MarketingSherpa Blog

A common question we often hear about social media is “I put some social media elements onto my page and have not seen much of a difference …”

I’m sure you can relate, because social media icons are everywhere. On landing pages. In emails. Heck, I even saw some on a billboard while I was driving the other day.

Now, on behalf of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and their investors, I’d first like to thank you marketers of the world for all of that free co-op advertising.

All kidding aside, let me throw the questions back at you to help you get the most value from your sharing icons. In today’s MarketingSherpa blog post, we’ll focus on three questions you should ask yourself about your company’s use of social media icons.

Question #1. Should we be using social media icons?

All jokes about free advertising aside, most marketers likely will find some value in using social media icons. And, here’s the key. While the value might not be great, it is likely higher than the cost.

Because, frankly, as marketing tactics go, simply slapping a few social media icons or sharing buttons on a landing page is fairly easy to do.  Almost any value you get creates an ROI since it is higher than the minimal cost involved.

For example, AT&T added Facebook and Twitter icons into an email newsletter.

This was one small part of a program that helped the AT&T Developer Program increase its Twitter audience 136% and Facebook audience 113%.

Of course, as you’ll see in the case study above, the team at AT&T did much more than just add a few icons to an email to get that lift. But since the cost, in both IT execution to add the buttons and real estate on the email, was likely so low, and it certainly couldn’t have hurt their efforts, why not add social media icons?

Well, here’s why not. For most brands, the answer is simple: not every brand needs or should be using social media icons and sharing buttons. For example, I interviewed Steve Parker, Vice President, Direct Marketing, firstSTREET, in the MarketingSherpa webinar “Optimization: A discussion about an e-commerce company’s 500% sales increase.”

“In our case given our target market, you’re looking at an age 75+ customer, they’re not big social users. And, the ones who are on social media, they really just want to see pictures of their grandkids and their kids. So they’re not going to be as interactive in the social world. So from our standpoint, it’s pretty low on the priority list. There are no social buttons on this website,” Steve said.

He went on to share, “We’ve tested a little bit of that on some of our other properties. As baby boomers, the younger part that grew up with some social media lives grow older, yes, that will get more important. For my particular target market at this point in time, it doesn’t help.”

Question #2. Which social media icons should we use?

Ask your audience in direct conversations, in surveys, through customer service interactions and other customer-facing employees: what social networks do they use?

Then, be present on those platforms. See how they’re using social media.

And, look at your analytics.

Here on the MarketingSherpa blog, you’ll notice the prime social sharing button we use is from Twitter.

That’s because when we looked at our analytics, more inbound traffic came from Twitter than from any other social network.

You might also notice, at the bottom of our blog posts, we have social media sharing icons as well. 

That’s because the rest of our inbound social network traffic came from LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Delicious and Digg.

Your analytics won’t be foolproof. Over time, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy (we receive more Twitter traffic because we encourage the audience to share on Twitter), but combining your analytics with active listening to your audience through many means will at least get you in the ballpark of how they want to interact with your brand using social media.

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Last week, I was a guest of Responsys at Responsys Interact 2013, and I had the chance to interview Rich Fleck, the company’s Vice President of Strategy.

We covered a range of topics that will appear in an upcoming MarketingSherpa how-to article, but I thought it would be interesting to address some questions from our audience that we didn’t have time to cover in MarketingSherpa webinars and MarketingExperiments Web clinics.

Here are your questions with Rich’s answers:

From Cate: “Can you go too far with personalization where it gets kinda creepy for the recipient? Big Brother-ish …”

Rich Fleck: Yes – there is great temptation to get hyperpersonal with all the data we now have at our marketing disposal. However, it’s important to align personalization with consumer expectations and privacy guidelines.

As marketers, we need to look at our marketing efforts through a consumer lens – putting ourselves in their position to make sure our initiatives make sense in the context of the consumer experience. How will the consumer respond? Are they expecting this message? Effectively balancing the targeting/personalization with consumer expectations will drive the best marketing result.

From Ed: “How does personalization affect conversion rates?”

RF: Smart targeting and personalization drives better consumer engagement and conversion. We often see targeted messaging out-performing status quo messaging by a factor of two to three times – on both engagement and conversion metrics.

The challenge is finding the right personalization opportunities by leveraging analytics to understand consumer behavior and then aligning marketing initiatives to propel a positive behavior (purchase) or mitigate a negative behavior (unsubscribe, customer churn).

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When I joined the MECLABS team in January, I was fully aware I would soon become best friends with WordPress. I truly believe WordPress is one of the most efficient ways to put out great content that not only looks polished, but is very simple to use.

Clarity is extremely important when it comes to content, so producing blog posts a reader can understand relies heavily on how it is displayed.

A blog post with photos in random places, sections without a subhead and discussing a process without the use of photos to accompany text are just a few of the millions of ways a reader can get lost in your message.

However, these are all elements you can control.

Here are five tips and tricks I’ve learned to improve a WordPress blog …

Tip #1: Use invisible tables for side-by-side comparisons

Sometimes, if you have just one image in a blog post, you can get away with setting it on the left, right or even in the center of text. This works great especially if your image can stand alone. However, if you have two images (a before and after example, etc.), it is definitely worth taking the extra time to craft an invisible table and place your photos into the code.

Here is an example from the MarketingSherpa blog post in which I placed two examples of an email side by side for easier comparison.

As you can see, placing the two images next to each other works well in this case. If they were placed one on top of the other, the reader would lose the before and after effect of the email. I would also recommend adding a caption to the photo, if the meaning without it is not very clear.

Coding an invisible table in HTML is an easy process that takes just a few tweaks. You want to start by uploading your images into the WordPress Media Library. Then, within the actual post, switch from the visual editor to the HTML editor. Next, paste the below code where you want your table to be:

<table style=”border: none;” cellspacing=”10″>
<tbody>
<tr style=”border: none;”>
<td style=”border: none; vertical-align: middle;”><a href=”FILE URL 1“><img class=” wp-image-11378 ” title=”IMAGE TITLE 1” src=”FILE URL” alt=”” width=”xxx” height=”xxx” /></a>CAPTION</td>
<td style=”border: none; vertical-align: middle;”><a href=”FILE URL 2“><img class=” wp-image-11379 ” title=”IMAGE  TITLE 2” src=”FILE URL 2” alt=”” width=”xxx” height=”xxx” /></a>CAPTION</td>
<td style=”border: none; vertical-align: middle;”></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

Now for the important part. Go back to the Media Library, select “edit” for the image you uploaded, and copy the File URL provided. Paste that URL into your first table box, and return to the upload gallery to grab the image title.

Be mindful if what you’re putting into the table does not match the upload information, it will not work.

Once you put the image title in, you will once again need to put in the same image URL. Finally, include the dimensions of the image, indicated by “xxx” in the example above. There is no need to change “wp-image” number.

Repeat this process for other photos you want to put into the table. It is also easy to make a third or fourth photo in the table: simply copy one of the table boxes, which is the code in between “<td style… and </td>,” and paste it into the code.

Tip #2: Use padding around images to separate from text

When using smaller images, a design that works well is to nestle the photo to the right or left of text. For example, this blog post used a small image placed to the left of the text.

Sometimes, if you put in an image, it may be too close to the text, or might cause strange separation of the text. For example, you might have a lost bullet point separated from the list, or maybe a few words orphaned from the rest of the sentence it belongs to tucked away under an image. To fix this problem, play with the vertical and horizontal space of the image to place the text into a desirable format.

In this MarketingExperiments blog entry, the original design plan was to have images larger in size, centered and acting as separators between paragraphs.

However, with multiple images, it is easier on the eyes and for the reader to have them neatly in the margins, sized smaller, but with the ability to be viewed larger once clicked.

Plus, for a post containing steps, having smaller images adds a level of clarity as the reader can fully see the steps in the subheader and the steps of testing, all without having to scroll all over the page.

For the first image, it was necessary to add a horizontal space to the right of the photo so the bullet points would not overlap over the image. This was done after the photo was uploaded and set into the appropriate spot to the left of the bullet points.

Vertical spacing is also a great and easy way to make sure there is enough space above and below the image.

One important tip to note is moderation is key – you don’t want to have an image on the left and an image on the right back to back in the body of your content. Try keeping a series of images or photos all on the same side of the page if they are in close proximity of each other.

Then, by selecting the image in the visual editor and selecting Advanced Settings, you can add any amount of space into the options. Here is what I used:

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National Geographic was sending an enormous amount of emails to its list – as much as almost 18 messages a week on average, depending on the season and the target segment within its database.

There were multiple marketing and creative teams sending those messages, so along with volume, branding and just simple look-and-feel was an issue as well.

To compound those problems, when a creative piece worked, it was re-used. A lot. A subscriber receiving a high frequency of emails might see the same, albeit (at least originally) high-performing, image for weeks or months on end.

Unsubcribes became an issue, particularly among the best converting recipients who were receiving the highest volume of email.

Kill your marketing calendar

I’m reporting live from Responsys Interact 2013 in San Francisco (Full Disclosure: I am a guest of Responsys at this event). Eric Brodnax, EVP, Digital Products, National Geographic Society, shared steps about how that well-known brand sought to overcome this challenge by taking a very customer-centric approach to completely change its email strategy in a session titled “Kill your marketing calendar. Moving from campaign-led to customer-led marketing.”

“What we saw was the retention rate was directly correlating to the number of messages they were receiving,” Eric said.

National Geographic used three learnings to turn this problem around across its email campaign ecosystem:

1. Ignoring your customer’s wishes impacts the entire business.

2. Your organization needs unified ownership of the customer relationship.

• Without central oversight, it’s easy to mail too much.
• It’s often your best customers who are treated the worst.
• Problems compound as time passes.

3. Tailor your message to your (internal) audience.

• Use analogies. Numbers don’t speak to everyone. In this case, Eric used the analogy of overfishing the ocean.
• Be patient. You may need to repeat your message again and again.
• Appeal to core values. Most companies claim to respect the customer and value collaboration.

“In the end, [appealing to core values] will resonate with people,”  Eric said. “But, if you don’t change the way you do business, you’re not going to make any differences.”

The implementation of business rules and frequency caps

I also had the chance to get insight into this email transformation from Marc Haseltine, Email Marketing Manager, National Geographic:

By actively monitoring our comments inbox and communicating with our email subscriber base, those on the front line of the program were aware that many customers felt like they were being over-communicated with via email.

These individual comments and feedback that were being received helped surface issues and potential problem areas in our email program for our data analysis group to really dig into. Their work helped identify long term trends that were impacting the email program.

We were actively targeting all our email campaigns, whether it was based on customers’ and fans’ stated preferences, purchase activity or geolocation, however, the email channel was helping to support so much of the Society’s content, activities and products.  Without business rules and frequency caps, it’d be possible for those most engaged with our brand to sometimes receive up to four emails a day from us.

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You’ve determined if there is any true value in your marketing and you’ve taken the steps to craft your value proposition, when the one looming question hits you – what should I do next?

Turning theory into action was the key focus of Tony Doty, Senior Manager of Optimization, MECLABS, and Lauren Maki, Manager of Optimization, MECLABS, during the Industry Deep Dive session, “Value Proposition: How to turn that shiny, new value prop into a high-performing page,” here at MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2013.

“We have a lot of great tools for developing value proposition, but often we find a lot of marketers asking us what to do next and that’s what this is all about,” Tony said.

Today’s MarketingSherpa blog post will feature four questions every marketer should ask themselves about what the next step should be for implementing value proposition development into marketing efforts.

Question #1: Who is my target audience?

Tony and Lauren explained before you think about where you will express your value prop statements, you need to first determine who your audience for that value proposition is and what their needs are.

“We should always craft a value proposition with a customer’s needs in mind,” Tony said.

Question #2: Do I know where my customers are coming from?

Tony also explained once you’ve identified the target audience for your value proposition, you need to understand the channels where your traffic comes from, and adapt your message as needed per channel.

Lauren brought up a good point that customers from different channels have different needs and motivations, so your value proposition placement should be strategic within each channel.

To do this, she explained you first need to identify not just who your target prospect group is, but also where that prospect group is coming from.

“There’s a lot more places than just your homepage for your value proposition,” Lauren explained. “Look at your data to determine if what you’re doing is effective once you’ve started putting your value propositions into place [in those different channels].”

Some of the channels Lauren highlighted in her example are:

• Targeted email campaigns
• PPC campaigns
• Display ads
• Referral sites
• Landing pages
• Product pages
• Informational pages
• Cart checkout
• Social media

Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

This week, I’ve joined marketers from around the world in Athens Americana — Boston, Mass. for MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2013. After a short (and rather scenic) water taxi ride from the airport, I’ve settled into one of the Value Proposition Development Course sessions being led by Austin McCraw, Senior Editorial Analyst, MECLABS, as he teaches marketers how to craft and express value propositions.

“I want to take the theory that we have put in place so far, and bring it down to a ground floor level of application,” Austin said.

So, today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Blog will highlight that ground floor application from Austin’s session by showing you how you can craft a value proposition in five simple steps. Our goal is to give marketers a frameworkthey can use to identify and express a value proposition using the MECLABS value proposition worksheet.

However, before we get started, take moment to download this worksheet to aid your value proposition efforts and let’s get clear on what a value proposition is exactly…

What is a value proposition?

According to Austin, there’s a fundamental question every customer wants answered that directly impacts your ability to capture and convert — “If I’m your ideal prospect, why should I buy from you rather than any of your competitors?”

“Your value proposition is the ultimate reason why your prospects should do business with you,” Austin explained.

To put this further into perspective, take a moment to ask yourself, “Can I clearly and succinctly state the core value proposition of the product or service that I am marketing?” and write down you answer.

If what you wrote down resembles any of these …

• “We empower your software decisions.”
• “I don’t sell products and services; I sell results — my guarantee.”
• “We help companies find their passion and purpose.”
• “We are the leading [insert your service here] provider.”
• “We give XX% off for new clients.”
• “This site has the solution your company is looking for.”

Then it’s very likely your marketing campaigns are underperforming from poorly-crafted value propositions that are also likely leaving some serious leads and revenue on the table.

Step #1: Identify the value proposition question

Austin explained the first step in crafting a value proposition is to identify the type of value proposition you need to answer.

“Once you have identified the value proposition question you want to answer, you have already won half of the battle,” Austin said.

And so, you first have to choose which question you want to answer; be it the primary question of “If I’m your ideal prospect, why should I buy from you rather than any of your competitors?” or a derivative value proposition that has a much more granular focus on your products or process.

Step #2: Identify potential claims of value

The next step is to list some potential claims of value that answer the primary value proposition question we identified in step one.

To illustrate this, I created a hypothetical email service provider and listed some potential claims of value.

Step #3: Rate the appeal and exclusivity for each claim

After you’ve listed some possible claims, rank them from one through five according to their appeal and exclusivity, of which:

• Appeal — “How much is this offer desired by the market?“
• Exclusivity — “Is this offer available anywhere else in the market?“

In keeping with our example, let’s take a deeper look at appeal and exclusivity of our highest-ranking example claim.

“We can integrate into any social media platform”

• Appeal: 4.5 — The ability to conduct multichannel marketing with your emails is going to have a reasonably high amount of appeal to our hypothetical ideal prospect.
• Exclusivity: 5.0 — While there may be other players in our market; our business intelligence has determined that we are the only ESP currently capable of integration into every social media platform.

Step #4: Identify evidentials for your highest-ranked claims

Evidentials are the backbone of your potential claim because they make your claim quantifiable, or as Austin explained, “Once you understand your appeal and exclusivity, you want to begin building supporting credibility with your evidentials.”

To help intensify the credibility of potential claims, Austin shared three key principles for selecting evidentials:

1. Specification — Substitute general descriptions with specific facts.
2. Quantification — Quantify your claims.
3. Verification — Let someone else do your bragging.

Step #5: Combine the highest-ranked claims with supporting evidentials

This is where you bring it all together — by taking your highest-ranked claims and their supporting evidentials and turning them into what Austin described as “the ultimate conclusion as to why prospects should buy from you.”

Related Resources:

Value Proposition: Congress has a value exchange problem … do your marketing offers?

Value Prop: Is there true value in your marketing proposition?

Customer Value: The 4 essential levels of value propositions

Through testing with our Research Partners, I’ve discovered a few common mistakes marketers make when crafting paid search campaigns using Google AdWords.

So, in today’s MarketingSherpa blog post, my goal is to provide you with a few fundamentals  to aid  paid search marketing efforts and, hopefully, help you avoid a few pitfalls along the way.

Mistake #1: Grouping all keywords into one ad group

Keywords are the heart of your ads and relevance is their soul.

So, if you lump all of your keywords into one ad group, the impact will be some keywords become highly relevant to the ad group while others are not.

This is a common mistake marketers make under the guise that the tactic will boost impressions. It will – but this approach is more expensive and those less relevant keywords that boost impressions are also likely to underperform.

Think of it this way … would you run an ad for plumbing fixtures in People magazine with the expectations that it will perform like an ad for the latest celebrity perfume line?

Mistake #2: Not testing ads

Another common mistake marketers make is not testing their ads.

Although testing is something we live and breathe every day at MECLABS, it’s important to understand in digital marketing, there are no sacred cows. Speculation on campaign performance is for the birds – unless you test, you’ll never discover what really works.

So, my suggestion is that you test. With AdWords, having two or more tests running is ideal as there is no other way to effectively benchmark an ad’s performance efficiently.

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Far too often, marketers become so ingrained within their own industry they fail to look elsewhere for valuable insights. My goal for this post is to challenge you to broaden your horizons and escape the confines of your industry.

I’m willing to bet you’ll find something worthwhile.

First, a definition …

Cross-industry competitive analysis is a study of company behavior and performance, outside of one specific industry, comparing several significant competitors. Using appropriate tools and tactics, researchers use analytic data to determine paradigm shifts within similar industries, and make predictions about possible cross-industry trends.

(MECLABS has a series of free competitive analysis templates for you to download, in case you need a little help getting started.)

Where to begin?

Now, one of the most difficult aspects of cross-industry competitive analysis is trying to figure out where to begin. Are you supposed to arbitrarily select a different industry from which to begin pulling valuable insights? The answer is found in one key aspect of every company – from the brand-new startup, to corporate giants like Apple, every company has one thing in common that they cannot survive without …

The customer.

It doesn’t matter if you have the greatest product in the world – without an interested customer, it really has no more value than the old shoe on the side of the road. I cannot stress this enough: the key to finding valuable insights in other industries is putting yourself in the shoes of your customer.

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When I was growing up, I remember a phrase my dad would use as a delay tactic on making big ticket purchase decisions that often frustrated my mother.

“I’ll ask the boys at work,“ he would reply.

My dad’s insistence on consulting people he perceived as experts before making a purchase is telling of human behavior – customers prefer to make decisions based on information, not persuasion.

I mention this because a shift to information over persuasion is coming to social media, driven by Facebook’s new Graph Search tool.

The way Graph Search works is simple … it filters our search results by what our friends and neighbors have previously liked and shared with us.

From a business intelligence perspective, the implications of this new function could be far reaching, given Graph Search allows users to formulate their perceptions of goods and services based on reviews from people they know and trust, potentially sidestepping most marketing efforts.

Here’s an example of Graph Search in action using the surroundings of our office here in Jacksonville Beach to put this into further perspective …

With Graph Search, relevance is king

Imagine you’ve just bought a beach cruiser and you’re searching Facebook to find the best spots for fun and entertainment in Jacksonville Beach.

Now, let’s say you search for “fun places to bike in Jacksonville Beach.”

Graph Search will present options your friends or other bicycle enthusiasts in a given geographical proximity have liked and shared.

From a customer’s perspective, this makes total sense.

Would you prefer to sift through a laundry list of options presented at random, or evaluate choices your friends and other biking enthusiasts are recommending?

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MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2013 is rapidly approaching, and today’s video excerpt offers an exciting preview for one of the sessions, “Boston Globe: Discovering and optimizing a value proposition,” featuring Peter Doucette, Executive Director of Circulation Sales & Marketing, The Boston Globe.

At last year’s Summit, Peter’s presentation was titled, “The Boston Globe: Managing a transition from free to paid product,” covering an ongoing and relatively early-stage testing and optimization program. This year’s presentation will discuss part two of that process.

In this excerpt, Peter and Pamela Markey, Senior Director of Marketing, MECLABS, talk about how tablets became an important digital form factor for The Boston Globe’s new online subscriber strategy, some of the customer insight that began informing the strategy and the new direction insight created at The Boston Globe.

Also, if you would like to hear the entire process Peter and his team at The Boston Globe undertook to transform the way it approached both its online and offline audience, watch the full presentation from last year’s Optimization Summit from the MarketingSherpa Video Archive.

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