That question popped into my head today, as I read over online media stats about the number of individuals with access to the web, Facebook users, Linkedin accounts, YouTube visitors, and other data points on social and community networks. I've worked in advertising so I started to think about the similarities (as well as differences) between the seemingly ubiquitous online media channel and one of its venerable well-known mass media counterparts like TV. I wondered what the online "reach" equivalent would be to TV's Gross Rating Points and Total Rating Points (GRPs and TRPs, respectively), and in particular, how the online metric could be calculated with an increasingly fragmented audience with dimensional behaviors that include commerical email message forwarding, member site comments and/or content creation, viewing, sharing, etc.
To succeed today, marketers must master the new "mass media" channel. Why and how?
To the first question of why: It is a question worth answering -- or trying to answer because companies are increasingly focused on it and ramping up their online spend. That means 1:1 Marketers, like me, need new ways to break through the online clutter to get noticed and engaged with individuals to attain our goals.
As to how: We need marketing automation solutions that support a more holistic multi-channel campaign management approach that includes additional online communication vehicles and tactics, some of which support 1:1 interactions and some that do not [directly, that is]. Here's my wish list for a multi-channel campaign management solution that gives me more end-to-end functionality, with the ability to better harness the power and value of the online channel. This is just a start and not all-inclusive:
(Of note, it will never be all inclusive, because the market continues to evolve, and so must my tools!)
- Interactive Marketing Campaigns - Replace email blasts that don't work with campaigns that run continuously (24/7), serving up variable highly personalized content in the form of email messages, offers, inbound forms/surveys, microsites (PURLs), etc -- based on an individuals off and online behavior.
- Creative Control - Give Marketers an easy-to-use HTML designer that lets them create professional-quality marketing content for their online communication vehicles while protecting brand standards with templates and reusable content blocks.
- New Communication Devices (e.g., microsites, PURLs) - Reduce dependence on corporate web site team, and allow Marketers to create powerful "weblets" within a campaign to improve customer engagement outcomes
- Demand Generation - Provide controls to manage online marketing tactics or tools that "sit outside" the 1:1 marketing campaign, but directly affect the outcomes such as search engine management, web analytics, web alerts, and banner ad management.
With applications that enable and empower marketers to use a mix of 1:1 communications and online tactics marketers can execute and measure campaigns improve customer loyalty, increase your brand awareness, and accelerate time to inquiry or brand preference (e.g., visits to your web site, content downloads, agree to live chat, etc). So...no, the internet is not truly a "mass media" channel, but it is the channel-of-choice so marketers need to expand their toolbox to include more than the traditional 1:1 tools. Probably should think about an expandable toolbox...
This is not shocking data (most already know it), response rates on commercial email marketing are collapsing. At last count, 210 billion emails were being sent daily. I believe that computes to several hundred emails per every email account that exists in the world. That is a lot of email marketing! The vast majority (90%+) is unsolicited. Frankly, the email is beyond saturated and performance within the email channel is reflecting that reality.
There are two basic steps to improving this marketing situation. First, make your commercial email more effective through micro-segmentation techniques perfected in the database marketing field to increase relevance. Frankly, without highly relevant content, you have no chance. Second, move your commercial email strategies to transactional email strategies.
What is a transaction email strategy? It is marketing to prospects and customers when they expect to receive your communication, not when you want to send it. So, when do customers expect to get email? The obvious times are when they have requested something. That is an ideal time to include some marketing content into that communication. There is no rule that says after fulfilling the customer's request, you cannot share more information about your services and offerings. Other times are based on real time events (anniversary dates, major offline actions, renewals, and more). By starting to time email communications by when the target expects it (or welcomes it), response rates will climb along with your reputation. By continuing to send email only when you want to send it, a continued collapse of performance should be expected.
Effective transactional email strategies are directly connected to effective profiling data strategies, but that is for another post!
Wow. I just read this great article on the effectiveness of Social Media specifically Facebook and it made me realize the vast possibilities for my organization. Take a minute to read
Facebook's frighteningly impressive ad potential and see what I mean. I realize this article is geared more for the B2C then the B2B but I think that is changing even as we speak.
Yes, social media marketing is one piece of the pie, yet tying it to specific offline activity is key. As a marketer responsible for Lead Generation, it is one thing to get alot of leads but it is quite another to actually have the majority of those leads be highly qualified. My goal is to create a healthy sales funnel and consequent sales pipeline. Now, with lead scoring every lead you receive can be a high quality lead. So, when will we initiate trigger marketing based on where someone goes on our Facebook or website? Now is the answer!
What is cool is the ability to send a person a highly personal communique which then links out to a specific microsite or purl. They get to then be engaged with marketing content relevant to them and all the while we are scoring them on thier behavior and determining our next line of communication. Kind of like predicitive modeling. Yes, digital marketing has taken on a whole new life and it is time to join the fun but don't just jump in, be deliberate, methodical and open to change. Make sure your technology for karketing is the best... meaning use a robust, easy to use marketing software tool. We use
Aprimo Marketing Studio and love it. What do you use?
I was recently harvesting vegetables from my backyard garden and got to thinking about how my physical plant nurturing is a little like lead management. With the right effort expended, I could produce both quality and quantity of the "things" that I desired. In the case of my garden, I want a lot of high quality, fresh vegetables to eat and share with my family and neighbors. For marketing, I want to drive as many qualified leads as I can for Sales. Of course, I want to do all of this efficiently -- i.e., keep costs low and production high!
I am certainly wise enough to know that a gardener's tools are not going to work well in lead management! Kidding aside, we can confidently say that both need tools, and importantly, they each need the right tool for the right purpose. Just as a gardener would not use a bulb dibber to weed, a B2B marketer would not (or would he/she?) use a SFA (sales force automation) application to execute continuously running interactive lead nurturing and scoring campaigns, which require defined business rules to run against dimensional data (i.e., historical depth within and across individual records) sourced from both off- and online behaviors. Crazy, isn't it?
I know. I know. But you'd be surprised to know how many B2B firms first try to plan, execute, and measure centralized or corporate marketing campaigns from their SFA system, only to find -- quickly, I might add, that they cannot easily (if at all) create,, manage, and measure the effectiveness of the marketing content they need (e.g., dynamic, highly personalized email messages, pre-populated inbound response forms, and microsites). And, although I've encountered many companies trying this approach, I have not seen the "reverse." In other words, I haven't seen many trying to use a multichannel marketing and lead management solution to support their sales process.
Instead, what I have seen and continue to see is companies that want marketing campaign and lead management solutions to integrate with their SFA tool of choice. The integration combines the functional strengths of each to make a whole marketing and sales solution that is greater than the sum of its parts! (Is that anything like hybrid vegetables where the best traits of each are combined to make a "whole" that is better? I'll have to ask my sister, the Biology and Chem teacher who worked summers at a national seed company who did some of that plant mingling...)
Funny thing is... firms have been trying to do everything with their SFA applications for years, and there's probably many who do it and are content with their results [that which they can measure]. Even so, for every one of them, there is a factor of X more that submit RFIs and RFPs each year to marketing campaign and lead management companies looking for solutions that "easily integrate" to other applications, namely SFA systems.
Well, it's been fun thinking and talking about the similarities between my hobby and my work. Is it any wonder why I love both, as the yield can be great -- quality and quantity -- when approached with the right tools for the right purpose! Must go pick some tomatoes...
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