Alberta Business Marketing

Today most CEOs are faced with many questions regarding Social Media. What is the ROI? Is it worth investing in? What are the tangible benefits? A lack of a persuasive business case and contradicting information has resulted in some inertia with regard to investing in the space.

The prevailing opinion is that social media is a free marketing channel that is good for sharing information but has little consequence on reputation and business results. It is important to distinguish between social media and social networking. Social media is content created by people using publishing technologies. Social networking is focused on building online communities with shared interests and activities. It is also important to understand how users engage in social communities. The 90-9-1 Principle of “participation inequality” applies here- 1 percent of people create content, 9 percent edit or modify that content, and 90 percent view the content without contributing.

There is some good news. Those CMOs who have adopted Social Media successfully have used carefully crafted strategies that are aligned with their corporate business plans to cover three broad areas: increasing employee engagement, engaging customers and prospects and strengthening the company’s reputation. CMOs must consider some important facts about Social Media:

Engage employees

Here are some surprising insights from the 2011 Arcus Employee Engagement Research Report. Only 20 percent of employees are engaged with their organizations, the remaining are actively disengaged. Moreover, managers rank internal communication problems as the top barrier to productivity. 55 percent of employees feel they work in silos and only 28 percent of employees say their companies are effective in communicating with them. Social media can help. Here are three steps you can take to address these gaps:

• Create a “You Ask, We Answer” Forum. A key tool used by CEOs to leverage social media is to open a highly transparent two-way communication channel with employees. A “You Ask, We Answer” forum hosted on the company’s Intranet will enable employees to post questions with an anonymous post option. The response time is important. A 24 hour turn around will increase employee confidence and also demonstrate that the channel is important to the management team. Mandating an answer to every question also reinforces the transparency of the channel. The benefits of the Intranet Q&A strategy includes a deeper understanding among employees of the corporate strategy, the challenges faced by the company and how employees can help with a shared decision making process.

• Recognize Performance. A second strategy is to use the Internal channel to recognize outstanding employee performance. A monthly recognition program with an outline of the case that led to the award can inspire employees to find new and innovative ways to solve problems.

• Empower employees to blog. The third strategy for the Intranet would be to encourage Employee blogs. This allows employees to share ideas, knowledge and solutions within the organization. A scan of these ideas may allow the company to tap into new strategies to increase client satisfaction and solve problems that may otherwise not be apparent. Employee blogs also allows quick insights into departments and issues such as gaps in employee development, leadership issues or product sales related challenges.

Engage customers and prospects

• Define your social networking strategy. A good strategy is focused on sharing useful content that is of interest to your network of customers, employees and partners. A good strategy will also allow you to identify success points in your social media plan and leverage information that can position your company as a leader and innovator. A key driver of the process is a continuous and ongoing stream of relevant information that we call a “drip strategy”.

• Engage your contacts. Most of us have a presence on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Few of us really understand how to leverage the platform. Leading social media users will tell you that it isn't about the number of connections, it is more about the quality of connections. A good gauge is to ask if your connections would recommend your company or your work. A higher percentage of recommenders means your social strategy is working harder for you.

• Foster a community. Your sites should promote active participation and foster a community as part of an enhanced shopping experience. This is facilitated by a high level of social interaction and consumer-driven content that support the shopping experience and deliver superior value to the customer. A community can be a valuable asset to help your customer support team solve problems quickly and efficiently. Fans of your company can connect directly with other customers and offer solutions that could strengthen customer satisfaction.

Strengthen your social commerce strategy

• Focus on destination branding. Making your brand a destination is likely to drive your social commerce strategy. Create a channel to listen to what your customers are saying and respond and act quickly to criticism. Our research shows that customers can be a valuable source of feedback on satisfaction drivers and their input can dramatically increase sales. The approach allows more informed decisions about social commerce strategies and improvement of the customer experience. A key measure of success is how many of your customers become your advocates.

• Monitor online conversations. It is critical to monitor in-market conversations about your brand and products. A better understanding of the tone of conversations can provide valuable indicators of the value your brand delivers to customers. A good social media strategy will include metrics that provide insights on activity, sentiment, share-of-market, and themes of online conversations. Thought leaders who are also prolific bloggers are closely monitored. With a sound impact measurement strategy, companies will be able to assess the return on social media investments and also offer benchmarks for ongoing social media activities. Companies can use analytics tools such as our Reputation Analysis and Management Tool for a real time, on-demand and in-depth understanding of the reputation of their brand on the Web. An advanced analytics tool searches, tags, and indexes topics on the Web. It can filter thousands of online content sites and identifies relevant brand and reputation information by applying discovery tools that interpret content trends and provide deeper visibility into impacts on strategies and sales.

• Leverage key social networking tools. Explore emerging trends in social media tools such as Widgets (portable carts (e.g., zazzle.com) and brand engagement (e.g., lemonade.com), social bridging (enable shoppers to log into e-commerce sites without a registration ID) and Mobile Social Networking Applications (allow users to access social networks from their smartphones). These cutting edge tools create seamless interfaces with customers and your brand. They encourage more frequent interaction and robust two way communication.

Benchmarking your social media strategy can provide surprising insights about where and how you need to recalibrate your approach. Email me for best practices from 1500 companies and viewpoints of CEOs on social media.

Merril Mascarenhas

Tags: Analytics/Measurement, Research, social media, Strategy
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One of my favourite recent books is the new Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. He has one line I love: " Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?"

He said that in reference to some of his new product ideas. Product ideas that had not yet been conceived or at least not readily on the market. His view was that consumers did not know what they needed until he showed them what they wanted. A great view for a truly innovative company that is bringing out products that no one yet uses.

For most companies however, they are not the innovation leader that creates truly new markets. What they are doing is selling similar products to other companies in a competitive market. This is why most companies need market research.

Six ways to do market research:

1 - Do the traditional and hire a market research firm. They will do focus groups and surveys. Their anonymity can help them do unbiased research (it is tough to tell GM that you would rather drive a Toyota but easy to tell a market research firm).

2 - If the budget is limited, companies can do their own focus groups. The disadvantage is bias. The advantage is they can create a double advantage of keeping clients "sold" because they spend time with you and feel heard.

3 - It is easy to do surveys now. You can even use free tools like surveymonkey to do this. And a well worded survey can be a sales tool. If you ask a customer do they like you more because of X or Y, it draws attention that you are both X and Y.

4 - There is a new breed of company that monitors social media. Companies like General Sentiment read all the Tweets, blogs, news etc and even interpret if what is being said is good or bad. These are a good addition to traditional market research.

5 - I have often blogged about "fail often, fail fast, fail cheap" as a way to do market research. Experimenting is a great way to do research. I advocate selling products at a price. Giving away products is not a good test of the market. If people have to invest their hard earned money, it says something.

6 - I am a big advocate of split run testing. Try one thing in one market or sample and measure the return compared to a different approach in a different market or sample. Send 500 people an email saying "lowest cost" and 500 people saying "most reliable" and see which one draws best. Doing split runs can prove which approach works best.

Market research is here to stay and adds value despite the fact that Steve Jobs and Alexander Graham Bell did not do it.

Jim Estill

Tags: Research, Strategy
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Many of us pride ourselves on our memories.  If someone questions how we remember a given fact, we may even become somewhat irate.  However scientists are now finding out that the power of our memory may well be set at our birth.

Short-Term Memory

In this we are dealing particularly with short term memory.  Here is part of an article from McGill in Montreal that explains how short term memory functions.

In the course of a day, there are many times when you need to keep some piece of information in your head for just a few seconds. Maybe it is a number that you are “carrying over” to do a subtraction, or a persuasive argument that you are going to make as soon as the other person finishes talking. Either way, you are using your short-term memory.

In fact, those are two very good examples of why you usually hold information in your short-term memory: to accomplish something that you have planned to do. Perhaps the most extreme example of short-term memory is a chess master who can explore several possible solutions mentally before choosing the one that will lead to checkmate.

This ability to hold on to a piece of information temporarily in order to complete a task is specifically human. It causes certain regions of the brain to become very active, in particular the pre-frontal lobe.

The pre-frontal lobe is highly developed in humans. It is the reason that we have such high, upright foreheads, compared with the receding foreheads of our cousins the apes. It is no surprise that the part of the brain that seems most active during short term memory is located precisely in this prefrontal region that is well developed only in human beings.

Improving Your Memory

There are of course a number of ways in which you can improve your memory.  HelpGuide offers suggestions on  how to Improve Your Memory with Tips And Exercises To Sharpen Your Mind And Boost Brainpower

Their list includes the following:

• Don’t skimp on exercise or sleep
• Make time for friends and fun
• Keep stress in check
• Bulk up on brain-boosting foods
• Give your brain a workout - Use mnemonic devices to make memorization easier

There are some excellent suggestions in this detailed article.

Another source of Memory Improvement Techniques is MindTools.  They promise that using them will allow you to avoid frustrating memory loss.  You will be able to retain and recall more information.

Some Memories Work Better Than Others

The latest news is that some of us will never have memories that are as good as those of other people.  Recent research at Cambridge is now suggesting that our memory capability is set at our birth.

A structural variation in a part of the brain may explain why some people are better than others at distinguishing real events from those they might have imagined or been told about, researchers have found.

The University of Cambridge scientists found that normal variation in a fold at the front of the brain called the paracingulate sulcus (or PCS) might explain why some people are better than others at accurately remembering details of previous events -such as whether they or another person said something, or whether the event was imagined or actually occurred.  The research was published tin October 2011 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

This brain variation, which is present in roughly half of the normal population, is one of the last structural folds to develop before birth and for this reason varies greatly in size between individuals in the healthy population.  The researchers discovered that adults whose MRI scans indicated an absence of the PCS were significantly less accurate on memory tasks than people with a prominent PCS on at least one side of the brain.  Interestingly, all participants believed that they had a good memory despite one group’s memories being clearly less reliable.

Dr Jon Simons from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Experimental Psychology and Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, who led the research, said:

All those who took part were healthy adult volunteers with typical educational backgrounds and no reported history of cognitive difficulties.  The memory differences we observed were quite striking.  It is exciting to think that these individual differences in ability might have a basis in a simple brain folding variation.

This is indeed remarkable news and could be the reason why some memories are just not as good as others.

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Tags: brainware, memory, pre-frontal lobe, Research, retention, society
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Content. Social media. Lead management. Sales enablement. Data. In growing numbers of b-to-b organizations, sales and marketing leaders are realizing that it is around these five strategic imperatives that dramatic progress must be made to better align with changing buyer dynamics, and to achieve more predictable, accelerating revenues in 2012 and beyond.

As your organization plans for the upcoming year, now is the perfect time to assess whether it has the process discipline required to succeed in five cross-functional areas, and if not, what to do about it.

In this post, we share five key trends that we believe will impact marketing and sales functions in 2012, and discuss specifics around each.

1. Content Remains King
Creating compelling content that engages target audiences has been a primary focus of b-to-b marketers for more than a decade, yet most continue to struggle to keep up with evolving content requirements. B-to-b organizations realizing efficiencies and success in creating and managing highly effective content have done so through a disciplined approach, starting with assigning accountability for creating a content strategy that maps content to the information needs of specific buyer roles in defined buying cycle stages. SiriusDecisions research shows that the trend of b-to-b buyers engaging with sales reps later in the decision making process continues. Organizations are responding to this trend with inbound marketing strategies and the creation of better and deeper content to attract, engage and educate, which has resulted in buyers with deep knowledge, and well-formed opinions and perceptions. When they’re ready to engage, they expect salespeople to add even more to their knowledge, meaning that marketing needs to up its game in terms of the enablement content provided to reps and partners.

2. Leads: Volume Down, Quality Up
Marketing automation has made it easier than ever to design and execute multi-touch marketing programs that generate high volumes of responses. While this is great news, it hasn’t created the efficiencies many expected. Marketers are also busier than ever and spread so thin that it becomes difficult to do anything well. By focusing on efforts with lasting positive effects such as search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), automated recycle nurture programs and Website conversion optimization (WCO), and integrating those efforts with serialized marketing programs, marketers can create a steady stream of leads via sustained tactics that simply need monitoring and tweaking over time. Leading organizations are using inbound marketing, WCO and other strategies to create more leads while executing fewer programs. In addition to fewer programs, marketers should review the volume of leads delivered to sales and consider turning down the volume and increasing the quality. Our research has found that fewer, better-qualified leads result in a far more efficient sales force and contribute to improved pipeline dynamics. If salespeople spend less time reaching out to prospects who are not ready to engage or buy, they can spend more time focused on deals that are moving forward.

3. Enablement’s Next Step
While product and solution marketers and product managers have always focused on supporting field reps and channel partners, what often have been ad hoc activities are evolving into a more formalized, continuous process known as sales enablement. The core goal of enablement is simply put: Increase rep and partner productivity. Product teams, business units and product/solution marketing will continue to set business goals, define strategy and act as subject matter experts (SMEs) for their domain (e.g. industry, solution, product, customer segment). But making a person or group of people (formal or virtual) responsible for standardizing enablement initiatives (e.g. program frameworks, content templates) from disparate business units or product teams is critical to ensuring that sales resources can absorb what is being delivered to them. This function also should be responsible for sharing enablement best practices across the organization, and performing the data collection and reporting necessary to demonstrate how enablement is improving sales productivity.

4. Integrated Social Properties
For too many organizations, social media strategy still consists of maintaining a Twitter account or two, updating a blog a couple of times a week and accepting LinkedIn group members. In larger organizations, different business units or regions often establish their own social accounts with little thought or insight into what their colleagues are doing. This results in social accounts whose focus overlaps, along with content and links that are endlessly repurposed and a general dilution of uniqueness and brand – not to mention the confusion that customers, prospects and other constituents experience when they can’t find the most appropriate social property to engage with. Organizations should conduct a social properties audit to determine the state of all of their social accounts and properties, including blogs. In some cases where there’s topic-area overlap or low levels of engagement, consolidate accounts to drive the highest levels of interaction. One of the best ways an organization can advertise its social presence is to create a landing page that lists all of its social properties by topic area to make it easier for individuals to find the most appropriate account.

5. Data: Better Buyer and Customer Insight
Data quality gets a lot of attention because it is the foundation of successful sales and marketing interactions. Unfortunately, having correct and complete contact and account records doesn’t mean much if they aren’t used to learn about buyers and customers, rather than just catalog and count them. Once data quality processes are in place and trustworthy data becomes available, use it for more than results reporting. Insights are needed to deliver the right assets and interaction options to buyers and customers at the right time. It’s not necessary to wait until a data project is finished. In fact, data improvement will never be finished; it’s an ongoing process. As data-related investments are made, look for incremental uses of data around analysis and action. Focus on “need-to-have” data elements first, then expand based on the potential value a new data element could bring to insight-driven marketing. Don’t forget to build a data dashboard to show progress.

Much uncertainty remains in the global economy, making it unlikely that marketing budgets will grow significantly in 2012. To succeed, those responsible for marketing and sales must focus their resources where they will make the most positive impact. Another key to success will be finding leverage points and preparing for the future. By employing strategies with longlasting effects (e.g. inbound marketing, WCO), marketing can deliver better-quality leads with fewer programs.

Finally, when planning for the year ahead, be sure to determine on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis the steps that must occur to accomplish your goal. While the goals may be exciting, the key to success is the execution.

Ally Motz

Tags: Research, Strategy
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The reality in most organizations is that most market research is commissioned by the marketing department, giving them special access to rich data on customers, competitors and the category. Yet the insights gleaned from this research has implications outside of just the marketing department, making the sharing of this information an important role for marketers.

This had never occurred to me until I had a conversation with a friend who is one of the top sales reps at his company. We were discussing his company’s brand and I asked what they did to track the satisfaction of their customers. Although the company was religious in sending out csat surveys, I was shocked to discover that my friend had never seen the results.

While marketers are often responsible for developing the brand strategy, this is an unfortunate example of ignoring the rest of the business system in the development and execution of that strategy.

A few ways that this customer data could be used outside of marketing:
• Sales reps could learn about the biggest pain points so they could proactively address them on sales calls
• Operations could learn about – and fix! - an aspect of product delivery that customers don’t like
• Design could adjust the product delivery to make it more intuitive for their customers

But if market research data isn’t shared by marketing then your business will be prevented from reaching their full potential. With first access to market research data comes great responsibility. In addition to promoting the brand externally, marketing must promote customers internally so that the rest of the people in the business system can help build the company’s brand as well.

Here are some simple ways to improve sharing:
• Hold cross-functional meetings to review research results when they are available, and better yet, include these groups in the survey development process
• Create a wiki for different groups to share and collaborate based on research
• Post research result presentations on the corporate intranet

Sharing shouldn’t be that difficult. A shame that it doesn’t happen more often.

Ben Wise

Tags: Branding, Integration, Research
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