Posts Tagged ‘ROI’

Oh no, Twitter makes money

October 23 2009

The folks at Microsoft must be absolutely giddy with Bing’s first place finish in the race for Twitter feed access. That and good press on the launch of Windows 7 put a smile on Bill’s face.

I’m warming to the fact that we have another way to measure social media’s impact? The announcement should generate a revival of sorts for Twitter users that abandoned the medium and spark a wave of net-new users of the online app.

Twitter comes out a winner in this deal. Hello, revenue! This is the best thing to hit Twitter since Ashton Kutcher.
kutcher_cnn_twitter_090414_mn
Google and Bing! fare well. Facebook probably feels like it just got punched in the mouth.

Microsoft clearly is euphoric about beating Google to the punch with plans to integrate real-time tweets and Facebook posts into its Bing generated searches. Google, which has more than 65 percent of the search market, will soon follow with a similar service that could provide new ways to generate social network revenue.

Facebook users have the ability to block access to their posts, but few on Twitter use the invite-only feature. This is the definition of a game changer, and just when the digital marketing world is just starting to heat up.

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Go Deeper

July 21 2009

Consumer and B2B marketing differ on many fronts, but one difference in particular speaks to challenges when selling from one business to another. Buy cycle.

Revenue serves up a universal measure of success. How do you divi up credit for revenue won? If a client was touched by eight different marketing programs, 10 sales call and knows someone that works at your company, who gets a pat on the back? If all these happen over the course of 12 months, how far back do you go to find out how you found that customer in the first place.

Tell us how you do it in your organization.

We talk about the web, because we build web-based marketing programs. Makes sense. Let’s look at some of the key metrics we or our clients use to assign blame. Impressions, clicks, response, lead qualification, deals closed, leftover budget, and lifetime customer value.

Where is this building located?

Where is this building located?

The most important in the minds of our customer are leads qualified and deals closed. Those are the most important, but often difficult or impossible to quantify. The fact that a qualified lead can be defined five different ways within the same organization makes success all the more difficult to measure.

You can’t go wrong with impressions, clicks and response as long as we can agree on the definition of a response. By that I mean, it’s easy to measure campaigns by these three measuring sticks. Impressions and clicks are often good enough when measuring success of SEM. Clicks and response handle outbound and inbound metrics equally well.

Think of an inverted pyramid with impressions at the top and customer lifetime value at the bottom. The deeper you go the better off you’ll be when handing out those bonuses. (Oops, I wrote this post in 2006.) The deeper you go the better off you’ll be when handing out pink slips.

B2B often has a killer buy cycle. If you can’t remember how you got introduced to a new customer, where will you go to find the next one. Pick a handful of metrics and start following them today. Go deep!

If you’re not, you should be following @wefightboredom on Twitter here!

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B2B Needs a Digital Touch

June 1 2009

The trick to marketing metrics today is a digital touch point. Adapted traditional media is an easy-to-measure marketing medium, as long as you go digital.

Send a coupon to drive in-store traffic, then count coupons and calculate your ROI. Easy. Send a coupon for your online store, then count visitors and buyers to calculate ROI.

Rent a billboard and post a huge, easy-to-remember URL, then count site visitors and calculate ROI. Rent a person and put them on a street corner with a big sign and easy-to-remember URL, then count site visitors and calculate ROI.

billboard

The digital touch point is the to ticket quick metrics and ROI calculations. You can spend thousands, even millions automating your marketing programs across digital touch points, but for most that is overkill.

Today’s B2B marketing programs are smaller, more agile and highly targeted. If not, you’re throwing money away. Whether you go to a trade show, send direct mail, host a seminar, or buy placement in industry pubs, the key to all of these is a unique URL and some basic math.

Make sure your marketing has a different URL for every program you’re running, every magazine, every billboard, trade show, mailer or radio spot. This will tell you half the story by revealing the impact of each marketing media. The next metric takes more time, a better database and some elbow grease.

To calculate ROI you’ll have to decide, “Do I include sunk resource costs?,” or “Can we track one person across all digital touch points?” Rough numbers are better than no numbers, so don’t be afraid to spit ball.

If you go to a trade show and no one noticed, it’s probably time to spend that money elsewhere. You might be afraid to find out just how much a trade show costs. We hear the same story all the time. “I have to go to the trade show, because my competition will be there.” Your customers can’t afford to travel, so you and your competitors end up eyeballing each other’s booths. “It’s networking,” how do you capture the return on that investment?

tradeshow

Save your gas money. Go virtual. Find new and unique ways to grab attention and hold it. We use personalized microsites to do just that and at the end of the day our customers able measure the impact of our program. The same may not be true of your other marketing spend.

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