Now, via Duct Tape Marketing, comes another tool designed to give you a leg up on understanding various personality types found specifically online.

Email service provider Exact Target has been doing research they call SUBSCRIBERS, FANS, & FOLLOWERS, and as part of this research, they created The Social Profile Interactive Tool, which introduces 12 consumer personas they found online. Studying this kind of behavior allows you to get to know your audience based on their personalities, not just their demographics.

Interestingly, as much as they’re for different purposes, it seems to me that this tool has similarities to Klout’s methodology for mapping online influence. While SPIT (great acronym!) maps personality traits and Klout maps the impact of opinion and content, they’re both ways of creating a more well-rounded picture of who people are, how they behave online, and how their online behaviors influence others. This, along with a good roadmap for creating buyer personas, can go a long way toward helping you get real insight into the people you need to reach.

Source: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Related posts:

1. 21 tips for creating buyer personas
2. Porter’s Five Forces: Tipping the Balance of Power in Any Business Situation

Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead

A longtime fan of the Dead, David Meerman Scott co-wrote the book with HubSpot co-founder and fellow deadhead, Brian Halligan.

Here’s a summary of the book from an interview with Scott:

“The Grateful Dead broke almost every rule in the music industry book. They encouraged their fans to record shows and trade tapes; they built a mailing list and sold concert tickets directly to fans; and they built their business model on live concerts, not album sales. By cultivating a dedicated, active community, collaborating with their audience to co-create the Deadhead lifestyle, and giving away “freemium” content, the Dead pioneered many social media and inbound marketing concepts successfully used by businesses across all industries today.”

Somehow, I feel like my life has come full circle. Make that drum circle.

Source: Online Marketing Blog

Related posts:

1. Direct marketing testing vs. social marketing testing

And, as they surmise, it’s not totally surprising. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was trained as a fledlging direct marketing copywriter to envision the reader of traditional direct mail as standing over a garbage can (now, a recycling bin) as he thumbs through the mail, ready to dump yours in. It’s not a stretch to imagine an email reader with finger hovering over the delete button.

Ecoconsultancy’s report goes on to deliver the other side of the coin, however, aka the good news: “good email campaigns can deliver impressive results. For instance, in “the best email campaigns” Litmus tracked, 77% of the recipients who opened the email read it in its entirety. In a coupon-based campaign, 4% of opens produced prints, and in another campaign, 9% of the recipients forwarded the email to others.

Given how important email is to many businesses, and the role it can play in driving sales, Litmus’ data is a good reminder compelling creative and copy should are always a priority.” They also recommend techniques such as segmentation and multivariate testing to boost email marketing performance.

Personally, I lean most toward testing as a strategy for enhancing performance. As long as your list size can accommodate it (that usually means at least 5,000 names, preferably 10,000), it’s a way to immediately keep honing in on what works.

Top Rank makes a useful point about the importance and relative ease of performing landing page tests. “Many email marketing tools now offer built-in A/B page-testing capabilities, enabling marketers to test multiple page variations and measure the performance of each…Silverpop, CEO Bill Nussey suggests that advanced A/B testing and optimization can easily yield a 5% to 10% lift in conversion rates. Plus, because email solutions are automating what used to be a manual process, marketers can spend more time interpreting numbers and focusing on the creative.”

Speaking as a creative, I can attest to this fact. Testing means honing in on variables that can be geared toward response, which answers questions like “which subject line works better?” and “do they prefer this layout or that?” Contrary to what some marketers believe, DM copywriters and designers can find this freeing, rather than inhibiting.

Source: Latest Strategy & Planning content from Econsultancy

Related posts:

1. Direct marketing testing vs. social marketing testing
2. How to get people to buy from you, right now
3. 7 and-a-half tips to start social networking

Throughout the ages, savvy direct marketers have used testing strategies to refine their marketing efforts and boost results. In fact, even as a fledgling copywriter, I used to tell clients that if you’re going in the mail, you should be testing something. That’s because the market will tell you what it likes. Offer A vs. Offer B. Creative A vs. Creative B. Email Subject Line A vs. Email Subject Line B. You get the idea.

These days, social media’s thrown a lot of new avenues for reaching out to your audience into the mix. So, the question is, can you use the same (or at least, similar) testing methodologies to hone your social media results?

The answer is yes, you can test social media. Plus, there are additional benefits to testing your social media marketing that direct marketing doesn’t provide, namely:

• Faster response times. Social media marketing responses can be measured in seconds and minutes instead of days and weeks.
• Emotional insight. Using carefully chosen search terms (like your brand plus emotive words like “love, “like”, and “hate”), you can get the pulse of your audience even if they aren’t speaking directly to you. In fact, companies like Alterian provide software that “automatically determines the sentiment of a conversation, so you know exactly how people feel about your brand.”  (In case “I adore XYZ Brand” isn’t enough.)

So, how do you test your social media marketing? The fundamentals aren’t that different from direct marketing:

1. Set a goal. As with direct marketing, your ultimate goal is a business goal (increased sales, faster conversions, and higher spending at conversion to name a few). Prolific media blogger Jeremiah Owyang wrote a great blog post and whitepaper in which he took business objectives and broke them into key performance indicators. Take his KPIs and break them further into measurable goals that are relevant to your business’s social media presence.
2. Test the big stuff first. Just like the direct marketers do it, test the things that can and will have the greatest impact on your results. That means test your offer, your creative, and your list (your fans, followers, retweeters, etc.).
3. Measure and analyze. What are the right metrics to use? Is your metric the number of friends and fans? Number of retweets? Click-throughs to your website from your social presence? Is it the time between click-through and purchase? That depends on your goal and your plan for moving ahead. In his article The 10 Social Media Metrics Your Company Should Monitor, Raj Dash at Social Times recommends 10 metrics—including social media leads, engagement duration, bounce rate, membership increase, conversions from leads into cold, hard cash in whatever way you get it (sales, paid subscriptions, paid advertising to name a few), brand mentions, loyalty, going viral and blog interaction.
4. Compare apples to apples. In your test, make sure you’re comparing a similar size of a similar demographic at a similar time for a similar offer. Any of these elements that are too different will throw off the results of your tested element.

If you’re still not sure what to test, here are a few ideas. Pick the ones that are relevant to your business:

• Tweet a link to the same blog post with two different titles.
• Drive potential new fans to your Facebook page by testing two different ads.
• Secure potential new fans to your Facebook page by testing two different landing pages (i.e., your wall or a custom page).
• Discover how closely your market is listening to you by measuring which of your tweets they retweet.
• Compare the number of comments between two types of blog posts and try writing two more of a similar style to test again.
• Ask the same question in two different ways on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

Last but not least, the two most important tips I can give about testing, whether it’s social media testing, direct marketing testing or any other kind, are these:

1. Build it into your budget and schedule. If you’re running around the office as the sole advocate for testing, it’s an uphill battle. Get buy-in from the team and build testing into your plan, including a post-mortem to review results and a Plan B for implementing next steps. Otherwise, you’ll lost the momentum and potential uptick.
2. Keep it simple. Testing can feel overwhelming. After all, it’s hard enough to get one campaign out there, more or less figure out how to rejigger it in order to examine and improve results. But it is worth it.

Related posts:

1. 7 and-a-half tips to start social networking
2. Why Brands Fail at Social Marketing
3. How to get people to buy from you, right now

You’ve worked hard to create a meaningful, engaging website for your audience. You’ve carefully thought through the content, the actions your audience will take, what results you want your website to have. You’ve developed an online experience that reflects your brand and extends your in-store experience. You’ve tested your site on various desktop- and laptop-sized screens and are convinced that the user experience is as good as you can make it.

But now you’re noticing a shift: People are walking around with mobile devices (we barely call them cell phones anymore, since “phone” is one of the lesser-used features) and they want to access your site on the go. The problem is: Your finely tuned site is… well… finely tuned for a larger-screen experience.

What should you do?

• Find out who’s accessing your site and how. You can do this through analytics, by polling your audience, and even with just a few demographic assumptions about your audience.
• Do an ROI assessment. Determine the return on investment to see if it’s worth adding a mobile site. If just nine of your thousands of visitors are mobile visitors, then it might not be worth it. However, if those nine customers represent 90% of your income, yeah, it’s worth it.
  

When you see a growing contingent of viewers looking for a mobile experience or even a few who represent a potentially large revenue opportunity, go mobile. And keep these factors in mind when you do:

• Size doesn’t matter. If you decide to create a mobile website, it’s not just about renting a miniaturization machine from your local sci-fi gadgets store and shrinking your site to fit on a smaller screen. A mobile site should be its own experience, not just a 6-point font version of your regular site: Reduce the number of on-screen choices to button size easier to press. If you’re a sports store and have dozens of SEO-friendly links on your website’s home page, consider a mobile version that starts with just 2 buttons – “apparel” and “equipment” – and allows users to drill down. Mobile sites aren’t about just mini-me versions of your regular site. They are about being user friendly in an on-the-go context that just happens to use a smaller screen.
• Context is king. An online audience who accesses your site on their regular computer might be curious browsers, they might be shopping around, or they might be planning to buy. A mobile audience, however, is on the go and is often accessing your site with a much more direct purpose in mind. That purpose might be to shop but it might be for some other reason. Consider your audience and the situations in which they find themselves on the road and needing to go to your site. Are they looking to your site to solve a specific need? For a good example of what I’m talking about, just look at iPhone Apps. Many of those apps solve situational problems for on-the-go users and wouldn’t be useful when functioning on a desktop or laptop.
• Brands must be consistent. Whatever you choose for your mobile experience, the brand experience you offer your customers must remain consistent. If your brand has long relied on its stodgy, old boy’s club experience to attract a specific demographic of customers, moving to mobile doesn’t give you permission to write in a sans serif font face and “funkify” the experience. Brands need to remain true to the experience they provide, no matter what media they are communicated through.

We’re seeing the initial emergence of the mobile web right now as people choose platforms and figure out how and why they interact in a mobile environment. There will come a day when every site needs to provide a mobile experience and you can get a jump on your competition by starting now.

Related posts:

1. A Brand that Needs to Grow Up
2. PHH Arval Brand Launch

CEO Concerns and implications for supply Chain Trends
(tags: ceo, buyer_personas)

Related posts:

1. 21 tips for creating buyer personas

1. Unlearn what you know about marketing plans. Common marketing plan wisdom says: “Shiny is good. Formatting is good. Clever deployment is good.” Instead, successful marketing is not about doing something clever but rather about communicating something meaningful in a way that reaches your audience.
2. Stick to media that’s worked, but save room to experiment. Experiment with one or two new ideas but don’t break the creativity bank each time. It never works. Don’t feel like you’ve failed because you chose tried-and-true marketing ideas like newspaper ads and press releases and branded schwag over something more outrageous.
3. Create an Idiot’s Guide. Marketing plans tend to be about ideas and justification first and about “how will we actually do this?” a distant last. Justification is important but should play a brief role up-front while the bulk of your plan should be devoted to a PLAN. Create a step-by-step, no-brainer, “complete idiot’s guide” to doing what you need to do. Make it so simple that you could delegate it to your kid on “take your child to work day”. Put in the phone number of the person to call who will actually print your branded schwag, along with the location of the high resolution logo file you’ll need to send to them. If your marketing plan includes topical marketing like blogs and press releases, write the subjects into the plan.
4. White paper, staple, done. Skip the slides, skip the expensive coil-ring binding. Print it on white, 20 pound bond 8.5 x 11 and blast a staple through the corner. Save time and money and put your efforts into deploying your plan.

The perfect marketing plan is a dog-eared, coffee-ring-stained, highlighted, notes-in-the-margin, sticky-noted document that is used daily and never leaves your desk.

The perfect plan can be handed off to someone else with the comment: “I stopped on page 11. If you can start on page 12 and just follow the instructions, we’ll have more business than we can handle next year.”

That’s a perfect marketing plan. I get goose bumps thinking about it. Do you?

Related posts:

1. Direct marketing testing vs. social marketing testing

What I mean instead is tapping into your customer’s negative zeitgeist. Aka, what keeps them up at night?

Anyone worth their weight in salt has had nights where professional concerns keep them awake. Or worse, make them bolt upright out of a deep sleep going “aaahhh!!!”

I’m not talking about fear of losing your job (although if you’re an employment site, this is relevant to what you do). I’m talking about the stuff that makes someone worry about meeting the specific objectives of their job. You know, all the things they have to write about in their employee review.

For example, when I was in sales for a brief, shining, terrifying year, I worried about making my quota. I worried that, come the end of the month, everyone else would report all the deals great and small that they’d closed and me, I’d have a big, fat zero. I would’ve been a ripe target for anyone who could show me a fruitful system for cold calling or an easy-to-swallow guide to the psychology of prospective customers and how to structure your pitch. (I was also 22 and too young to be wearing a big ol’ suit and hawking telephony products for Pacific Bell but that’s another story…)

Whether you’re a B2B or B2C* company, you can—and should—be able to imagine your customer’s greatest fears and the areas of their job responsibilities they’re concerned about. And you must show understanding and empathy along with your solution.

This is not about scare tactics and fear mongering. Forget all that. It’s short-sided and will only serve to tarnish your professional reputation and brand. Let your competitors try that route and fail.

What it is about, however, is a way to cut to the chase. What does your customer really, really need in order to do their job well?

Sure, you can throw in all the demographics you could ever handle—age, income level, education, region, etc. That’s all good information.

But the truth is, I go for psychographics every time. Psychographics marketing means tapping into what your audience is thinking and feeling. Psychographics goes beyond demographics to tap into the lifestyles, behavior and attitude of your audience to build a more detailed picture of who they are. While a lot of psychographics focuses on lifestyle choices that may or may not be relevant to B2B marketing, you don’t have to focus there. The point is to focus on their perceptions. What is this person thinking about? What do they believe? What do they want?

What are they afraid of?

Since so many advertisers concentrate on demographics, using psychographics marketing not only gives you critical insight into more important questions of motivation, it also can help you stay a step ahead of your competition.

By way of example in the B2B space, I have a high-tech client who creates fabulous digital experience solutions. One of the big topics floating around right now (which you’ve probably heard about) is Apple’s announcement that they’re not going to support Flash on their mobile devices. See Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash for details.

If I’m CTO for, let’s say, a major insurance company considering my next big solution to help mobile insurance agents file applications in the field, I’m worried about which technologies to throw my hat in with. What if we choose a cul-de-sac and have to rebuild in a year? What’s our competition doing? How do we future-proof?

As a marketer, your job is to ease my mind by way of making me aware of your solution. Are your marketing efforts doing that?

Something to sleep on.

* Don’t think this applies to B2C? Imagine the 50-something exec who’s worried about balancing job responsibilities against taking care of her own aging father. That’s exactly what customers of a a health care client of mine had on the table. Is something similar on your customers’ minds?

Related posts:

1. 6 questions to define creative strategy
2. Create a marketing plan you’ll actually use

A couple centuries of that kind of branding effort is a hard habit to break. Today’s social media marketing, however, has shifted how consumers interact with brands and, as a result, brands need to break the habit and communicate in a different way. Once upon a time, media was one-way, from the brand to the consumer, so control of the message remained firmly in the hands of the brand. Your brand. Those days are over.

Today, consumers work with, interact with, manipulate, and augment brands. They’ll put videos of your brand’s messages on YouTube, dissect branding messages on blogs and Twitter, post brand images on Flickr, and all of this get pushed through the social web—into sites like Facebook—where commenting and “Liking” can sway perceptions.

Today, thanks to the web, it’s less about your brand and more about how people interact with your brand that can make or break your message. So, how can your brand give up control over its message while still communicating your message effectively? Here are three ideas:

1. Perform thorough market research. Make sure your message will resonate with your audience and not take on a life of its own. Avoid the Motrin Baby-wearing commercial fiasco that upset moms and spawned parody commercials and a mountain of angry responses.
2. Keep your message consistent yet fresh and prolific. A continued volume of message production can help to keep people watching for more rather than growing bored with the same old thing. Burger King does this well with their variety of commercials featuring that creepy mask-faced king. You’ll still get people talking about your brand but you’ll be changing the story from “this again?” to “what’s next!?!”
3. Participate. Don’t produce marketing messages and just release them to the world. Be part of the message. Run an active, engaging Twitter account and YouTube channel and blog and Facebook fan page. Rather than flipping the “on” switch and walking away, participate and engage your audience. Welcome protagonists and antagonists equally and respond respectfully to detractors with a dose of understanding, as in, “you make a good point…”

Today’s social web demands that you give up some control over your message but it doesn’t mean that you’ll give up the impact your brand can have. Consumers can interact and disseminate your brand message for you if you’re willing to loosen your grip a little, and tighten up your creative thinking—and your social media strategy—a lot.

Related posts:

1. Direct marketing testing vs. social marketing testing
2. 5 marketing megatrends you can’t ignore
3. There is gold in them there social media hills

Created by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter to analyze the attractiveness and likelihood of profitability of an industry, Porter’s Five Forces are a simple but powerful tool for understanding where power lies in any business situation. Using this tool, you can gain insight into the competitive strength of your current position as well as one you’re considering moving into.

In this way, you can take fair advantage of situations of strength, improve weaknesses, and avoid missteps.

While these Five Forces are typically used to determine whether new products, services or businesses may be profitable, you can use them to analyze any “balance of power” scenario, including key strategies in your marketing plan.

How to Use Porter’s Five Forces

The Five Forces that determine the balance of power in any business situation are:

1. Supplier Power. How easy is it for suppliers to drive prices up? The answer depends upon the number of suppliers of each key element, how unique their product or service is, their ability to control you, the cost of switching from one to another, and so on. The fewer your choices, and the more you need their help, the more powerful your suppliers are.
2. Buyer Power. How easily can your buyers drive prices down? As in Supplier Power, the answer depends upon the number of buyers, how important each buyer is to your business, what it costs them to switch from your products or services to a competitor’s, etc. If you only have a few buyers, they can exercise a lot of control over you.
3. Competitive Rivalry. The key here is how many competitors you have and what their capabilities are. If you have a lot of competitors that offer equally attractive products and services, then you’ve probably got very little power. If suppliers or buyers don’t like the deal they get from you, they’ll go to someone else. If no one else can do what you do, however, you may have a lot of strength.
4. Threat of Substitution. Can your customers find another way to do what you do? Can they hire people to do what your product does? Can they hire developers to re-create your software? If it’s easy and viable for them to substitute something or someone for your product or service, your power is weakened.
5. Threat of New Entry. How easy is it for new players to enter your market? If it doesn’t cost much money or time for someone else to start a business and compete with you (low barriers to entry), if you can’t gain or haven’t gained advantages via expansion such as lower-priced supplies (economies of scale), or if your key technologies aren’t well-protected or can’t be, then new competitors can quickly enter the market and destabilize your position. On the other hand, with strong barriers to entry that you can defend, then you can keep your position of strength and use it to your advantage.

To use Porter’s Five Forces to assess the balance of power in your business situation, start by examining each of these forces individually.

Think about the factors that are relevant for your market or situation, and then check them against those in each Force.

Download a copy of this diagram and mark your key factors for each Force. To characterize the size and scale of each Force, use a plus sign for any force that’s moderately in your favor, two pluses for any that’s strongly in your favor, and a single or double-minus sign for any force moderately or strongly against you respectively.

Next, brainstorm opportunities. Where can you further leverage a Force strongly in your favor, bolster one that’s a moderate advantage, or shore up weaknesses? Does one area require a rethink in order to change the balance of power?

At first blush, it may not be readily apparent where branding or marketing strategy’s role is in this tool, but if you consider “quality differences” in Competitive Rivalry, you’ll realize that this is where brand has the most impact. “Quality differences” is a catchall area that can also encompass other value-adds such as brand affinity, “stickiness” and customer service, all of which have a huge impact on “customer loyalty,” also in this category.

Consider the Coke vs. Pepsi rivalry and the point becomes clear. Two simple products—I always like to refer to them as “brown, bubbly, sweetened water” to illustrate their simplicity—that have waged brand wafare to the tune of billions of dollars. The Coca Cola logo is one of the most recognized logos in the world. (Not bad for a can of bubbly brown water.) That alone shows how important perceived quality differences are. They can make or break a brand.

Related posts:

1. 21 tips for creating buyer personas