Source: Canvas Magazine, June 2009
Excerpt From: www.printinthemix.rit.edu
In the 2009 Advertising’s Impact in a Soft Economy, Ad-ology Research studied adults’ perceptions about companies that continue to advertise or do not advertise during a recession. The findings are particularly valuable for printing companies and their sales representatives as well as their customers.
More than 48 percent of U.S. adults believe that a lack of advertising by a retail store, bank or auto dealership during a recession indicates the business must be struggling. Likewise, a vast majority perceive businesses that continue to advertise as being competitive or committed to doing business.
The study finds that advertising appears to play a key role in consumers’ views of how a business is doing, and by not advertising, businesses may be sending a warning signal to current and potential customers.
Other Key Findings:
- TV, newspaper, direct mail, and Internet top local media from which consumers saw or heard an ad within the last 30 days that led them to take action.
- 40 percent of consumers use coupons more now than a year ago.
- Most consumers are willing or more willing to pay more for ‘healthy’ or ‘organic’ products than they were a year ago.
- A ‘deeply discounted price’ was the number-one factor that would make consumers more likely to purchase a big-ticket item (+$1,000).
- Store Web sites ranked second only to search engines as the way consumers reach products and shop online.
July 1st, 2009
Source: PIA: The Magazine, May 2009
Source: John Leininger, Professor, Department of Graphic Communications, Clemson University
You do not have to be involved with variable-data printint (VDP) for very long to hear someone tell you about the importance of data, but it goes much further than just starting with good data.
It has to be relevant and inserted strategically. The critical element of data management that separates success from failure in a printed piece is more than just cleaning up the data. It has to do with enhancing the data, selecting relevant information that will created a desired action or response. Going one step further, it deals with linking the data from one source to another source. I do not mean to minimize the importance of properly cleansing and preparing the data. You are wasting your money if the mail piece never gets delivered because of an incorrect address, but what is going to be covered here is preparing an effective message that is based on compiled relevant data personalized for the individual.
Cleansing Data
We did a recent test with a variable-data research experiment for an alumni mailing. We received the ready-to-use list from the campus data service department. They informed us the list had been run through the National Change of Address (NCOA) registry. There were 8,770 records, and 1,000 records failed the NCOA process. This seemed high at about 11%. The USPS expects a typical NCOA pass-through to drop about 5.51% of the records.
Next we ran the list through a commecial postal software program to CASS (Coding Accuracy Support System) certify and DPV (Delivery Point Validation) the data to properly format and check for a valid address and then through the NCOA registry; we recovered 850 of the 1,000 names USPS claimed failed NCOA. In this same process there were 200 addresses from the “good” addresses of their sort that failed NCOA in our sort. Why? When you do an NCOA cleanse, you have a chance to decide how strict you want to be on any questionable address - we keep it at the highest threshold but USPS may have been accepting a questionable address. The 850 names were recovered because NCOA makes a comparison to the actual address. If one or two things are different (say an abbreviation or the North/East/West/South direction is not correct) it will fail the NCOA comparison. That is why you always want to CASS and DPV the list first. This process standardizes the address format (and in some cases corrects the address) so a match when running it through the NCOA registry is more likely. It takes a bit longer, but it makes a difference as is evident from this single example.
Maximize Your Data
So what do you do to get the most out of your data? The first place to focus is where the data came from. The Direct Marketing Association in their 2008 Statistical Fact Book, 30th Edition, states the average overall response rate from using an outside list is 4.9%, and when using an internal list is 11.8%. Keep in mind this is an average. If you do a great job with your direct mail piece, it can be higher - a poor job will be lower for either list. But using this as a ballpark number, the data is telling you the internal list of customers will yield better results than an outside list of customers.
Customers constantly say they do not have good data. But if they have 500 to 1,000 customers who have purchased their product you can take the list and send it to a commercial list company like USADATA, InfoUSA, Melissa Data or AccuData. These companies have compiled hundreds of background characteristics about people who live in our country through public information, including: Census data, motor vehicle registration cards, magazine subscriptions, telephone directories, and surveys. They will take the list of customers, append the original data with new information from their databas, and then analyze the names to determine what commonalities show up throughout the customer’s database. If you find that 55% of the people are male between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-five, own their home, etc., you can ask for another 10,000 names of people with those exact same characteristics. If you use this type of list, even though it is considered an outside list, the responses will increase because you have focused on a group of people that appreciates your customer’s product. Once you have the profile, you can continue to use the report to locate similar people in a wider geographic area.
Response Rate
The overall average response rate mentioned earlier for outside and internal lists (4.9% and 11.8%) includes multiple contacts with the consumer (through direct mail, phone calls, emails, PURLs, personal visits, etc.). Unless you run some type of analytical setup, an outside list is just a general list of poeple who live in a certain area. Compare this percentage to direct mail where the DMA 2007 average response rate is 2.15% (this is only for contacting through direct mail and that is why it is lower than the overall average response rate). This 2.15% is a mythical number that customers consistently make comparisons to, and it means nothing if you cannot compare it to a relevant direct mail piece. It is an average, and the chances your customer’s mailing will be average is no better than it being above or below average.
Things are always changing in the world, and if you try to compare a variable-data printed piece to a static piece mailed twelve months ago, six months ago, or a month ago, it is not a fair comparison. The offer may be different, and the environment may have changed - gas prices, the economy, the weather, the political environment, and the cultural group to which the mailing is being sent. You should randomly pull out a group. if the total production run is 4,000 or more, 5% is an acceptable number to send a static piece to. The rest of the group gets the variable treatment. This way you can determine what would have happened without the variable data, and if there was a lift in the value of adding variable-data personalization you can prove that to your customer. Likewise, if you compare a group from a general outside list to a profiled list, while always maintaining a 5% static control group, you can show there is value in profiling your customer’s customers. The more you know about an individual, the more targeted you can make the promotional piece.
The Data
So, what if you do not know much about the person? To start, when you confirm their address you have access to many different things related to the address - most deal with the USPS encoding of the data and coding for mail delivery, but you can identify the country, the congressional district, and even the longitude/latitude of the house. Additionally, some mail processing programs allow you to identify the gender, parse out the address elements, and show the short or long city names. This means you can identify things like the community college they might attend, their senator or representative, and the distance from a store to their house. if you want to increase the value of the information that you can identify from someone’s address, you can upload the address to a list company and they can return up to 400 attributes for that individual record. Their business is to gather and track this information for business-to-consumer and business-to-business strategies. One such company is USADATA. One their website, http://www.usadata.com/consumer.html, they list several hundred data fields that can be analyzed; the major categories deal with households, homeowners, individual, special interests of the individual, automobiles, health, high-tech status, marketing segmentation, travel, wealth indicators, and live events.
Think of how you may be able to relate data from this service to existing data available on any subject. If you know when someone was born, got married, or graduated from college on a certain data, you can link that data to a list of events or facts from that year. If someone was born in 1956, they typically will pay attention to the list of facts from that year. Emotion or nostalgia may be the driving force, and people will read on if you tell them in 1956 the New York Giants won the NFL football championship, a gallon of gas cost 30 cents, the median household income was $4,780.00, Around the World in 80 Days was the best picture, etc. Or you could link information about the state where they were born into a database about the state flower, the state tree, the state bird, the state motto, etc. You can also collect data when they log into a Web page or respond to a PURL and then link the data to an existing database. If you find out, through a PURL, the name of the person’s favorite NASCAR driver, you can link all sorts of data about that driver and their team to the original database. This is done with the use of relational databases.
When you are ready to merge the data for a variable-data piece, all of this data is available through the links and any specific fields can be pulled out to create a flat, delimited database to be used in the variable-data application. You can have dozens of databases linked together to create a unique set of data you can bring up for a given individual based on their own history.
Success vs. Failure
What really separates the successes from the failures is knowing what data you want to use and how to reach the customer. You have to treate a twenty-five-year-old differently from a fifty-year-old. you have to start thinking in terms of strategic marketing tactics based on data you have gathered or know from a history on an individual or company. Printing has become more than putting ink or toner on paper. You need to work with a customer to analyze what you can do to help create a response from the marketing material you are producing for them.
There are so many great resources available for you to review. Strategic Database Marketing by Arthur M. Hughes can serve as the marketing bible for a company working with variable-data printing. He goes into philosophical discussions on how to manage and maximize the value of a database. He also provides a matrix dealing with the recency, frequency, and the monetary (he refers to this as RFM) analysis of customers’ purchasing history to identify the best customers to market at any given point of time. He offers a white paper on this topic RFM Migration Analysis - A New Approach to a Proven Technique, co-authored by Jim Sellars, on his Web page - http://dbmarketing.com/articles/Art123.htm. You will find other useful tools on his website and several downloadable files to work with. His book is a must-read if you are going to become a marketing service provider for the variable-data segment of our industry.
List Companies
The list companies are also great resources for material to help you view databases not as a tedious and difficult task but rather as a value-added service that can set you apart from your competition. AccuData is a strong list company, and they offer several white papers on marketing concepts to help you sell the service to your customer. The following white papers are available to download for free from http://www.accudata.com/White+Papers.26.lasso. All of these topics are relevant to almost everything you do when approaching a customer from a marketing perspective.
- Targeting Repeat Buyers: Building a High-Performance Customer File
- The Marketer’s Guide to Descriptive vs. Predictive Marketing
- 3 Ways to Improve Customer Care through Data Hygiene
- Quick Study: 85 Ways to Jump-Start Demand Generation
- 30 Questions to Jump-Start Your Business: A Guide to Expanding Your Marketing Services
- Generating Buyers, Not Leads: Best Practices for Finding High-Propensity Buyers
In Summary
You need to understand where you can locate data and how to merge it together with plans to bring it into a variable data application. Without planning a strategy for the marketing message to properly communicate with the customer, whether it is business-to-consumer or business-to-business, you will just end up with a marketing piece with average results. Tool up with new employees or train the existing employees to look past the mechanics of doing their job. It is not just what you have to work with, it is what you do with what you have. Success is not an accident; it takes a strategic plan and proper implementation of variable data.
June 23rd, 2009
Source: Marketing News; 06.15.09
Author: Elisabeth Sullivan
Zeroing in on markets of one has long been talked about; now technology is making it doable. But beware of the pitfalls, and the caveats of doing it wrong.
The reigning mantra in marketing is to target the right message to the right person at the right time. For many, it’s the marketing ideal: Deliver customized, relevant messages to interested consumers, and you’ll get demonstrable returns and cut down on marketing dollars wasted on irrelevant messaging to uninterested consumers.
That’s hypertargeting in a nutshell. New technology coupled with calls for relevance and accountability are prompting more and more marketers to move from a predominantly mass marketing approach to a hypertargeting model. But before you skew your marketing mix toward a more targeted strategy, make you you’re still casting a wide enough net.
From Mass to Micro
The traditional push models of mass marketing and advertising no longer are enough with today’s increasingly enlightened and empowered consumers who expect more targeted communications. Many mass channels, themselves, are becoming more targeted mediums - with newspapers going local or moving online, and network television giving way to cable television and now DVR-driven TV. The old ways are rapidly being supplanted by a more interactive, consumer-focused model in which well-tailored messages are aimed at small consumer niches based on increasingly accessible and detailed consumer data. Hypertargeting has come to the fore.
Direct marketers have been using hypertargeting for years, and now that more marketers have access to consumers’ demographic, psychographic, behavioral, attitudinal and lifestyle data, the technique is growing throughout the industry. Digital marketers can use behavioral and keyword targeting tools to reach consumers online based on their web browsing behaviors and social network profiles. And even cable television providers are getting in the game: Marketers soon might be able to hypertarget TV-viewing consumers based on data gleaned from their cable TV set-top boxes.
“I believe that the trend is towards more targeting, and that’s fundamentally a good thing for consumers,” says Andy Fisher, vice president of analytics at Razorfish, a Seattle-based digital marketing agency with clients such as Red Bull, Starwood Hotels and Williams-Sonoma. “In an era of consumer control, advertising that doesn’t offer value to consumers will go away,” he says. When done well, targeted, relevant marketing messages “drive efficiency for everyone.”
The ROMI Factor
In this era of accountability, marketers are seeking effective methods to generate demonstrable returns on marketing investment. According to Randy Stone, CEO of Marketing Management Analytics, a Wilton, Conn.-based marketing mix modeling firm, “The theme is to eliminate as much waste as possible.”
Hypertargeting is a cost-efficient and -effective tactic because marketing messages are sent to consumers who are likely to be interested in receiving them, which decreases waste and most likely generates higher ROMI than more broadly dispersed messages, Stone says. “It’s ideal to target people who are most receptive to your message” because, as far as ROMI is concerned, the odds are then stacked in your favor.
For example, a recent marketing campaign to mark the launch of Irving, Texas-based Kimberly-Clark Corp.’s Huggies Pure & Natural diapers skipped traditional TV advertising in favor of an integrated campaign targeting new and expectant moms through print and online ads, Web sites, in-store promotions, direct mail and in-hospital TV programming. “A level of broad messaging is certainly needed as well,” and TV advertising isn’t out of the question down the line, says Tim Abate, Huggies’ senior brand manager. “But for this launch, print advertising and direct mail can serve that [broad messaging] purpose, while being much more targeted to reaching expectant and new moms than TV. …Rather than layering on further broad messaging with TV on top of this, investments were prioritized to enable the online programs and the deeper and more meaningful product experience to be amplified.”
Such a strategy has multiple benefits: It reaches an inherently more receptive audience than a mass marketing channel would, greatly increases the chance that the marketing message will be perceived as relevant and eliminates the costs associated with reaching consumers outside of the company’s targeted audience.
Relevance At A Price
While the ROMI generated from hypertargeting efforts might be high, the necessary investments of time, money and resources can also be substantial, says Nick Moore, executive vice president and chief customer officer at Wunderman, a New York-based direct marketing and promotions firm with clients such as Coca-Cola, Diageo and Nike. “The more [narrowly you target your messages], the more creative executions you need,” Moore says. “Instead of relying on 10 or 20 separate ads, you’re maybe going to have to make 100 or 200. …People might be underestimating the cost of creation.” Savvy targeting is one thing, but when the prefix “hyper” is adde, it’s another thing altogether. As marketers zoom in closer and closer on niche consumer segments or individual consumers, expenses rise.
Last fall, the New York-based National Hockey League worked hard to compile the necessary resources to institute a hypertargeted email strategy this season. The NHL began targeting e-newsletters based on fans’ affiliations and locations, sending 62 versions of the e-newsletter weekly - two for each of the 30 teams to suit fans both in the United States and Canada, and two generic league e-newsletters tailored to fans in the two countries. Another NHL e-mail campaign to promote the start of single-game ticket sales had 930 versions, according to an NHL spokesperson.
That kind of personalization certainly makes consumers take notice, but according to stone, there’s a point after which marketers’ messages can become too hypertargeted. If there are 200 million active U.S. consumers, hypertargeting is not about creating 200 million unique messages, Stone says. “Despite what our moms told us, that we’re all individuals, that we’re all unique, when it comes to marketing, maybe not so much. …There are a lot of Randy Stones out there,” he says. “I think the ieal would be the highest point on the response curve and the profitability curve” before you pass the point of diminishing returns.
‘You Don’t Know Me’
Moreover, marketers shouldn’t be so quick to assume that they know who those Randy Stones are. One of the primary flaws of many hypertargeting systems is that the targeting capabilities are only as good as the limited consumer data available. “Hypertargeting is based on massively improved data, but here’s the thing: As a customer or consumer, I know you don’t know me. You just know some things about me,” Wunderman’s Moore says. “The risks are getting it wrong. … The more relevant you try to be, the more wrong you are when you’re not relevant,” which can be very damaging to a brand.
Plus, relevance is subjective, really, and it can be difficult to determine relevance based only on available customer data. A 36-year-old male, for example, might consider baby diaper ads to be relevant, even though his online profile and browsing behavior give no indication that he’s about to be a dad. “If you only look backwards and extrapolate from past behavior, you’ll be missing out on new opportunities,” Moore says.
In The Mix
Experts say it’s likely that the progression toward more targeted marketing will continue, but marketers must keep their wits about them. No one targeting tactic can do everything, and marketers should be wary of casting too small a net.
“It’s not a panacea,” says Dave Morgan, a pioneer in the online behavioral targeting space who founded online behavioral targeting firm TACODA Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL. Morgan now serves as CEO and director of Simulmedia, a New York-based media marketing company that uses predictive technology and aggregate market data to help TV companies optimize the placement of on-air program promotions. “I learned this in targeting at TACODA: There are a lot of people that our product isn’t right for,” he says, and mass marketing tactics still must play a pivotal role in many companies’ marketing strategies.
For example, there’s no need for a big-box retailer like Wal-Mart to break down its message to fit increasingly smaller segments of consumers, Morgan says. Meanwhile, for more specialized brands with significantly smaller target audiences, there’s less of a need ot blanket the marketplace with messages if only a small portion of consumers will be receptive to them.
Consumers obviously respond well to relevant ads, but marketers musn’t forget that marketing services an educational function, and mass-marketed messages help build brand awareness and brand equity. “From a logical point of view, if I talk to my target group, that should be enough,” says Martin Lindstrom, a brand consultant and author of Buyology: The Truth and Lies About Why We Buy who was recognized on Time magazine’s list of the world’s most 100 influential people of 2009. He was also featured in MN’s March 15 cover story. But companies that rely too heavily on hypertargeting and put fewer resources into mass marketing messages risk losing visibility in the marketplace. “I’m not a big fan of mass communication, but let’s be frank here: It’s too dangerous to skip it altogether because you need that mass appeal so that [consumers] feel that this [brand] is respected in our society. And if that totally disappeared, many brands - not all - would suffer from it. So you need to have a fine balance,” Lindstrom says.
‘Somewhat More Receptive Person’
Razorfish’s Fisher says both consumers and marketers can benefit from more targeted marketing, but there’s no need for marketers to go to extremes. The “hyper” in hypertargeting is simply a good motivator. “One of the mantras of the industry is to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. I think that’s false,” he says. “Really, I think it’s to deliver a somewhat better message to a somewhat more receptive person at a somewhat more optimal time.”
Adds Morgan, “Consomers get dramatically more marketing messages than they used to … most of which are irrelevant.” But more often than not, general market data is enough to help marketers target their messages appropriately and ensure that they are perceived as more relevant. “The question is, do you need hypertargeting or do you need better optimized advertising? … Do you need a rifle or do you just need a better choke?” he says. “You don’t need to have it perfect. You just need to make it better.”
June 22nd, 2009
Source: Deliver Magazine, May 2009
Author: Bruce Britt
Customized mailings help a New England car dealership nudge sales higher.
When customers walk into a Prime Motor Group auto dealership to check out its vehicles, they may not drive off with a new car - but they haven’t heard the last of the dealership’s pitch either.
Rather, as part of an aggressive follow-up campaign, Prime Motor dealerships get their messages back in front of customers within days, this time in the form of a cutting-edge and highly personalized mailing that is winning rave reviews for its immediacy and detail - and winning the dealership business with its savvy.
Indeed, at a time when many companies are slashing their marketing due to economic uncertainty, Prime Motor franchises are raising the ante on their direct mail investment. Along the way, the Massachusetts dealership group is proving that smart and consistent customer communications, not fewer, can offer businesses distinct advantages over competitors to maintain vigorous marketing efforts.
Dubbed the “Thank You for Visiting” campaign, the Prime Motor effort centers on a 5-1/2-by-8-inch postcard that the franchise mails to prospective customers within days of their visit to one of the import dealership’s showrooms or its Web site. Made of heavy, high-gloss stock, the card naturally features the prospect’s name, a minimum for customized mailings. But in an even deeper dive into the personalization pool, the card also provides the names, contact information and photos of the specific salesperson who pitched the prospect and of the sales manager who assisted. Further, the card includes a photo of the exact model, color included, that the mail recipient test drove (or showed interest in online) and a savings coupon for that particular auto.
The card bears a message from a Prime Motor Group general manager: “Thank you for your recent visit to our auto dealership. I hope you found your sales consultant to be helpful and informative. I want you to know that we are committed to providing you with a buying and ownership experience truly ‘like no other.’” The message concludes with direct contact info and an invitation for the customer to call or e-mail with any questions, comments or suggestions.
When the franchise implemented the campaign, the idea was to make deeper inroads into the finicky Boston luxury car market and to reinforce brand perception of Prime Motor as an industry leader. “We’re trying to give that customer some enticement to return to the dealership and make a purchase,” says Anthony Monteiro, former director of business development at Prime Motor Group and the brains behind the “Thank You” campaign. “It’s absolutely an attempt to establish a relationship and trust, but it’s also an attempt to wow the customer, to receive this postcard and basically run in the house and say, ‘Holy mackerel! Look at this!”
Since the launch, Prime Motor Group has sent out an average of 300 postcards a month - about 7200 since the rollout. “Thank You for Visiting” cards have gone out to potential car buyers throughout the Prime Motor Group family of franchises, which specializes in several high-end import models.
Monteiro reports that response to the campaign has been positive, with all 14 Prime franchises averaging about three to five postcard-generated sales per month. To track the effectiveness of the campaign, salespeople enter coupon information into Prime’s online CRM tool whenever a customer comes in to redeem the offer.
“We also get anecdotal feedback from the guys on the showroom floor saying, ‘There’s this guy we’ve been trying to reach for a week, and the next thing he shows up with his postcard,” says Monteiro. “Or we get customers saying [of the mailing], ‘How do you do that?’ They’re fairly impressed.”
The new system has allowed Prime to save on its overall media expense by cutting back on newspaper advertising. “We believe in keeping existing customers and going after customers through electronic media and direct mail,” says Monteiro. it’s shooting fish in a barrel, versus throwing a big net out there and hoping somebody picks your ad up.”
Monteiro admits that Prime Motor Group had been giving short shrift to the mail channel the past few years despite the medium’s reliability and effectiveness. “Ten years ago, we would use direct mail for everything,” he recalls. “Then the internet came along, and you could blow 50,000 e-mails out there and pretty much accomplish the same thing. Well, in the past five to seven years, our e-mail campaigns became ineffective because a lot of the e-mails were hitting spam filters.
“So I said ‘Let’s do some postcards’,” he continues. “When you get a postcard, you have to hold it in your hand and make a decision. Typically people put them aside if they think it’s something they can use. That’s where we found that postcards are so effective.”
As part of the campaign development, Monteiro and AmazingMail.com collaborated to create an information matrix that included a variety of interchangeable demographic components. The system can generate personalized postcards within hours of a customer’s showroom visit or Internet inquiry.
Now when a customer comes in to inquire about a purchase, Prime is ready with sales information and a follow-up pitch. So if the customer tests out, say, a six-cylinder, four-door Japanese luxury sedan, but decides not to buy it, Prime’s system goes into action. Hours after the visit, AmazingMail.com gets a feed of the potential buyer’s name, the model he or she looked at and the identity of the salesperson and sales manager who spoke with the prospect. The system will pull an image of a car and put it on the front of the card, and on the back include all of the information specific to that particular customer’s profile and preferences. Within three days, the customer will receive that postcard in the mail, with an offer specific to that particular car.
For Monteiro, the ongoing postcard campaign has driven home the importance of promptness in seizing on chances for follow-up dialogue with prospects. “These days, when you talk to anybody at marketing seminars, you hear that the message has to be timely and relevant,” Monteiro says. “Being able to accomplish that with a postcard was a home run. It’s been one of our cheapest and most effective ways to bring customers back into the store.”
June 9th, 2009
Source: M Guide: 2008-2009
Author: John N. Frank
Monitoring social media is becoming a must for savvy marketers. Here’s how to put together an effective monitoring program.
Social media like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter give anyone who has ever had any problem with your company or organization the opportunity to tell not just their closest friends but the entire online world about it. That extraordinary reach is why social media monitoring is becoming a must-have component of your marketing toolkit.
The key elements of a social media monitoring plan include:
- Determining what your objectives are and how you will measure the success of any monitoring program
- Deciding on tools for listening. A variety of free services that can scan across the Web exist as a starting point. Pay services offer more analytics that the freebies do.
- Figuring out where and for what to listen. Experts advise finding blogs, social networks and Web sites where your key audiences go and monitoring those most closely.
- Knowing when to engage in conversations, whether positive or negative, that impact you. Not every offhand comment may be worth a full-blown response. Knowing when and how to answer can spell the difference between enhancing your reputation or adding to your woes.
- Providing information of value to your key audiences when you do engage in social media conversations. Simply trumpeting your product or service isn’t valuable; giving out information others can use is.
- Committing the time and resources needed to be successful. Simply having someone in PR or marketing responding to every comment about your organization may not be enough. Senior company executives also need to be involved.
If you haven’t begun your social media monitoring efforts yet, don’t be discouraged; neither have many other companies or organizations, says Rob Manfredo, an account director with KCSA Strategic Communications in New York. “Clients are starting to ask about it now,” he says. “People are really putting their heads together and trying to figure out where to get started.”
The starting point, experts say, is deciding on what you want to achieve. Having clear objectives - such as cutting negative comments by a certain percentage or garnering more positive comments, or even increasing sales - will help you determine if investments of time and money in social media monitoring are paying off. A full-blown program can cost anywhere from $1,000 a month to $100,000 a year depending on how extensive a commitment you make of technology and people, says Bret Clement, a team leader with Page One PR in Palo Alto, Calif.
Some of the most popular tools, however, are free. Google Alerts provides e-mail roundups of mentions of any term you enter into it, for example. “Because it’s Google, it has a certain appeal as the leader in search, but we do warn our clients about only relying on that,” says Jillian McDowell, social media specialist with Carmichael Lynch Spong in Minneapolis. Yahoo Pipes is a similar service. Brand Tags is a site where you can see how people perceive your brand. For blog monitoring, Technorati is the best known tracking site.
Simply waiting for daily reports isn’t enough, however. “There’s a lot to be said for going out there and actively seraching for your products,” McDowell advises. Go into Facebook and search for your company’s name, for example.
Courtney Lowe, director of sales and marketing with the Bedford Spring Resort in Bedford, PA., says he’s doing everything he can to keep watch on, and be actively engaged in, social media. That includes asking guests to post photos and videos of their stays at the resort on Facebook and using a $99-per-month analytical product to give him a report of things being said about the resort online. He has someone in his marketing department devoting 50% of her time to social media, making sure there are new posts on the resort blog from chefs, golf pros and other personnel, for example.
When it comes to sites like Facebook or Twitter, “we need to respond to everything, negative or positive. We want to have constant communications with our guests,” Lowe says. The resort’s general manager personally responds to negative comments.
Lowe’s efforts illustrate two important points in social media monitoring, experts agree. First, having a senior executive answer complaints is important. “Many a PR person has been burned for responding on behalf of their clients and not being transparent about it,” Manfredo notes. Always get responders within your organization who can actually address problems raised, he and others agree.
A second step Lowe has taken is also important: He’s looking at a variety of social media in addition to blogs and travel Web sites. “One of the first things to keep in mind is that social conversations happen across platforms. They don’t happen isolated in one platform. They start in Twitter, move to a blog, then YouTube. It’s a journey,” says Saurabh Wahi, a senior vice president with MWW Group, a public relations firm in East Rutherford, N.J.
That’s what Page One PR found in its work for SourceForge, a depository for open source software. It began its social media work on Twitter because many in the open source community - software developers who basically share their creations with the world - use Twitter, explains Shelly Milam, social media account manager with Page One. Finding key members of the open source world on Twitter and talking to them led to blog mentions of SourceForge and helped build positive word of mouth for it.
Social media monitoring is a journey, one you’d best start now to ensure you know who is saying what about your company.
June 4th, 2009
Author: Julie Shaffer, VP, Digital Technologies, Printing Industries of America
Source: Digital Printing Report: Volume 16, Number 4
According to Technorati, the leading weblog search engine, there are over 15 million active blogs on the Web. This number has been disputed and debated (usually in the form of blog posts), but even if that number is only true by half, the blogosphere puts forth one heck of a lot of talk, advice, and opinion. Blogs are just one form of social media, primarily Internet-based technologies and practices that allow people to interact, share, and discuss.
Most of us are aware of social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace (there are dozens more), but social media also includes virtual worlds (Second Life), micro-blogging (Twitter, Plurk), Wikis (Wikipedia), video sharing (You Tube), social news (Reddit, Digg), social bookmarking (Delicious, Google Reader), photo sharing (Flickr), forums, gaming, chatting, music, file sharing, and more. It is clear that the way we communicate is changing, and if we want to reach an audience with a message, it will be important to use, at least in part, these new social media to do so. Enter social media marketing.
Marketers are, or should, always be in touch with the communication channels used by their intended audience. Are marketers engaging social media to reach their audience? How are they doing that? Which media are they using? How much time are they spending there? All of these questions and more are answered in a new study commissioned by marketing consultant Michael Stelzner. This freely downloadable report is a great example of Stelzner practicing what he preaches on his White Paper Source website: offer an audience of free information (a white paper or study) and in return they give you information about themselves (by filling out that form to get that paper) which you can mine for more information.
The Social Media Marketing Industry Report, the result of surveying almost 900 marketing professionals, is a gold mine of information. As printers, we have been told (for years) that we are not good at marketing. If this is true, now is the time for us to catch up to marketing pros in general, who too, are just now jumping on the social media as a marketing platform. According to the study, a significant 72% of marketers have either just started or have been using social media for only a few months.
There are many gems in the study, including the fact that gaining exposure through social networks can result in qualified sales leads. Says the report, after only a few months and with as few as 6 hours a week, more than half of marketers have generated qualified leads with social media. Outside of purchasing ads on social sites, the only financial cost of social media marketing is time. However, a significant percent of participants said they strongly agree that overall marketing costs dropped when social media marketing was implemented.
Just how much time do marketers spend on social media sites?
Apparently, the longer one takes part in social networking, the more one is likely to get sucked in. The study cites that for those marketers just beginning to interact with social networks, the average time spent on them per week was two hours. For those who say they’ve been doing social media marketing for years, the time spent is 20-plus hours per week (although this was just under 10% of all respondents). Overall, 39% say they spend 10 hours per week on the social media marketing activities.
Surprisingly, the 30 to 39 year-old demographic group is most likely to be using social networking, followed by the younger 20 to 29 year-old group (perhaps because there are more marketers in the older age group). Still, marketers of all ages are taking part in social media interaction.
What does all this mean?
Communication is changing, social media are where people are communicating, and if you wish to reach them, you have to be there too. Grab this terrific free report here: http://www.whitepapersource.com/socialmediamarketing/
May 26th, 2009
Source: Marketing News, 05.15.09
Author: Elisabeth Sullivan
To help customers through these tough times and foster long-lasting relationships, B-to-B marketers need to tailor their offerings and messages to fit specific customers’ needs.
B-to-B marketers, forget the spray-and-pray approach. Today’s economic climate calls for a more targeted, more personal method: one-to-one marketing.
As this recession drags on, B-to-B customers are relying more heavily on their relationships with B-to-B providers. They want more attention, and more advice, than ever before. They want to do business with companies who know them and understand their needs. They want to be reassured that their purcahase decisions are sound and to receive relevant offers that make their jobs easier. They want to know they’re in good hands.
One-to-one marketing is just as it sounds: It’s the personalization of marketing in order to determine a customer’s individual needs and then to meet them. By tailoring marketing messages and offers to suit customers’ demographic and industry profiles, as well as their needs and desires, marketers can get customers’ attention, build lasting relationships and make it easier for customers to do business with their companies. One-to-one marketing also helps marketers foster customer loyalty and boost customer retention - two very important accomplishments in an economy that’s unfavorable to customer acquisition. It’s the ultimate in customer-centric marketing.
B-to-B marketers are “leading the charge” with one-to-one marketing tactics, says Rick Segal, CEO of HSR Business to Business Inc., a Cincinnati-based B-to-B marketing agency with clients such as Fidelity Investments, Kellogg’s and USG. “I think B-to-B marketers are more naturally oriented toward a more one-to-one or high-touch relationship with their customers,” he says. “In many cases, a B-to-B marketer knows who his customers are, knows where they are and might even know them by name.”
Adds Ralph Oliva, executive director of the Institute for the Study of Business Markets at Penn State’s Smeal College of Business Administration: “It’s always been one to one. …It really is all about the nature of the relationships you strike” and how you nurture them. The more a marketer knows about his customer - and the easier it is for that customer to continue his relationship with the company.
Like personal relationships, business relationships aren’t static, Oliva says. At the start, customers might need a deeper relationship to get to know a company well. Over time, though, their needs might lead to a more cursory relationship and, eventually, simply a transactional relationship when hand-holding no longer is necessary. Marketers have to know how to serve customers well at each stage. And while some customers aren’t buying now because of economic stresses, it’s a great time for B-to-B companies to develop one-to-one marketing tactics and tools to help build lasting, loyal relationships that will be profitable down the line, he says.
Of course, many B-to-B companies work through middlemen - retailers, distributors, wholesalers or consultants - so marketers have to find ways to circumnavigate the middlemen to foster stronger relationships with end users, Segal says.
For example, Makino Inc., a Mason, Ohio-based machinery manufacturer and an HSR client, is finding great success in building relationships with end users by hosting an ongoing series of industry-specific webinars, Segal says. The company uses highly specialized content to connect with end users online, creating a visible identity for the Makino brand and positioning the company as a thought leader in the manufacturing space.
Makino produces an average of three webinars each month and, thus far, has archived more than 100 on topics ranging from how to get the most out of your machine tools to how metal-cutting processes are done. The content is tailored to specific industries such as aerospace or the medical industry, and is promoted through occasional banner ads, press releases and personalized e-mail invitations sent to recipients based on their style of manufacturing, says Mark Rentschler, marketing manager at Makino.
The company had multiple objectives at the outset of its webinar series, Rentschler says. It wanted to build its database, generate leads and build relationships with end users by serving up relevant information to them online. Makino also wanted to increase its return on marketing investment and warm up its leads by using educational webinar content to prepare potential customers for a process-oriented dialogue. “We’re in a complex, business-to-business, manufacturing selling process,” he says, so anything that marketers can do to target a contact with information specific to his needs “frankly [helps] get him on the right path so he’s not just talking about price and product specifications.” It speeds up the sales cycle and makes it more efficient - for both the company and the customer.
After three years of hosting webinars, the results have been “outstanding,” Rentschler says. “We’ve built our database dramatically, we’re obviously generating leads, we’ve obviously reduced our cost per lead” and Makino also has reduced the need for some traditional, non-targeted marketing such as advertising and trade show appearances. “We’ve shifted dramatically into the electronic marketing area,” he says, allocating more of the company’s marketing budget to more targeted tactics. Makino has found a way to cut through the clutter and target customers with relevant information in a user-friendly format, he says.
Thread the Needle
Customers are stressed, and bogged down with marketing and advertising clutter. Rather than having to sort through innumerable irrelevant offerings to find the product or service that suits their needs, they want B-to-B providers to know them well enough to distill it all down for them, says Susan Aldrich, an SVP and senior consultant at the Patricia Seybold Group, a Boston-based customer experience and customer relationship management (CRM) consulting firm that works with clients such as Boeing, DuPont and Hewlett-Packard. “Customers in the B-to-B realm always say the same thing: ‘I want you to know about me and offer things that are relevant to me. … Don’t show me all 3,000 kinds of safety gloves. Just show me the ones you know I might buy,’ ” she says.
At smaller B-to-B companies, marketers often have the chance to interact with customers or to stay abreast of customers’ needs on a regular basis. For companies with mid- to large-sized customer bases, though, keeping track of individual customers’ needs, preferences and purchase histories can take a Herculean effort. but ever since the Web-based tools and tactics found a place in marketers’ toolboxes about 10 years ago, marketers have had the ability to compile more customer data and serve up more targeted messages - yet many are just now getting a handle on it, Aldrich says. “One to one in theory remained exciting; one-to-one in practice was one of those unattainable dreams. However, technology has improved vastly since then, [and now] a high degree of personalization is highly feasible. … These different marketing tools are starting to kind of reach out and connect.
A New Pattern
More marketers are reallocating their marketing budgets to increase their investment in more personalized, Web-based marketing channels. A recent study by the Aberdeen Group Inc., a Boston-based research firm, found that marketers in a range of industries have cut spending on traditional media: 62% have cut event budgets, 60% have cut TV and print spending, and 45% have cut trade promotion. And many marketers are reallocating marketing budgets to beef up technologies, tactics and strategies that allow for more personalized marketing: 68% are investing more in social media, 47% in e-mail marketing, 41% in online promotions, 38% in search engine marketing and 16% in mobile marketing.
Also, marketers now are finding ways to merge data they collect from multiple customer touch points to compile a more comprehensive profile of each customer. Information from merchandising, direct mail response and customer service interactions, along with data from e-mails, online surveys, Web site registrations, online transactions and behavioral tracking, for example, can paint a more complete picture of who the customer is and what he needs at any givent time. “I think that personalized marketing is based on puddles of customer data, and over time, those puddles are going to start to be connected,” Aldrich says.
Web analytics and CRM software can help ensure that customer data from one touch point or another doesn’t end up compiled in a spreadsheet that just sits on someone’s desk. But “apart from whatever wires and bundle bits you might employ for this task, I think what’s important is what’s at heart for the customer,” Segal says. An organization’s alignment and approach - more than the technology it chooses to employ - often determines its success in one-to-one marketing, he says. Everyone within an organization, from marketers, to sales reps, to customer service reps, should understand the customer and how his needs should be met.
“I’m not a big fan of solving your CRM problems in B-to-B by investing in a big software package, “Oliva agrees. The keys are to segment your customer base and work to make it more profitable; better mobilize your customer data; and invest in technology, training and tools to make your employees more efficient and effective at serving each customer, he says.
Smart marketers now allow customers to edit their own profiles to better reflect what they want marketers to know about them and which offers they might be interested in, Aldrich adds. And many now strive to make each customer’s online experience with a brand unique and relevant. E-mail marketing messages pertain not only to a customer’s industry, but also to his past purchase behavior with the company. Or when the customer logs into the company’s Web site, he’s greeted with a list of recommended products based on his profile, online behavior or purchase behavior.
Stitch it Together
Many companies are just starting to connect the pieces of the one-to-one marketing puzzle. “It can be hard to properly connect them,” and to figure out the process of “smushing all this stuff together and not smuching when you’re not supposed to,” Aldrich says. But the better a market knows his customers, the better he can serve them. Mass marketing is great for generating brand awareness or drumming up new business, but as Web 2.0 tactics become the norm, customers are starting to expect personalized interactions with companies. They want marketers to meet them where they are with what they want.
“Marketers have to be thinking about this right now,” Aldrich says. “The leaders are doing it, the smart ones are working on it and the ones with no budget are just waiting for the train to roll over them.”
May 13th, 2009
Source: Canvas Magazine, April 2009 (2008 Vertis Customer Focus Direct Marketing 2009)
- Timing of the piece arriving coinciding with the need for the service/product (67%)
- Consumer’s name on the front of the envelope (66%)
- The package looks interesting (60%)
- A special offer or discount (54%)
- The package looks important (52%)
- Feel something in the package (51%)
- A free gift or token inside (42%)
- Dated material enclosed (35%)
- None of these (5%)
May 7th, 2009
Source: Deliver Magazine: May 2009
Author: Greg Whiteman
With consumer spending sliding and the economy in a downturn, marketers are more pressed than ever to build relationships with target audiences. They must develop a bond that goes beyond a single sale and into long-term engagement with the brand. This type of interaction isn’t a marketing luxury, either. Engagement is quickly becoming one of the most important and hotly contested industry battlegrounds of 2009. And no channel can engage as potently as direct mail.
Consider that most businesses grow by acquiring new customers or increasing the amount of spending of existing customers. When you create a relationship with a consumer, you increase the likelihood that you will either win that customer’s loyalty or increase their share of wallet.
To this end, mail remains an ideal medium. It is a fundamental, familiar, easy and safe communications pipeline into homes. Moreover, mail stimulates multiple senses at once. And unlike typical internet marketing - where the consumer has to initiate contact with the company - mail brings your brand to the consumer. In fact, one USPS study shows that 98 percent of consumers bring their mail in each day, and that 77 percent of customers sort through and organize the mail immediately.
When consumers receive mail, they know they are in complete control of the relationship. They can open the envelope, remove the contents and decide whether or not to keep them. They know it’s a secure, private message, which helps them be open to an ongoing dialogue. There are none of the privacy concerns that in digital marketing frustrate the connection the company is trying to forge.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that the digital realm can’t strengthen the engagement.
But mail can target in a way digital just can’t match. In the home, one person is typically responsible for handling the mail. Known in our circles as the CEO of the Mail, this person is also the household’s bill payer and principal shopper in 85 percent of homes. That’s the person most marketers want to reach. There’s no similar connection between a computer user and the manager of home life. E-mail messages may get to the right home, but not the right person.
By the right person, I mean the influencer in the home. For instance, our research shows that, in three-fourths of American households, women are CEOs of the Mail. In these households, women are also overwhelmingly responsible for responding to marketing offers: 95 percent determine which ad materials to keep; 93 percent clip coupons; and 86 percent write the checks. So not only can mail engage, but it’s much more likely to engage this person most responsible for purchase choices.
Some marketers feel mail is not as effective at brand building as it is at generating response. But mail can be just as effective at building a relationship with a brand.
For instance, large retailers have always used mail to retain and strengthen relationships with existing customers. While some store mailers, like coupons or special promotion notices, aim to get customers in the store, other pieces communicate changes in the relationship with existing customers, such as upcoming merchandise or special events.
The retailers differentiate themselves by building a deeper relationship with their consumers, resulting in a definite advantage in the marketplace. Mail can engage customers like no other medium because consumers already trust it and are open to receiving it in a way that makes building marketing routines and relationships around it very easy.
May 1st, 2009
Source: RealBusiness Magazine
Did you know that…
When looking at the overall print market:
1) Digital production color page volume is expected to grow from 30 billion pages in 2007 to more than 330 billion pages by 2015 in North America, and from 21 billion in 2007 to more than 215 billion pages by 2015 in Western Europe. (Caslon & Company)
2) The total global digital printing market was valued at $68 billion 2007, up 122 percent from 2002. It’s expected to double again by 2012, when it will account for more than 21 percent of the total market value of the print industry, up from 11 percent in 2007. (Pira International)
3) Digital printing is expected to account for more than 21 percent of the total market value of the printing industry by 2012, compared to 11 percent in 2007. Offset will drop to 45 percent of the market from more than 50 percent in 2007. (Pira International)
When looking at the nature of print jobs:
4) Seventy-eight percent of today’s four-color jobs have run lengths of less than 5000. (Strategies for Management Commercial Print 2010)
5) Nearly all print jobs are likely to have a 24-hour turnaround requirement by 2010. (Interquest)
6) Thirty percent of today’s digital color work is versioned or personalized. (Interquest)
When looking at print providers’ priorities:
7) According to a survey of print providers, the top capital investment priorities for 2009 include digital printing with variable personalization and one-to-one marketing capabilities, cited by 54 percent, and mailing capabilities, cited by 47 percent. (NAPL)
8) The No. 1 investment priority of print providers over the next five years is digital printing presses/systems, cited by 58 percent of those surveyed. (NAPL)
When looking at print capabilities:
9) Personalization increases average order size by 25 percent, response rates by 36 percent, and response time by 33 percent. (InfoTrends)
10) About 30 percent of print providers offer web-to-print services today, and the percentage of print spending conducted on the web is growing by 18 percent year over year. (InfoTrends/CAPV)
April 30th, 2009
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