Latest posts from Danny Brown

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How Visual.ly Can Help You Measure Metrics That Matter

This is a guest post by Stew Langille.

Content marketing is mainstream. From infographics, articles, and videos to images, whitepapers, and web experiences, 90% of marketers now use content to build their brands and help achieve their business goals, according to the CMI.

Yet, fewer than half of marketers believe their content efforts are effective. That?s quite a large confidence gap, but one that is easily explained.

Despite its widespread adoption, content marketing remains a relatively new practice. Content marketing requires experimentation ? in messaging, format, and frequency?to see what resonates with a particular target audience or best achieves a specific business goal.

At Visual.ly, for example, we help some brands tell their stories through videos, others through micro-content like Vine clips and .GIFs, and still others with data visualization in the form of presentations, infographics, and web experiences.

Depending on your brand?s specific goal, the best approach may include all of the above.

Measuring Content

Beyond its relative newness, content marketing has also suffered from a lack of universal performance metrics.

Do we judge a piece of content?s success by the number of tweets, shares, likes, or some other metric entirely? Even so, we struggle to place accurate value on how much a ?like?or a tweet is worth to a brand?s bottom line.

Until recently, even aggregating this information to arrive at overall counts has been a difficult task. Many marketers and PR professionals regularly cobble together data from a set of sources, including Hootsuite, Google Analytics, and good old-fashioned Google search, in order to piece together a story around their content?s performance.

And once that data is pieced together, communicating the results to internal and external stakeholders becomes similarly challenging.

We saw this issue firsthand at Visual.ly.

Clients routinely struggled to measure the return on their content investments?within a given campaign and as compared to past initiatives.

New tools like Visual.ly?s Native Analytics aim to address these challenges, helping marketers track content performance (e.g., shares, views, distribution channels) across the web, as well as provide insight into which audiences are most influential in amplifying the impact of a particular piece of content.

While marketers have historically looked at absolute counts as the definitive measure of their success, at Visual.ly, we?ve seen that pockets of users can drive outsized results for brands.

By surfacing the demographics, key interests, and online behaviors of a brand?s key influencers, analytics platforms can help marketers tailor their efforts to engage these audience segments.

The Return on Content

We took this approach with Bravo and The Huffington Post last fall, when we helped create an infographic?guide to New Orleans cooking to support Bravo?s premier of Top Chef New Orleans. The piece was designed to engage entertainment and food enthusiasts, and drove thousands of social shares, tweets, and likes in the process.

For Turner Media?s Bleacher Report, a sports news and entertainment site, we created a single interactive map that was flexible enough to be customized and incorporated into nearly 200 different articles ? each generating deep engagement among a specific fan subgroup.

The total impact was staggering: combined, these tailored pieces drove more than 2MM pageviews.

Only once performance data is readily available in a single platform can the true work of optimization can begin. Not only can marketers tailor content to key audiences who will drive their message forward, but they can also start to examine which metrics drive their business itself.

For example, a product launch?s success may most directly correlate to social sharing rates, or it may tie to the quality and volume of press pickups. Once marketers have this knowledge at their fingertips, they can start to optimize their content campaigns to maximize the metrics that matter.

And isn’t that what really matters?

About the author: Stew Langille is the CEO and Co-Founder of Visual.ly, the world’s marketplace for visual content, and a serial entrepreneur. Langille helped unleash the power of visual storytelling and infographics while VP of Marketing at?Mint.com, and subsequently, Director of Marketing for Intuit’s Personal Finance Group. Today he is bringing the same concepts to new visual formats like video, presentations and interactives, while continuing to push the boundaries of how visual content can improve and sharpen storytelling. Visual.ly’s marketplace serves as a critical global hub matching Fortune 500 brands, startups and publishers with the world’s best creative talent. Langille was also CMO at iKobo, a pioneer in online money transfer and currently serves as an advisor to 500 Startups.

Six Easy Metrics to Measure an Influence Marketing Campaign

Measurement is one of social media?s key advantages over traditional marketing and advertising.

Prior to social media?s rise as an essential business solution, marketing campaigns were primarily through print, media including TV and radio, and direct mail. The use of flyers, posters, billboards and print editorials were the staple method of promotion, often complemented with radio spots or television ads.

The main problem with these methods is that it was difficult to pinpoint which ones were working and driving foot traffic to a brick and mortar store.

If a business sent 10,000 flyers out, how could they guarantee their intended recipients saw all 10,000?

Or if a radio spot played during a certain time of day based on that radio station?s demographics, how could the brand be sure a certain percentage of that audience heard and acted on that ad?

The answer to both questions is simple ? they couldn?t. If there was increased foot traffic to a location or more calls to a call center for a company?s information pack, more often than not the source of that referral was virtually impossible to identify.

Social media changed that.

The ability to create extremely targeted campaigns, combined with platforms that measure which networks and content create the most return on investment, has made social media a key part of every smart business owner?s toolset.

This ability to measure business results is easily transferrable to measuring influencer results ? the difference is in what, and who, you measure.

Measuring the Brand Metric

There are two core metrics that brands need to measure in any influence marketing campaign. The first is the Brand Metric.

Investment

The investment metric is the pre-campaign cost of researching which influencers are right for you by identifying Micro and Macro Influencers; how much it costs to set the program up; and using that as a barometer against how much return (financial or awareness) you experienced.

Resources

The financial investment of an influencer campaign involves more than pure monetary costs. Resources like manpower (how many employees are needed and how many hours they need to allocate to the campaign) and education (how much time you need to allocate to train each influencer on your product and company culture) also need to be measured and added to the bigger financial investment.

Product

To encourage an influencer?s audience to connect with your brand from a lead generation or purchase decision angle, free samples of your product need to be made available to the audience as well as the influencer. Test or demo areas may also need to be set up for more technical-led products or software.

The cost to your company for the amount of products sent out, coupled with the hosting costs of the demo area online, need to be factored into the overall financial investment of the campaign.

Measuring the Influencer Metric

In addition to measuring the Brand Metric, the second key metric to track is the Influencer Metric, which can be broken down into three key areas.

Ratio

The biggest problem many brands have when it comes to results from social scoring platforms is the ?influencer? targeted is simply another number in a database with a large following and an amplified voice online. This lack of differentiation is guaranteed to provide poor returns.

Instead, the ratio of community to followers is key ? a thriving, interactive community that reacts to an influencer is far more important than higher follower numbers. It?s these qualitative reactions that provide a higher propensity of actions taken by the influencer?s community.

Measure how many reactions an influencer is receiving when sharing your message as a percentage of their overall following to extract a more exact return on that specific influencer.

Sentiment

Every marketing campaign, whether online or offline, succeeds primarily for one main reason ? the perception of that campaign and the buy-in of the audience.

Using the same metrics to measure your influencer campaign will allow you to understand the sentiment around the brand message, and how the target audience perceives both your brand and the campaign itself. It also allows you to quickly identify areas that upset a certain demographic and amend the message accordingly, or instigate a crisis communication response if needed.

Additionally, you can see which influencer receives a favorable reaction and adoption, allowing you to increase awareness around him or her and helping improve the perception of a less well-received influencer.

Effect

The most valuable barometer to showing whether an influencer campaign has worked or not is the effect it has on your brand.

From a brand awareness point of view, measurement needs to include:

traffic generated to a website, microsite or landing page;
how many times your brand or product is mentioned online and how many people recognize your name when mentioned;
how many new fans or followers you accrue on the social networks your brand is on;
how many white papers or fact sheets were downloaded from your website;
and how many new subscribers you receive to your company blog or newsletter.

From a more dedicated business angle, it?s much more straightforward:

how many new inquiries did your inbound sales team receive;
how many referrals did your direct sales team receive;
and how many sales were directly attributed to your influencer?s work with their community.

Depending on your product or service, the purchase cycle of your customer may be a longer one than the duration of your campaign ? include a plan to continue measuring the effect of the initial influence campaign on this purchase path.

Moving Beyond the Metrics

While by no means exhaustive, both the Brand Metric and the Influencer Metric measurement examples are key parts of any kind of influencer campaign your brand partakes in. Each metric is a guideline to the core information that needs to be tracked in each example ? your own brand?s definition of additional metrics will be determined by the results you?re looking to achieve.

You may only be interested in awareness, in which case you?d place more emphasis on what platforms will show most return; what new platforms you can take advantage of; where your competitors are interacting online and how you can insert your brand into these conversations via your influencers.

If you?re more geared towards pure sales and lead generation, your outreach and subsequent measurement needs to be focused more on potential ecommerce partnerships with peers and colleagues of your influence; affiliate sales programs for your influencer?s community; strategic partnerships with other businesses in your industry who can benefit from increased exposure through your influencer while introducing you to their audience.

Either way, determining the end goal allows you to chart a path back from there and identify the milestones and metrics that matter for each one. Get this part right, and your influence campaign will move from being a nice to have to becoming an essential part of the puzzle.

image: antony_mayfield

Disruptors and the End of Digital: The Future of PR

There’s a lot of talk about where the future of PR lies. Much like its brethren marketing and, to a degree, advertising, PR is at a crucial juncture – where does the industry go to keep evolving and moving forward?

After all, despite the great work being carried out by forward-thinking professionals in the space, it’s clear the mainstream (you know, the people that really count) still see?PR as a shady backwater mud hole. Even if out-of-date thinking skews the arguments put forward by those people, it doesn’t matter if the people reading those pieces don’t see what’s really happening in the PR industry.

So does that mean PR should just skulk away and accept that it will never be seen as anything other than a profession full of spin doctors? Far from it – but there does need to be a continuing adoption of new thinking, forward thinking, and sheer hard work just to keep beating the new thinking drum until it reverberates in more dusty halls.

Accept the Disruptors

One of the accusations often thrown at the PR industry is that agencies and professionals are clinging to the belief that they should control the message. From client news to product launches to crisis countering, only the most positive and accepting of news outlets should be used and approved.

This approach won’t move the industry forward. Nor will it help to counter the incorrect thinking that this is the norm for the PR industry.

At the same time, companies and agencies afraid of losing control aren’t seeing the bigger picture -?you still control the facts.?That cannot be changed. Whether they’re accepted or not has more to do with your track record in authenticity and openness than it does with the medium on which these facts are being reported.

This is where the Disruptors – those new channels and outlets, like bloggers, citizen journalists and?influencers?- need to be collaborated with as opposed to feared and mistrusted.

It’s not just for promotional use, either. Much like marketing, PR is often seen as putting out puffed-up information and fluff in order to part customers with their money (or, in the PR industry’s case, separate truth from fact). So use Disruptors to counter this.

Use tools like?Traackr,?Pulse Analytics?and?Nimble?to connect the dots between your client and those who can influence public perception (positively and negatively);

Reach out to third-party Disruptors with no agenda other than sending them the latest facts and news, and allow them to disseminate as they see fit;

Have an accessible area on your site where Disruptors can come of their own free will and access anything they need to create content;

Open channels to key personnel for Disruptors to connect with and question;

Allow Disruptors to create content based on facts, without dictating how that content must sound, and then share that with critics and supporters alike.

This is a basic set-up, but you start to get the picture on how Disruptors shouldn’t be feared, but accepted and worked with/respected.

Leave the Turf for Your Lawn

One of my biggest pet peeves – and not just with the PR industry – is the turf war mentality that seems to pervade when disciplines clash.

Whether it’s marketing vs. PR, PR vs. advertising, or even PR vs. PR, there’s one thing that rings loud and clear -?it benefits no-one.?Seriously, does anyone think that beating your chest and saying, “We showed them!” makes sense? Who cares? It’s not about you, and never has been -?it’s all about the result.

So what if marketing is a better lead for the customer acquisition part of a promotion or campaign? So what if advertising is a better lead for that native content program? Who cares if PR is the better lead for the overall strategy and what part needs to be placed where?

While the disciplines may still have core differences, at the end of the day PR, marketing and advertising have the same basic directive – get the result through allocating the right approach at the right time.

Turf wars are stupid. They belong in the playground where we have our little imaginary lines and flags to capture – they don’t belong in the modern business world, and anyone who thinks they do needs to have a serious look at how their results are panning out for them.

Integrate and cross-collaborate, people. You know it makes sense.

Forget the Term “Digital”

Perhaps the biggest shift in thinking, though, is around the terminology itself. For some reason, we’ve allowed ourselves to get sucked in by the word “digital”.

Digital marketing;
Digital consultant;
Digital content;
Digital agency;
Digital ads;
Digital PR.

And on, and on, and on. Why? Why is it so important to make the distinction? Does the thinking behind a strategy really change? No – the tactics, and what platforms/channels to use, change. But the overall strategy remains the same – what’s our goal and how are we going to achieve this, and then measure the success?

The thinking that the PR industry needs to adapt to the digital landscape is the exact reason it’s struggling with this so-called digital landscape, because – essentially – people do not change.

We’re creatures of habit. It’s why we’ll keep dating the wrong kind of person; or we’ll complain about the same bad menu at our local diner, as opposed to finding another diner.

Consumers are the same (not surprising, given that they’re, you know, people too). While research channels have evolved, the basic questions remain – can your company meet my needs and are your products reliable? And will I be looked after once I become a customer?

This question is asked in-store; on FAQ reading; on forums; on telemarketing calls; on email; and, yes, on digital. See the pattern? The channel is irrelevant – it’s the answer that matters. So stop focusing on how to be better at digital, and simply focus on how to be better, full stop.

It’s not that hard – is it?

A version of this post originally appeared on the Spin Sucks blog.

image: RawheaD Rex

Is Your Marketing the PITS?

When I took my marketing degree back in 2001, part of the course was learning about the?Four P?s of Marketing???Product, Price, Place?and?Promotion.

These terms have been the mainstay of marketing since the 1950?s, when Neil H. Borden published an article called?The Concept of the Marketing Mix?, although the actual phrase The Four P?s was coined by E. Jerome McCarthy in 1960.

Marketers have used the Four P?s to plan marketing campaigns, measure and gauge how well something will be received. Without using at least one of the Four P?s, you can pretty much guarantee that any marketing initiative will go tits up.

Yet as much as the Four P?s are still relevant when it comes to any kind of marketing (or advertising), one of the ways I like to create marketing plans is by something I call the PITS.

Persuasion

No matter how great a product or service you have, it won?t mean anything unless you can get people to buy it. Same goes for ideas ? unless you get folks to buy into your ideas, they?ll fizzle out.

Not only that, but unless you have a physical product to show then you?re going to have a harder time getting that all-important buy-in (and this can be from an internal point of view as well). That?s where Persuasion comes in.

The best marketers know how to persuade people that their ideas are worth listening to. This isn?t just down to charisma and a nice suit, though ? the best persuasion comes from solid information. Here?s just some that you can/should provide.

The unique selling point?(USP) of the product or service (you better have one, otherwise just let your competitors continue winning).

What it means for the end user?(ease of use, reliability, the ?want factor?, loyalty).

Manageable logistics?(what do I need to do and how will I have to do it).

Timescales and expectations?(gestation period, launch period, return on investment period ? and make this information realistic).

Having information that answers the questions you?will be asked?goes a long way to persuading your audience, whoever they may be. It?s not always money that nixes new campaigns.

Intent

Customers can usually be broken down into two camps ??Consider?and?Intent. Those in the Consider camp will often look at a product or an advert and think, ?That looks nice?, but never actually do anything else. Those in the Intent camp, however, are the ones that are more likely to move to the buying stage.

The trick is to make Considers into Intents.

How you do this depends on your business and audience, but each method you use should be one that tips the balance from Consider to Intent.

A strong call-to-action.?This can be replying to a text SMS message for more information or signing up for a newsletter.

Time-urgent details.?Make a close-off date for an offer and stick to it. No-one?s fooled by ?this weekend only? anymore.

The nature of desire.?Sex sells. It doesn?t need to be physical sex ? turn your customer?s mind on and make them desire you.

Relevance of the offer. If your product isn’t relevant to the audience, it doesn’t matter if you have the world’s greatest marketer in your employ – the product won’t ship, or your efforts will backfire. Just ask Shutterfly about that.

Every single thing we do, either in life or business, is a consideration. Even automatic reflexes happen because at one stage we had to consider whether we needed to react or protect from an action. Intent, though, happens because of the after-effects of consideration.

Show your customer there?s an after-effect worth having and the intent to discover it will be there.

Traction

If you look at some of the most successful products or services, it?s for one simple reason ??traction.

The ability to take something new and ingrain it into the hearts and minds of customers and competitors alike is where real success lies. Traction in your customers relates to sales; traction in your competitors relates to being ahead of the game.

So how do you build traction?

Don?t always reinvent the wheel. It takes time, research and money to build from scratch. Can you take an existing product and add something that?s sorely missing?

Support networks.?Regular readers of this blog know how much I love the Livefyre comment system. Yet it’s not the cool features that keep me coming back to Livefyre whenever I revert to native WordPress, or try other systems – it’s the stellar customer support that Livefyre gives to every single one of its users. Too many companies only offer that support to tiered accounts; treat every customer as important and you’ll see the traction build.

Open your gates.?One of the most successful video games of all time is?Half-Life. Released in 1998, it?s a first-person shooter with a great storyline too. But what set Half-Life apart is the level builder that developers Valve released, allowing gamers to build their own levels and share across the web, leading to a?thriving product?years after the first shipment. Adaptability is key to any success.

A solid engine room.?The iPod isn?t the success it is because of design or geek love ? it?s because of iTunes. No matter what system you have, iTunes just?works?? allowing it to change with you as your product preference changes too. It?s the iTunes engine room that makes the front-end so sexy.

Gaining traction is one of the Holy Grail?s of any business. How to get it should be one of your priorities in the planning stage.

Sketchability

When I was a kid growing up in the U.K., one of my favourite TV shows was by a guy called?Tony Hart. Hart was an artist who took the scholastic approach to art and turned it on its head, allowing anyone to use any product and sketch something cool.

The great thing about Hart?s art was its ability to be changed on the fly and made into something completely different. It?s this sketchability ? the ability to sketch an idea and then have the option to erase/amend and sketch a new approach ? that turns a good marketing plan into a much better one.

Give everyone a pencil. Too many marketing plans silo themselves from other company inputs. But real insight can come from many places.

Customer service?could offer great insights on frustration factors;
Distribution?on realistic budgets and scale;
IT?on network stability and how your site will handle extra traffic; and so on.

Simply put, give everyone a pencil and see what pictures get drawn.

I?m a huge fan of the Four P?s of Marketing. I know they work; I?ve used them for years. But I also know you need to adapt and have more than just the existing to compete in any market.

The PITS is one of these adaptations. How about you – how are you adapting?

image: loopoboy 2.0