There you sit, downcast, watching your social media investment proposal burst into flames.  The CFO has just leveled the “fuzzy math” charge at you. The head of sales is yammering on about how he could hire another salesperson for your proposed social media investment, and he could guarantee X incremental sales.

There’s a devilish catch-22 at play here.  As with any new touchpoint or technology, you can’t credibly project ROI until you make an investment, but you can’t get the investment resources without showing ROI.

How to skin this cat?

Click Image to Enlarge

Try the 70*20*10 portfolio argument (illustrated at left).  The logic goes like this:

In any fiscal year, marketing communications spend should be reviewed at a portfolio level.  Roughly 70% of spend ought to go toward “tried and true” touchpoints. Our organization is familiar with these touchpoints.  We know their mechanics. We know the returns they deliver, or at least have benchmarks for what good looks like. Read More »

I had the opportunity to attend the ANA’s Masters of Marketing Conference this weekend.  The topic of this year’s conference was “Growth: Defying the Recession.”  I wanted to pass along a few of the great insights from the first day of the conference.

My biggest takeaway was the focus on authenticity I heard from all of the presenters.  “Your brand has to be who it is” was the common refrain. Read More »

By Laura Morris

Remember the old vinegar and baking soda volcano experiment of elementary school days?   The one where you begged your mother to use her kitchen as your laboratory, constructing that pasty mess of flour and red food coloring to see what would happen if you poured in more soda?  Yeah, we know how that turned out; bet you were mopping the floor for hours.

That “what would happen if…” approach to experimentation hasn’t completely faded from memory.  In fact, it’s how most companies are thinking about social media.  “What would happen if I post my TV commercials to YouTube?”  “What would happen if I create a Facebook app?”

But while the “what would happen if…” method works well for kitchen counter experimentation, it falls decidedly short when it comes to social media.  If we take that approach, we risk significantly stunting our learning:  We won’t be able to pinpoint why something worked (or failed) or how it impacted our business (if at all).

Social media leaders take a different approach.  To learn as much as they can as fast as they can, leaders apply the test-and-learn method to add some rigor to their social media experimentation. Read More »

By Whitney Satin

Leading B2B marketers focus on the customer experience to build loyalty and strengthen their customers’ willingness to buy more.  The typical approach looks at improving the experience touchpoint-by-touchpoint— a losing strategy.  Marketers instead must focus on the benefits they provide, prioritizing those touchpoints that help deliver specific benefits to customers.

Click Image to Enlarge | Customer perceptions of Unique Benefits are the best predictor of preference and intent to repurchase.

Benefits come in all shapes and sizes, but they essentially fall into one of two camps.  There are some benefits that all companies try to provide, things like “easy to do business with” or “is responsive to customer feedback”.  We call these Common Benefits because they’re relevant in any commercial relationship, regardless of company or industry.  We also see Unique Benefits that are specific to an individual company’s experience.  Things like “simplifies my supply chain” or “provides a good out-of-the-box experience” are unique in the sense that not every other company in the industry is trying to achieve them through the experience. Read More »

In recent posts, perhaps I’ve been a little sour on marketers’ efforts to emerge from the economic doldrums to provide growth for their businesses in 2010 and beyond. One more sour point, and then I promise to make some lemonade. Fifty percent of the share you lose to private label this year, you will never regain. Stick with me, you optimists – our research shows if your brand can use the recession to jump into the top quartile in your industry, you’ll likely retain that premium position for at least three years.

 Here’s the challenge I’m seeing in recent client meetings, from financial services looking to recover to media companies searching for identity. The single biggest asset we have as marketers is also the likeliest thing we de-emphasized as budgets were slashed in the past 18 months: our brands.  Read More »

Last time, I wrote about how marketers should choose the right social experience—one that accentuates unique strengths—to put at the center of integrated communications.  We’re now at a spot where we can structure and assign roles to our other touchpoints so we can scale that social experience.

To get started, break touchpoints into two categories: secondary touchpoints (the outer circle in the graphic below) and supporting touchpoints (the middle circle):

Click Image to Enlarge | Secondary and supporting touchpoints establish a mental link and then drive the target audience to the social experience focal point.

1.  Secondary Touchpoints link the social experience to your brand for the target audience.  They’re often mass in nature—TV, out-of-home, print, and so on.  Best Buy’s TV ads showcasing Twelpforce are one example of such a secondary touchpoint.

2.   Supporting Touchpoints drive the target audience to the desired social experience.  Targeted banner ads, paid search, and direct marketing often do well here.  Best deployed, these touchpoints will:

• Engage a target audience at moments when they are susceptible to or desirous of the social experience
• Enable easy entry to the experience. Read More »