Designdamage Blog

Social media is changing how businesses find customers and how customers engage with brands. There are many reasons to believe that it will eventually overtake email marketing, but I’m a firm believer that it’s here to stay.  In fact, I believe email marketing combine with search (SEO) and social media will the best strategy moving forward.

However; let me get a few things straight. First, email is the original social network. Second, you need email to open social network account and get alerts. And third, search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) will continue to index and aggregate social network data not to mention most social network has their own internal search engine as well.

It sounds like there is a lot of cross-over between the three, so how should you use these three tactics to help you strategize your marketing efforts? It’s hard to realize how these tactics can impact your business without some basic understanding of the big three. Let’s look at how each works and what you can do to get the most bang for your marketing bucks.

The Big Three #1 – Email Marketing

Why email – Today it’s hard to find someone without an email account and majority of account holders have had it for a while (I still check my hotmail from 14 years ago) thus letting it go is not likely for most. Account holders may reduce the time they spent on email but it doesn’t have the abandon rate (Facebook, Twitter) like majority of the social networks.

Almost all basic business communications are done via email not via social networks.  The perception is that it’s more secure, private and user friendly (centralized contacts, integrates with calendar, easily accessible via mobile devices).  Simply put, people will use what’s easy to achieve the same goal – to get work done and to communicate. Another benefit of email is that it’s a direct private channel of communication to alert customers on new product offerings or promotions. At the same time, customers can use e-mail to provide feedback and ask questions.

Done right, you will be kept away from the spam folder and earn a permanent spot on the white list. This is why great email marketers tend to focus on delivering high value content at the right time, with the proper frequency using attractive subjective lines that encourage clicks and forwards.

Building your email list should still be all marketers’ top priority. Give people a reason to subscribe and to remain subscribed is the ongoing art and science of email marketing.

The Big Three #2 – Search Engine Marketing

Why SEO – This one should be a no brainer. What is the first thing you do when you’re looking to buy a product? If you do your homework you would first Google it. This applies to almost anybody looking to learn more about a company, a product or how to do something. Often times, people don’t even question the search results because it’s just easier to trust Google’s rankings and feel good about the decisions you’ve made based on what was found.

It’s no surprise that 79% of United States hiring managers and job recruiters search online information about job applicants according to a recent research commissioned by Microsoft.

This is why smart businesses (and individuals) are putting more emphasis on content marketing and shifting their mindset to operate more like a media company. They understand search engine is catered to “people” and people want relevant, valuable content that’s going to move them a step closer to identify the information they’re searching for.

The key is to create great content around what your customers are interested in when looking for your product; such as how things work (the outcome of your product or services), step-by-step guides or research reports that reveals product comparisons. Then tie these high quality content with relevant keywords and over time you’ll likely to move higher through the non-paid “organic” rankings. And today you can SEO anything from websites, blog posts, videos, images, podcasts you name it.

SEO is one of the key marketing arsenals especially for retailers, direct marketers and authors. The latest Internet Retailer Survey (some sample data below) clearly shows a growing interest and investment in search to drive more online sales. It’s not a matter of why, but how.

There is simply too much information and too little time. Search engine is our instant gratification to today’s ADD (Attention-Deficit Disorder) society.

The Big Three #3 – Social Media

Why Social – If search engine is a way for people to find information, then social media is a way for people to find conversations and be part of them. It adds the credibility fuel to the fire of trust since social media is basically word-of-mouth. Instead of just believing in what you read from company websites or reviews you found online, you can talk to people you trust or listen to experts you follow. Similar to search, you can get people to your site with social media, and it’s a great tool to tell customer stories, demonstrate expertise, and stack up your social proof to win business from competitors.

The goal is to connect with customers on an ongoing basis to further understand their needs, wants and concerns.  This will help you to build strong, lasting and engaging relationships with your customers for future business as well as referral opportunities by getting people to share your products on social networks to bring in traffic and find new customers.

And since social media is word-of-mouth, it’s your brand’s reputation on the line. Your digital reputation is your first impression and perception is reality.

How The Big Three Can Work Together

Although you can choose to only do one or two of the three, but to get the most out of your marketing investments, you should consider doing all three.

Here are a few ideas to consider on how to leverage the big three:

1) Create Once, Recycle Many- Focus on content not just promotions and sales, it’s about facilitating people through the sales cycle.  People usually don’t buy base on just one piece of data think of it as adding “trust points” to people’s decision to buy. If prospects consumed a great piece of educational content on your landing page, that’s one point.  If they read some great reviews about your product from a third party site, that’s another point.  If there is more positive comments than negative ones about your brand in social networks, that’s another point.  The goal is to accumulate enough trust so prospects feel good about why they’ve made the decision over you than others.

You want to invest your time and money on creating the best blog content, how-to articles, educational videos, whitepapers or anything that will get your audience to bookmark, download and share. Then make sure you optimize the content for search engine with the proper keywords and deliver them to the right people in your target channel via email and social networks.

For example let’s say you have a really good article on how to do something (try not to involve your product first, focus on solving the problem then introduce your product later when appropriate), you can package it in a downloadable PDF put it on a landing page that’s highly optimize for SEO.  Then abstract the summary from the content for your email newsletter so you can send your subscribers to that very same landing page, a typical web marketing campaign. But let’s take it a step further by turning that piece of content into a video (using screen capture tools like Camtasia, or with a webcam or FlipVideo) and upload it to YouTube, Ustream or Vimeo to drive traffic back to your landing page.  Then post the video on your blog, tweet it out via Twitter, send it to relevant groups on LinkedIn or submitted to social network sites like Technorati, Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon. Continue to produce great content and after 3-6 month you can recycle that piece of content with some updates and do it again.

2) Streamline with Process – Think about how your customers consume information and respond to connections. It’s NOT jamming the information down their throat like traditional one-way push advertising but allowing them to discover and get permission to establish a relationship. Talk to your customers, ask them what they read, who influence them and why? Understand what they don’t care about (don’t be surprise if it’s a lot of what you do) is just as important as what they care (a lot of what you should know). If you make the wrong assumption it will bring you the false conclusion which will impact on how you strategize your campaign.

For example if you know your customer reads certain blogs regularly, should you advertise on their site or is it better to build a relationship with the blogger? Once you’ve made your decision, focus on identifying the path to your web properties. Take out a piece of paper and map out that path and create a process to streamline every possible step that your customer may take so you can funnel them via your sales pipeline.

Remember, not everyone consumes media the same way, some people like to read while others prefer to watch videos or listen to a podcast. It’s important to have as many media options as possible available to maximize engagement opportunities.

3) Target, Track and Repeat – Without the right data you won’t know where to focus your marketing efforts and no accountability in your actions. What happens after your prospect conducts a search? What actions were taken after consuming your content? Was it shared on Facebook or forwarded to a colleague?

The biggest benefit from tracking your email, search and social media analytics is that you will be able to tie them all together and figure out your ROI. You’ll know where your site visitors are coming from, which email links they clicked on and what gets shared so you can make adjustments to improve conversion rates. Why continue to do something that doesn’t work? You need to know so you can keep doing what works and stop doing what doesn’t. Perhaps Facebook is not the best social network to target your audience or is it because your marketing messages aren’t resonating with them? Marketers must aggregate customer behavior information to build a holistic view of the customer.

This means analyzing quantitative data to measure and monitor customer-related metrics such as customer attrition rate, customer retention rate, number of products purchased, repeat purchases, likelihood to recommend, etc. When you have the right customer insights, you’re in a position to address customer needs, improve processes (to shorten the sales cycle), and to maintain a strong connection for an opportunity to turn customers into fans and fans to brand evangelists.

Do Your Homework, Fish Where Fish Are

Before you start, you should learn where your customers are at, the tools they use and why.  This allows you to make better informed decisions and build a framework for your assumptions before you jump in. You can find some valuable research data from the internet and here are two examples I’ve found.

First is the Morgan Stanley Internet Trends Analysis, which has a lot of in-depth information about all things internet, mobile, cloud computing, email, social networks and more. (Check out slide 12 on social networking vs email usage).

Morgan Stanley Internet Trends Analysis

The second report is from Edison Research on “Everything You Need To Know About Who’s Using Twitter.” I found it particularly interesting that people actually go to Twitter to learn about products, far more than they do with other social networks. (51% of active Twitter users follow companies, brands or products on social networks)

Twitter Usage in America 2010 –

The take away: Email marketing, search engine optimization and social media are all great, but it takes a combination of know-how and creativity to get people just to open your e-mail, to click on your search results or to retweet your messages. Business owners and marketers need to have some technical knowledge of what methods produce positive results. Your goal should be to have a mix and balance of the big three utilizing content strategy that is useful and easy to share.

Think like a publisher, not only do you have to figure out ways to engage your subscribers (and to remain subscribed) but also prospects, people on the fence and try to sway influencers your way.  Yes, it’s time consuming like what Jay Baer mentioned recently but think of it as investing in your customers, you get what you put in.  It’s easy to setup your email newsletter, social network accounts and have SEO gurus optimizing your site, those are executions of tactics NOT strategy.

First, learn before you start, listen before you talk and research before you decide. You’re better off investing your marketing dollars to build your own targeted database (and customer segmentation!) with accurate information.

Questions on email marketing, search engine optimization or social media? Drop me a comment below.

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.