Jen Evans | Sequentia Environics

Underappreciated digital marketing stat of the week

by Jen Evans March 27, 2012

If you’ve read my recent posts in MarketingProfs you’ll know that there are some digital marketing stats that everyone gathers and looks at but aren’t very useful, and some stats that are very important that no one looks at. We’ll look at some of these on a regular basis.

The stat of the week is the visitor retention ratio: or, how many people are opting-in to get more content and information from you? What percentage of your website traffic subscribes to an email list or follows you on Twitter?

It’s a mystery to me why Twitter itself doesn’t publish more data about corporate accounts and pages: traffic, content performance, and visitor retention ratio: how many people who see your profile actually subscribe? How many found you rather dull last month and unfollowed and unsubscribed?

Your goal should be to boost your visitor retention ratio, especially if you are a B2B or complex sale marketer. More subscribers isn’t the only goal, but a bigger pool of qualified opt-ins means more relevant sharing, wider reach, and faster impact.

For more information on some of the most important stats digital marketers should monitor, download our From Talk to Action white paper.

How to define buyer personas to facilitate measurement

by Jen Evans March 7, 2012

Your marketing team probably uses buyer personas — most companies do — but how confident are you in their effectiveness?

Personas are meant as a way to define your audience of potential customers so you can focus your content and maximize your budget. The problem with most personas is that they are each created as isolated depictions of typical buyers. Without a common thread running between them, it’s difficult to ensure that you are addressing the entire spectrum of your audience needs. More importantly, you can’t accurately measure how effective your efforts are.

Fortunately, it’s easier to develop effective personas than people think, even if you can’t budget for any research just now. The simplest way is to divide any audience into thirds by the amount of existing knowledge or experience they have with a subject. Then by developing useful content that targets each group, you can measure how many people of each group make up your audience.

Here are some examples:

Product: Enterprise data accelerant system that offers huge cost benefits

Segmentation criteria: Amount of experience with data accelerant systems

New — people who know nothing about enterprise data acceleration (these could include people in Procurement, RFP researchers, transferred executives looking for information on a new portfolio, employees at new companies after a lateral career move into a new industry)
Experienced — people who have enough knowledge about data acceleration, but function in other areas (such as CFO, CTO, product managers of similar or integrated products, potential integration partners, prospective employees, independent consultants)
Expert — people who provide organizations with technical expertise about data accelerant systems (technical experts, journalists, pundits, scientists, researchers, analysts)

Product: Women’s jeans

Segmentation criteria: Amount of fashion knowledge

Fashion learner — girls and teenagers forming their opinions and tastes
Fashion sophisticate — women with more than a passing interest in fashion who like to dress and look good, they are still looking to be educated on the latest trends in an efficient, easy-to-achieve way
Fashionista — people who want the best or daring fashions and know trends before they’re a trend, including professionals, designers, bloggers, socialites

This type of segmentation will allow you to target your content and gather metrics such as which segment is biggest, which content performs best for each, and whether there is any evidence of research cycles. Simply by segmenting your audience in terms of the depth of their knowledge and experience, you can get a clearer picture of what kind of content resonates most.

3 key ways that Google+ search integration will change content marketing

by Jen Evans January 16, 2012

As of last week, Google is now including Google+ activity into its search results. For B2B marketers that rely on search engine marketing (SEM), Google+ integration represents the single biggest shift in how Google calculates page ranking since their search engine debuted in 1996. The inclusion of relevant pictures and posts from Google+ followers means that your SEM strategies should now extend out into social media, if they don’t already.

Some of the results of Google’s move into social search (called “Search, plus Your World”) are already clear. Local business searches, for example, will become more reliant on recommendations from the people you follow in Google+. Knowing that a friend has used a local florist or restaurant will help reinforce a search engine ranking result.

Other implications are less immediately obvious, since this is the first time that social media and search, the two major silos of the digital world, have been integrated in such a seamless way. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land argues that Google might have compromised the neutrality of its search results by playing favourites with Google+.

Google’s social search will continue to evolve, but this collapse of the digital world will require companies that rely on search marketing to start moving to a centrally planned, multichannel approach to content marketing. Until now, social media has generally been treated as a separate but parallel marketing strategy for B2B lead generation. Google’s new approach will require businesses to ensure their SEM and social media strategies intersect and intertwine or risk losing visibility. At the same time, this shift will also reinforce the value of a distributed community strategy.

Without a two-fold approach, B2B companies that optimize around keywords may find their current search strategies far less effective. Successfully adapting your business to social search will require you to:
• Maintain organic search visibility through new, granular approaches to keywords
• Conduct ongoing experiments to determine the right amount of strategic content required for Google+ to maintain traffic levels
• Look for new digital customer narratives by tracking conversion paths such as:

Google search –> Google+ content –> your company website.

So, for example, if your company specializes in cloud computing you might need to take a careful look at the content marketing assets that currently reside on your website. Do you have existing blog posts that can be adapted for use on Google+ in order to drive more traffic to popular landing pages? Are there certain aspects of the implementation process that would benefit from further discussions with your Google+ followers? You might also post a key diagram from a white paper as a teaser that will encourage potential customers to fill out a form and download the entire PDF document.

Is your business unsure about how to create and measure strategic social content for Google+? Are you trying to determine the optimum content mix to ensure your Google+ page matches your intended customer experience activities? Drop us a line and sign up for a webinar on January 30 on how to measure and plan for the impact of Google’s social search strategy.

Image credit: Sean MacEntee

The Funnel Is Dead, Long Live the Measurable Customer Narrative

by Jen Evans September 7, 2011

It’s one of those reassuring little white lies we tell ourselves as marketers: people make linear decisions. It’s simpler to draw straight lines about their behaviour, so to date we have typically pushed people through carefully scripted marketing processes. But does that really reflect people’s actions and how they find information? Of course not. We all know it doesn’t really happen that way. But by rejecting this common fallacy, we face some more challenging questions: If we rigidly enforce our own processes, how many people do we leave behind? Can we trigger behaviour and if so what and how? How is the fragmenting media landscape changing the processes by which customers research and make purchases?

Traditional marketing approaches fall short in the new customer landscape

The answers are clear: marketing has fundamentally changed and many in the profession are struggling to catch up. The framework by which they understand marketing is not set up for a non-campaign world where they don’t control timelines, only experiences. The so-called sales funnel, if that was ever an accurate metaphor, no longer looks even remotely like a funnel.

Companies are used to viewing the sales and marketing process as a systematic approach of between seven and nine steps that begin with initial contact and push the potential customer through sales lead, need identification, prospect qualification and so on through to closing the sale and then maintaining the customer relationship.

But that is how sales and marketing teams structure the selling process. The buying process, from the customer’s perspective, is nothing like that. This how buying more accurately works now in the era of social media and online communities:

It is a complex process with multiple stops and starts and options, and each potential customer will move through in unique ways (although in aggregate, demonstrating certain patterns of behaviour). It is linear in that any two sales will end in the same result, but no two routes to that sale are the same. The same is true for any type of engagement decision (i.e. join an email list, follow on Twitter)

The best marketers can hope to do in this environment is manage the process so that, while all roads may not lead to Rome, eventually all roads lead through digital “toll booths” of content and information exchange.

Why don’t most marketing organizations view that process as a coherent customer narrative? There are three reasons:

Marketing is structured around campaigns, not customers
Marketers don’t measure a linked sequence of customer actions across all touchpoints yet—they still think in terms of pre-sale post-sale, not a relationship that can last a lifetime
Marketers have been determined to control the narrative, rather than create digital touchpoints of content and experience, and then measuring how people interact with those touch points

How the new customer narrative works

There are many ways a future customer can first engage with a potential purchase, whether it’s a new pair of shoes or a new VPN. It could be a billboard with a URL that they type into their smart phone’s mobile browser, or by clicking a Facebook wall post from a friend’s feed, or searching on Google. These are all examples of entry points to a research experience that could initiate a longer relationship with the brand: a relationship that begins with the brand getting permission to communicate more and progresses toward one sale and possibly many.

What happens between those start and end points is where it gets complicated, and are almost never connected, especially when activity begins through a discussion in social media or an online community.

Consider an online relationship with a customer where she makes two appliance purchases over 4 years, and twice shares content.

Today, those start and end points are not connected. By setting up measurement beacons that customers interact with, we can understand what each digital customer narrative looks like. And by shaping these experiences with content and the addition of community engagement, the context and experience of research and customer care is measurable from the first interaction and throughout the relationship. In this context, the true measure of influence is how many people take up your shared content.

If you have unlimited marketing budgets and don’t care how they’re spent, then maybe this approach won’t matter to you. But if you’re a results-driven marketer with limited resources who wants to really understand how each part of the marketing mix contributes to progression via either relationship and/or sales conversions, parallel but intersecting tracks that must both be viewed and measured in order to understand customer buyer and audience dynamics.

This ties directly into small movement marketing: by measuring how people progress and move through digital properties we can quickly see which marketing investments are performing and which are not.

In my next post re-examining the sacred cows of marketing, I’ll take a look at the role of content in measuring small movement marketing, and why it’s not the message or—gasp!—even the copy that matters most anymore, but utility. In our final installment, I’ll examine how you manage brand in a completely fragmented media world of vastly shifting customer expectations.

This article first appeared on Marketing Profs.

How to Measure Digital Relationships: Marketing Lessons From “Moneyball”

by Jen Evans August 18, 2011

[This article was originally published by MarketingProfs.]

I grew up watching all kinds of sports with my father, and to this day I love baseball. Though my brother, the other sports fan in the family, says baseball is ponderously slow, there’s something about its rhythms that I love.

I remember as a kid watching the larger-than-life baseball heroes of the ’70s and ’80s, players like Pete Rose and “Mr. October” Reggie Jackson. Back then, it was Reggie’s game—a game of big hitters and bigger egos, of smashes to left field and home runs.

But, over the years, the game changed. It got smarter. Baseball has always been uniquely suited to statistics, and, over time, player performance started to be measured in new and surprising ways. That shift wasn’t easy, and it didn’t happen fast, but eventually teams began to unlock new insights about how to win.

Moneyball and Marketing

The transformation of baseball through numbers is beautifully told in Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, a seminal work by Michael Lewis, who is perhaps the finest narrative business writer of our time. (The story is also coming to theatres later this year in a film starring Brad Pitt.)

The story is as much about business as it is about sports. It describes how Bill James, using the statistical analysis of baseball records known as sabermetrics, along with Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, discovered unknown secrets to gain competitive advantage. Surprisingly, it had very little to do with paying tens of millions of dollars to a guy who could hit the ball 500 feet but still struck out three out of every four at-bats.

In many ways, Moneyball is a great model for how digital marketing—and marketing communications of all kinds—is changing right now. For decades, advertising and PR campaigns have centered on the Big Idea: swinging for the fences with a clever, provocative, or powerful concept that drove brands, hearts, minds… and, ultimately, business. How did it drive business? No one knew exactly, but the numbers—whatever their provenance—showed that it worked.

But the advent of digital has changed that. As anyone in marketing knows, the frothy talk around “relationships” and “measurability” is now part of any social media or digital marketer’s semantic toolkit. The irony? Most of social marketing spend is on advertising and influence—in other words, the long-ball of marketing communications.

Many practitioners today still think of marketing as mainly a zero-sum game. Even social media goals are transactional. The message most campaigns send? Buy this, and go away until I’m ready to send you another message. That’s thinking in terms of a campaign rather than a lifecycle.

New Performance Indicators

I liken that approach to the runs batted in (RBI) stat. RBI is the random, red herring stat of baseball. Because it measures how many runs a player has brought home, it sounds important. But look closer, as Bill James and Billy Beane did, and all RBI tells you is that the player gets hits when other people are on base. So what does really matter? Getting on base in the first place.

A stat called on-base percentage (OBP) tracks how often a batter reaches base (except when a fielder makes an error), including walks. Many hitting stats don’t count walks. But it turns out that in baseball walks matter—a lot. The more hitters can avoid striking out and force the pitcher to give them a pitch to hit or to walk them, the more players are on base. The more players on base, the higher the likelihood of runs and more wins. That’s why a walk can be just as valuable as a hit. But before Bill James, that kind of common sense didn’t apply.

New performance indicators like OBP have fundamentally changed baseball. Despite the phenom that is home-run king Jose Bautista of the Toronto Blue Jays, baseball is no longer a long-ball game. It’s about getting on base, progressing from first to second to third, and creating the conditions to get home. Maybe players score on a home run, but maybe they score on a wild pitch or a bunt.

The lesson is deceptively simple: small movement matters.

And the same is true of marketing: Get on base, progress, and create the conditions for the next step. Scoring in marketing is about how a consumer progresses through a relationship with a company or brand—the kind of relationship built on the customer’s researching a purchase, and so a planned, stage-driven relationship based on need. (And, no, despite the familiarity of social media, it’s not a friendship-type of relationship—it’s an informational and experiential one.)

Going Deep

Depth is the as-yet untapped promise of digital communications. Customer experiences can now be both real-time and practically bespoke, and they can be multilayered and asynchronous. Some relationships may not evolve for 10 years (think big appliances). Some will move fast. Some have fixed lifespans.

Consider a new mom: She will be a new mom for 24 months. After that, she’s got a different set of mom information and different experiential and product needs that could span years and dozens of interactions across multiple media in varying depth and complexity.

A customer-relationship lifecycle might have included one or two touch points in the 1970s (ads, in-store branding, and some PR), but there are now dozens. And those touch points can now be planned out with options: the choose-your-own-adventure approach to marketing, with measurement.

Accordingly, advertising is now rightly relegated to its proper place on the marketing spectrum: the outer edge. Advertising draws people in, but then what? How many people move from first base to second?

Some people will see an ad, start following a brand’s Twitter account, and then opt in to receive an email newsletter, which indicates a stronger tie and deepening progression in the relationship—welcome to second base!
The next steps: what kind of content they consume, and how quickly? Or download an app, set up an account, or join a community— they’ve made it to third!

Keeping Better Score

We’re starting to see words like “interaction planning” cropping up more in RFPs and programs. There is real potential for organizations and brands to build actual relationships of real utility with customers. And there is real potential to look at data on behavior to structure how those relationships can progress and to identify indicators of an increased likelihood to participate or buy—and then to measure results.

This isn’t about impressions—the RBI of the marketing world, a useless metric that doesn’t reflect anything other than a big impressive number for highlight reels and presentation decks. It’s about how relationships progress and evolve and what they reveal about the customer-relationship lifecycle.

We’ve learned over the past 10 years that digital relationships among consumers, buyers, and brands progress like other relationships. How they progress can be structured, benchmarked, and measured, telling us a great deal not only about consumer needs and interests, but also about how well current digital experiences truly deliver on those needs.

Oh, and one more thing: Go Jays!

Jen Evans is the Founder and Chief Strategist of Sequentia Environics.

Image credit: Rafael Amado Deras

A Sequential Thought: interaction and engagement design

by Jen Evans November 25, 2010

We talk a lot about conversations and relationships these days, but we forget that both have beginnings, middles, and endings.

So when it comes to communicating with your customers in the digital sphere, it is critical to remember that there is a natural arc to these engagments.

Ask yourself: when new people find you online, how are you introducing yourself? Are you forcing them to wade through a sea of engagement options? How do they know whether to follow you on Twitter or Like you on Facebook – and why? Once they’ve subscribed to your content for a while, how do you ensure you’re staying relevant – and how long should you expect to? What is the information or consumption cycle?

In answering these questions, you can start to map out a long-term experience narrative for your digital visitors and community members. This is interaction design or engagement design, an exciting new field of digital customer experience we call the customer or buyer narrative. We’re going to be exploring this in greater detail, including its relationship with strategic content and social CRM, so keep checking our blog!

Introducing the Sequentia Presents Series – exploring the intersection of marketing and technology

by Jen Evans August 5, 2009

It’s a remarkable time to be a marketer. Lately, our conversations with clients contain an increasing amount of confusion about a shifting industry, questions about what technologies are important to various types of marketers, what works, what doesn’t, and the most likely future landscape. We are lucky to work with an exceptionally interesting and diverse group of clients, so when there is a common theme in our conversations with them, we know there is room for informative, useful content that can help them make decisions and guide investments in their marketing infrastructure and tactics. From mass adoption of social networks to mobile apps to marketing automation and the ever shifting and fragmenting world of online media, flux and shift are the keywords of the digital era. Today we launch a new series of articles that reflect our thinking on the intersection of technology and marketing, based on a content model that reflects how we feel the world of marketing content and collateral will evolve. Three things you need to know:

Sequentia Environics Presents is a five-article series about the intersection of marketing and technology, and what marketers need to know to make a digital shift effectively. Our goal is to publish magazine-calibre writing as shareable, distributable digital articles freely.
The series is authored by tech journalist (Wired, Walrus, Maisonneuve) and author Jon Evans. Jon, a software developer currently developing mobile applications and an award-winning novelist, will be writing on everything from measurement, to what marketers need to know about the cloud, to the mobile application environment, to the topic of our first issue, the evolving world of managing identities on social networks and websites. Click here to read the PDF.
Sequentia Environics and our sister companies are sponsoring the articles developed by Jon. Our commitment to our readers, customers and prospects is to provide the highest quality content: useful, objective, practical and interesting to both the general reader and the marketer. If we give you valuable facts, we know you’ll want to receive more. We’ll measure which content you prefer and engage with most actively, and share those findings as well.

We welcome your feedback on the series and ideas for future articles.

Attention, Relevancy and the Online Buying Arc

by Jen Evans April 16, 2009

I was having dinner recently with some very smart internet people and talking about methodologies and approaches, and the importance of information in the internet experience. One of them said to me “People don’t want all that stuff, they want fun experiences, not information.” What he really meant was “they don’t want advertising”. And it’s true, advertising is generally unwanted, unless you are in advertising or marketing and consume it for professional reasons, if you’re a pop culture junkie and enjoy how advertising reflects the state of a society, an economy, its values and mores, OR – you have a need for the product or service that is being advertised. If you’re planning a vacation to Los Cabos, information on Los Cabos is highly relevant and interesting to you, and something you would likely act on. Continue reading »

What Fibonacci Said

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