Designdamage Blog

It’s no surprise that the increasingly social web have enabled customers to be heard while helping to improve the very products and services they’ve purchased. As millions of people continue to search online for the product they need and the service they want, do you know how the recession has impacted your customer’s value perception?  How are you going to improve the customer experience to optimize your products and services?

Your customer may have already shifted their spending in favor of private label brands over name brands or reduce the quantity or frequency of buying altogether.  Perhaps the freemium business model has become the new standard to get your customer to try your product. Whichever way you look at it, consumer’s perceptions of an interaction are influenced heavily from their purchasing experience, by how they research to who they trust.

To understand and improve customer experience, companies should first research their customer’s natural behaviors, and then seek opportunities to influence those behaviors through targeted strategies and niche offers.

According to a recent Nielsen analysis revealed generationally shopping habits that reflect diverse lifestyle preferences and economic habits.

Naturally, Boomers have the highest earning of any group, followed by Gen X, then Millennials and finally Greatest Gen.  What’s interesting is that according to the study, “Millennial and Gen X shoppers favor mass supercenters and mass merchandisers over more traditional formats like grocery or drug stores which remain a draw for the Greatest Generation and Boomers … Millennials today represent the largest population segment—over 76 million strong—just slightly larger in number than the Boomer segment. The two groups together represent half of the U.S. population.”

From these data, marketers should apply behavioral economics to further understand the minds of their customers.  Once you understand the patterns contributing to buy and not buy, you can craft highly targeted campaigns and behavioral tracking techniques to connect with customers. Couple that with direct customer research such as surveys or focus groups, you will end up with a customer segmentation metrics that can help you define how changes of an offer can influence the way people react to it.

However, it’s critical that a more systematic approach to behavior targeting is used when defining your customers.  This will help to make irrationality more predictable in an attempt to understand the behavioral economics of your customers.

Here are some questions you should consider to help you improve customer interaction:

• Where does your customer go when searching for your products and services? Online communities, offline advertising, word-of-mouth, search engine, blogs etc.
• How and where did they obtain the knowledge necessary to make a purchase?  Do they know how to find what they need?
• When and how do customers gain access to your products and services?
• What kind of lifestyle and overall financial situation are they in?
• What does value mean to them? Where is the line drawn between getting a bargain vs being cheap?
• Who and what influence their buying decision? And why?
• What conversations are generated around the ‘benefits’ of your product and services?
• What are some of the potential barrier to purchase? Lack of knowledge, confusion in the market, price points, product features etc.
• Who are your competitors and how are they perceived in the customer’s eyes? What other options do they have if they don’t buy from you or your competitors?
• In your vertical, does you customer look at brands first or price first? Is the service or support more important than the product itself?

You may consider paying for research from companies such as ComScore, Ipsos, Harris Interactive, TNS Group or Hitwise just to name a few. If you’re not ready to pay for research, you can always conduct direct customer survey yourself or simply start gathering free data from sites like Consumer Reports, MarketingCharts, Pew Research Center or eMarkter on a regular basis.

Here is an example from the Compete Online Shopper Intelligence study that provides a high-level overview into the complete online shopping experience.

Often times, paid research firms will provide complete free report as well, you just have to keep an eye on it or subscribe to their newsletter.  Here is one focusing on eCommerce from ComScore: State of US Online Retail Economy in Q3 09

State of US Online Retail Economy in Q3 09 –

You can also search on sites like Docstoc, Scribd or SlideShare to find more supporting data.  Keep in mind most of the data on those sites may be dated but you can still use them to investigate current trends or form your own insights.

The take away: Because of the many factors contributing to consumer’s buying pattern and media habits; there is no silver bullet to improve customer experience. Instead, the goal is to minimize wasteful spending while learning to invest in the drivers of customer satisfaction from desirable customer interaction. Do you know what makes your customer tick?

I received some feedback and questions on Augmented Reality (AR) after my last post and thought to provide some additional inspiring ideas with regards to where AR is heading. The best example can be seen from Yelp’s Monocle app that allows users to see location-based reviews from their iPhone screens.

The result is crowd sourced commerce with social proof data to enhance purchasing decisions on the spot. It’s an integration of social media with physical space to bring relevant information based of our physical behaviors such as the places we’ve visit or the reviews we’ve posted online.

This new technology integrates real-time social networks, location-based tracking, and the semantic web to aggregate qualitative data. Information you want will run towards you instead of the other way around, fully customized to your personal taste based on your friends, location, and how you search online. The cultural ramifications represents a step forward towards artificial intelligence.

As for marketers, it’s important to monitor how consumers and businesses interact with AR technology that creates deeper and more meaningful engagements which may lead to new marketing opportunities. However, everything does hinges on privacy policy so it’ll be highly regulated on what information can be abstracted.

The fact is, consumers are more incline to take action if the ads are what they want to see from providing coupons to what’s on sale at the moment on location. From a brand’s perspective, it helps to improve data quality to deliver impactful, targeted integrated marketing campaigns enabling a dynamic social commercial connection through multiple touchpoints. It improves the branded experience.

If you haven’t look into AR, I suggest you to checkout some of the examples below.

Here is a demo at TED2010, where Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos new augmented-reality mapping technology from Microsoft.  This one shows you how far technology can go, very inspiring.

As augmented reality applications get better, and people have the ability to aim their camera at any real world object and get real-time information on the fly, it’ll be interesting how consumers will take interest in utilizing this feature. Here is an alternative way to improve online shopping experience using AR.

Augmented reality on print is probably the simplest to start, the idea is to integrate the AR with your offline marketing activities as part of the sequential advertising to tell your story like the examples I’ve provided in the last post. For brand experience, a great example is the Adidas Augmented Reality Sneaker Experience.

I think it’s worth reviewing the cost of integrating such concept on a smaller scale just to keep an eye on it. Ultimately it’s another touchpoint marketers can use as part of an advertising campaign but also an added element in abstracting ROI. I welcome any thoughts on this, what do you think?

If you’ve been keeping up with the current marketing trends, you should be in the process of exploring how to utilize social media to benefit your business. By now, most of the “how to use” social media content is everywhere especially from reputation resources such as Mashable, Social Media Examiner or Twitip to name a few.

While most large organizations such as Fortune 500 companies are slow in adopting social media, many have started pilot programs to experiment with this new tool.  Brands such as Dell, Coke Cola, Ford, Starbucks, Zappos, Best Buy and even sports league like NBA and NFL have found rapid growth by allowing fans to engage directly with athletes.

Share content that people find useful and want to share with others is the new mantra for new media marketing.  Particularly small businesses have found social media as a way to demonstrate leadership and command influence in niche communities.

The latest data from the Small Business Success Index shows that “Social media adoption by small businesses doubled from 12% in 2008 to 24% in 2009. The biggest expectation small business owners have from social media is expanding external marketing and engagement, including identifying and attracting new customers, building brand awareness and staying engaged with customers.”

The small and medium size businesses (SMBs) get it.  They are using this recession as an opportunity to connect and expand their sphere of influence.  While social media is still in its early phase, the business benefits of social networks are very real. Every small business is looking to integrate “social” into their eCommerce sites, direct mail campaigns, webinars, blogs and SEO tactics hoping to build top-of-mind brand awareness.

Certainly you’ve heard that it’s about conversation, customer engagement and providing value.  However; it’s also quickly becoming a spam destination and experienced users have started to be very selective on who to connect and how to communicate. Sure, you can learn all the tricks and tactics in getting followers on Twitter, ramp up fans from Facebook and connects with hundreds of professionals through Linkedin but the real engagement is when you involve the entire community to take action and interact with your brand.

Understand Social Media Users

Social media is about conversations. It is important to understand why and what kind of conversation users are more incline to engage themselves in.  Accordingly to the latest survey of social media users conducted by Crowd Science, “Users want to be heard. Overall, 45% reported liking when others notice them—leading some to stretch the truth or reveal too much personal information… But 36% believed others are simply interested in what they have to say. That shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to marketers, who know many users will tell all their contacts about good (and bad) experiences with products and services.”

Detailed Study Results

These new social customers will look up Yelp for reviews and tweet customer service for support.  It all boils down to the fact that every single customer from B2B to B2C has increased their influence throughout the buying process, gaining control of your brand’s perceived value, commanding more attention to satisfy their needs.

Lior Arussy wrote an excellent article in CRM magazine describes exactly that: “There’s a significant gap between the transaction as perceived by the employee and the outcome value as perceived by the customer. In short, what you sell is not what they buy.”

The truth is, even if you have the most market share in your industry it doesn’t translate to loyalty, and loyalty generates word-of-mouth.  This is the reason why customers today are able to demand more for less, a loyal customer is worth more than a passive one and brands are fighting to gain trust.  With the space getting crowded, consumers are already flooded with choices not to mention most don’t have the desire to spend in the first place.

In an effort to drive business success, companies must become more customer-centric by focusing on the needs of each individual customer to earn their trust and meet their needs. More social means more conversations and when you add in the increasingly mobile factor, you have a whole new dynamic to reposition your brand to deliver a differentiated value proposition.

Here are 5 quick tips to help you address the increasingly social and mobile customer needs:

1. Start with local – Just because the internet can reach across the world doesn’t mean you need to do an all out global campaign. Often you will find hyperlocal campaigns to be more cost-effective and can benefit from hybrid campaign where you combine online with offline promotions.  Find mobile advertising vendors that can help you target your local customers to drive traffic to your local stores or promote an event.

2. Provide free resources – With the emerging trend of the Freemium business model, free is the new standard.  In fact, it gives your prospects a reason to give you the time of the day so you have an opportunity to earn their trust.  Establish yourself as a resource by sharing your knowledge. Add value to the conversation by offering your thoughts and commenting on blog posts that your audience read, tweet resourceful information from your Twitter account, or by answering a question on LinkedIn Answers. Free resource such as buying guide, e-books, product recommendations from third parties or even free trials on your product are great ways to nurture leads with drip marketing campaigns.

According to the recently released ChoiceStream 2009 Personalization Survey, “65% of m-commerce shoppers indicate that they would buy more products from their mobile devices if it were easier to find products on them from trusted retailers.”

3. Mark it easy to pass along – A simple word-of-mouth tactics that’s often overlooked as companies look to pack in all the features and benefits of their products and solutions on their brochures and websites.  Go with something that’s easy to pass along without making it difficult for your customers to explain to their social network.  Just like Twitter with 140 character limitations, mobile devices have limited viewing real estate so make sure your messages are simple and to the point.  Provide a link to your content if you have more content to disclose, but make sure the link is short by using a URL shortener.

4. Use location based advertising (LBA) – Since people almost always have their mobile phone with them, LBA provides highly targeted reach. And because customers are in control on how they receive ads on their mobile devices, customers receive more personalized, relevant information in real-time resulting in greater customer satisfaction to help you build brand awareness, create loyalty, and drive purchase decision. Keep in mind that successful LBA is a permission based so establishing trust will be important and a privacy policy must be in place.

5. Tell a story, create passion – Reporters loves a great story because they know readers love them too.  Often times a great story can get viral because well, it’s a great story!  The increasingly social web has vastly increased the fragmentation of media. Leverage sequential advertising to tell a story and lead your prospects down a path of related messages with continuity of the call-to-action. Each engagement touch point should evoke a compelling response with fresh information and unique impression.

Don’t forget to keep any eye on the emerging trend of Augmented Reality on the social web and on mobile platforms:

Samsung

Home Depot

Esquire Magazine

The Take away: The real challenge for company embracing social media is finding the sweet spot that fits their business needs without draining their resources.  The key to success is to understand and measure the direct business impact of social media campaigns and identify the gaps between the customer experience and expectations as we continue to become more social and mobile.  Ask yourself, what do you want to achieve with social media?  Where do you see your brand go in the next 18 months?

What do you think? Are you looking to do any mobile marketing in 2010? I’d love to hear what you’re doing to engage social and mobile customers.

UPDATE 1 (2/24/2010)

Business Insider just published an new research from the Federal Communications Commission indicating that 86% of American adults now own cellphones.

Detail FCC Broadband Adoption Study 2010 below:

FCCSurvey –

In today’s fragmented media world where we all have some attention deficit in our busy lives, there are simply too many sources of information thus finding a filter that we trust is extremely important. Most people tend to prefer value, look for key opinion leaders and trust one-on-one communication sources.

Accordingly to a recent “Purchaser Influence Survey” by EXPO provided to eMarketer, over 92% of US mom internet users trust peer review more than manufacturer’s brand information.  This data should not be a surprise because if you want recommendations for a restaurant or suggestions on buying a new cell phone, you’re pretty much going to first ask your friends.  If you’re really serious about the purchase, you will do your “homework” first by reading bunch of online reviews from Yelp to Amazon before accessing your trusted sources.

Thanks to the increasingly social web, everyone can have a voice in their sphere of influence.  As a result word-of-mouth has become the ultimate marketing arsenal for marketers to tap into their loyal customers and advocates to help spread their marketing messages through what it’s called earned media.

Earned Media vs Paid Media

As opposed to paid media where publicity are gained through advertising, earned media usually are from real people, not marketers, which explains why consumers tend to trust them more.  It’s indicative from the survey conducted by Synovate for word-of-mouth ad network PostRelease, over 50% of the word-of-mouth activity was to help a friend or family member with a purchase decision, as well as sharing information they found on the web offline.

While these finding are insightful, it’s simply a confirmation that earned media is what’s working and will continue to lead the way as we crawl out of this recession.  Obviously, there are other factors that contributes to the buying decision that aligns with the “four Ps of marketing” (price, product, promotion and placement), but there is a definite shift in the perception of value that builds on trust.

So how what does trust mean to brands today? According to the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer from PR firm Edelman, transparent and honest practices and trustworthiness are extremely important while financial return have fallen below those factors.

One thing I must point out is that these data can be misleading because financial returns actually increased but have fallen behind other factors so there is merely a shift in value perception.

We’ve gone from push advertising to social influence marketing.  Online users have learned to focus on content and ignore online banners (banner blindness) simply because display focus too much on getting attention and have failed to deliver.  The concept of getting attention as a way to create brand awareness is being seen as noise which leads to resistance. People have caught on to the fact that more marketers are increasingly behind influential bloggers, social media rock stars and even popular portals by endorsing their content diluting the credibility of peer-to-peer networks.

Long Tail of Trust

In the ear of new media, brands have quickly learned social marketing is build on the idea that people trust their friends more than they trust authorities, but on the other hand, consumers also start to question the intend and authenticity of their social networks.

As I’ve mentioned previous in “7 Keys to Creating Social Media Strategy for Your Brand”, social proof plays a key factor as a weapon of influence, the challenge for marketers is to earn trust as skepticism remains about how long trust will last.  When it comes to trust and brand loyalty there is no silver bullet, but knowing what value proposition to focus on and how to make adjustments can help marketers to acquire high level of trust over time.

If you truly want to earn the trust of your audience, don’t get sucked into the numbers game. How many Twitter followers, Facebook fans or Linkedin connections you have on is far less important than how you interact with them. Instead of concentrating on how many social network participants you have, try instead to gauge success on how engage they are with your brand.

The take away: When it comes to trust, it pays to earn it over time via high targeted more personalized channel that drives engagement and loyalty.  Mass media may reach a wider audience faster but the conversion rate is low and the experience becomes de-personalize.  There is still a place for mass media, but there is growing concerns over the value and ROI in the long run.

Moving forward companies should focus on shifting towards a customer centric strategy that retains long term customer loyalty as a sustainable competitive advantage. Unless your brand connects with the customer, your chance of earning trust will be slim.  The role of marketing is only going to become even more important and integrated closely with customer interactions.

Get back to the basics in the context of customer feedback.  It should be more about starting the conversation to understand the customer’s point of view in an holistic effort to co-create value that defines your brand strategy.

We’re almost midway through Q1 of 2010, if your business is still going through a tough time, you’re not alone.  Perhaps it’s time to review your cost cutting measures or reexamine your value proposition to your customers.

McKinsey Quarterly recently published “The downturn’s new rules for marketers,” which suggests new ways to look at marketing in this post-recession era. Here are some key points from the article:

- To weather the storm, it will be necessary to identify anew who and where the profitable customers are and to prioritize the most effective marketing and sales vehicles for reaching them.

- The old tactic of focusing on historically profitable regions and customer groups will miss the mark. Instead, marketing and sales executives must reprioritize geographic markets and customer segments at every shift of economic fortune.

- Business-to-business (B2B) companies must go a step further. A fresh look at segments isn’t enough; instead, such companies must reexamine their opportunities and risks on a customer-by-customer basis.

- No matter how a company arrives at its quality assessment, the real power comes from combining that analysis with data on the reach and cost of an advertising vehicle. This combination of reach, cost, and quality helps marketers compare the impact of different vehicles on an “apples to apples” basis—the key to effective prioritzation.

- Companies that follow the playbook from past recessions will probably chase markets and segments made less attractive by the present downturn and focus too many resources on traditional marketing vehicles and frontline salespeople. To avoid these costly mistakes, marketing and sales executives must dynamically reassess their geographic, customer, advertising, and sales force priorities, with constant attention to the ever-shifting economics of this downturn.

The take away: It’s time to check under the hood of your marketing vehicles.  Not just from a marketing perspective but from a brand’s perspective to focus on customer-centric strategies in order to improve the overall brand value.  What’s your value to your customers? Can you differentiate? How do you stay relevant?  How will your reprioritize your business opportunities?  Marketing is no longer owned by the marketing department only, consider a more fluid approach in coming up with your new marketing playbook.  We must adopt a marketing strategies that mimic the lives of our consumers and how they choose to interact with brands.

As we progress into 2010, the rapid growth of social media has allowed more access to information, consumers, communities, and experiences.  This new medium has enabled a new way to communicate and share, from B2C to B2B marketers are all trying to figure out an edge.  Many brands start to focus on the hybrid approach which I believe will be the next phase of digital and web marketing.  The question is what role will it play in the marketing arsenal?

Here are 3 steps to consider when integrating social media to your marketing practices:

Brand Strategy Reassessment

Understand the changing habits of your customers should be the focus of your brand.  Use the 80/20 rule to segment your customers and identify the difference between your old customers and new customers.  The recession has permanently altered the way people think of value and the concept of trust.

According to Decitica’s new study, “Marketing to the Post-Recession Consumers,”

1. The effects of the Great Recession on consumer behavior are so profound that many of the assumptions underpinning consumer segmentation are no longer valid; and
2. Marketing strategies that do not fully recognize the diversity of consumers’ recession experiences won’t have the desired potency in the post-recession world.

Business owners should reassess existing brand strategy to gauge the shift in their industry ecosystem.  Although the above report focuses on B2C, for B2B marketers, you can expect similar shift in behavior from a high level perspective.

The key is identifying the new trends in how your customers think, feel and act.  Your customers may be part of the fastest growing mobile user groups or have adopted new ways to find and share information before they buy.  Every person and their sphere of influence were affected by this recession, reevaluate your existing customer segmentation should be a priority.  It’s time to make adjustments as to how you view your customers.

Smart companies will always shift their brand strategy to focus on customer retention by maintaining a high level of value perception.  Your customers expect you to keep your brand promise and that’s just the beginning, only those that are over delivering will earn the trust over time.

Integrated Marketing and ROI

Social media’s growth is undeniable, it seems like every company has a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account not to mention all the early adopter consumers.  For example, according to a report from BabyCenter, “The number of moms who use social media regularly (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, BabyCenter Community) has significantly increased from 11% to 63% since 2006; a change of 46%. 44% use social media for word-of-mouth recommendations on brands and products and 73% feel they find trustworthy information about products and services through online communities focused on their specific interests such as parenting.”

So does this mean if you sell to moms, you must get into all the social networks?  Should social media marketing be your priority?  Not so fast.

According to a study from MomConnection, The Parenting Group’s nationally representative research panel of 5,000 moms, “the role of social networks in moms’ lives is still largely for entertainment and personal communication; it’s not a channel where most moms are receptive to gathering product information. Only 24% of respondents have used Facebook for product information and buying advice, while 5% have used Myspace for product info, and 3% have used Twitter.”

Social networks is still growing and evolving because it’s mass media, it’s crowdsourcing and it’s here to stay. However, instead of being hype it’s moving towards ubiquity and part of the everyday mix that works alongside email and search marketing.  People will continue to search for answers online and offline regardless of B2B or B2C.  Every chance you get to optimize your brand’s search ranking is an opportunity to leave a bread crumb for your prospects.

Moving forward, the challenges will be to monitor, measure and manage a fully integrated campaign due to the amount of resources and time it takes to pull together the overall picture. This is precisely the reason why you don’t need to be on all the social networks or even be on it all the time.  Some companies use social media as a platform for effective one on one engagement while others utilize it as a PR tool.

Whatever the role social media plays in your organization, you have to really understand how social media is driving your business.  If you’re doing social media, do you know how many sales you got out of your social media app?  Are you measuring the actual incremental sales from your e-commerce store?  Or is social media primarily a driver for your brand value?

Both print and digital advertising costs have come down dramatically, this presents a new opportunity for a dynamic approach to hybrid marketing.  You can simultaneously capture your audience via print and web advertising but the key is to identify which channel they come from to rapidly and accurately aggregate customer and prospect data.  Perhaps most of your new customers reside on the internet while your existing customers still favors the traditional channel.  Regardless of how you integrate your marketing campaign, remember to benchmark them so you can gauge the ROI to improve your sale funnel and lead generation capabilities.

If you goal is to build a customer engagement program, consider incorporating it with existing and new CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools that can be customized for each individual consumer.  This helps to improve the ROI with more measurable data against the deliverable.

Here is “2010 Digital Marketing Outlook,” an excellent report from the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA).

Two Thousand and Ten Digital Marketing Outlook

Business Alignment

Businesses will emerge from the recession looking to further strengthen engagement and interaction with their customers.  But what does “engagement” really mean?  How much does it cost? And what will it take to engage a customer? If you have already done the first two steps by reassessing your brand strategy and integrate social media into your marketing campaigns, your next focus should be to develop a social media policy to protect your company and make incremental changes to improve every aspect of your business.

I’m hardly surprise when I read the new consumer poll by CMO Council and InfoPrint, that “consumers today are deluged and overloaded with a plethora of unwanted direct marketing and promotional messages that are blasted out via email, or mass-produced and mailed in vast quantities, ending up choking mail boxes and filling recycling bins. In most cases, recipients ignore, or have become immune, to standardized commercial overtures. And with the advent of the Internet, consumers are seeking product information and affirmation from trusted sources and referral networks online.”

That’s the path social media is on right now.

Instead of email and mass-produced mailers, it’s spam tweets and uninvited LinkedIn notifications.  Marketers are forgetting that consumers and prospects are real people like you and me.  At the end of the day when we go to the grocery store or eat out at a restaurant we want to be treated like a person not a prey.  It’s shocking to me that “staying relevant, valued and connected to customers has become the number one challenge for marketers today” according to the report.

The biggest adjustment brands must realize is that in social media you’re no longer in control of the conversation instead you will turn over the brand experience to the community and let them define it.  If you want people’s opinion they’ll give it to you the way they want how they want it.  Social media will NOT fix a bad product or negative customer experience.  What it will do is to force you to reveal your brand’s true persona, allow additional means for your customer to reach you, and capture relevant analytical data for product and service improvements.

If you read my previous post “The 12 Principles of Brand Strategy,” you’ll know that principle number 2 states that your brand is your business model.  Well, if your customer’s behavior is changing, shouldn’t you adjust your business too?

Checkout these challenges to social marketing effectiveness, and you’ll understand why it’s not so simple to integrate social media into your existing marketing practice.  Is it worth to invest in obtaining a large number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers?  How do you convert them into sales?

There needs to be a transition and I believe hybrid marketing on a single integrated platform will be the next trend to emerge in an attempt to leveling the playing field across all social networks.

I hope you find the information helpful, share your thoughts what do you think? Have you integrated social media into your marketing strategy?

I’ve been busy with end of the year work and now I’m back on track.  For those of you that follow the designdamage blog since the beginning, I want to take this opportunity to thank you for the support and hope I can continue to provide value for your time.

Although no new entries were posted for the past weeks, I continue to follow industry trends and send out useful content via my Twitter account.  You can follow me via @designdamage

Now back to work.

After reviewing some important data and content from 2009, I’ve come to these conclusions that in 2010 social media will follow the footsteps of SEO and other forms of digital advertising: on the path to commoditization. As I’ve mentioned in the post “When to Adopt Social Media for Your Business?” that social media is still in the early adopters stage, but it’s heading towards early majority phase as the concept of connecting and sharing information online are gradually accepted.

According to eMarketer’s report supported by research from Cone “More than one-half of new media users (53%) believe brands should have a presence in new media, interacting with consumers as needed or by request only, while a further 36% demand a new media presence with regular interaction.” These type of users wants experience, dialogue and immediacy so if you want in on social media, you must provide a combination of those attributes.

So what can you do that’s different in 2010 that you haven’t try in 2009?  Here are some ideas to get you started:

Create New Brands & Co-Branding
The shift in consumer behavior will continue towards “value” even for luxury brands so private label brands and sub-brands will stand to benefit moving forward as we emerge out of the recession slowly.  For companies with strong core brand, creating a sub-brand or a new one that targets new customer base has been a popular strategy. For businesses looking for cost-effective and fast-to-market ideas you can try partnering with other companies for a co-branding effort that creates exposure in other markets while extends your brand story.

Develop a Fascinating Story For Your Brand
The word-of-mouth marketing will continue to grow acting as trust agents providing top of mind reference for consumers.  Brands will shift advertising strategy to focus more on storytelling rather than push advertising.  This means developing a story that demonstrate the personality of the brand in campaigns such as supporting non-profit initiatives (social responsibility, cause marketing), co-branding to create unique content, or collect and promote stories about your customers.

The idea is to implement customer engagement strategies for the company to build a strong human connection that helps build brand loyalty.  Incorporating free resources to help educate your audience is another way to develop a story.  Another great way to build a rewards program around your social network fans by rewarding their participation. Another great way to ramp up your fans is to offer them something they can’t get elsewhere

Collect Valuable Customer Data
It’s time to review your customer data collection process especially if you’re going to use social media with traditional media.   Information such as where they are, what they spend money on, what are the key influences, and what content or applications they download can provide you some advantage for tailoring future product/service experiences to the individual.  Just knowing their demographic or what they buy will not be enough, leverage social media’s crowdsourcing feature and establish

The take away: It’s indicative from this past holiday shopping data that consumers simply wants more for less.  This is where smart companies find ways to cut costs so they can pass on the savings to the consumers.  It’s about keeping the customers coming back, allowing word-of-mouth to work in favor of value for money incentives, and maintaining a healthy relationship with your customers. Why would customers come back or past on your name to others when you didn’t provide value beyond what they paid for?

If you’re a small business, think of ways you can leverage technology instead of people and be creative with your marketing dollar.  Discounts, promotions, rewards programs are all vehicles to build a relationship with your customers.  You may see smaller profits and longer time to get the ROI (return on investment), but that’s all part of investing in your customer for the long haul.

If you want customers to be loyal to your brand, be prepare to deliver a consistent level of value and experience that they can come to expect in 2010.  The goal is to build and maintain customer trust, a key to gaining access to more profitable relationships with customers and competitive differentiation.

We’ll be looking at B2B ideas next to help with strategy planning in 2010.

It will be increasingly difficult for brands to ignore the web when making marketing decisions. The brands that get ahead will be the ones that harness the web to work in conjunction with their existing offline campaigns while adopting more social marketing strategies to generating new consumer insights.  Customers will continue to increase their time spent online and they need to be reach where they prefer to be reached.

Even for companies marketing entirely online or B2B businesses, the question will be how to benefit from blogs, social media and search engine to achieve the marketing goals? How to take their brand message online and into web communities that will create new business opportunities?

Here are 3 web marketing trends to consider:

1) A Shift in Web Properties to Blend Online With Offline Campaigns

There are two parts to this trend.  First is the optimization of web properties, specifically efforts in blogs, social media, search engine optimization and email.  Second is the strategic usage of those web properties within an overall campaign that may or may not include offline media (e.g. direct mail, catalogs, print ads, TV, radio etc.).

Benefits to consider: Both online and offline campaigns have similar concepts in reaching target audience with different processes so define your desire outcome first.
- More touch points (frequency) to reach target audience throughout the buying process
- Lowers marketing costs by shifting more campaigns online from offline (plus flexible payment models)
- Faster time-to-benefit in tools and planning
- Find out more about your customers via two way conversation online
- More strategic options with online campaigns (e.g. brand awareness campaign, call-to-action campaign, lead-generation campaign)
- Target new customer base across multiple demographic for wider reach

Ideas for action: For consumer brands – build and drive traffic to your own community, identify and communicate directly with your fans to help close the sales with promotions, coupons or rewards.  This is a popular approach to get opt-ins and many consumers actually look for these value-added deals.  Aggregate your social media profile on all outbound materials both online and offline to support the decision and buying process of prospects and customers. Own the relationship and be platform agnostic with you network of customers, focus on supporting the needs of the community as a priority before promoting your offerings. As always, enlist someone that will take ownership in this role.

For B2B brands – Leverage content marketing strategy to drive sales leads from search engine ads, email campaigns, social media communities, affiliate blogs or offline media to a highly targeted micro-site for prospects to opt-in for webinars, podcasts or free resources (e.g. whitepaper, reports, presentations).  The goal is to pre-qualify leads that can filter through the sales cycle to improve the probability to convert the sales efficiently.  When you’re able to convert sales efficiently, it saves time and money allowing your operations to be more productivity.

2) New Measuring Matrix: Hybrid Measurement

Unlike traditional forms of gathering consumer insight, online tools are often cheaper, based on much larger sample sizes, and are quicker to deliver results.  For the past few years the value of search engine marketing (SEM) are measured largely by ad impressions, page views and click through rates.  However, as internet users are more willing to input additional data online, companies are now looking to measure key metrics of engagement on a person-level.

According to a recent comScore and Starcom USA’s study on how U.S. Internet users click on display ads, “Only 8% of internet users now account for 85% of all clicks… The results underscore the notion that, for most display ad campaigns, the click-through is not the most appropriate metric for evaluating campaign performance. Rather, advertisers should consider evaluating campaigns based on their view-through impact.”

That’s just one of the examples that web analytics can be misleading.  It will continue to be challenging for marketers to abstract reliable data as social media adds another pile of data to the media measurement mix.  The future trend to measure more accurately will be to combine technical web analytics (server logs) with a sampling of user surveys (opt-in by visitors) that visits the site.  Although there will be sampling errors, it certainly beats making assumptions that doesn’t reflect real user behaviors.

Benefits to consider: - Provides more realistic feedback that extends the meaning of web analytics
- Rich information aggregation from online surveys/feedback forms provide personal data and demographics to better understand your audience
- Keep track of page(s) users frequent and the duration can help you benchmark it against server data to find the delta in errors
- Can be utilized across multiple platforms including mobile, gaming, ad networks and offline campaigns

Ideas for action: Create a web survey on your site, put them on different pages then compare them with your web analytics.  Develop your own dashboard using hybrid measurement by choosing one that’s has the API integration with your Google Analytics account (most of them do now). There are a number of online survey tools such SurveyMonkey, Checkbox, SurveyGizmo, Zoomerang, GetResponse, Vovici, QuestionPro, Kampyle, and you can even use Google docs as your survey tool.  Reward visitors that take the survey with coupons, discounts or gifts (sometimes it’s not even necessary, just a thank you will do).  Switch out the questions, put them on different pages and try different styles of asking from stealth at-the-corner feedback button to in-your-face pop ups.

3) Marketing Platform Extends to Mobile, Social, and Local in Real-Time

There is no question with 13 hours of YouTube videos uploaded every minute and over 900,000 blog posts every 24 hour, you can definitely count on the continuation of information overload over the social web.  This means content has to be tailored to fit the lifestyle of today’s digerati on smart phones that can accessible the web via faster and more available network. Accordingly to The Niesen Company, “U.S. mobile subscriber base grew 7% to 277 million by the second quarter of 2009, which represented 221 million unique users…. Social networking drove the growth train for mobile Internet, with a 187% increase in audience for the year ending July 2009. The distribution of 18.3 million unique social network users by the top three sites is Facebook (26% reach), MySpace (13% reach) and Twitter (7% reach).”

What does this mean?  It’s means that the growth in social networking will accelerate as mobile technology advances to embrace emerging trends in mobile social commerce, on-demand interaction from the real-time web, and fascinating concept of augmented reality.

Brands should leverage mobile marketing strategy to drive sales and cultivate customer engagement. There are a number of ways to do this but ultimately consumer brands will have an easier time in adopting the usage of the mobile platform than B2B companies.  The opportunities for B2B companies remain the same – to generate leads and shorten the sales cycle.

Marketers will need to rethink content marketing strategy that aligns with the business objectives to deliver a dynamic mobile consumer experience.

Benefits to consider: - More opportunities to engage with customers (new or existing) means brand building and top-of-mind awareness
- Smartphone owners tend to be affluent with expendable income, making it a prime target for product and service marketing (ready-to-buy candidates)
- Aggregate rich user information (e.g. user profile, ratings, recommendations, tags etc.) from location based mobile apps
- There are numerous mobile apps that can push out information across all social networks by authenticating with your Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube account, making it mobile and real-time viral
- Deliver superior experience with augmented reality

Ideas for action: Leverage the mobile platform to provide unique location based experiences (e.g. services, games, ads, commerce) for your audience via instant customer support (e.g. assist in the buying process like check inventories or availabilities), real-time product information (e.g. price check, health labels), or event promotional notifications (e.g. cause marketing programs for non-profits, or buy-it-now via SMS or mobile web app/browser).

Another idea is to create downloadable coupons to promote offline activities to drive traffic to local events.  According to RetailMeNot, “coupons are now the deciding factor in purchases for nearly one-third of consumers.”  In today’s economy, coupon is the call-to-action that can produce rapid, favorable results to drive sales.  Offer coupons based on location also helps your customer to discover new retail locations, making marketing as a service via alerts.

The take away: These Web marketing trends will reshape your marketing efforts as more conversations, engagements and experiences are delivered via the internet. In order to stay relevant, brands must transition to become more social on the web and use mobile platforms to gain competitive advantage or risk of loosing opportunities.

Are you thinking about moving your marketing efforts online?  If you’re already doing the mix and match of online and offline marketing, how are you measuring your ROI?  Do you have a mobile marketing strategy?

When you hear something enough times, it may be a fad.  But when you start to see email spam about it, you know it’s a trend.  That’s the case with marketing trends such as email marketing and social media.  The problem with trends is that it’s usually a lagging indicator which means to seize the opportunity you may need to be an early adopters to reap the rewards.

If adopting new strategy and implementing fresh tactics sounds too risky, just take a look at the troubled newspaper and magazine companies and you’ll realize what I mean.  Similar to technology innovation, brand strategy is taking on an increasingly strategic role focusing not just on the bottom line but the ability to produce desirable financial outcomes.  It’s no surprise that the most innovative brands also fail more frequently, it’s the nature of the tried-and-true culture.

However, it takes discipline, research, analysis and creativity to find the right fit that works for your organization. Whether you’re promoting your personal brand or your corporate brand, here are the 3 brand marketing trends to look for in 2010:

1.Brands Must Become More Social Online

It’s no secret that B2B or B2C customers have been talking about your industry and your brand. Now with social media it’s simply going to be “on the record” somewhere over the internet, searchable and conversable. If you can deal with customers in person, why couldn’t you deal with them online?  Engagement with your audience creates brand awareness, increase brand loyalty and the opportunity to get feedback that can help to improve your product and services.  Social engagement encourages crowdsourcing, use it wisely it can energize both you and your audience.

Provide transparency in what you do and demonstrate authenticity in what you say are the keys to building your online “street cred.” Organizations must look at the bigger picture and realize the emerging trend of social business branding and how it will impact all aspect of the company from internal collaboration to external engagement.  Becoming more social for brands means establishing a collaborative infrastructure within the organization to support the core brand strategy. There is no doubt that consumer wants to engage through social media so if brands don’t get into it, consumers will leave.

Ideas for action: Learn the tools of the trade in social media and (please!) put someone that cares about your brand to the task.  Research and identify where you customers are at talking about you, listen and monitor before you jump in.  Analyze the conversation around any product, topics, or category and identify any detractors and advocates to take actions.  More importantly learn to communicate well online, respond on time, be clear and to the point.  Provide value when interacting with your audience, focus on helping not selling and always deliver relevant and effective communications. In addition, make sure you have a policy in place so you have a focused, consistent and cohesive approach in reacting to the situation regardless of which platform you’re using. The bottom line is that social media engagement without governance is a recipe for disaster.

It’s possible that your customers may not be on an open social network but on several discussion boards (forums/BBS), a private professional community, or even a popular blog where comments serve as dialogues.  speak to your customers directly to identify where they get their information, use a survey and provide rewards if needed.

Myths to consider: We can’t quantify the ROI (return on investment), so let’s just not measure them.  First of all, there are ways to measure all the marketing activities whether they’re meaningful to your organization is another story (yes you want the meaningful ones!).  The important thing is to cultivate accountability in your actions so you get results that can give you the insight to make real informed decisions.  My recommendation is to rank your marketing priorities that are most likely to pay off or generate the impact your want first.  If your strategy is to aim for awareness and exposure, then put reach and volume first instead of experience and frequency.  Keep in mind that you need to be able to quantity to a certain degree so you don’t drain your marketing resource and budget.

2.Shift in Value Perception Creates Opportunities for Brands

Generic brands are nothing new especially in the grocery store where the house brands are marketed and sold side by side with the leading brands.  The economy has shifted the perception of value fundamentally into a do-more-with-less and value-for-money mode.  According to the latest IRI Times & Trends Report: Game-Changing Economy Taking Private Label to New Heights, “private label unit share has grown 1.2 points to 22.8% and dollar share has grown 0.7 points to 17.6% across all outlets in the past 12 months.” Simply put, private label brands are gaining momentum across all tiers of product categories from premium tier to value tier because they have the advantage to compete on quality as well as price. This represents a significant opportunity for less known brands (startups, SMBs, personal brands) to compete for new businesses while leading brands still has their eyes on cutting costs (overheads, infrastructure) and reorganizing operations. In addition with the explosion of social media, unknown brand can go viral instantly followed by awareness because brands no longer control the buying space or the conversation, it only needs credibility to explode.

Ideas for action: This is the time to take your brand to another level especially with more cost effective tools and technologies, why not take a hard look at your current setup for operations, sales and marketing? Reallocate your investments and prioritize your marketing, branding or product development strategies.  Many out-of-your-budget marketing avenues have dropped in price dramatically, check your local advertising channels you may be in for a surprise on how cheap it is now to run radio, print and even TV ads.  It’s a good time to build your email marketing campaign, run promotion events or even redo your old website so it’s more social media friendly.  You can even try partnering with someone locally to share the cost or co-brand some offerings together.  Another idea is to create a new brand allowing you to expand into other categories or verticals utilizing the resources you already have.  Brand extension can help secure new revenues and reinforce brand strength without compromising your current brand equities.

This is the time to drive appeal and awareness to build recognition.  Use today’s digital communication platforms to collect meaningful customer data, conduct surveys and optimize your digital presence via social networks. Reevaluate your brand strategy, be innovative with your products and services, create a culture that reward your people and update your performance metrics.

Myths to consider: We don’t have the time, money or resources for marketing and nobody is buying!  If you don’t have a plan to convert data to actionable insight, a process to collectively review the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, how do you know what you’re doing works?  If you don’t invest in marketing or advertising, how are you going to differentiate the unique meaning of your brand?  Without differentiation you will loose pricing power and competitiveness. If your brand isn’t even in the run for consideration, how will your customers know that you exist? And people are spending, just selectively in a timely matter.  According to the American Express Spending & Saving Tracker, “amid their (consumers) cautiousness we are seeing some areas where people are willing to increase spending.” There is a shift in how businesses and consumers are expressing their priorities, but that doesn’t mean you should be reactive, in fact I would argue that being proactive now will benefit your ROI in the long haul.

3. Community Building is Now a Priority

Moving forward, brands will have to focus on fostering their own community to own the communication distribution network.  Building a community is about connecting and sharing experiences, I’ve outlined this previously specifically in social networks, which still applies to other platform as well. The fact is that the adoption of new communication platform (ie. email, radio) has led to a new wave of user experience in which the context (ie. direct mail, website) and the message (ie. ads, PR) must stay relevant.  If the community is trusted by the members, they will extend the trust through word-of-mouth that could mean more opportunities for brands to increase buying frequency using content or conversation marketing tactics.

Keep in mind that you should get involved in the right channel and passively direct customers to your community.  Effective engagement can also lead to permission-based marketing. According to a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by ExactTarget, “One-half of consumers said unsolicited messages were unacceptable even from companies they did business with regularly. That was up from about one-quarter in 2008.”  When your audience allows you to contact them, you essentially have a direct line to access a targeted customer base.

Ideas for action: For low barrier to entry options, look into building a community using one of these: Facebook fan page, Twitter account, Google group, LinkedIn group, Yahoo groups; or create your own social network (with blog, discussion forums etc.), Ning, KickApps, ThePort, SharePoint, Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, Posterous, Moveable Type, SocialText, SixApart, and Pringo just to name a few.  If you’re tech or internet savvy, you can use a combination of them but I suggest to focus on becoming versed in 1-2 first then expand to others.  Personally, I’m using a combination of a WordPress blog (you’re reading it now) and Twitter (@designdamage). You can also use video sharing sites like Youtube and Vimeo to help funnel traffic to your community. Another import tip is to leverage RSS feeds to push your message from one-to-many networks.

It’s easy for someone to discover if there’s any participation in your community or not so if you’re going to have a community, you need to be there for your audience.  Dedicate a set amount of time to regularly check the activities in your community, answer questions, drive conversations and connect with members. People have short attention span especially on the internet, so make sure you work on your message (goes to number 1 above) and keep your audience interested. The goal is to mobilize brand advocates to drive word-of-mouth for greater engagement.

Myths to consider: We’ll just hire an expert and let them do the work like how we outsource web design and SEO.  Although we’re at the age of outsource-anything today and get it done tomorrow, it’s hardly a sustainable long-term strategy especially when it’s about your brand’s core value and mission.  Too often we forget that people are at the center of any holistic effort to improve business performance and accountability.  Outsource to gurus may get things done, but you need to take the time and effort to work with them not to mention they’re hard to find, afford and keep.  I’ve clean up some mess for clients before where the outsourced expert created more problems than what they were hired to solve.  This is why so many brands fail to update their websites regularly or refresh their SEO campaigns.  Take the time to educate yourself some of the trends will benefit you in the long run, or get your team involve and split the workload across multiple heads.

The takeaway: The evolving marketing and media ecosystem is putting pressure on brands to innovate and evolve, or risk becoming extinct.  These trends will be here to stay and is essential for brands to be successful moving forward.

Have you made the transition yet to accommodate these trends?  What are you doing to make the necessary changes to your brand strategy?

I will be reviewing the trends in digital marketing, specifically social business branding next, stay tuned.

In an effort to keep up with the rate of change in the marketing landscape, it’s important to understand the tools available to drive results.  Social media is the fastest growing tactic according to a survey by virtual events provider Unisfair, “Marketers’ top priorities for 2010 will be customer acquisition and retention and the most common tactics marketers plant to increase was social media, selected by three-quarters of marketers polled, followed by search (51%) and e-mail (49%).”

It’s indicative as the internet gets more social, the speed at which information is shared through platforms like Twitter and Facebook will continue to expand.

There is no argument that social media can benefit a brand but the problem is most companies are operating with a limited supply of resources.  And with TMI (too much information) flowing around the internet you can easily lost yourself in a sea of information resulting in analysis paralysis.

In order to utilize the time on hand, it’s important to maintain focus on what’s relevant and wrap your head around a resource that walks you through the social media maze. Rarely is there a silver bullet that can solve all the marketing challenges so the key is to research and learn as much as  you need before you jump in.  However, research can be the source of wasted time so it’s better to approach experts within their respective disciplines or pick up a book like Friends with Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook, by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo.

I had the opportunity to read a preview copy so I’m going to go straight to the highlights from the book:

- Chapters 1-2 provide an excellent overview on the history of social media and how it has evolved today.  I believe this is important for marketers especially those that are looking to transition to the web2.0 platform.  Without knowledge of the social landscape as a whole, it’s difficult to decide what you should use and why.  Furthermore it paints a picture on the opportunities that exist on the social web and a step by step guide to prepare your blog and leverage RSS.

- Chapters 3-6 focus on the strategy behind building a community and networking with the right bloggers as well as communication tactics.  I consider these chapters the “meat” of the book, where most marketers failed to understand the meaning behind using these tools, Friends with Benefits nailed it.  In addition, it’s got use cases from the perspective of business, product and measurement to illustrate the impact of each tactics.  If you’re operating without reliable metrics and measurement, you’re essentially operating blindly in social media. Although chapter 6 does a good job on performance tracking, it could use more financial models to further the topic of social media ROI (return on investment). If you are using social media but aren’t sure about the tactics, strategies, and practices to get them right, there are some good case studies on what to do and what not to do.

- Chapters 7-8 are guides to deal with scenarios from pre-launch to post-launch of social media campaigns.  They’re good resources for damage control in social media marketing and explain the risk implications during crisis.  Particularly the “Rules for Making Social Media Work for You in a Crisis” provides 6 valuable resolutions even for experienced marketers to quickly put out fires and can serve as reference to develop corporate social media policies.

- Chapters 9-12 goes into details on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube (and other video marketing tools), and Twitter.  These sections are essential case studies to the leading social media platform which is a good beginner’s guide.  As for people already using those tools frequently, it’s just common sense nothing you shouldn’t already know.

The take away: This is not a Twitter or Facebook for dummies, or how to setup your social media account.  What’s different between this book and other social media guides is that it tends to focus on the outcome rather than just the features and benefits.

It’s a resourceful book for those wanting to hop on the social media marketing train to learn this new viral platform and to leverage word-of-mouth tactics.  You will find plenty of answers to why and how as well as what’s in it for you.  For experienced marketers looking to keep up on their own industries as well as learn the intricate details of social media, I recommend adding this book to your reading list.

For your information, this book is scheduled to be published in next month (November) and you can pre-order the book now from No Starch Press.