Feb
19th

Oneupweb : Word Of Mouth ROI And Brand Equity

Posted by Vern on February 19, 2010 at 9:58 am

Today’s Analytic Packages Are Creating False Hope That All Online Interactions Are Attributable.

Blame it on Google Analytics, Omniture or even WebTrends for that matter. The perceived ease in which we track online marketing data has created unrealistic expectations in the minds of online marketers. Don’t get me wrong, many online marketing activities have a measurable spend and corresponding sales value. You spend $0.55 for a click on your Google PPC ad that results in a sale of $12.00. At its very basic level your ROI is $12.00/$0.55=2,181%. That sale can be attributed to that particular ad and keyword.

When the only game in town was PPC on Google and Yahoo, attribution was pretty cut and dry. We became programmed to the certainty that sales/spend=measure of success. It was so easy to assume that we could apply the same model to other online marketing. This is where the digital marketing analysis picture begins to get cloudy. If you’re running PPC along with an ongoing SEO effort, you may argue that attribution is precise. Well, what about ad impressions (not clicks)? Maybe the searcher you’re tracking post-click viewed multiple SERPs, saw many variations of PPC ads along with your organic listings and finally clicked on the 10th variation. Since you can’t attribute that sale to impressions, how do you really know what induced the sale?

Add social digital marketing and attribution becomes almost impossible. Social digital marketing is essentially 21st century “word of mouth.” Oneupweb does a wonderful job of tracking interactions across all digital channels. Heck—PodTractor, Oneupweb’s podcast tracking system, was ground-breaking in 2006 and to this day, remains unmatched in its functionality. Our Twitter and Facebook reporting documents interactions in these two venues like no other analytics available. But how do you track/document the conversation between two friends who “saw it on Facebook” or “looked it up on Google” that resulted in direct navigation to your website for a purchase? You can’t.

Every dollar a CMO spends online can generate word of mouth marketing and is an investment in building brand equity. This concept is very often lost in the buzz of attribution. We’ve become slaves to micro-managing ROI at the keyword level, never giving credit to that SEO project or Twitter effort in adding to brand equity and building market share.

I encourage you to take a step back and look at your marketing budget as a vehicle to drive word of mouth, increase brand equity and improve total sales. Take off the blinders. Stop concentrating on ROI by keyword and know that whatever advertising and marketing you’re doing online can’t be totally compartmentalized. Get back to the simple ROI calculation: $25,000,000 in sales/ $1,000,000 in online spend = kick ass results, no matter where that money was spent.

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Mar
11th

ROI Is Dead.

Posted by Carly Wujcik on March 11, 2009 at 3:33 pm

Ok, that’s a lie. ROI, is not dead. In fact, the fusion of search and social media has spawned a new ROI. Return on Insight.

I can’t take credit for discovering and unlocking the power of this metric, but I can take credit for starting to use it. Sure, our economy is as hot as Traverse City in March and it’s only natural that we’re all trying to justify every marketing dollar spent with measurable returns. But what are we missing by neglecting to use and calculate the insight that social media is capable of delivering? And, how can the new ROInsight affect traditional ROInvestment? Let’s take a journey through a big math-tastic story problem shall we?

Pretend for a moment that you’re Bob/Roberta, Marketing Manager for Frozen In TC, a manufacturer of cherry porter flavored ice cream (if “miraculously” this new flavor is on the Kilwin’s menu this summer without my name next to it, I’m calling someone out). You have a marketing budget of $1,000,000 this year. Since that’s half of your 2008 budget, you cry about it for a while and whine about your job and then you realize that even though this appears to be a dark day, it’s time for innovation! And you seize the challenge. (Nice job Bob/Roberta!)

Knowing that you have to display a positive ROInvestment with this budget to a)keep your job and b)keep the company forging ahead, you make the following investments with your 2009 budget:

$600,000 to SEO and PPC (it delivered terrific returns last year)
$200,000 to display media (some banners and splash of local tv)
$100,000 to trade shows and events (sometimes they work)
$75,000 to social media initiatives (because everyone’s doing it)
$15,000 to direct mail campaigns (because it just feels right)
$990,000

$10k to spare in case it all tanks and you need to head to the casino. (Shame on you Bob/Roberta, that is not your money!)

You tell your agency to continue down the same path with your SEO and PPC campaigns as they did in 2008. Your creative budget is toast, so you run the same display ads as last year. You gallivant around the country and attend every fruity beer flavored ice cream convention you can find. And then you mail out flyers to the entire town of Traverse City, their brothers and their mothers. And oh yeah, you’re agency designed and set up all of those social campaign things, too. But after about two months, you can’t track a single sale or lead back to any of those initiatives, so you just let them ride on auto pilot – not checking in or updating them often, and having no real conversation with customers or prospects. And now you think social is so overrated.

Well Bob/Roberta, I’m about to tell you what you did wrong.

#1. You neglected to realize that search and social are now one. Continuously updating those “no good” social profiles could have further bolstered your search presence, and ultimately, the returns from your search campaigns.

#2. Social media is not a one way tweet. I mean, street. It’s about conversation, building relationships and listening to the people (your customers and prospects). You have to listen Bob/Roberta. What creates positive ROInvestement? Sales. What’s the secret to sales? Listening.

#3: Since you didn’t converse with anyone through your social channels, or listen to what anyone was saying about “Frozen In TC”, you didn’t gain any insight that you could act on. Potential product improvements, customer service issues, marketing strategy – nothing, nada. So you missed all that feedback that circulated about customers being irritated by the long lines, grocery chain execs tweeting about how they would like to start carrying your product, and the group that formed on facebook called “Bring Frozen In TC to NYC”. Oh, and all of the comments about how much better it would be if it were raspberry porter. Yep. You missed all of that.

So Bob/Roberta, since you were only focused on ROInvestment and not ROInsight, your ROInvestment actually suffered. For all of your campaigns. Ooh.

Ah yes. In the words of BusinessWeek’s David Armano, “Listen. Learn. Adapt.” And in my mother’s, “Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda.”

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Jan
28th

ROI: Not Just Data on a Spreadsheet

Posted by Luke on January 28, 2008 at 9:03 am

Measuring your return-on-investment is about more than justifying budgets. It is the measure by which a company can identify opportunity, move forward and continue to grow. However, while the ability to accurately assess marketing’s return-on-investment is critical for justifying more marketing budget, marketers are still finding difficulty in measuring the actual impact their marketing initiatives have on overall sales.

money under a magnifier So where does this difficulty originate and how can we avoid it? The answer: defining ROI for your company. As simple as this may sound, the metric means different things to different people. A 600% return-on-investment within the marketing department may translate into a 450% return-on-investment within sales.

The point is, marketing and sales need to come to an agreement in terms of how ROI will be measured, whether that means including cost figures or defining a qualified lead.

Now let’s say marketing has already launched multiple online initiatives, including paid search marketing and natural search engine optimization prior to meeting with sales.

As a search marketer, it’s my job to help marketing accurately measure the overall value of these initiatives. Therefore, there are a few questions I need to be asking myself. Are we tracking every conversion opportunity? Is there a ‘tell a friend’ feature or live chat function that we can be tracking. There are multiple components within a web site that have the potential to provide added value to these online marketing initiatives.

Next, have I provided my client with all of the performance numbers as well as sound rationale necessary to show value and make the case for additional budget? Communication breakdown is too often overlooked and this means that search marketers need to be thinking beyond marketing and IT. Search marketers have the ability to feed information to the sales department. For example, insight as to when people begin looking for their product(s) and services throughout the week, month or year and the specific search terms that are being used by these potential customers is vital information.

A key enabler for success is a strong marketing automation platform utilizing a single database to collect, segment, and integrate all marketing campaigns. With such automation, companies have the ability to manage marketing programs that deliver accurate, timely and unbiased ROI reporting. In addition to traditional marketing metrics, marketers can then calculate how much revenue is generated from a specific campaign, offer or lead source.

In the end, real ROI goes beyond data on a spreadsheet and serves as the foundation to good marketing.

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