every $1 you handed over, wouldn't you go find as many singles as you could?  Blogging for business really works.

I just left a meeting with a global organization that's facing the same challenges even the smallest of companies wrestle with.

• How can I build thought leadership?
• How do I capitalize on all of the great content our company produces?
• How can I use social media to start meaningful conversations with my audience?
• How can I target only those I wish to reach and engage them?
• How do I extend my event marketing plan to other channels?
• Can social media help me fill the room my next event?
  

While the answer is 'yes', it's not as simple as sending tweets with the event details.  The client was quick to dive into tools and platforms, but I'm trying to help them start the conversation at a different point.  I'm refocusing them on the market, what customers and prospects are trying to achieve, how the content the client has can help prospects in their education process, and then identifying the the conversations we're capable of starting and adding value to.  

Social media is just a channel.  It's not the strategy.

Social media is definitely a channel we will use to build event attendance, but ultimately, the client wants to close business.  To do that, we must engage the market in meaningful dialogue, and in order to get there, we have to first understand the conversations that are already happening, define the role we want to have in those conversations, and then devise a plan to add value to them vs. noise.

This is going to be a fun process of listening first, planning the dialogue we want to help foster, and using content, social sharing platforms and social media channels to engage the market and build a relationship.  I'll chime in along the way with some insight as to how the process is going.

In the meantime, I'd be interested in anyone you've seen do it right when it comes to using social media for event marketing.  Please share!

 As a Cincinnati marketing firm, I'm often asked for an explanation of how we help clients.  Here's a quick view of how we help grow your business:

1. Attract: - Generating demand, qualified traffic and new business leads.
2. Cultivate:  Building relationships with prospects via personalized marketing communications that resonate with their needs.
3. Close:  Focusing on conversion strategies - leading prospects down the path to buying decisions.
4. Retain:  Keeping customers around by developing deeper understandings of their lifecycle of needs and how the company can continue to serve them over time.

1. Brand Identity Design - imagery, ligature, logo, stationary
2. Sales Support Collateral - brochures, whitepapers, case studies, etc. - design & copywriting
3. Email Marketing - design, copywriting, implementation & the needed software
4. Search Engine Optimization - keyword research & site optimization
5. Blogging for Business - strategy development, blog software, training, content development & measurement
6. Social Media Marketing - strategy, messaging, training & monitoring
7. Public Relations - corp. communications strategies, news releases, media database development & on-target pitching
8. Website Development - soup to nuts creative strategy, design, writing & programming or in some cases, maybe you just need a great strategy to help your programmer along.
9. ROI Measurement - call to action design, program measurement & reporting

We help you define your strategy, plan and execute marketing communications that grow your business, and then we measure the efforts to make sure we're delivering powerful ROI.

Need more customers?  Get in touch!  We'd be happy to buy you a cup of coffee, discuss your goals and share our approaches.  It'll cost you nothing and you're guaranteed to walk away energized. (The caffeine will help with that too!)

Hitwise announces today that Google creeps toward 73% of U.S. searches.

Wow, if you haven't already, it's time to get your search engine optimization thing going...

• Can your customers & prospects find you if they search on something other than your name?  No?  You're in big trouble.
• Still dumpling keywords in your meta data as your only search engine optimization strategy?
• Are you executing a comprehensive content strategy & pushing it to the appropriate channels?

We don't go to web pages anymore.  Thanks to search, web pages come to us.  Are you bringing yours to your market when they're searching?


 

I had a great meeting with a fun team at a local Cincinnati company today and the topic of conversation was how to use a blogging for business platform to dominate search, aid in recruitment marketing and leverage the power of keyword focused content to extend their reach into a variety of communication channels.  

The possibilities for a well-executed blogging for business platform are endless.  While this isn't a complete discussion of the topic, I'll share some of the highlights of our conversation.

• Blogs are the ideal acquisition tool - 91% of all internet users utilize search (Pew institute); 44% of all online activity begins with search (Piper Jaffray)
• Search engines love blogs. If deployed correctly, blogging for business platforms deliver the page titles, keyword rich content, narrow topics vs. encyclopedias, linking, recency & age that search engines need.  
• Pay per click advertising doesn't accessing a sufficient portion of the market. 99% of clicks on a search engine results page are on organic links (Sherpa Search Engine Guide 2008)
• SEO by itself isn't easily scalable. To truly dominate the search space in your industry, you have to cast a wide net but with SEO this takes tons of time & effort to create enough content.
• Blogs are a fantastic recruitment tool - blogs allow you to showcase your culture and the human side.  People buy from (and want to join) people who are like them. (Edelmen Trust Survey)  As such, a blog focused on recruiting should:
  • Talk about the culture
  • Share employee stories 
  • Bring clarity to the hiring process
  • Provide calls to action to apply, search jobs, learn more
• Blogs will drive better engagement with customers & prospects & create new business opportunities. Each sales rep could easily have their own page featuring their photo, bio, blog posts, customer testimonials, etc.  One post per day from just half the sales team about one customer they helped would produce hundreds of pages of content quickly & dominate search.
• Blogging for business helps you fully leverage other distribution channels like email & social media
  • Content creation via the blogs as the central strategy
  • The best blog posts become email campaigns - these could even be automated from each rep with their blog posts populating the email! - i.e., Posts could include
    • Photo
    • Bio
    • What I'm doing this week
    • The last customer I helped
    • Here's what my customers say  
  • All blogs can pushed to rep-specific pages on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter - AUTOMATICALLY

So, how are you using your blog?  Does your blog...

• Attract employee candidates?
• Tell your story?
• Communicate your culture?
• Bring your company to life?
• Give your people a voice?  Each of them?
• Create communities?
• Drive engagement?
• Attract & share customer testimonials? (user-generated content)
• Serve as the hub of your content strategy?
• Enable you to leverage social media & other content distribution channels?
• Achieve significant search engine positions?
• Deliver new business leads?

In my view, the rate at which people these days are calling themselves experts has approached the unbelievable.  Thanks to P&G and other well known companies with a rich history in this town, many Cincinnati advertising agencies are stocked with fantastic talent.  But I think that in many respects we've created a problem.  Great experience across diverse client bases has turned many into legitimate experts in their fields.  But today everyone is calling themselves an expert - in social media, advertising, interactive, etc., and in many respects it's almost like we're expected to say as much.

Clients want us to take their data, their brands and their problems, go away for a month and work on it, strategize, analyze, etc. and come back with the silver bullet answers. As one Cincinnati advertising agency among many, for so long we've wanted to do this, and depended on appearing capable of this.

Here's (my version of) the real story.

We can't be the experts on everything, and if I or any other Cincinnati advertising agency told you that we were, would you really want to hire us?  Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours.  Seth generally agrees, but offers an interesting take.  More importantly, the internet changes things everyday.  We knew the answer yesterday.  Today we don't.  Do we have experience in your market?  Yes.  Have we solved similar problems?  Yes.  Have we encountered an exact replica of your challenge combined with the internal dynamics and external market factors that only you are experiencing?  Not likely.

Two points:

1.  Specialist, Not Expert
I think it's more important, and more credible, to become a specialist.  Instead of claiming to be a social media expert, how about a specialist at using Facebook to help luxury auto brands drive test drives?  Rather than claiming to be the Cincinnati advertising agency that's an expert in interactive, how about a specialist in helping apparel retailers build interactive experiences & communities that engage their customers and turn them into brand ambassadors?  Skellie has started a wonderful conversation on this point and I'd encourage you to investigate further.


2.  It's OK to Not Have All The Answers...Initially
So why are you hiring a Cincinnati advertising agency?  In the past we had to be right all the time.  We had to have the answer that the client couldn't come up with on their own, or didn't have the time for.  Do we really need to be that today?  Maybe what we need to be is a group of people that has experienced enough business challenges and figured out enough solutions to earn the trust from our clients that we can probably do the same for them.

I think it's the same when you try to hire great people.  You want people who have been in the trenches, but is it critical that they've solved your exact problem before?  In some respects it is, but in many others perhaps not.  What you're looking for is a smart person who has the skills and the problem solving abilities to get you through what you don't yet know is coming.

As advertising agencies, I think it's OK to not claim to be the expert.  Instead, I think we should demonstrate our specialties and get specific.  Secondly, I think if we demonstrate our experience, it's OK to not have all the answers right away.  Six months or a year into the relationship, what the client really cares about is that you are an innovative enough group of folks that can help them out of the mess they're in right now.  

Wrestle with the problem - in front of your clients.  

Apply smart thinking and proven problem solving abilities.

Work together to find the answers. 

Very interesting report out last week from email marketing services provider ExactTarget.  According to research conducted by ExactTarget and Ball State University, "a record number of email marketers are planning to bridge the gap between online social networks and their email marketing campaigns, and the number of social email initiatives is expected to grow 367% this year.

If you want to really improve email marketing open rates, create a focused effort around testing various subject line strategies.  This is your one shot to say something that matters, and your audience is sitting there scanning messages and decided what to read.  

Here are a few email marketing tips for improving open rates by working on the subject line:

• Personalize that subject line with the recipient's name.
• Say something compelling and maybe even a little provocative.
• Speak in a human voice.  Instead of "Tell us what you think - take our survey", consider something like "Brian, thanks for being my customer.  Can I ask you for a 2 minute favor?"
• Test the length of your subject lines as well.  Some will only pay attention to what they can read in the inbox, while others will glance down at the preview pane to read the whole subject line before opening. 
• Test using your brand name and/or recognizable names of key people in the subject line
• Test different benefit statements right up front.  For example, "Mary, [product name] will save you 2 hours a week.

Have more email marketing tips to improve open rates?  Please share!

The From address is one of the most common places where email open rates can get sabotaged.  

 

Your email marketing campaigns should come from a person, a real person and not from newsletters@, info@ or any other address you come up with to avoid putting a real person in there.  

When we receive new email, we often use the from address for email triage.  Face it, if you see an email from your CEO, you're probably reading it right now.  Messages that come from institutions, info@ or from people you don't instantly recognize will get pushed to the bottom of the list at best, if not deleted right away.  

People like to hear from and buy from real people like themselves.  Send your email marketing messages from a real person and stick with it to build familiarity. You'll foster closer relationships by communicating in a more 1-to-1 fashion.

P.S.  Make sure someone is reading and responding to the replies! (Ideally, the person who "sent" the email.)

• Send your email from a person, not newsletter@
• Get REAL permission for the specific campaign you're sending
• Ask subscribers to whitelist your from address
• Utilize double opt in, making your your subscribers have confirmed their intention to join your list
• Educate yourself on words that commonly trigger spam filters - and avoid them
• Use content scoring tools that analyze your content againts major spam filters
• Cleanse your list of email addresses with hard bounces & repeated soft bounces to avoid having the ISPs block all of your messages
• Use Multi-Part MIME to make sure you deliver both HTML & text versions
• Monitor blacklist reports & make sure you're not on them
• Employ SPF and Domain Keys to prove you're who you say you are and avoid domain spoofers
• Consider a dedicated IP address - if your email services provider offers it, do it.
• Throttle your sends - if you send large volumes of email marketing communications, you should employ send throttling to avoid hitting limits set by some ISPs
• Use a reputable email services provider that works with ISPs to make sure your emails get through.  This takes a lot of effort and should not be underestimated.

Have you employed any other tactics to improve email deliverability?  Share your email marketing tips!