Polls Versus the Ballot Box: What It Can Mean to Your Marketing
Category: Measure
Wednesday, 11 January 2012 13:30
As the election season heats up for the presidential election showdown in November, the public is inundated with results from polls describing the acceptance or the relevance of this policy or that candidate. Keep in mind though, whatever your level of political interest, a poll is only significant based on what it measures.
A poll only reports the results of the opinions of a relatively small groups of people, and can be influenced by how the questions are prepared and how receptive the respondents are to the inquiry. (Next time a pollster calls during your dinner hour, you’ll know what a challenge this may present!) Yet, for all the emphasis on polls, the only result that matters is in the voting booth.
In your business, you face the same challenges, where customers tell you one thing, and then do completely the opposite. That’s where measurement comes into play. With any campaign, you not only have to monitor the outcome, you have to measure the right thing. There’s a classic marketing story of a boom-box maker who brought in a focus group to test-market colors on boom boxes. In the focus group, the consumers said they preferred black boom boxes; at the conclusion of the test, the consumers allowed to pick from a selection of boom boxes on the way out of the conference room. The overwhelming color choice? Yellow!
Fortunately, web analytics have made it much easier to track user behavior, and you can test-message broadcast emails to measure effectiveness. But what about direct mail? As with all marketing, it’s important to have a goal and a strategy. Are you going to measure success by cost per acquisition? Cost per piece? The response rate? Pick a metric based on your goal, and stick to that. And don’t forget to put into place processes that will help you achieve your goal. For example, if the goal is to acquire leads by having an offer tied to a phone number or email, make sure your call center or sales team is briefed in the proper response.
Entrepreneurs and small-business owners are optimists, and optimism can sometimes amplify expectations. But by keeping expectations within the scope of what direct mail and marketing campaigns can achieve, you’ll be much more pleased with the results.
Should You Be Customer Profiling?
Category: Measure
Tuesday, 03 January 2012 11:16
In casual conversation, the word “profiling” often has a negative connotation, but in marketing, it is a driving force behind success. Building a customer profile helps you understand your customers’ attitudes, interests and preferences, and tailor your marketing to these and other factors relevant to their buying behavior.
How does it work? To create targeted campaigns, marketers typically do a basic select by some kind of relevant demographic. A travel agency might select consumers of retirement age, for example, because they tend to have more leisure time. Customer profiles take this a step further, layering on home ownership, median home value and other factors that provide insight into disposable income. It might include whether or not they have purchased a vacation in the past.
How do you develop a profile of your customers? Smaller marketers often have little data to work with, but tools for getting around this are exploding.
1. You can purchase data cuts of increased detail. For a few more dollars per thousand, you can purchase a more refined data select than a single cut. In the earlier example, this might be a list of consumers aged 65 or older who own homes worth at least $150,000 and have purchased at least one vacation in the past 12 months. The trick is to balance the increased cost of the data with the likelihood that it will bring a greater return. This is where testing becomes critical. The more you test, the more you know what brings additional value and what does not.
2. You can append your existing list with additional data. If you have an existing customer list, you can do what is called an “append,” or purchase additional data on those same customers that will create a relevant customer profile. You can do this even if you have nothing but an e-mail list. It’s called a “reverse append.”
3. You can purchase complete customer profiles from list companies like Accudata, Nielsen and Dun & Bradstreet. These companies are increasingly providing packaged solutions aimed at helping small and mid-sized business owners with an overall demographic overview of customers who spend the most money in their markets. These include both standard selects like median household income and business standard industrial classification (SIC), as well as proprietary categories like “wealth scores” and “super niches.”
Customer profiling sounds like a scary word, but even for smaller marketers, it doesn’t have to be. Talk to us about creating a customer profile and taking your targeted and personalized marketing to the next level.
Marketing Lessons From Audi's A6 Campaign
Category: Measure
Tuesday, 20 September 2011 00:00
By Heidi Tolliver-Nigro
Audi is launching a new advertising campaign for its 2012 A6 sedan that offers a lot of great insights into what makes marketing and advertising (whether television, direct mail, or any other medium) great.
The ad talks about the embarrassing condition of American roads, dominated by ubiquitous potholes and lunatic drivers (one driver texting, another reading a newspaper), and lined with incomprehensible road signs. It does this in a way that makes every driver say, “Uh, huh! That’s right! Uh, huh!”
"The road is not exactly a place of intelligence,” pans the voiceover. “Across the nation, over 100,000 miles of roads and bridges are in disrepair. Add to that countless distractions every mile. Half a million cubic yards of debris, and the 38 million drivers who couldn't pass the driver's exam today."
The ad then contrasts these deplorable exterior driving conditions with the serene and optimal conditions inside the Audi A6, including its luxury interior and MMI touch pad for navigating past traffic jams.
Read a great article on this ad here.
What can we learn from Audi? Whether it’s direct mail, a poster, or anything else, the power is in the ability of the marketer to present a common problem in a way that causes the audience to identify with it at a very personal level. This creates the context for the marketer’s product as the natural solution.
I am reminded of an award-winning newspaper ad for an airline rewards program that showed a man and woman staring longingly at the Canadian Rockies, but with their hands pressed up against wall of glass that prevented them from actually getting there. Ever feel like your airline rewards program is like that? I’m sure lots of people reading the ad did. It’s a powerful image.
These are critical lessons for all aspects of print marketing. We want to talk about all our products’ features and capabilities, but those capabilities only have power when the audience can relate to them. The more emotional you can make this connection, the more powerful the solution will appear.
How are you making an emotional connection in your print advertising?
Heidi Tolliver-Nigro is an industry analyst specializing in digital, 1:1, personalized URLs, QR codes, and other marketing technologies as they apply to print. You can contact her at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Tools to Measure Your Social Media Effectiveness
Category: Measure
Thursday, 15 September 2011 11:42
By Gary Pageau
Social media is all the rage these days, with CNN anchors reading tweets and presidential candidates announcing their candidacy on Facebook. There also as many social media experts out there plying their trades as there are grains of sand. Before delving deeply into the social-media morass, however, take time to set some goals and standards for success.
The most important thing to remember about social media marketing is not “whether” you should do it, but how can you work it into your overall marketing mix. Social media, and Facebook, in particular, can really benefit your business. For example, if you have a built-up a business based on couponing and promotions, Facebook and local-couponing services like GroupOn or LivingSocial can be effective. But, they have their own set of challenges, too, which is why marketers embarking on a social-media marketing program need measurement tools.
What is your most important marketing objective for your social-media program? Encouraging trial? Engaging future customers? Engaging current customers? Regardless, you are going to need to routinely use measurement tools to gain insight into your success. There are many web services popping up to track social media effectiveness and, unfortunately, they can come and go. (For example, a popular tool named BackType was recently purchase by Twitter and some of its capabilities curtailed. PostRank was just bought by Google.) Also, keep in mind, some of these tools work differently than others, so there’s really no standard of success. Find out what is important to you, and focus on that.
Klout is an interesting for measuring Twitter reach and influence. Just put in your Twitter id and the site analyzes your Twitter “style.” For example, if you’re more of a lurker, you’re Twitter will be as a “Listener” or, if you are knowledgeable in your field, your Klout score may indicate your expertise as a “specialist.” This is valuable because, if you position yourself as an expert, but are only influencing a few people, you know you’ve got some work to do to improve your tweets.
Tweet.Grader is another tool to track, to measure, and to increase Twitter effectiveness. Enter your Twitter name, and the system pulls your account data. The site tracks the history of your follower growth or the number of tweets that were sent. It provides a different perspective than Klout.
Website Grader, from the same developers as Tweet.Grader, lets you to enter your website, along with the name of a competitor, and receive a report featuring like-blog analysis, blog grade, recent blog articles, Google index pages, and readability level. And, if you haven’t had enough Grading yet, this developer also offers Blog.Grader.com.
Twitalyzer is an extensive Twitter management tool, and may be too intensive for the time-press marketer. It does provide a broad view of Twitter metrics – especially in the paid service – but may be information overload for the casual user.
Bit.ly is a URL shortener allowing marketers to shorten links (with options for customized and user-friendly links for reusing links) with some nice tracking features. There’s a pro version, too, for multiple domains, advanced dashboard for data layout, real-time data analytics feed, and customer support. Bit.ly Pro could help in measuring how many people click a specific link. (Also, don’t forget to use the skills you’ve learned from other direct-marketing efforts. Unique PURLs, for example, can be embedded in tweets, to optimize tracking.)
And, finally, HootSuite is a great dashboard tool for monitoring several services, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. You can send messages directly from Hootsuite, as well as schedule posts for later use. This is especially useful to find out the times of day your customers are more receptive to messages, as well, as planning a campaign in advance. Don’t have time to camp out on Twitter all day to messages out specific times? HootSuite is a good tool for managing campaigns. Another HootSuite benefit: You can have multiple people posting on accounts, and measure their effectiveness. There is a pro version, but most small businesses will need only the free version.
Lessons from Betty Crocker Cake Mix
Category: Measure
Tuesday, 16 August 2011 00:00
By Heidi Tolliver-Nigro
This is a story I heard at one of the recent trade shows. I wish I could remember who I heard it from or the details of the story, but I don’t. I’ve Googled it, too, and can’t find it. So please indulge me as I tell it from memory.
So the story goes, years ago in the early days of commercial cake mix, Betty Crocker wanted to increase sales of its cake mixes. Because its original mixes required women to add water and eggs, its marketing team figured it could increase sales by making the recipe even simpler. Powder the eggs and its customers would just have to add water. The idea was to appeal to busy moms who wanted great tasting cakes without the work.
Instead of boosting sales, the change tanked them. Why? Because busy or not, customers wanted to feel like they were baking from scratch. Just adding water wasn’t really “baking,” in the eyes of its customers, so the change — while simpler — made the mix less appealing. Betty Crocker put the requirement to add real eggs back in and sales bounced back up. Their customers felt that they were baking again.
What does this have to do with you? Betty Crocker made a mistake by not fully understanding what drove its customers and prospective customers to make purchasing decisions for its products. It knew its customers were mostly women. It knew that they were extremely busy, and it is likely that during this period many were going into the workforce for the first time. What the company didn’t know was what drove the specific purchase decisions for the products it was selling.
It is times like this when surveying your customers can really pay off. Whether it’s encouraging them to fill out a survey online, respond with a tear-out card, or respond using a personalized URL, sending out those surveys and soliciting their feedback helps you understand what makes them tick. Once you understand that, you can tweak your marketing message in a more powerful — and effective — way.
So whether you are launching a new product or marketing or repackaging something tried and true, maybe it’s time to take your customers’ temperatures again.
Heidi Tolliver-Nigro is an industry analyst specializing in digital, 1:1, personalized URLs, QR codes, and other marketing technologies as they apply to print. You can contact her at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
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