In the world of web analytics, top-right-oriented-graph-itis is particularly rife, with the only challenge facing the web manager being what to put into the x and y columns to ensure the graph goes the right way.  Web managers across the land, in a desire to state their senior management’s case of top-right-oriented-graph-itis, will put anything in the columns to make sure they stay out of the firing line for another month.

What this invariably means is that time goes in the x axis and anything from hits / page impressions / unique users goes into the y axis.  As sure as egg.com is egg.com, over time search engines and social media identify a website, some traffic gets driven to it, more pages are added to it, and by a process of osmosis all the KPIs for the website get driven towards the top right hand corner.

Senior management can breathe a sigh of relief that the online channel which they don’t quite understand is going in the right direction and they don’t need to cure their graph orientation medical condition.  Job done.

Therein lies the rub.  There is no relationship between unique users and commercial business KPIs, page impressions on their own do not facilitate the making of wise business decisions.  And heaven help us, unless you are a Unix system administrator, the humble hit has no value at all.

Many marketers have already observed this and thus have made valiant attempts to link online activity with more traditional KPIs.  Those involved in offline forms of communication will be familiar with measurements such as recall rates, column inches, and market penetration, but yet again these crude tools are clearly square pegs in round holes.  They manifest themselves in impossibly difficult to benchmark terms such as banner ad page impressions and click thru rates.

When it comes to the world of social media the challenge becomes greater still because our old world traditional marketing metrics, and our new world online metrics are entirely inadequate to allow us to set targets and measure performance.

There is a crying need within the Internet industry to establish a new set of metrics based on audience, engagement, loyalty, influence and action.  Once we understand that opt-in online marketing is about lots of individual dialogues, and thus contrasts in almost every way to offline marketing which is about lots of mass market monologues, it must change everything about how we measure what we do.

How large is our audience?  How engaged and responsive are they to our communications?  How loyal are they to our brand and how is that enhanced through online channels?  How influenced are they by us, and how well do they act as advocates to their friends and colleagues on our behalf.  Have we persuaded them to take the desired action?

We have been blessed in marketing by the work of Kotler, Peters, Drucker et al in the past three or four decades, with their seminal texts which have become the mainstay of third level education.  As the millennium enters its second decade an opportunity exists for web marketers to write their name into history by establishing a set of credible, senior-manager-friendly online metrics, which embrace new marketing, empowering businesses to understand their online return on investment, and make wise decisions about the future.

Signposts To Clutter

“Sign Up To Our YouTube Channel” or “Join Us On Flickr” are often signposts on the homepage of our websites.  They are pointers telling customers that there is better content on someone else’s site – just not here.   In many cases these signposts should say “Go Here For Uncoordinated Video and Image Content”.

When we arrive at most of these channels the reality is that the content is out of context and meaningless.  Often the channel has few subscribers and the content viewed count low.  Out of context content is practically useless to the reader and distracts from their task in hand.  So why do we insist on putting these badges of dishonour on our sites inviting readers to sift through our non-task related content?

Our costly and well produced videos or pictures look great and mean a lot to us, that’s why we commissioned them.  It serves a purpose in our stories, messages and explanations while in context as part of a web journey.  Too often we forget that the majority of readers are on our site for a purpose, to solve a problem they may have or find the answer to a question. Pushing readers to content that is without context or answers their particular problem only serves as an irritant.

YouTube and Flickr have their function in many web strategies but for most they are simply broadcast tools allowing you to stream video and photography into your website. Isn’t it time that we put as much effort into paying attention to our customers information requirements as we speed on trying to get their attention in the first place?

In Lee’s spare time he has constructed a website called lookaly.com, a Northern Ireland centric ‘rate your experience’ website.  It’s similar to TripAdvisor but region specific, not industry specific.  The site facilitates user contributed content and allows customers of businesses to rate their experience.  The businesses that are lucky enough to be rated can use the site to get honest and hard truths about their business and engage with customers that were moved enough to post a comment.

At a recent conference Lee was asked, “How do you intend to monetise the site?”.   Lee paused for a moment and looked mildly puzzled, almost as if he didn’t understand the question.  His response was “I am not a business man, I built lookaly.com because I am passionate about building great customer experiences online”.  The crowd looked puzzled.  Lee was then asked by a different attendee “Lee if I wanted you to design stuff for me could you?”.  Lee smiled and said, “I’m really sorry, but I am so backed up with work it would be at least 6 months before I could take on any new projects”.

Lee graduated one and a half years ago from university as a freelance web designer among thousands of freelance web designers.  What makes Lee different is that he has more commercial work offers than he can deal with primarily because of his reputation from building lookaly.com and donating it to the world.

I do lots of presenting to hundreds of people every month regarding online marketing.  I share my experiences with as many people as are willing to listen.  Sometimes, I am lucky and a wealthy organisation understands that 13 years of experience can’t be replicated in a 30 minute presentation and they ask me to come in and help them change their business or charity.

Others take my ideas and implement them into their business themselves.  I am flattered either way and I know that those that do it themselves were never likely to be customers but always likely to be advocates ensuring that my business, like Lee’s business, has an endless supply of those willing to
pay for expertise.

The new web economy doesn’t always support revenue streams via the normal channels of subscription, advertising or payment for news, information or services rendered.  This model of gaining revenues from the few and giving the masses the service for free is now becoming the norm.  As counter intuitive as it may seem the new internet revenue model favours those that bring gifts not those that charge for them.

Lee's Gift Leads to Profits

Northern Bank Sell Products

Hands up who has gone to a bank to get a product?  Not many hands I’m guessing.  In this current Northern Bank above the line campaign they have used the strapline “New Charity Savings Products”.

In common parlance bank customers (like me) don’t talk about our savings products, we talk about our savings accounts.  We view the bank as a service provider not a product supplier.  Internally within the bank, when talking about customers and how the bank can sell their services they tie up a list of services and refer to them as a product.

The problem with this campaign is that the Northern Bank has used internal corporate language and assumed that its customers do the same.   The very worthy charity co-sponsoring the campaign wouldn’t write, “Donor Products For Sale” if it was looking for sponsorship – that would be an internal phrase.

It’s not easy to make marketing truly customer centric but in order to be effective an agency and marketing department need to look at it from the customer perspective.

This is particularly true on the web.  It is your customers who dictate the language they use to link and search for you.  Just ask those organisations who waited for people interested in climate change, only to see their target audience search for global warming.  Or those who promoted satellite navigation, and waited in vain for customers whilst the market searched for satnav, or the the low fares airlines whose customers wanted cheap flights.

In a busy world falling over itself with white noise, you get nanoseconds of opportunity to connect with your customers.  Don’t miss the chance by talking in a language they don’t understand.

All service based businesses have periods of high demand and times when they carry manpower costs

Reducing Your Available Capacity With Planned Marketing

without sufficient supply of work. Unlike the national grid, we rarely plan to carry a backup reserve solution.  What our businesses need is a stored supply of work to help smooth our business cost/production graph as very quickly three months of profit can get wiped out by one month of slow orders.

Recently I have been working with two small (20+ people) service businesses, one in the software sector and the other involved in landscaping.  They both had the common problem of employing staff  (incurring necessary cost) when the business wasn’t busy. During times of high staff availability they resorted to the method of panic, taking any job they could in order to cover costs.  The commercial team became diverted from more profitable long term work in search of an early fix. Once orders recovered, the sales team found it hard to recover their value proposition, charging higher fees and securing better quality work.

Upon identification of this business process problem we set about creating a marketing strategy that actually planned for this eventuality.  The marketing process prompted the customer to avail of a low cost solution to non-urgent projects. Customers were encouraged to think of projects that they would like to get done that weren’t urgent and place the order.  The least urgent projects got the lowest price (around £210 per day)  and the projects that were needed within the year got a slightly higher price (£260 per day), but still a fraction of the full price (£520 per day).

The marketing strategy involved communicating the proposition in an open and direct way that the company had special rates to help fill dip-dates. The customer was accepting and immediately understood the proposition as this kind of variable supply/demand pricing is evident in the airline industry among others.

After two months of marketing, the net result was that both organisations had enough work pumped into storage to fill demand shortages for around six months in advance, smoothing their forecasting and cashflow. Customers also started to identify new work that they would like to get produced at a lower cost but at no pre-determined time. At no stage did revenues per client dip or clients move critical work into the ‘nice to have’ delivery method. The order books simply expanded.

Our natural temptation is to market for growth and so we should.  My argument is that taking a longer term view of how we market and preparing for the inevitable demand/supply mismatch may actually help supply the extra energy our businesses need.

TalkTalk are a UK provider of telephone and broadband services.  It’s difficult for them to create unique stories because they are a highly commoditised business.  There aren’t a lot of unique stories to present to the market to create buzz so instead they spend millions on advertising sponsoring TV hit shows like the X-Factor.

Recently however, TalkTalk issued a press release that said they would pay selected house owners £250 to change the name of their house to Talk Talk. You can choose:

·      TalkTalk Towers
·      TalkTalk Mansions
·      TalkTalk@ (eg TalkTalk@37 Acacia Avenue)
·      The TalkTalk House
·      The TalkTalk Home

This is hardly the same as sponsoring the Emirates Stadium for £100m but what it does do is create lots of local small-scale conversations.  The cost to TalkTalk is incidental in comparison to the buzz they create.  I think this is true creative marketing and alongside their advertising, gives them the right to claim to be innovators in marketing.

Take Ryanair’s marketing as the alternative to this type of creative thinking. In a recent report by the Office of Fair Trading they were criticised by John Fingleton, the Chairman of the OFT, for exploiting a loophole in the law that allowed them to advertise rates without including the credit card fees.

In response to the allegations, Ryanair took the opportunity to repeat their same mantra about being a low cost airline.  This is a typical Ryanair PR response to negative publicity but it does create a buzz and water cooler conversations about their brand, albeit controversial.  This is an exact quote from Ryanair’s Head of Communications, Stephne McNamara “Ryanair is not for the overpaid John Fingletons of this world but for the everyday Joe Bloggs who opt for Ryanair’s guaranteed lowest fares because we give them the opportunity to fly across 26 European countries for free, £5 and £10.”

Why the BBC published this ‘ad’ verbatim is unknown. The response doesn’t address the allegations set before them and has no context to the article. Nonetheless it is the same subtext told often using different stories.

In the online world it is easier than ever to create positive buzz.  We have established networks and easy conduits to getting our message out via social networks and email marketing.  The hard part is always coming up with the creative idea, response or creating the correct marketing mix. As these examples show however, it need not be expensive.

Unfortunately the plan backfired and many customers thought the site had been hacked.  This lowered confidence in the brand and undoubtedly made customers nervous about shopping there.

Getting tired of answering the phone to explain that it was a part of their online strategy Dixons’ gave in and changed the site and removed the strapline.

A clear case of trying to be a little too clever with an online strategy

Dixons - The Last Place You Want to Go

]]> http://blog.ionom.com/2009/12/when-an-online-strategy-backfires/feed/ 2 http://blog.ionom.com/2009/12/email-marketing-connecting-the-reader-with-the-news/ http://blog.ionom.com/2009/12/email-marketing-connecting-the-reader-with-the-news/#comments Wed, 16 Dec 2009 06:40:16 +0000 Niall McKeown http://blog.ionom.com/?p=449

Connecting The Reader With The News

Email Marketing: Connecting the Reader with the News

I often display this picture at seminars I have the good fortune to present at.  After the laughter dies, a serious message follows. When broadcasting your message especially via email marketing, you need to make sure there is a connection between the reader and your news.

Many email newsletters are used for sales and not marketing.  They are easy to spot. They usually have a corny strapline then mention the product/service accompanied by a price, an image and a link to go and buy.  These email broadcasts do work for commoditised products or services but the emphasis is always on price and margins are typically low.  These emails play a numbers game and rarely require much thought. Even good retailers don’t lead with price, they lead with lifestyle promises and create aspirations.  Price lead email selling will give you back what you asked for, low margin sales.

On the other side of the coin we are often tempted to put in news stories about our latest award or accolade, the company golf day out and the chairman’s welcome.  Stories often make our newsletters that have appeared in the mainstream media and are republished verbatim.

As a reader, I often don’t care about your award or golf day (although these activities do play a marketing role just not right now) and I sure as hell don’t need to read another “Welcome to our newsletter/website/snorefest” from the chairman.   And yes, the industry news may be of mild interest to me, but I want you to translate it into what it should mean as features, benefits or drawbacks to me.  I want to know your opinion on the news.

It’s hard to make our email marketing customer centric and not price lead.  Our enthusiasm about what we do is rarely identical to your customers.  As a marketer it is our job to put ourselves in the reader’s position and ask, ‘is there a connection between the reader and the news?’

Take a hotel for example.  Many hotels work hard to be in the top page of a search result for most of the big search terms like “Hotel in [insert destination]”. The site is built optimised for search.  The text is written with key words appearing frequently within the body of the text. Inbound links are generated artificially to make it appear that the site is relevant under key search terms and the hotel gradually floats north toward the top of the search charts.  So how does Google reward these efforts?

Take the example search term “Hotel in London”:

• The first 3 links are paid for sponsored links and not influenced by SEO
• The 4th link is a local business directory link
• Links 5 to 11 are Google Local links based upon both geography, reviews and other non-SEO related activities
• Link 12 is a hotel resellers site
• Link 13 is the Ritz Hotel.  At last a hotel that has focused on SEO! In SEO terms the Ritz is #2 in the natural SEO results.  In real terms it’s not in the race.

SEO Natural Position #1 is Now 13 Links From Top

I don’t have the conversation figures of lookers-to-bookers for the Ritz in London or how many people eventually convert from Google generic searches like mine.  What I do have however, are the analytics results of many other hotels in different regions and the results show similarities across the regions and search terms.

Even though most of the hotels, restaurants, shopping centers or any service based destination clients we look after have good natural SEO results for generic terms, around 80% of the searches for their site include their brand name and not simple generic terms like “Hotel in London”.   My guess is that the Ritz is no different and that the vast majority of bookers who find the hotel search for it by name.  It has an enhanced reputation.  This means the visitor is looking specifically for that destination.  They have researched elsewhere and their decision on where to stay is already at a closing stage when googling the hotel name.

If you extrapolate this out further and take the amount of visitors to the site that search by brand name, have clicked on inbound referral links or visitors that have simply typed in the URL of the destination, it vastly outweighs the generic search term in the order of 95% to 5% of visitor traffic.  Unless you have a really generic name like “Smiths of London” appearing #1 for your own brand takes little to no SEO effort.

The question then switches to being “Why do we spend so much time, money and effort on being #1 on Google when less than 5% of the visitors arrive at the site for generic terms?”   Where is the customer taking their influence?  Why am I only getting attention as part of their already filtered field of view? The answer is that the customer is taking the opinion of others that have used these services.  They are reading the reviews of what other people say about the business and believing that before the businesses own marketing message.

If you are in the services industry this is happening to you.  Regardless if you supply stag weekend clay pigeon shooting in Brighton or zorbing in Ballymena, your online reputation management and what is said about you on review sites, forums and blogs is having an enormous influence on your bookings.  ORM takes effort and means focusing on leveraging customer’s good experiences and getting them to publish their positive experiences.  It requires a deep understanding on where your customers or potential customers are taking their influence from and understanding how you can influence that process.  A bi-product of good ORM is that your natural SEO will look after itself.

SEO is still a valid channel and shouldn’t be ignored, however its relevancy in converting lookers-to-bookers is weakening as Google restructures its results pages and customers become more informed and only Google your site as part of the decision making process. The pending introduction of Google Real Time search is set to further enhance the argument that SEO isn’t what it once was.

The problem was much more complex.  To understand Northern Ireland, you just had to live here and as a native, you knew that the outsiders just didn’t understand the culture and complexity of the solution needed.

There is a sculpture  in Northern Ireland’s second city, Derry.  It is called ‘Hands Across The Divide’ and it illustrates the change in Northern Ireland’s culture.  It symbolises how politics has moved from a shouting monologue to an engaging dialogue.  The sculpture shows the need to reach out and understand the differences in culture.

Deploying an online marketing strategy for an organisation is a lot like ‘The Divide’.  There is a temptation to use monologue techniques and try and advertise your thoughts, opinions and prices. This technique fails as it did in the old politics in Northern Ireland.   There is a temptation to think your message is all that counts and that everyone should listen.  There is a temptation to use traditional marketing speak and convince others that your products or services are worth their attention.  This is not the culture of new marketing.

New marketing, like the statue depicts is about understanding, listening and engaging.  It is about talking to your followers in their language and convincing them that you are worth engaging with, by respecting the culture of online marketing and showing some understanding. This cultural understanding can’t be taught.  To  truly understand the online conversation you need to get immersed in it and live it!

Hands Across the Divide in Derry.