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Using survey tools to impact the lead-nurturing process

Mfg1 — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:10:31 +0000

Surveys can provide unique input from prospects as well as customers. Consider using surveys in lead-nurturing programs to maintain relationships and drive customized offers. B2B marketers can use this new information to categorize leads and determine next steps for each.

Customer-centricity: Do marketers really get it?

Mfg1 — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:09:56 +0000

Direct marketing is supposed to be all about reaching out and touching customers and prospects in a dynamic way, as well as managing one-on-one relationships with target individuals through to conversion or actual deals.

Service Economics in a “Something Failed to Go Right” World

Mfg1 — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:09:41 +0000

I don’t think I’ve been to a conference lately that didn’t have a mention of Twitter and its effect on service teams everywhere. Frank Eliason from Comcast, Tony Hsieh from Zappos, and their teams, as well as a number of other great examples are shown as the “new way” of providing customer service. I don’t disagree, but the challenge here is that this must cause a massive shake-up of budgets and the way that organizations are structured if it is to succeed – and that is not a topic that is discussed in any significance.

What I mean is, the idea that Twitter and social media can, and should, be used to enhance our service offerings will almost certainly fail if we just think of it as a service team challenge.

Let’s look at the math.

If you look at an average service team, let’s say a call center, they receive calls that generally meet three criteria:

- Definable: a discrete problem that can be identified, discussed, and either resolved or not resolved

- Significant: enough of a problem that a person saw fit to pick up the phone, wait in a call queue, and bring it to your attention

- Solvable: a problem for which one can generally visualize a defined, near-term solution

If the problem is outside of that criteria set, we will likely not bother phoning support as they will not be able to help us.

Given these criteria, which I would call the “something went wrong” set of problems, we staff our support centers. Rarely do the teams in these support centers find themselves lacking work, and they are often very strapped for resources, as we manage the budgets for the call centers to maximize utilization and minimize costs.

Then, however, if you look at the set of problems that might surface in social media you see that these three criteria are not met.

- Definable: a complaint can surface without being discrete, or naturally resolvable. General dissatisfaction with airline flight delays, as an example.

- Significant: a negative Tweet about a company or its products requires less effort than calling a service center, so the bar of significance is much lower

- Solvable: many problems that are discussed in social media are not inherently easy to solve, and success may mean guidance, coaching, or training, as much as technical support

I’m not in any way suggesting that these are not important problems, just that they are a much bigger universe of problems than the problems that make their way to today’s call centers. This is the “something failed to go right” set of problems.

So, if we are to staff our service teams to proactively reach out and deal with the “something failed to go right” set of problems, rather than reactively deal with juse inbound “something went wrong” problems, we are dealing with many more problems. Whereas there may be some mild efficiency gains from connecting in an online environment, I would guess that these gains are far outweighed by the increase in size of the problem set.

Where will this budget come from? My suggestion is Marketing. I have long believed that social media is forcing marketers to think of their overall brand experience, including product and service realities, rather than just the visuals like logos, when they are considering brand. Rather than set your service team up with Twitter handles and send them an article on Frank Eliason and the Comcast Cares team, proactive marketing organizations should realize that this new approach to service opens up a much broader universe of problems that must be addressed. Doing so will have a significant positive impact on your company’s brand, but may require a significant investment in service people.

Next time you allocate marketing budget to “brand”, think about whether the best investment in brand that your marketing team can to is to hire an extra few people for the services team and start tackling more of the “something failed to go right” problems.

Lead generation metrics should emphasize opportunities not just leads

Mfg1 — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:08:58 +0000

tweetmeme_url = ‘http://blog.startwithalead.com/weblog/2009/10/on-lead-generation-metrics-focus-on-costperopportunity-for-effective-measurement.html’;
tweetmeme_source = ‘brianjcarroll’;

I was asked to write a response to this question, “In what ways have metrics evolved with the increase in digital B2B
marketing? Suggest one ROI metric that you have found to be very
effective.”

Read ClickInsights: What ROI metric should B2B marketers use in this digital marketing era?

Here’s my response….

The use of the Internet, mobile and other interactive channels has
certainly increased the number of leads marketers receive today. Many
organizations spend thousands of dollars each month on search marketing
to take advantage of this increase.

This increase, however, causes many marketers to focus on the wrong
metrics. In order to generate leads marketers have to know how to use
the analytics. Many marketers focus on conversion rates of specific
phrases or banners and are ignoring other valuable information. While
conversion rate is one way to measure the effectiveness of a search
phrase, for instance, it can be extremely misleading.

If marketers are spending a lot on search marketing and not capturing
visiting organizations (both those that convert and the many more that
don’t), they are making decisions based only on half-truths. And they
are probably routing dollars toward phrases and ad creative that appear
to perform better but in reality are really just clogging the marketing
database and sales pipeline.

The metrics of digital marketing is starting to slowly evolve.
Marketers are starting to realize that sales people care very little
about the cost of the leads we generate. What they really care about is
how many of those leads will actually become viable sales
opportunities in their sales pipeline.

For this reason, I think cost-per-opportunity measurements are the most
effective metrics. The most common metric, cost per lead, is irrelevant
unless we can answer other fundamental questions first, “What is our
rate of lead acceptance (a.k.a. sales pursuit) into the sales pipeline”
and then “What is the cost per opportunity?” Cost-per-opportunity is
the one metric that can help you understand how well your sales team
accepts and pursues leads. Ultimately, it shows if your leads are
actually helping our sales team sell and if marketers are positively
contributing to their pipeline.

Cost-per-lead models drive down the cost of each lead by generating
more leads, which is good if the quality does not suffer. However, this
is rarely the case since there are a finite number of high quality
sales ready leads in your target market at any given time.

The real question is, “Are these leads helping our sales team sell more and will these leads become profitable customers?”

These are real-world metrics that every marketer should track in their lead generation program:

Number of inquiries? (people who raised their hands)
Number of leads? (qualified as “sales-ready”)
Number of opportunities? (leads that move to pipeline)
Number of closed sales? (generated from marketing leads)

If marketers know those metrics they can start to track the following key performance indicators:

Inquiry to lead ratio (cost-per-lead) – this isn’t a enough
Lead to opportunity ratio (cost-per-opportunity)
Lead to pipeline revenue ratio (cost-per-pipeline revenue)
Lead to sale (win) ratio (cost-per-closed sale)
A value driven mindset requires leaders and marketers to plan and
budget for the long term and to take a more holistic view that goes
beyond cost-per-lead budgets.

What other metrics have your found are important to track for tracking your lead generation results?

HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI

Mfg1 — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:37:16 +0000

Last month, we reported on a survey that found that 84% of social media programs don’t measure return on investment (ROI). The comments in that post indicated that a lot of individuals and businesses want to be able to measure the ROI of their social media strategies and campaigns, but they don’t know where to start.

Companies and executives are finally beginning to really jump on the social media bandwagon, and that’s fantastic. However, for social media to fully work (for everyone), businesses and brands need to be able to evaluate the impact their social media use is having, both positive and negative. Measuring social media ROI isn’t impossible, but it can be difficult because many of the pieces that need to be evaluated are difficult to track. This guide is designed to help you track down those pieces and determine the ROI you’re getting on social media.

ROI Reality Check

Oliver Blanchard’s Social Media ROI Presentation is a witty, fun introduction to ROI in terms of social media. If you’re confused about what ROI is (or rather, how it is measured), in the context of social media, check out his presentation (below), before you proceed with this post.

Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

Defining Clear Goals

As a standard formula, ROI is pretty basic, ROI = (X – Y) / Y, where X is your final value and Y is your starting value. In other words, if you invest $5 and get back $20, your ROI is (20 – 5) / 5 = 3 times your initial investment. In the financial sense, ROI is measured purely in the context of dollars and cents, however, the principles can really apply to any type of investment — monetary or not.

Having concrete goals and concrete baselines is crucial to calculating your return on investment. So before you set out to measure and monitor your social media returns, you need to have a clear idea of what it is you want to accomplish.

Once you have your goals defined, you need to gauge the baseline for your levels before starting or changing your social media strategy. For example, if your goal is to increase social media mentions of your company, in order to measure the ROI of any actions taken toward that goal, you need to know where you stand now. You can’t evaluate the ROI accurately without a baseline.

Metrics Tools

Although ROI ≠ metrics, traditional web metrics like traffic counts, number of comments, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc. are an important component when calculating your ROI.

The trick is to not rely solely on the numbers, but on what the numbers end up leading to. For instance, does your increase in website visitors correlate with higher sales? Are people that find your website from Twitter or Facebook then clicking on your product pages or going to the e-Commerce section of your site? That’s the sort of data you want to be able to look for.

Back in January, we did a round-up of 50+ Tools for Measuring Web Traffic. Here are some of our favorites and some additional social media related measuring options:

Google Analytics — It’s free and it can provide a really powerful baseline for a variety of different factors. You can track incoming links and then the activities of the users they send, which can be helpful.

Omniture — Omniture has a slew of services available for businesses, including components that track Facebook and Twitter metrics.

TweetMeme Analytics — This is useful if you use TweetMeme’s retweet buttons on your sites. It’s a lot like Google Analytics, but focused on TweetMeme.

PostRank Analytics — This suite of tools measures social engagement on other platforms and services. What’s nice about PostRank is that instead of just a raw number, you can actually see the messages and comments from other sites that contribute to your stats. This can be really important for sentiment analysis (more on that later).

HootSuite — HootSuite is a great Twitter manager but also offers impressive analytics. The nice thing about the click data you get from an app like HootSuite (or bit.ly) is by looking deeper you can more easily see if those clicks translate into transactions or impressions on your other sites.

Be sure to check out our post on Tracking Social Media Analytics for help with these tools and for the type of data you want to look for. Also check out some other reasons to use a URL shortener.

Sentiment Analysis

Having a metric for something like Twitter mentions is pretty meaningless if you don’t know if those mentions are positive or negative. This is where sentiment analysis is interesting. Sentiment is also a useful baseline to look at before implementing or changing a social media strategy and calculating your ROI.

We’ve written a lot about different sentiment analysis tools for Twitter and here are some highlights:

Viral Heat — Viral Heat is an affordable social media monitoring service that includes a sentiment breakdown for Twitter mentions.

Twendz — Twendz is a very basic real-time Twitter sentiments tool.

Tweet Feel — Tweet Feel is another real-time Twitter sentiments search-engine.

Crimson Hexagon — Crimson Hexagon is an Enterprise-level social media tracking tool. The algorithm they use for their VoxTrot Opinion Monitor is really impressive stuff, and will help you determine what consumer sentiment is toward your brand based on social media mentions.

Sentiment Metrics — Sentiment Metrics is another tool aimed at enterprises or larger businesses. We mentioned them in our round-up of reputation tracking tools last year.

Social Media Product Suites

These products can be extremely useful in measuring ROI on social networks but are primarily designed for bigger brands and corporations. Still, in terms of all-encompassing tool sets, these tools have the edge.

Vitrue SRM — We’ve covered the Twitter Pages component of Vitrue SRM (Social Relationship Manager) before, but the whole suite is really dedicated to managing and getting the most information out of your social media accounts. Vitrue does analytics for links posted on Twitter or Facebook and can also plug into third-party services like Omniture and Google Analytics. Vitrue SRM is basically a CMS for controlling and monitoring your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

ContextOptional — ContextOptional offers both a Social Reporting Dashboard for monitoring engagement and activity and a Social Moderation Console for Facebook.

Salesforce.com — Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 line of products is really designed to integrate Twitter and Facebook results and pages directly into a company’s CRM. Although this isn’t ROI in the most clear-cut terms, by improving customer service and getting a handle on problems quickly, brands can save themselves from potentially costly mistakes. Those savings can be taken into account when computing your ROI.

Making the Data Usable

This is the hard part. After you have defined your baseline, you need to take the metrics from your monitoring tools and see how they correlate to higher sales, better customer retention, or whatever your primary markers for output are.

If your ultimate measurement is sales for instance, look at your sales level. If it has increased, look at the number of referrers on your e-commerce site (assuming you can track this data) from your website or Twitter or the number of coupons used that were given away in a Facebook campaign to start calculating which sales stemmed from your social media campaigns.

Do you see any trends? Is traffic up to your store after posting on Facebook? What about Twitter? Does store traffic correlate with more sales when evaluating that same data? Does a higher sentiment analysis on Twitter lead to more sales or more visits?

Finding trends and tracking them back to their point of origin is the key to measuring ROI.

What do you think?

What do you use when measuring social media ROI? Is ROI the best term for measuring impact of social media, or should something else be used? What have you found to be good indicators of things that work and don’t work when using social media? Let us know!

More business resources from Mashable:

- 5 Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Business
- Top 5 Business Blogging Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
- 4 Ways Social Media is Changing Business
- 6 Must-Follow Steps for Selling in Any Economy
- 5 Small Businesses Successfully Using Social Media

(Photo Courtesy of Cambodia4Kids on Flickr)

Tags: analysis, contextoptional, crimson hexagon, facebook, metrics, ROI, salesforce.com, social media roi, twitter, vitrue srm

National Public Media’s New CEO Has Tech/Ad Background

Mfg1 — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:35:43 +0000

LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) — Public broadcasting sponsors have a new name to add to their Rolodex. Stephen Moss is the new CEO of National Public Media, the corporate sponsorship firm for National Public Radio, PBS and WGBH, taking the reins for departing CEO Robert Williams, the founder of National Public Broadcasting who retired in June.

Newspaper Websites Attract 74 Million Visitors In Q3

Mfg1 — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:31:08 +0000

An average of 74 million people visited newspaper websites in the third quarter of 2009, representing 38 percent of all Internet users, according to a custom analysis by Nielsen for the Newspaper Association of America (NAA).

Newspaper website visitors generated more than 3.5 billion page views during the quarter, spending 2.7 billion minutes browsing the sites over more than 596 million sessions.

The NAA says there are higher levels of subscribers keeping subscriptions, with subscriber "churn" falling dramatically to 31.8 percent in 2008, compared with 54.5 percent in 2000.

The higher retention rate among subscribers could be due to the fact that in 2008, 92 percent of newspapers offered a discount for participating in a recurring payment plan; 38 percent of new subscriptions were sold on a recurring payment plan while only 28 percent were sold with no initial payment required.

In addition, 32 percent of newspapers priced their daily edition at 75 cents at the end of 2008 (vs. just 2 percent in 2006), while the average seven-day, home-delivery weekday rate rose 8.6 percent at the same time newspapers are increasing retention

"Newspaper publishers continue to aggressively reinvent their business models, leveraging trusted brands to attract a growing and sophisticated audience in the digital space," said NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm. "At the same time, industry executives have adopted smarter circulation strategies that are growing circulation revenues even though paid circulation numbers are lower."

"This places the focus where it belongs: retaining core readers who deliver maximum value to advertisers while harnessing digital platforms to broaden our medium's audience and position us strongly for the future."

Related Articles:

> Twitter Bigger Than Newspapers in the UK

> Can New Media and Old Media Get Along?

> Can SEO Help Save the Publishing Industry?

> The AP's Battle For Relevance In A Decentralized Universe

> Americans' Trust Of News Media At New Low

MySpace, MSN Now Said To Be In Talks

Mfg1 — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:29:29 +0000

Yesterday, the surprising news that Facebook and MySpace are negotiating a content-sharing partnership broke, yet that’s not all the latter social network has on its plate. A fresh report indicates MySpace is also in talks with MSN over some sort of music deal.

MSN is interested in "using the social networking site’s music service, MySpace Music, to help power music offerings on the giant portal," according to Kara Swisher. She then continued, "While sources at both companies cautioned the talks were still early, Microsoft (MSFT) – which has its own music site that it programs with original and partnered content – execs are interested in goosing it."

An arrangement that would give MSN users access to more music would be of obvious benefit to Microsoft. The exposure – and/or cash – that MySpace would receive from such a deal would no doubt help it, too.

Plus, it’s not like either company has defined itself as some sort of lone wolf. Microsoft’s reached out to Yahoo and Twitter in recent months, and MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta was quoted yesterday as saying, "Partnerships are going to be a big part of our strategy moving forward as a lot of value can be derived from them."

So stay tuned and see what happens. It may be that little "powered by MySpace" graphics will start popping up in quite a lot of places.

Related Articles:

> Twitter Makes Share Buttons More Useful

> MySpace Introduces New Music Features

> Facebook, MySpace May Share Content

Email Marketing Driving Purchases

Mfg1 — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:21:00 +0000

Consumers in the U.S. prefer email marketing to direct mail, social media and telemarketing, according to a new survey by smartFOCUS.

When asked to rank their preferred ways of receiving marketing messages, the majority of respondents (62%) said email was their preferred channel of communication, followed by direct mail (23%), and social media (13%). The least popular way to be contacted was telemarketing, with 80 percent putting it at the bottom of their lists.

The survey also found that email communications frequently lead to purchases, with three-quarters (75%) of respondents reporting that they had bought products or services as a direct result of receiving an email.

The most common items purchased as a result of direct email marketing were clothing (82%), followed by purchases from restaurants and coffee shops by almost half (49%) of respondents. Other popular items bought include grocery items (40%) and personal electronics (38%).

When it comes to social media, 40 percent of respondents said they receive communication from vendors on the social networking sites they use, such as Facebook and Twitter. Nearly one in five people (17%) have opted in or requested that companies actively contact them via social media sites.

"This survey reflects what we are seeing in the marketplace: e-mail is popular. It's non-intrusive, can be highly tailored and is a compelling and actionable marketing communication," said Curt Bloom, President of smartFOCUS International.
>
"Although some of the indications of the uptake and interest in social media may seem low, this is a new communication channel that businesses are tackling. In our survey, quite predictably, the age ranges that said they preferred contact via social media platforms were the 18 to 25 year-olds. With platforms such as Facebook reaching 300 million active users, we continue to see that businesses and retailers who ignore the potential of social media do so at their own peril."

Related Articles:

>10 Reasons Social Media isn't Replacing Email

>Making Money With Social Media Marketing

> Social Media Will Not Replace Search

Promote the Right Landing Page to Maximize Holiday Sales

Mfg1 — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:20:24 +0000

With the holiday season on the way, online retailers are obviously going to be looking for big sales. A lot of retailers are turning to Facebook and Twitter to help in that department, but if you sell goods online, there’s no better place to start than on the site itself.

Amazon, probably the most successful online retailer there is, knows this, and that is one reason why it has prepared for an influx of holiday shoppers by creating its own Holiday Toy List. Amazon knows what people are going to be looking for, and it has put together this list to make finding these things as easy as possible. It’s not just a list, but a page that points to these items.

“The Holiday Toy List is a helpful tool for parents, friends and family members who are searching for the perfect toys for the kids on their list,” says Sarah Wood, director of the Toy Store for Amazon.com. “With navigation that’s simple, convenient and fun to use, it’s easier than ever to find great gifts at Amazon’s everyday low prices.”

Not only has Amazon created the page, but they have promoted it. They have issued a press release for news organizations and bloggers to pick up, which should give the list plenty of coverage. It will likely lead to increased sales on popular items.

Now, granted, not everyone can put out a press release and expect to get the kind of coverage Amazon does. Amazon’s huge. Your online business is probably not quite so big. That doesn’t mean you can’t put special focus on the items you expect to sell the most during the holiday season and promote them in other ways. You may still issue a press release, but you can simply use social media marketing, search marketing, email marketing, etc., but have a focused landing page where customers can easily find what they want, or what you expect them to want.

This may seem like common sense, and perhaps it is, but there is a lot of competition online, and if you are not focused on promoting what has the best chance of bringing you business, you may not be getting the sales you’re after.

Related Articles:

> Online Retailers To Focus On Facebook And Twitter During Holidays

> Amazon Launches Same-Day Delivery Option

> Good Chunk of Holiday Spending Will Be Online

> More People Plan To Shop Online During The Holidays

> Test Landing Pages for Big Impact on Bottom Line