The Science of Marketing

Now even auto dealers are finding ways to leverage the social medium of blogging to make their businesses better.  On NPR’s "The Bottom Line" segment, Herb Chambers – who owns the largest string of car dealerships in New England – discussed how he is using a blog called herbcares.com to help give his customers a voice – and his bottom line a jolt. 

Here’s how it works.  Customers buy a car or have some work done at one of the many Herb Chambers dealers, after which they are encouraged to share their experience on Herb’s blog.  They visit the web site, key in a little information about themselves and their activity with the dealer, and they’re off and running.  They can type anything – positive or negative – and when they click submit it shows up unfiltered on the site.  Herb requires that his dealers answer all negative postings directly and quickly, offering solutions to customer issues and returning Herb’s reputation to good standing.  The customer walks away feeling empowered, probably willing to deal with Herb in the future.  Herb gets a living case study for his dealers’ customer service prowess, and leaves a string of satisfied customers in his wake.  A win/win.

Looking at what Herb Chambers is doing, I can’t help but think – if a car dealer can leverage social media to strengthen its relationships with customers and help its business in the process, we all can do it.  So what’s it going to take to put you into a new blog?  Why don’t you think it over, while I go ask my manger if I can give you a deal.

Recently, I have been engaged in an ongoing discussion with a colleague (a financial guy, no less) about the use of serif versus sans serif fonts.  I just expected it to drag on in a Seinfeld-esque could-Mighty-Mouse-take-Superman?** standoff.  In fact, I was firmly in the sans serif camp – always used Arial, always would – and didn’t take much stock in what the money man had to say.  He claimed to have a book that argued why serif fonts were better but never produced it.

Our Billy Madison argument went something like this.

Me: Sans serif fonts are cleaner and have more aesthetic appeal.

Him: Serif fonts are easier on the eyes.

Long on opinion and short on data.

Finally, last Friday, I decided to consult The Google.  I found that we are both right.  The common wisdom is that serif fonts are more readable (i.e., easier on the eyes) except on computer screens where sans serif fonts are more legible (due to varying screen resolutions).  This is why the Wall Street Journal is publised in a serif font while WSJ.com is in sans serif.

Anyone have another preference or opinion?

**Ironically, the writer who created Superman was named "Jerry Siegel" – look it up.

Occasionally I get the question- "Are marketing activities really worth it?"  Sure, it sometimes takes the more direct form of "Is this really going to help my company?" or the skeptical tone of "How much is that going to cost me?"  But the theme remains the same- people would love to measure the return on their marketing investments.  But is measurement really possible?

More and more, the answer is "yes".  The rise of direct marketing has yielded a wealth of statistics on open rates and click-throughs.  As more and more media move to the Internet, we can track referrals from a news story to a company web site.  And once visitors hit a site, we can track their every click, how much time they spent, and what resources they downloaded.  Our ability to measure is better than ever.  But are measurable results the only game in town?

While business managers and investors alike might nod in agreement, I’d argue that we have to continue to leverage "old school" activities that don’t produce oodles of statistics or fancy line graphs.  Don’t get me wrong, I love activities that produce measurable results- after all, this is The Science of Marketing and here we like things we can prove.  But to do the best job we can, we have to deploy the right mix of programs, some of which we can measure, some of which we can only believe to be effective.

We must continue to brief analysts on our strategies, and trust that they’ll provide better guidance to their clients and be better references for the press because of it.  We must continue to advertise in print publications and exhibit at trade shows, because sometimes people need a reminder that our companies exist and are active participants in their market.  And we must get out and talk to audiences about our latest solutions to their most vexing problems, because there is no substitute for personal touch.

There are plenty of activities we cannot measure, but that doesn’t mean we should scrap them all in exchange for stat-filled spreadsheets and fancy bar graphs.  We must continue to mix it up and do things that we can only trust will produce results.  We ust continue to believe.

A recent client engagement has reinforced a gut feeling I’ve had for a long time: business blogging is hard.  More specifically, it’s very difficult for a professional to make a habit of blogging about work stuff regularly- and tougher still for them to stick with it after the novelty wears off.  When business blogging turns into more labor than love, it may be time to recruit additional authors to help sustain blogging frequency.

 A multi-author blog can help take the pressure off of any one individual in your company, and provide some much needed time between posts for your bloggers to find some inspiration.  It also gives your company a way to express multiple viewpoints- "Technology Trends" by a lead engineer, or "Customer Corner" by the VP of sales…or maybe "The Fluff Factor" by the marketing director.  With a multi-author blog, you can bring your company’s unique viewpoint to life in multiple ways for multiple audiences.

Are there downsides to a multi-author blog?  You bet.  Maintaining consistency can be difficult as additional authors enter the fold.  To sustain a unified voice for your company, establish and publish some guidelines for blogging- some simple dos and don’ts that will help guide blog content.  Also, nominate a blog editor- someone who has the final say over the final posting and monitors keywords and formatting for consistency.

With a little structure, a multi-author blog can help ensure that your company is churning out quality content at a regular pace- without hiring a CBO (chief blogging officer).  And that’s nothing to shake a stick at.

As thin sheets of ice begin to form on New England’s many ponds, I can’t help but think of…swimming.  No, I’m not a member of the Polar Bear Club or anything, that’s just too adventurous for me.  I think of swimming because it helps me look forward to warmer times, when the boots and shovels will be replaced with golf spikes and irons, and the winter clothes will be once again packed away.  Today, this warm weather daydream has gotten tangled up with some client activity, and its got me thinking about rolling thunder: the marketing activities we use to sustain momentum between launches. 

When we put all the right pieces together, a well executed launch (much like a cannonball off a dock) can result in a big splash.  At launch time, onlookers watch to see how high, how far the splash will carry.  But inevitably the water falls back down to earth, and all that’s left is a concentric ripple that travels away from the swimmer in all directions.  Much like that ripple, rolling thunder provides a steady beat of awareness for companies and products once the initial splash subsides.

Since December is often the time to get next year’s plan in order, I thought I’d provide a sampling of basic rolling thunder activities that can be used between major launches to sustain awareness the whole year through.

Advertising – Get your brand out there through targeted ads that won’t break your budget.  Consider sponsored webinars and other non-traditional paid opportunities.

Announcements – save "B" and "C" level news releases for between major launches, and space them out to avoid quiet times. 

Blogging – Your company has deep experience and a unique viewpoint.  Use your blog as a forum for interaction with your audience about the topics you know best.

Communications Calendar – research and pursue editorial opportunities, speaking engagements and awards submissions that raise your profile among your targeted audience.

Direct Marketing – send the prospects you know a periodic, useful newsletter.  Always think of ways to expand and segment your list.

Events – Establish a presence at industry events, if not with an actual exhibit then through sponsorships and aggressive media engagement at the show.

Web Content – Make sure you plan some updates to your web site between major launches to reward frequent visitors with new content, and increase your search engine rankings.

As you may have figured out, my fellow author and I alternate posts.  He gets Tuesdays, I get Thursdays.  So as we began closing in in our 100th post, we wondered who would get the honor.  I have to admit, I peeked ahead a little to see who it would be, and was happy to see that I would be writing today’s monumental entry.  I was pleased, not only because I’m a sentimental sap who enjoys reminiscing, but also because I knew that inspiration would come easy (and you probably know that it’s not always easy creating fresh content). So, with this – our 100th post – I offer you a brief and humble recap of what a couple first time bloggers have been able to accomplish in a little less than a year:

Cornering the Globe

With our first 99 posts, we’ve had 3,899 unique visitors from 103 countries on six continents (Come on Antarctica!).  In the US, we’ve touched every state except Alaska, but we’re still holding out hope that Sarah Palin will stop by before the election.

Joining the Conversation

One of the best parts of blogging is participating in all the great discussions going on out there.  Since we started doing this, we’ve had about 200 other blog posts link to us.  And we’ve started conversations of our own, sparking over a hundred comments on the stuff we’ve written.

Contributing to a Cool Book for a Great Cause

We never saw this one coming, but we’re sure glad it did.  Through blogging, we came across the opportunity to contribute a short chapter to The Age of Conversation 2, which is due out any day now.  We’ve written exhaustively about the experience, so if you haven’t heard of it, you can catch up here.

Keeping Readers Happy

For us, it’s tough to pick our favorite posts.  For our readers, it’s as easy as a click or a comment.  We keep a close eye on what our readers respond to, and try to deliver content that keeps them coming back.  Here are The Science of Marketing’s most popular posts so far:

1. Pricing Strategy: Anchors
2. Internal Communications: Own It
3. Slogans: Say What You Do
4. Market Segmentation: How to Prioritize Targets
5. Mission Statement: Make it Possible

 That’s not bad for 100 posts.  We’re looking forward to the next 100, and hope you are too.

I was thumbing through  my alma mater’s magazine the other day and read that a group of students took third at the RoboCup World Championships last summer in Suzhou, China.  (I know, college kids do fun things and go to exotic places these days.)  Since robots are cool and "RoboCup" is a twist on the title of one of my favorite movies, I decided to check out the RoboCup web site.

The web site says that RoboCup is an international organization that promotes artificial intelligence, robotics and the like.  Once a year, teams of robots from all over the world face off in a soccer world cup competition.   But, what immediately caught my eye was the RoboCup mission statement in big, bold font in the upper right of the home page.

By the year 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer championship team.

Aside from the visionary time frame, the less-than-perfect grammar, and whether you believe soccer bots can beat Brazil (or Germany), that’s a mission statement – a date with a well-defined outcome.  (High tech B2B companies take note!)

See the 2008 finals between Team Osaka (Japan) and the NimbRo (Germany) on YouTube here.  Fortunately, they still have 42 more years to comply.

Not so long ago, I was sitting in a company meeting.  It was one of those periodic all-hands meetings where the heads of each department report what’s going on.  When it was the IT person’s turn to talk, she was bombarded with questions about corporate network access through the new VPN.

"How do you do it?"

Her answer was the same to each question – "Did you read the memo?"

Maybe the employees did and maybe they didn’t.  But, no memo ever answered everyone’s questions.  On top of that, after the meeting there were many pairwise conversations between employees and IT that would have been of interest to the entire company.  Internal communications can be better.

This is a great place to have a corporate conversation with an internal blog: one that summarizes new IT features, procedures and problems, allows employees to comment with questions and concerns and provides IT with a tool to respond to everyone at once. Think of any area in a company – sales, product/service, HR, finance – and there are bound to be items of broad interest that can be shared and discussed in a single place – an internal blog.

While it takes some up front work, departmental commitment and effort to make it part of the business, in the long run, internal blogs can be an effective (and cost effective) internal communications tool.

Any success (or horror) stories out there on internal blogs?

In a recent post on Bizmark Tech, Deb calls our attention to some pointers by Suzie Gardner on what makes good material for a company blog.  One common thread that runs through most of the content areas she lists is information, and I couldn’t agree more.  If you want your company blog to become a resource for your customers, partners or anyone in your ecosystem, you have to give them something that’s useful, something that’s relevant, something they can’t get anywhere else.  You have to inform them.

What types of information should you provide?  Well…whatta you got?  I’ve seen high tech companies that are sitting on top of mounds of data about performance and security create blogs around this information – becoming authorities in their respective industries and generating massive media coverage because of it.  I’ve seen a building safety equipment vendor centralize publicly available research and legal information on its blog, providing a resource for its audience and creating awareness for its solution.  And I’ve seen an executive at a storage hardware vendor use his blog to discuss trends in data management and backup strategies, using his unique viewpoint to promote his company’s differentiation.

The point is, the people you want to communicate with are just outside your door, and they’re looking for useful information.  Chances are your company has some inventory of information that nobody else can provide to them.  By sharing this information with them, you can open the door to new conversations that position your company as an expert, as a resource, as a partner. 

The only question remaining are – what useful information does your company posess, and how can you leverage it on your blog?

I love looking at Google Analytics.  I do it every day for both this blog and our corporate web site looking for patterns, insights and clues to help increase eyeballs and hopefully business. One of the areas that I focus on is referring sites – how visitors got to our web site.  For each referring site (including direct links), Google Analytics lists visits, pages/visit, average time on site and bounce rate (percentage of visitors that exit on the same page they enter). Here’s some statistics and observations for our corporate web site from the beginning of the year until now.

Visits

• 39% – direct link (someone typed our URL into the browser)
• 35% – search engines
• 26% – other referring sites
• Of the other referring sites, 9% were from this blog and 5% were from LinkedIn.

Pages Per Visit

• 6 – direct link
• 4 – this blog and LinkedIn
• 3 – search engines

Average Time on Site

• 7:45 – direct link
• 3:01 – this blog
• 2:33 – LinkedIn
• 1:47 – search engines

Bounce Rate

• 23% – LinkedIn
• 38% – direct link
• 44% – this blog
• 53% – search engines

The conclusion is that social networking sites:

• Generate additional visitors
• Produce quality visits (more time on the site, more pages per visit, lower bounce rate) as compared to search engines

So, why not beef up your social networking efforts?