What’s at the heart of a successful social media marketing campaign? Are there certain attributes that make one company’s efforts sparkle a little more brightly than others do?

According to ClickZ’s Liana Evans, Ford Motor Co. is a great example of a company that has fine-tuned its social media marketing to a point where it can serve as a robust case study in how to do it right, and in her recent blog post, “5 Reasons Why Ford Continues to Kick Butt,” she outlines the key points that make the automaker’s approach “shine.”

“For a few years now, Scott Monty has headed up the social media marketing efforts at Ford with resounding success,” Evans writes. “Monty and his team do more than just "pimp" Ford's products in social media communities; they continually provide valuable content about Ford to engage enthusiastic fans of the brand.”

More specifically, she distills the company’s approach down to five main points. Ford:
1. Understands its audience.
2. Learns from past campaigns.
3. Sets goals and measures.
4. Integrates.
5. Looks forward.

I particularly like that Evans  recognizes Ford’s integrated digital approach, one that includes a variety of platforms, such as Facebook (Did you see the 2011 Ford Explorer reveal?), PPC ads, YouTube videos, e-mail and Twitter –all of which, of course, work together with more traditional campaigns on tv, radio and print. This type of integration points back to the first point and shows, again, how Ford understands its audience and is ready, willing and able to reach out to them and encourage engagement.

Is there a particular social media marketing approach that you have seen work well? Which components are essential to your strategy?
 

If you have the data, there’s tremendous value in segmenting. In fact, a recent JupiterResearch study found that engaging your audiences in more relevant communications increases net profits by an average of 18 times more than broadcast mailings. Any bit of segmenting from your data will help. You may have gleaned customer information directly from online forms; or you’re collecting behavioral data from PPC search activity or through your website analytics platform by visiting trending data. Whatever the case, it’s invaluable to the success of your communications – whether it’s your monthly newsletter or an on-going nurture campaign.

Start by making each email count by implementing email marketing best practices. Here are 3 primary steps you can take to increase your email’s ROI:

1.  Be relevant and personal. The basics here are tried and true: Talk to your customers the way they want to be talked to; know their purchase history and timing. 1 to 1 Media’s 2009 Direct Marketing Survey found that Relevancy improved click-thrus by 53%. And for Pete’s sake, don’t annoy by over-emailing.
2.  Try advanced segmentation. While the basics help a lot, try something beyond your comfort zone to see if you can score major lifts. Things to try: gender, location, hobbies, type of company (for b2b). Keep splitting your lists. There are plenty of tools out there to help with this.
3.  Engage new customers. Sounds obvious but many marketers miss this crucial step. You have a very small window of opportunity with new visitors; make sure you give them your best, and most welcoming, shot. Find something that new visitors value – research, analyst reports, intriguing white papers, case studies with real data for example.

Once you’ve started, take segmentation as far as your data allows.  One motorcycle company used segmentation to create new lists based on riding styles, then further divided those segments into lists based on purchase history and email behaviors. Their new, highly targeted email campaign achieved DOUBLE the open rates (38.6%, up from 18.5%), and TRIPLE the clickthroughs. (20.6% from 6.2%.)

Not only does segmentation allow you to drive a more personalized message that leads to higher performance, by segmenting on previous response history you can reduce your actual email sending costs simply by sending to the smaller, more qualified list.

 A customer who is communicated to in just the right way earns your trust. And that’s the ultimate success. So start being smart about using your data to really relate to your customer. As an added bonus, you’re sure to reduce your costs and increase your ROI.
 

·         Bid amount does not necessarily ensure a high position.  A PPC advertiser can have the highest bid for a keyword, but the PPC ad may not rank well. Google will factor in CTR and Quality Score as well as Bid Amount to award a PPC search ranking.

·         CTR must be a certain rate, generally .05 percent, to even continue the campaign.  Google will disable PPC campaigns if the CTR falls much below .05 percent. The higher the CTR the better the chances for the top spot for your PPC ad.  Typically, the more focused the PPC ad, the better your CTR will be.  Of course, this is subjective as to the keyword and the PPC ad.

·         Quality Score: Google will assign a measurement  or grade to the overall campaign. The higher the Quality Score (from 0-10) the better chances your ad will appear in the No. 1 spot. To achieve a high quality score, the PPC ad should use the keyword at least once. And, the landing page should have considerable keyword density as well as content that directly relates to the what the PPC advertisement is selling.  For example, if your PPC ad is pushing an Email Marketing Webinar, your landing page should be focused on offering the Webinar.  Your density would go down if the Webinar is only a small part of the landing page.  If your landing page does not offer a Webinar at all, it is highly possible that Google would disable the PPC campaign, or, at the least, your quality score would be so low that your PPC would not show regardless of CTR and bid amount.

Once upon a time, we had marketing and we had marketing-related specialties like search engine marketing and online marketing. Not so much today. The division between offline and online marketing is becoming more and more blurred. After all, marketing needs to create demand and interest for a company's products and services, no matter what form it takes.

For a traditional marketer, online marketing can seem a little overwhelming, but it doesn't need to be. Marketers can find a Webinar or podcast for nearly any facet of the marketing world.

One of the marketing tactics nearest to me is search engine marketing. Network Solutions had become a great resource for everything Web related, from securing a domain name to browsing and watching its comprehensive listing of pre-recorded Webinars.  It's a great place to brush up on some lesser used skills or learn new ones.

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
3. Link Building Techniques
4. Effective Keyword Strategies
5. Search Marketing for Local Businesses
6. Constructing Optimized Web Pages
7. Blogging/Web 2.0 Strategies
8. SEO for Ecommerce Sites
9. Getting your Business Online 101

As a company, Aprimo spent many years in a software category (marketing resource management) that most marketers knew little about.  This category focused on the "back office" of marketing, helping the marketer manage their projects, their budget, and their marketing assets.  However, most marketing organizations 10 years ago did this with spreadsheets and file systems (and many of them still do today!  p.s. we still would like to talk to you!).

When you live in a category for a long time that does not have general awareness, you get addicted to outbound marketing.  This is because you are constantly having to "reach out" to educate someone about what you do, why it is important, and why they should care.

Times have changed at Aprimo, and now we are serving many markets that have ready, willing buyers looking to solve the problems they have today with software we offer.  However, it is interesting that our marketing was slow to change.  We became addicted to outbound.  Even though there are many marketers now looking to solve problems like email marketing, search engine marketing, campaign management, and more, we have built an engine that tries to "call everyone" asking if they want to solve the problem vs. putting up a sign saying "we solve this" and letting them find us.

Ok, a sign is a simplistic example.  However, effective PPC campaigns are just not something we think first about.  For instance, there were 700,000 people looking for "email marketing software" this month.  However, we never seriously tried to win that search term.  Instead, we will place millions into channels calling people about email marketing hoping they happen to be one of the 700,000 that already told us they were looking via search.

Times are changing at Aprimo and so is our marketing approach.  In the coming months, we are going to be investing more and more on inbound channels.  However, habits are hard to break and this change does not come easily.  I imagine we are not the only company struggling to break such habits!

 

If you're like me, you are constantly wanting improve your ROI in marketing. Paid search is one of the many tools interactive marketers use to stay a few steps ahead of the search engine management circus.

But, what does one do when conversion rates start to slip? No matter how well you have your paid search ads crafted, regardless of how well you use all of the technology for marketing tools offered by Google, sooner or later, your ROI will start to lose some of its luster.

Search marketing is a larger-than life project, one that requires major planning and insight. But sometimes, it's the smallest of strategy shifts that produce big results. And, with everyone trying to do more with less, these small optimizing ideas can be golden.

As any PPC guru is well aware, Google Adwords offers a plethora of tools to manage your paid search efforts. Two that are often overlooked are ad scheduling and IP restriction.

Ad scheduling will help search marketers fine tune their paid search campaigns by limiting when their ads appear within Google searches. If, you know that your prospects are going to be searching for you during business hours, does it make sense to run paid search ads on the weekends?  You can dictate when your paid search ads appear from the campaign management tab. 

Another tip would be to restrict your ads based on IP address. This tool can make your paid search budget go even farther and increase your marketing ROI. This easy to use tool is also found in the Tools section. By excluding IP addresses that have low conversions rates, you can focus your precious search engine marketing budget on more lucrative site visitors.

I mentioned getting Marketing Finance Operations under control in my last post.  We operated as a typical marketing organization with distributed authority for approving expenses and no real good central mechanism to track expected expenses.  The complexity with managing marketing financial software is the various stages of marketing spending. 

First, there is a forecast for a program (e.g. an online marketing campaign)  that is planned in the future.  This "earmarks" money from the budget somewhere out in time.  Second, there is the point where you actually start to commit spending money for the online marketing campaign through a verbal or written contract (e.g. a PPC advertising campaign).  Finally, there is the actual invoice when cash flow is impacted. These all need to be managed on three dimensions - a budget, an activity and alignment with your General Ledger accounts.  Visibility to all these aspects allows me to react to budget increases (yes, it can happen), budget cuts (okay, this is more common) and the desire to change plans to react to market dynamics.  The association with the General Ledger provides an alignment point between Marketing Operations and the company accounting system.

In the past, we would get invoices that we didn't realize we had not yet paid and be forced to adjust our future spend when it was almost too late.  A good proportion of marketing spend is committed well in advance. When we had to adjust within a quarter, our options were limited on finding places to cut.  Also, without the visibility of what was committed and what wasn't, we didn't really know what activities carried a large amount of sunk cost.  The other side of the equation, measurement, is equally as important. Without knowing the cost of an activity (the Investment), it's pretty difficult to assess the Return on Investment or ROI in Marketing.  But, that's a topic for my next post.  Until then, may the marketing process be with you!

• Integrated marketing communications
• Integrated marketing planning
• Integrated marketing operations
• Integrated online marketing

• Cultivation of customer loyalty and success
• Commitment to the highest standards of integrity and ethics
• Dedication to teamwork and the focused pursuit of excellence
• Creation of career passions and professional growth
• Respect for the individual and the importance of a balanced life
• Responsibility for service and philanthropy in our communities