Below is my presentation to the Minnesota Society of Association Executives for their annual Marketing and Sales Symposium. In short here are 7 main trends I feel are most pertinent to associations for 2104:
Struggle in Building A Digital Marketing Team
Hiring managers these days are struggling to find good digital marketing talent according to the Online Marketing Institute. They surveyed almost 750 Fortune 500 and ad agency execs and the results showed there’s a vast gap between the digital marketing expertise needed by organizations and the talent that is actually available to them at every level.
Many times the trouble starts with the hiring managers who don’t have enough work experience in hiring the optimal digital marketing team. About 30% of the time companies haven’t hired in the past year because they can’t figure out who to go to for talent.
Just Getting By
Many companies are doing just enough by working with the talent they already have to sustain their digital marketing campaigns. Many times the tech people don’t have the marketing skills and the marketers are lacking the tech skills so its difficult to get someone to pull it altogether.
Invest In Talent
If companies are just maintaining current staffing but they’re most certainly missing significant opportunities that better qualified digital talent, contractors or consultants could take advantage of. It may take some time and the willingness to pay for experience but if companies dedicate themselves to finding digital talent with the proper skills and experience they will have a much better shot at:
Here are some resources to finding the best talent:
While larger companies see mobile as a top marketing priority for 2014, SMBs are still behind in seeing its significance for marketing. eMarketer estimates that more than 45% of the US population will use the mobile internet at least monthly this year and that will rise to 66% by 2017.
A quick look at any company’s web analytics account will most likely show mobile visits significantly increasing from the last few years as its visits from PCs goes down. Even with this ever evolving trend SMBs are still slow to establish even a basic mobile-optimized website.
The result of not optimizing for mobile is significant as I’ve seen recently transformations in lead generation and sales due to incorporating mobile strategies. When going from a non-mobile optimized site to one with responsive design, you’d be amazed at the spike in website conversions.
With the huge proliferation of mobile and tablet use a responsive designed website is a necessity, not a luxury. If you do anything in 2014, a website that is mobile optimized should be 1st priority. Don’t worry about building an app. Your website is more important.
Here are some resources to get you started:
http://onlinecrowd.com.au/5-tips-help-small-business-mobile-marketing/The Harvard Business Review has a great article, Advertising Analytics 2.0 in their March edition where they discuss marketers common habit of measuring performance of each channel as if they worked independently of each other. They use of the metaphor of swim lanes and suggest how marketers need to think in terms of cross channel path-to-purchase and start to pay attention to how certain channels give an “assist” in terms of influencing a consumer to buy.
I continually see companies, both big and small, continue to view their marketing and ad campaigns through a narrow lens and fixate on channel which lead to a direct sale. There’s a lot of consternation about the ROI of social media sites but it helps to understand the support role these channels play in getting a customer to convert. The graphic by HBR demonstrates this well:
Google recently came out with some research called Zero Moment of Truth that very clearly and convincingly lays out the business case for social media and how it impacts the consumer’s buying journey.
Google states that the Zero Moment of Truth is the moment when a consumer picks up a laptop, mobile phone or other wired device to research a product or serve and then decide what to buy. The research shows that more and more, people are making their buying decisions well before they get to the store.
Recently, I’ve been telling anyone who will listen (ad nauseum, perhaps) that there’s been a fundamental shift in how consumers gather data and how they’re using that data to make buying decisions for products from new cars to ball point pens.
They are increasingly turning to online social interactions to check out ratings and reviews (which is a form of social sharing) for opinions on products and services and searching what a brand’s Facebook Pages or Twitter account has for deals and insights as to what’s new. They’re also using sites like YouTube and Vimeo to research how-to videos or demos on how products are used. Here’s some interesting stats that highlight this behavior:
All these social interactions can be quickly and easily found using search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. For a long time the conventional wisdom was that people won’t go out of their way to research things like laundry detergent and butter but in fact they do. Google’s research clearly shows they do.
The graphic below shows when those Zero Moments of Truth are happening:
Average purchase cycles for three diverse categories
If you don’t believe what Google’s saying, the Harvard Business Review came out with some research from McKinsey & Company that supports Google’s thinking. (See my recent article Consumer Decision Journey in the Digital Age) They’ve actually documented this behavior in 2009 and Google backs up their assertion that brands need to be at that digital evaluation process or Zero Moment of Truth when the consumer looks for information. If a brand isn’t showing up when consumers do their search, they are losing sales.
Where social media really makes its impact is in the advocacy phase of the consumer’s buying journey after they’ve taken advantage of a service or brought a product home and used it. If they like it (or not) they will go on Facebook, Amazon.com, Twitter, blogs, Consumer Reports, or brand website and let you know what they think. And for the first time in history, this word-of-mouth communication is being digitally archived making one person’s advocacy someone else’s Zero Moment of Truth.
I highly recommend you check out Google’s research (it’s free), watch all the videos and read it in its entirety. This Zero Moment of Truth will become, if it’s not already, the most important impetus for a customer to buy your company’s goods and/or services.
As I was perusing the intertubes today on my phone I suddenly received a flurry of notifications from my Twitter app telling me that 21 people had mentioned me (@jbsem.com). I usually don’t receive this many mentions in a week let alone all at once so I clicked to see what happened.
Apparently, @MariSmith, bless her heart, who’s a prolific tweeter (106,000 followers), just re-tweeted a blog post of mine (7 Keys to Choosing the Right Social Media Monitoring Tool). Another 20+ people then re-tweeted her tweet. All of a sudden a good number of people were clicking on the link to my post.
This got me to wondering how many people did this one tweet reach so I brought up my online tools and got to work. There are some robust systems out there that could have provided a complete view of clicks, reach, impressions, blog visits, etc., all in one dashboard but those cost some serious change.
So instead, I used a variety of free online tools that produce reports similar to the more sophisticated platforms; it just took a little more work and some knowhow. Here’s what I used.
Bit.ly is a URL shortener that shrinks long URLs into ones that are more conducive to 140 character limits. It also has tracking capability that measures the number of times people click on the URL and where they’re coming from. Using my URL http://bit.ly/j5xc3j it showed me that 42 people clicked on a bit.ly link to get to my post; 32 of which clicked on the link I created. This means 10 people used a different bit.ly link to get to my content.
This is a simple tool that lets you easily gauge the reach of a tweet, link, #hashtag, phrase or keyword and shows the reach and exposure data for those tweets. I typed in my bit.ly link and it showed that my tweet as of June 6 reached 129,137 people via 18 tweets; producing 142,627 Impressions. It’s a nice quick and easy way to see how far a tweet has gone. See below.
This is a free social media search and analysis platform that provides an easy way to track and measure what people are saying about you or your company across the web’s social media landscape. The tool lacks the customizable reporting capability other monitoring tools provide, however you can’t beat the price (free). This tool showed me that mentions, using my bit.ly link, had a sentiment ratio at an excellent 21 positive to 0 negative. This due to the fact @MariSmith included “LIKE!!” in her tweet. I love her. While I have serious doubts about automated sentiment analysis, it’s a quick and dirty way to see if good or bad things are being said about you. The tool also uses metrics like strength, reach and passion of the posts. You can click here to see how they define these metrics (just hover over the number and the definition will appear).
I really don’t know what marketers would do without Google Analytics. It’s by far one of the best and easiest tools to use in measuring and monitoring your website and/or blog’s traffic. And its FREE. It provided me with metrics on the number of visits I received to my post, the time people spent reading my post, the number of people leaving the page without further clicks (bounce rate), percent of new visits, source of the traffic, etc. I won’t go into all the detail other than to say that this information is critical for me in determining what content is most useful and how well my content is being picked up by search engines. If you don’t have this program set up, just ask your web master and they’ll do it for you and give you access.
It was a fun day today as it’s always interesting to see the impact of your online social activities and it’s a great way to really understand the power of social platforms and the tools used to measure them.
IBM Global CMO Study
IBM has recently released their IBM Global CMO Study for 2011 and once again, social media comes up very high in what CMOs see as an area of concern for the future of their business. Other areas of concern were the data explosion, proliferation of channels and devices and shifting consumer demographics; all of which tie into social media.
The one tidbit I found most interesting in this study was CMOs are still predominantly relying on traditional sources of information such as focus groups and studies that focus on understanding markets rather than individuals. It seems that most are still ignoring what people are saying about them through social channels. Case in point:
In a past blog post, called Consumer Decision Journey in the Digital Age, I highlight a McKinsey & Company study that shows how more and more consumers are using these social channels to make their buying decisions. However, organizations have yet to leverage these tools which can provide crucial insights into how customers and influencers think and behave.
The graph below shows the sources of information CMOs are using to make strategic marketing decisions and as you can see most are paying more attention to markets than individuals. The key sources to understanding individuals (highlighted in yellow) still are ranked relatively low:
It’s quite obvious that CMO’s have not yet aligned their strategies with how consumers are behaving today and aren’t keeping up with the trends in technology. Therefore, I see a big role for social media going forward and the companies that embrace this trend will be well positioned to be leaders in their industries.
Enough can’t be said for how social media is changing the way people use and search for information on everything from travel to buying a ball point pen. For parks and recreation organizations social media is an integral aspect for conveying to the community all that is offered in terms of city parks, youth programs, sports, special events, etc.
It is imperative though for park and recreation departments that a social media strategy be put in place before a single post or tweet goes out because you must first answer the question “why are we on Twitter/Facebook/YouTube?” If you can’t describe how your Facebook page addresses an overall communication objective then you’re not yet prepared.
This presentation, created for the 2011 Minnesota Recreation and Park Association Annual Conference, will hopefully help you prepare for online social interaction by providing a framework for a social media strategy and demonstrating some useful tools for managing your organization’s social presence.
I’ve also included some useful articles that can help better craft your social strategy.
The quick answer is we don’t know yet but the popular belief is that Google+ will play a significant role in your search engine optimization efforts (SEO) in near future. Most people I run into are rolling their eyes at yet another social network but there may be something to Googe+ that businesses need to pay attention to.
Google is attempting differentiate itself from Facebook by allowing people to divide their friends, colleagues, acquaintances into groups and share individually targeted content. And it’ll most likely be the case when it comes to brands. My guess is that Google will attempt to capitalize on this functionality and apply the notion of building individual audiences to its version of business pages. This will allow page owners to communicate with different groups through one main page.
I wouldn’t concern myself too much with the hype right now (fastest to 10 millions users) but I would suggest you start preparing for the eventual launch of business pages. Note: DO NOT start a profile for your brand yet as Google has been aggressively deleting branded profiles. The functionality will be coming soon so here are some ideas on how you can prepare your business:
Consumers today are connecting with brands in fundamentally new ways, as more and more of them are actively participating in sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and soon to be Google+1. Yet companies are still very slow to adopt this media into their marketing strategies.
A recent survey by Jive Software and Penn, Schoen & Berland found 78% of executives thought a social business strategy was somewhat or very important to the future success of their business. Yet most are still only in the beginning stages of making their social strategy a priority. Only 27% listed social business as a top strategic priority in 2011 and half admitted a social plan was necessary but not a strategic priority.
While no one is suggesting companies abandon their past marketing activities for a social only strategy; they need to consider revising their marketing mix to reflect this new age of interaction. And they need to do this sooner rather than later. The Harvard Business Review had a great article this last December called Branding in the Digital Age: You’re Spending You Money in All the Wrong Places, where it demonstrates how the consumer decision journey has dramatically shifted in past five years; altering how they buy products and services. However, companies still continue to embrace outdated marketing strategies and thus aren’t keeping up with their customer’s buying habits.
Due to this slow pace of social media integration, the gap between consumer’s adoption of social media and corporation’s ability to integrate social into their marketing mix seems to be widening. The question for companies today is; how long are you willing to continue allowing this gap to grow before your market share begins to erode. As small businesses, startups, entrepreneurs, consultants, and agencies begin to utilize social media to get an edge on their competition, you’ll start seeing some larger companies lose their footing.
