marketing
Magnification Potential
Online marketing promotes or builds awareness for a product. Often, the decision as to which tactics are used depends on available resources – time and money.
There’s also an important factor to consider, which I like to call the “magnification potential”. By magnification potential, I mean the expected multiplication factor of a dollar spent.
Faced with limited resources, you’ll need to determine which marketing tactics will help you achieve your objectives within the given time. If your objective is to gain as much exposure as you can for your product in the next 2 months, tactics with a high magnification potential will be more beneficial. However, if your objective is to make as many sales as possible, a tactic with a lower magnification potential, but a stronger, more targeted message may be more beneficial.
So what determines a tactic’s magnification potential? It’s quite simple. The likelihood that the target audience will share your message with a secondary audience.
For example a pay-per-click campaign on Google Adwords has a lower magnification potential. A fixed dollar amount spent on Adwords will attract 1 visitor via 1 ad click. It is highly unlikely that this visitor will “share” or discuss the ad with someone else.
An email campaign has a moderate magnification potential. There is a low chance an email will be shared, unless it is requested. The number of people reached in the secondary audience will also be limited because the original email recipient will need to manually add each person to the forwarded email.
A contest that requires public voting has a higher magnification potential because contestants are encouraged to ask their friends to vote for them, hence increasing the motivation to share the message.
A Facebook wall post, depending on the content, has an even higher magnification potential because users are able to Like, comment or share the specific post. Any one of these actions will potentially expose the post to the users’ friends. A popular post may reach a secondary or even a tertiary audience. This is the key benefit of social networks.
When creating your next digital strategy, consider your objectives and the magnification potential of each tactic to ensure your campaign will reach the desired number of people.
Victor Chan
Digital Strategist
Photo Credit: StockMonkeys.com
Tags: magnification, marketing, sharing, strategy, virality, word of mouth
Finding the Universal Marketing Metric
In our ALERT® digital strategy process we emphasize the importance of measuring your online marketing efforts. Measurement is important because:
- A marketing initiative needs to yield positive returns, otherwise it should be discontinued.
- Tracking and measuring helps you make better business and marketing decisions. For example, see the post about Using Google Analytics to Help Make Business Decisions.
- You need to be accountable to your clients, managers, investors, etc. You need solid metrics to report to stakeholders.
Relevant marketing metrics (especially online marketing metrics) have evolved in the past few years.
- In the early days, a basic ad impression or the number of eyeballs that saw your ad, was the ultimate marketing metric. This measurement was especially important on the broadcast medium (ie. television and radio) because it indicated how much exposure the ad received and subsequently the value of the ad space.
- Next came the ad click or a basic response (eg. newsletter sign up) from the audience. This was a better measurement because it tracked a reaction from the audience, meaning the audience was actually moved-to-action by an ad or message.
- Next came social media and the pursuit to “engage” with the audience. This greatly fragmented the number and types of metrics that could be tracked and reported. Each social media channel and digital property had its own terminology and way of measuring user interactions.
- Finally and most recently, has come the quest to measure user sentiment. Based on the tools I’ve seen and tried, that claim to measure sentiment for you… Let’s just say, we’re not there yet. The English language is complex. How would a computer account for idioms, slang, context and cultural expressions? For example, would you interpret the following statement as positive or negative, “That’s sick!”
As marketing professionals in the ever changing digital marketing space, we are faced with the challenge of making sense of all these metrics and conveying to our clients what really matters. Life would be a lot easier if there was one universal metric that can be used to measure all marketing initiatives.
However, in order to have a universal metric, there needs to be a common factor in every type of marketing initiative imaginable. As it stands, a user could click on a banner ad, or a user could click play on a video, or a user could compose and post a comment on a blog or a user could explore an interactive website — the list of actions and measurables are diverse, and go on and on…
The only common factor is — the user!
No matter what the marketing initiative, online or off, the user is at the heart of it all. Therefore, the universal metric must be measuring the human being.
If we wanted to measure a user’s level of engagement with a marketing message, we’d likely need to measure their level of brain activity. The more engaging the task, the more neuro impulses triggered in the brain. For example, a simple click of an ad wouldn’t require much thinking power, but writing a comment or navigating through an interactive website would. If human emotion could be monitored, we might even be able to accurately track sentiment. All marketing initiatives could then be measured against the level of positive brain activity from its audience.
So… Is there any hope of truly and accurately tracking this elusive and complicated universal marketing metric? With the progression of wearable technology (eg. Google Glasses) and brain scanning technology (eg. EEG), measuring brain activity may actually become a reality. We’ll just have to see where science, technology and society takes us.
Victor Chan
Digital Strategist
Photo Credit: MikeBlogs
Tags: marketing, measurement, metric
Engage Customers in 5 Simple Steps
Do you…
- Need a true assessment of yours and your competitors’ online presence?
- Want to know where your customers are gathering online?
- Have trouble converting social media efforts into real ROI?
- Look for ways to genuinely drive engagement with your brand?
- Want a simple, effective way to keep current with online marketing tools, techniques and trends?
If you answered Yes to 2 or more of these questions, you need to take a look at ALERT®: a simple 5-step process for creating, implementing, and monitoring digital strategies that work. This process is tried and proven.
ALERT® is an acronym that stands for the five phases. Assess. Locate. Engage. Respond. Track.
If you’d like to take advantage of our special offer for a FREE initial assessment of your current online presence, please click here. (Available only to the first 10 respondents).
Tags: ALERT®, digital strategy, marketing, online strategy, process, system, tool
Facebook Ads Vs. Sponsored Stories – What’s the deal?
If you are on Facebook chances are you’ve seen Facebook Ads pop up on the right side column of your News Feed. The ads are impossible to miss. Facebook advertising has become a prominent piece of many social media strategies. Facebook has generated $872 million in total advertising revenue in 2012 thus far, an increase of 37% from 2011. Until recently most of the advertising revenue came in the form of Facebook Ads. Now Facebook is driving revenue from Sponsored Stories, too. So what’s the difference?
With Facebook Ads, the marketer has control over every aspect of the advertising content, from creating the title, design, and content (135 characters of text). Sponsored Stories, on the other hand, piggyback on actions Facebook users take; highlighting them and making them more visible to others. To put another way, if a restaurant wants to gain visibility on Facebook and it sees a guest named John Doe has just checked-in on Facebook, the restaurant can choose to “sponsor” John’s check-in. When John’s check-in becomes a Sponsored Story, there’s an increased likelihood of John’s Facebook friends seeing his check-in and it now serves as John’s endorsement of the restaurant to his personal network.
Seeing that a friend has Liked a Page or checked-in to an establishment gives the brand a personal connection, and people are more likely to take similar action. Once the marketer has chosen which “story” to advertise, the demographic options and pricing structure are the same as with Facebook Ads. Similar to other Internet advertising options, marketers pay-per-click on Facebook. When selecting your pricing options, you must indicate the maximum price you are willing to pay for each click, and Facebook will distribute your advertising according to your set demographic target, and bidding budget.
Marketers are also using Facebook’s Mobile platform to promote Sponsored Stories. Because Sponsored Stories slip into News Feeds more seamlessly than other Mobile Ads, users have been more receptive to Sponsored Stories. Mobile Sponsored Stories are getting over 13 times the click through rate (CTR) and earn 11.2 times the money per impression (eCPM) on mobile over Facebook desktop ads. Facebook is projecting $300 million in mobile ad revenue alone each quarter in 2013.
Here are some ways to Sponsor a Story:
- Promote when someone likes a link posted on the Business Page, linking back to your website.
- Promote when someone likes your Business Page.
- Promote when someone “checks-in” to your establishment.
Good luck marketers!
Maryam Mehrtash
@socialmaryam
Tags: ads, facebook, marketing, sponsored, stories, strategy
What If There Were No More Lucky Pennies?
On March 29th, the Canadian government announced the 1-cent coin, the penny, will be phased out beginning fall of 2012. Soon pennies will no longer appear in circulation. It will become rare to find one on the floor.
The announcement raises questions about the impact on product pricing. Today, a common practice is to list prices as “odd numbers,” $3.99 instead of $4.00. This is called psychological pricing and is based on the theory that consumers are more willing to purchase a product that costs $3.99 rather than $4.00 because they perceive the price to be at much lower.
Businesses that use this pricing strategy will have to decide whether to round up to $4.00 (and abandon the pricing theory) or round down (and take a small hit in revenue per item sold).
Fortunately, if you run an online store or accept only electronic transactions, this will not affect your pricing strategy because these transactions can still charge down to the penny.
Victor Chan
Digital Strategist
Photo Credit: annrkiszt
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Tags: canadian, marketing, penny, pricing strategy, psychological pricing
