Summary:The Numerati weaves a story that’s as potentially compelling to marketers as it may be chilling to consumers. Every time we subscribe to a magazine, use a credit card, visit a website, or use a supermarket rewards card, data points are created that this new breed of entrepreneurial mathematicians can use to profile us and our habits, building predictive models that make companies smarter about their markets, expose buying habits, and present opportunities for ever more targeted marketing and segmentation efforts. Even more compelling from a societal perspective (though a bit forward-looking) are applications in health care and food delivery, though this will also (you guessed it) make it easier for companies to sell things.
You’ll love this book if: You’re looking for an easy read on the heavy topics of statistics and data, and are interested in how the data trail we all leave has the potential to transform everything from dating, shopping, politics and marketing, to healthcare and the workplace.
You’ll hate this book if: You get freaked out by how much privacy we’re each giving up simply by participating in an interconnected, always- on economy. If ignorance is bliss for you, don’t touch this book.
Words of Wisdom: With the global information store doubling every 18 months or so, the amount of digital data available to help us better see patterns and understand behavior may actually benefit consumers and corporations. Through better targeting of customer segments and marketing messages, consumers see more of what matters to them. Corporations reduce costs and increase profits. But the downside risk – lack of privacy and the potential ethical issues of these insights – is disquieting at best.
Why we think this book is important: While understanding people is hard work, quantifying their actions through numbers and analysis does allow us to draw powerful connections and conclusions. Managed well, the work of the Numerati may actually benefit us all.
The Economy has slowed, but it has not (completely) stalled. Even as we plough through the unemployment statistics and wait for what most believe will be a long climb out of the “Great Recession,” as long as there are companies and people doing business, things will continue to be bought and sold. That’s why for many smart businesses, now is the time to grab this opportunity to increase customer loyalty, solidify market position, and get new customers.
The evidence is in, and supported by studies of every major slowdown since 1970: Marketing wins market share in recessionary times.
Studies conducted by organizations ranging from Business Week and Harvard Business Review to The Wall Street Journal support this contention, underlining the importance – and value – of marketing in an economic downturn.
In a study of U.S. recessions, McGraw-Hill Research analyzed 600 companies from 1980 to 1985 and concluded that at the end of 1985, “…firms that had maintained or increased their advertising during the 1981-1982 recession could boast an average sales growth of 275% over the preceding five years. Those who cut advertising realized a paltry increase of only 19%.”
Management Review asked AMA member firms about spending during the 1990-1991 recession. “Fortune follows the brave,” it announced, noting that the data showed that most firms that raised their marketing budgets enjoyed gains in market share.
And Harvard Business Review chimes in with this: “The rationale that a company can afford a cutback in advertising because everybody else is cutting back [is fallacious]. Rather than wait for business to return to normal, top executives should cash in on the opportunity that the rival companies are creating for them. The company courageous enough to stay in the fight when everyone else is playing safe can bring about a dramatic change in market position.”
The tipping point: where fear and opportunity collide
In spite of this overwhelming evidence, many companies are still tightening their belts, and the marketing budget is typically an early casualty. This is a mistake for two primary reasons. First, if you reduce spending on marketing, you will reduce the number of new customers. Direct marketing drives direct sales. And consistent brand presence is critical to keeping – and increasing – customer loyalty and prospect awareness. Second, (a direct result of the first reason) it is much easier to gain ground against competitors who have cut back on marketing. Why? It’s easier to drop below buyer radar as a result of decreased market presence.
This said, we recognize costs do need to be cut. So marketing smarter is more important than ever. From strategically leveraging social media tools to doing a better job of tracking brand, marketing and customer experience ROI, there are many ways to scale back dollars without dropping off the radar.
What’s the worst that can happen if you don’t step up your customer acquisition and recession activities?
You slowly leak customers and profits, and can’t keep the doors open long enough to participate in the recovery. It’s happened to plenty of companies already and there are many more to follow before we’re through. Or maybe you and your current competitor’s scale back your marketing, only to find a competitor you didn’t know existed come from behind to take over your market.
Today, the phrase “for every loser, there is a winner” has particular relevance. Your organization may be staying the course, cutting back or (let’s hope!) using this opportunity to aggressively dominate its market. No matter which direction you’re headed at the moment, it’s not too late to take steps to make sure you’re one of the winners. But don’t leave it too long…
C-Suite execs share concerns across sectors, size and geographies.
In our business, we talk to key executives literally every time we’re engaged to help address an issue. Usually in the areas of brand, touchpoint, loyalty and customer experience improvement, we hear many of the same questions and concerns from the “C” suite, across industries, company size and geography. This insights and concerns have also been surprisingly consistent for the past several years, indicating to us (on a qualitative basis) that they may be universal, and that many struggle to resolve them.
Why should brand and marketing performance be tracked “by the numbers?”
Though not all, a small majority of executives we speak with feel that – overall – their brand and marketing programs are at best only somewhat effective. We think this perception is driven by the lack of clear metrics to show what’s working, and what isn’t – and why. To improve both perceived and actual performance, marketers must be clear on their objectives, and relentlessly work to improve their programs and measure their success.
Where does marketing (and the voice of your customer) get to sit in your boardroom?
This is particularly prevalent in organizations where marketing might not have as “big” a seat at the board table as other groups. Though more and more executives are coming from marketing and sales backgrounds, the ability to quantify performance is key to assessing effectiveness.
If you’re part of a company that “gets it” then good for you. Keep it up. But if you’re not tracking the “soft stuff” by the numbers, there are some questions you can ask that may begin to get you there.
Does your organization have an overall philosophy of encouraging and rewarding performance?
How does marketing specifically support the CEO’s agenda, and deliver the results to support his or her strategic objectives?
Whose “agenda” is marketing tasked with pursuing?
Are there any informational barriers between the marketing department and the CFO’s suite?
Has your organization begun thinking about the benefits of tracking brand and marketing performance, and being able to improve performance over time as a result?
We think that the challenge many marketers face is to become more strategic and accountable in nature, focusing more on financial and customer value metrics – without sacrificing the creativity inherent in successful brand and marketing initiatives that truly “connect” with and engage your audiences.
1. Be Dominant: Many studies show that companies which slow marketing spending lose out now, as well as after a recovery. You want your customers to know that they’ve picked a winner, and your prospects to know you’ll survive – and thrive – in tough times as well as good.
2. Audit Your Brand your company or product brand accurately reflect who you are… and who you want to be? Is what you say you stand for believable – and important to your target audience? Make sure the brand you go forward with is the right one, and put systems in place to maintain its value. A consistent experience, a single “voice” and the way you communicate your brand in other ways is critical. If you are like most companies, your brand is the most valuable intangible asset your company owns. Improve it, and protect it.
3. Reevaluate Your Product and Service Mix: Are there ways you can repackage existing products or services in ways that can provide more value? Or, develop a product or service line that can accommodate smaller clients or customers with reduced budgets? Ask your customers – they’ll be happy to help.
4. Embrace Your Database: Your current database probably houses former customers and prospects, as well as current customers and suppliers. Now’s the time to go after them. Reactivate dormant accounts and leads with new products, promotions and services. Also, contact current customers for referrals. Give them ideas they can use to help their business in the current economy, and they’ll be happy to pass you on to others who could benefit from your knowledge.
5. Measure your Return on Marketing Investment: The problem with many marketing efforts is the inability of management to ascertain what really works, and why. That’s why smart marketers always measure outcomes so they know exactly where to invest for the greatest return. The more you test and measure, the more relevant data you’ll get. And the more data you get – and analyze – the smarter your marketing will get.
6. Cost Controls: Controlling cost does not mean cutting cost. It means being smarter with the budget you do have, and wringing greater value from every dollar you invest in your marketing program. Closely related to Marketing ROI, controlling costs allows you to invest your money where it drives the greatest revenue.
7. Launch a Targeted, Integrated New-Business Campaign: Now is a great time to launch a customer acquisition campaign. Set specific goals, tighten-up cost controls, and strive to sell product and build brand. Target your best customer segments through an integrated campaign across different media (including social and other online tactics) leveraging results-driven direct-marketing and customer engagement strategies.
8. Reevaluate Your Marketing Service Relationships: Are you totally satisfied with your marketing or PR agencies? What about strategic marketing counsel? Do you have a Social Media agency, or an expert on-staff? There are lots of smart practitioners out there, and many may be able to give you greater insight, higher levels of service, and greater value for your investment.
9. Enhance the Customer Experience: Do you provide “bullet proof” customer service? The cost of getting new customers is much higher than getting more business from existing customers. Each customer you lose is taking money out of your pocket over time. By improving customer experience – with a focus you’ll boost awareness, acquisition, loyalty and retention.
10. Increase Customer Insights: The more you know about your customers, the more accurately you can target brand and marketing messages to address their specific needs. To do this, marketing executives need to get down in the trenches. What do your prospects and customers want or need, and why? From voice-of-the-customer research to tracking your brand’s online reputation, it’s easier to gather real-time data – and act on it – than ever before.
Fueled in part by the Internet and other interactive technology channels, as well as the increased fragmentation and segmentation of traditional media, the explosion of brand and marketing touchpoints has increased the complexity of acquiring and retaining customers.
In many instances, this rapidly changing and increasingly hectic landscape can also lead to higher marketing costs, reduced marketing and brand effectiveness, and declining customer loyalty.
Increased customer choice leads to new skills for marketers
For most customers, instant access to choice, market opinion and competitors – combined with increased levels of education, product knowledge, and awareness of competitive options – have significantly increased their service expectations, making the process of cost-effectively delivering products and services even more complex. And as this complexity increases, the time, expense, and skills required of companies selling and servicing increases as well.
In response to this evolving landscape, “marketing” is being re-defined as “the science and art of finding, serving, retaining, and growing profitable customers.”
Brand and customer experience are more important than ever
That’s why brand and customer experience are more involved and more important than ever in fueling acquisition, driving word-of-mouth referrals, and ensuring retention of the right customers. Because yesterday’s marketers must become tomorrow’s customer experts, leveraging a deeper understanding than ever of customer wants, needs, perceptions and options to drive more of the right customers closer to their organizations.
While there are still some B2B executives who dismiss social media as an effective tool for engaging key audiences, the truth is that many B2B companies have successfully embraced the interactive world of “Web 2.0”, adapting core tools and technologies to connect with prospects and customers in ways they could only dream of a few short years ago.
In fact, earlier this year Forrester Research reported that B2B buyers have very high social participation; this presentation on Slideshare (“Using Buyer Social Behavior to Boost B2B Social Media Success”) outlines their 4-step approach, as well as Forrester’s Social Technographics ladder, a segmentation slice of online users based on their likelihood to leverage and/or participate in social media in business decision making.
The conclusion is simple: “If you’re a B2B marketer and you’re not using social technologies in your marketing, it means you’re late.”
B2B social media touchpoint examples: Different approaches, common goals.
Social media touchpoints needn’t look like your teenage daughter’s MySpace page. Nor should they – but that doesn’t mean B2B marketers can’t make us laugh.
IBM (Consulting and Products) The now-famous “Art of the Sale Series” shows the fun side of IBM in their videos, a take-off on “The Office.”
Accenture (Consulting)
Global consulting firm Accenture has entered the social media world with several employee-written blogs, including a “Consulting Analyst Video Blog” , along with other tools and channels focused on sectors, clients, prospective employees, and others.
Kelly Services takes a slightly different approach.
Although their client list is comprised of Fortune 500 companies, Kelly has focused social media efforts on improving the “product” (employees) with videos aimed at honing job interview skills by showing humorous videos of interviews going awry. The videos can be found on their website for job seekers called getajobthatdoesntsuck.com.
Now that popular social media tools Facebook and Twitter have been invaded by Baby Boomers, we can safely conclude that these sites are now “mainstream” and “safe” for even the most skeptical B2B marketers.
“Boomers are the mainstream of the country now,” says Rainie. “When you attract a mainstream audience, you’re going to attract a lot more commercial interests. Boomers validate that this is a big market, and that this is a place where commercial interests can make money.”
Bottom Line: If you’re not in, you’re already late.
No matter your industry, if you’re in B2B (or B2C or Non-Profit, or…) and you are not yet leveraging some of these tools, then you’re late. But it’s not too late.
Though wildly successful at connecting people, businesses in general are still feeling their way through the options. Even though most businesses won’t see immediate sales, the ability to drive awareness and influence your audiences is high. From micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter) to You Tube, and Facebook to LinkedIn, the range of touchpoints is broad, and the ability measure influence and activity is high.
Which leaves us with one question: What is your social media strategy?
Summary:World Wide Rave: Creating triggers that get millions of people to spread your ideas and share your stories is an exploration of the new methodology for marketing your products and services. Scott urges us to stop hyping our products and services. He suggests that we harness the viral power of the Web as a platform for creating and sharing content and solutions. Each chapter contains a succinct action item entitled “Your Challenge” – so you can start implementing the ideas right away.
You’ll love this book if: You realize that traditional marketing and advertising methods are increasingly ineffective, and you are ready to lose control, share ideas, and connect with your buyers, colleagues – whoever.
You’ll hate this book if: You are sticking with what worked decades ago: Yellow page ads, direct mail, image advertising, trade shows. You think that because you don’t use social media, your company doesn’t need to, either.
Words of Wisdom:
Think about the last few products you purchased. Did you answer a direct-mail ad? Go to a tradeshow to learn more? Turn to the Yellow Pages? As I mentioned earlier, if you’re like most people, you didn’t do any of those things – you went online. So why are we marketing in the same old ways? If we’re really honest, we must realize that buying access with expensive advertising and communicating exclusively through the media and analysts is not an effective online strategy.
Why we think this book is important: It’s a new world out there for marketers. People no longer respond (favorably) to the same old corporate messages: Authenticity and creativity are the new rules of the game. Are you up to the challenge?
You may recall that in our first post in the “Don’t be that guy” category, I called out Citrix for the overly aggressive sales experience I had with them when I signed up for a webinar.
I think it’s only fair that I follow up with a suggestion on how these first interactions might have been done differently.
Step 1: Align the first email with the first step in the sales cycle.
The fact that I was required to used the GoToWebinar product in order to attend the webinar should not have translated into the broad assumption that I have an interest in the product. The email, as you recall, began with
Thank you for your recent interest in …
and thus was geared towards a lead.
A more appropriate introduction might have been:
Thank you for signing up for (the webinar). Citrix is pleased to partner with (webinar company) to bring you this informative presentation.
Step 2: Segment responses for follow up.
The second part of the email might have contained a link:
Would you like to learn more about collaboration technology? Please take a moment to view this presentation. You are welcome to contact me directly at …
As you can see, the link to the presentation provides a data-gathering opportunity.
The recipients who click through to the presentation might indeed be interested in the product. They might receive a second email thanking them for their interest and asking them to expect a call.
A different email might be sent to those who did not click through to view the presentation:
We hope you enjoyed (the webinar). We are proud to make it possible for you to experience the best web collaboration experience ever. Should you wish to learn more about (our product), please feel free to contact me or check out this presentation.
Step 3: Don’t hand it off to sales until it’s actually a lead.
Making the effort to nurture recipients into prospects and prospects into leads increases your chances of connecting with those who are interested in your product at the right time.
This makes it possible for salespeople to manage their time more efficiently. Even though it requires significant involvement on marketing’s part to nurture those leads through the process, by the time the leads are handed to sales, the chances of leads actually closing will increase.
(In our particular example, however, the issue was compounded by the fact that the salesperson lied. My suggestion? Just don’t do it.)
I love to learn for the sake of learning. (Unless it has something to do with math.)
My favorite mode of learning is what they used to call in public schools “self-paced.” I am a frequent consumer of webinars and online courses. I’m a constant consumer of books. (Sitting in a classroom – or conference room – doesn’t work for me. I think my mom calls this “ants in the pants.”)
A couple of my favorite topics include marketing and sales. Which part? All of it. Lead generation, lead nurturing, lead conversion. Cold-calling, warm-calling, call scripts.
The funny thing is, I don’t study this stuff because of my job (although, as a marketer, it is tremendously useful). I study this stuff because it’s interesting. It’s really about human behavior. Mine and everyone else’s.
So it was in this spirit of learning that I signed up for a webinar … about webinars. Which, by the way, I thought was terrific! (In fact, I plan to use the invitation/landing page concept right away.)
When I signed up, I received an email from Citrix. What struck me immediately was the first line of the email:
Thank you for your recent interest in GoToMeeting now with GoToWebinar, the 3rd generation of web conferencing and collaboration technology.
Hmm. I’m not at all interested in GoToMeeting. I simply signed up for a webinar. I hope they leave me alone.
Email marketing is, of course, part of what we do. You probably do it, too. In fact, our email campaigns are a key part of my job. So I consider each marketing email that I receive to be a learning tool. In this case, the lesson is “Don’t assume.”
I will be calling you in the next day or two to review your needs or interest and help determine if our service is the right solution for your online meeting & collaboration needs. If you would prefer to schedule our call, please let me know when you have availability.
Oh no. They’re going to call me.
I found this email to be so pushy and assumptive that I shared it with one of my colleagues. It turned out she had received the same emails – and already received The Phone Call:”I told them we were not interested at this time,” and added, “(they) were ‘pushy’; I didn’t like it.”
Whew. I was relieved that The Phone Call was over.
Or was it?
A couple of days later, I finally received The Phone Call. I was surprised because this was the same person that spoke to my colleague – what kind of sales manager would allow salespeople to call in to the company just a couple of days after already getting a “no, thank you”?
And wait till you hear how they started the pitch:
Hi, Rhishja. I’ve been talking to other people in your company and they have expressed interest in our product.
As soon as there was a pause I said, “You spoke to Denise a couple of days ago, and she told you we’re not interested at this time. All we cared about was accessing the webinar.”
Silence.
I broke the silence by thanking them for checking in with me.
I understand that prospects need to be contacted. I understand the concept of sending marketing emails to prospects. And follow-up calls. I get that. I live that.
But there’s no excuse for lying.
Have your own “don’t be that guy” story? Share it with us!
How often have you heard the phrase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)? According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia with over 1.7 million articles, it’s “a metric that projects the value of a customer over the entire history of that customer’s relationship with a company.”
But even if you’re unfamiliar with this phrase, don’t ignore the dynamics of marketing to your base. Politicians do this especially well. But no one does it better than the TV networks.
A few years ago, ABC was in last place among the big three. But now, by giving its base what it wants, Disney’s network has runaway hits like Lost, Desperate Housewives, Dancing With The Stars, Ugly Betty and Grey’s Anatomy.
In fact, many companies totally ignore the impact that loyal customers can have, when the benefits of increasing it are so dramatic:
> A 5% increase in retention can create an 85% increase in profits;
> A 10% increase can translate to a 20% increase in sales;
> Extending customer lifecycles by three years can triple profits per
customer.
As you’ve no doubt heard, it’s difficult to improve what we cannot measure. So it’s even more difficult to accurately project how much you should spend to acquire, service and keep your customers if you actually don’t know their value.
But it’s ALWAYS far less expensive to reach out and market to your current customers than to your prospective customers. That’s why tracking your CLV will help you –– and your organization –– find, keep and profit from the right customers.
