By Tim Redpath
(Tim Redpath heads up Train of Thoughts, working with clients on strategic marketing, campaigns and communications as well as trying to measure value from marketing budgets. He is an occasional lecturer at the Sprott School of Business and is vice chair of the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce.)
Eighty-four percent of business professionals using social media don’t bother to measure its ROI, according to eMarketer. Almost half said they did not even know whether the social media tools they were using had ROI measurement capabilities.
To me, this is a sad indictment of marketing professionals like me. We have jumped in to play with some shiny new toys but are not taking the time to invest in proving their worth.
The whole point of marketing is to effect change – change in buying behaviour, change in knowledge, change in attitude. But if we can’t measure these changes, how can we know what has worked?
I am as guilty as the next marketing professional. I have architected many marketing programs over the years and been consumed with marketing, promotional and communication tools. Measurement has been based on criteria as varied as number of customers engaged, number of mail outs, column inches of media coverage and a general warm feeling. Barely a chart or a metric to be found.
Marketing’s budget gets hit hard in a downturn when it can’t prove that it adds value. Bluff and bluster buys you only so much time; eventually, in the words of Jerry Maguire’s client, you have to “Show me the money.”
Google AdWords has gifted marketing a remarkable measurement tool. If you can’t determine value from your Google spend, then you need to find another day job. Other tools, like some social media elements, are trickier. Sometimes you can fold them in to a broader measure of, say, aided-unaided brand awareness; sometimes it’s just plain tough. But it behoves us, as marketing professionals, to try and justify our budget.
Just because programs are hard to measure does not necessarily mean that we should not do them. White papers are great thought-leadership tools but not always easy to measure in terms of value. You can track the number of downloads off a web page, number given out at a trade show or number of mentions in media. None of these is perfect but they give a peripheral sense of value. For the cost of producing a white paper, they should be a no-brainer for most high-tech companies.
With that in mind I have a matrix that compares the cost of a program with how easy it is to measure value. National print ads with an easy call to action are an example of something you can spend tens of thousands of dollars on and easily drive a measure of value. Conversely, you can drop hundreds of thousands on a sponsorship program and be left judging long-term value on gut feel and experience.
Direct mail is always a favourite in the easy-to-do-and-easy-to prove-value quadrant, while brochures are hard to measure but not that expensive.
As marketing professionals, we have to justify ourselves and our budgets, all the time. Don’t worry about the brochures, pick the big ticket-big impact items first and work your way down the list. We have no excuse for not trying.
By Danny Sullivan
We’ve written on marketing in a downturn a few times over the past couple of years – unfortunately, it’s a topic that is close to everyone right now. But I had to come back to the subject again after reading an excellent and insightful article by Beth Comstock, CMO of GE in BusinessWeek.
It’s very refreshing to hear such a frank discussion about how one of the world’s biggest companies is ramping up its marketing spend to capture more market share and position itself for the inevitable recovery. At inmedia, we have long advocated using the downturn as a time to increase the marketing volume rather than cut back, but all too often our words have fallen on deaf ears.
It’s understandable that companies look at marketing as something that can easily be cut back on when times are tough, but such a reaction fails to take into account the immediate opportunity that exists to gain a marketing foothold over other cost-cutting competitors, and does not look beyond the downturn to the time when they will need to be well-positioned to take advantage of the recovery.
Comstock’s example of Priceline outspending the competition to post an 82% increase in profits and improved market share should be enough to convince anyone that there is value to be gained from marketing in a downturn.
Some might say it’s easier for the biggest companies to remain bold during a downturn, but what about those whose revenues are a fraction of GE’s? I believe that the principle remains the same – going silent can only cause one to lose business and market share. The truth is that plenty of business remains to be won in a downturn, and canny marketing investment can help capture that business, while simultaneously ensuring a company’s readiness for the recovery.
By Leo Valiquette
It’s been a while since I have expounded on the subject of reference customers. (OK, it’s been a while since I’ve expounded on any subject on this blog, but here I am, back in form.)
In our work at inmedia, where we strive to engage with the editors of specific trade and industry titles to sell them on the merits of a client’s story, enthusiastic reference customers who can articulate the pain points that were addressed by our clients’ products will, more often than not, make the editor sit up and take notice.
Customers who have actually opened their wallets for a vendor’s product or service provide validation and demonstrate uptake in the market. They can speak in dollars-and-cents terms about why they adopted a particular product and the benefits and return on investment they have derived from it.
Read More
By Linda Forrest
Senator Ted Kennedy died late yesterday, the latest tragedy in the long string to befall the family that has so captivated the world these last 50 years. His passing is also the latest high-profile death to spawn a flurry of internet traffic, blog posts, Tweets, and the like.
Being a child of the 80s, it has been a rough year, with iconic figures like Michael Jackson and John Hughes, director of some of my favourite movies, passing away unexpectedly, shocking their many followers.
We truly live in an era of mass communication. Sometimes that brings us together, other times it alienates us. In times when people need to have even a virtual shoulder to cry on, the many means of expression available to them, the virtual support system at their ready disposal is of great comfort indeed.
Bob Lefsetz, editor of the Lefsetz Letter, a music industry trade newsletter, was on the Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos last year talking about just how messed up the music industry is (quite) and he touched on the fact that in today’s modern age, there is so much media available that we’re less connected to one another. Ironically, the glut of media channels meant to provide us with more content, ostensibly, one assumes, in order to provide us with more cultural touch points to be able to discuss with one another, is providing each of us with customized content that it’s unlikely that any of our friends or contacts are aware of. His example was a television show that he’d seen and adored that aired on an obscure cable channel and despite his evangelism about the program, had yet to meet another human who had seen it.
These recent high profile deaths and the public’s reaction to them represent the flip side to Lefsetz’s argument. When Michael Jackson died, it was said that he almost took the internet with him, so compelled were his legions of fans to flock to news sites, to write blog posts about what his music had meant to them, what his impact on our society had been, some to mock, others to mourn…
What can we as modern marketers learn from this? In the same way that on a personal level the many channels available to us can draw us closer or push us further apart, they accomplish the same when used for business, for promotion. The media channels are many, the messages on them innumerable, but focused messaging on the proper channels can bring your market closer, can provide them with the niche information that they need, can, in short, sell more of your stuff.
By Francis Moran
When baggage handlers for U.S. air carrier United Airlines manhandled and broke Dave Carroll’s beloved, custom-made, $3,500 Taylor acoustic guitar while he and his band-mates looked in impotent disbelief from inside the aircraft, and then refused to compensate him for it, the Canadian musician didn’t get mad, he got even. He wrote a song, “United Breaks Guitars,” posted it on YouTube and, nearly five-million viewings later, Carroll has become the lyrical poster-boy for disgruntled airline passengers everywhere and United is learning very difficult and expensive lessons about the power of the individual in the age of social media.
The key lesson United needs to learn here is that it broke much more than Carroll’s guitar. It broke the cardinal rule of customer service and it broke my first law of competitive differentiation. That law states that the only sustainable competitive differentiation for most companies in today’s economy is superior customer service. In an era where a technological advantage lasts only as long as it takes competitors to reverse engineer your product or leap-frog over it with an innovation of their own, and where a price advantage erodes just as swiftly as your competitors can off-shore their own manufacturing, keeping your customers happy is the sole long-term strategy you can employ to develop and sustain a sharp differentiation from those competitors.
In the challenging world of airline travel, where every operator goes to the same places at the same time for much the same price, it’s the only differentiator.
Canada’s WestJet Airlines, which used to be an upstart little operation out of Calgary, has stolen fully 37 percent of the domestic airline business right out from under the nose of the once-monopolistic Air Canada by emphasising and delivering on a promise to treat its customers better. Air Canada’s reputation for lousy customer service is so well established I have named my annual award for the worst customer-service experience of the year after the airline and one of its (surprise!) baggage people who displayed the same indifference that drove Carroll to song.
Superior customer service doesn’t mean nothing will ever go wrong, and you’ll never have a disgruntled customer on your hands. However, if you assume an orientation from the outset that says your customers will be well treated, it’s amazing how many fewer things will actually go wrong and how forgiving those consumers will be when they do. And when something does go wrong, superior customer service is all about setting it right again. It’s all about how you treat customers in good times and in bad.
When I awarded the 2008 edition of my “Air Canada-Harold McGowan Memorial Award for Truly Egregious Customer Service” to the Canadian online DVD-rental service Zip back in November, the post I wrote on our blog unleashed a fury of responses the likes of which I had never before or since experienced. I had to block most of them because they were simply frothing-at-the-mouth irrational and offensive. And they completely missed the point. My complaint was much less about my actual experience with the service, which, in my view, had deteriorated substantially over the few years I was a subscriber, and all about the utterly indifferent response I got from Zip’s customer-service people.
One more recent responder, whose slightly more reasonable comment I now wish I had actually allowed, told me I wasn’t the centre of the universe. How completely wrong. As a customer, I am exactly the centre of the universe since no company will have a universe without customers.
Taylor Guitars, by way of sharp contrast to United, offered to repair Carroll’s guitar for free and further capitalised with a YouTube video of their own directing viewers to their web site to learn more about how to protect your guitar when travelling.
The singer himself has shot to newfound stardom and is booking new gigs left, right and centre, and the world awaits the second in what he promises will be a trilogy of songs about his experiences with United. He has also turned down all new offers of compensation from United, saying it had its chance to deal properly with his complaint. (In fact, the second song promises to be all about United customer-relations agent Ms. Irlweg who, Carroll says, was the last person at United to tell him he would be receiving no compensation.)
And United? Well, the Times of London claimed the fallout delivered a 10 per cent hit to United’s stock price, costing its shareholders about $180-million. It would be nice to think a consumer backlash of this nature could cause that kind of real pain to an unfeeling global corporation, but the stock-price dive probably had more to do with lousy second-quarter results that were released as Carroll’s video was going viral. Still, the airline and its utterly indifferent front-line agents, whom Carroll names and shames in his catchy and witty song, have become the laughing stock of the world wide web.
Update: The second in Carroll’s trilogy of revenge hymns is now up on YouTube.
