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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“A weekly 'marketing lesson' from Quizative on the heels of its participation as a 'Marketing Mentor" in the reality show Recipe to Riches airing on the Food Network. Previous episode write-ups here.

Recipe to Riches: Episode 5
Marketing Lesson: Even the Experts will Disagree

In this emotionally-packed episode, the two finalists were Sonya Walos with her gluten-free cookie and Donna Feir with her breakfast cookie. Donna joined us at Quizative to help bring her product to market.

Donna’s recipe was inspired by her love of Stampede breakfasts. She had creatively managed to combine the flavours of pancakes, bacon and maple syrup into one neatly packed cookie! With all the different flavours and ingredients it was hard to believe there was still a cookie in there. The inspiration of the Stampede and the distinctiveness of bacon led us to the name “The Bacon Stampeder” and the tagline “may contain traces of cookie.” Donna loved it! With the name as inspiration we set about helping her plan a full-fledged rodeo in the city!

The team at FUSE Marketing Group worked with Sonya and arrived at “Smart Cookie” to name her recipe which everyone found tough to believe was actually gluten-free. Sonya thought the name was brilliantly simple. In the end, more consumers preferred the taste of Sonya’s cookies. The benefit of being on trend and gluten-free tipped the scales in her favour and she took home the $25,000 prize that day.

In the final segment as the judges debated the merits and weaknesses of both products, they really tended to dislike the names. Despite the love of the names from the contestants, Quizative and FUSE, the judges felt that “The Bacon Stampeder” was confusing. They also didn’t think that “Smart Cookie” was an accurate claim - and they didn’t like that gluten-free was dropped from the name. In fact, one judge, Tony Chapman, said that whoever won had to agree to change the name! Now apparently between filming and the packaging of the winning product something changed because the name of the product on shelves at Loblaws is still “Smart Cookie.” The point however is that even experts will disagree with each other from time to time.

On one hand you had the competitors and two very experienced agencies who loved the names. On the other hand you had a panel of qualified judges who didn’t. If you were stuck in the middle and had to make a decision what would you do? The answer is simple. Test it. In the show, with only 24 hours there was no time for testing or even second guessing, but in the real world, put it to a test. Survey your customers and target audience, test sales in control markets, conduct research and see what your customers have to say because ultimately they’ll vote with their dollars.

The lesson here is that there will come times when the experts disagree. That’s normal. If you’re the one making the decisions do what you can to test your alternatives with actual customers. Do it right and you can make an informed decision.

Adrian Capobianco

Tags: Branding, Strategy
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Marketers are measuring more of their activity today than ever before. With an increase in measurement comes an increase in results (well, at least we hope so, right?). But what if we as marketers aren’t measuring the one thing that can have a large impact on our ROI?

You are likely familiar with the famous words of John Wanamaker, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Looking at the returns marketers have come to expect on their marketing efforts, it's become clear to me that we are in-part focusing on the wrong metrics. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s very important to measure reach and conversion rates, but when you are achieving click through rates of 1%, clearly, there is room for improvement.

I believe one of the metrics we should be focusing more of our attention on is how we can reduce our marketing waste. Since our waste tends to be significantly larger than our productive activities, we can create more value by reducing our waste than by increasing our productive activities.

For example, if we are digital marketers and we focus on increasing our productive activities, we might aim to increase our CTRs by 10% (ie from 1% to 1.1%). However, if we focused on how we can reduce our waste by 10% (ie from 99% to 89.1%), we would improve our overall returns by 9.8%.

So, what do you think? What can you start doing to measure and reduce your waste?

Josh Singer

Tags: Analytics/Measurement, Strategy
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A weekly 'marketing lesson' from Quizative on the heels of its participation as a 'Marketing Mentor" in the reality show Recipe to Riches airing on the Food Network.

Intro and Episode 1 here
Episode 2

Recipe to Riches: Episode 3
Marketing Lesson: What’s in a Name? Quite a bit!

In this week’s episode, the final two came down to energetic Diana Petrini with her Olive Lapedonasi and the gentle giant John Grass who joined our team at Quizative. Right off the bat John stepped up with his presence. His sheer size and giant handshake dominated the room but he didn’t dominate conversation – he was open to our feedback and direction all the way.

Much of the marketing-related conversation this week centered on the product names and whether they were good, bad or just plain confusing? John came to Quizative with his “Chicken Grenades.” When it comes to naming a product or company, many times we balance the dual challenge of making it descriptive vs.distinctive . Take for example iTunes vs. Google. The name iTunes is descriptive and tells you that you’re likely dealing with some form of digital music. Google on the other hand tells you nothing about what it is or does, but it stands out. Google’s name is distinctive.

The name “Chicken Grenades” is actually a bit of both. You know there’s chicken but frankly his recipe also included the ever popular bacon, plus cheese, jalapenos and spices. By adding “grenade” to his product name he instantly became distinctive. True naming exercises go through many rounds of revisions, many iterations, much debate and often extensive research (feel free to ask me about the process and strategy behind naming our agency Quizative!). In working with John to name, design, market and sample his product in less than 20 hours there was none of that - just experience and instinct. He liked the name, the team at Quizative liked the name and we ran full steam ahead with it.

Diana on the other hand went with the traditionally accurate name “Oliva Lapedonasi” – it is descriptive, but downright confusing. She made a great pitch to the judges on other food categories that had tough names which have become renowned, but in the end they felt it was still confusing. Throughout the show they had to refer to her product as generic “stuffed olives.” Imagine someone walking in to a grocery store that couldn’t remember her product name and asking for “those stuffed olives.” What are the chances they’d end up with her product?

When it came down to it, the instinct of the judges also agreed with the distinctive Chicken Grenades. Tony Chapman said he liked it. Galen Weston said, “… it was a blockbuster of a name.” At the store level and in homes across the country the judges could imagine families asking for “those grenades.” In the end, John took home the $25,000 weekly prize based on a combination of his product, the taste and yes – the name!

The lesson learned here is that when it comes to naming, if you can be distinctive, do it!

Adrian Capobianco

Tags: Strategy
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