Digital Impact: The Two Secrets to Online Marketing Success

Metadata

• Title: Digital Impact: The Two Secrets to Online Marketing Success
• Author: Vipin Mayar and Geoff Ramsey
• Book URL: https://amazon.com/dp/B0052O7AUW?tag=malvaonlin-20
• Open in Kindle: kindle://book/?action=open&asin=B0052O7AUW
• Last Updated on: Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Highlights & Notes

“The 2010s will be the Data Decade. Companies that understand how to harness it will win. Those that don’t will perish. The same goes for marketers.” —Steve Rubel, Senior VP, Director of Insights, Edelman Digital (Advertising Age, January 4, 2010)

the two common challenges facing digital marketers today: 1. Lack of adequate metrics and measurement systems to drive marketing performance. 2. Frustration with how to effectively engage online consumers, who have short attention spans, face abundant choices, and are increasingly resistant to advertising messages.

1. The seven most important digital marketing metrics every marketer should know. 2. How to establish the right measurement system for your organization. 3. How to break through advertising clutter and engage with consumers on a deeper and more personalized level. 4. How to calculate a return on investment (ROI) for social media and other new media initiatives. 5. How to integrate offline and online marketing approaches for the best possible outcomes.

Too many marketers, for example, are still using the highly flawed click-through-rate (CTR) as the primary metric for their online marketing efforts.

Success ultimately involves tracking performance over time and then optimizing the inputs of media and messaging to the outputs of sales, cost-per-lead, or some other bottom-line metric of your choice.

Buying frequency becomes less important than creating compelling content that will draw the consumer in.

Rather than interrupting consumers with ads, it’s about attracting them, engaging them—with some kind of utility, entertainment, helpful information, or other valuable content that is actually welcomed by the consumer.

“What’s changed is that the engagement level we can have with our consumers is just so much higher. We can have a two-way dialogue, a relationship. That means we will need more brand-enhancing, consumer-enhancing dialogue in more of our businesses. It’s a different skill set—with different capabilities—than we required in the past.”

“What can I do for you, the consumer, that is unique, valuable, fun and compelling?”

When shopping or buying a product, a majority of consumers will look to the web as a primary influencer and as a decision tool.

Performance Measurement systems that do not task your resources, and are simple and easy to execute across channels, will answer the call for better marketing performance. Directing your creative efforts to focus primarily on Magnetic Content (for customer attraction) will give you a competitive edge in a consumer-driven digital marketplace.

So, where can you find the digital consumer today?a More than 60 percent of all Internet users regularly visit social network sites, and well over three-quarters of teens and millennials do so. Well over half of Internet users regularly read blogs, and about 12 percent write them. Nearly 70 percent of all Internet users in the United States are active watchers of online video, and more than 90 percent of millennials stream and/or download videos. Nearly 15 percent of Internet users are Tweeting or participating in some other kind of microblogging activity.

That’s why daily consumer time spent with media has continued to rise over the past few years. In the United States, total time spent with media rose from 635 minutes to 660 minutes daily, from 2008 to 2010.

Getting your organization to recognize that advertisers no longer control the entirety of the message is a critical step to appreciating the importance of Magnetic Content.

But for the most part, consumers see ads as the necessary evil to get what they really want, which is great content. And particularly in digital channels, consumers can bypass ads easily, even if it’s simply by ignoring a static banner ad.

One major obstacle that marketers now recognize is their own tendency to measure only what can be easily measured, resulting in an overemphasis on direct response. Click-throughs on banner ads are simple to measure, and so are open rates on e-mails. On the other hand, when it comes to measuring the branding impact of social media efforts, most marketers remain completely stymied. They have also failed in their attempts to accurately measure a return on their digital media investments (ROI), despite spending large sums on branding initiatives.

“If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.” —Lord Kelvin

“The challenge for marketing is ‘Prove to me that marketing works. Prove to me that no matter how you slice it, the investments are paying back in both short- and long-term deliverables.’ ”

Digital media suffers from an overabundance of data, which creates confusion for marketers and overwhelms them.

80 percent of the 340 marketers surveyed said that their companies allocated their budgets across different media by either using subjective judgments or simply by repeating what they did the year before.

One of the biggest barriers to an effective online measurement strategy is a lack of budget and resources (Figure 2.1). A 2010 global study by Econsultancy found this was the number one obstacle, even trumping organizational silos.

Let’s define each of the three buckets: 1. Exposure—metrics that typically relate to the short-term aspects of the campaign, such as the reach/frequency and engagement of digital marketing. 2. Strategic—metrics that capture strategic, longer-term marketing objectives of customer and brand growth. 3. Financial—metrics that quantify the return on investment, or financial outcomes, of the marketing activity.

Exposure metrics capture the immediate impact of a marketing spend, such as an increase in the number of visitors to a site, or click-through rates on search terms. Exposure metrics are often used as diagnostics because they provide an immediate and obvious view of the short-term aspects of the program. Are consumers noticing the ads? Are the messages reaching the right audience? Are they driving them to the right online destinations? Strategic metrics are more forward-looking and are used to evaluate the effects of the marketing spend on strategic marketing dimensions, such as brand impact on favorability or consideration or customer impact on acquisition/retention and Net Promoter Score (NPS). Strategic metrics take longer to build and often require at least three months before their impact can be measured. Finally, Financial metrics are the ones relating to financial performance, such as sales, market share, profits, or ROI. They are the ultimate consequence of the marketing effort. With marketing becoming more accountable, all programs should have financial metrics. The most important objective over time, at least for a large public firm, is to create movement in the stock price or to impact market capitalization. This kind of movement can be…

Exposure metrics capture the immediate impact of a marketing spend, such as an increase in the number of visitors to a site, or click-through rates on search terms. Exposure metrics are often used as diagnostics because they provide an immediate and obvious view of the short-term aspects of the program. Are consumers noticing the ads? Are the messages reaching the right audience? Are they driving them to the right online destinations? Strategic metrics are more forward-looking and are used to evaluate the effects of the marketing spend on strategic marketing dimensions, such as brand impact on favorability or consideration or customer impact on acquisition/retention and Net Promoter Score (NPS). Strategic metrics take longer to build and often require at least three months before their impact can be measured. Finally, Financial metrics are the ones relating to financial performance, such as sales, market share, profits, or ROI. They are the ultimate consequence of the marketing effort. With marketing becoming more accountable, all programs should have financial metrics. The most important objective over time, at least for a large public firm, is to create movement in the stock price or to impact market capitalization. This kind of movement can be achieved with a successful branding campaign, as well as with direct-response or e-commerce efforts. For smaller, private firms, the ultimate objective might be to increase revenues and/or profits by a certain percentage. Or the goal might be to attain enough brand presence to attract new venture capital or assist an IPO.

Primary metrics are used to gauge the overall success of your marketing programs and business. They are closely aligned to the overarching goal of the marketing spend. Typical primary metrics are sales, revenue, and key brand attributes.

For example, some marketers will use web traffic or click-through rates (CTR) as their primary metric, when their real goal is to build brand preference through engaging online content. Always make sure that you have carefully selected the right primary metric that truly reflects your ultimate marketing objective.

Diagnostic metrics help explain the primary metric. For example, lack of message clarity can explain why a print ad campaign is not breaking through and driving preference or sales. Or in the digital space, an ad unit’s inability to drive clicks may help explain why you’re not getting visitors to your site. Using the right set of diagnostic metrics is vital; without them, it is impossible to know the reason (or reasons) why you are seeing movement—or not seeing it—in your primary metric. Too many programs are implemented without due consideration to setting diagnostic metrics that can help explain the success or failure of an initiative.

Trust us, if you select two metrics from each of the three tiered buckets—one primary, and one diagnostic—you will have a complete measurement system. Establishing a primary metric as well as accompanying diagnostic metrics will provide a solid foundation for measuring any campaign or marketing initiative.

Exposure metrics provide a base and help you get a handle on your audience. Strategic metrics help you measure whether your tactics are working or not.

Properly done, strategic metrics also inform you, on a continual basis, whether or not you are going to achieve what you’ve defined as your financial metrics goals.

The selected seven metrics are based on the rationale that all digital campaigns have the following common objectives, regardless of the channel: To reach the right audience To engage the audience with relevant content To motivate the audience to take a desired action—registration, demo, conversion, etc. To be efficient with the spend To deliver a positive ROI With these common goals in mind, the seven selected metrics align with these objectives: 1. Qualified Reach, or Qualified Visits 2. CTR 3. Brand perception lift 4. Engagement Score 5. End Action rate (end action can be acquisition, redemption, trial, purchase, or other conversion) 6. Efficiency metrics cost per X (X can be clicks, impressions, leads, orders, or engagement) 7. ROI

We believe that reach and frequency, although highly relevant to marketers, are not adequate metrics for the Internet. They fail to capture the key “quality” ingredients of interaction and engagement, which are essential with digital channels.

We believe that reach and frequency, although highly relevant to marketers, are not adequate metrics for the Internet. They fail to capture the key “quality” ingredients of interaction and engagement, which are essential with digital channels.

However, we do believe a modified version of reach and frequency should apply to digital channels. The modified definition of reach is not simply the number of people who may have seen an advertising asset online. Rather, it is the number of visitors who may have seen an advertisement or brand-related content online AND then choose to have some interaction with the branded content, such as a website, video, or ad. We call this Qualified Reach. If the interaction occurs on the brand’s website, we refer to it as Qualified Visits. In either case, the reach is “qualified” because it requires some measurable degree of engagement from the consumer, which in turn signifies some level of interest or intention. The key, therefore, is to elicit some kind of measurable behavior (engagement) that can serve as a proxy for the consumer’s intention or interest. Qualified Reach and Qualified Visits are similar, the only difference being that Visits is used in the context of a site, whereas Reach can be anywhere. Both these metrics are critical diagnostic tactical metrics…

Marketers are realizing there is a trade-off between aggregate audience reach and the quality of the engagement consumers have with the brand. We believe it is better to restrict your definition of reach to include only those consumers who, by their engagement, demonstrate some level of interest in your product or brand, for…

Why do we believe Qualified Reach is the most important metric? It captures two important dimensions that no other single metric does. It has quantity (number of individuals) and quality (have performed a desired interaction, which in turn…

CTR is the most common metric used by online advertisers and in fact is the way most digital campaigns are measured. We believe it should be used—but only as a diagnostic metric, as a somewhat crude and incomplete measure of consumer interest. CTR is calculated by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad or a link by the number of times the ad or link was delivered (that is, impressions). For example, if an ad on a website content page was delivered to 100 viewers, or at least…

Also, the quality and creative execution of too many Internet ads and other forms of branded content is poor, thus driving down CTRs. Fundamentally, though, most consumers are simply not interested in clicking on banners, flashing pop-ups, or floating ads that usually have little or no relevance to them. Such intrusions disrupt their enjoyment of the web experience.

CTRs can also be easily manipulated by click-fraud farms or by flashy or even provocative ads that can trigger the initial click but that don’t represent qualified leads since they don’t reflect inherent interest in the product. In summary, we believe CTR is a valid diagnostic metric in that it gives an important view into the potential interest level in learning more about that specific digital content. It should not be used as an end objective, a common misuse of the CTR metric.

Increasingly, we see marketers launching relevant, branded content designed to create unique and meaningful experiences for consumers.

Such an engagement metric will: Compare the ability of different digital assets to engage consumers in a consistent, repeatable fashion. Pinpoint content that is more/less magnetic and drive the redistribution of content based on the engagement metric. Segment consumers based on their engagement behavior, to then drive subsequent messages and even deeper engagement.

We believe the right diagnostic metric for engagement is actually a series of metrics all bundled into one—something we call the Engagement Score (ES). It represents the degree of magnetism of the branded content and is based on the following beliefs: What’s important is what a visitor does with the branded content. Channels that efficiently deliver more engaged audiences are more valuable. The average number of pages per visit and the average time on a site are not important; what’s important is whether the visitor obtains his or her desired outcome (and how that outcome aligns with the site’s business objectives).

The values of the ES vary based on the degree of engagement; for example, the mere viewing of content has a smaller value than does interacting with content. We recommend a hierarchy of seven levels of engagement with a recommended point value for each level in the engagement hierarchy. These levels are outlined in Figure 2.4.

In addition to being a solid measure for capturing engagement with digital assets, the ES is also a great metric you can use to optimize sources of traffic; that is, it can be used to identify which banner ads, search terms, videos, and sites where you are advertising are providing visitors that engage with your company site. This is done by using statistical analysis to determine the strength of the relationship between the ES and the different source channels (such as banners, search text-links, video site traffic) at the site/placement/creative level. For search, this can be done at the search engine/keyword level, and for e-mails, links within the e-mail at the unique URL level. Thus, we can gain valuable, actionable insights and data-driven recommendations to optimize the design of a site, site section, or landing page and can also determine which landing pages are optimal, depending on the site driver.

An End Action, on the other hand, is any strategic outcome that results from the consumer interacting with the content. Another term for End Action is Conversion.

To calculate the End Action Rate, divide the total number of individuals who went on to perform the End Action by the total Qualified Reach or Qualified Visits. Simple and quick.

However, survey-based measurement of brand perceptions can offer brand marketers useful insights into how well their content is engaging with consumers and building the brand over the long-term.

Brand lift is calculated by determining the change in a brand perception before and after a group has interacted with digital content, compared with a controlled group that did not interact with digital content. This is the classic test of exposed versus control methodology, common to most brand-health studies. Typically, online brand metrics are gathered through audience panels or surveys—typically via pop-up windows that ask users if they would answer a few questions.

Aided brand awareness Unaided brand awareness Brand attribute lift Brand consideration Brand favorability Purchase intent

Since brand-health measurements depend on audience survey data for their results, accurate ad targeting is essential for getting the most viable results.

The two most important metrics for you to get under your belt are Return on Investment (ROI) plus an additional standardized method to measure efficiency of the marketing spend.

As a marketer, you need to make sure that you are allocating monies to the channel or channels that result in the greatest efficiency, that is, those that provide the best cost per X.

Efficiency metrics are actually easy; they all work the same way and represent the cost to get a unit that is measurable. The unit can be any one of the following, including several we discussed earlier: Cost per Qualified Reach Cost per click Cost per order Cost per lead Cost per Engagement Score Cost per End Action (acquisition, download, trial, purchase, conversion)

The one we recommend using above all others is the Cost Per End Action. A financial efficiency metric that is based on your End Action not only complements the End Action rate metrics but also helps you estimate the volume of the End Actions you can expect from a level of investment. In other words, whether it is worth it to scale up or not.

It posits that all marketing, whether it is offline or online, should result in an incremental improvement in acquisition, retention, loyalty, key perception(s), or sales.

Audiences may be different. Products may be different; for example, new products will have a different ROI than products that are mature in their markets. A better way to measure ROI for marketing is to compare incremental lift as a percentage. This allows you to more effectively compare new platforms (social media, street teams) with traditional media, and it can also provide you with measures such as the relative success of a new product launch versus benchmarks of previous products. To determine incremental lift, ROI is computed by a simple equation, as follows:

A better way to measure ROI for marketing is to compare incremental lift as a percentage. This allows you to more effectively compare new platforms (social media, street teams) with traditional media, and it can also provide you with measures such as the relative success of a new product launch versus benchmarks of previous products. To determine incremental lift, ROI is computed by a simple equation, as follows:

In certain instances, it may make sense to set up your own panel. For example, you may want your own panel if you are focused on a highly affluent or specialized professional audience, who typically will not participate in a mass panel. Setting up your own panel requires some effort to find the audience, ensure that it is representative of the universe, enlist their participation, and establish reliable monitoring protocols and technology. But it can be very effective for companies that have the resources and are committed to tracking incrementality through testing.

It is also necessary in this type of research to control for “noise,” that is, outside factors that might affect the results, such as differences in ages or other demographic variables between the exposed and control groups. Often, the percentage of the potential audience exposed to a given program may be fairly low. Thus, you need to ensure that the sample size is large enough to net a sufficient number of “exposed” respondents for statistically projectable results.

If you have not done any market tests before, here is a simple checklist for how you should approach it: Set up comparable test and control groups (match them on the right characteristics). Ensure a statistically significant sample size (use sample size calculators you can find online). Design the experiment with a clear understanding of different treatments. If testing for many factors, use advanced experimental design (fractional, factorial, multivariate, etc.). Take baseline readings before and after the experiment.

Remember: measurement by itself cannot create marketing success. Creativity, which is one of the great strengths that marketers bring to their organizations, can also be advanced and its riches unlocked with the second key: Magnetic Content.

“Advertising is no longer about blasting the most messages to the most people. Instead, it’s about this: Ideas that spread, win.” —Seth Godin, speaking at the IAB MIXX conference in New York, September 27, 2010

Content to attract customers and drive business results. In this chapter we will: 1. Discuss what Magnetic Content is and the consumer and marketing trends that require this new approach. 2. Describe how to establish a practical framework for creating Magnetic Content. 3. Discuss the seven proven strategies for making the most of your Magnetic Content.

marketing success is all about Performance Measurement—specifically how to measure the effectiveness, or performance, of the marketing programs you run.

For marketers, Magnetic Content is any kind of content they create on behalf of their brand—whether in the form of an advertisement, a YouTube video, an online game, a Facebook page, a Twitter promotion, or a mobile app—that has the effect of attracting consumers toward their brand and leads to increasingly higher levels of brand engagement. Magnetic Content entertains, amuses, informs, serves a function, answers a need, or in some other way provides value to consumers such that they welcome it, ask for more, and want to share it with others. It complements the standard push ad model with a powerful pulling effect.

When adopting the Magnetic Content approach, you will think less about pushing ad messages out and more about pulling consumers in. You will focus less on interrupting or trying to borrow attention and more on earning that attention. You’ll place less emphasis on directly selling product and more on providing something—and it could be just about anything—that adds genuine value to the consumer’s life. Not only does the best Magnetic Content pull people in, it pulls in the right people—the kind of people who will most likely buy your product and want to tell others about it.

In a world of infinite digital content, quality matters, which is why you need Magnetic Content to succeed online today.

some ads are so high quality, contextually relevant, or entertaining that they can be considered Magnetic Content.

To fully embrace this as a best practice, we believe marketers should acknowledge that just because they have “paid” for an audience, people will not necessarily pay attention or care.

A second caution is not to be misled into thinking that Magnetic Content can totally replace traditional “paid media” efforts. Magnetic Content improves the approach, but it is not a replacement.

In the new world order, everyone is a content producer, including marketers and consumers.

Here are the five critical factors that define Magnetic Content: 1. Is the content unique? 2. Is the content useful? 3. Is the content well executed? 4. Is the content fun? 5. Does the content make good use of the channel in which it appears? Importantly, not all Magnetic Content needs to meet all five of the criteria, but obviously the more you can check off, the better chance you will have at engaging customers and prospects.

Differentiation and being new or first is an important goal toward creating successful Magnetic Content.

Even a simple advertisement that single-mindedly focuses on a product’s core benefit can be useful to consumers—if it is relevant, clearly identifies an unmet need, and provides a clear solution.

Besides your product, what can you do for me? Your answer to that question will be Magnetic Content in the form of something useful that will add genuine, practical value to the consumer (while also subtly promoting your brand). To help you brainstorm Magnetic Content ideas that will be useful to the consumer, ask yourself what you can create for the consumer that will be: More convenient More timely Easier Quicker More accessible More sharable Less painful, simpler

If creative execution is important for ads, it’s doubly or quadruply (sic) important for Magnetic Content. Why? Because it has to go beyond simply being tolerated by consumers—it has to be welcomed by them. Make no mistake; if you buy into the idea of attracting consumers through Magnetic Content, then you are effectively raising the bar for creative execution in your marketing efforts. This is all the more true when you are talking about placing the content in owned and earned channels, such as social media environments, where the consumer has ultimate control.

The fact is making videos, or other forms of content, that consumers actually want to watch (and indeed, choose to watch) is very, very difficult, and usually very expensive. Consider hiring the best creative and production talents that you can afford.

Think of fun broadly. Ask yourself what you can create for the consumer that will be: entertaining amusing inspiring hilarious uplifting silly a welcomed distraction

1. Educate and organize your teams around Magnetic Content. 2. Develop ideas based on prospective customer behaviors, attitudes, and lifestyles, not your products. 3. Define and own the value proposition. 4. Leverage your existing customer base to find and test ideas. 5. Build an Engagement Map. 6. Buy media to build reach (you’ll need to draw attention to your Magnetic Content at scale). 7. Stay flexible: attract, engage, and measure.

Assuming you have ways to directly and efficiently reach your existing customers—through opt-in e-mail, social network platforms, Twitter, and so on—you can increase brand loyalty by letting your current customers enjoy the Magnetic Content first. Not only will this reward them and thereby strengthen their attraction toward your brand, it is likely they will want to share the content (if it’s good!) with their friends—a group of like-minded prospects for your business. In addition, if for whatever reason the Magnetic Content is off the mark or needs tweaking, your current customers can help you correct course before you fall on your face in front a larger, less forgiving audience. Let your current customers “beta test” your Magnetic Content and you’ll make them feel special in the process.

Magnetic Content should not exist in a vacuum. Before you launch any Magnetic Content, no matter how exceptional, build an Engagement Map detailing what path or paths you want the consumer to take after the initial hook. Each subsequent milestone on the path represents a deeper level of engagement and self-qualification—and therefore identifies the consumer as being more interested, and more valuable to you.

Don’t throw out your traditional media buying plans just yet. The paid advertising model is by no means dead. It’s just that you’re going to use it differently—to alert as many consumers as possible that something useful/entertaining is now available for their enjoyment (your Magnetic Content).

With Magnetic Content, your paid media efforts should be more effective, because you’re not shilling a product but rather drawing attention to an experience or service that promises value. Magnetic Content acts as a no-cost, low-risk way for consumers to get involved in your brand. You’re not asking them to part with their money; you’re simply inviting engagement in some positive way. The only risk for them is wasting a fragment of time.

The low costs and risks associated with producing Magnetic Content should encourage you to emphasize experimentation over deliberation. Spend less time thinking and debating about what is going to work and more time creating stuff that goes out into the field—where consumers can be the judges.

Embrace the power of feedback loops: Attract. Create and disseminate Magnetic Content into the marketplace Engage. Allow consumers to experience or interact with your Magnetic Content, or not Measure. Monitor results, based on the precepts reviewed in Chapter 2

We are not really after reach so much as Qualified Reach, where we count only those who are not just exposed to our message but also demonstrate some level of interest and/or intent through their initial and ongoing engagement with the content and our brand.

Search is the number one engagement vehicle online, and it is still the most efficient way to magnetize new customers toward your brand. In one branding study, 39 percent of searchers perceived those in the highest page rank as the top brands in their fields!

The abundance of free search data available through such tools as Google Insights (www.google.com/insights/search) gives marketers an unparalleled view into the way their customers think. This kind of market intelligence once required multiple focus groups to generate far less meaningful results. Searchers are telling you what they want and also provide a clear road map through the terms they use for the messaging and copy you should use to connect with them—they essentially are giving you the language—actual words—they want you to use when communicating to them. These are the words you can use when selecting keywords to lead the masses to your website.

The most cost-effective way to use search is to make SEO changes that will improve your web page rankings within the automated system of a specific search engine.

A Penn State University study indicated 60 percent of searchers rely primarily on the title of a result when deciding whether to click. So a strong title that ranks fourth might do the job. This also helps explain why the page title is the most influential on-page element to establish keyword relevancy with search engines. Thus, as a marketer you want to think of your title as Magnetic Content and use the same criteria found in Chapter 3 to draw a searcher in to click on your link.

A special tip for businesses that want to rank highly in their local market is to focus on local search optimization (LSO); this means including the full city and state in each page title. In addition, put the address and phone number prominently on every page, because each page is a potential on-ramp to the site. With the explosion of geo-targeting services and Google embedding businesses into “Google Places,” it’s even more important to optimize for local.

Bid management is critical. Do the math properly. Does it make sense for a publisher to pay $1perclickonapopulartermiftherevenuegeneratedisonly$15 per 1,000 page views?

Google rewards advertisers whose ads have superior click-through rates and relevancy. The reward comes in the form of a reduced bid price for the same keyword. The idea is that the ad is offering an optimal consumer experience. Time-of-day and day-of-week display will affect pricing. Running a campaign 24/7 requires a higher budget than one turned on and off. Google will also regulate the appearance of your ads based on your preset budget. The more goals and the more keywords used, typically the higher the budget.

considered for companies with smaller marketing budgets. On the other hand, if you are in the content business and search is a primary driver, build it internally. For example, if you are a local newspaper and are consistently creating new content and building out your site, it would make sense to bring in an in-house expert who will become an integral part of your organization.

The most Magnetic Content you can dream up will be useless if your potential customer base can’t find it. This is why we consider search as the first channel to get right: all your other efforts online will benefit if you have designed your search program to be magnetic on its own. You might review the following five best practices periodically for compliance, because it’s the equivalent of “less work for mother” and pays off no matter what your campaign.

1. Optimize for natural search. 2. Develop fresh content around keywords that are relevant to your business goals and objectives; publish frequently. 3. Develop and organize keywords for all stages of your purchase funnel. 4. Make sure you have an organic link-building strategy that avoids utilizing paid links. 5. Use social media in conjunction with your SEO strategy.

Make sure all internal landing pages have clear paths to the other key portions of your site. This includes ensuring that relevant and appropriate links are included within the main body content. People may arrive at your site straight to an internal page, and they should know where they are when they get there.

People go through a series of stages before they make a purchase decision. Their search behavior reflects these. Consider each stage of the purchase funnel and identify the keywords and content that address each stage. A good exercise for this is to develop keywords that will lead each imaginary prospect to the appropriate landing page that addresses his or her need. For example, consider keywords that are important to the prospect during initial interest in the product (feature comparison) and those that are important during actual purchase (product location, price); even consider the last stages of loyalty (user community, service, and support).

Google’s keyword suggestion tool in AdWords (www.google.com/ads/adwords) can help.

Link building is perhaps the most important consideration for ranking today. Links are more than a popularity contest. The more you have and the better the reputation of the sites linking in, the more important, authoritative, and popular the engines “think” your site is. Engines jump from page to page through links, so the more links, the more likely the engine will be to find you and attribute some of the “link juice” coming in from the authoritative third-party sites.

Find out who is already linking to you (and your competitors) through www.yourdomain.com or www.linkpopularity.com.

YouTube is now the second largest search engine, and people go there looking for brands. For the first time in 2010, unique visits to Facebook exceeded those made to Google. People spend hours on social media. Content has become distributable. It’s shared openly and easily. Facebook’s Open Graph turned the web into one huge opportunity for friends to share their likes and dislikes. Now the company intends to introduce a web search of all sites deploying its “Like” buttons.

Make it easy to share your content via social media sites such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and so on. Capitalize on Facebook Open Graph and embed as many “Like” buttons for your brand throughout your content as you can. Update your company’s Facebook brand and community pages regularly and keep it open for searching by Google. Use free SEO-friendly blog platforms such as WordPress to easily add fresh content to your site, and encourage linking and conversation from other bloggers. Make your content available through RSS feeds, which also syndicate to search engines, raising traffic and visibility. Use Twitter when appropriate to lift your real-time search rankings, particularly when highly topical things are happening involving your brand. (This is also a good strategy for reputation management to keep negative stories from spiraling out of control.) Keep in mind, it’s important to tweet regularly with interesting “tweet bait” to keep your followers engaged and coming back for more. When participating in conversations on key blogs and online communities relating to your industry, include links to your site when relevant to enhance the discussion and generate traffic. Put your commercials on YouTube and optimize all videos with descriptive copy so they rank prominently in Google search results.

Here is where the Qualified Reach metric comes into play, as an indicator of valid traffic from search. It is defined as the number of consumers who clicked on a keyword resulting in a visit to your website or to other places where your brand’s Magnetic Content is present.

Although not part of our seven key metrics outlined in Chapter 2, keyword and page rank are critical metrics when it comes to SEO and PPC for search. As discussed earlier in the chapter, it is important for the keywords to be either ranked high enough to show up in the “golden triangle” (see Figure 4.2) or on the first page. For SEO, page rank is also important; it is a ranking of the page by the search engine and is based on a variety of technical factors described in the section on optimization for natural search. With SEO, focus on getting your keywords right and don’t worry so much about page rank. Page rank will come as you follow the best practices tips. It’s more important that you get the right traffic from the right keywords.

Ad groups or keywords with a high CTR often do not result in conversions. This can happen because the ad text can be made provocative or eye catching but may not be representative of the website content. Or the problem may be that the site/landing page is not optimized. However, the opposite can often be true: keywords with a low CTR can result in a high conversion rate. Thus, it is important to look at the next metric: End Action, or conversion.

End Actions represent the action taken by a user, also often called a conversion activity. An End Action can be a sale, a lead generated, a download, a video view, a form completion, and so on. It is the end goal of the content and it is important to identify the right end outcome to measure before the start of the optimization of search. Conversion is especially critical to look at for determining the cost effectiveness of pay-per-click campaigns. It is the combination of the CTR and the efficiency of your conversion that will really determine whether or not the campaign is working. For example, a keyword with a low CTR but a high conversion rate leads to a low cost per conversion, which results in a higher ROI. Let’s look at a metric that addresses the ROI issue next.

Cost per conversion is an important metric for PPC campaigns and represents the potential ROI. Your PPC efforts will generate a return for you only if the revenue associated with each conversion is greater than the cost. Search advertisers can use tools (discussed next) to compare the cost per End Action with the revenue and determine exactly how much revenue their PPC efforts are driving; they will then be able to manage their keyword bids using these ROI results.

What are the most important keywords to my target audience? What keywords are driving traffic to the website? How can I expand my keyword lists? What sites are referring visitors to our site? Roughly how many users are visiting the site across a specified time period?

What percentage of traffic is from paid versus natural search? What are the demographics (gender, age, income level) of my site visitors? How do people get to my site, and where do they go when they leave?

Two important resources are Compete (www.compete.com) and comScore (www.comscore.com).

What is my rank, coverage, and even share of voice? How have these metrics changed over time? What are my competitors’ traffic and bid on keywords? What is the synergy between paid search and natural search? What is the cost/conversion for each keyword? What is the incremental ROI of PPC performance at various positions (page rank)?

Some key tools in this space are SearchIgnite or AdGooroo (www.adgooroo.com).

Who is linking to the site, and what keywords are they using? Who are competitors receiving links from? Are any of the links broken on the site?

One of our favorites in this space is Advanced Link Manager, which allows you to select from a list of a large number of search engines.

Are all of the on-page elements incorporating keywords properly? Do URLs include parameters and/or session IDs? Is the site navigation crawlable? Are there quality inbound links pointing to the site?

The leading automated tool in this space is Covario (www.covario.com). Covario uses a proprietary knowledge base of information about the search engines, their algorithms, and SEO best practices. We believe it reliably provides a global view of organic search ratings for websites.

By 2006, the $120,000-per-monthPPCbudgethaddroppedto$18,000 per-month and site traffic was tripled. Some 1,400 keywords were appearing as natural search results on the first page of Google results; think “RCA battery,” “Sony battery,” and so forth. “When you can drop a million dollars a year in paid search costs,” Petruzzi says, “I’ll take that million dollars and go on vacation.”

Chromebattery.com was built with the intention of 100 percent natural search, although Petruzzi believes a certain amount of paid participation is necessary for Google to rank you as the lead organically.

Unlike the $300,000to$500,000 he says it cost to build Batteries.com, Petruzzi bought an off-the-shelf package, Magento (www.magentocommerce.com), for about $100,andbuiltChromebattery.comfor$20,000. It fills the basic needs for the product and a checkout. In the category, cross-merchandising of related products is not relevant. The other relevant search strategy Petruzzi employs is sending a product feed to Amazon.com, which is another important source of sales.

A strategy that marries social and search adds to the likelihood your brand will get highly ranked by Google. Blogs and Facebook’s Open Graph make what happens outside your own site as important as what’s within it.

Listings in directories help categorize your business if there is any possibility of misinterpretation. Search engines like directories because they are typically organized in neat, systematic hierarchies. So if you get your site into the proper vertical directories, you’re more likely to show up correctly in vertical searches.

Provide value and relevance to the consumer, and Google will reward you, too.

“If I don’t have a display campaign to support my paid search campaign, I’m basically giving the traffic away to my competitors.” —Robert Murray, CEO, iProspect, May 2009

Overall, the iProspect study concluded that Internet users were more likely to engage with or make a purchase from brands with which they were already familiar, and online display ads are one way to get there.

An ad network typically amalgamates thousands of web properties ranging from small, niche websites to larger, premium sites, all with ad inventory to sell.

Some of the big ad networks are Backpage.com, Advertising.com, and 24/7 Real Media. However, there are two major drawbacks with ad networks. First, they have yet to deliver on the promise of truly cost-effective scale. Second, advertisers usually have no clue about where their ads are getting placed. Brand advertisers are particularly sensitive about the kinds of contexts in which their ads appear, so they are increasingly demanding greater transparency.

Ultimately, this real-time bidding approach shifts the advertiser’s focus from purchasing website pages to buying actual audiences—wherever they are—based on detailed audience profiles. This leads to far greater buying efficiencies, and often better business results.

The market leaders in this space are MediaMath, Invite Media, x+1, Triggit, Turn, and eXelate.

1. Creative counts. 2. Size matters. 3. Pay attention to context. 4. Behavioral targeting is a must. 5. Integrate search and display for maximum synergy. 6. Use display ads to drive consumers to your Magnetic Content.

“Creative is about 70% to 80% of the effectiveness of advertising.”

“By far the biggest driver of brand impact success is the creative. The best ads that we see in terms of performance online tend to be ones that almost have a magazine feel. They look nice; people think about things like having the right human form in there, the right product shot.”

A strong image can pack a lot of punch. Even in campaigns for text-heavy websites—such as publishing websites, print book retailers, financial services, and health care products—it’s been shown time and again that strong images with limited text provide the emotional pull to draw audiences in (see Figure 5.4). There’s also considerable credence to the idea that a static banner ad with a strong, emotional image can be as effective as a busily animated display

Another creative approach with banners is to focus on giving consumers what they want. In a 2010 study by Cone (Figure 5.6), whereas only 21 percent of online consumers said they wanted marketers to “market to me,” 77 percent said they would like marketers to offer them incentives, such as free products, coupons, and discounts. Furthermore, a healthy 46 percent said they would like marketers to “solve my problems/provide product or service information,” and 39 percent wanted marketers to solicit their feedback on products and services. Thus, even banner ads can serve as Magnetic Content—if they are useful, offer help, entertain, or inform consumers.

Larger, more impactful ads consistently perform better than smaller ones, on average.

On the other hand, be aware that the larger your ad size unit, the more likely it will be perceived by consumers as intrusive. This is why you need to refer back to the first guideline—creative counts. If your message is compelling and/or relevant enough, consumers won’t mind if it takes up more space.

The challenge for marketers is to fully integrate the display and search functions. This entails making sure that your in-house or outsourced search experts understand the basics of buying display; it also means having your media buying professionals know the basics of search. You need to manage the free flow of dollars between the two to achieve maximum impact and efficiency.

Before you launch display advertising, take the time to nail down your objectives and make sure you take into account the difference between reaching your intended audience and influencing them.

A typical goal for display ads is to reach a large number of people and make them aware of and interested in your brand, product, or service. Our definition of Qualified Reach from Chapter 2, as applied to display advertising, is the number of visitors who may have actually seen an advertisement and have either immediately clicked on it, or later choose to have some other form of further engagement with your brand’s content such as on a website or video. This metric offers quantity (number of individuals who have seen the ad) and quality (they have performed a desired interaction, which in turn suggests a degree of intention on the part of the consumer).

In summary, we do believe CTR remains a valid metric for display ads because it provides an important view into the consumer’s potential interest level in learning more about the specific digital content encountered. However, it should not be used as an end objective, a common misuse of the CTR metric.

Are there certain ads and placements that drive the highest conversion? Does a specific time of day result in higher conversion rates? Which target segments and audiences provide the best conversion rate? Does positioning on a page affect conversion?

With display ads, the metric most often used is the cost per click (CPC), which measures what you pay for a click. It is literally the cost of getting one click to your end destination from any given ad source. However, cost per End Action or cost per conversion is a better efficiency metric. Getting clicks is not the end game of display ads. Realizing an end action/conversion resulting in revenue is the right goal. Your display ad efforts will generate a return for you only if the revenue associated with each conversion from these ads is greater than the cost.

E-mail remains popular for a reason: it’s inexpensive, and when well done, it works. Traditionally, e-mail is used to establish and then to cement a relationship, but the ability of e-mail to improve brand magnetism is often neglected in favor of a numbers game.

It’s estimated that one-quarter of all e-mail flowing into the inbox is permission-based commercial messaging. The remainder is personal messages, transactional messages, and spam.

Subject Line: These are the words first seen in the “inbox” and the first thing seen by the customer. Subject lines should be clear and compelling, and they should drive a desired action. Apply the criteria of Magnetic Content—this is your opportunity to be unique, or useful, or fun, or all of these. One of the fastest ways to get e-mail recipients to open and click on messages is to send notices of abandoned shopping carts within the subject line. As Sara Ezrin, senior director of strategic services at Experian CheetahMail, explained to eMarketer, recipients of such messages are already thinking about the items in their cart, and because they are, or were, in the market for those products, it will spur them toward quick response. Such messages are personal (unique to the user) and directly reference a product already considered as useful by the customer. (Figure 6.2.)

Put benefits into your subject line rather than overhyping a sales message. Don’t be afraid to have some fun. Although subject lines should fall within the 35- to 45-character length, feel free to go shorter. Here are a few examples of successful subject lines: Sports Authority—Take The “Fat” Out of Fat Tuesday - Check Out Our Fitness Deals PETCO—PETCO Celebrates Mardi Gras With 72-Hours of Sitewide Savings! Barnes & Noble—This Week—Coupons, Save up to 30% on Oscar Winning DVDs, J.D. Robb, More Dell—Act Fast! Dell’s 4-Hour Sale Starts Today L.L. Bean—Top Values—Pima Shirts at 1992 Prices Crutchfield—DIY value: Save with FREE installation gear & instructions Ann Taylor—30% Off Pants (Your legs will thank you.) Tiffany & Co.—New Designs from Frank Gehry Neiman Marcus—The Rock Goddess from DIANE VON FURSTENBERG + Free online shipping Saks Fifth Avenue—Runway Trends Are Here Now Ralph Lauren—New Arrivals: Polo Club Makes The Ultimate Iconic Statement JC Whitney—Drive Safe - Talk Hands-Free Plus $40 Off!

Just as you may use Google’s AdWords tool to hone in on the right keywords for search optimization, you can research terms that are trending on Twitter and the search engines when crafting e-mail subject lines.

“From” Field: Be recognizable. It’s best to use your company’s name so the e-mail has credibility to the customer. This also helps you maintain your e-mail reputation as an online business.

Add to Address Book: Once your e-mail gets opened, ask—right at the top—for recipients to put your “from” address in their safe senders list/address book. This is your best protection against ISP e-mail filters and helps make the use of this channel more efficient for you.

If both the subject line and message are personalized: 28.0 percent If only the subject line is personalized: 24.3 percent If only the message is personalized: 22.2 percent Body Message: Keep it focused and concise and always include a clear call to action.

Forward to a Friend, Join us on Twitter, Join us on Facebook: These social-sharing prompts can improve exposure for your message and help build your database.

If you want to learn more, the E-mail Experience Council (www.e-mailexperience.org) has a treasure trove of examples and concrete pointers.

For the recipient, e-mails are free. But would you be able to charge money for the information you’re sending out? If so, you’re well on your way to creating e-mails with magnetic appeal.

When Silverpop surveyed business-to-consumer (B2C) and B2B marketers, more than half said identifying the right time to send the message ranked as the most important tactic for overall campaign performance. What time is the best time? The best way to find out is to A/B test various date-and-time scenarios. Examine your open rates by day of the week or “daypart” as well. Another useful gauge is to look at your website traffic by existing customers, by day or daypart, to see when they are most primed to spend. For example, one small retailer catering to women found that Friday evening was the most active sales period online, so began sending promotional e-mails on Thursday evenings or by Friday morning.

More than any other factor, relevance will most influence the open rate and action taken on your e-mail marketing message. The rules applying to traditional direct marketing and CRM all apply to e-mail marketing as well: Don’t send people e-mails they don’t want to receive. Best practices companies send relevant e-mails based on a consumer’s behavior. Often referred to as trigger e-mails, these e-mails typically have open and click rates two or three times the usual e-mails.

How do you make sure your e-mails are relevant? Segmentation and continued attention to customer behavior and profiles is the key.

Identify the “What’s in it for me” (the benefit) and get it in the subject line. “How are you, Nick?” “You’re invited to attend [event name goes here].” Don’t be a perfectionist. Get your ideas out, measure and then modify based on how many people took action. Did you send them to your blog? If so, did your traffic increase? Did you invite them to a webinar? If so, how many people registered? Did you pitch a product? If so, how many sales resulted?

Unsworth runs and manages the entire operation using Infusionsoft.com, which handles his e-mail marketing, shopping cart, affiliate program, accounting, and contact management for a mere $200permonth.Heestimatesitautomatesabout$30,000 worth of work that would otherwise require an assistant. (GetResponse.com is another package he recommends, which allows free mailing up to 500 addresses and $18 per month for up to 2,000.)

This primary metric for e-mail is defined as the number of consumers who may have received an e-mail and opened it. A key aspect of understanding this metric is looking at how many people had bounce backs where the e-mail could not be delivered. As stated earlier, having proper e-mail addresses is critical; undeliverable e-mails will affect this metric significantly. A second factor affecting Qualified Reach is the open rate, one of the most commonly used metrics for evaluating e-mails.

The more you know about your customer, the more you can build a magnetizing relationship. Use custom fields to pull database information or dynamic content that is unique to a specific subscriber (offers based on past purchases, birth dates, expiration dates, etc.).

Make it easy for people to share. Above all, be relevant and timely. And continuously measure and optimize for open rates and click rates.

“We spend the majority of our time engaging with people on these networks, not advertising on them.” —Scott Monty, head of Social Media, Ford Motor Company, in an interview with eMarketer “If you do not listen carefully, you are a fool—not because the crowd is a threat (although, of course, it is) but because it is your greatest resource. What if its wisdom were harnessed and its power unleashed … ? Here’s what: payday.” —Bob Garfield, former ad critic, Advertising Age

Traditional advertising placements play second fiddle to more genuine, personal forms of consumer engagement. You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again: social media is less about paying for media and more about how you can earn and own it. This is why offering Magnetic Content is so important in this channel.

In the social media realm, Magnetic Content can take on many different forms and functions: Advertising sponsorships placed on Facebook’s home page. Twitter updates as a delivery mechanism for targeted promotions. A fun video experience shared via the brand’s profile page on Facebook. A series of posts on MySpace inviting young adults to participate in a branded online game. “Like” or “friend” options for your brand. A brand representative on Twitter available to assist a customer with a service problem. An opportunity for customers to rank or rate products on your e-commerce site.

1. Is it unique? If you stay true to your brand values and engage with social media denizens in a genuine, personalized way, then your brand personality will keep you unique, and you will likely meet this criteria. 2. Is it useful? It is vitally important in the context of social media to be adding value to the conversation. As we’ll see in the next section, there are many ways to deliver meaningful, practical contributions within the social media space. 3. Is it well executed? Often in social media environments, “well executed” can simply be a matter of “fitting in”—speaking in a natural voice, being honest, and using a tone that is appropriate for the situation. 4. Is it fun? Social networks, blogs, and community forums frequently lend themselves to fun, amusement, and entertainment. This should inform the kind of Magnetic Content you create for these platforms. Are there “fun” aspects to your brand? 5. Does the content make good use of the channel in which it appears? In the next section, we share a specific set of guidelines for deploying Magnetic Content on social media platforms. In fact, we identify seven best practices and explain in detail how to execute them.

1. Don’t think social media; think social marketing in the broadest possible sense. 2. Leverage the secret ingredient: trust. 3. Listening comes first. 4. Don’t just barge into a conversation; add value. 5. Be authentic, transparent, and humble. 6. Recruit from your core: the brand enthusiasts who already love you. 7. Target the coveted influentials.

Paid media advertising on social sites represents a relatively limited opportunity for most companies. Rather, marketers should recognize that social interactions can—and should—be linked to nearly every facet of their organization—not just marketing, but also employee communications, customer relationship management (CRM), product design and packaging, public relations, and even research and development (R&D). Successful social marketing will require organizing, training, and empowering select staff members—across multiple departments—to engage with consumers on social platforms. The aim is to build a corporate social presence that goes way beyond paid media placements.

The fact is, by allowing some negative comments to bubble up, consumers will feel a greater sense of trust that the favorable comments are indeed genuine. A little of the bad stuff makes the good stuff all the more believable! What’s more, if you promote the highest-rated products on your home page, you can expect to see even greater returns.

If you want to create a really powerful magnet for consumers, design a social platform or virtual community to engage with consumers on a particular topic, theme, or set of passions. Of course, the theme you select will, in at least some subtle way, relate to your brand or what it stands for. However, the mission is not to pitch your product, but rather to provide a valuable service—in the form of a public forum—where like-minded consumers can share and communicate. Your brand is merely the (trusted) sponsor.

Consequently, “social listening” is now a core competency that virtually all marketers must master.

Critically, one of the greatest values of effective listening in social media is that it can help you identify what types of Magnetic Content will resonate best with your customers. In many cases, they will even give you specific ideas for Magnetic Content. In addition, marketers can use ongoing social listening to: Find out about problems or defects with a product that may need to be fixed. Discover if the customer service process is broken, and in what particular area. Learn if consumers have a misperception about the product or company and—even worse—are telling everyone about it on Twitter. Gain a better understanding of how consumers perceive or experience a competitor’s product, service, or brand. Learn about the language consumers use to describe a product or brand, and then use those insights in offline and online advertising messages (e.g., your keyword search buys). Get a faster, more accurate read on how consumers feel about a company’s advertising campaigns and then be prepared to change them on the fly. Create more effective forms of Magnetic Content that will drive further engagement with your brand.

Mega coffee brand Starbucks was an early pioneer in using social media as a listening ear to the consumer with their MyStarbucksIdea.com forum, a branded social media community that solicits suggestions, comments, questions, and even votes from consumers. Importantly, Starbucks not only listens to the consumer ideas, they actually implement many of them as well.

Radian6 is a leading provider of such dashboards, and there are at least 50 other vendors when last we counted. The tool is less critical; what’s more important is how you apply the learnings that result.

Which topics precipitate customer buzz? What is the sentiment around these topics (positive, negative, neutral)? What are the customer perceptions of key product attributes such as product, quality, and service? Which elements of the value proposition and core benefits most resonate with consumers? What are the greatest areas of misperception where we need to defend the brand?

In fact, by this point, consumers pretty much expect their interactions with companies to be like their interactions with friends.

The key is to act more like a helpful friend and less like a corporation with a product to plug. When a consumer is looking for help deciding what kind of car to buy for his or her family, for example, it might be appropriate for you to share a link to a third-party source such as the results from a Consumer Reports rundown of automobiles that happens to favor your brand. In other situations, you might offer up factual information and links to correct a misperception or dispel a rumor.

Even with a mostly decentralized approach, it is often a good idea to identify a particular group of employees to serve as the main hub for all social media interactions. Usually, this hub is spearheaded by an experienced person who serves as a kind of community manager. Technology can also play a key role here. At Dell, for instance, the company has created a social media “command center” that effectively monitors all the social media conversations that relate around Dell. At Starbucks, nearly every department in the organization has a deputized representative charged with acting as a liaison between the consumers conversing on social platforms and the department. There are about 50 such representatives worldwide.

Part of letting go means adjusting, and yes relaxing, the corporate voice. In the social media space, consumers want to hear from genuine people, not disembodied corporate entities pushing a poorly disguised vested interest. Most important, social networks demand that you be very careful about what promises you make to consumers. When they see a disconnect between what you say and what you do, or how your product performs, they will find you out and alert others. Remember how important trust is!

So before you invite everyone in your company to “have at it” with Twitter and Facebook, we advise you to create and distribute a set of organizational guidelines that direct your employees on how to engage with consumers via social platforms. Roles also need to be established so that employees are clear on who does what, how, and when.

Generally, the rules go something like this: Skip the “marketing speak” and talk in a conversational, natural tone—like a real person. Put forth real people and real voices, not a stilted corporate front. Speak in the first person singular, rather than the formal “we.” Be willing to accept and acknowledge the negative comments as well as the positive. Be the first to acknowledge a mistake—and own up to it. Provide full disclosure as to who you are, what you represent, and what stake you might have in a given topic. Respond quickly if there’s a crisis (ideally within 24 hours, or sooner).

Answer this question honestly: Is your company, product, or brand fortunate enough to have a sizeable following of brand enthusiasts—that is, consumers who are so engaged, loyal, and passionate that they want to share the good news with as many others as possible? If your answer is “yes,” you have a ripe opportunity to exploit the viral power of social networks—as long as you proceed with patience, sensitivity, and tender loving care.

Digital communities allow marketers to: (1) find these coveted consumers (through listening/monitoring), (2) reward them, and (3) empower them to share their experience of your brand story with hundreds, thousands, or even millions of others. Millions are possible. According to the Facebook profile page of the Coca-Cola Company, the beverage maker enjoyed a fan base of nearly 22 million consumers as of January 2011.

Look for creative ways to reward your loyal fan base—with unique, personalized Magnetic Content. Often, this can come in the simple form of special discounts and coupons. As but one example, Starbucks, with more than 20 million followers, offers its brand enthusiasts downloadable vouchers for free food or music along with a purchase.

There are good marketing reasons for creating brand pages. First, it’s a powerful form of permission marketing, since you’re allowing your most valuable consumers to opt in at a deeper, more public level. Those consumers can, in turn, encourage their friends to opt in as well. Magnetism begets magnetism! Efficiency is also a strong consideration here: for example, once a consumer has “liked” a brand on Facebook, or begins to “follow” the company on Twitter, it costs nothing for the marketer to be able to continually “speak” to that consumer, who has essentially opted in.

Researcher Nielsen found that if Facebook users see that a friend of theirs “likes” an ad or has commented on it, they are up to 30 percent more likely to recall the ad’s message.

One more thing: even though brand pages can be incredibly easy and cheap to produce, you likely won’t have any visitors if you don’t spend money on paid advertising to make your potential fans aware. Social media does not work in a vacuum. It must be integrated with all of your other offline and online communications in order to direct your fan base to the channel.

As we’ll see, measurement and the calculation of ROI for social media initiatives is complicated by three factors: (1) it’s a channel that can serve both branding and direct response goals; (2) it’s a consumer-centric channel where the marketer may be able to only indirectly influence results; and (3) there are numerous qualitative benefits to social media programs that defy simple numerical measurement.

A key goal of social media is to reach a large number of people, get them intrigued in your brand’s Magnetic Content, and then motivate them to interact with the content, as well as share it with others. Along the way, you want them to opt in to your brand’s social media presence as a friend, fan, follower, or even a member of your brands’ blogs or social communities. Our definition of Qualified Social Reach is the number of consumers who opt in to your social media presence, which, depending on the social platform, can include any and all of the following: Number of fans or friends Number of followers Number of subscribers/members—this would include your brands’ own blogs and other social communities created around a specific product or brand

The Social Interaction Rate is a metric that will help you determine whether your consumers are actively engaging with the content—do they comment on it, do they pass it along? Fundamentally, you want to find out if the Magnetic Content is striking the right chord with the target audience. Here again, depending on the social platform, this metric represents interaction/engagement with the content, and it can be any or a mix of the following: Number of comments Number of tweets or retweets Number of posts or repostings—brands’ blogs or related social communities Number or percentage of comments in response to photos/videos/posts

Efficiency metrics are simple and easy to work with. They represent the cost to get a particular unit that is measurable. The unit can be any one of the following metrics we have discussed earlier: Cost per fan/friend/follower/member Cost per comments/tweets Cost per brand perception lift We recommend using all of these metrics to evaluate your social media efforts. They are critical in helping you determine whether you can efficiently scale your social media efforts.

Consumers are the owners of my brand.

“For over 10 years in my career conducting analytics around customer satisfaction and loyalty, I have found that the biggest driver of loyalty is an unexpected positive experience. The mobile channel is uniquely equipped to provide this unexpected delightful experience, especially with fast 3G and 4G speeds and highly contextualized location-based services. For example, imagine the value to a consumer of being able to find an item of interest in stock at a convenient location with comparison pricing in seconds. The value of mobile as a local driver of satisfaction and loyalty should not be discounted.” —Vipin Mayar

It’s a small screen, but it can pack a powerful punch. With mobile devices, the variety of opportunities for delivering Magnetic Content to consumers is perhaps greater than for other media. But so too is the danger of alienating them—all because of the close, personal nature of the device, which is typically strapped somewhere on their bodies for 16 hours or more a day. This puts a huge premium on an offering that will magnetize the consumer with clarity, timeliness, and relevance.

Mobile ad network Greystripe, for example, suggests 10 different ad-stimulated actions that can be performed on a phone screen to drive consumers down the conversion path through mobile: Branding/information dive Data collection by survey Click to web/WAP Click to call Click to YouTube/QuickTime (sample video) Click to iTunes (sample or download) Click to download (variety of assets, including apps) Click to maps Click to buy Click to poll

Or consider the global picture. There are 6.8 billion people on the planet. A total of 1.3 billion can access the Internet on a personal computer, but 4.6 billion people, or two-thirds of the entire population, have cell phones—all with the capability of delivering your marketing message. For many people in the world, their only experience of the Web is through their phone.

And consumers are getting more and more comfortable with seeing ads on their mobile devices. According to an August 2010 study by ad network InMobi and comScore, 38 percent of the nearly 4,400 U.S. mobile consumers surveyed felt mobile ads “serve an important purpose,” and an additional 25 percent stated they are getting accustomed to viewing mobile ads. Consumers younger than age 25 were the most comfortable.

a new breed of players is fueling greater competition, innovation, and excitement in the mobile category. Until recently, the U.S. mobile market was dominated by legacy telco players—carriers such as AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. But now that two powerful and innovation-driven rivals have entered the picture—Google and Apple—the market is being reenergized. Both Google and Apple have introduced new operating systems, Android and iOS, respectively, and have directly entered the mobile advertising network business through their acquisitions of AdMob (by Google) and Quattro Wireless (by Apple). Intense rivalry, world-class execution, and a zealous fixation on customer-focused innovation by these dominant players suggest a market about to bubble over with opportunities.

1. Identify and understand your mobile audience to discover what may attract them. 2. Make the best use of the channel with precise targeting. 3. Design and execute mobile as an integral, but additive, channel. 4. Use geo-location technology—judiciously. 5. Make it measureable and actionable with mobile couponing/shopping. 6. Think before you app!

You will also need to be diligent in your approach. Because of the intense personal nature of phones, any clumsy efforts on your part, such as inappropriately targeted ads, or an overly simplistic or poorly executed app, can significantly harm your brand. The bar for what constitutes good or acceptable brand interactions on the mobile device is much higher than for any other medium, simply because it’s so personal. Proceed with caution.

The key is to realize that although consumers are increasingly accepting of marketing messages on their mobile phones, they also expect something valuable in return for their attention. That’s where Magnetic Content comes in!

Understanding the demographics and preferences of mobile users and how they use their devices is an essential first step in determining what will appeal to them as useful, unique, and magnetic. So, arm yourself with all the data you can find to understand your particular mobile target. A basic question is whether your target uses a conventional feature phone or a smart phone, such as an iPhone, Blackberry, or Droid. The more sophisticated your users, the more sophisticated you can be with your marketing approaches. By age group, young adults are not only heavy users of mobile phones, especially the latest smart phones, but are also more open to mobile marketing initiatives. And generally, smart phone owners are wealthier than their standard-feature phone-owning counterparts.

The mobile phone can become the ultimate targeting device for marketers!

With the Point Inside iPhone app, for example, visitors to large shopping centers can find their way around much more easily and enjoy a customized experience reflecting their physical surroundings. When the app is launched, the floor plan of the respective mall appears on the iPhone; the integrated GPS module in the phone then locates the user’s position and displays a visual map of where all the retail stores are located. Point Inside also displays the phone numbers of the shops and even remembers where the user has parked his or her car.

The mobile phone, because it’s always on and follows consumers along wherever they go, has the unique ability to bridge the gap between the digital and physical worlds. It can also serve dual marketing roles, lending itself to both direct response and brand image campaigns that rely on multiple exposures to reinforce a marketing message.

While there are plenty of opportunities for delivering Magnetic Content directly through the phone (such as through apps), another strategy is to use the mobile phone as a messaging device to alert the consumer about Magnetic Content that lies waiting on other platforms, such as your brand website, YouTube, or a branded Facebook page. Even a brief text alert can be used as a trigger mechanism for pushing consumers further along on your engagement map toward Magnetic Content—where they can become engaged at a deeper level. In this way, SMS not only is efficient and cost-effective, but can also be carefully timed to coincide with key events or promotions. (It is essential, of course, to garner the appropriate permissions from the consumer to send such messages.)

Respondents to the August 2010 survey said the number one benefit (47 percent) of having seen mobile advertising was that it introduced them to something new; the second-rated benefit, at 35 percent of respondents, was helping them learn more about something. Both responses suggest consumers would welcome ads leading them to valuable Magnetic Content by a marketer.

Jiffy Lube provides a classic, textbook case for how to incorporate mobile as a call-to-action measurement tool for a traditional media campaign promotion. The oil-change service ran a radio spot that invited consumers to text on their mobile phones for a chance to win a year’s worth of oil changes. Each listener who entered received a $5 coupon via SMS, and Jiffy Lube found that 50 percent of those redeeming the SMS coupons were new customers. By adding the mobile call to action to the existing media buy (at very little additional expense), Jiffy Lube made its radio dollars work harder and was able to track the results far more effectively. For a slightly more sophisticated approach, marketers could use mobile to test the efficacy of multiple media channels. By including different keywords or numbers for consumers to text in to a short code, each representing a different media channel or vehicle (such as print magazine or newspaper), marketers can determine which publications perform better in terms of generating opt-ins, and then reallocate media spend accordingly. Mobile can thus be used to efficiently measure the health of other media channels.

Mobile coupons—delivered to customers while in or near the store—can be used to accelerate purchase activity. A coupon delivered right at the point of purchase can be just the incentive to push a hesitant customer over the fence. Consumers can also download relevant coupons on their phones for redemption at a more convenient time. The best news? All of this coupon activity can be monitored by the marketer in real time.

“Buy one pack of Pampers at Safeway, and get the second one free! Text Pampers to 80800 now!”

So your CEO walks into your office, pounds his fist on the table and exclaims, “Where the heck is our app?!”

According to FutureSource Consulting, consumers worldwide will download 10 billion apps in 2011 and 16 billion by 2013.

If you’re building a brand app from scratch, rule number one is to keep the customer and his or her needs firmly in mind—before you start designing. If your app is really just a thinly disguised ad for your product and doesn’t solve any consumer need or want, no one will care and you won’t draw people in. On the other hand, you can also fail another way. If you create a nifty app that manages to hit a home run with consumers but does a poor job of linking back to your brand in a way that either indirectly reinforces a key brand attribute or directly leads the consumer to seek information on your company or product, it’s useless.

One often-overlooked challenge with apps is discoverability. You can build a great app, but consumers won’t necessarily find it. Discoverability, or the way in which consumers browse, search for, or learn about an app, presents challenges for any brand in such a crowded environment. Understanding how a consumer will discover your app is a key consideration and probably represents the more expensive proposition. Getting onto Apple’s Top 25 Free Apps or other app lists of the week are avenues for discoverability, but they can’t be the only ones. Recommendations from family and friends via Facebook and other social networks can play a role, too. Of course, a search campaign and accompanying landing page should also be part of the mix. But, most likely, you will need to extensively promote the app using online, offline, and mobile display media. In other words, paid media. A general rule of thumb is to allocate at least two-thirds of the app budget to its promotion. If you are thinking about spending $20,000ondevelopinganapp,plantospendatleast$60,000 on marketing to make sure it gets some penetration.

PercentMobile is a mobile analytics tool with an expansive and accurate database and detection mechanism. It has a simple user interface and reporting layer and is appropriate for small-business owners. Some of the other ones that we like are AdMob and Webtrends Mobile Analytics.

This metric is defined as the number of mobile users who may have seen your messaging AND then choose to have some interaction with branded content. Qualified Reach is very appropriate to the mobile channel and can be used to measure the success of your ads (or other Magnetic Content) in terms of driving consumers to your mobile sites. It is especially useful given that mobile customers are opting in for ads to access rewards, coupons, and special offers. As we mentioned in Chapter 2, Qualified Reach is different from pure impressions, which is incomplete, because it does not contain any element of actual engagement with the ad or message unit.

Mobile enjoys unusually high click rates, often five times or more higher than that of Internet display ads. CTR for text messaging can be as high as 15 percent. As an opt-in channel, texting (or SMS) is used by marketers to drive traffic, often by including a link to rich media or a video. Text campaigns integrated with offline media like TV can use codes to track the number of clicks or hits being generated by your campaign, broken out by medium. For example, if you are running TV and radio ads, you could insert different text codes for each, for example, “VMGR001” and “VMGR002,” to distinguish response rates for each medium. Of course, if you are using SMS coupons (delivering coupons through SMS), you will have a great way to track the effectiveness of your campaign.

End Action in the mobile space often relates to the number of people who download an application, sign up for an offer, or continue on to buy something. The End Action rate is often referred to as the conversion event because it represents the conversion, or any desired outcome for the mobile content. Given the importance of the End Action, you should conduct the appropriate analytics to understand what drives the highest conversion. For example: Are there certain ads, messages, or placements that drive the highest conversion? Does a specific time of day deliver higher conversion rates? Are there any handsets or devices delivering higher conversion rates? Which target segments and audiences are most likely to convert?

As we have suggested, all marketing, whether it is offline or online, should show results as an incremental improvement—in acquisition, retention, loyalty, key perception(s), or sales.

“Half the battle of staying relevant is showing up in the right place, at the right time and on the right device.”

Text messaging currently accounts for the bulk of spending on mobile advertising in the United States—about 55 percent of the U.S. mobile ad market in 2009, according to eMarketer.

Along with taking pictures, sending and receiving text messages is the most popular content activity on mobile phones today.

However, the audience today is still relatively small and fragmented, and there are complications involved in delivering video on a range of incompatible devices and operating systems, all to a tiny screen.

Hispanics are also heavy users of mobile video; 33 percent of mobile Hispanic users watch video on their phones, whereas only 15 percent of non-Hispanic whites do so, also according to Pew.

eMarketer projects that growth in mobile video revenues will be fueled primarily by consumers paying directly for content in the form of subscription-based and pay-per-download services, as opposed to ad-supported video. The ad-supported mobile video market is estimated at less than $60millionin2011andisexpectedtorisetoonly$206 million by 2014. Growth, however, should be rapid. Ad-supported mobile video revenues will post a 60 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2009 and 2014.

All the available data suggest they will continue as a central facet of the mobile ecosystem, meaning that in-application display advertising will likewise grow in importance.

The opportunity for marketers who succeed at the app value proposition can be great. Smart phones are in the hands of ever-increasing numbers of mobile users, and smart phone owners tend to be wealthier and better educated than the average consumer, making them an attractive target. Furthermore, in-app advertising has relatively high recall rates and is well tolerated by many mobile users, considered less annoying or intrusive than tactics such as messaging-based ads.

Wi-Fi provider and mobile ad server JiWire found in April that nearly half of Wi-Fi users would share their location to receive more relevant advertising, although even more were willing to do so in exchange for local content as well. And research from the Mobile Marketing Association in March found that although relatively few mobile users recalled seeing location-based ads, they had the highest response rates.

“As soon as I could see we were making as much or more money each day than we spent on ads on YouTube, I knew we had something.” —Jeffrey Harmon, CMO, Orabrush, as quoted in the New York Times, September 27, 2010

In fact, no other advertising channel—online or offline—is growing faster than online video.

In addition, online video is cheaper to produce, on average, than a typical television spot. The cost of video cameras and related equipment today has democratized video production so that all companies, large and small, can make quality videos without busting their budget. And spending for broadcast television spots can also be amortized when TV spots are redeployed or archived in online channels.

Currently, most online video viewing falls under the loose heading of “digital snacking”—typically characterized by two- or three-minute snippets on YouTube or a similar length movie trailer or news segment. According to Nielsen, more than 80 percent of online video was labeled by the researcher as “short-form” in 2009. It’s important to note that this short-form content is predominantly user generated, as opposed to professionally produced video material. Other sources confer with the short-form skew (Figure 9.4).

Of all the digital channels discussed in this book, video offers marketers the most promising opportunities for engaging with consumers in an emotional way, just as they’ve done for decades with television.

One of the simplest ways to get started with online video is to place video ads on contextually relevant content sites that feature video content. This is a paid media approach similar to buying commercial time on television.

“Having to select an ad makes consumers more engaged.” —Beth Uyenco, global research director, advertising and publisher solutions group, Microsoft, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2010

Video demonstrations of a product or service in action have been used by marketers for decades. It is one thing to “tell” your consumers how well your product works; it is quite another to “show” them using online video.

Another great example comes from Apple. The company of iconic brands like Mac, iPod, iTouch, and iPad, creates polished, highly engaging video tutorials to show customers all the many ways they can enjoy the product they have just purchased. But each of these tutorials does double-duty, because they also act as powerful selling demos for those who have not yet purchased the product. With video, seeing is not only believing, it can be highly persuasive!

A fishing reel manufacturer produces a video segment demonstrating the best practices for fly-fishing. A financial services firm creates a series of videos that profile various investment approaches based on stage of life. A gardening supplies catalog company invites customers and prospects to share videos of their own gardens and how they created them. A fast-food chain seeking to improve its image delivers a series of online videos that educates on healthy eating and exercise habits. A floor cleaner manufacturer produces a video showing homeowners how to take care of their floors. A car insurance company creates a series of videos providing tips on how to maintain a good driving record.

General Mill’s Betty Crocker brand provides a good example of deploying video content as an instructional tool. Specifically, Betty Crocker created 1,485 helpful videos for preparing delicious treats—covering everything from how to make chocolate peanut butter cookies, which runs a little over two minutes, to whipping up gluten-free marble cake, at a little over four minutes. As a result of the series, Betty Crocker saw traffic to its site more than double to over 5 million per month after the videos were posted. Plus, through an aggressive syndication and distribution effort involving video ad networks and other partners, as well as organic search efforts on Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and YouTube, Betty Crocker was able to position itself as the go-to guide for birthday cakes and party desserts.

As one example involving a small business, Original Skateboards produced a series of videos demonstrating skateboard skills and then placed the videos on YouTube along with a coupon offer that enabled the company to carefully track sales. Clearly, instructional videos can be highly magnetic as they seek to solve a consumer problem; if done well, they are also likely to draw in the very consumers who are ripe for your product.

The ad’s placement, such as the site, the video stream, or the network The quality of the ad inventory The type of video ad, in-stream (like a pre-roll) versus in-banner (which a user must start in most cases) The source of the video ad—repurposed TV commercials versus made especially for the Internet The quality of the ad’s creative The length of the ad, such as 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 34 seconds, or a 4-minute video that’s branded content The time of day when the ad runs The location of the viewer The accuracy of the ad’s targeting The degree that both the ad’s creative and the product were relevant to the target audience

For online video, this metric is defined as the number of visitors who have viewed the video ad or branded content. A key consideration in defining this metric is how much of the video should the consumer have watched. What if someone started the video and then stopped it within seconds? Should that consumer count in this metric? We believe you should look at only those consumers who have completed the video for this metric. Thus, another important Exposure metric is completion rate.

For online video, marketers gravitate toward completion rates and associated metrics because they provide critical input on whether the audience has viewed and fully engaged with the video ad or branded content. The completion rate is the percentage of times a video clip is played in its entirety, as measured across all viewers of the video.

because of the consumer tendency to drop out at some point before the ad is completed, marketers should aim to place their key communication points, including the advertiser’s brand name, as early within the video as possible.

The following are the most commonly used brand-lift metrics: Aided awareness Brand attribute lift Brand favorability Purchase intent

As we outlined in Chapter 2, to estimate ROI you will need to identify and segment those individuals who were exposed to video ads and/or branded content and compare their purchase history or purchase intent with a control group of consumers who were not exposed to the content.

“We have proven that digital media can work harder when it’s used with other media. [That’s why] we sit together at the table to ensure that we are integrated from the very start of the media plan.” —Doug Chavez, senior manager, digital and integrated marketing, Del Monte Foods, in an interview with eMarketer, August 28, 2009

The scale of online has reached mass media proportions—73 percent of Americans are online. Facebook alone has more than 600 million users worldwide. In the United States, 24 percent of consumer media time is now spent online, second only to television (40 percent). Marketers are continuing to divert increasing portions of their media budgets from traditional channels to digital channels, and online now accounts for 17 percent of total U.S. media spending. There is an explosion of user-generated content pouring online, in the form of blogs, social media postings, status updates, videos uploaded to YouTube, photos uploaded to Flickr and Shutterfly, and 140-character tweets pushed out onto Twitter; all of this user-generated content competes with traditional, “professional” content for the consumer’s time and attention. Consumers have become rabid multitaskers—three-fourths of Internet users have engaged in simultaneous TV and Internet usage, and 57 percent do so on a monthly basis, according to Nielsen. Search is a particularly critical part of the media integration mix, because it is so often used by consumers to find out more about a product after seeing an ad for it in other media, such as television. Finally, mobile phones allow consumers the ability to potentially engage with marketers wherever they happen to be, and often in reaction to ads seen in traditional media, including television, outdoor, and radio.

True Attribution Models can answer all of your key channel allocation questions: What is the right spend between online and offline channels? What is the return on investment (ROI) of different marketing channels and tactics? Do certain types of markets respond to varying levels of investment? What is the impact of competitive spending and activity?

“The marketing dashboard’s purpose is to capture the most critical diagnostic and predictive metrics and visually, at-a-glance, represent performance patterns.” —Marketing Profs, March 9, 2010

A dashboard enables marketers to consolidate an abundance of marketing data—pulled from a variety of different information systems—and make it conveniently accessible through visual displays on their computers and/or mobile devices. For example, a dashboard enables you to look at sales by product line and campaign performance compared against goals and across products, markets, and segments, while also allowing you to monitor customer interactions and responses. Importantly, a dashboard can also answer critical questions, such as, “What did I get for the money I spent on my last campaign?” “Which of my key performance metrics are improving?” and “What was the return on my $50,000or$100,000,000 spends?” Some dashboards will even tell you, “What will I get for my next $50,000 spend?” In fact, it is these predictive capabilities that are really what separates a run-of-the-mill dashboard from an exceptional one.

Typically, marketers using dashboards can expect to realize insights that yield improvements in ROI ranging from 10 to 35 percent.

The best dashboards allow you to: Easily drill down and get to details, root causes, and more. Create personalized views based on a user’s domain of responsibility. Be forward-looking and predict outcomes. Perform data analytics: what ifs, drill-downs, linkages, and comparisons. And above all else, generate transformative insights.

Answering your most pressing marketing questions: What are the most important questions a dashboard can answer? Consider the partial list below: What is the relative performance and ROI of each medium in the mix? How are my campaigns performing against goals? What are the potential opportunities for optimizing marketing spend? At what point is the creative and message wearing out? What are the key trends across the customer funnel stages? What are the trends in different communication channels, for example, driving traffic to the company traffic? Where is my site traffic coming from? How engaged are my visitors in different digital media? How can I better optimize their website experience? What are the key drivers of my marketing effectiveness? How is our brand doing versus the competition? How should I allocate my next set of marketing expenditures? Can I differentiate my brand by introducing a smarter media mix?

Determining the objective and scope of the dashboard. Identifying challenges and knowledge gaps across the business. Gaining an understanding of the processes for data aggregation, report generation, and distribution. Selecting key metrics that will be used to measure the impact, efficiency, and value of your marketing programs, as well as how these metrics will be used for decision making.

Do you have the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) spelled out? Are there both primary and diagnostic KPIs, the latter of which can serve as proxies for the former? How timely are the data being presented in the dashboard? Can the end user find out when the dashboard information was last refreshed and when the next cycle of refresh is going to be (daily, weekly, monthly)? What’s the right frequency for data refresh? What is the quality of the dashboard data? Are there ways for the user to know when the data hygiene is not good and the information is only directional? Does your dashboard show context to the information so that it can be properly interpreted? Is the source of information tagged to the dashboard so that users can dig deeper into the original source if needed? Can you establish data linkages between the various metrics across categories, such as by linking brand preference or intent to purchase with actual purchase behavior? Are the right analytics available? Can users access drivers of KPIs? Is the dashboard forward-looking? Does it allow for forecasting and/or predicting results or outcomes? Are the insights readily accessible with the right context and interpretation? How actionable are the insights that are disseminated? Are they approved by subject matter experts? What is the appropriate level and type of training required for correct interpretation and utilization of different data views in decision making? Can you easily find descriptions for the meanings of each metric, as well as the granularity associated with the metric (in terms of time, geography, product hierarchy, segment, etc.)?

1. Geography Filters: navigate across geographic market views to display data at the desired level of detail. 2. Time Filters: navigate between annual or quarterly views. 3. Module Navigation: navigate across different modules corresponding to distinct performance areas. 4. View Navigation: enables user to access the right data views within a specific module. 5. Metric Selection: allows user to select relevant metrics/KPIs for analysis—clicks, engagement, sales, etc. 6. Benchmarking: in certain views, allows users to access benchmark data to compare current results with those of past years or quarters. 7. Insights: enables users to upload commentary, share these insights with other users, and access the expert opinions of other system users. 8. Data Source: enables users to view detailed documentation regarding the source of the data presented—data-gathering process, methodology, and any data deficiencies or biases that would assist interpretation. 9. Data Extract: enables users to export the data presented into an Excel document with the click of a button.

We recommend, for the first couple of months, sending a weekly e-mail with links back to the dashboard, highlighting some of the key insights and trends from the dashboard. This will encourage reluctant users to get in the habit.

If you build a dashboard and nothing material happens, you have failed.

The insights get much more actionable when an individual is assigned responsibility for each metric or an area of the dashboard. A clear metric ownership structure fosters a culture of responsibility and gradually trains people to become specialists who can then be highly responsive to shifts in the data or performance.

Some kind of alignment between incentives and performance is often required to create ownership and speedy resolution among metric owners. The incentive system should be structured in such a way as to motivate people and encourage them to be collaborative as a team.

The popular blog Dashboard Spy is a good source of information for off-the-shelf products, templates for the do-it-youselfer, and examples of best-in-class dashboard designs for various industries.

“This new marketing model doesn’t shout; it listens and learns. And relevance, interactivity, and accountability are its essential ingredients.” —Christopher Vollmer, Partner, Booz Allen Hamilton

This Internet-enabled technological revolution has several implications for marketers. First, the digital consumer is more advertising resistant than ever before. Most accept advertising and marketing messages only on their own terms; through use of privacy settings, block outs, opt-outs, time-shifting, and on-demand technologies, there is more individual control over what messages are seen and when they are seen. Ads that are irrelevant, out of context, interruptive, or lacking inherent value will be ignored, clicked away, or otherwise rendered useless to the marketer. Like spent bullets against a superhero’s impenetrable chest. Second, we know the digital consumer is spending more time engaged with the web. The average American now spends 24 percent of his or her total media time online, accounting for 2 hours and 35 minutes per day. That amount of time spent is second only to television, at 4 hours and 24 minutes per day, a medium that commands upwards of $60 billion annually and yet is quickly, inexorably morphing itself toward the properties of the Internet, opening up new possibilities for engagement, interactivity, and measurement. Finally, the digital consumer is a moving target online. No longer content with just checking e-mail, searching, or surfing portal sites, consumers in every age group are spending increasing amounts of time on social network sites, video platforms such as YouTube, and other, equally immersive digital destinations, often via their mobile phones.

1. Exposure—metrics that capture the immediate impact of your marketing spend, such as the reach/frequency and engagement of digital marketing. 2. Strategic—metrics that are forward-looking and help you evaluate strategic marketing objectives related to customer and brand growth. 3. Financial—metrics that relate to financial performance and return on investment and that quantify results for sales, market share, and profits.

1. Qualified Reach, or Qualified Visits: We believe that Qualified Reach is the one critical metric that every marketer should use—specifically because it captures two important dimensions that no other single metric does: both quantity (number of individuals) and quality (the users have performed a desired interaction, which in turn suggests a degree of interest or intention on the part of the consumer). Depending on the channel, the specific metrics you use will vary, but the emphasis is always on actual behavior—a far different approach than typical measurements of raw reach and frequency. 2. Click-through rates (CTRs): CTR is the metric most commonly used by online advertisers. Although it is still relied on too heavily, and in inappropriate ways, we believe the CTR should continue to be used, but only as a diagnostic metric, not as a primary metric. 3. Brand perception lift: This metric is calculated by determining the change in a brand perception among audiences, with the results compared with those of a control group that was not exposed to the messaging. 4. Engagement Score (ES): This represents the degree of magnetism of the content or ad. Based on a flexible value system, the ES works across all digital media, from videos and mobile apps to microsites and social community platforms. 5. End Action Rate: End Actions represent the action taken by a user; it is often also referred to as a conversion activity. An End Action can be a sale, a lead generated, a download, a video view, a form completion, and so on. It is the end goal of the content or advertisement and is a critical metric for determining the effectiveness of the campaign. 6. Efficiency metrics cost per X (where X can be clicks, impressions, leads, orders, engagement, etc.): These metrics represent the efficiency of your marketing. Are you achieving your goals in a cost-effective manner? 7. Return on investment (ROI): ROI is a critical financial metric representing the financial value created by your marketing. The ROI methodologies we have suggested for each of the online channels described in this book are built on the principle of incrementality. This is another forward-looking concept and especially helpful when determining ROI of new media. All marketing, whether it is offline or online, should be measured to determine an incremental improvement in some critical consumer activity, such as acquisition, retention, loyalty, key perception(s), or sales.

The second secret involves nothing less than radically altering the way you are creating and distributing your brand messages and content. Rather than trying to push messages out to consumers who are increasingly resistant to traditional advertising pitches—and typically see them as intrusions or distractions—the goal is to create Magnetic Content that attracts consumers and seduces them into engaging with your brand. Magnetic Content is a powerful form of branded content that directly engages the consumer—so that they willingly choose to interact with it and share it with others. This approach represents a broad shift in emphasis from “paid media,” where the marketer places ads that interrupt the consumer’s content experience, to “owned media,” which is branded content that commands its own attention and interest. It’s more about attraction, versus distraction.

There is no substitute for acquiring top digital talent. Regardless of the current state of the economy, digital talent is scarce and demands top dollar. Do not let up in the war to acquire these specialists—especially in the areas of digital analytics, search, social, and mobile. At the same time, you need talent that is experienced in integrating marketing communications, building bridges across offline and online. Very often you will find this scarce even at the leading marketing communication agencies.

Both types of people offer critical contributions. Your job is to bring the left-brainers and right-brainers together in ways that will lead to a seamless interplay between backward-looking, precise data measurement and forward-looking creative executions that will engage consumers emotionally as well as rationally. Often, this can be achieved by pairing left- and right-brainers together in teams, and then letting the sparks fly.

We argue that the “fishing” approach is highly preferable and can be just as cost-efficient. With fishing, the idea is to find the best possible bait to attract your fish. The best bait to use, of course, is Magnetic Content. The best Magnetic Content attracts consumers—the right consumers—toward your brand. It achieves this by being so compelling, entertaining, informative, or otherwise engaging that it attracts promising prospects to your net.

The budgets required for creating Magnetic Content can vary widely. On one hand, the expenses associated with setting up or updating a Twitter account or Facebook brand page can be minimal. On the other hand, the cost of creating a full-blown webisode series using high-production video values and top talent can easily exceed the cost of producing a 30-second television spot. However, while the production costs may be higher with many forms of Magnetic Content, the costs to deliver and distribute it will usually end up being far less than what you would spend on a traditional media buy. This is because you will be redeploying your resources in a more efficient way. You will spend more on creating great content that attracts consumers, and they will help you spread it around to others—at virtually no additional cost to you. You will also spend much less on paid media trying to spray your message across a mass audience that includes a large portion of people who will never buy your product or service. Your marketing dollars will thus go more directly to the very people you want to reach—your most likely prospects.

Most companies understand the importance of testing marketing campaigns, whether A/B testing, multivariate testing, or user testing, as a means of improving conversion rates. Many other firms believe that introducing testing into the process is an unnecessary added step, an unwelcome delay to launching a campaign that adds cost. We strongly recommend that you institute testing as a critical step in your campaign process. Testing is the step that, with a little effort and time, allows you to pinpoint the most efficient tactics to meet your goals.