Lead quality or quantity: what's your goal?

Originally published on The New Group blog on 6.29.09

Hopefully it's a no-brainer that closing deals and generating revenue from leads is directly tied to the quality of the leads you generate. What's the focus of your lead gen programs? And how are you cultivating a stream of sales-ready, high-quality, qualified leads?

Here's an interesting recent study by MarketingSherpa that points to the necessity of optimizing your digital media for organic search as well as ensuring that your PPC search ads are sending visitors to content that delivers on the expectations set by your ad copy.

How to read this chart
CHART NOTE: Marketers were asked to rate the quantity and quality of leads generated for each of the search tactic listed at the bottom of each column using the scale shown to the right of the chart. The total percentage of each column reflects those who are using that tactic. For example, 71% of respondents use 'Search engine optimization'. The remaining 29% do not use this tactic.

Should you create a formal brand ambassador program?

Originally published on The New Group blog on 5.20.09

The short answer is yes. The bigger question is how and what will it cost you.

It seems that every business today wants to discover, interact with and harness the connectedness and influence of brand ambassadors. Why? One great benefit is to stimulate authentic word of mouth through people that other people already trust and listen to, AND are outside the formal corporate brand marketing and messaging machine.

Numerous studies have been done which point to the reality of what information sources people trust and it has become clear that brand messages are way down the list while information from colleagues, peers and friends is squarely at the top.

Intel is one of a number of corporations to jump on this trend over the last year and proactively develop a network of brand ambassadors. They’ve reached out to bloggers with influence, who are articulate, opinionated and have a following of readers who listen…and likely act on the ideas these brand ambassadors put forth.

As with many programs of this type, Intel did invest some dollars in making this happen. They pulled the bloggers from the virtual world of the Internet into the real world of the Intel campus, got to know these people better and in-person, gave then an incentive of a free Mac book Air and sent them off to continue putting forth perspective on Intel products. Pretty simple, it will be interesting to watch the evolution of this program to see how the investment of time, energy and dollars pays off, I think it will.

You can read more about the “Intel Insider” brand ambassador program. Great to see big brands that get it that organizing people with influence online often involves getting people together in the real world to further solidify connections.

Do consumers want to know what online advertisers really know about them?

Originally published on The New Group blog on 3.23.09

A recent article on the New York Times blog, An Icon That Says They’re Watching You,  brings up a fascinating issue in the area of behavioral analytics and consumer control. I guess the answer really depends on who you are and what the context of your desire to know is. I mean, I’d be fascinated to know what a given online advertiser knows about me that triggered them to serve me a particular advertisement or offer. I already have fun guessing when I see surf trip ads on facebook or a Jenny Craig ad on snow-forecast.com...clearly someone is targeting me by my behavior, and that’s fine, I get a kick out of it.

Maybe that’s just because I’m in digital marketing. However, I’d wager that there are many consumers who would be curious to know, if they were aware the information was available to them.
           
Apparently Google is blazing a trail to make this happen in the near future with its new behavioral targeting system by including the phrase “Ads by Google” on all its advertisements. You’ll be able to click on a link and access a limited profile of what Google knows about you, and even edit some of the preferences. It will be interesting to see what percent of consumers choose to access the data, and even more fascinating, how many edit any of their information.

While many in the advertising world may see this transparency to show consumers what we really know about them as a negative, I see it as a positive. If people don’t already get that advertising is in many cases necessary to fund the production of the content they consume, then that’s a fundamental piece of reality to acknowledge. Beyond this though, what if the ability to target brand advertising actually got better because people knew they could edit their anonymous online identity with ease, and trusted the systems that managed this information?

Consumers giving brands more information to better target offers and ads – it certainly brings up controversial issues around trust with online data. It will be interesting to revisit this thought in five years. I bet I’ll have more control over editing my anonymous advertising data. What do you think?

Practical tips for Conversational Marketing Outreach Programs

Originally published on The New Group blog on 1.6.09

Harness the social capital within your organization & leverage your agency to deepen your insights.

Thinking of moving beyond listening to online conversation around your brand to a mode of engaging with influential bloggers and participants within social communities? There’s a lot of opportunity to join the conversation these days, but prepare yourself and your organization first before jumping in.

Before immediately looking outside your organization for experts to engage in dialogue on behalf of your brand, look internally – you might just be surprised at what you find. Your strongest brand evangelist may be sitting right down the hall, across the country or working remotely from their home office. These people know your brand, can engage as direct representatives and bring an immediate level of authenticity to online dialogue.

However, consider this, while you may find people within your organization with deep expertise in various areas, they may not be comfortable sharing their opinions and thoughts openly on the web. With this in mind, look for people who are both interested in contributing and knowledgeable on topics that matter to your brand. Passion for engaging in the online social mediums will provide the fuel for your program.

Understanding this, while a direct representative of your brand is often the best way to build trust with online audiences who are eager to dialogue with your company, you may want assistance getting started and managing your program as it evolves over time. This is where your agency partner can help you with setting program strategy and objectives, diving deep into conversations to mine for trends and unearth engagement opportunities, amplifying your program with fresh ideas and unique angles to approach your prospects and customers.

Social Media Measurement

Originally published on The New Group blog on 1.25.08

Blogs posts, conversations within social networks and threads of dialogue in message boards, all of this online content represents a potential gold mine to gain deeper insight regarding what people really think about our brands, products and services. As marketers we’re fortunate to have a number of analytical tools available to us today that allow for measurement of conversations occurring across these different social media channels. This is exciting, powerful stuff that offers up many opportunities to gather strategic intelligence that we can weave back into our marketing, branding and advertising initiatives. Generally speaking most brands have passionate devotees as well as a few critics.

Previous to the availability of social media tracking and analytical tools, mining the conversations around a brand was a laborious if not impossible task, today the landscape is much different. Current social media measurement tools offer great opportunities to tap into the conversations occurring around brands, identify people who are influential in these conversations, understand the sentiment that is being expressed and ultimately devise strategies by which to reach out and engage with these individuals and communities in ways that can create positive word-of-mouth momentum, often multiplying the effect of other advertising and marketing programs.

Recently at The New Group we’ve been getting deep with a number of the latest tools that are pretty interesting and offer the ability to mine deeply into and target conversations happening in blogs, social networks, discussion boards and other online spaces. The way these tools work is often similar to a search engine in that you specify query terms or keywords, particular phrases you want to show up in posts as well as other conditions to focus your research.

What’s important to consider up front is the breadth and depth of conversations you’re looking to surface. Thinking this through will save you time from searching through too many off topic conversations…because in the end you still must do some reading of the posts, so knowing how to intelligently focus your queries is pretty important! Something else I’m pretty excited about is the ability to visualize the conversational landscape around a particular topic. Through social maps we can see the relationships between people engaged in a conversation and also get a sense for the reach of each participant’s voice.

I could go on about cool features of social media measurement tools…maybe in another post, but for now I’d like to suggest that if you’re embarking on a social media strategy, remember to keep your mind open to learning something new because you just might find a nugget of insight that you could have never anticipated.

Still pushing your USP? It's time to connect with your UBT.

Originally published on The New Group blog on 11.1.07

The days of the unique selling proposition (USP) are over. People don't want to be sold to anymore, they want to be part of a community, associate with others they trust and consume the products and services that their group of like-minded souls supports. Think Amazon reader comments, customer reviews on CNET, niche communities in B2B spaces of all sorts, people want to hear the objective opinions of peers to inform their purchase decisions.

Enter the concept of the unique buying tribe (UBT). This is a concept woven into a great book about branding, ZAG by Marty Neumeier - check it out on your next plane trip, it's a quick insightful read. People want to trust the brands they support and the companies they purchase from. More than ever people trust the opinions of their peers above and beyond your marketing communications and advertising.

So consider thinking of your audience as a tribe and think about how you can provide ways to build trust with that tribe, they'll tell others why they trust your brand and provide a powerful source of influence in the market.

Strategies for Capturing & Transferring Knowledge

Originally published on The New Group blog on 9.26.07

So I just attended an event put on by ASTD Cascadia this morning. It was a small panel event with senior learning and development professionals from organizations like PGE, Nike and Boeing, plus a variety of other people who've been in the training and development fields anywhere from 10 to 25 + years. Aside from bringing to top of mind some basic but often overlooked practices, things like documenting processes, conducting "lessons learned" de-briefings and developing easy to use job aids like diagrams, check lists and such, a few of the more interesting topics that surfaced were:

1.) the fact that learning happens all the time, not just when we intend it to happen
2.) recognizing and tapping into communities of practice
3.) the notion that storytelling is fundamental to the knowledge transfer process
4.) the simple act of asking people to share their knowledge can be incentive enough for them to participate in the knowledge transfer process
5.) "tacit knowledge" - that which comes only from experience - is one of the toughest yet most important types of knowledge to capture and transfer

What I'm most curious to explore further are the types of internal communications that can impact employee behavior relative to participating in the knowledge capture and transfer process and how to make the captured content not only accessible but easy to consume.