Marketing

A Conversation About SEO, Social Media and Content Convergence

A few months ago, I sat down with Steven Sefton, Digital and Social Media Director for Think Zap, to discuss a variety of topics including the changing face of marketing; where different verticals fit; how the UK and North American markets are different; where influence marketing is heading; and much, much more.

Below, you can find part one of that chat (which originally appeared on The Social Penguin), centred around the shifting face of marketing, and how demographic buyer differences between the UK and North America impact tactics.

I hope you enjoy, and you can find the concluding part here.

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Are companies truly embracing social media (or at least?seriously considering it) or do many still think it?s a fad?

Danny: No, although it?s much better than it was just a year or so ago. The problem?remains poor information and conflicting advice. ?Be everywhere?, ?be focused?,??blog?, ?don?t blog?, ?social media is owned by marketing?, ?social media is?owned by everyone?. And on, and on, and on?

When you have that kind of confusion coming at you from all angles, you can see?why businesses are unsure on what to do next. Combine that with the continued?and very wrong assumption that social media is purely for relationships, and you?can?t ? shouldn?t ? measure ROI on it, and I?m surprised any businesses are even?considering social!

The good thing is, there are some very smart people trying to change the?conversation and move us away from the warm fuzz mindset that so many?consultants are clinging to as their business model. The trick is in getting these?people heard, versus those with the easy soundbites.

What was the last social media campaign that was a success in your eyes?

Danny:?I?m going to cheat a little here, and share the one we used as the case study in the?opening chapter of our book.

MV-1 Canada was trying to launch their dedicated,?as opposed to retro-fitted, mobility vehicle into Canada.?With limited budget and?no market penetration, they used our model of influence marketing, combined?with social campaigns as well as on-foot outreach, and gained a 20% market?share in the first 12 months of sale.

For anyone that says social media doesn?t?equate to real business ROI, I respectfully suggest they think again.

They say social media and digital in the UK are lagging behind our northern?American friends. Do you believe this?

Danny:?I think it depends ? there are some great agencies and consultants in the UK.?People like Shannon Eastman, Paul Sutton, Andrew Burnett and more like them?are paving the way for some really great forward thinking.

And in Canada, I?d say?many businesses are lagging behind their American and UK counterparts, often?because of the longer buy-in cycle that many Canadian businesses have, as well?as the reduced budgets compared to their US counterparts.

It?s like most things?? there are great examples and there are poor examples. I think the greater are?starting to outweigh the poorer, and these countries are getting much closer to?each other.

How does social media and digital work compare in general by brands and?agencies from the UK to Northern America?

Danny:?I find the UK is still very much focused on email as the lead social marketing tool,?versus say an influence campaign or a social marketing one across networks.

This ties into UK social users preferring email as their primary means of?communication from retailers, versus social channels.

Buying signals are also very different. UK consumers are still very much geared?towards connecting with companies for discounts and low-cost goods, whereas?in the NA market, consumers need more data and information before they?commit to offering up their contact details. It?s a very two-way thing.

This means NA marketers need to have a far more tangible offer than a simple?discount or special offer, while UK marketers have a slightly easier buy-in. This?would suggest the loyalty factor would be something that NA brands focus on,?versus the stack-?em-high, sell-?em-cheap UK marketplace.

Many companies are still finding it hard to merge the different departments?within an organisation. How can companies manage the link between PR, Social?and SEO?

Danny:?By understanding they all need each other. There are still too many silos?within businesses of all sizes, not just the bigger organisations. Companies?that understand this and break down these silos are the ones that enjoy bigger?success, because they understand the strengths of a fully integrated approach.

Different consumers use different methods to research, connect, purchase and?review. If you?re still focusing on one core method over another, you?re going to?miss these nuances and then wonder why your conversions sucked.

Understand that all three disciplines work better when aiming towards a?common goal. Let?s face it, it doesn?t really matter which department you feel?should lead ? every single one?s goal should be both the short and long-term?success of the business. Gelling currently silo?d departments together isn?t just?common sense, it?s business acumen sense.

How do you see SEO, social and content converging in the future?

Danny:?There won?t be any divergence ? there shouldn?t be today. It?s all marketing, pure?and simple.

SEO ? traffic to a destination for the goal of conversion (marketing).
Social ? building two-way conversation for brand awareness that evolve?into customers (marketing).
Content ? thought leadership and advice for the purpose of attracting?readers to your destination to evolve into customers (marketing).

Buzz words like content marketing, social marketing and yes, influence?marketing, are simply soundbites that take away from the simple fact that it?s all?still just marketing. That?s the hub ? everything else is the spoke that?s used as?and when needed.

It’s about how we use social search to define local SEO queries; how paid media drives social activity; how content educates and supports brand acquisition, whether that’s social ads, PPC, SEM, etc. There’s no separation – it’s simply marketing with a common goal.

Realise that, and we don?t have to worry about silos and how?disciplines will converge.

Don’t forget to check out the concluding part of this interview here.

image: Rubin Starset

Quit Trying to Market With a One Size Fits All Mindset

As marketers, we focus a lot on data to help us create strategies and tactics that will appeal to our core demographic.

We collate reams of information from various channels – social, mobile, print, media, research studies – and filter out the non-useful to drill down into the qualitative information needed to offer our campaigns a better chance of success.

The problem is, we’re allowing the data to drive our decisions, instead of our decisions being driven by the insights we, as humans, gather from the automated machine learning solutions.

This leads us to market with a one size fits all mentality, when – as any good marketer will tell you – we should be doing anything but.

The Perils of Driving Decisions Using Simple Data

Part of the problem comes from the instant result mindset we’ve forced upon brands in the age of social media.?Pre-social media, word-of-mouth campaigns and more traditional marketing and advertising was built with longer-term thinking when it came to results.

Now, if your Facebook campaign doesn’t garner you 1,000 new fans, or your blogger outreach campaign doesn’t drive sales, it’s clear that social media and selling/marketing/advertising don’t go together.

Except they do, and this is continuously being shown by the brands that do it right.

The reason the complaining brands aren’t seeing return is because the brand manager or CMO has read a survey or two from leading publications, and used them as the basis for the demographic knowledge for his or her upcoming campaign.

For example, let’s say your brand is targeting millennials. Now, depending on who you talk to, the age range for this consumer group can vary – but they’re primarily folks that were born between the early 80’s and the early 2000’s.

If you were to read a recent study of over 500 millennials from technology vendor SocialChorus, whose product is aimed at brands looking to connect with advocates, you’d get the following takeaways:

They are educated and big digital users, particularly Facebook, but they distrust advertising;
67% have never clicked a Sponsored Story;
95% say friends are the most credible sources for product information;
98% are more likely to interact with a friend’s social update than they are with a brand.

Going by this information, which was featured by respected publication Huffington Post, as a brand manager you’d be thinking:

Okay, so we’ll use Facebook to target our ads, because we still have 33% of the audience to go after, and we’ll look to offer their friends freebies to share since our own brand updates won’t be engaged with.

And that’d be all well and good – until you read this survey, from marketing data specialists Valassis.

In their findings, which surveyed more than 5,100 respondents (10x more than the SocialChorus one), a different view of millennials arises:

51% prefer newspapers for coupons and deals, compared to only 23% using the digital channels of blogs and savings sites;
Email coupon alerts accounted for 50%, as opposed to the Facebook-heavy usage that the previous report highlighted;
Mobile is a huge driver for millennials, with 45% saying they’d accessed a coupon in an email via mobile, and 32% downloading a coupon via smartphone.

So, going by this data, you’d swing your approach from Facebook marketing to a more traditional approach using print, complemented with a mobile-focused campaign that incorporates email sign-ups.

Except you’d still be missing a core part of the story.

Why Data is Only Telling Half the Story

The two surveys highlighted here so far from SocialChorus and Valassis show the purchasing preferences of millennials – depending which one you take notice of, it’s either by recommendations from friends, or by coupon ads in newspapers, or email/mobile offers.

However, neither of these surveys have countered in a third option – that of situational decision-making.

It’s all well and good having data that shows you the atypical behaviour of a demographic, based on surveys and publications from that specific market. Yet these behaviours are only as good as the situational knowledge we have about that audience.

In his article over at AdWeek entitled The Millennial Male is Not Who You Think He Is, Sam Thielman shares something that many surveys don’t take into account – the situational factors that impact today’s millennial male (essentially half the target audience for brands in this market).

From Thielman’s article:

As a collective, they have $1 trillion in student debt;
Just 62% are employed, of which half of these are part-time jobs;
Over one third live at home with their parents;
They’ve lost a third of their median net worth in the last 8 years.

Simply put, millennials don’t necessarily have the disposable income to spend on the marketing approaches the surveys from SocialChorus and Valassis would suggest brands implement.

Instead, as Thielman continues, brands need to look to alternative methods of advertising – digital viewing channels like Netflix, Hulu and Apple TV, for example. However, given that many consumers use Netflix to avoid advertising, brands will have to think smarter than simple ads.

Perhaps the biggest spanner in the works is the belief that millennials prefer friend recommendations over brand marketing. Not according to a survey by Bazaarvoice from 2012.

According to that survey, conducted with over 1,000 correspondents:

51% trust user generated content (UGC) from strangers, over that of their friends, when it comes to making a purchase;
84% of millennials said that UGC influenced their decisions, with only 3% saying it didn’t impact them at all;
71% feel brands care about the opinions of their consumers.

Based on that data, a blogger outreach campaign would be much more effective to run a marketing campaign. Now you can see where the confusion could come in.

Three surveys, three different recommendations, three different data points – yet all about the same target audience. And that’s before you even get to the viability of whether or not your target audience is going to be able to afford your product or not.

Simple Data Out, Insights In

It’s not all doom and gloom. The surveys I highlighted here all have valuable information, and can be used to really hone in on what the best approach would be for your target audience, if your brand sits in the millennial consumer market.

Where the problem arises is when it’s the only data that a brand marketer, CMO, or similar uses to put together the strategy for any upcoming campaign.

It’s just one part of a far bigger picture, yet it’s the ignoring of this bigger picture for quick hit data that is messing everything up. Instead of the simple data, we need to be collating everything into a more insights-led overview.

Is there any data that crosses over between reports?
Does the data vendor understand my market?
How does the data correlate to the specific audience I’m after (geography, financial, brand affinity, local laws);
Does the data make sense from an archival behaviour aspect?
Does the data allow for long-term building approaches or short-term fire sale targeting?

As you start to build out your knowledge graph from these questions, you can add them to your previous knowledge points based on previous campaigns, results, and increased understanding of your audience (in this case, millennials).

This collates all the data, new and old, and offers actual insights for your campaign versus trusting the latest survey that may or may not be relevant to your brand’s goals.

It’s a longer process; but it’s one that actually builds around known specifics versus unknown intangibles.

Which one do you think offers the greater return potential?

Without Context, Data is Meaningless

There’s a big push at the minute by marketers and technology vendors around the concept and importance of Big Data. Run a Google Search for the term and the resulting titles of posts, articles or books speak for themselves:

Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition and Productivity;
Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think;
Big Data Transforms Business;
Put a Fork In Big Data – It’s Done (just to balance the positive/negative results).

So, Big Data is clearly big business, and – with more than 1.7 billion search results – something that businesses are looking to understand, come to grips with and benefit from.

That’s understandable – after all, the potential of Big Data is huge. In March 2012, no less an institution than the White House itself announced the Big Data Research and Development Initiative.

So, yes, Big Data = Big News.

The thing is, though, while access to such huge amounts of data helps us be better marketers and – by association – better businesses, there’s also the danger that we let this data inform our decisions, without stopping to think of that most important aspect of any data analysis – context.

Context Drives Educated and Informed Decisions

Think of any major decision you’ve made in life, either personally or professionally. While there will be examples of impulse buys or snap decisions made in the heat of the moment, the majority of your actions will be based on the context surrounding them.

I wanted the sports car, but it wasn’t kid-friendly;
Job A offered more money, but Job B offered me deeper satisfaction;
The penthouse condo in the city offered amazing views, but the suburb neighbourhood was safer.

Three very simple examples of decisions that looked at the bigger picture of context, and took into account the long-term view versus the short-term buzz. Each option would satisfy our basic instincts, but the latter option of each choice is the one I’d go for based on its deeper context.

It’s simple economics of educated decisions, based on the data available – yet as the following examples show, context is still being missed where it’s needed the most.

Visual Data is Great, Real Data is Better

Professional social network LinkedIn is continuously looking to increase connections and the viability of its service with new additions, some useful, others less so. At least, currently.

One of the new features they’ve released is the visual ability to see who’s viewed your updates, and how far they’ve spread. Visually, it’s pretty cool, as can be seen below:

The problem is, functionality-wise, it’s very limited.

While the image on the left tells me my update had 536 views, it doesn’t allow me to dive into the data to see who actually viewed the update. The same with the image on the right – I can’t click into the big purple circle to identify the type of people viewing my content.

The potential for this visual data is obvious – I can see if I’m attracting my target audience to my content – either potential clients or new employers – and, by having access to this information, tailor my sharing even more, as well as connect with these folks in particular.

It’s not just LinkedIn that’s missing the importance of context, though. Check out the image below from technology vendor Jugnoo?(click to expand):

The results are from a search around the words “social business”, and show not only the main keywords around the topic, but also who’s discussing them, via what platform, and the time they’re most likely to be discussed.

This basic data offers a simple overview of that particular search – but where’s the bigger context?

For example, you can see that “business” is the most discussed word, and then I’ve highlighted “product”, “agencies”, “customers” and “platform”. As you can see from the two yellow circles I’ve overlaid, a couple of people are in multiple results. So what’s the context behind that?

Is it because they’re connected to these different communities?
Is it because they’re seen as influential around these joint topics?
Is it because they’re more active than the other profiles?

Again, these are simple questions, but ones that the software doesn’t answer, or at least attempts to help with. Because of this, other software and analysis is needed to see how valuable these folks might be to my business.

That’s not to advocate lazy marketing, nor to forget about the legwork that real analysis requires. But if a software tool can’t provide further context around the solution it offers, why use that platform at all?

Dig Deeper, Think Bigger

And this is where Big Data’s main weakness can be found – it’s encouraging lazy solutions that seem to offer reams of data, but in reality offer very little. By doing so, it’s impacting the true potential of Big Data when used properly.

It’s this type of limitation that’s attracting valid critique of Big Data.

In his 2013 paper entitled Big Data for Development: From Information to Knowledge Societies, Martin Hilbert raised the concern that Big Data-led decisions are “informed by the world as it was in the past, or, at best, as it currently is.”

Last year, Harvard Business Review published an article, Good Data Won’t Guarantee Good Decisions, which highlighted the bigger issues around the data available to us today.

For all the breathless promises about the return on investment in Big Data, however, companies face a challenge. Investments in analytics can be useless, even harmful, unless employees can incorporate that data into complex decision making.?Meeting these challenges requires anthropological skills and behavioral understanding?traits that are often in short supply in IT departments.

Simply put, we can have all the data in the world available to us, but unless we understand the context in which it’s presented, and the actions that will drive based on our analysis, we’re as effective as driving at night with the lights off.

It’s up to us to think bigger when it comes to Big Data, and start providing the context and meaning behind it, as opposed to just the “But it looks cool, right?” mindset that seems popular today.

Challenge on.

image: Kris Krug

Where Does Online Video Sit in Social Media for Marketers?

With the recent implementation of video posts for popular photo app Instagram, and the swift uptake of the Vine platform when it was released on iPhone and later Android, video has continued to make bigger inroads into the marketing tactics for brands and agencies alike.

Whereas previously marketing budgets would allocate a certain amount for professionally-filmed video for promotion and media ad spots, the rise of YouTube as a content-rich medium for brands saw tactics change.

Videos could be more “real”, with less focus on polish and more on the brand: its story, its products use cases and, most importantly, what its customers felt.

Big Things Can Come in Small Packages

This richer interaction has led the way for Vine’s short, snappy videos, which – despite early criticism of the six second limitations of the format – saw successes for brands that adapted to its style.

Nascar gave racing fans an idea of what it was like to be behind the wheel of a race car;
Fashion retailer Nordstrom created a funky video of a shoe being passed between Vine apps;
Child non-profit Barnardos ran a very powerful Vine short highlighting child abuse for their “Believe in Children” campaign.

Instagram’s new video feature isn’t slouching when it comes to brand usage, either. Despite being later to the market , their longer videos – 15 seconds, compared to Vine’s six – has seen a variety of ways to showcase a brand’s message and culture.

Ice cream retailer Ben & Jerry’s use it to show how they make fan favourites;
Computer technology manufacturer Dell shows how to create a laptop sleeve using a ?sweatshirt;
Women’s lingerie and clothing manufacturer Victoria’s Secret offer a stop-motion gallery on changeable summer accessories.

These are just some examples of how brands are not only using video effectively for promotion, but using short-form video and making it count.

So how does this impact where marketers focus when it comes to integrating different tactics when it comes to social media?

The State of Video for Social Media 2013

A new mini-report from digital publishing company Uberflip shares some statistics regarding video’s continued ubiquity when it comes to online and social media crossover.

Using data from reports by Google, Forrester, ComScore, The Guardian and The Globe and Mail, they’ve compiled this overview into a short video that shows just how much we’re using video, both from a creation and curation standpoint.

Some of the key stats that stand out include:

40 billion videos are streamed in the U.S. every month;
75 million people watch video in the U.S. every month – a quarter of the population;
87% of marketers use some form of video for their content marketing campaigns;
$6.3 billion – that’s how much the video ad market is projected to be worth by 2015;

Search Google for “online video marketing statistics” and you’ll get about 97 million results, with stats, figures, predictions and more around this ever-growing medium. Simply put, it’s about to be very big.

How this impacts your brand marketing is up to you – but as both the Vine and Instagram examples linked to in this post show, as well as the more traditional marketing videos, it’s an impact that is growing.

Are you ready for it?

[youtube]http://youtu.be/VyqD0Vzo_K8[/youtube]

image: Daniel Proulx