Wide Angle

(Note: This is Part 2 of a 4-part series on marketing planning. Part 1, “Making the Case for Higher Spend“,  can be found here. Check back here every Wednesday in August for a new installment!)

B2B marketing organizations today are emphasizing the transfer of ideas to customers (just consider the rise of terms like “thought leadership”, “consultative selling” or “solutions”).  This makes sense – done right, an insight-based approach is one of the few ways suppliers can avert pure price-based competition. Additionally, our research shows that insight is valued by customers in the long term.  “Teaching” activities such as offering unique perspectives on the market or helping the customer navigate alternatives strongly predict loyalty.

It follows that marketing plans this year should have a strong insight orientation.  Naturally the marketing plan will align to broader organizational strategy, but the marketing objectives that support company strategy should be grounded in delivering insight that changes customers’ valuation of your offering. Read More »

Measuring social media campaign effectiveness is a topic near and dear to the marketers we speak with – and justifiably so.  Experimentation is a key element of social media strategies, and evaluating the impact of experimental campaigns helps marketers maximize future investments.

For marketers who target viral campaigns to the blogosphere or use online PR as a marketing channel, measurement can be especially challenging.  Mentions of a brand can be monitored, but if they don’t link to the brand’s website, it’s hard to tell which mentions are leading to web visits, online purchases, or other objectives.  Certain third party sites might be especially influential in directing traffic to a brand’s website – but without the direct link, how do you know? Read More »

The post title is cheeky, yes; but this one incredibly true. The more we see members implementing a social media strategy, the wider the gap grows between success and failure – and along with that, the attendant risks of failure. For those looking simply to make the social media case, failure means another year lost while consumers and technology forge ahead. For those making social media a central part of the customer experience, failure means massive personnel costs that could have been spent on tried-and-true techniques. So without further ado, the top ten list: Read More »

Plenty of Council members are asking us questions about social media ROI.  As our research team scans all that’s been written on the topic, we occasionally come across little gems.  One that may have escaped your attention is a section of a larger 2007 study, Never Ending Friending, which may provide some valuable rules of thumb and benchmarks for those of you diving into social media ROI.

The study was commissioned by MySpace which, at the time, was on the top of the social networking heap.  You’ll likely want to skip the first 34 pages (unless you have a keen interest in MySpace circa 2007), and get right to the meat.  Read More »

Click Image to Enlarge

A social media strategy without metrics is like Thanksgiving dinner without turkey, truly missing a core ingredient. A social media strategy with the wrong metrics serves the turkey with pasta sauce rather than gravy. Sure, it adds flavor, but it completely distracts from the purpose of the meal. Here’s my point – in marketers’ rush to prove that social media investments produce the required ROI, our social media plans trumpet metrics that may have little relation to what we’re actually trying to accomplish.

In delivering the results of our Social Media Maturity Diagnostic to multiple members over the past month, I sense two problems with social media measurement schemes (and trust me, some are more scheme-like than your local bank heist): Read More »

A recent New Yorker article on the financier Martin Armstrong’s obsession with cycle theory got me thinking: while I don’t know anything about cycle theory, I’ve looked at enough data to observe that some numbers are indeed fixed. Not literally fixed in that they are absolute numbers like pi, but fixed in the sense that they are hard to move and in that they will tend to revert back to the mean. This makes them very powerful from a management perspective in that changes in either direction provide you with a lot of information about what’s happening in the marketplace. Read More »