MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

Around the MarketingExperiments labs, we are constantly debating the future of Internet marketing. Unfortunately, for the really big picture stuff, our normal answer of “test it” simply doesn’t work. So in the spirit of Jerry Springer, we’re airing our dirty laundry and bringing the debate straight to you.

But there’s a bit of a twist. In this debate, we’re forcing our team to take the opposite opinion of what their day-to-day role would suggest. On Wednesday, Boris Grinkot, a technology (among many other things) guy wrote a blog post I intend to use in my annual review saying how vital high-quality content truly is. Today I dive into the bits and bytes to make my argument for the importance of technology.

Use our Twitter and comment features to tell us who (hint: not Boris) you think is right.

Here’s the problem with great content. I can’t find it. There’s simply too much of it.

Sure we have Google, Facebook, Twitter, iTunes, and Bing to help us hunt through the haystack and find that glorious hidden needle. But my argument is this. These technologies don’t help you find quality content; they help you find content that is good at gaming the system. To see why, let’s take a trip in the Wayback Machine…

The first few thousand years of content

From “Lothar hunt well” to “And that’s the way it was,” great content has always been controlled by technology. In those days, content creation was limited to those that had access to the means of production – whether that be a cave and some pine tar, basic literacy and a quill pen, Guttenberg’s famed press, or a contract with CBS.

This was both a blessing and a curse, of course. We were not bombarded by endless Facebook status updates about the joy of eating grilled cheese sandwiches. At the same time, content was limited to what people with money could sell to an audience with at least some critical mass.

Creative destruction of creative endeavors

While we all know what has happened over the past few decades it’s still worth asking the question…what the heck just happened? Because it has happened so darned fast. As Joseph Schumpeter said, “Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.”

And turmoil is the right word. While Johann Gutenberg’s technology reigned supreme for hundreds of years, content distribution technology is lucky to last longer than Steve Guttenberg on “Dancing with the Stars.” Or even the viability of the previous reference. (Gutten who?)

Yet herein lies the opportunity. Throughout history, as one technology has overtaken the next, the content producers that have survived and thrived are not those that produced the best content, but rather were the most technologically savvy. To annotate Marshall McLuhan, “The technological medium is the message.”

From “All the News That’s Fit to Print” to “Pretty Much Anything that Pops in my Head”

As I started this post by saying, great content is everywhere. Of course, so is schlock. So in my argument for the centricity of technology for any content-generating company, let me make clear that content is still king. You need (to hire or be) a top-notch writer who provides compelling content.

But that’s just the beginning. Without savvy use of technology, that king has no empire over which to rule. In the music industry, savvy bands have adapted by going from producing albums to producing singles (Radiohead even made money by giving the music away for free).

The smart advertising agencies look past the thirty-second ad and big media commissions to integrated brand promotion – like Sally Hogshead creating a tropical island next to Manhattan’s Hudson River to generate $30 million of free publicity for the Fine Living Network. And the savvy media companies are already taking advantage of Apple’s iPad by developing content specifically for it. (Why must a sitcom that tells a story in three minutes and 12 second be forced to fit into a 22-minute window?)

More news, still paper

This doesn’t mean old media is dead. It means the launch of smart media. A traditional newspaper might be a great avenue for serious, in-depth analyses of news and business for high-net worth individuals. Yet that organization can repackage that same content in a different way with opinion pieces posted on a community-based website that drives sharing and comments among a tech-savvy, middle-income audience.

So don’t just rely on creating killer content for everything. Leverage technology:

• Shop around – Find the right technology to bring that great content to your audience – or as I said so flippantly before – make sure you’re gaming the system to get your killer content seen. I’m not going to give you specific advice here because it depends so heavily on your audience and objective and I’d be in way above my head. But there are a slew of resources on this subject – from niche magazines to entire Internet communities. Find your golden apple. Or perhaps red Apple iPod nano.
• Find 12 degrees of content reuse – Use the same piece in 12 different ways using many different technologies to reach people the way they want to be reached. Twelve, you say? How did you come up with that number? Extensive MarketingExperiments research? No, I just randomly pulled it out of my head (I like eggs). But to show you how possible it is, let’s see if I can come up with 12 possibilities for reuse right here and now.

Let’s say you’re an environmental organization and you interview the CEO of a new, organic laundry detergent company. You could post that interview to your website in the “news” section (1), include a quick synopsis in your email newsletter (2), include extra questions that didn’t make it into the official article on your blog (3), tweet the biggest lesson learned from the interview (4), include the interview in a quarterly printed newsletter you send to major donors and prospects (5), make a Scribd or Issuu version of that newsletter so everyone else can read it on their mobile device (6), podcast (7) and YouTube (8) recordings of the interview, start a discussion around the interview’s subjects on Facebook (9), add the audio files to the iPhone app that updates all of your members to the latest news (10), turn the interview into a press release that you distribute to broadcast and print media (11), and tell Kevin Bacon about it (12).

• Tie it all together – I use the above example part tongue-in-cheek, part seriously. With so many free and low-cost opportunities (not counting man hours, of course), it can certainly pay off to just throw your content onto as many technological media platforms as you can find and see what sticks.

The next level is to hone your use of different technologies into one go-to-market plan that guides your audience from capture to conversion using your content marketing funnel. For example, you might tweet a link to a blog post that promotes a website that has a sales message (keeping a close eye on the metrics all the way).

By doing so, you’re leveraging each technology for what it does best. Twitter offers a very low level of engagement but is a great way to promote content and grab new eyeballs. A blog offers a medium level of engagement and provides the chance to tell enough of a story to convince someone to invest an hour with you for a webinar. In that hour, you can provide valuable content to your audience that also illustrates your value proposition and drives prospective customers to the ultimate sales message – perhaps a phone call to a sales rep.

• Experiment. Refine. Experiment some more. – Perhaps you can tell from our name, but we’re into this kind of thing. Technology brings opportunity. And it also tends to bring real-time, measurable information. So run tests and see what works best for your audience.This is the excitement of a technology-centric future. There is not necessarily one right answer. I started my career writing print ads that ran in USA Today and Wall Street Journal. Now I’m writing blogs. Same skills…but finding the right use for them. Through testing, you can take the same basic content and gain measurable results to help you guide your investments based on ROI…not on some blog post some guy wrote.

This blog post would have never worked in a newsprint forum. It’s meant to be shared, reused, and built upon by the readers. So take advantage of the technology you have in your hands. Tweet and comment about this post. And show Boris, once and for all, that I’m right and he’s wrong.

Related Resources:

Debate Team (Part 1): Does the future of media companies, ad agencies, and content marketers lie in technology or content?

Online Marketing Optimization Technology: We have ways of making technology talk, Mr. Bond

Technology Blind Spots

Marketing Insights

Around the MarketingExperiments labs, we are constantly debating the future of Internet marketing. Unfortunately, for the really big picture stuff, our normal answer of “test it” simply doesn’t work. So we’re taking our latest brawl into the streets (so to speak), and asking you to judge what the future holds.

But there’s a bit of a twist. In this debate, we’re forcing our team to take the opposite opinion of what their day-to-day role would suggest. On Friday I must hide my content-creating hat and make an argument for the centricity of technology. But first, read on as Boris Grinkot, a technology (among other things) guy, touts the merits of content. Use our Twitter and comment features to tell us who you think is right.

Executive summary (in three sentences)

The Internet is swarming with content. Technology helps make the content easier and quicker to digest by auto-summarizing, sorting, classifying, or repurposing it in various user-preferred formats. By enabling conversation, technology helps us choose content to consume based on deliberate recommendations or computed popularity. However, technology doesn’t impact content quality.

Shiny boxes sell faster

Technology for content is packaging, which can be visually appealing, convenient, and useful. If anything, it allows those who are bad at content, but good at gaming the system, to float the lousy content to the top, and pile on lots of it. Both owners of the systems being gamed, and increasingly incredulous consumers, are wising up to the games. Just as Mother Goose, or Honest Abe, or Santa Claus (I am sure it was one of these three) has taught us, it is what’s on the inside that counts.

How did we get into this predicament in the first place? Until the last decade of the 20th century, owning publishing technology to a large extent had meant controlling the content. The technology was localized, prohibitively expensive, and required extensive training. Furthermore, distribution channels also added barriers to entry.

In digital media, it’s almost exactly the opposite. The technology is largely distributed and free to users, requires little or no expertise, and provides access to billions of potential readers. However, this blog post is not about the paradigm shift in the publishing industry. The argument that Dan and I got into centered around the question of whether publishers (whether it’s their core business or part of marketing strategy) need to focus more resources on the quality of their content or on the technology. It’s not a rhetorical question, with the obvious answer “Both.”

What I’d like to communicate is that while technology certainly helps efficiently deliver and format content, it inevitably becomes a commodity. It does so at an increasing rate, as the proliferation of both new technologies and best practices associated with them (also traveling down the same content channels) is becoming near-instant. In other words, you need technology to compete, but it’s not enough to win.

Commoditization

There is a good parallel in SEO. For a good decade, the “secrets” behind SEO were known only to the initiated few. With search engine technology in its early stages, there were plenty of opportunities to exploit it, increasing the SERP position or even density of content that was less useful or relevant to the user than its rank implied.

Those practices were used both for spamming the searchers and for increasing the ranking of legitimately relevant content– even the “good” content had to employ black hat techniques to rise above the junk. This cat-and-mouse game is ongoing, but is fought more with resources than with unique know-how.

SEO has become to a large extent a commodity – a must-have, but not sufficient to beat your competition. Various technological tools make SEO management more efficient, but that enabling aspect doesn’t transpose well to content – we have a ways to go before typing becomes obsolete.*

The other spam

The SEO arms race had led to an explosion in the demand for writers, reaching so far as to create an entire industry of bloggers-for-hire and, at a lower quality level, of blog commenters for hire. The search technology that was supposed to help us focus in on what we need has been responsible for an avalanche of garbage that has flooded the Internet.

However, just as spam didn’t eliminate email as an efficient communication medium, this junk won’t eliminate the Web as the primary content platform. With spam, both technology and human auditing combined to continuously update white- and black list databases, as well as to improve algorithms to recognize spam that passes the latter. Finally, better-late-than-never legal restrictions took accountability to the next level.

So how are things looking for the content providers out there? Certainly the publishing industry is yet to find itself in the digital medium. I am anxiously awaiting how The Times and others in the newsprint industry will standardize a profitable way to monetize their online presence. I expect independent content providers are going to settle into their own profitable niches (whether combining forces to establish competing brands or continuing on their own), while others will simply drop off the radar, as they realize that the time they’ve spent ranting on blogs just doesn’t pay the bills.

Lawmakers might get involved to put a leash on content mills because they reek of mendacity, if not false advertising and conspiracy to commit fraud. The consumer is ultimately going to be the judge of quality, and technology is only going to be important in the sense that, for the consumer to judge, the consumer has to see the content first.

Bottom line: technology delivers, but content quality sells.

Content quality ROI

Now let’s get to the question the ROI-driven marketer is really concerned with: How should I invest my resources in a content-driven world?

• Use technology, but don’t rely on it to write the content for you. – Invest in research and editorial production and then do the same market research you would do in your product development cycle: understand who your audience [market] is, understand what information [product] needs they have, what communication and reading tools they prefer.

Use what you know already: the abundance of content has made us picky, so you cannot rely on brand name (unless you are Barron’s or The Economist) to get your content read. Just as we talk about conversion on landing pages, with content you need to provide a reason for your audience to give you their time. In other words, you need to “sell” your content. Powerful headlines and short summaries require little effort from your readers, but can efficiently trigger a decision to read on.

• Quality is essential, both in these summaries and in the content that follows. – You can fool your readers once with a promise in the headline that doesn’t deliver, but you will sacrifice return visits and/or email subscribers. This is another huge problem with thinking that technology can help you by getting your content in front of a large audience: if the content is poor, your one exposure will not likely net any results.

This strategy works well for fly-by-night affiliate marketing schemes, where the supply of unsophisticated site visitors is effectively unlimited for the duration of the enterprise. However, if you are a respectable business, especially in B2B, losing potential customers with poor content is not an option. It noticeably reduces your addressable market size.

• Find out where the conversation on your topic is taking place and engage with your audience. – The latter statement is not meant to guide your social media strategy – it’s far too trite for that. My point is that social media will help you get your content in front of people that are already interested in the topic, and likely have both ability and desire to provide meaningful feedback and pass it on to others.If you have quality content, then even if they may disagree with your particular message, it will generate discussion resulting in additional exposure (earned media). Obviously, feedback you receive becomes an essential part of your content “product development” cycle.
• Take stock of your resources and make decisions about scope. – Today, there are many technologies to help search, read, and store content. Ultimately, the same folks that deal with communication technology in your organization (whether in Marketing, PR, or IT) need to continue doing so. They can help you package, deliver, and market your content on the new platforms, test their performance, and ultimately advise the ideal channel mix.Engage only in the content channels you can afford to support. Spreading yourself too thin may gain short-term exposure at the expense of the brand. Whatever content categories you choose to maintain, ensure that you have dedicated resources, whether in-house or outside. Having a company blog can be a powerful tool for maintaining communication with your market, but a poorly maintained blog can reduce the credibility of the core offer.If you do have a blog, it doesn’t mean that you can automatically re-package the content for other channels – quality control must be maintained in transit. The content you produce, whether as part of your marketing strategy or as your core business, is going to be a part of your brand. Its quality can either increase or decrease your brand equity. Technology you use to deliver it has little to do it.

So tweet and comment about this issue and let us know which you think is more important – content or technology. And, if in the process, you think I’m right and Dan’s wrong, well…that sounds like the highest-quality content to me.

Related Resources

Google Caffeine: Use social media and quality content to get a jolt for your site

Marketing Leader’s Perspective: No cogs allowed in social media and content marketing

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

Marketing Insights

EDITOR’S NOTE: Historically, at the center of the trough in an economic recession, extended unemployment serves as a catalyst for starting small businesses. Entrepreneurship can be very appealing, with dollar signs popping in your eyes as you think of the Google/Facebook/Your Next Company Here billionaires.

Yet while you might be highly skilled at your own profession, being the boss means so much more than knowing how to do what you do well. From my own (extremely minor) foray(s) into entrepreneurship, let me assure you the hardest part is the required intense focus on things you really don’t care about.

When considering starting a business you’re likely already focused on the critical micro elements (your skillsets, potential customers you may know, a snazzy logo) and don’t have the resources for an on-staff Economist/Researcher. So below are a few things this Editor really doesn’t care about, but you should if you’re thinking about making that leap.

Director of Sciences Bob Kemper was kind enough to share some observations about recent and emerging legislative, economic and societal trends that, though they’re broad-ranging, will have a disproportionate impact on the success of smaller businesses and start-ups.

I’ve spent a little time over the last few months researching and reflecting on recent events and changes in the macroeconomic and societal environment, which led me to consider what they might mean to a small Internet-based business or to someone considering starting one.

I’ll begin with an observation and statement of principle that will give some context to the comments that follow…

The list of key (internal) factors essential to starting and running a successful online business is long—as is the set books and other resources that enumerate them.  Yet, even the best-of-the-best at those remains subject to a host of uncontrollable factors that, if unseen or unheeded, could undo the business.  From a law change at the capital that cuts your legs out overnight to the slow suffocation of an emerging trend in technology or consumer sentiment, these external threats are real and tangible.

It’s to those same factors though that our iconic Internet startups owe their very existence.  The first century Roman philosopher and politician Seneca quipped that “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”  From Microsoft to Google to Twitter, the convergence of exceptional internal capabilities (preparation) and a favorable external environment (opportunity) led each to an epic run of good luck.

Following are a few currently relevant external factors that have smiled on the likes of Gates, Brin, Dorsey, et al., and that could be sources of threat or opportunity for any who’d seek to emulate their good fortunes.

ECONOMIC

The worldwide economic meltdown that began in the Fall of 2007 and accelerated through 2008, culminating in the collapse of U.S. Real Estate prices and serial liquidity crises in the U.S. and abroad among lenders and investors, resulted in a deep and extended recession and in the tightest credit and investment capital markets in more than 80 years.

While some sectors of the economy have begun to show signs of recovery, investors remain decidedly cautious and investment risk premiums remain historically high—particularly for small-cap and privately held companies. Even so, as credit and capital begin to loosen, the sectors most likely to open up first are those which historically thrive in a down economy and—because of the unique characteristics of this recession—those least dependent upon Real Estate and commercial property values.

Key Question: Internet-oriented services business score well on the first factor, so the second factor will likely be your focus. Which sector(s) will you serve?

TECHNOLOGICAL

During the last several years, there have been significant advancements in both website development tools and protocols, and in database and application development platforms – both of which lend themselves to rapid application development and deployment. This trend favors both companies that are agile in decision making and those that employ full-time, dedicated technical professionals.

Key Question: Your small size will make you agile, but do you have the resources to hire, recruit, and retain technical professionals? If not, how will you compensate (outsourcing, etc)?

POLITICAL/LEGAL

The combination of a justifiably suspicious consumer population and the increasingly fervent public debate over personal privacy, spurred on by a seemingly constant stream of high-profile news stories exposing both the intentional misuse of, and the accidental disclosure of private information resulting from corporate security breaches, has led to a broad array of both federal and local legislative proposals seeking to limit and to regulate the collection and use of personally identifying information both in the U.S. and abroad.

In just the last several years, a host of laws regulating the collection and use of personally identifying information over the Internet have been enacted, including the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA)[1], the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)[2], the USA Patriot Act of 2001[3], the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)[4], the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 – Amendments Act of 2008 (FISA)[5] and many similar laws enacted by states, most pertaining to the practices and policies of government and employers in their jurisdiction.

In addition, the rate of new complaints and calls for further regulatory action continues to rise[6]. A thorough and continually updated treatment of Internet privacy and associated federal, state and international laws can be found in the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse’s topical “fact sheet” titled “Fact Sheet 18: Privacy and the Internet: Traveling in Cyberspace Safely”.

Add to this already strong momentum toward increased regulatory restrictions on Internet marketing practices, the intentions of the present White House administration – both stated and implicit – toward greater government regulation and oversight, and it should be presumed that some of the customer segmentation and targeting methods that have recently emerged may soon be significantly restricted – or even prohibited – by federal law as unfair or unduly invasive of personal privacy.

Key Question: Data is the lifeblood of the evidence-based Internet marketer, so this will likely be a necessary consideration. What strategic alternatives do you have for collecting and using information about customers – both to match them with potential partners, and also to other products and services that may be ideally suited their needs and their motivations?

SOCIO-CULTURAL In the last ten years, the relative scope and volume of information available online has grown explosively – driven primarily by the emergence of enormous and pervasive search networks, and global information repositories such as Google and Wikipedia.

The corresponding trajectory toward an “oligopical”—and plausibly a monopolistic—market profile within the coming two-to-five years represents a significant threat not only to the other competing search networks, but also to advertisers.

For example, Hitwise reported in March 2009 [7] that Google’s market share in the U.S. was 72.11% in February 2009, with Yahoo Search, MSN Search and Ask.com receiving 17.04%, 5.56% and 3.74% respectively. Further, it reported that these market share figures were down from the same period the prior year by -17%, -20% and -10% respectively.

On the international level, the market share imbalance may be even greater. A report from the AT Internet Institute indicates that Google’s market share in France for February 2009 exceeded 91.2%, and comScore reported Google’s March 2009 market share in Belgium as 96.00%, with Yahoo and Live Search accounting for the bulk of the remaining 4%.

Add to this somewhat alarming state of the competitive search market, the staggering level of investment by Google in both hardening its existing core of dominance and in aggressively expanding into other loosely-related markets traditionally led by others – such as the Internet Web browser (Google Chrome), global mapping and geo-location based search services (Google Maps / Google Earth) and office productivity applications (Google Calendar / Google Docs), let alone entertainment, social media, mobile device apps, and photo-sharing spaces (YouTube, Google Wave, et al., Android, and Picasa Web Albums respectively) – and one might conclude that a proportional investment in anti-trust attorneys should round out their growth strategy.

While the growing imbalance in relative market share among the search networks is a potential source of vulnerability for all online advertisers, those businesses that currently depend almost exclusively upon Natural Search (SEO), may be disproportionately at risk.

That is, as Google continues to expand into an increasingly broad range of non-search-specific services, it will simultaneously begin to compete directly against an ever-increasing proportion of its advertisers.

Since Google is a Ninja master of profit-maximization, the second to lose among Google’s field of new competitors in a given market would “naturally” be those who are already paying them the least for favorable ad placement – i.e., right behind those who are not paying them at all (for SEO traffic).

Key Question : Is your business model centered around organic search traffic from Google? What other options might you have should this develop into a strategic threat?

DRIVING FORCES

If you are considering a business that will rely on Internet marketing to a large extent, keep these overall driving forces in mind:

• The well-established and accelerating trend of consumers to research alternatives and to “shop” for solutions over the Internet.
• The increasingly ubiquitous access of consumers to broadband access to the Internet.
• The consolidation of the search network market and the consequent concentration of available traffic among fewer suppliers – specifically, the emergence of Google as the dominant supplier of online search traffic.
• The well-established and growing trend of Google broadening and diversifying its range of services such that it increasingly competes directly against its online search advertiser/customers.

Related Resources

Domain/Product Name Testing: Our testing demonstrated that choosing product, service, or domain names based on what you “like” can cost you dearly

Offer Pricing: Literature Review

Online Competitive Analysis Tested

Marketing Insights

If you lead a team of marketers, you likely have a creative bunch. People who, ideally, have a lot of passion about what they do – the key ingredient for successful social media and content marketing.

But that natural passion can easily get buried under layers of indiscernible corporate fiat. So how do you help your team break free of the stultifying grind that makes the average enterprise run? How do you make sure they don’t just feel like a cog in the wheel mindlessly hewing to corporate policy and filling spreadsheets all day?

To find out, I talked to Brian Carroll, the CEO of InTouch (our sister company). While you might know Brian as the guy when it comes to lead generation and lead nurturing for complex sales, he made a very interesting comment on a recent blog post I wrote with Andy Mott about marketing silos.

Brian talked about the important role heart and passion (should) play in our job as marketers. This intrigued me. I don’t often hear anyone talk about marketing this way. So I gave him a call. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation…

“Passion” and “heart.” Those aren’t words I often hear associated with “job,” at least not “marketing job.” How do you instill passion in a company, in a marketing department?

Brian Carroll: The most important thing is clarity about your values and vision. Clarity trumps persuasion. Do people understand what your company stands for? What difference do they make? And how do they fit into the big picture? How are they integral parts in making that difference?

Unless the people who do your marketing, advertising, sales and public relations are passionate about their roles, it’s nearly impossible for them to acquire and grow customer relationships.

What role does fear play in a passionate company?

BC: Some people are motivated by the things they don’t want to have happen – lack of job, loss of lifestyle, family stress. When that’s the primary thing that drives you, that is a bad thing.

But fear can play an important role. Knowing that revenue is needed when people are invested in your company, for example, certainly helps drive people. As long as there is transparency and clarity around goals and culture, fear can be a positive motivator.

For example, we had someone who was written up and was quickly moving down the path to getting fired. That fear helped send him down a positive path of transformation, and two years later that person won the award for being the most valuable employee in our company.

Of course, prolonged fear is bad. It means something is wrong. And you must balance fear as a motivator with reward.

How do you do that?

BC: It comes down to two things – the organization and the individual.

As individuals, we may have all the potential in the world, but it doesn’t matter if we’re not willing to do the difficult, mundane, repetitive things that are essential to success. Only then can we focus on the fun, enlightening things that we really have a passion for. These things aren’t going to make the impact they could without doing our homework, getting those mundane yet essential tasks done right.

That’s where the heart comes into play. If someone loses heart and only has fear as a motivator, they are going to do just enough to get along at this particular moment.

Every marketer has a huge opportunity in the company they work for. They have the chance to do things differently, look outside themselves and do something that’s never been done to grow and acquire customers. To be that representative presentation to the world about what their company is, what it stands for, and why it matters.

But you need passion for that. And if you don’t have it, you may need to manage up. Seek out your leaders and pull that clarity of purpose out of them. Find out what’s important to them, what their goals are, and figure out how it can mesh with what matters to you.

I imagine that clarity can be easier to obtain in a sales organization if you’re, say, a quota-carrying rep or a sales leader with a specific budget to make. But marketing, advertising, these disciplines can be a little more fuzzy. At MarketingExperiments, one way we advise marketers to confront this challenge is with testing, which offers verifiable proof of impact to the bottom line. What else can marketers do?

BC: Testing is a great example, especially because it often shows improvement, that you’re making things better.

I think the metrics that you use are also important. In B2B, our goal is to help the sales team sell. Marketing can be run like sales to measure leads generated and track our pipeline contribution with lead-to-pipeline conversion rates.

B2C marketers can have an even easier time proving their value. It is often a more transactional sale; there is not a series of steps between the marketer and the purchase. Whether it’s ecommerce, or bar codes at a bricks and mortar retailer, or a service, the buying process is simpler. So you can usually look at metrics beyond just “activity” (like traffic) to key numbers like expense-to-revenue and time-to-revenue ratios.

Now I’m not trying to dismiss brand, but it helps to have more passion for what you do when you get a clear understanding, and provide key business leaders a clear understanding, of the contribution you’re making.

Of course, this isn’t news. It’s a constant struggle in marketing to be seen as a revenue center, not just an expense. But, remember, the onus lies on you to make that happen. Executives now often manage by spreadsheet out of necessity. So make sure you can prove contribution to revenue and sales so they (and you) understand the real value you’re bringing with hard metrics…especially in a down economy.

So part of establishing a culture of passion is having clarity around hard performance targets, but not everything is revenue driven.

BC: That’s true. And there’s more to a job than just the paycheck. At InTouch, we give awards as well. Just the recognition from peers and leaders can make a big difference to feeling appreciated and feeling like you make a difference.

We have awards like Nurturer of the Month, Specialist of the Month, the Executive Mission Award, and awards that employees can give to each other. We identify and highlight what contributions lead to success based on our mission and our promise to our clients.

From an employee standpoint, they get a clear scorecard of what success looks like. When someone’s doing a good job, they need to be recognized. In some companies that have a fear-based culture, managing is almost like a game of Whack-a-Mole – the manager is just trying to catch people doing something wrong.

In addition, employees can give awards to each other, to build up camaraderie and teamwork.

At the heart of this, everybody wants to know “I am making a difference…my contribution matters.” That’s the whole point.

We’ve focused on success, but what about a culture of failure? How do you build a system where failure is OK? As Thomas Edison once said, “Why, I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” In marketing, and really any discipline that thrives on motivation, if you’re going to truly drive success you have to stick your neck out there and take a chance.

BC: Absolutely. Everyone should stretch. And when you do that, mistakes will be made.

So you need to balance things. You want everyone asking “What can I do to improve this?” but you can’t abandon the tried and true tactics that work.

I like to use the analogy of a high-quality, well-balanced mutual fund. A good mutual fund seeks to balance high risk with steady performance. Generally speaking, you can stretch and take some risks, but if you put all your eggs in that basket, and then something bad happens, you’re really in trouble.

As marketers, let’s look at our entire portfolio and categorize what is high risk versus what is relatively safe on the path to making things better. Based on that, you’ll know just how much you can let your team take a chance in certain areas, while ensuring you have a reliable base of execution that is always there for you.

Another thing, that you mentioned earlier, is to test. That way, you learn what works and what doesn’t before betting a sizable chunk of your marketing budget on it.

And, of course, we’re not just marketers. We’re people, too. How do you bring, and perhaps channel, personal passions in the workplace? What about cause-related marketing?

BC: People need to know, at the end of the day, that what they’re contributing to does other kinds of good for their community or for society at large. And there are a number of big brands and small companies who get that, where it’s not just about profit.

The workforce has changed, and people under 45 or so need to know that what they’re doing is making an impact. It’s not all about “me.”

So it’s important to connect them with the difference they make. And that isn’t just at a company-wide level, it’s at an individual level as well, allocating funds or time. For example, lawyers who do pro bono work or sponsoring an employee in a cancer walk.

Companies need to welcome that and give permission to that. If you sponsor something as a company, great. But it’s better to have the company as well as employees doing things, so you empower people on a collective and individual basis. I’m all for profit, but the whole point is to make a difference.

Once you have a passionate marketing department and a passionate workforce, social media and content marketing seem like great ways to channel that passion.

BC: And this is a place where small companies often have a huge advantage. They don’t need to have the established rules of a big, publicly traded company has or a company in a heavily regulated industry like health care or telecommunications. In any company, there are some things that people can’t say, but in general smaller groups can be more open and transparent.

But I don’t want to discourage the big companies. In my book, I took a look at Sun Microsystems before it was acquired by Oracle. It had about 2,500 blogs from employees, including Jonathan Schwartz (the President and CEO at the time).

Whether large or small, most companies have a few passionate employee advocates using social media. But, especially in large companies, there is often an important element that is missing. Individuals want to know, “What can I do to make a difference using social media?”

The answer is simple – be yourself. Share your individual passions. Don’t make it just another corporate mouthpiece. Social media should be about who you are as much as about the company or brand you work for. Distinction is everything.

Because, I’ve got news for you, even in a large company “you’re already self employed.” Don’t just take it from me, that is a direct quote from Seth Godin.

How does thinking of myself as self-employed affect how I use social media and content marketing?

BC: My point is, every marketer has a personal brand in addition to your company’s brand. Don’t just look at yourself as some cog in a big company.

Now don’t go too far. We all know the story of someone who lost his job by saying the wrong thing on social media. And your boss and peers are listening…or will be soon. So pretend your boss is standing next to you when you’re typing.

Thanks to the prevalence of the Internet in general and social media in particular, every brand, both personal and corporate is held accountable for all of our actions. So in some ways, reputation has become more important than brand. Customers and employers will find out about you.

So put yourself out there. Share your heart and passion and the greatness of what you have to offer. But be transparent. After all, the World (Wide Web) is watching.

Related Resources

Holistic Marketing Optimization: What’s more likely to show up on Twitter?

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Resources on Transparent Marketing: How to earn the trust of a skeptical consumer

Marketing Insights

From time to time here on the blog I like to revisit Transparent Marketing: How to earn the trust of a skeptical consumer, which I believe to be an excellent blueprint for the modern marketer. Of course, I may be biased because it was written by my boss, the Director of MECLABS Group, Flint McGlaughlin.

But I consider it to be one of the best things Flint has ever written (second only to his name in the lower-right-hand corner of my paycheck), because it was so incredibly prescient. It was written in 2003. And while it was certainly relevant at the time, it has become an even better guide to modern marketing thanks to the rise of social media.

Rage against the machine meets unbridled access to information plus megaphone

The recent meteoric rise of social media, coupled with Google’s impressively fast and accurate algorithim, means that now every 13-year-old with an iPhone is an instant fact-checker. Teen angst can be channeled at “the man” (sorry, that’s now you) with the tweet of a button. Or even worse…mom angst.

Bill Maher sums it up best, “…we just had the fifth anniversary of YouTube and the twelfth of Google, and between them, they’re killing off a great institution: lying. You just can’t lie anymore – facts are too easy to check, everything is on video…our Internet conversations are forever.”

Of course, where’s the line, right? Unless your email marketing is trying to help a Nigerian prince get his oil wealth safely to the shores of America, you’re probably not outright lying in any of your marketing. So I’m going to present a few examples and we’ll play “You Make the Call.” Share your opinions via the comments section, Twitter, however you want.

And when you read the below examples, you might be thinking, “Wait a minute Dan. You are a supersleuth private eye type who has an uncanny knack for getting to the bottom of things.” Really, I only have two assets. A free, unlimited, lifetime plan for Google searches. And the ability to read. Yes, it’s that easy for your customers to dig stuff up.

Like a rock? Or like a brick?

If you’ve taken any MarketingExperiments training, you know that we often recommend using third-party credibility indicators to reduce anxiety. And a central tenet of Transparent Marketing is “Let someone else do your bragging.”

However, it doesn’t say “Let anyone else do your bragging.” You can’t pick just anyone. You must choose wisely. Chevy’s homepage proudly boasts, “No one has more Consumers Digest ‘Best Buys’ for the 2010 model year than Chevrolet.” And it’s not just the homepage. TV ads, magazines ads, banners ads…the entire campaign is built around Consumers Digest.

The first thing that comes to my mind is, “What the heck is Consumers Digest?” To the Google…

Let’s first talk about what Consumers Digest isn’t – Consumer Reports. (bait and switch?) According to Wikipedia, “The publication has no connection to the Consumer Reports magazine published by Consumers Union (which, unlike Consumers Digest, is an independent non-profit organization).

Consumers Digest is a for-profit magazine. And how does it make a profit? Not through subscriptions, it has zero subscribers. “Many car makers have financial ties to the publication,” according to The Wall Street Journal (although, in fairness, it does sell some issues on the newsstand. How many? Nobody seems to know).

Consumers Digest website (I’m not giving them the link juice, use Google or common sense to find it) is poorly designed, to put it kindly. After a thorough (five-second) analysis, Senior Manager of Research Partnerships Andy Mott remarked, “It looks like it was built by a third-grader.” And I’m not trying to be harsh, no website is perfect, but they don’t even look like they’re trying. The site is essentially PotemkinVillage.com:

• There are several bullet points in both columns purportedly stating what they review (baby gear, cameras, etc) that are not links, you can’t click on them and find out more
• In fact, there are essentially only three pages to the whole site – homepage, latest issue (table of contents has no links to content), and automotive best buys (in fairness, you can click-through for a paragraph-long “review” of each car)
• Best line on the site… “If you are interested in receiving information on how you can subscribe to our Web site, please write to: Postmaster, Consumers Digest Communications, 520 Lake Cook Road, Suite 500, Deerfield, IL 60015 or send an e-mail to: postmaster@consumersdigest.com”

And then there are the Automotive “Best Buys” themselves. While different independent ratings organizations may disagree, you would think that there would be some overlap. Consumer Reports’ Best Car Overall for 2010 is the Lexus LS 460L, which “scored an outstanding 99 out of 100 in our road test, making it our highest-rated vehicle.” While Consumers Digest has 44 “Best Buys” for 2010, the LS 460L is not one of them.

In fact, of Consumer Reports’ top cars in ten categories, only two made it onto the Consumers Digest list. You guessed it, both were Chevrolets.

Before I ask you to make the call for this campaign, let me set the tone. First of all, Chevy is in a segment – automobiles – that is usually heavily researched by customers. Cars tend not to be a point-of-purchase decision, like cereal or gum. So if a customer was interested in a Chevy, how hard would it to be to Google “Consumers Digest” to learn more about these awards the carmaker has been boasting about?

Secondly, Chevy isn’t just any car company. In fact, the only reason it is in business is because just last year taxpayers bailed the company out, at which time then General Motors President and CEO Fritz Henderson said, “We are deeply appreciative for the support we have received during this historic transformation, and we will work hard to repay this trust by building a successful new General Motors.”So while third-party awards could certainly help Chevy regain that trust, does Consumers Digest fit that bill? In other words, I won Who’s Who Among American High School Students but I didn’t brag about it and put in on my resume.

Social media factor: So far, with the notable exception of The Wall Street Journal, the mainstream press hasn’t reported on this campaign as far as I can tell. But the first hit in Google for “Consumers Digest fake” is a blog. And I found tons of blog posts claiming that Consumers Digest is fake, from the well-known (Clark Howard) and the unknown. So, for even the mildly curious, it is quite easy to learn more.

Now marketer, I turn it over to you, if you worked in the Chevy marketing department, would you have green-lighted this campaign?

You Make the Call


So real, it’s fake

OK, not to bias you, but that first one it a bit of a gimme. So let’s ratchet it up a notch. This next call comes courtesy of my wife.

For my last transparent marketing blog post, I told you how impressed I was with Domino’s “The Pizza Turnaround” campaign by Crispin, Porter & Bogusky.

As a follow up, they came up with their new “Pizza Holdouts” campaign. If you’re not familiar with it, they basically stalk people who haven’t tried the pizza yet with a personal ad campaign. Billboards that say, “Bill Johnson, our sauce is now herbier” along with signs, trucks, planes, radio announcements, etc.

Eventually the person takes the hint and, surprise, loves it! My wife is convinced that these are fake. And ever since I wrote about Domino’s Pizza the first time, she’s wanted me to do a follow up to expose how they turned their backs on transparent marketing this time. To the Google!

Well, it turns out, as best as I can figure, this is for real. Again, my research is not extensive. For the Chevy info above, I simply typed “Consumers Digest” into Google, found an interesting Wikipedia entry, and then tried “Consumers Digest fake.” “Pizza Holdout fake” didn’t provide me with the same flood of bad publicity, but it did show a very wise use of social media by Domino’s – they listened. And responded.

The first search result was a YouTube video of the campaign. Right below the video are negative comments, most notably skepticism over the reality of the video. Domino’s responded to those negative comments with more info about the campaign. And since “Uploader Comments” show first in YouTube, you quickly see these replies. While they didn’t address every negative comment on the page (there will always be naysayers), they did prominently speak to a few key issues.

And that was about the extent of my research. After all, who researches the purchase of a pizza that much?

Of course, just using common sense, there are a few obvious things to be skeptical of. After Domino’s made a personal ad campaign for you in your town that your friends and family were in on, and then shoved a camera in your face when you tried the pizza, could you really bring yourself to say, “Tastes like cardboard warmed over. Honey, call the local pizza joint.”? (And what town has only one Bill Johnson?)

Social media factor: Social media played a positive role in this case, thanks to Domino’s proactively responding to skeptical customers. Also as part of my lazy research, I went to Domino’s microsites where they promote use of Facebook and Twitter. Since they’re encouraging social media and giving people positive things to tweet about (such as a contest to capture so-called pizza holdouts), not surprisingly, there seems to be mostly positive stuff out there.

So the campaign is real yet it looks so real some people think it’s fake. If you were asked to green-light this campaign, what would you do?

You Make the Call


Trust but verify

You didn’t think I could write a post about transparent marketing without shining that harsh light of analysis in the mirror, did you? You did? Really? Then just skip the next part and move right along.

Here at MarketingExperiments, our job is to serve you, our audience, and help you do your job better. To that end, we freely publish our experiments.

However, in publishing those experiments we have a debate raging internally, because we anonymize our experiments. We don’t share the name or our Research Partners and we obscure identifying information as well. And just in case a competitor could figure out which company we’re talking about, we also don’t share data like “number of conversions.”

On the one hand, we feel that this does a disservice to you, our audience. We want to be transparent and share as many juicy details as possible.

However, we do work with real-world Research Partners on their actual marketing campaigns. We believe this provides far greater value than running hypothetical experiments with brands that don’t exist. But because our Research Partners are actual companies competing every day for business, they view the experimentation we do as sensitive information. They consider “number of conversions” and other data we use in experimentation to be sensitive business intelligence that could give competitors a leg up.

Social media factor: Zero. I’ve never seen anyone tweet, blog, or even Foursquare about this, and I listen to the conversation every day. In fact, other than this blog post, no one probably even noticed.

So what would you do if you were in our shoes (well, mostly sandals, our office is by the beach)?

You Make the Call


True perfection

If you follow the news at all, you probably know where I’m headed with this “You Make the Call” theme – the imperfect game. Long story short, Armando Galarraga was one out away from a perfect game when umpire Jim Joyce blew the call. Galarraga didn’t throw a temper tantrum. And after the game, once Joyce saw the replay on TV, he apologized for getting it wrong.

That’s transparency. No one is right all the time. And your produce isn’t right for everyone.

So how can you apply these lessons to your own transparent marketing?

• Don’t be everything to everyone – Focus on what you do best and hammer it home.
• C’mon, keep it clean – That line isn’t always totally clear, as I’ve referenced above, but some practices are egregious. Quick hint: If you’ve hired a consultant or agency with the words “Black Hat” in its name, you’ve crossed the line. Stay on the sunny side of marketing.
• Listen – Social media makes it very easy to listen to your customers. Don’t just use “powerful auto-tweet technology” to build followers and blast promotions. Hear what they have to say. Then go the extra mile. Ditch the auto-tweet technology and actually have a conversation. You may be tipped off to (and mitigate) a mistake before it becomes a full-blown crisis.
• Test – Good marketers with good intentions can disagree on how transparent your brand should be and what will work best. While one of you might be wrong, the customer never is. So test. See what works.
• Hear it straight from the source – Heck, just read Transparent Marketing: How to earn the trust of a skeptical consumer. It’s all in there. And it’s a free download.
• Of mice, men, and marketers – In the end, even with the best intention of transparent marketing, you will go awry. While writing this very blog post I got a note calling a promotional email I wrote a scam. Ouch! But, as with anything, if your aim is true, you’re more likely to hit the target.

Related Resources

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

Holistic Marketing Optimization: What’s more likely to show up on Twitter?

Resources on Transparent Marketing

Marketing Insights

It’s easy to focus on one aspect of your marketing and lose sight of the big picture. So in Wednesday’s free web clinic – Compounding ROI of Sequential Conversion Rate Increases: How one company took a small gain and multiplied it tenfold – Flint McGlaughlin, the Director of MECLABS Group, will help you find the leaks in your sales or lead generation funnel and share three key steps for holistic marketing optimization.

In the meantime, here is our latest community-written blog post to help you understand how your peers deal with optimizing their entire conversion funnel during the customer/client acquisition period…

There’s no simple answer

In a former life I worked in computerized irrigation – a lot of plants, a lot of pipes and a lot of leaks.

The only way to find the leaks was to manually walk up and down each row looking for pooled water on the ground.

The same applies to leaks in the funnel. The only way is to use something like Urchin or Analytics and find the “black-hole pages” – pages traffic goes into never to be seen again. Concentrate on the pages with good volumes of traffic and plug those leaks!

– Dave Collins, Founder & Managing Director of SoftwarePromotions

If your oil funnel had a leak, you’d be sure to replace it

The sales cycle certainly calls for a consistent, quality funnel which has just the right amount of viscosity and throughput.

I believe that it really goes back to the age old question of “How do we integrate marketing and sales?”.

When this question comes up within a company, red flags fly through the roof. It’s a shame because we’re not territorial animals. We’re civilized human beings who should solely be focused on what’s best for our company – because this attitude will ultimately help you achieve more.

Sales and Marketing should align their policies so that quality information is passed from the point of initial contact – inbound or outbound – through the sales cycle. Nurturing is the key fluid in keeping the motor up and running. Having the tools to manage the data is great but it’s human intelligence that ultimately drives nurturing and sales.

People buy from people, not from software or companies. Optimizing the quality of your staff and providing them with tools to better manage and view their data is what companies need to improve lead generation and sales.

For example, landing pages should have some form of unique ID or should be interconnected to CRM so that when related information is recognized, it’s automatically tracked as a touch point. Capture forms should be simple and brief for initial contacts and get more detailed as prospects choose to dig deeper.

– Jason Croyle, Lead Generation Specialist and Social Media Evangelist at InTouch

Connect PPC ads to landing pages to capture forms to lead generation and sales

I deal mainly with Google Analytics, Website Optimizer and AdWords, so my example will be within that frame.

1. First, connect Google Analytics and AdWords (To track ROI on a variety of ads and keywords.)
2. All buttons on landing page are tracked using the _trackEvent method. (This will help you determine what buttons/ call-to-actions on your landing pages are receiving the most awareness.)
   1. Buttons on landing page are also tracked using Google Website Optimizer so that we can provide multiple variations of buttons, content, and call-to-actions on landing page.
3. Combining steps 1 and 2 will allow us to determine what steps, content, ads and call-to-actions work best not only on a micro level, but on a “holistic” level – all together.

– Omar Ead, Director at Digitus Marketing

One at a time

Short answer: fix one phase/step at a time. You truly will not know where your fallout point is until you’ve fixed the phases above it. It’s quite easy and inexpensive to test various elements; see what works best to set a baseline. Then move on to the next step in the process and repeat.

I tend to spend a good amount of time building the optimization roadmap before I start tweaking and testing.

– Nick Rice, Regional Manager of Field Marketing at McCann Erickson

Related Resources

Compounding ROI of Sequential Conversion Rate Increases: How one company took a small gain and multiplied it tenfold

Holistic Marketing Optimization: What’s more likely to show up on Twitter?

The Compounding Effect of Micro-Gains: How small performance increases in PPC, landing page conversions, completed sales, and more combine to deliver big improvements in revenue.

Marketing Insights