Two pieces of news came out this month on the state of the Chief Marketing Officer. First the good news... according to Advertising Age and Spencer Stuart, CMO tenure has more than doubled from 23 months to 45 months. Now the bad news. A new Accenture study claims that 4 in 10 Chief Marketing Officers say they do not have the right people, tools, and resources to meet their marketing objectives. So, research shows that there is a strong correlation between being unprepared and keeping your job; a real turn of events for marketers that prided themselves on being prepared as they were summarily fired.
The Reality of the CMO
CMO's operate in a complex and accountable environment. Fortunately, all of this responsibility has contributed to a higher level of transparency and importance. Take Facebook as an example. The CEO can now touch the brand by visiting the Facebook page, by watching the Like counts grow and by reading posts that express the true relationship between consumers and the brand. It also demonstrates how the brand and the customer relationship are the responsibility of the entire enterprise, not just the CMO. If that isn't enough, measured media can draw a straight line between revenue and marketing driven sales contribution.
The CMO Challenge
In terms of CMO's feeling unprepared, this is a direct result of the need to improve operational effectiveness and test new marketing channels. The role of the CMO in aggregate hasn't changed much....to deliver and optimize workflows that make a measurable contribution to the business. What has changed dramatically is the number of marketing channels that require unique expertise and a technology investment, not to mention integration with existing systems. The challenge is to validate these channels within a time frame that doesn't test the patience of the Executive Team. With every new channel comes risk for the CMO due to required incremental resources on staff and technology.
Unfortunately, while most marketers see a new channel as the equivalent of giving birth to a baby that requires care and upbringing, the CFO views every channel as an adult that can be judged within the fiscal year. The result of all this is a drop of 5% in the number of CMOs that feel prepared vs. the 2011 Accenture study.
The Case for Marketing Demand Systems
Luckily, there is a solution to the CMO paradox of longevity and being unprepared. Firms like MMB Marketing Demand Systems are offering CMO's fully optimized workflows that can be immediately used to test new marketing channels at a fraction of the cost associated with building internal capabilities. Marketing channels such as social, organic search (and content marketing), paid digital media and CRM can be tested using these types of solutions on a trial basis. Results can be used to justify an in-house investment, or to continue with an outsourced solution.
This type of approach benefits the CMO in several ways including the ability to minimize the size of the internal marketing staff and technology investment while aligning marketing expenses with clear outcomes. It also protects the CMO from being associated with high internal staffing costs during times of organizational change. Answering questions and internal probes become a conversation around where investments were deployed and the associated results.
The new world of the CMO is one where every new channel is tested and optimized outside of the enterprise. Without the burden of staff and technology, the CMO can be nimble in the way they turn on and off various initiatives. Internal costs never become an issue, while external investments are completely aligned with outcomes. This approach will not only help the CMO survive, but once again become prime candidates for CEO.
According to Time Magazine students are more likely to remember where information is saved then to remember the information itself. Search is changing the nature of how we learn, how we think, and to all the organic search enthusiasts out there, how we write. Search is also a time capsule of our culture as depicted in this video on what we searched for in 2012.
It's that time of year again, where we need to think about 2013 marketing trends and the implications it has for the industry. Here are some thoughts on the year ahead.
Dish Network is a pioneer in addressable TV. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
1.Addressable Cable and Satellite Television Moves from Test to Mainstream: Addressable cable enables a marketer to target specific households with a TV commercial. Targeting is based on multiple proprietary and syndicated data sources including television viewing habits, on-line activity and overlays from shopping, demographic and behavioral data. The challenge for addressable is to demonstrate that household level targeting will justify the higher CPM's charged by local television providers combined with the cost of labor and database analysis required to execute these types of campaigns.
To date, only Dish Network, DirecTV and Verizon have offered these types of targeting capabilities. Starting early next year, Cablevision will be offering the service (3M+ households), exponentially increasing the available footprint.Expect other cable companies to follow.
The potential of the technology is to change the way marketers target. It can also make television accessible for advertisers that can only justify the expense when viewing households have a higher concentration of prospects.
Any marketer with a large television budget will be testing and rolling out addressable television technology and programs. For example, Wireless companies will be able to utilize customer databases to broadcast up-sell messages to customers and acquisition offers to prospects. Car companies such as General Motors will be able to target Ford households. Watch platform such as Visible World for the latest
I'm personally looking forward to working with MMB advertising clients and experts such as Caroline Horner on how to deliver a measurable return using this technology.
2. Plug and Play Marketing Technology: It used to be that marketers had to hire programmers to power game, social and on-line initiatives. That era is coming to a screeching halt as marketing moves from the "program it for competitive advantage" era to the "discovery era" where everything imaginable exists, it's just up to the marketer to connect idea to implementation.
Take social media as an example. In the early days of Facebook advertisers needed to both conceive of promotional ideas and then under go the complexities of implementation. Today, with platform providers such as Offerpop, best practices on Facebook are pre-defined combined with plug and play implementation technology. Common Facebook engagement techniques such as coupon distribution and "fill in the caption" contests can be implemented in minutes.
The challenge in 2013 is to work with a team that stays on top of new technologies, and then having the funds and bandwidth to act faster than the competition.
3. Marketing Systems Become Standard Operating Procedure for CMOs: Coming off of plug and play marketing technology, the next challenge for marketers is to integrate these systems into workflows that enable end-to-end execution. These work-flows need to be optimized overtime and then applied to multiple businesses. At MMB New York our goal is to develop marketing demand systems that enable clients to trial new marketing channels. A systems approach includes the required implementation and measurement technologies, combined with the know-how to execute the program and generate results.
Systems reduce risk by providing turnkey methods for trialing marketing channels. One system we offer at MMB
is a Search Engine Optimization system, where we have predetermined how
several best in class analytical, execution and measurement tools can
be used to provide better insight into client opportunity, and then
another set of systems which use a combination of trained people
assisted by technology for content creation and syndication.
4. We Learn Where to Search: Time Magazine recently reported that today, students are more likely to remember where a piece of information is stored than memorize the information itself. Search plays an obvious role in providing access to information, resulting in +9% annual growth in search activity year after year. Search becomes even more important in a world driven by single results, such the technology behind "Siri." When someone queries into their iPhone - "best restaurant in Plainview New York" the answer better be a restaurant you own. Search engines are everywhere, including search on Amazon.com and Craig's List.
English: White hat seo symbolizes good ethic techniques in search engine marketing (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The key to all of this is to continually demonstrate that you deserve to answer the consumer's question. Why should your restaurant be considered the best? Do you have the best reviews? Do you have video on You Tube that showcases a superior culinary experience? Do you have multiple friends in your Google+ circle highly recommending it?
The challenge for marketers is to determine how to best organize around search. This is harder than it sounds given that their are typically multiple constituencies within an organization battling for the same search term. Let's say you are an insurance company and need to own the phrase "health insurance." If you are organized into a small, medium and large business division, ownership of the term becomes confused since cross-organizational decisions need to be made regarding who controls the inbound traffic flow and what content will be used to demonstrate competency to the search engines. Few companies are structured to tackle these issues without some organizational pain and chaos.
Having a clear and organized system for executing SEO is now becoming normative for most marketeers. The good news is that turnkey solutions like those offered by MMB New York make it easier to ge validate search as a channel.
5. Outsourcing becomes a way of life for marketers. Lean Marketing teams replace bloated organizations: With the proliferation of marketing channels, technologies and platforms, there is a temptation by CMO's to continually add platforms and staff every time a new channel becomes available out of fear that not to do so would result in failure. The problem is that expansion ahead of ROI validation leaves behind bloated staffing levels and platforms that fail to deliver required returns.
The proliferation of social media and CRM platforms are examples of the temptation to expand. While CRM or structured communications (life-cycle emails etc.) might appear to be an obvious need, it does not apply to all organizations. For example a sales driven B to B might have difficulty proving the worth of the investment vs. the ability to hire incremental sales personnel for the same cost. In the case of CRM, a CMO is required to commit to an annual contract as well as the staff required to develop strategy, structure a program, execute creative and measure results.
Let's say for argument that the CRM program fails to deliver any return. The CMO is now responsible for incremental staff and investment. Now play this out across other perceived "must have" platforms such as Social Media management, Social Media monitoring, Organic Search, Paid Search, Content Management and Content Development. Each piece of complexity, driven by the need to balance innovation with ROI, results in a gradual increase in CMO risk that ultimately ends in staff reductions.
Instead. CMOs can and will seek to reduce the size of corporate marketing teams and the risk of platform investment in favor of outsourcing. This way costs can be aligned with the channels they support, with the only risk coming from the length of the outsourcing contract. Instead of annual contracts for CRM platforms, companies can test the ROI of these capabilities using outsourced companies. Once channels are tested and validated, a decision can be made regarding outsource vs. in-source. Even if validated, the rapid pace of change still points to the maintenance of a team of outsourced experts instead of the less efficient approach where staff is continually hired, only to watch skills fall out of sync with marketplace realities..
Anyone running the marketing group in a Fortune 500 company should be thinking of a marketing organizational design that has a staff of no more than 20 on staff instead of 200.
Visualization of all editing activity on Wikipedia)
6. Big Data Drives Us to the Marketing Dream: Marketer's access to data continues to exponentially increase in 2013. Many of the aforementioned trends such as addressable cable combined with shopper data and on-line behavioral data will provide new insights into how to target consumers. We've already seen the digital marketing world move from website level targeting to targeting actual purchasers. Who would of thought we'd be able to execute a program for a major salad dressing brand that targets only people that frequently eat salads. Now imagine doing this with targeting across television, on-line, mobile, direct, auto (yes advertising to individual cars), game platforms or wherever we can get the consumer's attention, and then taking all of this data, understanding it, only then to turn it into actionable programs.
7. New Video platforms and Multiple Screens: Anyone that works with Google Analytics must have already taken note of platforms such as XBox as a source of on-line traffic. With the proliferation of screens, and the emphasis at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show of multi-screen viewing, we can expect this added opportunity to be a part of breakout marketing programs in 2013. With the average person spending 4.4 hours a day in front of screens, the opportunity is in understanding how to structure communications which coordinate the time and the place these screens are used.
Adding to the pressure, consumers are forming expectations on how brands need to operate across screens. A new study from Google on multi-screen marketing shows how consumers expect the real world and the virtual world to be in perfect sync. The average person spends 4.4 hours a day in front of screens. They will be quick to judge brands the feel out of sync with their multi-screen expectations.
Strategy will be driven by the two modes of multi-screening used by consumers. They are sequential usage (phone to laptop) or simultaneous usage (multi-taking, or complementary usage). In sequential use, most activities start on s a smartphone and then transition to a PC. The exception is a complex task with the PC is in the lead. In erms of simultaneous use, the biggest overlap is between Smart phones and television (81%), with most people on average using three different screen combinations daily. TV commercials account for 17% of Smartphone searches and 6% of PC searches.
Last night Bing launched an ill-advised advertising campaign taking
direct aim at market leader Google search.
The campaign uses the classic “man on the street” interview style to
make the claim that more people prefer Bing than Google in a blind taste test;
I mean search competition. The campaign
broke on the MTV Music Awards, making the unoriginal approach stand out against
the outrageous musicians and style of the awards.
In the introductory television spot, which mixes bad craft with amateur hour advertising strategy, Bing makes the "startling" claim that more people prefer their search engine when compelled to use it by the man on the street announcer guy. Sorry for my rant, but It’s as if the agency mailed in the
campaign. The client is also to blame
for probably handing the agency some kind of turd in a paper bag that was
handed to a creative team tasked to molding it into a campaign that would sail
through a client meeting.
Where did Bing go wrong?
If you are the number two brand, bringing a focus to functional
superiority as a wedge against conceptual superiority is a fools errand. Let's put this another way. We all wake up with a set of problems each day. My first problem today beyond having to work on a Friday was how many Craisans is optimal for a bowl of Special K. Finding better search results is just below my fear of a meteor storm blowing up the earth this afternoon. No problem, no solution.
Bing's misplaced expectations is the equivalent of coming out with a Tablet and
expecting everyone to stop buying IPads because it has superior features (can
anyone say Google Nexus 7). It's takes atomic weaponry to move a #2 brand to #1, not the weak ad claim used by Bing. If anything the Bing campaign will solidify their role as the distant #2 as they implicitly advertise to the world that the people who would know, Bing search experts, see Google as the #1 brand against which all others are compared.
Instead of spending money on advertising, I'd suggest Bing focus their efforts on how to re-invent the category. Better yet, ask Siri, she may have some ideas.
Every year I look forward to the Affiliate Summit presentation hosted by Wil Reynold's, the iconic voice of search engine optimization and leader of Seer Interactive. Here are some highlights of his presentation at Affiliate Summit East 2012 on the recent Google Penguin and Panda changes and how to think about SEO.
How Are Companies Linking to You?
First Wil suggested doing backlink research. He recommended that marketers start by getting an overview of backlinks into a website from the Webmaster tools offered by Google and Bing (dates and links to get velocity), Majestic SEO and SEOmoz (opensitexplorer.com). Note that Bing Webmaster tools will show you links into competitive sites. When you use opensiteexplorer.com, be sure to look at all pages on the sub-domain.
Next, look at the anchor text for those links. Anchor text should primarily be the name of your business not what your business does. In his case It is un-natural to see anchor text that says "SEO Company" vs. the company name, "Seer Interactive." If you are putting anything other than your company name in SEO you are eventually going to get dinged for un-natural SEO linking.
Check the Quality of Links that Link to Your Site
To check link quality use Ahrefs.com. First enter your doman and click search. Next, look at the keywords tab and the resulting graph. It shows you how many keywords the site is ranking for. Next check the sites that are linking to you. If the sites that are linking to you are ranking for less keywords, then the links to your site will decline in value.
Unfortunately, if someone points bad links at a site, such as purchased links, this can tank a site. The best remedy is to let Google know if someone is funneling bad links to your site.
Stop Tricking Google, Do "Real Company Shit"
Wil's advice hasn't changed over the years, which is to never exploit temporary link building opporutnities. He suggested that you look at your site as you would have years ago before the internet and think like a marketer. Ask yourself, what you are doing adds value?
Wil started the hashtag #RCS or real company shit to drive the point home. He asked the audience to start doing real things. He urged everyone to consider how they make someone's life better and then to create a real business to do it. For example; answer reader questions with an intent to help.
Another tip was to act as if you would do it for free. People who do things for free do not fill pages with ads, they fill the page with the answer to the search question.
HipMonk is a great example of a site built to help people who are booking travel by providing new and clear ways to present information. The site has the same content as other sites, but they've made it easier to read. Now compare gathering the same information on Expedia. Big difference. Zappos is another good example of RCS.
Wil also showed Climbing Frames UK and the "real people" reviews. They encourage customers to take pictures of the backyard swings they sell and ask for customers to comment. A contest is to "get your purchase back" if you participate in their forum with a review. He suggested asking people on your email list to start writing for you and to stay away from writers who are not passionate about your topic.
If you compare Climbing Frames vs. the larger sites such as WalMart, they are both using drop ship to fulfill orders. The difference is Climbing Frames is focused on building a business around backyard swing sets that provides high quality content to the buyer.
He did point out that because of a company's size they are able to leverage their domain power. He also urged the audience to remember that "your competitors are not stupid forever." All this says is that you need to continually innovate and out think the larger company.
Passionate Competitors Will Do it For Free
If your passion is to make money, the problem is that there is always someone that is willing to do it for free. To compete, you need to share that passion and understand how to add value to the audience. He gave an example when working with Bank of America. Wil pointed out how search is going to get more and more personal, with Google checking your circles to influence results.
He also suggested that if you use the Google author association, make sure you do it with someone that is recognizable. You are more likely to click if you see a person that has shared something of value in the past. The author project is about sharing their influence, not authors.
The http://bit.ly/authortool will take a link and show you other places that they have authorship. Wil suggested that you take a list of people that every commented on your blog and twitter (use follower wonk), and drop all of your links on the http://bit.ly/guest-post-gdoc tool to see if they take guest posts. You can also export people that left a comment on your blog using http://bit.y/export-commenters.
Google is Changing The Appearance of Search
Wil provided examples such as Linkin Park and the Philadelphia Zoo. Google results are now eliminating listings from random websites in favor of organized results that are provided by Google. Said another way google is substituting information provided by the search engine and eliminating publishers using tools such as www.google.com/hotelfinder.
Google is Rewarding Brand Activity
Wil ended the session by recalling the days when if you had no followers and no engagement you could win by gaming SEO. This game is now over. Today, you need to have rabid fans that are engaged. He suggested that building relationships is more important than building links.
The net of his talk was that to win in today's search your you need to "build something amazing." You should seek to help people with your expertise on sites such as INBOXq.com and build your reputation.
To build followers you need to be a leader in your field. In Twitter, there is search where you can look for people that asked questions. If you want to meet a major speaker, search for their name and your city. Use the tool "If this Then That" for be alerted whenever someone you are following asks a question or seeks advice about something you know, such as a restaurant in your home town.
The bottom line is that "Google is knocking out the crap," and sites that should win, are starting to rise i the rankings. All I can say is that it's about time.
One of the themes at this years Affiliate Summit East is the role of link building in light of algorithm changes recently implemented by Google (known as Panda and Penguin). These notes are from the Link Building presentation given by Loren Baker, VP of Business Development, BlueGrass Interactive. His focus was on how to build a web presence via quality links.
Tips:
1. Do you deserve the links? If you don't, you shouldn't have them.
2. Are the correct social signals available. Is Google+ linked to your site?
3. Evaluate link targets. Old link evaluation metrics are less important. Think audience potential over domain age. If the link can't send you traffic, you probably don't want ot. Is the site a bug? Do people rely on it to get their news?
4. Look for metrics related to engagement when evaluating link targets. Check overall traffic, number of comments per post, social sharing per post and average links generated per post.
5. Link building cannot be seen as a separate strategy any longer. Links should be seen as a byproduct of creating remarkable content.
6. The best way to get your brand out in front of consumers is via a content marketing solution. Great content builds your brand and your audience. Great content drives traffic and brand exposure in tandem with high value links. Great content is highly shareable.
7. Links generated from content marketing initiatives are nearly always freely given, contextual and relevant, long lasting and diverse.
8. Content and Topic relevance is key.
9. It's all about relationships. Great content marketing relies on great exposure. The bigger the initial seed for content, the better the result. The larger and broader the reach, the better. Don't get too niche.
10. Make your content valuable. Create content in tandem with publishers. Work together and involve them as partners. Thank about the audiences of potential publishers. They may differ from your target audience. Find commonalities. Add value for publishers. Make them look good. Give them ore than they give you.
11. Embeddable infographics are highly effective as generating traffic and direct links. Find something topical such as the "content explosion" infographic used by BlueGlass. Thank every site that embeds the infographic and request attribution where none is provided.
If there was a guru of online testing it would have to be Justin Rondeau. In a whirlwind journey through the world of testing at a speed which exceeds my ability to capture all of the notes, Justin, the Chief Editor and Evangelist of WhichTestWon reviewed his innovative approaches to ad testing innovation. Here are a few quick tips from his session as Affiliate Summit East 2012.
Fun tip: When adding pictures, have people's eyes looking at the button you want them to press.
Test only 1 change at a time
Start testing programs on the pages with the most lift potential
Select a realistic confidence level such as 95% or 90% (99% not realistic)
Text version of email could win out over html. Picture downloads may block any graphic calls to action. Blackberry phones tend to pick up text. Follow mobile best practices.
Mobile optimize and keep in mind the device your audience is using.
In B to B email, a message that started with "I'm your relationship manager" did extremely well and was enticing for the user.
Be personal. Personalization test by AWeber in which personalization was used in subject line won.
If using a multi-field form, there was a 8% lift when you have an indicator on the top of the form which shows each completed step (lit step 1, 2, 3) etc. Hypothesis is that you get your time commitment right away.
All of the above doesn't begin to capture the number of tips provided. I'd suggest reviewing WhichTestWon.com. The site is filled with 200+ testing case studies and an opportunity to sign up for a free online testing newsletter that features a test and results in every issue.
Off to a great start at Affiliate Summit East 2012 with a session on mobile marketing lead generation by Alex Tsatkin, CEO MobAff LLC. Here are some of the highlights from Alex's talk:
First, 5 strategies were reviewed that lead to mobile marketing failure or success:
Outdated strategies: always think in a mobile context, not in a context that was developed using other communications channels. Use third party mobile tracking to monitor your campaigns. Often placements do not match criteria.
Evaluate Quality: approached differently such as metrics unique to mobile.
Don't just focus on feature phones: in some markets more basic phones are the primary mode of communication.
Must track mobile specific variables
Diversify sources of traffic: Test on one network, but quickly scale. There is no major player in mobile. For example AdMob is just Apps. Each network has strengths and weaknesses and vary by geography, type of traffic, availability of premium inventory. Mobile publishers are much more savy to rotate the different ad networks. Plus they always change their network affiliations making it difficult to rely on any one network as a stable source of traffic. Better approach is to scale successful programs through an increasing number of networks.
Most direct marketing offers work on mobile, the problem is scale.
Premium SMS
Lead Generation
App Downloads
Pay Per Call
Offers that you wouldn't expect work on mobile can work such as filling out long credit card applications.
Three things to think about when putting together a mobile marketing program:
Offer must appeal to 1 out of 100 people
Does the offer function properly on the phone.
5 Tricsk to Help with Mobile Testing
Block WiFi: most of the traffic that comes in will be wifi if you do not block it. Also it confuses data and doesn't provide a true read of costs.
Block App traffic: Takes more effort to make things work with apps
Track Site ID: Most networks will provide the site ID of placements, which greatly aids in tracking.
Focus on high CTR First: click through rate is everything, especially in direct response
Watch Your Redirect Speeds: on mobile, especially without WiFi it loads slower. Anything that gets in the way of load time such as images will lower response.
Once again we are about to witness a marketing disaster perpetrated by two market leaders that are letting ego get in the way of sound judgement. The laws of marketing physics describedt by Trout and Ries in the book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind are at play and like any law of physics, they cannot be broken. To quote the law, "on average, the market leader gets 2x the market share of the #2 brand, and 2x again as much as the #3 brand.
Apple's share of tablets currently stands at roughly 72.1% followed by Samsung and the Kindle Fire. Also in the hunt are the Barne's & Noble Nook and a Leveno tabet. There are too many products selling undifferentiated features that are competing for the limited attention span of the consumer. What makes this category even more competitive is the iPad's leadership in both share and perception.
The problem that Google and Microsoft face is that the value proposition of each company is irrelevant to the sale of a competitive tablet. While Apple is selling art, design, fun and education, Google's Nexus 7 is selling ? and Microsoft is selling ? Both companies have little device credibility as they hope to go head to head with Apple. Unfortunately the Nexus 7 and Microsoft tablet products are largely undifferentiated and do little to demonstrate how they can win against existing competition. Even a weak effort where each company seeks to create a new category or reinvent the existing category would be a better strategic option than what we are seeing. Instead, each is competing based on criteria established by Apple, instead of playing the games along a new set of criteria. It's the difference between the excitement of Google Goggles, a product based on Google's search heritage vs. the lack of news associated with a a tablet based on a better operating system that might steal a sliver of share from the Kindle.
Corporate ego and size doesn't win the marketing race. Better features do not win. Positioning, smart marketing and an understanding of marketing physics does. There are ways for new products to compete with leaders, but it usually involves the equivalent of throwing a hand grenade into a market or by creating an entirely new market (think Tylenol and Advil vs. Aspirin).
My advice to Google and Microsoft would be to go back to basics, figure out what you stand for with consumers, and then launch a new breed of devices that deliver on this promise (Google Goggles anyone). Delivering poorly on the promises of others is a strategy doomed to fail, no matter how large you are, or how much money you have to spend.
Whether you are a B to B or Consumer marketer, understanding how the principles of value capture marketing can be used to your advantage can be the difference between a successful program and one that fails to deliver the required ROI.
For brands, this often stops at collecting clicks, views, impressions or shares. While these metrics have some value, they will constantly be challenged by those managers that will only buy into hard metrics such as revenue. The good news is that most marketing programs offer many opportunites to capture value.
For example, when placing a video on YouTube, why not end the video with some type of incentive that will encourage the viewer to provide some identifiable information such as an email address. Why not go even further and offer a coupon that can measure purchase, then a reward for providing referrals, or anything else that provides a clear path for the consumer or prospect. In the case of B to B, a simple white paper is all it takes to move someone from anonymity to known.
With each email collected, a brand is obtaining the name of a potential customer that at minimum showed interest in a particular product or service. Now let's say you collect 100,000 or 1,000,000 of these names. Would you rather have 1,000,000 "Likes" or 1,000,000 names.
Even with "Likes" why not market to the "Likes" so that you can attach real value to each person that has expressed int
erest in the brand. As Gina Sverdlov notes in the Forrester research blog, their "Facebook Factor" research shows that individuals that "Like" a brand are significantly more likely to purchase. Now what if these "Likes" are incented to download a coupon, or take some other action that identifies them as brand interested. Any incentive such as loyalty points, coupons, books, virtual currently etc. can work to engage with this self selected audience to yield greater value for the brand.
Determining how to capture and increase the yield from value captured from a succession of customer interactions is sure to increase the batting average of any marketer. Value capture marketing promises to transform programs that traditionally rely on soft metrics such as Likes and Views to one that delivers real measurable value to marketers.
Derek Sivers: Anything You Want Great 77 page read on the philosophy that drives CD Baby's success. Well written, honest and great reminder of how to build a great company. Perfect business book for a plane ride. (*****)
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Accenture (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
are at play and like any law of physics, they cannot be broken. To quote the law, "on average, the market leader gets 2x the market share of the #2 brand, and 2x again as much as the #3 brand.
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