What's in it for me?

As marketers, most of our campaigns are focused on eliciting a response from a customer – a sale, a download, completing a form, posting a comment etc... Most of the time, you’ll get a better response if the outcome is mutually beneficial to both parties. A sale, for example, means the customer gets something they want, whilst the business brings in a nice bit of revenue.

All too often, however, businesses focus on pushing a customer into completing an action which is really only intended to meet business goals. There are two areas which I think are particularly guilty of this.

Sign up forms

They’re on all sites across the web, but how often do they actually promise something in return to the customer? With these actions, the value exchange is of paramount importance. “Sign up for updates” just doesn’t cut it so don’t be surprised if your plaintive call for names fails.

Give them something in exchange. A discount, a white paper (particularly appropriate in B2B), some information that only the privileged few gain access or even promise a donation to charity. Be aware that the bigger the incentive, the less engaged your prospect will be so it’s important to find the right balance.

Social media involvement

I find it a little perplexing when companies encourage users to send in a video/picture of them using their product.

Why should I? As a customer, what’s in it for me?

If you’re going to ask your “friends” to start participating in your brand, at least make it worth your while because, outside the committed few advocates, no one cares (a fact it’s often hard to lose sight of when your working day is filled with the products you sell).

Well done to Rowse Honey who at least gave some money to charity for each vote and seen to have bought over 10,000 social interactions (I hope they did the sums and this represents some VFM for them?).

Not so well done to Kingsmill whose “Confessions” campaign on national TV seems to have brought in fewer than 200 responses (some of which seems distinctly copy-written).

Analytics? Excellent!

A quick post to draw your attention to a nifty little Excel add-on called Excellent Analytics.

It’s a free program that lets you pull your Google Analytics data straight into Excel. The beauty of this is when it comes to reports which you frequently re-run (weekly dashboards, yearly sales views etc...). If you build a front sheet which takes Excellent Analytics data and displays it attractively, you can quickly bang out reports without endlessly starting from scratch.

It also allows you to execute several queries that you can’t normally carry out within the Google Analytics U.I., segment at some really deep levels and pull out up to 10,000 rows of data.

Outcomes, not output

In busy marketing departments, there’s often a tendency to rush headlong from one deadline to the next. This email campaign needs to be out by Thursday, there’s a DM we need to design for Tuesday, the new PPC campaign goes live on Wednesday and so on. Deadlines are hit, the campaign goes out the door and everyone breathes a sigh of relief before leaping up to start the next project.

Why does this happen?

It’s because too many teams driven by a marketing plans which deal with outputs, not outcomes. And this can happen when there’s no clear objective established.

If you want to sell 2000 widgets, forecast exactly what activity  you need to reach that goal and how much it will cost. End up with a nice healthy ROI (note, it may not have to, ROI isn’t always the end point of a piece of marketing activity, but it really should be for the end of the campaign).

If you reach that target with half the activity planned, then that’s great – STOP NOW!

You’re been presented with the rare opportunity to review the other parts of the plan and decide if you can switch resources/spend/effort to these instead. You can free up time to start chasing the best results for what you’re doing. True, you may work out that there’s benefit in continuing with your original plan but you’ve made this decision based on outcomes, not outputs.

The content chesnut.

The old adage "content is king" is so oft-repeated it's beginning to become a cliche. I've been working on kicking off a social project recently and I've really started to believe the old chestnut applies just as well to this medium as any other.

Why should anyone want to socialise with your brand? Well, for some lucky brands, there appears to be a level of love and devotion among consumers that simply draws them in. I'm thinking about Apple here which, despite not pursuing an obvious social media strategy, has a huge fan base online (see eConsultancy's recent post for more on this). But we're not all as luck as that. Some of us have got to really work for a social gathering.

And it's here that content comes into play. Give people something valuable, something they want, and they'll come to you. Good content can form the nucleus around which your customers can socialise. Without it, you're not giving them much to hang on to.

I've taken this further, an even applied a bit of an SEO-methodology to it. We all know that good content can drive SEO but what happens if you adapt more of this strategy to social?

Get good content.
Let people know about your content.
Give them the means to share your content.
Let them collaborate with you/fellow fans on creating and driving that content.

I've labelled these steps as below.

Whilst I admit that this isn't the end point of social media (there's limitless possibilities from customer service, UGC etc), it's a worthy first step to ensure that your social skyscraper has sound foundations.