Blog & Website Marketing Resources

Marketing ROI: A guide to the free MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal

April 30, 2010 By sean212 Leave a Comment

Point of personal weakness – I love buffets! I try to eat healthy, I try to live in moderation, but when I see a gorgeous spread of fresh seafood and fruit and all sorts of goodies like at the Marketplace at Atlantis Resort in The Bahamas, I just don’t know where to begin.

I’m afraid we might have created the same situation with our new MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal…

Our desire was to create a one-stop resource that you can refer to throughout the quarter to give you ideas, insights, and (dare I say) inspiration to drive ROI with testing and optimization. The Research Journal includes never-before-published social media research along with content that our loyal blog readers will recognize – all in one convenient package.

However, with so much information in the same place, the initial reaction might be to take it all in at once. According to Internet Standard Time, after something has been posted for five minutes (the half-life of a tweet), it is old news.

We take a different, principle-based approach to marketing. As opposed to a relentless pursuit of the latest “everyone-else-is-doing-it-and-so-must-I” practice, we share higher-level principles that apply across media, timeframes, and executions. We pair those principles with tactical advice to help put them into action the right way for your organization right now.

With that in mind, here are three simple ways you can get value out of the MarketingExperiments Research Journal every day this quarter…

Research

What is your biggest marketing challenge today? Email? Social media? Your website? Go to that section and read the applicable research or actionable insights. Again, don’t try to push through the entire Journal in one day, let each day’s challenge dictate your intake.

Relate

As opposed to pure or theoretical research, we focused on ROI-based marketing research that can help the evidence-based marketer drive results in her organization. Combine the principles from our research with your own experience knowing your business inside and out. It’s not up to the tools to make it happen. It’s not up to rote adherence to best practices. It’s up to you.

Respond

This Research Journal, along with everything MarketingExperiments publishes, is meant to be just one part of a conversation with you. How can we better educate you? Take our three-minute survey. What works for your organization? Send a letter to the editor. What success have you driven? Share your story for a chance to win a Landing Page Optimization package.

Related Resources

MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal, Q1 2010

Methodology

2010 Online Marketing ROI Tour

Filed Under: Advertising, Marketing, Optimization Tagged With: Practical Application, Resources, test, testing

Live Marketing Optimization: Send in your traditional and online marketing for a chance to win

April 23, 2010 By sean212 Leave a Comment

Live optimization is often one of our audience’s favorite aspects of a MarketingExperiments web clinic. For those not familiar with the term, live optimization is when marketers submit their advertising and marketing materials and, if chosen, receive free advice from our optimization researchers.

For our April 28 web clinic – Integrate Your Marketing: How one company combined offline and online marketing to increase subscriptions by 124% – Jimmy Ellis (Director of Optimization), Gina Townsend (Senior Research Manager), and Corey Trent (Research Analyst) will apply the same MarketingExperiments Optimization methodologies that have driven triple-digit conversion gains for our Research Partners to your offline and online marketing (if you are chosen).

This clinic will focus on the integration of traditional and digital marketing. To have your materials considered for live optimization, just register for Wednesday’s free web clinic and complete the fields on the registration form. Or, send your creative (direct mail, print ad, billboard, you name it), along with the online marketing it corresponds with, to WebClinics@MarketingExperiments.com.

PLUS: We’ll pick one lucky marketer at random to win free enrollment in one of our Online Training and Certification Courses (winner chooses).

Related Resources

Live Optimization Workshops – Learn How to Increase Conversions on Your Landing Pages, Email and Websites

Live optimization + lead generation = better B2B landing pages in one hour

Live optimization: Boost your PPC campaign conversions

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thetruthabout/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Filed Under: Optimization Tagged With: clinic, Clinic Notes, live optimization clinics

Marketing Symbiosis: How your peers combine traditional marketing with social media, Facebook, blogs, and the rest of the digital world

April 21, 2010 By sean212 Leave a Comment

If you’ve flipped through your favorite print magazine lately, you might have seen an ad for a product you’ve never seen advertised to consumers before – magazines. In fact, magazines now even have their own tagline – The Power of Print.

At the same time, the publishing industry is falling all over itself to promote the supremacy and fresh capabilities possible with every new digital distribution tool (Heart is even looking at buying digital-marketing firm iCrossing). It is quite a post-modern experience for my print version of The Wall Street Journal to try to sell me on reading that issue on the iPad instead.

The way the publishing industry has reacted to the digital world is akin to your wife trumpeting how wonderful your marriage has been at the same time she suggests you would have been much happier with her sister.

I kid because I love

I kid the publishing industry because I love it so much. In my job, I read every publication I can get my hands on, and savor the knowledge awaiting me in every bound issue that arrives in my mailbox.

But I’m also picking on the publishers because I don’t want to turn that harsh spotlight on myself and my fellow marketers. Truth be told, while all these digital developments are exciting and spark the creativity inherent in marketers, they’re also a little scary.

And while there are sublime examples of marketers combining the traditional with the 2.0, many marketers are losing money by not putting the puzzle pieces together correctly.

On our free April 28^th web clinic – Integrate Your Marketing: How one company combined offline and online marketing to increase subscriptions by 124% – we’ll share the latest discoveries to help you do just that. In the meantime, here is a look at how your peers are making the connection…

Start with the problem

For too long marketing budgets have been set and then an arbitrary percentage, say 10%, went to online without a true understanding of its impact. My firm, WCM, no longer differentiates between traditional and online because the separation is not necessary and new tools are constantly being developed. Online is mainstream.

Moving forward: Start with the business problem. Then make a list of the techniques you can use to solve that problem with marketing. Prioritize the list and diagram the best course of action. See where the connections lead – I suspect traditional is driving interaction through online channels.

Example: For a hospital network, we are creating pre-scheduled, topic-specific discussions on Facebook. (Most companies still use Facebook as a broad discussion board). By using traditional marketing (TV, radio, posters), we will drive patients and caregivers to the daily discussion and grow the loyal and active fan base. Monday is a discussion on nutrition and diets for those combating cancer, Tuesday is all about fashion tips (“looking beautiful when your hair is gone”) etc.

Marketing tool selection should be based on how you want to interact with your audience, but more importantly, how they prefer to be communicated with. For example, those struggling with cancer generally crave interaction with people. Social media makes it happen.

– Rick McKenna, President of Wallwork Curry McKenna

The hub or the mirror

There are a thousand different techniques used to integrate online and offline marketing. For a lot of companies, the website is the “hub” that all other marketing efforts connect with. And if the website is not a “hub” then it works as a “mirror” to reflect what other channels are promoting.

With that in mind, online and offline marketing work best in tandem. And they work best when there is a common strategy with outlined goals and pre-defined benchmarks for evaluation.

Here are some obvious techniques:

Developing a plan for accounting for untrackable web sales (it’s going to happen)

Making sure a website’s URL can be used as a response mechanism

Including the URL in all marketing efforts (if it fits strategy)

Allow the website to “enhance” the content or messaging of your offline efforts

Other than the URL, make sure your site can be found; using keywords in offline marketing that are mirrored through paid and organic search

In the end, your customers do not necessarily care about the techniques used, only that their ease of shopping or ordering or learning, etc. is as seamless and unobtrusive as possible.

– John Kennerty, Director of Marketing at Sinclair Institute

Communication and eliminating silos

You must first align your goals, objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) around one strategy and then speak the same voice across all channels. The communication internally and externally must mesh and meet the customer’s expectations in each channel.

Beyond this, cross promotion and teasers are great. Examples:

In your catalog, place the copy of a hot blog, but only put the first couple of lines and refer to the blog. Or have a fun fact and point people online to learn more.

Make your homepage either match any direct mail or retail pieces that are active or at least have a space for it.

Have a virtual catalog online and/or a virtual showroom.

Have your email messages, direct mail, direct response television (DRTV) or other advertising hit at the same time with the same message. Make sure your promotions/discounts are available through any ordering method.

There are many other examples and ideas, but at the core you must stay true to your brand and message in all channels.

– Steve A. Cates, VP of Multichannel Marketing at Carrot-Top Industries

A detailed method

Here is a strategy we tested that has worked successfully for us since 1999. We used it for over 30 Fortune 500 clients, mostly publishers. Word of warning: excellent technology will not take a bad campaign and make it good. However, if you have an otherwise excellent effort, it’s worth adding powerful technology behind it. Passing some of Marketing Experiments’ exams would truly help you understand the power of this method.

Overview:

1. A direct mail piece goes out with a common URL and a unique login ID for each recipient.

2. There is an incentive and a deadline to encourage recipients to log in.

3. When they do, the campaign owner will be notified.

4. Additional enhancements (leads delivered by email, SMS, stored and exported to delimited or mainframe formats), are all possible to add value to your client (if you are an agency).

A brief non-technical explanation:

Direct mail list (database if you will) gets an additional field, let’s call it UniqueID. This number can track each individual as well as campaign constants (campaign ID, incentive used, etc).

The recipient is offered an attractive incentive in the mail piece to log in with their unique ID (raise motivation).

When a login occurs, the campaign owner is notified. If a form must be completed, the information we already have about recipient can be conveniently pre-populated (reduced friction).

Notice how even if they DO NOT proceed to claim your offer (but just log in) you are still notified, giving you the ability to identify “warm leads.”

If the user is supposed to complete a form, this can be pre-populated with variables which display values from the same database used for the mailing. When they log in, the form they are supposed to use for ordering is already filled out (they can correct any mistakes / update info and continue).

Some marketers make intentional mistakes, to “push a button” in people to correct a misspelling (and in the process subscribe to something they offered).

Simply having the technology (your prospect receives a mail piece that allows them to log in to claim a desirable bonus) puts the merchant in a better light (reduced anxiety).

If the campaign is an email, the login step can be eliminated. Clients can click and land directly on a pre-populated form or personalized welcome / landing page.

This is something I’ve done for a decade and I can elaborate at length, if anyone is interested in the technical details.

– Dan Banici, Business Analyst at Incentive Server

Win a free ticket

Are your worlds colliding? Or are you a smooth operator at making the digital and the analog flow seamlessly together? Let us know how you integrate traditional and digital marketing in the comments section. Our favorite comment will win a free ticket to the 2010 Online Marketing ROI Tour.

UPDATE: Congratulations to Paul Pacun, winner of a free ticket to the 2010 Online Marketing ROI Tour.

Related Resources

Integrate Your Marketing: How one company combined offline and online marketing to increase subscriptions by 124%

Press Releases — How we tested the impact of press releases on website traffic and inbound links, and found that effective PR can deliver an ROI superior to PPC advertising

Are video clips medium-agnostic?

Filed Under: Advertising, Marketing, Marketing Insights Tagged With: clinic

Marketing Optimization: Make the business case for testing to fight the squirrel

April 16, 2010 By sean212 Leave a Comment

If you’ve been following the MarketingExperiments blog in the past few weeks, you’ll quickly learn that we’re a little obsessed with two things – the real-time, real-world results of online marketing testing and the strong desire to fight squirrels.

No, not literal squirrels with their cute little acorn-filled cheeks. The squirrels we seek to battle are figurative. That is the name we’ve given to that bad idea your boss has that just drives you nuts (pun intended). The “squirrel” is that red herring that diverts your audience’s attention from the main conversion objective. Of course, since squirrels are more personable and cuddly than herrings (not to mention easier to train), that is the analogy we went with for our videos…

To see how our dynamic marketing duo initially tried to fight the squirrel, please watch Part 1 and Part 2 in our ROI-increasing/squirrel-slaying trilogy.

To help you win the budgetary and executive approval to defeat your organization’s squirrels, watch a replay of our latest free web clinic – The Business Case for Testing: How one marketer convinced her business leaders to start testing and drove a 201% gain in the process.

Related resources

Online Marketing Optimization: Does my 95-year-old Grandmother Understand Split Testing Better than your CMO?

A/B Split Testing: How to use A/B Split Testing to Increase Conversion Rates, Challenge Assumptions and Solve Problems

Multivariable Testing: How testing multiple changes simultaneously can save you time, speed up your optimization schedule, and increase your profits

Photo attribution:http://www.flickr.com/photos/96884693@N00/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7715686@N05/ / CC BY-NC 2.0
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brandonchalk/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Filed Under: Analytics & Testing Tagged With: clinic, online testing, test, testing

Search Marketing: Tips on mastering the latest innovations in this mature category

April 14, 2010 By sean212 Leave a Comment

Most experienced marketers tend to think of anything Internet-marketing related as new, cutting edge, and/or unproven. But a funny thing happened on the way to Google’s $180 billion market capitalization – search has become a commodity.

To wit, a site like GoodSearch. GoodSearch is a search engine, except it’s not. It’s really an advertising platform that donates 50% of its revenue to charities (“You search, we give”) that leverages the commodity of search, in this case Yahoo (which itself is powered by Microsoft Bing).

And, of course, GoodSearch is not unique in this respect. There are many businesses built on the commodity of search. Perhaps we’ll soon see a search futures market develop so it can be traded right along with pork bellies.

The paradox of search commoditization

Now here’s the rub. When most product categories achieve commoditization, innovation dies (think generic drugs) in favor of merciless cost cutting (since once a product is perceived as a commodity the only difference becomes price).

Search has been the opposite – innovation is still occurring at a breakneck pace. So we’re left at an interesting crossroads. Social media marketing is new enough that most marketers recognize the huge learning curve, print advertising is established enough that experience in itself is quite valuable, but search is a shade of gray. As the financial services ads (must legally) tell you, “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.”

When it comes to search, you need a GPS system, not a map

For all of the above reasons, I’m glad there are people like Jen Doyle in the marketing world. Jen is a Research Analyst at our sister company, MarketingSherpa.

Along with her peers, she is constantly delving into hot-button marketing topics to help you discover how to best use these ever-changing tactics. So what you get is an ever-changing GPS system that helps you navigate this new terrain, not a map that shows you best practices from several years go.

Jen and her team have launched a new research project into search marketing, and she was kind enough to update us on the latest developments in search…

What has changed in search marketing since your last Benchmark Report one year ago?

Any search-engine marketer knows how quickly things change with search, and the past year has been no exception. Between social media’s growth and search innovations such as real-time search and personalization, there are a lot of unanswered questions for search-engine marketers.

How are marketers perceiving and reacting to these new changes in search? This year’s Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report will be stacked with a wealth of information on balancing search and social media to achieve optimal success, as well as sections dedicated to search innovations.

You mention that the rocket-like ascendancy of social media has had an impact. So how can social media help with search engine optimization (SEO)?

One of the most effective, and most difficult, SEO tactics is generating inbound links. With social media, you can generate highly relevant inbound links to your site by attracting links from blogs, forums, social networking sites, and other social media channels.

Another great benefit search engine marketers are reaping out of social media is increasing the number of listings that get displayed for their brand in the search engine results pages (SERPs), pushing their competition to lower rankings and increasing the click-through rates on their own listings.

How can you use social media to optimize for multimedia and universal search, from blended listings to focused multimedia search such as Google Images?

When optimizing multimedia content for search engines, you must strike a balance between traditional SEO tactics and social media integration.

For starters, whether you’re optimizing a video, an image, or a slide presentation, you need to make sure you have good, relevant, link-worthy content. Additionally, check to see that your multimedia sharing site has options to add title tags, description tags, etc. and then optimize these tags for your target keywords.

You can then utilize social media to generate inbound links (not to mention traffic) to your content.

Has social media made universal search more competitive (i.e., harder to get towards the top of listings)?

The search landscape is growing more competitive in nature over time, and this is partly due to social media. Social media has added another venue for marketers to up their SEO ante, so to speak. As the competition is stepping up their game, it continues to be a challenge to keep up.

MarketingSherpa has recently published Social Media Marketing research. In that research, did you find that SEO was the main reason most marketers are using social media?

There are a number of target business objectives that can be achieved with social media, and search engine optimization is a popular one indeed.

Other popular objectives include increasing website traffic, lead volume, sales revenue, and improving brand reputation and awareness. These objectives, of course, can also be achieved with SEO. The key is to balance your SEO efforts with social media in order to achieve success towards these common objectives.

And perhaps as the flip side to that, how can you leverage search to best get your social media content (like blog posts) some traffic?

Whether it be a blog, a Facebook fan page, or a Linkedin profile, leveraging search to attract traffic to social media content starts with good, link-worthy, keyword-targeted content. And a lot of it. You will naturally generate inbound links by creating social media content, and the search engines will take notice.

For your blog, it’s important to use the same optimization techniques you would use for your regular website – and definitely link to your blog from your homepage (or the page on your site with the highest page rank) using optimized anchor text.

Again, the goal here is to achieve balance in your SEO and social media efforts to achieve success.

What are some possible tactics to help more traditional media, like PDFs, get good SEO results using social media sharing options (as opposed to just keywords, etc)?

Taking advantage of social bookmarking sites is a great way to get more traditional media, like PDFs, ranked.

For one, the search engines crawl social bookmarking sites at a high frequency, so the likelihood that your content will get indexed quickly increases as you generate bookmarks.

Social bookmarking sites can also help get your PDFs well-ranked because of the inbound links you will be generating. You can increase the likelihood of generating inbound links by adding social bookmarking icons to your content so that visitors can instantly bookmark or share your content.

Share your search marketing insights

Jen and her colleagues at MarketingSherpa want to hear how you use search marketing in your day-to-day job. They’ve created a quick, easy-to-answer survey to help you add your insights to the search marketing “GPS system” they are creating for the industry. As a special thank you, everyone who participates in the survey will receive a free executive summary report. Survey participants will also be invited to an exclusive webinar covering a review of the results.

Related resources

Paid Search Marketing

SEO Shortlist: 10 search optimization sites and resources

PPC Advertising

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dullhunk/ / CC BY 2.0

Filed Under: Search Engine Marketing, SEO Tagged With: Research Topics, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), search marketing

Share Your Success: Top story about a marketing test wins a Landing Page Optimization Package (a $4,000 value)

March 25, 2010 By sean212 Leave a Comment

Our job is to help you do your job better. And to tell you the truth, it’s a pretty fun job.

The fun part comes in when we hear about all of your successes. So while I know sometimes it can be hard to toot your own horn (even though, as marketers, we spend every day tooting our company’s or clients’ horns), we’re going to ask you to do just that.

Brag a little, you’ll be glad you did

Not only are we going to ask you to boast, we’ll make it worth your while. Our favorite case study will receive a complementary Landing Page Optimize Package (a $4,000 value).

Here’s what we’re looking for

3991736436 4ef4543dae 300x225 Share Your Success: Top story about a marketing test wins a Landing Page Optimization Package (a $4,000 value) If you’re anything like me, you have a bit of a creative bent and don’t like to be told to color between the lines. Hey, it’s part of what makes a good marketer.

So we’ve tried to create a good middle ground, letting you know the details we need for a successful case study that the MarketingExperiments community can benefit from, while giving you the flexibility to stand out from everybody else.

The media can be anything of your choosing – landing pages, email, social media, you name it – but we’ll need to know a few basic facts:

Comps of the control and treatment(s) – in the form of screenshots or URLs

Results (we won’t publicly publish specific numbers if you don’t want us to)

Number of observations, e.g., visits, email sends, etc
Number of conversions, e.g., sales, clicks, leads, etc
Intermediate or subsequent metrics, e.g. clicks to leads to sales (if applicable)

Background

Brief company description (we can anonymize when we publish)
Channel or audience descriptions (Where are they coming from? Is this a segment?)
Objective of this page, campaign, etc
Test dates
Additional info about test (stopped the test then restarted it, etc)

Now for the wild horses

Here’s where the fun comes in. You can communicate this info to us in whatever way you desire. Send us a simple email. Make a video on YouTube. Sculpt a giant sandcastle graph on the beach (our office is just a few blocks away, we’ll check it out at lunch).

This is a chance to really stretch your creative legs and have fun. Think different(ly). Whatever you choose to do, you can point us to it by sending an email.

You have until May 31, 2010, so there is time to really knock our socks off.

So show us your biggest successes. We can’t wait to see them.

Article Resources

Improving Conversion Rates

B2B Success Stories

B2C Success Stories

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anniferrr/ / CC BY 2.0

Filed Under: Analytics & Testing, Marketing Tagged With: test, testing

Antisocial Media: Social media marketing success does not lie in you

March 16, 2010 By sean212 Leave a Comment

“…I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!” – Sally Field

Social media just makes us all feel so darn good, doesn’t it? I mean, look at me, my name and picture is right there in the upper left. Back in my advertising days, I had ads run in The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, but no one would ever know, since my name wasn’t attached.

And I’ve got followers on Twitter. And LinkedIn. And…

Sorry, did I just become an egoblogger?

On second thought…don’t look at me

This is why most social media marketing is so, well, outright bad. To go back to that study by Pear Analytics, 40% of tweets are “pointless babble.”

In a discussion last week with Pamela Markey, our Director of Marketing, she came up with the perfect phrase to describe this phenomenon – antisocial media.

Social is defined as “relating to human society and its members.” But, how many social media marketing practitioners are really relating to anything beyond what they are trying to promote?

Automatic for the people

To make matters worse, there are social media “experts” who sell products that offer to automate social media promotion and marketing.

One product I came across allows you to auto follow targeted Twitter profiles, rapidly increase niche Twitter followers, have unlimited Twitter profiles, automate direct messages, and, consequently, spend time on other tasks while the program works for you.

Feature rich but concept poor. This begs the question, what’s the point? (And the second question, can any software automate blog writing so I can spend time on other tasks? Where is HemingwayBlogger v3.0)?

So, what is the point then?

The point of social media is to give the people what they want, which is not necessarily what you want to tell them. That’s why social media marketing success does not lie in you, it lies in them.

Now I am not a social media marketing “expert” (which seems to be defined by having a five-figure following on Twitter), but there are certain discoveries we’ve made at MarketingExperiments that should logically work with these new platforms. Namely, the most important factor to conversion is motivation.

Let me take two real-world examples to show you what I mean.

Not only is Bill Gates richer than you, after only two months on Twitter, he already has more followers – 601,109. Then there’s That Guy (name changed to protect his anonymity). We were first tipped off to That Guy by a comment on this blog. That Guy has 84,466 followers.

Both pretty impressive. Now let’s look at another column on Twitter – “following.” Bill Gates is following 44 people. That Guy – 91,349. So how do you think That Guy got so many followers? Not only did he auto follow his way to “expertise,” he is trying to use that number of followers as a proof point for why you should buy his social media product.

Don’t be That Guy

In stark contrast, how did Bill Gates get so many followers? People likely want to hear what he has to say.

Of course, if you’re not a world-famous tech billionaire and philanthropist, people are likely less motivated to listen to you. But the same principle applies. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes. What can you tell them through social media that they’ll actually care about? How do they connect with your brand?

For example, I rarely tweet anything that’s not marketing related, but for a free Pearl Jam song I gladly added my 140 characters to the Twitterverse. Pamela is happy when she receives a 30% off coupon from J. Crew. And at MarketingExperiments we try to create valuable, free content that helps you do your job better.

My point is, there is no one right answer for how to use social media to tap into your audience’s motivations, but there is an answer for your brand.

And unless you tap into that motivation with your social media efforts, you’re just wasting your most valuable resource – time – while stroking your own ego at the huge “following” you have.

Am I right? Am I wrong? We’re listening. Use the Topsy button at the top of this post to tweet your opinion or leave a comment on this blog.

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ky_olsen/ / CC BY 2.0

Filed Under: Marketing Insights, Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: Motivation, Social Media, Twitter

Twitter and Social Media: Pointless babble or pot of gold?

March 9, 2010 By sean212 Leave a Comment

If you’ve spent any time on Twitter, it will probably not shock you to learn that about 40% of tweets are “pointless babble,” according to Pear Analytics. In fact, in their recent study, they rated only 8.7% as having “pass-along value” – the gold standard for true viral marketing.

“I feel like eating Cheetos with my grilled cheese & turkey sandwich, but I have none ”

– Random Twitterer

This presents a huge challenge to the modern marketer. We all see social media and the real-time web as a pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow. But with these new media awash in so much “pointless babble,” finding success with social media marketing is akin to trying to find that rainbow against a psychedelic sky of endlessly flashing colors.

So before our next free web clinic – Social Media Marketing in 4 Steps: A methodology to move from sporadic to strategic use based on research with 2,317 marketers – on which MarketingSherpa Research Director Sergio Balegno will share actionable insights from research on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogging, we thought we’d post this simple (and simply blunt) question to marketers:

How do you use social media to make money?

From the obvious (”cultivate relationships”) to the iconoclastic (”you don’t”), marketers had many interesting takes on this question (what else would you expect from a group that has to think out of the box for a living?). Here are our favorite tips, techniques and insights:

Win real fans
I have a brand called Mocks (socks for mobile phones) which I started to heavily promote on Facebook last year. Basically, over three months I gained 12000 fans and doubled online sales.

I use social media as a way to increase brand awareness and engage customers so that they become fans in the “old” sense of the word. This then means that they buy more and tell their friends.

– Lara Solomon, CEO of Mocks

New way of thinking for a direct response pro
We have really embraced social media in the past year to raise our profile in our own industry (medical marketing). Until recently, because we come from direct response backgrounds, we focused all of our marketing efforts solely on targeted prospects, with little regard for the larger industry.

Our strategy has been to leverage the publication-quality content we were already producing for magazines and our newsletter base. Therefore, we are getting a lot of bang for little additional effort, leading to more and better client inquiries.

– Stewart Gandolf, Founding Partner of Healthcare Success Strategies

Long-term relationships over short-term profits
Social networking isn’t always about an instantaneous transformation into dollars. It is about a long-term continuous relationship with the customer. You stay on their mind even when they aren’t actively seeking your product.

– Timothy Bonnar, Marketing Coordinator at King’s Transfer Van Lines

Virtual Tupperware party
Direct selling on a social network is difficult. The best way to sell is to replicate the offline world to a certain extent by signing up online agents. The same people who would host a cosmetics party or a Tupperware party are natural networkers who will have large social networks on all of the primary platforms.

The possibility exists to build a platform that they can invite their friends to at specific times and, in effect, host online sales parties. Obvious inducements include discounts on branded goods and free prizes, but the key may be to create a uniform space for the agents that they can build into a profile for themselves.

Even without a platform, they could simply become discount agents for their friends. Somebody who all their friends know can get good deals on specific products or services.

For the agent, it is not abusing their relationships on the social network platforms. For the most part, their friends already know them as somebody who hosts sales parties and they will either be ignored or valued but are unlikely to be criticized for the entrepreneurial efforts among their friends.

– Stephen Cudd, Digital Strategy Consultant

A straightforward sale
E-commerce websites (especially B2C) are the ones who can reap maximum benefits out of social media. The best examples are Dell and Zappos. Dell has reportedly made $3.5 million in 2009 from Twitter promotions.

These retailers post updates about various product offers in Twitter, Facebook and other social media. And they also give additional promotions to followers. Timely promotions to a well-targeted market segment will spur an increase in conversion rates and hence an increase in revenue.

One emerging trend is Facebook and Twitter commerce. Retailers are trying to build applications around Facebook and Twitter to port their entire commerce platform.

– Arvind Muthukrishnan, Manager of Business Development at UST Global

Find out what customers want
By gaining a relationship or connecting with your customers and getting feedback, you can take the ideas they offer and put them into practice. For small businesses this is easier because most changes will be simple and not too costly. Larger business might need to run suggestions through a spreadsheet to find the most popular ideas before taking action.

Also, by doing this you pull in your customers and let them know they are being heard and that you’re really looking to make them happy. A great example of this type of mentality is Domino’s. They listened and then took action.

– Grant Gaither, President/Creative Director of Owen Graffix

Track lead generation
When it comes to quantifying social media and social networking efforts into an actual dollar value, the best way I’ve discovered is to use a simple tracking system. This consists of a spreadsheet and/or entry into my CRM that shows: lead to customer and what channel they came through, whether this be blog, social network (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), or referral.

– Mark Mathson, Director of Keenpath

Present real value
Social media must be presented as a value proposition. It’s got nothing to do with befriending people and tweeting, but everything to do with brand value and lead generation.

– Matt Chandler, Internet Marketing Consultant at WSI

Lead generation
If you are currently advertising for customers, you can now “advertise” for FREE by posting a sample, giveaway, or contest on Twitter and linking to your website. Ask for pertinent details that are important to qualifying your potential customers…and drive them to your site.

– Linda Frakes, Chief Connectivity Protagonist at What the Heck is Social Media?

Social media is about awareness, not revenue
We use it to drive business and increase our profile, nothing more. But do we make money from it? No, we make the money from the services that we provide to our clients. Our social media strategy could be the best in the world but if we cannot deliver then it is pointless. So yes, it drives traffic, increases awareness, and generates leads, but it does not make money.

– Patrick Murphy, Director at SiliconCloud.com

As we confront this brave new world, let’s remember that there is nothing particularly new about it…

Personally, social media has been around forever. We have always had teenage hangouts, chambers of commerce, the restaurant breakfast/coffee club, the local newspaper and specialized magazines. The difference today is that our social media has more two-way interaction, is worldwide, and can be instant.

– Georgenne Eggleston, custom market researcher

Social media is not a novel concept, we’ve just thrown a bunch of technology into the mix. And there are great benefits – speed, cost, and reach among them. But don’t get so caught up in the technology that you overlook what is really transpiring – a conversation.

Because, in the end, people don’t buy from social media platforms (or websites or email messages or even companies) – people buy from people.

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tgerus/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

Filed Under: Marketing Insights, Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: Social Media, Twitter

Transparent Marketing: A slice of honesty from Domino’s Pizza

February 28, 2010 By sean212 Leave a Comment

Let’s say you make mass-produced pizza that tastes like cardboard. How would you sell it?

A) Hire Jessica Simpson as a spokesperson to tell everyone how good your pizza tastes
B) Have your founder drive across the country in a classic sports car to tell everyone how great your pizza tastes
C) Launch a nationwide campaign to tell everyone how bad your pizza tastes (and then make it better)

Domino’s Pizza actually picked option C (and if they didn’t, really, would it be worth blogging about?). In fact, the cardboard reference above is something Domino’s itself is promoting…

This campaign is a great example of two principles we teach about in our training workshops…

Transparent Marketing

So let’s get back to why I’m writing about a pizza campaign. It overcame one of the first hurdles in a crowded, overwhelming, thousands-of-sales-messages-per-day marketplace – it stood out. It grabbed my attention. And I even remembered the marketer’s name. How often can you say that about a pizza (or any other) marketing campaign?

As George Orwell has said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” And, without being too harsh on my marketing peers, “universal deceit” is a pretty good summation of most marketing today. As Dr. Flint McGlaughlin has said, “When you say ‘sell,’ I hear ‘hype.’”

And that’s precisely why Transparent Marketing is so powerful. With the rise of social media, it is not hard for prospective customers to quickly learn the truth about your product. If you openly admit your weaknesses, you may be able to gain their trust. And, ultimately, every sale is an act of trust.

In Domino’s case, they are readily embracing social media – including every tweet, good or bad, right on their microsite:

Optimization Sequence

Of course, if your weaknesses are big enough, simply admitting them isn’t enough. You actually have to improve. Let’s take a quick look at the MarketingExperiments Optimization Sequence formula:

Wherein:
Opr = Optimize Product Factor
Oprn = Optimize Presentation Factor
Ocnn = Optimize Channel Factor

As you can see in the formula, you must ensure you have an effective value proposition before you try to express it to prospects.

Of course, this can be the biggest challenge for marketers. First, admit your product has a problem. And then second, investing the resources and (in some cases) political capital to try to improve it.

In this case, social media can be your friend as well. Don’t just use services like Twitter as a one-way communication tool. Listen to what your customers are saying about you. Use this feedback, combined with other ways of communicating with (not to) your customers, to find ways to improve your product and build a case internally to invest in these improvements.

Grab the zeitgeist and don’t look back

If you look closely at how Domino’s Pizza applied these principles, they didn’t do it in a vacuum. The name of their campaign is The Pizza Turnaround.

The word Turnaround has been splashed all over the news in the past few years. With the biggest financial and automotive companies in the world needing government assistance to stay solvent, and then looking to make changes to return to profitability, the public has gotten quite used to companies needing to improve the way they do business.

So if you haven’t yet, now is a quite auspicious time to begin applying the principles of Transparent Marketing. Heck, even the notoriously broody band Pearl Jam has been writing about making a turnaround of sorts. As Eddie Vedder sings in the recent song “The Fixer”…

When something’s dark
Lemme shed a little light on it

When something’s cold
Lemme put a little fire on it

When something’s broke
I wanna put a little fixing on it

Filed Under: Internet Marketing News

Test Your Marketing Intuition: Which email delivered the highest click-through rate?

February 23, 2010 By sean212 Leave a Comment

To wrap up our email response optimization trilogy, today’s free web clinic will focus on live optimization of audience-submitted emails.

Our roundtable of research analysts will use your peers’ email messages to share transferable principles that you can use to improve the ROI of your email sends. To give you a firm understanding about what the MarketingExperiments methodologies are based on, we’ll begin the clinic with the below experiment.

As always on web clinic day, we’re giving you an opportunity to use your experience and intuition to see if you can guess which treatment won…

Background: An established financial institution offering online savings accounts

Test Design: This was an A/B/C/D multi-factorial test that pitted three treatments against the control. While we also split traffic between different landing pages to test which combination produced the highest conversion rate, today we’ll focus on which email increased click-through rate. Here are the email versions (out of courtesy to the Research Partner, we have anonymized these email messages):

(click to zoom in)

Control

Treatment 1

Treatment 2

Treatment 3

Results: Before we reveal the results, here’s a chance to test your own marketing intuition and be regarded as an online marketing leader! Use the comments section to let us know which email message you think delivered the highest click-through rate.

Which email generated the highest click-through?

* Control
* Treatment 1
* Treatment 2
* Treatment 3

We’ll post the name of the marketer who guessed the winning email and came closest to the click-through rate gain, so make sure to include your name, title, company, Twitter handle or any other info you would like to include.

The winner and results for this experiment will also be announced live this afternoon at 4 p.m. EST during our free web clinic – The Five Best Ways to Optimize Email Response (Part 3): Special live optimization web clinic.

Congratulations to Stefanie Kelly of Pathway Medical Staffing, the only marketer with the intuition to guess what our tests have confirmed – Treatment 1 delivered the highest click-through rate.

This copy-rich email outperformed the control by 42% by synchronizing to the decision patterns of the recipient through a commonality of language. This email carries a very personal feel and is crafted to capture the recipients’ attention and convince them to click through to the landing page.

Filed Under: Analytics & Testing, Email Marketing, Marketing, Optimization Tagged With: email, email optimization, Optimization, Research Topics, webinar

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thetruthabout/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

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