Your CEO Doesn't Trust That You're Doing Your Job! Bryan Eisenberg | November 30, 2012 | 0 Comments inShare11 Let's make a resolution to make 2013 the year marketers regain trust from their CEOs and become obsessed with business performance. Did you see the startling statistic shared last week that 70 percent of CEOs have lost trust in marketers? If you're a marketer, like I am, that should alarm you. According to the recent Fournaise 2012 Global Marketing Effectiveness Program, which has interviewed more than 1,200 CEOs across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, CEOs have lost faith in their marketing departments with their inability to prove ROI on campaigns: Furthermore, they have: Made the conscious decision not to expect more from marketing than branding, look/feel good ads and promotions…CEOs feel marketers "live too much in the brand, creative and social media bubble.
" I was discussing this with my buddy, Mitch Joel, who shared the following on his blog: Doesn't digital change everything? Kids on Retail: Thoughts from the Next Generation of Shoppers - How to Use Gamification to Reward Customers and Engage Prospects. Everyone wants new business. But sometimes we get so wrapped up in trying to predict what the next great lead-gen tactic will be, we forget that new business doesn't come just from new customers. It also comes from your current customers, and it's a lot cheaper to acquire, to boot. Most marketers have undoubtedly seen the Bain & Company study that put hard numbers to the new-versus-existing-customer conundrum: it's six to seven times more expensive to gain a new customer than it is to retain an existing one, and a 5% increase in customer retention can boost profit from 25%-95%. You can always try to make your customers happier by sending them free goodies, responding to emails quicker, and smiling more when you see them, but odds are that any gains you'll see aren't going to move the needle much.
It takes more than extra elbow grease on your part—it takes a new approach. Give as often as you take One way to start is by looking at your email marketing. Reward at the intrinsic level. Everything Marketers Need to Know About Creating Exclusionary Personas. You know those people who poke around your website for hours? Download every lead generation offer you have? Comment on every blog post you write? 'Like' every Facebook update you've ever posted? They are sooo gonna be a customer. Except they might not be. What I'm trying to say is, sometimes, despite every single indicator otherwise, some leads will never, ever buy. But you can sidestep this problem -- by creating some exclusionary personas for your business. What's an Exclusionary Persona? To explain what an exclusionary persona is -- sometimes also called a "negative" persona -- let's first briefly revisit the definition of a buyer persona.
Why Should You Create Exclusionary Personas? Now, when I say you shouldn't spend time marketing or selling to these less-than-ideal customers, a little clarification is in order. What I mean is that some leads just aren't a good fit for your business. Walking Through the Creation of an Exclusionary Persona Fill in Basic Demographic Information. Google Study: 9 in 10 Consumers Engage in Sequential Device Usage. As the number of Internet-enabled consumer devices continues to grow, so does the propensity of consumers to sequentially use multiple devices to complete a single online task. In fact, according to a new study from Google, 90 percent of people move among devices to accomplish a goal.
Results of “The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior” indicate that these devices can include smartphones, PCs, tablets or TV. Examples of how consumers sequentially use multiple devices for a single task include opening an email on a smartphone and then finishing reading it on a home PC and looking up product specs on a laptop after seeing a TV commercial. And 98 percent of sequential screeners move between devices in the same day to complete a task. The most popular reasons for sequential device usage include web browsing (81 percent), shopping online (67 percent), managing finances (46 percent) and planning a trip (43 percent). Search Connects Devices Useful article? Marketing Is Dead - Bill Lee. Traditional marketing — including advertising, public relations, branding and corporate communications — is dead.
Many people in traditional marketing roles and organizations may not realize they’re operating within a dead paradigm. But they are. The evidence is clear. First, buyers are no longer paying much attention. Several studies have confirmed that in the “buyer’s decision journey,” traditional marketing communications just aren’t relevant. Buyers are checking out product and service information in their own way, often through the Internet, and often from sources outside the firm such as word-of-mouth or customer reviews. Second, CEOs have lost all patience.
Third, in today’s increasingly social media-infused environment, traditional marketing and sales not only doesn’t work so well, it doesn’t make sense. In fact, this last is a bit of a red herring, because traditional marketing isn’t really working anywhere. Restore community marketing. Find your customer influencers.
How to Thrive in Social Media's Gift Economy - Mark Bonchek. So you’ve got your brand on social media. You have a Facebook page and Twitter account. Maybe a Pinterest board. But now what? There has to be more to social media than posting coupons and running sweepstakes. The answer may come not from Silicon Valley or Madison Avenue, but from places like the Trobriand Islands and the Pacific Northwest. Indigenous cultures developed what anthropologists call gift economies. The concept of gift economies has been used to explain open source software and the Burning Man festival.
To understand a gift economy, consider the example of moving into a new apartment. 1) Context: Transaction or Relationship In a market economy, the focus is on transactions. 2) Currency: Financial or Social In a market economy, people use money as a medium of exchange — a financial currency. Note that social currencies are not the same as virtual currencies. But just because something has a monetary value doesn’t mean it can’t be a social currency. How is your brand doing? Why CXM will replace CRM.
By Chuck Schaeffer Several of the major CRM software publishers are individually and collectively changing their CRM messaging to either append or replace what we've now been calling Customer Relationship Management since about 1992. The new term that's now in vogue is Customer Experience Management—and neither the term nor its acronym (CEM, CXM or just CX) are anywhere near a shared understanding or consensus definition; but such is always the case with innovation and new business strategies. Whether CXM is the next wave of marketing hyperbole or delivers new strategic value depends upon your perspective and how well the (formerly) CRM software vendors articulate the concept and its value.
Lets Start at the Beginning To begin with some perspective, and give us a starting point to compare and contrast, lets quickly revisit what I consider generally shared definitions of both CRM and CXM. So Why The New Nomenclature? Lets face it, CRM has a troubled history. Why CX Now? What's Next for CX? How a Clean Energy Startup Used Social to Help Others Go Green. Name: Clean Currents Big Idea: Clean Currents offers businesses and residents clean energy at prices on par or below their utility company's rates. Why It's Working: The green energy company has built a social media following by offering Facebook rewards, enticing young brand advocates to convince their parents to switch to green energy. Sure, most of us would like to power our homes and businesses with renewable energy, but that doesn't mean we know how to find a provider that can give us clean energy without much of a hassle.
Clean Currents has created a simple solution for clean energy-seeking residents of the Mid-Atlantic. The Rockville, Md. -based company lets you decide how much of your power will come from natural sources (you must choose at least 10%) and works with your utility provider to implement the program. That means your power will continue to come through the wires that are already in place — no extra modification required. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, chromatika. The New Funnel. InShare58 The more data you have, the more confident you become in your correlations and conclusions. In the year 2000, Matt Cutler and I published a white paper called "E-Metrics: Business Metrics For The New Economy. " In it, we proposed a down-to-earth visualization we called the "Customer Life Cycle Funnel": We simply turned a B2B sales pipeline on its side. Little did we know it would spawn billions of PowerPoint examples and generations of marketing analytics report formats: A dozen years later, it's time to re-imagine the work Matt and I did and bring it up to date.
The Digital Analytics Funnel Data This is the flour, water, green vegetables, and protein of our analytical feast. The more data, the merrier. Metrics When you measure your data elements and compare and contrast the results, you end up with metrics. Reports Just as an accountant starts with bookkeeping, the analyst starts in the world of data wrangling and report writing. Benchmarks Is our progress acceptable? Alerts Automation. To Facebook's Chagrin, Time Spent Online Doesn't Equal Money -- Yet | Digital. A Simple Tool You Need to Manage Innovation - Bansi Nagji and Geoff Tuff. How to Speak More Strategically - Peter Bregman. By Peter Bregman | 3:29 PM May 31, 2012 It had been three weeks since my throat started to feel sore, and it wasn’t getting better. The pain was most acute when I spoke. So I decided to spend a few days speaking as little as possible.
Every time I had the urge to say something, I paused for a moment to question whether it was worth irritating my throat. This made me acutely aware of when and how I use my voice. Which led me to a surprising discovery: I spend considerable energy working against my own best interests. In my observations, we speak for three main reasons: To help ourselvesTo help othersTo connect with each other That’s not surprising. What is surprising though is how frequently we fool ourselves into thinking we’re achieving those objectives when, in reality, we’re thwarting them. Frequently, I had the urge to gossip about someone else. I also had the urge to share information when I thought it would be helpful to someone. But life and relationships are long-term. Donate to Charity Every Time You Buy Online. The World at Work is powered by GE.
This new series highlights the people, projects and startups that are driving innovation and making the world a better place. Name: CauseCart Big Idea: CauseCart is a Chrome extension and Firefox add-on that works with ecommerce websites to donate a portion of every user’s online purchases to charity. Why It’s Working: CauseCart seeks to revolutionize the culture of donation by enabling shoppers to give money to a charity of their choosing for free. All donations are handled between CauseCart and the ecommerce platform.
Social startup CauseCart revolutionizes the online donation model by siphoning a percentage of a user’s ecommerce purchase to a charity of his or her choice — all at no cost to the user. “There’s a bit of frustration today that there’s really great people making a difference, but they’re built on top of a donation model,” Geer explains. “You’re not thinking, ‘Hey, I did nothing to do this,’” Geer says. Series presented by GE. Three Myths about What Customers Want - Karen Freeman, Patrick Spenner and Anna Bird. By Karen Freeman, Patrick Spenner and Anna Bird | 9:10 AM May 23, 2012 This post is the last in a three-part series. Most marketers think that the best way to hold onto customers is through “engagement” — interacting as much as possible with them and building relationships.
It turns out that that’s rarely true. In a study involving more than 7000 consumers, we found that companies often have dangerously wrong ideas about how best to engage with customers. Myth #1: Most consumers want to have relationships with your brand. Actually, they don’t. How should you market differently? First, understand which of your consumers are in the 23% and which are in the 77%. Myth #2: Interactions build relationships. No, they don’t. Of the consumers in our study who said they have a brand relationship, 64% cited shared values as the primary reason. CEB has done extensive work on shared values, showcasing how brands like Mini, Pedigree and Southwest use them to engage with customers. Wrong. Tom Doctoroff: What Chinese Consumers Want.
Apple has taken China by storm. A Starbucks can be found on practically every major street corner in coastal cities and beyond. From Nike to Buick to Siemens, Chinese consumers actively prefer Western brands over their domestic competitors. The rise of microbloggers, the popularity of rock bands with names like Hutong Fist and Catcher in the Rye, and even the newfound popularity of Christmas all seem to point toward a growing Westernization. But don't be deceived by appearances. Understanding China's consumer culture is a good starting point for understanding the nation itself, as it races toward superpower status.
Various youth subtribes intermittently bubble to the surface -- see the recent rise of "vegetable males" (Chinese metrosexuals) and "Taobao maniacs" (aficionados of the auction website Taobao). The speed with which China's citizens have embraced all things digital is one sign that things are in motion in the country. The Way We Shop Now. Win the Pitch: Tips from Mastercard's "Priceless" Pitchman - Kevin Allen. As a growth officer in my early career with the mad men and women of McCann Erickson, my mom could never quite grasp what I did for a living. But, when we pitched, won and delivered the phenomenon now globally known as Priceless for MasterCard, she could finally brag to her friends at my Aunt Rose’s kitchen table. From the moment the very first television commercial appeared (You remember it, right?
“Two tickets: $28. Two hot dogs, two popcorns, two sodas: $18. One autographed baseball: $45. Real conversation with 11-year-old son: Priceless.”), Mom told practically anyone who would listen that I wrote and executed the entire campaign single-handedly. My role, in fact (promise not to tell her) was that of the Pitchman. In one of the industry’s most hotly-contested advertising accounts, dozens of agencies’ pitches were winnowed down to two contenders. 1. There are no magic tricks or hypnotics to persuade people to do what you say. 2. 3. 4. Choosing Between Making Money and Doing What You Love - Leonard A. Schlesinger, Charles F. Kiefer, and Paul B. Brown.
By Leonard A. Schlesinger, Charles F. Kiefer, and Paul B. Brown | 11:32 AM March 29, 2012 “If you’re really passionate about what you do, but it’s not going to make you a lot of money, should you still do it?” What a great question! It seems like just about everyone who has ever addressed a graduating class of high school or college seniors has said “Do what you love, the money will follow.” Inspiring. Based on the research we did for our book, we’re convinced that when you’re heading into the unknown, desire is all-important.
And, it will help you persist. But, let’s be real. A friend of ours was hanging out at a bar with a few fellow professional musicians after a recording session, talking admiringly about another musician they all know. So this reader question attacks us straight on and says, in essence, “I have the desire, but I am pretty certain it’s not going to lead anywhere that’s monetarily profitable. Of course you should. Now let’s qualify the answer a bit: And you should! Why? How Social Login Enhances Websites. P&G marketing chief: Fundamental shift from TV to digital required - News. Four Steps to Building a Strategic Communications Capability - Georgia Everse. How Top Brands Pull Customers into Orbit - Mark Bonchek.
Neuroscience Makes Strong Case for Engagement, Personalization in Marketing. Request for Proposal: How to Make the Most of It. 8 Obstacles That Ad-Supported E-Publishing Must Overcome. Marketing Study Shocker: QR Codes & Social Media Have Little Impact for Shoppers. How to Structure a Kick-Ass Marketing Team for Any Company. 8 Tell-Tale Signs You Do (Or Don't) Need Marketing Automation. 10 Steps To Turn Your Passion Into Your Business. Why You Need a Better Elevator Pitch - Jeffrey Hayzlett. 10 Commandments of Modern Marketing.