ManoByte

Marketing Automation Analytics

Kevin Dean — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 00:44:35 +0000

Understanding Marketing Automation Analytics How much do you know about Marketing Automation Analytics? One of the best parts of a marketing automation system is the ability to easily generate analytics and KPI that help you see instantly how well various marketing campaigns are converting contacts to sales and keeping customers. The importance of using analytics to make informed decisions is hard to overstate. According to an article in MIT/Sloan Management Review, companies who believe in the value of analytics are also twice as likely to be top performers in their industry or market segment. What are some good KPIs that marketing automation can help track? According to the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), marketing-related KPIs and specific measures for demand management that are predictive of corporate performance across all industries include: Market Responsiveness. This includes traditional metrics such as Market Share Index, but also metrics such as “Product Portfolio Index” that shows how each product or service in a portfolio contributes to revenues and profits by size and margin. Other metrics include Target Market Index, Opportunity/Threat index, Channel Profitability Index, and Configurability Index. Sales Effectiveness. These metrics include Sales Opportunity Index, Sales Cycle Index, Sales Close Index, Sales Price Index, Cost of Sales Index, Forecast Accuracy, and Customer Retention Index. For example, Sales Cycle Index is the number of days between initial contact with potential customers and the sales close date. Product Development Effectiveness. This includes New Product Index, Feature Function Index, Time to Market Index, and R&D Success Index. Specific definitions of each of these metrics can be found on the AICPA website, along with industry-specific KPIs and metrics. As you decide which KPIs to use for analyzing your marketing success, be sure to include metrics that capture all your automated processes, from inbound marketing techniques to customer relationship management to sales fulfillment.

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When you think mobile, think Twitter

Kevin Dean — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 12:45:03 +0000

Going mobile is a good first step to expose your business to a whole crop of potential customers, but many businesses don’t know how to reach mobile users. The first phase of inbound marketing for your business is to attract more users to your website. Mobile users are a vital resource in driving traffic to your website. A recent study of Twitter users found that users of the mobile platform are more likely to be engaged with brands and interact more often with Tweets. It may not come as a surprise that mobile Twitter users are more likely to interact on Twitter more often than desktop users. Mobile access means you can check-in on Twitter anytime, anywhere. Mobile users are 79 percent more likely to use the platform multiple times during the day. Many mobile Twitter users rarely use Twitter on a desktop, so if you link to your company website, make sure the site is optimized for mobile viewing. When it comes to driving traffic to your website, it is important to remember that mobile Twitter users are much more likely to click on a link they see on Twitter —up to 44 percent. Mobile Twitter users follow more than twice as many brands, and they are more likely to be able to recall an ad they saw on Twitter. Mobile Twitter users drive the engagement of others by creating and retweeting links. A business can increase the likelihood of their call to action or link being retweeted twenty-fold by simply asking users to “please retweet.”

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Facebook Announces “Verified” Pages and Profiles

Kevin Dean — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 12:54:23 +0000

We’ve all searched Facebook for a popular celebrity or business. But when you get 12 profile matches all claiming to be that celebrity or business, how can you tell which profile is real? Enter Facebook verified accounts. Facebook verified accounts are designed to help users identify authentic users. When a user sees a blue check mark on a profile page, he or she will know that is the real profile page for that person or business. Facebook has made this feature available to a select group of users with a large following: celebrities, journalists, government officials, and popular brands and businesses. A small, blue check mark appears next to their name in their profile. If you roll over it with your mouse, a small grey information box pops up telling you it is a verified page. This feature will be particularly useful for journalists and businesses that have come to rely on Facebook as a platform to connect with followers and customers. The feature is similar to Twitter’s verification system. Like Twitter, at this time, users cannot request verification by Facebook. Facebook has a page in its help section about verified accounts and has issued a public announcement introducing verified accounts, http://newsroom.fb.com/News/619/Verified-Pages-and-Profiles. They remain, however, fairly vague about what criteria they will use in evaluating the legitimacy of accounts. The verified account feature is already live on Facebook.

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The Value of Community Management

Gillian Singletary — Fri, 31 May 2013 19:30:36 +0000

At the heart of any social media strategy is community building. Bringing new people to your Facebook page, getting comments on your blog, and generally starting and nurturing a conversation about your industry and your brand. Studies have even shown that when it comes to online business, community members represent up to 65% of generated sales. That’s significant. So while we know that community is essential to a successful online marketing strategy, there are still some companies that are at a loss as to how to cultivate and nurture the type of community that they want. This means a community that will grow, thrive, and ultimately generate sales. While there are a few things you can do, the most important to is properly manage that community. A community manager is a specialized role and companies that can afford to have a person dedicated to this job are going to be better off. But smaller startups and the budgetarily challenged may not necessarily be able to devote an entire staff member (or more!) to their community management goals. No matter what your particular sitatuation, ManoByte wants to provide you with a few ways in which proper community management can offer value to your business. These tenets hold true whether you have a full time manager or are trying to do everything yourself. The bottom line is: community management is important and valuable. Community managers can listen. Someone that is in the trenches with your community is in a much better position to listen to your customers and potential customers. They participate in discussions, mediate comments, and should be reading everything that gets posted about you, whether it’s on your Facebook page or an unrelated forum. This information can be invaluable to a company that is trying to build a reputation from scratch or improve one that has been tarnished. If you know what people are saying about you, it is much easier to create a strategy that addresses their concerns. Community managers can improve customer service. Customer service is a huge concern in virtually every industry. With the current state of social media, a customer service slip can become a full-blow crisis with little notice. Having a community management strategy that puts someone on the front lines can make your whole customer service process work more efficiently. A community manager can shepherd customers to the right people when the have a problem, can make sure issues are followed up on, and can even provide basic FAQ answers and links, relieving overworked customer service agents when necessary. Community management can improve your ROI. Ultimately, the goal of any marketing strategy is to improve your bottom line. Community management can do that. By properly responding to customers on your blog and across social media platforms you can create advocates, grow your community and ultimately generate more sales. Community management can improve profitability. Are you convinced? Tell us why or why not in comments.

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An International Perspective of LinkedIn

Kevin Dean — Mon, 27 May 2013 20:24:44 +0000

There are many benefits that an organization gains from participating on LinkedIn. One area that is often overlooked is the potential to connect an organization to a larger international market. In this YouTube video, several professionals who have used LinkedIn for some time explain the advantages of participating on LinkedIn from an international perspective. LinkedIn is a powerful platform that can help you expand the reach of your business easily. Regardless of how large you want to grow your business LinkedIn can assist you in reaching individuals in the next city, in the next state, or in the next country. Enjoy this video, and feel free to leave your comments about what you appreciated from the comments of the professionals that are interviewed.

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Social Media Issues and Crisis

Kevin Dean — Sun, 26 May 2013 20:00:00 +0000

Understanding Social Media Issues & Crisis What is a social media issue? A social media issue, also known as a social media risk, this is any type of activity that can expose a company or an individual to loss, damage, trouble or any or adjectives that can be a problem in the future. In other words, there isn’t a problem yet but there is a chance there might be. There are so many of these possible issue, that we wouldn’t have time to go through them all so a few examples are as follows: customer services issues, miscommunication on behalf of a brand or negative or flagged comments on a social media channel. Social media issues can also be ongoing concerns that aren’t triggered by a specific event, but are seeds that can grow into larger problems for a company in the future if the social climate changes in a particular way. The better a social media marketer knows these issues and how to respond if they begin to grow, the more in control of the situation they will be. Other social media issues can come from simple rebranding that the public disagrees with. One example of this is with the well-known clothing store brand Gap. In 2010 they attempted to change their logo and get rid of the blue box altogether. What was supposed to be an exciting moment for the company quickly turned into an embarrassing nightmare as the public responded with comical disgust to the new look, causing Gap to cancel the change. As social media has become even more powerful since that occurred, the response to these issues is all the more important. In the aforementioned example for Gap, what began as an issue would have turned into a crisis had the company not responded and kept the logo change from occurring. Many customers would have probably turned their backs on the brand, writing them off as being stubborn or out of touch, causing serious problems for the clothing brand’s business. It’s also important to remember that social media crises always have an element of surprise. Everyone has a smartphone and can communicate with many other people incredibly quickly. This means that something that would have otherwise been forgotten about in the past can become a very big deal very quickly. Another element to remember is that many crises evolve out of an environment where there is insufficient information about the relevant facts and the emerging public perception of the issue. This should be addressed when trying to stem a crisis as well, and it should be done quickly as there is a real need for speed so that the misconception or the size of the crisis doesn’t reach more people and become any bigger. The Gap example given earlier was self-inflicted, as would be the Melissa Mayer rule at Yahoo about Mom’s not being given ample maternity leave time. Stories that break via major media have a number of different elements to them, ranging between what the headline says and where the focus of the story directs the public initially, to what the public’s collective response is though the numerous comments on different media outlets. Viral content grows out of people spreading information about a company themselves, like a cell phone video of a FedEx driver throwing a computer monitor over a gate to make a delivery. 5 million people saw that, instantly giving the company a lot of negative press, The best way to deal with this type of crisis is to respond publicly, which FedEx did quickly and it went away. So what is the difference between a social media issue and crisis. An issue is something that could become a problem in the future, is currently small, but won’t grow out of control with proper management. A social media crisis is one that has grabbed the larger public’s attention because it touches on one or more of the characterizations of a crisis. There are various ways to deal with these issues and crises, depending on what categories they fall into. But the one thing they all have in common is the social media manager and the company understanding why the public is upset in the first place.

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