Archive for the ‘Marketing ROI’ Category
Great Targeting By T-Mobile or Waste of Money?
Read an online article regarding the new iPhone 4S and don’t be surprised if you see an ad for T-mobile. As you may know, T-Mobile is the only major cell-phone provider that doesn’t sell an iPhone.
So why advertise around content for a product you don’t have? Maybe it’s to get your attention about the benefits T-mobile has over AT&T, Verizon and, now, Sprint like unlimited data, text and talk on the “largest 4G network”.
On the one hand T-mobile is capitalizing on content in which people are interested. On the other hand, a large proportion of “iPhone news” readers are iPhone owners or plan on being one soon.
Is this a smart, targeted move by T-mobile or is it a waste of their marketing budget?
Do You Know How Much A Like Is Worth?
In this age of social media everything, companies are scrambling to find ways to measure and quantify their social media activity.
Likes, Followers, Shares and ReTweets have given way to a cottage industry of measurement tools, but, in lieu of traditional ROI, do any of these metrics, like Klout Scores and Peer Indexes, provide a key indicator for success?
I’m of the mind that they don’t. While they measure activity, they don’t translate this information into sales or at the very least learning.
Creating engagement through social channels is important. Here are a few ways to move your friends and followers into a more results oriented relationship:
- Incent people to opt-in for email communication. Doing so allows you track how they heard about you, and then you can actively market and test offers.
- Use microsites and unique URL promotions on social channels to measure interest of your fan base.
- Use coupon codes (or actual coupons if a CPG company) that are specific to a social channel to track activity to sales.
By knowing if people are coming to your site or store from social channels you can begin to measure the value of a Facebook Fan and the return on your marketing efforts. This will help you determine if it is worth growing your fan base or followers.
Social media can play an important role in your marketing communications plans, and just like any media, you need to put the tools in place to determine what its worth to your company.
Why You Might Want To Consider Having An Active Facebook Page
There is significant debate over whether creating and managing a Facebook fan page is worth the time and investment.
A recent study conducted by Syncapse and Hotspex suggests it is. In their June 2010 review of 20 consumer brands, ranging from Nokia to Secret to McDonalds, they found:
- The average Facebook fan spent $71.84 more than the non-fan on a given brand
- They are 27.7% more likely to continually use the product
- They are 40% more likely to recommend the product
- Affinity for the brand is 2.5 times that of the non-fan
Furthermore, Syncapse and Hotspex positions the average fan value at $136.38 versus a non-fan, using a formula that incorporates actual spend, loyalty, recommendation, earned media value and acquisition,
It’s no surprise that people who “like” a brand on Facebook have a greater affinity for a brand; Syncapse and Hotspex has now assigned a dollar value to it. The whitepaper can be downloaded from Syncapse.
If your audience is on Facebook, it’s time to reevaluate how you can interact with them.
Is Your Brand Indispensable?
Two years ago, who would have thought Coke and Energizer could ever be cast aside by retailers?
Well – it’s happening.
Costco recently announced it was no longer selling Coca-Cola products as a result of a price battle. CVS is dropping most Energizer products and will only carry Duracell and its private label. Following this trend, Wal-Mart continues to move towards its product mix goal of one top brand, one value brand and its private label.
Costco is betting people will continue to come to Costco and buy alternatives to Coke. CVS has used its customer shopping data to predict a minimal sales drop if they no longer sell Energizer.
What should all businesses take away from this?
Few brands are indispensable to the customer. In fact, you know your customers could find a pretty good alternative if you were no longer in business.
So what can you do to become as close to indispensable as possible?
Know your customers
- Why do they choose to buy your product/service?
- What do you offer them that they can’t get anywhere else?
- Why do they buy from your competitors if you aren’t available?
- What do your competitors offer that you don’t?
- How are they using your product or service?
- How do they use your competitor’s product or service?
(These questions can be easily answered through one-on-one interviews and quantified through online research.)
Know your competition
- What are they offering that you don’t?
- What makes them unique in the market?
- Do they partner with other companies?
Upon learning about your customers, develop service offerings that they can only get from your company. Some ideas could be:
- Guarantees
- Special hours
- Rewards programs
- Loyal customer specials
- Packaged service offering
- Something extra every time they do business with you (for example, a local Chinese restaurant gives you an extra appetizer as their way of saying thank you)
Why no mention of lowering prices on these lists? Making your brand indispensable is not about price; it is about creating value that your audience can not receive anywhere else.
How are you creating value to make your brand indispensable?
Post your comments so others can learn from what you are doing.
Measuring The Impact of Social Media
The attraction of social media is based on its ability to reach an audience with few out of pocket costs. However, social media does require a financial investment through an employee’s hours and opportunity costs.
As a result, companies need to know how their social media efforts are making an impact on their business.
Part of that impact should be measured by social media activity that was generated by consumers, not your marketing department. By measuring consumer comments regarding your company, you get a good sense about their interest in your brand – good or bad.
Two new tools can help measure this activity:
BackType lets you monitor what people are saying about your company or your competitors. Its trend section is under development but will allow you to trend activity.
Addictomatic creates a dashboard of things like flickr, digg, twitter, youtube, blogs and other tools to give you a current picture of what is being said about your brand.
The benefit of social media is bringing you closer to your consumer by understanding what they are saying about you.
BackType and Addictomatic are two tools that help make that goal easier.
The Importance of Timing
November 1, 2009
I went out to get my Sunday paper (yes, I still read the paper) to find it polybagged in an advertisement for Snickers. The bag included a coupon for a bag of Snickers’ Minis.
Does anyone else find it odd that I received a coupon for snack-sized Snickers the morning after my children are waking-up from their Halloween-induced coma?
Return on investment is crucial for your marketing efforts, but some things are out of your control – like natural disasters or a surprise launch of a competitive product at the same time as yours. However, there are some things you can control – like timing.
A few years back I participated in Bzz Agent’s word-of-mouth marketing program where they were getting people to try Hershey’s new Take 5 chocolate candy bar. The problem was they sent me the product in July in Georgia. The melted glop that remained was not very appetizing.
When I brought this to Bzz Agent’s attention, they stated they had received similar complaints and would rectify the situation. They did resend the bars – in August.
I can’t imagine Hershey’s received the return they had hoped for based on poor timing on behalf of them and BzzAgent.
Just last month, Toronto’s subway newspaper, the Metro, began running ads promoting their mobile website, suggesting that the website was so riveting it might cause car accidents. Their timing, however, was lousy, since the Toronto government had just passed legislation making it illegal to drive and use a cell phone at the same time.
There are many things not in your control when marketing, but to ensure the best possible return on investment make sure you control what you can.
Do you have any marketing disaster stories caused by poor timing? Let us know.
Reduce Customer Credit Card Usage. Increase Loyalty.
Credit card usage is a key component in creating customer loyalty, from earning frequent flyer miles to rewards points. In today’s economy can you increase loyalty by encouraging your customers to use their cards less?
A few weeks ago I wrote about the importance of keeping pricing consistent and instead adding value. This is important because cutting your pricing may impact your ability to recoup a higher margin for an extended period of time.
But in today’s economy, the pressure facing companies to provide discounts on their products and services is strong.
So what can you do to encourage consumers to purchase your product, remain loyal to your brand and keep your price consistent?
Change your model – by giving your customers the incentive to pay another way.
The average company pays between 1.5% and 5% in credit card service charges. If you have $5,000,000 in revenue and are paying 3.5% in service charges, up to $175,000 of your bottom line could be going to the credit card companies.
While you may consider this a cost of doing business, what if you encouraged your customers to pay by cash, check or bill pay by putting 2.5% of their bill (based on the 3.5% noted above) into a loyalty account for them to use towards future purchases? You would still come out ahead by $50,000.
Such a program provides many consumer benefits:
- Reduces their cost on future services
- Does not increase credit card debt (according to IndexCreditCard.com the average consumer household is carrying a $10,640 balance on their credit cards)
- Saves money by not having to pay interest on credit card purchases
- Provides value for products and services they already use
Your company benefits as well:
- Reduces transaction costs (thus benefitting the bottom line)
- Increases customer loyalty
- Provides unique point of difference
A recession is great time to change how you do business without changing your business.
Creative Ideas For Smaller Budgets
While marketing topics are seemingly endless, I wanted to hear what topics were top of mind for small business owners so I posted a link on Peter Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out (HARO). I have received numerous responses and a common theme – especially in today’s economic climate – is how do I market my business without a marketing budget?
Social sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube etc can certainly help. Email marketing is also a great tool. Word-of-Mouth is incredibly powerful. And we’ll discuss those in more detail in future posts.
In the mean time to market yourself in a way that doesn’t require much money you have to be creative and take advantage of your resources.
When I worked with a poker chip company the best point of difference was the chips themselves. They were actual clay chips not the composite ones. You could tell the difference the minute felt the chip in your hands. The client didn’t have a huge marketing budget, but they did have an endless supply of chips.
The solution: We printed a unique URL (so we could track the success of this program) on stickers which we then adhered to the back of the poker chips. We then would leave single chips in bars, casinos,poker tournaments, retail stores where other chips were sold – pretty much anywhere our target audience frequented.
The result: We generated almost $900,000 in revenue from a program that cost less than $100.
Another idea is finding someone like Jason Sadler who offers “the top part” of his wardrobe to promote your business. Sadler of I Wear Your Shirt sells himself to advertisers and his rate increases a dollar a day. If you want him to wear your shirt on January 1, it will cost you $1. January 2, it will cost $2, etc. He then posts photos on Flickr, provides status updates on Facebook and Twitter and even posts videos and podcasts on YouTube. All you do is choose your day and send him a shirt.
Contests are another great ways to generate awareness.
A few years ago, an Atlanta furniture store hosted the ugliest couch contest where the winner received a new couch. The new couch cost them nothing, but the PR it garnered was incredible.
Threadless builds awareness by having monthly t-shirt design contests and then turning the winning design into t-shirts they sell on the site.
Another idea is advertise where there aren’t currently ads.
Remember when you got your first Starbucks with that cardboard “collar” around it and how it quickly became an ad venue? Who would have thought that individuals would wrap their cars to become rolling billboards? And ads in a bar’s restroom? When people first looked to these as ad tactics, they were very inexpensive and people noticed.
We will certainly visit this topic throughout the year, but the key to working with small or non-existent budgets is being creative. Anyone can market with large budgets, but being able to make small budgets work demonstrates the ability to market smarter.
If you have other ideas please post them here so that everyone can learn from your experience.
A Horse Threw Talking Flowers For Doritos?
Photo By Robert Deutsch, USA Today
The headline of this post doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but neither did a lot of the ads in Sunday’s Super Bowl.
I am a huge fan of great creative, but to me the best creative work is meaningful as well. At $3 million for 30 seconds being clever is important, but more important than that is to be remembered.
Three days from now will you remember any of these television spots?
But the reality of the Super Bowl spots are actually not the running of the spots themselves but the marketing value surrounding the game.
Super Bowl spots are more than about the :30 during the game. In the case of Doritos the hype started in July when they launched a consumer contest to develop the Doritos ad.
For other companies the media coverage online, on television and in publications like the Wall Street Journal and USA Today around the spots started in mid-December and continues well after the game itself.
Why is this relevant to small and medium sized businesses? Because just like the larger companies, you need to make sure your marketing dollars work as hard for you as possible.
When you launch a new marketing effort (more than just a brochure) think about the following to maximize your marketing investment:
1) Share it with your customers first so they feel like they are on the “inside”
2) Send out a press release to the media regarding the new campaign. This should include industry pubs, local news, etc.
3) Post all new work on your web site.
4) Post new work online at sites like YouTube (if television)
5) Have all your employees update their status on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, etc to let their networks know of the new work
6) Send an email to your prospects sharing the new work and the message behind it
For your marketing to work your message needs to be relevant, unique and motivating.
Once that is done,to make the most of your marketing dollars look for ways to merchandise it as well. Doing so will help you market smarter.
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