For marketing, I can see a couple of things showing through as prime areas of concern (and things to spend the most energy on), and I have listed these below. Now other marketers may or may not agree with me, but this is what I intend to work towards:

• Cleaning up messages
  At least for B2B marketing, it feels like messages are generally way too complicated, and I’d like to go back to basics and focus on little more than stating what the pain is, what the cure is, and how you can get the cure.
• Understanding customers
  Not really something that is new, but if you have the tools to understand how your customers are interacting with your website and your brand, then that information needs to be exploited ruthlessly, so that’s another thing (analytics) that has crept up the top of my list of priorities.
• Nonline marketing
  I was listening to someone from the new Metro Bank who was saying that customers need to be able to contact you any way that they feel comfortable. Cruel words if you work in online marketing and your focus has been forever to push people online whether they like it or not. For a while it worked because everyone was doing the same thing and customers had no option. But I have a feeling that might be about to change.

So there we go – three simple marketing resolutions that have proven themselves to be important. A very crucial issue to tackle as I see it is to decide what channels are going to work best for you, and then spend time judiciously doing a good job implementing those few channels. I have seen already how over-complicated marketing campaigns don’t necessarily deliver results, and personally, I’m beginning to swing towards an almost Helvetica-like attitude towards my plans and campaigns.

Speaking of plans,  that’s another area where this marketing-zen like state might come in useful in a few months time when it’s time to write plans for 2011. For me, I can see that there will be three key areas of focus:

• Analytics – What is my audience doing?
• Demographics – Who are the people in my audience?
• Action – What do I want my audience to do?

Within the course of the last few months, we have seen the focus shift very dramatically to driving traffic towards paid products. I have long been a proponent of this kind of thinking and have wondered what the point is of having zillions of page views if these people are not doing anything on the site – and if we’re not guiding them towards something that has the potential to either:

1. contribute to the company’s bottomline
2. move the customer one step closer towards taking an action of some sort

Anyway, there are my thoughts for this cloudy south London weekend. Updating this blog is turning out to be a bigger task than I thought – so much to say, such little time to say it!

If you’re here, you’re probably looking for a place to download a copy of the dissertation.

So here it is:

An empirical study of the factors affecting
the user acceptance of paid content online

For those of you with hawk-eyes, I know that Facebook Connect is now dead – I just haven’t had the time to write another post.

Thanks for stopping by!

Learn more about Facebook Connect here.

Anyway, here’s the scenario – you’ve got a site, visitors come and register on your site, you’ve got some data collection fields. Now imagine that through your site and through m0re or less the same registration/login process, you can access your visitors’ Facebook profile information as well.

It is immediately evident how this feature can be of use if you’re in B2C marketing or retail (especially if you’re selling a number of brands or different kinds of products) – but even in a B2B context, there’s a lot of potential to use this tool. Let’s explore a couple of “principles” down below. We are proceeding with the assumption though that you’re working in a market where at least some of your audience is online. It’s important to stress that if you’re working in a market or industry (or country!) where nobody is doing anything on Facebook, your role then potentially becomesthat of a Thought Leader and Educator.Let’s not go there for the moment. So, here are our thoughts:

1. Businesspeople are “people” too

A lot of professionals are on Facebook, and looking at some of my peers’ profiles, increasingly personal and professional posts and updates are being mixed up. And for the moment, Facebook is the defacto standard social networking platform – at least in the US and the UK. Facebook Connect allows you to allow your users to share the content on your site with their colleagues or friends without ever leaving your site.

2. You want to know more about your customers

Potentially of more importance to people who are sales and client focused. Would you not like to know what your customers are like “as people” as opposed to when they have their game-face on? Think of relationship-building possibilities based purely on how much more you know about a company and the people working there than your competitors. This could be simply their attitudes towards social media, what they think of the economy, their understanding of what you do or just the fact that they like golf.

3.Engagement andpropagation at the same time

Facebook Connect allows users to comment on content on your site, and then share it pretty instantaneously, all simultaneously. There’s a caveat here though – you’ve got to first have a content strategy in place to generate the kind of content that people will actually want to share with people.

The above three are barelyscratching the surface of what Facebook Connect can do. For me, the biggest practical obstacle sems to be actually the development work required for a successful integration of Connect into your site.

But what if you’re not in one ofthese fields, and what if you’re not a huge brand? What kind of a social media strategy can you adopt, and what should your expectations be if you’re not British Airways, Microsoft, Adobe or Aviva?

Let’s get one thing straight here. “Social media” as far as I am concerned is a “tool”. I still cannot see the word “strategy” being strongly linked to social media. Even when you talk of “social media strategy” – doesn’t it really just boil down to “using social media to achieve your business goals” ? i.e. it’s part of your business or marketing strategy (just my point of view, don’t send me hate emails about it!).

So you’re a small or large company, but you may not have a big brand whih everyone knows about. And also, you’re in an industry where probably not a lot of people are on Facebook or Twitter or Myspace or whatever else decides to spring up one day. What do you do to jump on this bandwagon?

#1: Clarify your business goals

Why do you want to use social media? Generate sales or leads? Get user-generated content? Get closer to your customers? Get new customers? Upsell? Cross-sell? Launch a new product or service? What you do will depend in part on what you want to do, and what all these lovely tools out there will allow you to do.

#2: Find out more about your customers

Finding out more about your existing customers will allow you to find out more about potential customers. No brainer. Talk to them, ask them nosy questions, visit them if possible, try to understand what makes them tick. If you cleaned up all your marketing messages but had to keep just one, what would resonate with your audience best?

#3: Find out where your customers are

This is quite crucial. It’s not unheard of to see people seting up networking sites and LinkedIn groups and Facebook fan pages and tweeting away to high hell – but nobody really giving two hoots about it. And why aren’t they? BECAUSE THEY DON’T USE THESE TOOLS! It’s tempting to dive straight into these things because the folks at LI or Twitter have made it so easy to set up profiles and start talking to people. But it’s no point talking to an empty room. So go where your audience is. If LinkedIn is their thing and there are a lot of industry folks on there, think about professional networking as a route. If tweeting is their thing, then think of how you can use Twitter to spread the word, serve them faster or better, create awareness or even generate responses.

#4: Set up a measurement mechanism

That’s he great (or horrible) thing about the internet – everything can be measured. And more often than not, you don’t need a lot (or ANY!) money to find some free online tools which will enable you to measure what kind of activity you’re generating. That becomes the subject of another post altogether, so I’m going to skip that for now. At the very basic level, you have free tools like Google Analytics and www.bit.ly which will help you get a better idea of how much reward your efforts are generating for you.

#5: Plan and execute

Not much more to it – is there? You know what you want to do, you know where your customers are, you know what they like to hear, and you’ve figured out a way to check if they’re hearing what you’re telling them. Now go ahead and do it.

I just realised that there’s a burning question that I wondered about for a while, and I haven’t answered that.

Does social media mean “Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn”?

My answer is a very vociferous NO. These are by far themost popular tools – but if youbreak it up into two parts, and focus on the first part – SOCIAL – you can see that anything really which causes groups of people with a common interest or objective to congregate can form the basis of social media. This could be a photo sharing site, a customer review website, a discussion forum, a site to complain about something (or someone!), guidance and advice websites or any other kind of user-generated-content type website.

If no such forum exists, it might even be something as basic as an email newsletter which then causes people to get in touch with each other and be…wait for it…SOCIAL. Keep in mind – sometimes conversations about your brand or industry don’t just start by themselves. If that is the case for you, think of what you can do to get your business community together.

As a marketer in a company with a relatively unknown brand where people are not sharing photos and updating wall posts , you need to know what you want to achieve, and what kind of creatures your customers are. Once that part is done, you can google your way out of the next part which is figuring out what you can do with all these great social media tools.

I’m not going to go into all of the gory details – look up Aaker, Keller and Kapferer for the real fancy stuff. Here are – however – my plan to get to the bottom of a brand conundrum. Keep in mind that we are dealing with two brands which have grown quite organically, and somewhere along the line, the focus on a single, cohesive message has been lost.

For a successful brand, it’s important to get tot he bottom of

1. What does your audience think of your brand at the current time?

2. What would you LIKE your audience to think when they see your brand?

Branding is really all about the message – whether it’s through images, words or sounds.

A couple of very simple concepts can point us in the right direction:

·       Current situation: We need to try and get clear answers for: “who” the brand is, “what” exactly it does, and most importantly, “why” the audience should care.

·       Branding and purchase decisions: Our messages and communications should allow the audience to organise the knowledge and information that we are giving them, so that they can then make a purchasing decision (that is what my end-goal is).

·       Brand association: The brand needs to be associated with an outcome, something that the audience desires deep inside, and when they look at the image, they connect it with your brand.

·       Choosing brand elements: Strap lines and slogans in some cases may be the most important brand element you have. Especially in B2Bcommunications, you may not have the privilege of explaining to a potential client what your product is through a 200-word paragraph – you’ll have to do it in just a few words.

·       Satisfying a need: Research, research, research! Get to the bottom of what your customer needs, then make a connection between that need and your brand. Speak to current customers to find out how they feel. Speak to potential customers and see what they’d like. Once you know what the most powerful words are, you can then work it into a powerful message that works.

·       Brand resonance and relevance: There’s brand awareness – and there’s brand resonance and relevance (linked to what I just wrote about). In addition to getting the brand out there, what you need to get clarity on are messages that the audience understand (relevance), and messages that they can relate to (resonance).

·       Brand promise: The above discussion brings to our next question: What is our brand promise? Our branding needs to give the audience the confidence that using our product or service will lead to some kind of benefit for them.

What I find around me is that there has been such a hoopla around the use of social networking for business, that there is almost a senseless dash to go out and create a Facebook page, set up a LinkedIn group and start a Twitter feed – irrespective of whether or not there is an actual objective at the end.

If you are getting all gooey-eyed at the mention of the tools and sites above, here are a few things I keep in mind before embarking on a project:

1. What are you trying to achieve? And can the use of these tools honestly help you achieve those objectives?

2. Do you really have a social media strategy? Or are you going to give it a push for 2 months, and then just forget about it?

3. Social media needs people to participate. Do you know if you have the right audience for social networking tools?

Lastly, and this is the most important question and it ties in with Question 3 above:

4. What’s in it for the participants?

I am now a little surprised at how often people go ahead and get started on projects like this without giving a thought to whether their target audience actually give two hoots about the damn thing!

More importantly in the B2B sector – these people are not online to join fan clubs and make friends – they’re here to make money, build contacts.

Very recently I was asked about some suggestions for setting up a Facebook page and a LinkedIn group for an industry event. From what I could see, these were the pitfalls:

* There was no medium-to-long-term strategy in place, it seemed like a knee-jerk reaction. Yeah, it sounds sool, let’s do it!

* There was no clear objective that was hoped to be achieved. So as a result, there were no clear metrics that could be tracked. And if you don’t have metrics (leave alone the RIGHT metrics) – you will never know if you ever succeeded. “Number of Facebook fans” is not a good enough B2B metric in my book.

* There was no thought given to the audience. Businesspeople with little time on their hands are unlikely to go through complicated registration forms, filling in their details two or three times over for no real benefit. And heck, they have no interest in being in with the cool kids inless it’s going to make them money.

The suggested actions then would be to identify what it is that makes these people tick – then use that as the hook, and see if this hook can be used to lure people to you using social media tools in order that you may achieve your business objectives – be it increased revenue, more traffic, generating engagement, leads or something else.

As far as I can see, unless there are favourable answers to the questions above, you seriously have to question whether social media is the right path to follow for your business or not.

As much as I am a proponent of all things online, even I cannot say that these tools work for everyone. For some, they work great – for others they need tweaking before they work, and yet for others – you just have to live with the fact that these tools are not right – and that is perfectly fine. At the end of it, what you want is a clear visualisation of the route to results, and you want to go down the path that will help you see this route.

It is often that one finds marketing people wound up in their own little worlds of  “branding”, “awareness” and other fuzzy marketingspeak which can mean a lot, but often don’t.

More and more though it seems that marketing is being asked to be ore accountable, more transparent, and more….a part of something. That’s not explaning it very well. Let me try again.

It is no longer enough for the marketing “department” to go about doing marketing “things” and not speaking to the sales guys, the biz dev guys, the product development guys or any of the other departments who are responsible in some part for bringing the bacon home.

I’ve noticed with increasing frequency especially in 2009 the notion that marketing is beginning to be seen as a core and integral part of a company’s function – not something that can be treated as a separate function. In the same way, I take reservation in some part to the term “online marketing”. I recently got into a rather stressful argument when someone mentioned that online marketing is a trend that is going to fizzle out soon. That really grinds my gears, even when I think about it today. But I digress, I was talking about marketing being a central, core, integrated part of the business.

And that means that the metrics and measures of success for a marketing person needto reflect those of the business as a whole. And if that means making more money (isn’t that always the bottom line?!)  – or generating more data – there needs to be some way – an attribution model of some sort – where marketing can take responsibility for X% of the final outcome.

And if that is not possible to do in the current scenario, then the connection between marketing and the rest of the business need to be reviewed again and again till it is figured out what exactly the hell it is that Marketing is doing for the business!

During a recent consultancy project that we (our University group) did for a major, multinational computer company – we realised just how commonplace this problem is – and how easy it can be to solve if you’re willing to address this as a problem.

Step 1: Ask the simple questions. We’re spending £X on marketing activities, and £X f marketing personnel. So what are we getting in return? Do we know? OK, cool, we think we know that. How do we know that? Is our current method transparent and waterproof? Err…hmmm, no, not exactly. Alright then, move on to step 2.

Step 2:  Let’s map out the workings of our money making machine and find out where Marketing slots in. What are the other little components that Marketing works with? Sales? Biz Dev? Are they working with them now? No? Then should they? Are there any common goals between these two components or departments? There are? Alrighty then, are they both looking at the same metrics or performance indicators? Solve these mysteries and then move on to Step 3.

Step 3:  We now know what Marketing is doing for us, and we know which other departments interact with Marketing, and we’ve managedto identify some common goals. I guess Step 3 – and this is probably the most important step – is to get buy-in from all the parties involved and agree that Marketing is no longer just a support function but something that is part of all of these other components and departments in the business without which that department is incomplete.

So if you’re developing a new product, get Marketing involved to learn from their experience, find out what mistakes not to make, gain from research that has been conducted – build a product.

If you’re the sales department, ask Marketing for ammo in the form of analytics data, competitor intelligence and new ideas and ways of presenting your product so that you can go out there and sell better than your competitors can.

Conversely, it’s the marketing department’s role to gain insights about customers, the business and the product or service in question, and focus their activities based on outcomes. We did X, and as a result the business gained Y.

There was a discussion we were having the other day where someone mentioned that marketing is muscling in on other peoples’ territories – this particular conversation was with elation to Sales. I’m not sure that’s the precise way to interpret what is happening – it’s more that in an attempt to achieve greater transparency and to improve measurability, Marketing departments around the world are creeping out of their marketing coccoons and figuring out ways to prove their worth to their owners, to show their businesses why they exist, or in other words….their raisons d’etre.

So here are my top marketing resolutions for 2010:

• Put a price-tag on online registrations and sign-ups
  This is going to be part of my plan to make online marketing activities more transparent. First we get an idea of how much it costs us to get hold of a customer’s details through traditional means – DM or phone etc. That’s the sticker price for an address. Then we apply that to the number of sign-ups or email addresses generated in order to put a figure on the value created for the business through an online marketing campaign. So in theory, we should be able to represent X signups as £Y. Sweet!
• More competitive intelligence
  There’s a lot of information online for FREE using sites like Google Ad Planner or Compete.com which can give us a lot of information about how competing sites are doing. I don’t take these as the last word, but they’re a pretty decent indicator. More decisions and promotion work need to be planned based on the insights we can get from sources such as these. If you know that your site gets 10 times the amount of traffic that your nearest competitor does, you’d be silly not to tell your advertisers about it. Of course, you don’t boast about it, you just direct them to the source very politely so they can see for themselves.
• Be more open-minded about success criteria
  Yes, we’re working on a website, and we love conversions. But as Avinash Kaushik has pointed out in his excellent new book Web Analytics 2.0, there’s more to look at on a website than just macro-conversions like revenue or leads. List all the little “jobs” that people come to the site to do, and then set targets for each slice of this “pie of activities”. Each one then becomes an object of attention by itself.
• Listen to the customer
  Well, this has started to happen already. Far too often it seems, marketers and marketing departments get caught up in panels and boards and meetings and experts, talking to and listening to people who are too close to the product or the market or the business. There are too many decisions based on “what we think is right” based on our experience and expertise, and not enough focus is given to what the customer is saying – or would say to us if we asked them. An on-exit survey, two or three quick questions – I’m really interested to see  what kind of insights we can get from switching off the “assumption lobe” in our brains, and just listening to what the site visitors have to say. Seems like a logical enough way to try things out considering these visitors are probably the only group whose opinion really counts.

That’s just about it. I’ll be over the moon if at this time next year I look back at this post and say to myself “tick, tick, tick…..”.

So what are you going to do differently in 2010?

What is really surprising though is sometimes when you pick up an old/existing marketing strategy, what might have been a good marketing plan at the time that it was implememented is still on the shelf past its use-by date and needs a bit of an update.

There are several directions that we can take this post towards – but right now we’ll just foucs on the thinking behind revisiting existing ideas – questioning why something was done in a particular way, and analysing if it’s still the right way to do things – especially if you’re taking on something that a different team had been working on. I’ll split this into a couple of questions and answers.

• What were the business objectives when this plan was put into place?
  It’s important to get an answer to this question partly for your own understanding, but partly as a refresher for everyone else as well, because unknowingly due to inertia, there are probably some elements of the plan which are no longer relevant, and some other business objectives might be being ignored with the existing plan. A discussion helps bring all hese out in the open for everyone to get clarity on what the objective is. Which brings us to our next question.
• What are the business objectives that we are trying to achieve today?
  Another excellent question. You can’t have a list of 10 objectives, not for one plan anyway. These have got to be 2 or 3 at the very most – a couple of “critical” objectives. If nothing else mattered, what were the two or three things that your product or service needed to do. Chances are it’s going to be something along the lines of “Need to make money”,  “Need to generate leads” or “Need to raise awareness”. I personally look at the last point with one raised eyebrow because it’s so easy tohide behind the “awareness” cloud – and if you can’t measure what you’re doing, then don’t go there – but that’s another discussion altogether. Your business objectives might be a combination of the ones mentioned above, and that’s fine too. This brings us to our next and final question – and this is really the big one:
• Is our current marketing plan adequate for what we want to achieve?
  BAM! You’ve got all the knowledge and history to now be able to answer this question honestly and reasonably accurately. I’m guessing that the answers to the first two questions were based on some kind of documented evidence, that they were not based purely on “gut feel”. Chances are, there are going to be some elements that you will be able to use, but there will be some which you will need to modify or new elements which will need to be added.

There you go – your formula for a marketing plan in three easy steps.

As far as I can see, these arguments have too many variables involved. What does strike me as missing in a lot of the articles is a critique of the perceived value that they are creating for their customer base.

One way I think about it is – the user us not paying for content, not paying for the words and pictures. He’s paying for a benefit that he will get as a direct result of consuming that content. And that is where all the cognitivue resource should be focused – what does the customer get out of our product (or content)?

And yes, free alternatives do play a role. And yes, what your friends day play a role as well.

I am skeptical about sites like NOTW and The Sun making online content pay – the question of perceived consequences is almost a rhetorical one when asked in the context of these two papers. The Times – maybe, perhaps, possibly – depends on what it is that they will be able to offer that nobody else will be able to offer – which at this point of time, to me, seems very little!

Newspapers will need to evolve, the way v stations and radio stations have had to evolve. It is no longer going to be enough to expect people to pay for reportage. There’s got to be more.

The content has got to give the user some kind of a measurable benefit, the provider must identify the key motivating factors behind the user’s intention to pay for online content. It could be something intrinsic (it’s purely for entertainment – gossip, exclusive photos etc.), or it could be extrinsic (improved performance at work etc.). Once this code is cracked, I’m not sure it really matters if you’re delivering your content in paper, over the internet on a computer screen or through a mobile phone. People will pay for it because they will feel that the amount of money/effort they are expending is less in value terms than the benefit that they will get in return.

So in short – focus on the customer – what is it that affects a person’s intention to pay for content? The look at your own proposition. Is there a fit? Yes, then great! No, then it’s time to start panic.

Prediction for 2010 – there are going to be a lot of paid content turkeys for Christmas 2010. Businesses will try, thinking their product is the bee’s knees, and they will fail. A few however, will have their finger on the pulse of their customers, and I’m waiting to see how these guys implement their paid content strategies.