Building a Social Media Strategy

The terms “social media” have seemingly overtaken “emerging media” for the new catch-all that ad agencies are pitching to their clients. The reality is, social is part of emerging, but I tend to think that when people don’t fully understand something such as Twitter they want to lump it into a general category so they can speak to a broader topic and not get questioned on specifics. With that being said, I’d like to take you into a hypothetical social strategy, but first, I want to identify for you the 5 elements Media Two categorizes are mandatory for your strategy to be successful:

1. Identify Personality. Although Media Two will do all of the heavy lifting, the brand personality should come from within your organization. As a brand cannot speak, this person will be the spokesperson for your brand. The only way to not come off as fake is to be real – not a made up agency person or avatar. We want you to interact in a way that only you know how.

2. Set up brand monitoring. Using a software such as Radian6 Media Two will identify what your current social buzz is, and identify a benchmark plan with ROI objectives in place so that you can see what your actual return on investment will be.

3. Identify Strategy & Opportunities. Depending on where your industry buzz is taking place, whether its blogs, communities, micro-blog’s, news outlets, video, etc – we will identify and define a strategy designed to hit your ROI objectives as previously defined. For example, if we see that you have a strong following in the Twitter community, we will set up a strategy that continues to bolster that.

4. Competitive Analysis. We will keep you updated on what people are saying about your competitors as well. Part of our strategy may even be to go after individuals with our strengths and benefits upon finding dissatisfaction with your competitor’s products or services.

5. Protecting Your Brand Identity. As new trends hit the airwaves, we know that you have other things going on. Media Two will continue to monitor the trade shows, tweet-up’s and what have you to identify where you should be protected. We recommend registering any brand URL’s, Facebook accounts, LinkedIn groups, Twitter names, Instant Messaging names, and Gmail accounts that might be needed in this ever changing interactive environment. This list continues to grow, and you need to stay on top of it.

Every company in the world has an online reputation – whether it’s good or bad is of no relevance. It’s what you learn from yours that makes it an important part of your marketing process. Think of the internet as the modern day Focus Group, only this group isn’t being paid for their thoughts on you in a controlled environment; they’re openly discussing them with their friends and even with strangers in an anything goes format. In my next blog post, I’m going to give you some sample strategies ideas that could be put to use for your own campaign.

Something Fresh

Here lately I think most marketers feel like their battles are all uphill. The economy is down, the cost of living up, and demand for products is disappearing (unless you're Budweiser of course). So what's an ad agency to do?

Work harder? Sure, that's a given. Work smarter? Hopefully, but some of us are more capable than others. Even with this approach though, it really comes down to how much of your efforts really shine through to a client when times are tough.

Across the spectrum agencies and marketing budgets are getting dropped like flies, but as a direct response agency, I've always felt we've got the distinct advantage of being able to show the empirical truth for every dollar our clients spend. That said, sometimes it's a little more evident than others. With this in mind, I'd like to share a little mini case study on one of the biggest suggestions we're making to our accounts... keep your marketing fresh!

Instead of putting what money you have into media spend and cutting production costs, I would recommend almost the exact opposite. Of course don't cut your media entirely, but find the right mix so your buy is optimized. Then follow it up with strong messaging on a regular basis.

Last month, we A/B tested new creative for a client against an old "standby" ad they've been running. Their approach was simple. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Ours was the opposite. We can do better. Here's what we found out...

• A 39% lift in clickthroughs for the new creative
• 53% more leads generated through new messaging
• A 28% decrease in their overall cost per lead
• A 200% increase in sales
• And finally, a 63% reduction in their overall cost per sale

Anyone up for some new creative?

Marketing/Media Plan for 2013

I think everyone is in agreement that 2008 ended horribly, and 2009 is starting off with longer lines at the unemployment office than at Disney these days (FYI unemployment office workers – Disney started a “fast pass” program a number of years ago that is awesome – you may want to consider it for 09). Every morning my inbox is filled with 10% layoff notices at this agency and that agency, and everyone on the OldTimers List and my Twitter is networking and appealing to the masses. So how are companies going to survive 2009? Well – if you haven’t figured that out already, chances are you’re not going to – so let’s move on.

I sat in on a great strategy and recap session yesterday between our account services team and the client themselves. The client was asking how they could catch up to their number one competitor who had dominated their industry. We just started with them in September and we’ve already hit a lot of their goals and expectations, but we’re playing catch-up to their competitor, and so the point was brought up by our media team for the client to start thinking ahead. We’ll worry about planning and executing for 2009 and make it a success – but what is going to differentiate them in the future. How are we going to get ahead and have their competition trying to figure out what hit them?

The most common theme brought up was mobile and new applications such as iPhones that make desktops a thing of the past. According to a new study by Parks Associates published on Media Post there will be more than 140 million US consumers paying for mobile broadband services in 2013. I personally have used my laptop for maybe 5 things since getting my iPhone in November. So if your website isn’t currently mobile enabled at the very least – now’s the time to be doing it. Then starting to look at technologies such as the iPhone where it registers as a web browser rather than a mobile device, and it doesn’t yet accept flash… So you need to take that into account – but understand that in the future flash will be there – so don’t spend millions now to only have to change it later. Road map your audience by age category and target usage, and build your mobile site appropriately.

The key to your success is still going to be knowing who your audience is and what marketing principles have worked in the past. Saving yourself from the grey hairs (and unemployment lines) is going to come with aligning yourself with the right partner who understands all of the changing technologies and can guide you through the process.

I love that Twitter thing (now what exactly is it again?)!

As you may have read, last month I made the Twitter plunge! I jumped in, tweeted my every move, searched for fellow interesting tweeters, and even made a couple friends and business connections. Now that I’ve done it – I feel compelled to answer the question “So what the hell is Twitter?” that I’ve been so frequently asked over this past year. Here’s my top level take-away for you…

1. Real Time Connections. You have 140 characters to tell the world what you are doing. If anyone cares, they connect with you and follow you and you have the opportunity to do the same. My take-away is it’s kind of like an Instant Message to the world. According to companies like Dell, they’ve sold millions of dollars of product simply by announcing new deals to their followers. Others aren’t as good at it.

2. Twitter Feeds the Ego. It took me all of about 4 minutes before I had my first follower. I was pumped – I was on top of the world… I was the next rock star of twitter world. When I didn’t reciprocate and follow them, they blocked me and moved on. What??? I learned very quickly that when you follow companies and certain individuals that they will instantly start following you. A sort of interactive warm and fuzzy for you that makes you want to hang on their every word (or at least not block them). I also learned that some people feel VERY important if they have thousands of people following them – so they reach out to EVERY person in the twitter universe simply to gain those reciprocal followers. Think of a bad link strategy that’s starting to evolve…

3.Curiosity Growth. I started to follow only agency and marketing happenings, but I quickly found out it’s fun to see how the “other half lives”. I find myself clinging to my holiday candy as I see that Lance Armstrong (@lancearmstrong) is working out indoors as it’s too cold in Austin today. I don’t know why – but I love it when inspirational people like him share their every move. Something tells me if he were to sign a deal with a chocolate company and tweet about it, I’d be a new consumer for that product. Just saying…

4. Search.Twitter.com. Research has been one of my primary uses… I’ve been able to see in real-time what people are saying about potential clients, products, etc. It’s the modern age focus group.

5. Some Get It. Some… I’ve enjoyed following places like @mashable, @bmorrissey, @agencyspy, etc… But there are still some that I wonder why… To name a couple @richardbranson and @adage simply let me know when they blogged or posted an article somewhere else. If I wanted that – I’d look at their blog or somewhere else… That being said, I’m about to go twitter that I posted this blog – so something about the pot calling the kettle names…

There are a lot of new things evolving out of twitter, and it’s still yet to be seen if it just becomes a facebook application, but for now – it’s been a fun experiment that I will continue to follow @mediatwo.

New Year’s Resolutions in Interactive for the CMO

A few weeks ago I sat and watched with great interest at the Internet Summit a panel of venture capitalists as they gave their forecasts for when the economy would turn around. There were 4 panelists, and their answers started out with 12 months, 18 months, 24 months… And then it got to the last person, and I could kick myself for not remembering who he was… “I have no idea” was his response.

Finally! It is ok to admit that nobody knows… So why is everyone so intent on trying to guess what 2009 will bring for Madison Avenue? After 13+ years in this industry, you’d think that I’d understand that it’s just the “big guns” trying to sound intelligent, and the reality is all of us in the trenches who are actually defining the industry are still focusing on delivering tangible results for our clients. So with that in mind, I’ve created a New Year’s Resolution list for Chief Marketing Officers everywhere (regardless of whether ad spend in 2009 will go up or down in each channel):

Test something new: I still believe 20% of your budget should be set aside to test new campaigns, technologies, solutions, etc… And by “new” – it can be something that is simply new to you – you don’t always have to be the first out the door launching your new Facebook Connect campaign. But if you know text ads work for you, maybe give SMS ads a try in a controlled environment. Just keep testing, as people’s wants and needs are changing every day - so too should your testing.

Marketing through Search: Yes – I say this a lot… It is Search Engine MARKETING – so test different products on different keywords, test pricing and discounts, test in-store promotions… Some of you that stayed awake in Marketing 101 are starting to hear some familiar P’s… Don’t lose track of what got your company where you are today. Search is the medium - marketing is how you use it.

Set Your Metrics: This goes without saying – right? Well knowing your metrics and dictating your marketing to hitting them while keeping a good marketing mix are a lot more difficult than you may think. That being said, if you know that your product retails at $20, and you need a COGS of $10 to be profitable, make sure you have a media campaign set up as a whole that will accomplish that. Don’t judge one medium independently of another. Even though interactive may appear to be the cheapest, there are offline occurrences that affect your online campaigns.

Own Social Media: The words social media seem to now be what “emerging” media was 2 years ago… A catch all for everything you don’t understand. Grasp the areas of social media that are relevant to you. Set up Google Alerts on your company name, your competitors, etc… Own your online reputation. Set up a Twitter account for your company, set up a LinkedIn account for your company… These are all free tools that are available for you to communicate with your customer. If you find they’re not working (make sure you review your site analytics before you make that judgment), then move on. But allow your customers to interact with you in the way they want to… You need to own Social Media – not let it own you.

Happy New Year CMO’s!

Congratulations President Obama!

I voted for McCain.

I think the better man for the job actually won the election, but I found a lot of things annoying about this election that didn’t seem to bother me in the past. Thankfully – we have a company blog that the company doesn’t back – but they don’t frown upon us voicing our opinion. So here are my top annoyances with this election:

1. Roughly 1% of McCain’s votes were from African American’s (stat I saw on TV – so who knows if that’s accurate or not). Before you label me a racist, please refer back to my statement that “I think the better man for the job won”. What concerns me is that this was a black/white vote – and not a vote about the principles. That being said, Obama was a good choice, so it worked out that we got the right person and had a historic first in our country – but hopefully this will be the last vote that we do black/white.
2. I was able to vote party-line without even looking at the candidates. So if this election weren’t a black and white vote – it would have been a Republican/Democratic vote. In reality – is that any better? How about doing away with that little box and actually making people fill in the circles.
3. And the best for last… My biggest annoyance… The marketers. I know! In my world, everything is about marketing. It is so important – and yet, I have never been more annoyed. I again heard on the radio that the combined marketing dollars spent by the 2 presidential candidates totaled $1 billion this year! Are you kidding me??? I love marketing, and it has it’s place, but with everyone talking about a horrible economy – you can only imagine what could have been done with that money.

So here’s a thought… How about the next election – we ban the candidates from marketing or advertising. Instead, we have one government website that allows the candidates to post where they stand on the major principles, shows their history of voting and so on. No political affiliation can be listed, only principles. For those people that don’t have access to a computer or the internet, they can submit a special request and the candidates will pitch in and send them one (for a billion dollars – they can probably send a few). This way the independent party will also be on a level playing field. One month before elections, they will hold 2 debates a week based on the most pressing issues that are submitted to this web site. I’m just scratching at the surface – but you get my point. There is $1 billion that just went to some marketing people and disappeared. We didn’t create more long term jobs, build any more cars, cure cancer… We apparently got a new President that has such a cool name even my 5-year-old wanted me to vote for him… Hopefully that will be enough.

Search Strategy for a Struggling Economy

Search Engine Marketing – for all of the hype (and rightfully so) – is finally being affected by the economy. Although we still consider it the best converting online platform, we are definitely seeing the indirect results of clients pulling back budgets. We’re seeing it easier to spend a lot of money. We’re seeing conversion rates slipping a little. And best of all – we’re seeing clients moving more money to search in hopes of a strong end to the year.

Without going into a long explanation about how search is not a stand-alone medium, I wanted to simply explain a changing strategy that we’re implementing here at Media Two that could save a lot of others money and headaches. Get back to the basics.

We’re getting back to manually changing ads out in the engines. Regrouping keywords into appropriate ad groups that have ads that match the content . Lowering our bids on keywords. Limiting the keywords we’re bidding on. And most importantly, turning off the bid managers. Why? Because we’re after the short-tail conversion.

The value in the long-tail conversion goes without saying, but in a time where clients are cutting back Broadcast, Print and everything that doesn’t answer to the bottom line, search engines can start to jumpstart a clients marketing again when focusing on the short-tail. Think of it in these terms… The long tail terms are still being bid on because of the eventual value. But with overall marketing budgets being cut, if an agency or client doesn’t scale back on these, then they’ll start to be short on budgets. This shortfall on budgets is the perfect supply and demand equation for a client that focuses their time and effort on the here and now.

I’m not saying that cutting off your conversion funnel is the right thing to do, but let’s face it – these are tough economic times and when the client dictates that you spend less and convert more – you need to focus on what will give the client the biggest bang for the buck right now. Once you’ve proven that this philosophy works, there will then be more marketing dollars to expand on your strategy. But right now – stay focused on cutting your costs, and maximizing your conversions.

{Insert Agency Value Here} (again)

With the interactive marketing news release this week that MySpace has started their own “do-it-yourself-interactive-media” platform, and Google’s subsequent Beta of the Display Ad Builder Tool, it’s right about now that agencies are doing one of two things: Saying it won’t change them, or reassuring their clients of their value and that these tools are not needed.

Chances are though – most of them aren’t getting into the applications and trying to figure out if it’s an actual tool they can use and master in order to save their clients some time and money. If you’re one of those people who IS interested – take a look at the product tutorial below.

But why is it that agencies are constantly shunning the new tools that make it easier for advertisers? Have you not learned anything by Google Ad Words (apparently not as most of them don’t even use it themselves). If we’ve learned anything at all, it’s to embrace Google and it’s technology, and then apply marketing principles to it to make it better and meet client objectives. Yes there are 100’s of tools that help you to optimize your campaigns and manage your bids, but in the long run, the success of the campaign still comes down the agency’s ability to apply sound marketing principles and execute strategic plan objectives flawlessly – regardless of whether you use a new tool by Google or your charge your client 10 times that amount by doing it the old-fashioned way. In this economy, don’t you at least owe it to your client to know all of the tools available to you?

Why don’t you care about your brand?

Re/Max – you do care – so you’re off the hook (but contact us anyway – as we want to work with you on your interactive advertising). But the other 100 companies – I’m very intrigued by.

What happened over the last month was extremely interesting here at Media Two. We embarked upon an online ad campaign on an unnamed search engine (ok – it was Google) that not only showed that advertising agencies believe in using search, but that we are creative masters at using it for ourselves as well as our clients. I don’t want to spoil the results of our campaign as we have a soon-to-be-released case study (AdWeek – AdAge – any interest?), but let’s just say that we targeted 101 potential clients with our messaging. In addition to the results of the campaign, we found another interesting phenom… No one was protecting their trademarked brand name.

Of the 101 Brands that we targeted, only Re/Max didn’t allow us to market towards their name. One other client politely said “OK – you got my attention; now get off my brand names”. An even more interesting occurrence happened with the Bank of America. I’m not claiming it’s someone in their marketing department, but I am claiming it smells like a funny way of watching your brand. Instead of contacting us, or filling out the appropriate Trademark complaint/protection form with Google (FYI Brand Marketers - REALLY easy if you simply go to http://www.google.com/tm_complaint_adwords.html), what happened was “someone”, located in the city of Charlotte, repeatedly clicked on our ad over a short time period (minutes), and spent less than 1 second on our landing page… Hmmm… Yes, it eventually depleted our perceived budget, but then Google replenished it when it noticed the blatant click-fraud (all without us asking – so thank you Google and your supposed non-existent click fraud protection group) and we were back online again.

So my question is – if you’re not watching your own brands – who is? More importantly, if you are watching your brand, what are you doing about it… I can assure you we’ll have a case study on this as well.

What Influences You?

My last post was inspired by a recent article on eMarketer, and to continue with that theme, this post is too. In this article called E-mail Marketing Still Works, the main focus was that “permission-based email is great at getting consumers to buy”, with the key word being permission-based. What they are really saying is CRM emails convert at a high rate. Yes, we knew that. There are still some interesting points regarding email marketing that you may fancy, so take a look. I’d like to take a more general view of the data and provide some feedback.

Let’s focus on the research from the “Green Marketing Study” by Opinion Research Corporation with the chart titled Type of Advertising that Most Influences US Adult Online Buyers When Making an Online Purchase. Another layer of this data that I like is it’s segmented by age and US region. There are several ways to use this information, but the two most obvious are landing page development and media buying.

According to the aforementioned study, younger folks like to have assurance from others before making a decision and older folks consider search results their pied piper leading them to a decision. This makes a lot of sense as I made several recent online purchases based on customer reviews on Amazon.com and other consumer report sites beforehand. They did not have any effect on purchase intent, but did influence my decision on the brand.

Speaking of reviews, we recently incorporated video testimonials into our landing pages, and although it may be too early to tell, the initial results have been positive. So, give it a try when developing your next landing page. Although ideal, it doesn’t have to be a video, just tie in some reviews and written testimonials … to go along with your kick-ass value prop in the upper left hand corner and call to action button strategically and prominently placed on the page.

I rarely use an email to initiate purchases unless the offer is phenomenal, but the results don’t lie. It does show that you can have success with a very qualified list rental, or even better, remarketing efforts via email. This is a whole other blog entirely, but CRM is an area that, more often than not, the client is neglecting and failing to utilizing these qualified leads to the best of their ability. The biggest problem is the turnaround times are just too slow. If I’ve made the effort to raise my hand, don’t contact me back in two weeks or worse, two months. I will have already started a conversation with your competitor or made a decision already by then, and now, you are just spamming me.

Lastly, it is surprising that display on social networking sites is at the bottom of the list. For a service or product targeted to a younger demo, social networking sites have worked well in the past, mainly because the inventory is inexpensive. On the other hand, I am not surprised about Blogs. From a direct response standpoint, these do not work, as well as, you run the risk of creating a negative forum that could harm your brand.