Marketing

We Need Better Insights, Not More Data

A little while back, I wrote about the difference between analytics and insights. My key point was while we may have awesome data at our fingertips, not knowing what to do with that data renders it obsolete and ineffective.

A new survey, with responses from attendees of the recent DMA2012 conference, as well as the recent Forrester Research conference Seizing Opportunity From Digital Disruption, seems to back up that insights versus analytics post.

Filtering The Noise Chamber

Today’s connected consumer has access to an insane amount of information, all at their fingertips, thanks to the ubiquity of smartphone access to the web.

From checking restaurant reviews and stock prices, to taking pictures of a new pair of jeans and asking the opinion of friends on Facebook, today’s consumer is no longer restricted to choosing a brand through a push marketing approach.

This change of direction in the purchase cycle has resulted in brands playing catch up in trying to make sense of this new paradigm.

Instead of buying a media spend and determining results based on increased foot traffic to a storefront, marketers and analysts now have to understand what tipped a consumer from intent to buy to an actual purchase, and what external factors can impact that decision in the first place.

To enable this, technologies and companies have sprung up to allow marketers all the data they need, and more. However, this now presents a new and far more dangerous problem, from the perspective of the marketer:

How can the right data be filtered when there is so much of it? Failure to extrapolate the right data will only make the job tougher for any brand looking to truly understand their customer’s mindset.

Failure to understand your customer equals failure to grow and remain afloat. The scary thing is, though, it’s clear that many marketers just aren’t getting to grips with this new analytical methodology, as the report shows.

The Problem with Data – Lack of Insight

Some of the key findings from the attendees include:

45% said the analysis and application of data is the biggest challenge;
39% are not using demographic information or customer behaviour patterns when creating marketing strategies;
44% don’t envision hiring new employees to oversee this data;
83% plan to start considering using real-time data.

There are other worrying statistics from the results, but I picked out these four because they highlight perfectly the challenges to today’s marketer, as well as the failings of many businesses looking to operate in the space.

If more than a third don’t take something as basic and yet hugely important like demographics and customer behaviour into the equation, and almost half think they’re qualified to oversee this core business component themselves, that’s a problem.

Even more disconcerting is the percentage that don’t use real-time data – 83%.

Eighty three percent.

That’s more than three quarters of the businesses asked not utilizing something as simple as Twitter Search to get the lowdown on what’s being said about their brand or product at any given time, and being able to react to it.

It’s almost like we’re trapped in 2006. If businesses today aren’t utilizing the technology out there to make their business smarter and more effective, then it’s no wonder so many fail when it comes to using social as a complementary component to their other marketing efforts.

It’s not data that’s the problem – it’s the lack of insight into how that data can be mined, analyzed and acted upon. And there’s no need for this to be the case.

Smarter Thinking, Better Execution

Just looking at some of the key points I pulled from the report, there are simple solutions to every one of them.

If analysis and application are the biggest challenges, identify the people who understand this new research opportunity to provide the analysis that’s most important to you – lead generation results, customer service satisfaction, brand perception, competitor activity, etc. (This also addresses the 44% of businesses who don’t foresee employing people to oversee the data).

Additionally, identify the analysis that’s most important to you – lead generation results, customer service satisfaction, brand perception, competitor activity, etc. If you have no-one internally that can address this need, look to the kind of people your competitors have in this key role and act accordingly to, at the very least, match that investment.

Use technology like Quantcast to identify the demographics and behaviour of your web traffic. Cross measure this with tools like Traackr and Nimble, that can identify the key people talking about your brand and then filter them into groups and level of relevance and/or importance when it comes to contact.

Change the mindset of considering real-time intelligence and start making it a key part of your brand’s customer experience reporting. Hell, you don’t even have to be on a platform to set up alerts on the information that matters, and then allocating the right person to deal with that opportunity/situation.

Unless, of course, you’re the type of business that would have the chance to speak with your customer in your shop about how their visit was, and instead advise them you’d rather be in the office drinking coffee and playing Angry Birds.

Data doesn’t have to be scary – you don’t need to be mining every single piece of information out there about your brand. You do, however, need to be mining for the right data that’s important to you at that given time, and act on that.

Reduce the data. Increase the insights. Be a smarter business. You owe it to yourself, and your customers deserve better.

You can get a free copy of the full report here.

Social Influence and The Marketer’s Dilemma

Just 20 short years ago, marketing was pretty easy. You got your budget, you allocated it to the media buy (TV, print, radio, direct), and away you went.

If you were conscientious, you’d collect results and give them to your clients. If you weren’t, you’d correlate any increased foot traffic to a store or business to your awesome marketing efforts.

Everyone was (kind of) happy, and marketers went about their merry way of sitting in a lofty seat, controlling the message and how that message was disseminated.

Then everything changed.

With the advent of the World Wide Web in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee, consumers now had a legitimate way to take a little bit of control back from the marketers.

While it was still in its infancy, and search wasn’t as advanced as it is today, private forums and message boards soon sprung up and consumers could connect with peers and fellow customers, and offer true feedback and advice versus the limited face-to-face conversations taking place in the home, workplaces and bars.

Jump forward 15 years, and the growth of Facebook, Twitter, enhanced forums and real-time review sites, and now the marketer’s game – or at least, the bad marketer’s game – was pretty much truly up.

Messaging was no longer the domain of the few – now it had to live up to its claims or be shot down in public, in the full gaze of a paying client. Not only that, but now the power of the budget was being taken away by the introduction of social influence – and the marketer’s dilemma began.

If Everyone’s an Influencer…

Before social media, if brands were looking to truly get their message in front of a certain group of people, they’d buy celebrity endorsements.

From Paris Hilton in a bathing suit washing cars to Madonna being paid $5 million for an advert that was pulled by its sponsor, celebrities have been big draws when going after a certain demographic.

The problem with this approach is when a celebrity takes a fall and the brand takes a hit because of it (or would do, if action wasn’t taken on their behalf).

Think about Tiger Woods and his extra-marital problems; or Lance Armstrong and his recent doping scandal. When heroes fall, they taint a brand too – if you don’t take action, you’re seen as endorsing wrong-doing or questionable behaviour.

Additionally, consumers are much more savvy now and aware of how advertising works – do we really believe that Celebrity X drives Automobile Brand Y? No.

Instead, we move back to where we’ve always been prior to the golden age of advertising and marketing – peer recommendations and trusted resources. In social media, these trusted resources are the new influencers, and brands are now looking to connect with them versus celebrity endorsements.

That in itself leads to the next problem – when social media can empower anyone to become an influencer, who do brands connect with?

It’s All About the Four A’s

Thanks to some social scoring sites, anyone can appear influential. Increased activity on Twitter and Facebook can see your score on the likes of Klout skyrocket.

For brands that can’t afford to put the legwork in that truly identifies the real influencer for their audience, social scoring sites offer a quick overview of who may be the right person, and let you filter out only those that meet a certain score and above.

While this can give you a quick introduction to the kind of people you’re after, it can also see you miss these very people as context and relevance can often be missed by a simple score.

Additionally, whether social scoring helps you identify people or not, to truly get your message out there you still need the Four A’s:

Audience – It used to be the medium was the message, but now the audience is the driver – without knowing them, the message is useless, no matter what medium it’s on.
Acceptance – You can have the greatest product and message ever, but if the audience isn’t ready to accept it, will it even be heard?
Application – How you’re perceived can define your success, and how you approach us defines how you’re perceived.
Amplification – The golden ticket, and not just for brands but for social scoring and influence: how far can you get your message?

These four tenets are core to the marketer’s success – but without knowing how to identify true influencers, how can you get all four aligned and working together?

The conversation is just starting on that one…

Top 7 Big Marketing Essentials for 2013

This is a guest post from Feather Hickox.

The average consumer receives over 16,000 marketing messages each day. Marketers face a daunting challenge to break through that volume of noise.

This challenge has given rise to Big Marketing ? the use of Big Data analytics to develop personalized marketing messages and offers on a massive scale.

Based on my team?s work with many of the largest retailers in the world, we?ve compiled a list of seven essentials for turning Big Data into effective, profitable and highly targeted Big Marketing campaigns.

Marketing Is So Much More Than Just a Sales Tool

Over at Mashable, Todd Wasserman wrote a piece about most social media marketing being a waste of time. Todd’s premise is simple:

…a lot of the buzzword-laden blather around social media marketing the past few years was itself a form of marketing for self-conferred experts looking to make a buck off scared blue-chip companies. That?s not to say there aren?t bright, honest people plying their trade. It?s just that I keep waiting for one of them to have a?Jerry Maguire?moment.

He then goes on to use examples of why social media marketing (or most of it) is a waste of time.

These include buying Likes and Followers being pointless, how only the famous like Steve Jobs get customer service resolution on Twitter, and that brands aren’t publishers and that because of this, there’s an instant suspicion that brand content is merely a promotion for the brand.

While Todd makes some good arguments, the overall one – that marketing in social media is a waste of time – is a flawed one, for one simple reason: marketing is so much more than a sales and promotional tool.

Tunnel Vision and the Bigger Picture

The problem with Todd’s main point is that he’s using marketing in the truest sense of the word – to sell products (or, occasionally, service). While it’s true that the main goal of marketing is to instill desire to make a purchase, that’s the tunnel vision approach. There’s a lot more at stake.

1. Education

For example, how do you get that desire in the first place? You need to know the audience and what makes them tick. How do you get that knowledge? Research. How do you carry out that research? Analytics, raw data and a shitload of legwork.

So immediately you’ve swung marketing away from sales/desire to knowledge and power. Let’s class that as the education part of marketing.

Takeaway: Use social media search and monitoring tools to educate your business.

2. Intelligence

Next on the list is knowing what the marketplace is ready for, as well as what your competitors are doing in the space or, more importantly, have planned. You can have the greatest product or service, but if you haven’t scouted the landscape then you’re launching something that may be a complete wet noodle (as my wife would say).

Intelligence comes from using the research you found while educating yourself in the previous example, and actually making sense of that data and what it means to you and your customers. It formulates your strategy and tactics from that, and ensures you’re as prepared as you can be when going to market.

Takeaway: Dissect search results and prioritize which platforms you should be on, and when.

3. Profitable Effect

One of the biggest takeaways from any marketing campaign is how effective it makes you as a business moving forward.

Results can show you what message worked and what didn’t, and help you answer the question of branding and positioning. They can also highlight strengths and weaknesses of a team and help you allocate better resources.

When you start to become tighter as a business, you have an immediate return on cost through savings – from money saved from poor targeting to money invested back into the parts of the business that need it.

Takeaway: Using social as another channel of your business (customer service, recruiting, etc) allows costs and time to be cut and used elsewhere.

The Best Marketing Isn’t Even Marketing

This is why Todd’s piece in Mashable is a little misplaced, even though good points are made. I completely agree that buying popularity is dumb and will backfire; and yes, brands often boast of their awesome customer service but then appear to service only the chosen few.

But then that’s pretty much true of business in general, and not just limited to social media.

Taking marketing at face value – as purely a sales or purchase-led tool – also limits the real potential of what marketing can offer. It’s like saying PR agencies just do press releases, when there’s a whole scope of activities and disciplines behind the scenes.

Marketing on social media isn’t a waste of time – it just needs to be viewed the right way.

There’s Nothing Savvy About Marketing or Newsjacking Disasters

This week, the eastern coast of the U.S. has been battered by Hurricane Sandy, one of the biggest storms to make land in the U.S.

The states of Connecticut, Delaware, District of Colombia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia and West Virginia have all bore the brunt of this “superstorm”.

So far, 16 people in the U.S. are confirmed dead. One woman died in Toronto, Canada after flying debris hit her. 50 people lost their lives in Haiti and the Caribbean as Sandy’s deadly path took shape.

And this is just the early hours of the disaster. Sadly, like any storm of this magnitude, the death toll and damage is likely to be worse yet, not to mention animals and livestock caught up in the devastation.

With all this in mind, you’d think we’d be more concerned about the welfare of those in harm’s way than taking advantage of some cool marketing opportunities, right?

Then again, this is the marketing industry we’re talking about – and I say that as part of that very industry, which is why this appalls me even more.

The Opportunity of Disaster

Yesterday, the inbound marketing business HubSpot published 5 examples of companies that have “newsjacked” (the practice of taking news stories and using them to your advantage) the disaster that is Hurricane Sandy.

HubSpot themselves took some heat in the comments, forcing them to edit the post – although it’s still not worded in a terribly sympathetic way.

Examples included a Hurricane Hair board on Pinterest, to a make-up company advising you how to look great by candlelight and ensure your nails are tip top. Because chipped nails while sifting through the debris of your destroyed home wouldn’t be the done thing, right?

While none of the examples are as tacky as the Kenneth Cole Cairo tweet – and one does offer generators and air mattresses for those affected by the storm – they don’t paint a great picture of the companies either.

The comments on the HubSpot post are pretty split – some defend the companies and their “marketing savvy”, while others call out the practice as well as HubSpot for the article.

As I mentioned earlier, HubSpot felt inclined to edit the post, so it’s possible the article was more “offensive” and some of the commenters didn’t see the earlier version (at a guess).

Can Newsjacking Work?

There’s no doubt that a hot topic is a way to get yourself – personally or professionally – into the “spotlight”. Heck, marketers and bloggers do it all the time on Twitter during various tweetchats, #blogchat often experiencing some of the worst hijacking from people desperate to share their blog posts.

Yet none of these are taking advantage of disasters to sell their product or service. It’s like hacking into the 911 emergency lines to call your girlfriend to save on your phone bill.

Can newsjacking work? For sure – if it’s done right. David Meerman Scott, who wrote the book Newsjacking, offers ways to interlope into other news stories and infiltrate your brand or message, and there are great examples in there.

However, it’s also very telling that David himself commented on the HubSpot piece, with less than a favourable view:

Newsjacking something related to death and destruction is very dangerous. I’m reading this morning that 20 people have died and there is billions of dollars in damage. That’s not fun nor funny.
If your company has a legitimate tie to the disaster and you are genuinely seen as being helpful then okay. For example, a home improvement superstore could blog “just received a shipment of 250 generators in the Boston store.”
But a frivolous attempt at newsjacking to draft off the news of the storm to sell a product unrelated to the storm is bad form and may trigger a negative backlash. A restaurant that says “Storm special – 35% off all appetizers” is not a good idea.

When the guy that wrote the book on newsjacking doesn’t see the benefits of these examples, then you know they’ve missed the boat and, perhaps, HubSpot has too with their article.

Although they also had their own frivolous moment with their specific Facebook post – because, yes, company messages going out are far more important than the company making sure their employees are safe.

So who knows..?

Additional reading: Doug Haslam, “Newsjacking” – A Good Idea with Dangerous Pitfalls