Multichannel Marketing - 2 years later: Digital is at a crossroads now (part 1/3)

In the two years since publishing the Multichannel Metrics book, the face of marketing has changed drastically.

We are entering a critical crossroads in 2010.

By 2013, will we look back and find that this was the year when marketers from online and other marketing teams first realized how similar their goals have become and took steps towards integration across camps?

Or will we look back and find that the camps remained ignorant of each other and instead set in stone silo’d technologies making integration more difficult than ever? 

 

What do you mean, web and direct marketers’ goals are aligned now?

Marketers have had no choice.

Greatness has been thrust upon them!

Direct marketers

  1. Have seen marketing dollars beginning to shift from offline to online
  2. Finally see clearly that a large portion of interactions with their customers has moved online. For example, according to anecdotal feedback from several older European banks, 25% to 50% of their clients use online banking now. Some financial institutes acquire the majority, if not all, customers online.

Online marketers

  1. Have had to abandon their silo’d, website-centric thinking because their websites are now only one component of their total web presence. Other presences include social media, mobile sites, behaviorally targeted ads and personalized emails.
  2. They may continue to treat the offline as a step child for another couple years. Yet, they are already adopting multi-online-channel marketing practices for the purpose of integrating all these web presences.
  3. The latter has required them to move from their traditional focus on aggregate level metrics and dashboards to looking at data about individuals across website, mobile, social, and advertising. This experience with individual level data will also make it easier for them to integrate their customers’ offline interactions down the road.

As a result, both online and direct marketers are now pursuing multi-channel data integration at the level of individual prospects and customers. Both camps do this for the purposes of

  1. behavioral targeting,
  2. better understanding of marketing ROI.

 

The technology gap is closing

While all vendors talked the talk for 360 degree views, the reality was different. Web analytics data was far removed from a direct marketers’ access.

  • After all, the data are owned by the web team who couldn’t care less about individual level data at that time.
  • The data are also hosted remotely at SaaS based web analytics vendors that prioritized reporting and good looking charts over granular data. As a result, data feeds (while available) would come with no SLAs. A feed might or might not arrive at the agreed time of night. That made it too unreliable for driving interactive (let alone real time) marketing programs.

Meanwhile, web marketers could integrate analytics based targeting into email marketing only by bridging the gap between several vendors and paying for integration services.

These technology gaps are now increasingly closing.

  • Omniture is positioning its online marketing suite along with integrations with ESP partners through its Genesis program.
  • Unica is positioning both
    • Its eMessage and Interact products for email and web personalization integrated with Unica’s web analytics and campaign management products for enterprise clients
    • Its recently launched Interactive Marketing OnDemand product where SaaS based customers use web analytics, email, and web personalization within a single application and UI.

 

The crossroads

This alignment of methods, goals, and technology represents our arrival at a crossroads.

But will we leave these crossroads into an integrated future or will we set in stone two silo’d multichannel worlds between online and direct marketing teams?

That is the big question.

—

In part 2 we will look at direct marketers vs. digital. Then in part 3 we will review where multichannel web marketing stands in 2010.

Tags: Business Metrics, Direct Marketing, Multichannel Marketing Measurement, Multichannel marketing metrics, Web Analytics, multichannel marketing by Akin
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Stop acting like a loner, ‘cause web marketing optimization is a team sport!

I have to say, I am growing increasingly annoyed with the silo’d nature of the discussion that seems to still be dominating our web analytics industry.

We have been so silo’d that, for example, even something as adjacent to web analytics as audience measurement and its vendors (i.e. the comScore, Hitwise, Compete of the world) seem to appear more like second class citizens in our discussions. Meanwhile, 90% of the chatter among web analytics vendors, consultants, and bloggers seems to focus only on core web analytics topics and vendors.

A symptom that should give us pause is that most of our guru authors and bloggers - who are such rock stars to us web analytics people - are utterly unknown outside our little niche. Forget offline marketers, not even other online marketers know them!

Surely that isn’t because “the others” are all stupid and don’t understand performance optimization.

Honestly, I don’t know exactly why we seem to be such a silo’d breed. It is probably just a function of specialization in the workplace. Web analysts handle web analytics tools, multivariate testing, voice of customer, and maybe participate in behavioral targeting. But

  • Who owns audience measurement / competitive intelligence? Probably a shared function with marketing/PR?
  • Who owns social media monitoring? More often the “social media manager” or PR rather than the web analyst?
  • Who owns search optimization tools? SEO and PPC teams, of course. (And they too can be separated from each other in larger organizations)
  • Who owns email marketing? The direct or customer marketing functions.
  • Who owns ad servers and behavioral targeting networks? The online marketing or media team
  • Who owns site performance? IT
  • Who owns the replay stuff? Web developers?

If there is any way out of this strange situation it is probably to be found in embracing the different aspects of web marketing in a more balanced fashion instead of losing ourselves in increasingly nuanced web analytics details that seem esoteric and boring to people outside our niche.

Might we find bigger gains in 2010 by looking more for a breadth-first approach vs. continuing our deep dive?

Take search marketing as an example

The diagram below shows the search marketing funnel starting from potential visitors, i.e. users of the search engines (or their content networks). The search marketer aims to acquire them on site and then lure them deeper into the funnel to engage, persuade, and convert.

semfunnel1

The diagram then lists the different categories of marketing tactics and technologies that are involved in moving prospects through the funnel. Let’s take a deeper look at each category.

1. Audience measurement and influence

This category includes more items than one might think at first glance, namely the following.

Tool Example of how it helps with search marketing
Keyword research tools Which keywords are being used in general?
Audience measurement or competitive intelligence tools Which keywords work for your competitors and what is your share of those keywords
Social media monitoring tools Which keywords are being used by your audience? If your search clicks are up/down is that because there is a spike of positive/negative buzz about you?
Advertising, online and offline With improved awareness and perception of your brand, your audience is more likely to click on your search listings

 

2. Search marketing

This category includes the most obvious items associated with search marketing optimization:

Tool Example of how it helps with search marketing
Search bid management tools or agencies Reduce manual efforts and increase returns from your paid search budget
SEO tools or agencies Help monitor your success vs. competition for ranking better on critical keywords

 

3. Landing page management, and 4. site management

These categories include similar items that I shall list together here. But it makes sense to keep them as two categories because the vendors/tools for landing page management are sometimes not the same ones as those used for managing content on the rest of the site.

Tool Example of how it helps with search marketing
(Landing) page design and deployment To make split testing of landing pages for reducing bounce rates feasible it needs to be easy to create and deploy alternative test candidates
Multivariate testing Multivariate testing can evaluate even more permutations of test elements on a single page.
Voice of customer The numbers don’t tell the whole story of why visitors searching for XYZ do or don’t buy. So you need to ask them.
Personalization or behavioral targeting Going beyond testing, dynamic content that is targeted to individuals based on their past and ral time behavior has the promise of increasing conversion rates further
Lead management For businesses where the sales cycle continues offline it helps for improving offline conversion rates to tap into the prospects web behavior. For example the salesforce automation system can be updated with past and ongoing web searches that the prospect does.

 

Not to even mention product recommendations, product reviews, etc.

Is that all?

No, there is much more that is critical. Search visitors will often not convert on their first visit. So re-marketing is essential.

semfunnel2

More importantly, maybe, the customer life cycle doesn’t end with the first purchase. That is in fact when the work of the customer marketer only begins and the life cycle continues with on-boarding, growing lifetime value, attrition risk detection, and win back. Some additional tactics and technologies that are involved on the online channels include the following:

5. Interactive Marketing

Tool Example of how it helps with search marketing
Email marketing The lead is nurtured with content that keeps their interest alive and brings them back to the site until they convert (again).
Re-marketing ad networks The lead is reached on other (publishers’) sites with ad banners that are relevant to their past searches
Interactive Marketing (or next-generation campaign management or event-triggered marketing) By building all interactions on each individuals’ past and current behavior on the web channel (and beyond), the marketer aims to keep their messages (both timing and content) aligned with the individuals’ interests.

 

Do we really need all of that … stuff … to optimize search marketing?

If your goal is merely to improve search marketing, e.g. PPC, you need nothing more than a Google AdWords account while paying attention to the built-in couple of metrics. But if you are after optimization, then the above are truly all part of the funnel or chain. Each of these pieces are truly needed and will pay for themselves.

And we are supposed to integrate that with web analytics?

As a supporting function and nerve center, web analytics has the potential to glue most of these elements together. When done right this could make your web analytics people some of the best known employees across all of these teams.

But you would be forgiven if you are thinking that integrating all of these functions with web analytics could be too big of an effort and cost. That is precisely why vendors such as Omniture and Unica are building out online marketing suites.

Today, not all of the above are available (and integrated) within one vendor’s suite. But that day will come because there is a real need by marketers.

Tags: Multichannel Marketing Measurement, Multichannel marketing metrics, Search marketing optimization, Web Analytics by Akin
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Announcing: Free Optimization Wizard for Organic Search (SEO)

“The best things in life are free”, they say, and organic search traffic might seem free at first glance.

But in truth, as you will know, organic search isn’t free at all. It requires hard SEO work upfront before you can rank well for highly coveted keywords.

This wizard is for any marketer looking to get more business results (traffic + outcomes) from organic search (and who doesn’t?).

It walks the analyst through a series of steps for increasing results, e.g. by identifying the keywords to prioritize for SEO, doing the on-site and off-site SEO, and optimizing your web marketing for organic search visitors.
Web Analytics Question Support System for SEO

Click here to start the SEO wizard

Bird's eye view of this SEO wizard
Click here for a bird’s eye view, i.e. summary flow chart

This wizard is the third example of an expert system that I got a chance to work on now. The wizards aim to help web analysts (and in this case also search engine marketers) with their complex work. Earlier releases were the wizards for PPC optimization and troubleshooting a drop in website conversions.

Couple comments and observations:

  • As always I would like to point out that these wizards can neither replace the need for experienced SEMs nor web analysts. The goal of the wizards is just to make their work more systematic.
  • A good example of why this is true may be the following. Namely, for any specific website, an experienced SEO can probably point out the 20% of the steps in this wizard that will help achieve 80% of the results. In contrast, in the wizard all recommendations seem to be of equal priority / importance. That is a bit of a flaw with this SEO and also the PPC wizard, I have to concede.

As I am not an SEM myself (neither SEO nor PPC), this wizard will only become truly exciting with the help of user comments that can be added to any step of the wizard.

Look forward to hearing what people think and hope that this proves helpful.

Tags: Multichannel Marketing Measurement, Multichannel marketing metrics, Search marketing optimization, Web Analytics by Akin
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This Thursday: Web Analytics for Driving Your Entire Business (not just your Website)

This Thursday, Angie Brown from Elsevier is presenting live in a webinar within the Web Analytics Association’s webcast series. She is going to share some very clever examples of her web analytics work at the publishing giant.

I had the chance to listen to Angie’s presentation live at Unica’s annual customer conference earlier this year in Paris. Her anecdotes about using web analytics to inform offline and other strategies showcase that the insights go much further than just to improve the website or advertising.

As the webcast is sponsored by Unica, I will get to follow Angie’s featured presentation with a few words on Unica’s view of next-generation use of analytics.

Register here to attend live on Thursday at noon US ET or to receive the recording link after the live event.

Tags: Multichannel Marketing Measurement, Multichannel marketing metrics, Web Analytics by Akin
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Social Media Metrics to Fit Your (Secret) Business Goals

Social media are challenging and humbling. The discussion of how marketers should use them is often clouded by vague recommendations, niche anecdotes, and buzzword mania.

The confusion has also impacted marketing analysts. More than ever they are facing questions of what can be measured and how. But very often there is neither a clear business goal nor action plan behind the question.

In order to select meaningful analytics for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs and videos, the key (as always) is to start with the business goals that your company is pursuing with each social media marketing effort.

But, as Jim Novo pointed out months ago, your team must come clean on what these business goals really are.

  • For example, just because you are blasting out messages on Twitter doesn’t mean that you are really doing viral or social marketing. You are just running a reach and direct response campaign much like any other form of spam or PR.
  • In that case you should also measure success with very similar metrics to those used for spam and PR, as Jim pointed out.

While there are wonderful lists of available metrics for social media overall, I didn’t come across a list yet that is grouped by the various business goals companies may be pursuing with their social media campaigns.

So, therefore, here is the grouped list that I would like to encourage.

Business Goal Description Typical Key Metrics
Brand advertising Even though the biggest opportunity with social media is thought to be in facilitating conversations, it is obvious that many marketers are still approaching social media in a way that is more similar to traditional advertising or PR. Companies doing this should then look at typical advertising metrics to measure and improve success

  • Reach and frequency, e.g. unique users and views of your Facebook application or Twitter followers
  • Engagement, e.g. number of comments or links on a post.
  • Share of voice
  • Quality of the audience that you are reaching, e.g. demographic fit
Direct response advertising Still with traditional marketing methods in mind, marketers often post tweets or blog articles with the goal of triggering a direct response, e.g. a registration to an event or an alert to a current promotion

  • Click-throughs
  • View-throughs
  • Outcomes, e.g. conversions, revenues, ROI.
Viral marketing The opportunity to increase the reach and effectiveness of your marketing messages through viral distribution represents both the most exciting and also the most challenging aspect of social media. The networked nature of social media makes them ideally suited for viral multiplication effects. Companies that know how to facilitate conversations and how to build their brands through the voices of their customers stand to build the best brands.

  • “Virality”, e.g. re-tweets on Twitter, application invitations on Facebook, or pick-up of your marketing messages across the blogosphere
  • Social graph of visitors reached by your effort, e.g. the number of their friend connections
  • Sentiment
  • Context of the conversations
Focus group It is often said that: “On traditional media you can shout but you cannot listen. On social media you cannot shout but you can listen.” Marketers that take this idea to heart may think of social media as a giant focus group that provides a window into the hearts of the market place and customers.

  • Volume of chatter on various topics, marketing messages, ad campaigns, or competitors that relate to the company’s business
  • Sentiment
  • Context of the conversations
Customer service Some social media channels, especially Twitter or blogs, provide the opportunity to respond or comment directly to the individuals that posted an article. This opens up the opportunity to encourage and thank fans while reaching out to help customers that are in need of help or feel disgruntled.

  • Customer cases handled
  • Improvement in customer satisfaction or net promoter score
Social CRM The opportunity to make social marketing personal extends beyond manual customer services. Namely, there is an opportunity for interactive marketing. Social media are part of the interactions and experiences that individuals have with your brand. It is commonly accepted that marketers should listen to their clients so that they can be relevant in their communications instead of interrupting with untargeted messages. As such, individuals’ interactions with your brand on social media represent another great channel for listening to individual customers and taking their interests into account.

  • Topical keywords that relate to an identified individual’s posts on Twitter, blogs, etc.
  • Topical keywords that relate to the posts with hyperlinks to your website from which an individual has clicked through to your site
  • RFR (Recency, Frequency, Reach, i.e. social graph.)

The overview reveals that social media measurement require combining data from multiple sources:

  1. Typical web analytics metrics such as unique visitors or views, click-throughs, and outcomes such as conversions, revenues, profits.
  2. Data about social media participants such as their demographic profile or number of friend/follower connections. This information would typically be available from the APIs of social media platforms or from social media monitoring solutions
  3. Social media monitoring trends such as the volume of chatter around specified topical keywords as well as sentiment

If you are a Unica customer, ask your account manager for our technical paper on how to measure metrics such as the above using Unica NetInsight and social media monitoring solutions.

Tags: Multichannel Marketing Measurement, Multichannel marketing metrics, Social media metrics, Web Analytics by Akin
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