Originally published on

Call them advocates, evangelists, ambassadors, or something else, these vocal consumers are perhaps the most compelling reason that brands invest in social media. Finding that small percentage of the population that loves your product, service, or brand; is inclined to talk about it within their various social channels; and has some influence online is no mean trick. When you do find them, you want to cultivate them and equip them fully to do what they do best – talk you up! In order to get them talking, you have to give them something to talk about.

1. Give them product. Sharing existing or new products with a devoted fan is a surefire way to get (usually) positive product, company, or brand comments. Make sure you have mechanisms in place to leverage those comments and get them widely distributed. Make very sure that your bloggers follow guidelines to disclose any relationships or gifts.
2. Give them product to give to their readers/fans/followers. You’ve further ingratiated the brand with the primary influencer with your generosity, and those products become a wonderful third-party endorsement from a trusted source when they give them away. The odds are good that those that are gifted are likely to thank the source and praise the gift. If your product is too costly to give away in volume, say a car, then use a contest to give away one but surround it with a lot of media support and social attention to get the contest spread widely. You could also give away less costly but unique, desirable promotional items that appeal to those committed consumers or give away experiences like a chance to test drive the newest wheels.
3. Showcase them. Highlight and feature users’ personal stories/photos/videos/testimonials. Let them know that this will be recurring and collect content. “Bob is our Greatest Fan in the World in the month of February.”
4. Validate and empower them. Consider making an elite group of fans your semi-official spokespeople. Making someone a small time celebrity by naming them to “Team Brand” will certainly give them something to talk about. You can also give these users a specific task to complete and report on. That approach gives them a structured way to contribute to the ongoing dialogue that surrounds your brand and guides the conversation in a constructive direction.
5. Pit them against each other in a positive way. Hold a contest to find the biggest brand fan or the most committed or longest running customer. Highlight these users or find them by asking direct questions; for instance, posting on your Facebook wall a question like “Who remembers way back when our product X was first launched?” or “Does anyone have a picture of the special edition packaging for [event] in 1995?”
6. Hand them the reins. Allow your audience to submit content for the brand for your social channels. Solicit user photos or stories or ask them “If you were [insert brand spokesperson] what would you tell your followers today?” Showcase their creativity as it relates to the brand by asking “Would love to see your favorite recipes using [brand]!” or “What is the last thing you built using [brand] or [brand packaging]?” Pinterest is a great vehicle for this approach.
7. Ask their opinion. Make these valuable relationships work harder for you by soliciting input. Use the various polling and voting mechanisms available to ask about the best/next/new products, services, or features, or even what they’d like to see next. Real-time R&D at a heck of a cost savings but remember that you are talking to those already connected to your brand in some way and so this will not be a representative sample. No two people will ever have the same opinion, so this is a great way to start a dialogue online.
8. Test market. Use your social community to collect feedback with sampling and previews before doing a mass launch. This not only gets important, in-market reaction to new products but may create demand in advance of launch as word spreads.
9. Listen to them. Listening in through social media tracking devices is a must and is probably how you identified your influencers to begin with, but also consider moving the relationship into the real world. Invite select brand advocates to headquarters or have them do an in-person or online focus group. We’re excited to see how brands use Google+ in this capacity in the near future. You could also schedule a meet-and-greet with the brand team or any brand spokespeople.
10. Encourage a dialogue within the community. By giving them access to each other, you provide value and you get the listening benefit. Be prepared with conversation starters.
11. Be relevant. Your brand advocates don’t sit around in a bubble all day thinking about your products. By connecting with the real world, you encourage dialogue that is engaging and makes you more relevant to their world. Stay away from politics and other dangerous topics.
12. Thank them. Sometimes simple acknowledgement is enough. A company can be a cold entity. It is a warm and human thing to thank someone for their patronage and support. It’s also the nice thing to do.

What techniques do you use to identify or activate your brand ambassadors?

Originally published on

It’s one of the first questions we ask almost every client – “What is the value of a customer to you?” Only a small percentage of otherwise sophisticated clients can muster an answer. Most of even those who do answer are simply estimating based on a guessing game in which our team plays game show host. Would you consider an acquisition cost of $X to be a win? Why? If you don’t groom your clients at all, what is their spend rate per year? If you do communicate with them, does it increase? By how much? What can you tell me about the different kinds of customers you service and their impact on your profitability? How has this changed over time? The list of questions can go on forever.

It’s not just an issue for e-commerce marketers. All marketing has the ultimate goal of finding, securing, retaining, defending, or growing the value of customers. This holds true whether or not you get the immediate feedback of an online sale or are tracking leads from a long-term, considered purchase online or off. It seems self-evident that you would need to know what an average customer and a good customer are worth to your business to have any hope of logically planning your marketing strategy and expenditures toward increasing that value. With all the talk of metrics and ROI in digital marketing, this basic but critical information seems to be missing far too often, resulting in lots of measurement and little logic in the decision-making those metrics are intended to support.

Let’s take a look at the impact of marketing informed by lifetime value (LTV) across a spectrum of marketing goals.

Finding Customers

New customer acquisition is not about gaining new customers at any cost. It is about finding those customer segments that bring long-term value and profit to your business and that can scale sufficiently to support your short- and long-term goals. Certain channels, messaging approaches, and media plans return those right customers. Knowing how to define them is the starting point for a deliberate, sustained testing program that will continue to refine your approach and results.

Securing Customers

For most categories (that aren’t insanely loyalty bound), you can create trial with new potential customers if you offer a new or intriguing experience or if you discount deeply enough. Sure, some customers will never pan out or will only buy on promotion, but some may become good customers if you continue to offer them a good value and a good experience. You need to be able to model out the expected long-term return on that discount-driven customer in order to justify the investment in what could be a negative margin initial sale. A key input in that calculation is the value that the customer is likely to provide over their life.

Retaining Customers

Long-term customer relationships are about brand-building and relationship-building activities that reinforce the value you provide customers and remind them you exist and can fill a need for them. More valuable customers should be provided with more value, more often. That value can be delivered in many forms including increased or priority access, special content or tools, or many other perks such as price incentives or rebates. All of the monetary and non-monetary value that you provide costs money and it’s impossible to know how much it makes sense to invest if you don’t know the value of your customers.

Defending Customers

The flip side of retaining customers is competitive defense. All customers have a choice and will be presented with other attractive options unless you are in a monopoly business. Stay focused on retaining those customers, especially the more valuable customers that were so hard-won. Knowing the lifetime value of your customers will help you plan your response should an aggressive competitor come into your territory. Are they after your prime customers or the marginal ones? You won’t know what to counter with or what level of spend makes sense in response unless you know your customers’ value, preferences, and responsive areas.

Growing Customers

The definition of a good customer is going to vary widely by company, category, industry, segment, maturity, and many other factors, but all other things being equal, we definitely want customers who buy in greater quantity or more frequently. We also want those customers who spread positive news about us. Through social media and other digital measurements, we can track how frequently customers engage or interact with the brand, how often they recommend the brand, or the scale of their sphere of influence.

Growing customers across any of these measures takes time, resources, and investment and can shift the way you might determine the LTV of a customer. Should you invest in growing a customer from a once-a-month buyer to a twice-a-month buyer or instead invest in grooming all buyers who have broad influence and/or are strong advocates in social media? The power of social media has changed the metrics that define LTV forever.

Despite all our cross-channel tracking capabilities and optimization proficiencies, LTV remains an elusive, if critical data point on which vital decisions depend. It’s not easy and it’s not a one-and-done proposition, but if you can’t articulate what your customer is worth to your business today, then you won’t know how to build, defend, or grow your business.

Originally published on

While reading the myriad year-end wrap-ups and predictions for 2012, it occurred to me that one of the most defining phenomena impacting digital marketing today is not technology or channel-based nor shifts in consumer behaviors. Instead, the change in agency-client relationships away from retainer-based contracts toward project-based relationships has become the new normal in the last couple of years.

Many of you on the agency side of the digital marketing marketplace will be nodding along with me as you read this while brands and client-side marketers may be shrugging their shoulders in a resigned way and thinking, “Deal with it.” But we should all acknowledge the impact this shift has on the strategic outcomes and business health of both agencies and clients. It is far from a best-case scenario for anyone.

How Did We Get Here?

Economic necessity mostly. When business collapsed in 2008, marketing budgets were slashed to the bone. Like everyone else, brand shepherds were asked to do more with less. As media and production budgets got chopped, brand marketers couldn’t justify or afford agency retainers. Brand marketers instead started to use agency partners where for rare discreet projects they could not execute with internal resources. Agencies were happy to maintain the connection to the client and feed the work to their teams in those troubled times but it was the start of the end of the committed two-way relationship between marketer and agency.

Emphasis on testing. As more marketers became attuned to the test-and-assess mentality that is so much a part of digital marketing, it bred confidence to take baby steps into both established and new digital channels like mobile and social. A test is by definition a short-term trial approach – a project by any other name.

The rise of social media. Almost everyone is still trying to figure out this channel and to quantify its impact. As new paid-earned-owned opportunities sprout almost daily, it requires regular testing. When you see an entity that has put a long-term stake into social media and has made a similar commitment to its internal or agency social media partners, it has usually evolved beyond projects and incorporated testing into a regular, planned approach to optimize social media results.

The Impact on Agencies

Provides no incentive for strategic planning or thinking. If the only commitment you have from the client is for this next project, you are less likely to think long-term and invest in specific talent, industry knowledge, or competitive tracking. The project approach institutionalizes short-term thinking.

Loss of dedicated staff. Having dedicated staff that wake up every day thinking about the client’s business brings positive results. If agencies only can plan for projects, that is how they must staff.

Loss of margin. Every project needs to be sold in. This leads to spec work and an outsized investment in business development. Agency staff spends way more time selling and doing spec work than they ever did before. This puts expensive talent on non-billable work for a good chunk of their day. Client lead times to get projects approved has lengthened considerably, further magnifying the impact as layered approvals and multiple presentations stretch the decision over many months. If an agency is lucky enough to win the project, it may not even recoup its investment. That may sound like a bargain for marketers but you want your agencies to have healthy businesses to continue to reinvest in talent, technology, and think time on your behalf.

The Impact on Clients

Supports short-term thinking. Discreet projects may or may not be connected in a common strategy thread that helps to move the business forward over time. It’s also harder to take the learning from one project to the next if different teams or people are working on the projects or doing the planning.

Loss of continuity. Customers are always on – why aren’t you? If you are only messaging, responding to, or communicating with your customer base inconsistently, you may be missing opportunities to maintain a valuable presence, dialogue, or listening post.

Clients lose valuable partner perspective. Agencies used to have a unique perspective on the business that added significant value. They had enough insider knowledge and enough investment to be informed, but yet enough distance to avoid group think and could question/prod/move the business in ways not possible from the inside. If agencies have only a partial mandate and partial information, they cannot offer that perspective reliably or effectively.

The Impact on the Industry

New hiring realities. Full-time jobs are harder to come by in agency land. Agencies have to staff in a way that mirrors the commitment they get from their clients. That means lots more freelancers and more virtual workers today. On the one hand, it allows talented specialists to stay busy working for lots of different agencies. Before it may have been a lifestyle choice for some freelancers, but now it is a necessity. For those who might have flourished in a team environment, this is a shame.

New management challenges. Ad hoc teams impose their own challenges and require more intense project management to keep any kind of order, results, or profit margins in the picture.

It should be recognized, of course, that there is a legitimate place for project-based digital work. They include: trying out a new partner; having a distinct need that your current partners can’t meet; having sudden budget infusions; or encountering a new digital opportunity. In a best-case scenario, that project would go to your long-term agency partners because they have the background and insights to help you integrate, succeed, and learn from that one-off effort.

As we continue to climb slowly out of the recession, it behooves marketers to advocate for the return of one of their most effective support structures – their agency partners. But agencies can only really be partners if they are empowered as such. It is time for us all to stop thinking short-term and fuel all our businesses with the commitment and strategic thinking that bring true results.

Originally published on

NetPlus CEO Robin Neifield is one of the leading industry experts on digital advertising topics ranging from search engine marketing to email strategy and social media to display. Robin recently shared with Magnetic her take on how marketers are keeping up with the evolution of the search marketing channel and the latest “searcher” trends in this installment of “All Marketers Are Geniuses.”

1. What shifts in digital strategy have you and your team seen in planning for this holiday season?

Most of the shifts we have seen have to do with timing and also dedicated resources to social media, but they are not the same across client categories. Retail clients have started a bit early this year hoping to fully capitalize on Black Friday and Cyber Monday online activity that proved immensely valuable last year. Promo calendars, email cadence have all accelerated to move consumers to an earlier decision point in an attempt to catch sales retailers might otherwise lose to more aggressive competitors.

Additionally, holiday planning came a bit later this year for many of our CPG and non-retail client partners who had last minute budget approvals. We have several CPG holiday efforts launching in early December that are centered around a social media promotion to take advantage of consumer activity and responsiveness in those channels. We can provide a lot of value and get tremendous response as we craft a social program that supports and extends the brand in an engaging and creative way. We’ve been able to build email lists and fan communities that will have long standing value as remarketing, messaging and learning platforms.

2. How do you think search will change for the “searchers” (i.e. consumers)?

For users with a clear search objective Google and Bing will continue to be the place most users begin their information mission. Also, the device a consumer chooses to use may impact the search experience. Mobile use, for instance, often signals a different kind of localized intent that demands a different result in order to be truly relevant. Integrated search results now give users more choice in the kind of content that will meet their need and drive users to a broader variety of locations. Where it used to be brand sites dominant in top search engine results pages, you now often find social sites, especially Wikipedia and YouTube, and other choices to compete with the brand site. This forces brands to focus on building content and, in many cases, community across multiple destinations.

We also need to recognize the growing role of social media in search. Consumers increasingly tap their networks for reviews, opinions and resources when they “search” for information or recommendations. In that way twitter lists, blogs, social pages and communities and other social clout can be a powerful conduit to resources that may supplant some pure searching activity – a fact that Google is keenly aware of and is attempting to address with Google + and its integration in search results.

3. How will consumer behavior impact digital strategies across your clients?

Integration across digital channels is now imperative as consumers move seamlessly from smart phone to tablet to laptop exhibiting surfing, searching, socializing, gaming, reading and other key behaviors that we can connect to and track. We have to understand the entire life cycle of the consumer and their varied needs and attention at different times and in different channels. This helps us to deliver appropriate messaging in the most effective format and at the most advantageous timing to support business objectives.

4. How important is data to your digital display campaigns?

Data is a critical element of any good display campaign. It is the backbone of good planning and helps us to match delivery channels, formats and partners to our targeted consumer and the specific objectives we have for this effort or time period. We’ve been working with demand-side platforms (DSPs) and ad exchanges to access third party (offline) consumer data that elevates the consumer profiles we are able to craft. This gives us a rich picture of our consumer and helps us to segment messaging and manage budgets to multiple objectives.

In addition to the demographic data and other campaign planning data there are other kinds of critical data used to optimize performance. We use site-side data to validate campaign impact and to uncover insights into what we are seeing in campaign reporting. Third-party ad serving data is vital to optimize post-click conversions that drive the ROI goals of the campaign.

5. Complete this sentence: Marketers are geniuses because…

Marketers are geniuses because in order to succeed they have to be equal parts psychologist, analyst, creative and visionary.

Originally published on

The holidays are a good reminder of many things, including the importance of family and the essential human need to reconnect in person rather than just through Facebook or other digital means. This Thanksgiving I got my annual stark reminder that not only do my relatives not understand what I do in digital marketing, they do not speak the same language or have the same nonchalance about the potentially intrusive technology that both fuels and follows their online activity.

People outside the digital industry don’t know the nuts and bolts of how it all comes together. And that’s completely understandable. Hey, I drive a car but barely know where the oil goes. I don’t intend to learn about engine mechanics or even maintenance beyond scheduling the right tune-ups at the right intervals with professionals who know this stuff. My automotive ignorance is a matter of choice and convenience. To me, the car is a tool; it’s a means to an end, possibly many ends encompassing transportation, entertainment, communication, and even ego validation if I am being truly honest.

Most of the digital content consuming population is also ignorant about how their chosen content is supplied, delivered, and supported. They don’t have a view under the hood, so to speak. The smartphone, tablet, or computer and the corresponding Internet access are a means to an end for them. They call up their social network or their game, email, video, or other content and expect immediate, seamless access, connections, and an ever-ready supply of new content. If they peeked under the hood, they would find a complex ecosystem that relies on buyers, sellers, and consumers and some pretty intimidating technology. They would see that consumer behaviors and preferences dictate the flow of content and that all that free or mostly free content depends on the efficacy of the advertising that supports the Internet.

I bet most of you in the industry had some or all of the following conversations around your holiday table.

“What is it you do again – something with computers, right?”

My holiday learnings: Grandmom will never understand what I do. I keep it simple and explain that I help our clients reach their customers or potential customers with brand or promotional messaging when they are online, wherever they are online.

“Do you do those pop-up ads?”

My holiday learnings: Uncle Tom, Dick, or Harry do not understand that ads are never the reason that people surf online and are almost always unwanted and intrusive – even if they are polite. These same people strangely never seem to hold the same animosity toward television ads and don’t even acknowledge the inconsistency in their stance.

“Can they really tell where I am or what I looked at?”

My holiday learnings: this is a hot button issue for almost everyone. The personal nature of content preferences and the mystery of the technology behind online ad delivery combine to fuel a paranoia that is not going away. Explaining what PII is or how consumers can to some degree control their information sharing does no good. Consumers (at least the ones around my Thanksgiving table) want to be able to view and share and interact with others without any trails, public or private. They do not value “smart ads,” reduced ad volume, or increased relevancy. Nor do they recognize the role of ad targeting in the reduced cost or free content that is a consequence of efficient advertising – at least they do not value it over their perceived privacy invasion. They may change their mind when simplified and naïve regulation forces advertising to dumb down, driving costs up and putting the content they have come to rely on behind a paywall.

While I may not understand the technology that makes my car go, I trust it to perform without intruding on other aspects of my life. Because our online lives are so interwoven with so many aspects of our real lives, the opportunity for crossover can be scary if consumers don’t know what is happening or the options to control it. Choosing where and how we allow online sharing or connections is about personal responsibility IMHO, but you have to first understand the system to adjust it favorably for your comfort thresholds. If I had to understand combustion engines before I turned the key I would probably be taking the bus. I think a lot of us would. If my other choice was to somehow make it the auto industry’s problem to make cars understandable or adjustable for my wants and needs that would sure sound like an attractive option on the surface. That is until the price of cars went up and the technology improvements were limited by new requirements.

We, in the industry, must find a way to ensure that Grandmom and every uncle understand their choices and the consequences of those choices. Consumers are not going to give up their online lives and they are not going to take the time to sift through a tangle of technology they don’t understand how to take control of their online data. If we don’t find a way to make the technology understandable, flexible, and less scary, then regulation is going to win and consumers will support it – to their ultimate disadvantage even if they don’t understand what they give up in the process.

Originally published on

If you are part of a full service online ad agency or are marketing to consumers online, then without a doubt Facebook advertising is a big and growing part of your offering. Facebook advertising is in demand for all the right reasons; it reaches a responsive audience where they spend their time, it has good targeting options, it has scale (and then some!), it can be bought and managed on a performance basis to accommodate your acceptable or target cost per acquisition, it is an evolving platform with richer ad units and targeting capabilities as it matures, and it just plain works.

As Facebook advertising has grown in importance in the last couple of years, there has been some confusion within online marketing teams both internal and agency side about who should be wielding this powerful tool. On one side you have media buyers and search pros that live and breathe CPC advertising and on the other you have the social media team who knows the channel intimately. There are compelling reasons to trust either group.

I recently asked our internal teams to give me their best arguments to own this part of the business.

Display and search team:

• It depends on the goals of the client. If the ads are just based on driving traffic, increasing “likes,” etc…then either team can handle it, but when it comes to driving qualified traffic for conversions (such as sales) or tagging URLs and using bid management to optimize conversions, then the integrated media team should handle it, as this is what they do daily.
• Facebook Ads require the same working knowledge (metrics, targeting, and creative) as interactive marketing campaigns.
• Facebook Ads are better handled by an ROI-focused team.
• Optimization levers are the same as an interactive media campaign; creative is split tested, target audiences are tested, landing pages are tested, etc.
• Interactive media usually has one of two main goals: branding and/or direct response. Facebook Ads are also used to reach these goals whether selling a product, linking to a Facebook page, linking externally, etc.
• The display and search teams can better balance and optimize budget across channels, as they are handling multiple campaigns.

Bottom line: experience in optimizing PPC in tools, experience in tagging for best optimization.

Social media team:

• The social media team knows the community very well. When managing the community, you get to know what type of person is interested in the brand.
• The social media team is sometimes more familiar with the brand. They essentially are the brand in their social space, therefore it is easier for us to target fans and come up with new target groups.
• The social media team is more familiar with how Facebook works. They are in it every day and learn things by analyzing the insights of a brand’s page that the display and PPC team might miss.
• When it comes to measurement and optimization, there are a couple new, unique metrics that are social-oriented, that the social media team would be more familiar with.
  • For planning :
    • Expected targeted vs. frequency vs. reach vs. social reach
  • For reporting:
    • Clicks vs. connections
    • Impressions vs. social impressions
• The social media team knows how to target by applying brand/traditional media knowledge with Facebook’s unique options. For example, for a particular client, the team goes way beyond age or other demos to use pin-point targeting that might include:
  • Competitors
  • Interests
  • Moms (married women with children)
  • Retailers (consumers who like and shop at retailers who carry the product)
  • Television (consumers who watch particular shows)
  • Websites and blogs (consumers who like particular, popular, relevant blogs)
  • Friends of fans (instant low-hanging fruit)
• New thinking required for newest targeting options like “stories.” The social media team can drive ads to our own brand’s Facebook posts (text, photo, video). The social media team would know best how to drive to stories since they’re the ones likely publishing them.
• Social PPC ad management options and systems tend to shift and reinvent themselves faster than display and search these days, making it even more necessary for someone who is intimately familiar with the space to be managing programs.

Bottom line: the social media team understands the community and can anticipate their reactions, can integrate with other platform efforts and share learnings they relate to, and can optimize for new social tools, ad options, and metrics.

Both teams make strong points and the answer for us has been a collaborative approach that makes the best use of the different experience, skills, and talents within each team. But PPC in search or display and PPC in social should not be confused. They reach different audiences in different environments with different mindsets and goals. Maybe the question is not who should own Facebook advertising but something else entirely. As the digital and social spaces continue to reinvent themselves, so must the professionals working in those systems – whatever their title.

Who manages your Facebook advertising and why?

Originally published on

We all spend a tremendous amount of time, energy, and resources focused on optimizing our online programs for traffic, engagement, conversion, and other hard metrics related to defined business goals. But if you asked your management team if they wanted to know what customers think about your brand, how they speak about it, to whom, how often and in what channels, what would motivate a second or third purchase during your season, if your advertising or communications are resonating, or why a certain group left you for a competitor, could the answer be anything other than a loud “Hell yes”?

It’s time we raised the importance of learning objectives to equal that of awareness, preference, conversion, and other goals, because the feedback we can get through customer interactions and the tracking of response and behaviors has the power to inform and improve everything else we do. That is if we set ourselves up to succeed.

Frame the questions you want to answer in advance of your campaign or programs. That way you can make sure you have in place the right tracking, the right listening tools, the right personnel or partners, have the scale of response to answer your particular question reliably, and most importantly – you have internal agreement on the important question(s). If you don’t agree in advance on the critical learning that you need and what you will do with the information after the fact, then you will find yourself sifting through a mountain of data and inputs trying to make sense out of chaos.

Differentiate between testing and learning. Testing is about performance. If you are not testing your digital programs, you are missing one of the primary advantages of marketing online. Tests might include time of day, day of week, landing pages, messaging, targeting criteria, creative approach, or device preferences – really any variable in your program. Learning is about the key insights that help you make better business decisions. Insights might be something like “new customers connect to my brand for the first time primarily through recommendations online” or “customers in this segment of our business value this product attribute most by a large margin.”

Get a budget commitment. Information is not free. Market research is not free and the insights and information that you glean have value. Your organization is going to have to invest time, money, and resources to succeed in this effort. Besides the obvious work to craft the test and expend the man hours to analyze the inputs, you may have to purchase or license new tools and train people to use them.

Differentiate clearly between directional insights and hard statistical facts. A vocal minority can have a very real impact on your markets in this age of social media. In fact, we court evangelists and advocates for that very reason. So while it is no less important to note, understand, and respond to the small voices, they are important for very different reasons than a large body of new or current customers that exhibit some common behavioral characteristics or voice common opinions about your product or service. You need to be able to separate noise from true insights, whether it comes from a small or a large group.

Consult non-obvious team members or departments. Especially those that don’t typically have direct contact with customers or access to their insights. The customer service department or operations group might have a burning question that if answered could have real operations value to the organization. Maybe those responsible for packaging design have a suspicion that the current packaging is a deterrent or want to test a hypothesis regarding the introduction of a new size, formulation, or package.

Don’t overlook the simple ask or insights available from partners or external inputs. There are valuable insights just waiting for the question to be crafted and posed. Conversely, are you ignoring what your customers are already asking you? There could be no more direct or potentially valuable input, yet those gems are often relegated to customer service realms never to be unearthed or explored for their possible potential. Partners are also a rich source of data and insights and they may have the added benefit of other industry or category experience to give those nuggets context.

Create the feedback loops and review cycles that lead to action. Organizations are driven by planning and release cycles, so make sure the information you are gathering is available within a time frame that allows you to use and benefit from its capture. It does no good to gather the information if you don’t know in advance when you need it and how you are going to ultimately apply the learning. If this is a new effort for your company, it may require some additional time and work to break with habit and integrate this into your planning process. Start small – maybe just a few critical questions for the first couple of attempts, but make sure to enlist strong support from someone influential in the organization.

Set expectations. You may not be able to get solid, reliable direction against all of your questions. There is learning involved in the design and implementation of these queries and you should expect some inconclusive or unexpected outcomes that may need further exploration. Sometimes those results ultimately yield the most value.

Digital paths to customers and interactions with digital customers provide a potential gold mine of valuable information and insights, but like any other effort, you need a plan and a framework that allows you to succeed.

What broader business, product, or customer insights have you gleaned from your digital channels?

Originally published on

Marketers everywhere are scrambling to set their marketing and digital marketing strategies for the coming year, and encountering obstacles ranging from corporate politics to shifting or disappearing budgets to a lack of appropriate information upon which to base that strategy. Most would welcome a tested approach to help define a strategy in a way that can drive planning and action and get internal support, but first we have to agree on what that strategy is. A budget allocation is not a strategy; neither is a goal a strategy – regardless of how well-defined that goal might be. The strategy is the much-needed plan to get you from your current state to your desired state.

This is an outline of a 12-step plan to help you understand your current state, define your desired state, and plot your strategy to bridge the gap from one to the other for a successful 2012 in digital marketing.

Understanding your current state:

1. Review past results. In an industry like ours, the past should be viewed primarily as a directional guide because all of the opportunities and channels have morphed in significant ways in the last year. Don’t ignore the stats but delve well-beyond them to the important insights about audience behaviors, channel preferences, and other learnings that can be applied to the opportunities present now.

   Start with the past year’s results (or another appropriate time period) against goals. Look at channel-specific impacts. Identify both the spectacular winning and losing efforts of the past and dissect them to understand why they fell in one camp or the other. Gather all of your stats – site, social media channels, email lists, etc. (including trending data) and dig in. Identify any dips or spikes in activity or performance and explain them.

2. Review environmental realities and changes. As noted, the world continues to spin while we make our plans and you want your new strategy to be relevant, so take into account any channel or industry changes. Do you have new competitors? New distribution options? New regulations? Supply chain issues? Budget challenges? Bad PR or a failed product launch to overcome? Factor the real world into your planning and identify key opportunities as well as risk factors.

   Document competitor activity including any new entrants noting spend, approach (channels, tactics), messaging, assets, and results. Set trackers to follow their progress and try and look for patterns that suggest where they are seeing results.

   Look for any changes in your audience. Mine your stats in various channels to establish demos and any trending information you can use. Use your partners to gather behavioral data.

Defining your desired state:

1. Articulate business goals. The marketing strategy and goals are nonsense if they do not ultimately reflect and support the business goals. Start at the top to understand what business moves and impacts on your organization plans to make for the year and how you can accomplish them. Translate those business goals into specific, quantifiable objectives with timeframes that can help define your optimal marketing strategy.
   
   
2. Articulate channel goals. Review all your options and identify how each channel is best used for your overall marketing goals. The channels and options are not interchangeable and each should have its own set of objectives. Look at how each one can contribute to the overall goals. In a best case, they help and support each other. Some elements of the plan might be great at driving awareness or traffic, while others create an excellent platform for remarketing, for example. Budgets, timeframes, messaging, and other elements should be revised according to your plan needs. Don’t forget your offline elements in this mix.
   
   
3. Articulate testing goals. What questions do you want to be able to answer about your audience, products, business, or campaigns this year? Set yourself up for success by structuring those tests to ensure the answers in advance.

Setting your strategy:

1. Confirm total budget. Unless you live in a fairytale marketing world, this budget is probably handed down to you before you have a chance to set the strategy. If the established budget does not give you the ability to meet your marketing goals, then you must prioritize, clearly communicate the lost opportunities, and set revised goals that make sense within the budget parameters. To make the most of your budget, establish out-clauses that don’t tie your hands as you optimize across channels once you start getting results.
   
   
2. Brainstorm initial approaches/tactics and messaging. Allocate budget across goals (not channels!). This is often the step where people start their strategy work – in a room with a white board and not enough information to get the job done well. The tactics that make up your strategy should be the steps that take you from your current to your desired state. Even the best, most innovative ideas may not take you down the path you need. Be sure to continually check back to your defined path while involved in your brainstorming so you won’t be tempted off course.

   Now that you have a set budget, you need to tie that budget back to your goals – not the channels. Don’t forget creative or production budgets, email broadcast fees, talent, stock, or other miscellaneous add-ons.
   
   

3. Allocate budgets for an initial period. It may be tempting to set the strategy for the entire year and wash your hands of the exercise, but in reality the plan is never set in concrete and should be optimized regularly for best results. One way to ensure regular check-ins is to mandate them by planning for an initial period and institutionalizing the regular review. The length of that initial period may depend on the seasonality and other factors specific to your business.
   
   
4. Set project timelines checking assets and resources for the proposed plans. It’s reality-check time. You have done your homework and stayed on plan and in budget to define your strategy, but there are still risk factors. Now is the time that strong project management can save the day. Do you have the time, expertise, and resources to execute on your strategy? Double-check with vendor partners on specs and lead times so you don’t have any surprises.
   
   
5. Sit on the finished plan for at least a couple of days and then review it with fresh eyes. Have you accounted for mobile, social, email, site impacts, integration with offline elements? New browser updates or devices? In your gut, does this feel like the right way to go or a watered down compromise? Ask someone not involved in the plan production to review the background information and completed plan. An outside consultant can be very helpful here.
   
   
6. Set appropriate internal expectations on results. Make sure everyone’s expectations are set on the scale and speed with which you expect to see results. Set official check-in dates with a dashboard that tracks results against stated goals and outlines recommended next steps. This should allow you to continue to march forward toward that desired state without uninformed organizational nervous twitches creating panicked off-plan responses.
   
   
7. Create a concise mission statement for your plan. Use this mission statement to rally the troops, remind everyone of the goals, and to test the new inputs that will invariably come up during the year. If you can’t articulate what you want to achieve with this multi-faceted, multi-dimensional plan in a sentence or two,
   start back up at step No. 1.

Have you started down the strategy road for 2012?

Originally published on

“Yes!” says the digital marketing director. While wiping her brow, she thinks, “I will take any resource I can get.” Or, it might be a win for the PR director, who now thinks that his department “owns” social media.

Social media is still evolving and growing exponentially. Hiring qualified folks is intensely competitive against a backdrop of strain, stress, and increased pressure to do more with less. It is a land grab for resources, attention, budget, and capabilities, and it can come from myriad places and land in a host of others.

As the hiring manager, the first thing you need to consider even before you start interviewing, even before you get the approval or petition for the hire is this: Should I even be hiring a social media manager? Consider this first because, if and when you do, you will increase your chances that it will be an informed, productive hire that will contribute value to your business and advance your efforts.

In this article, we’ll consider a few reasons why you might not want to hire a social media manager.

Reason No. 1

Social media has yet to be defined and communicated as it is relevant to your business.

While social media can bring communities together, it can also tear corporations apart. There are numerous battles being waged as to who “owns” social media, as well as what the objectives and roles are within a corporation.

Social media is not a single channel; it is not one thing. In the broadest and most comprehensive sense, social media requires multiple cross-disciplinary skills to plan and execute well. Some companies, for example, might decide to plan and execute against specific goals and singular strategic objectives.

If you are the hiring manager or agency executive, there should be some level of planning and communication beforehand. Social media, as we know, has multiple applications across functional areas including marketing, advertising, PR, customer service, and even legal. Defining those applications to your business and with others in your organization is key to this hire’s success, your success, and the overall success of the company’s social media efforts or your client initiatives.

Without clear definition and communications, the opportunity for misaligned expectations, departmental friction, and failure increases.

Reason No. 2

Goals, responsibilities, and expectations for the role are not clearly defined.

If you don’t have the role and responsibilities for a social media manager clearly defined, you reduce your odds of finding the right person and you will not be able to adjust to meet your needs and consider other potential options. You have to consider all the resources you have at hand, including others in your organization who might have skills to lend to the position, as well as outside resources that could complement, extend, and support your needs.

Consider how many ways there are to define social media positions and responsibilities. For every social media post, the responsibilities, roles, and skills vary. Title variations include social media advertising manager, social media community manager, social media marketing manager, and others. A search on Indeed, a job aggregator site, returns more than 30,000 job postings with the words “social media” and 2,597 of what it calls “new” jobs posted on the day of this search.

Take a look at some of the job descriptions and responsibilities posted:

The social media manager is responsible for establishing the voice of… and using this voice to engage with members, reach out to influencers, build brand awareness and tactfully promote “company” and its sales events.

The social media manager will work closely with the marketing and merchandising teams to strategize sales specific social media campaigns and promotions, as well, reach out to like-minded bloggers to build awareness and member growth.

Another position overview reads like this:

The Social Media Manager will oversee all of the brands social media activities. This position is responsible for supervising engaging and innovative content on Twitter, Facebook, the social media space, and the blog that is aligned with brand marketing goals and will keep ‘company’ at the head of the social media pack among its competitors. Through social media administration and content management, this position will be accountable for the public face of the brand in social media channels. The Social Media Manager also oversees all customer service responses and problem-solving in the social media sphere, including on the comment boards and related Web forums.

Other qualifications, roles, and responsibilities companies are seeking include the following. (Note: This is a combination from a few different job descriptions):

• Verifiable track record of social media campaign development performance analysis


• Must be extremely creative and demonstrate immersion in social media


• Experienced in social media monitoring tools and versed on industry trends and innovations


• Expertise with sourcing and managing content development and publishing


• Functional knowledge of HTML/CSS/FBML (administration of Facebook pages)


• Adobe CS, excellent verbal and written communication skills, excellent project manager (manage timelines, deliverables, etc.)


• Create and maintain a social media calendar for long- and short-term projects and campaigns that aligns with all brand marketing and business goals


• Liaise with independent consultants and agencies to execute social media campaigns


• Liaise with the marketing, customer service, tech, and merchant teams to provide accurate, on-brand content


• Manage the maintenance of a reporting and analytics system to track social media engagement and campaigns


• Stay apprised and inform team of emerging social media technologies, trends, and industry news; attend social media conferences and key industry events


• Manage the blog schedule and maintenance of blog


• Supervise the maintenance of the compendium of customer service interactions and outcomes


• Consult with the PR team on blog relationship strategy; work with PR to respond to blogger inquiries/posts

Job titles can vary, as can as the specific job responsibilities. But clearly, there are more jobs than qualified individuals out there. And qualifying individuals to your particular needs can be challenging, making all social media positions difficult to fill.

Alternative strategies in action

Even if your needs are specifically defined, your candidate options might be limited. Defining the role can enable you to be more flexible to consider other options, such as hiring someone relatively green but with “potential.” And while this might not be ideal, with significant guidance and direction, it might be a viable option, among others.

While you are considering your overall needs and the position, it is also wise to consider existing resources. This can help you not only better define your needs for the role but also adjust if you cannot fill the role in an ideal manner. It can also reveal other solutions and strategies that might not only support your goals but also advance them in ways that you might not have considered before.

Consider how Home Depot, for example, staffed its social media needs and in doing so met a number of strategic objectives. While the company has an internal team, its strategy led it to fill some of its needs with existing resources — selected in-store “expert” staffers.

This strategy clearly reflects astute consideration from Home Depot as to how to best meet its needs and extend existing resources. At the same time, the strategy aligns with its business and brand. Home Depot’s strategy includes engaging select store associates to serve as go-to experts in a social media role in the areas of content creation and community management. These tasks are often primary responsibilities of social media managers. But at Home Depot, certain in-store associates contribute to the blog and are on-call experts in the Garden Club. They are supported by internal team members who work closely with the marketing and website teams in a cross-functional approach.

There are many good reasons to hire a social media manager. But while social media is playing an increasingly important role in our overall marketing and business efforts, it is a challenging environment in which to make a good hire. Considering the insights outlined in this article will help you identify and hire (or not) in a way that will achieve your organization’s social media goals.