Do you have a #socialmedia strategy or a socially adept #marketing strategy?

February 2, 2014

connect-enterprise-social-teamsThis is a redux of a popular blog entry from July 2012: “Do you have a #digitalmarketing #strategy” or a marketing strategy for the digital world?” In that entry I tried to describe my professional movement over 15 years of digital marketing… that “I no longer think in digital terms, I apply digital concepts, tactics and measurement to marketing strategy.”

Your target audience IS your target audience, regardless of where you come upon them. The key to this series of blog entries is that a marketing strategy needs to be your marketing strategy. Tactical plans should feed into that. Digital and social plans need to connect to the larger marketing activity. Sure, this sounds obvious, but is it really? I constantly hear people talking about their organizations’ digital marketing strategy, with no mention of overall marketing strategy. It’s as if the digital marketing strategy is the strategy. This is where we disagree.

Back to social media. Forrester describes the current state of enterprise class social media programs as producing “islands”. Altimeter identified some 74% of these same organizations producing “social anarchy”. Both indicate that social media programs are already headed in the wrong direction. The enterprise is particularly tricky, a dozen different functional organizations are hiring dedicated headcount, making connection or alignment of approach nearly impossible; meanwhile, none of the activities are attaching themselves to the larger marketing initiatives.

Making social media more difficult than digital, social is really an enterprise-wide necessity. Outside the marketing objectives of awareness and engagement, social activity is growing in importance for less obvious functional areas of todays’ company: HR needs to use social to connect with candidates, product teams need market feedback, and sales teams need to demonstrate competence and listen, to name a few.

To wrap this up, social media needs to be an intrinsic part of your marketing strategy, not a separate, disconnected plan. When done properly, your social program will:

  • Provide a centralized enablement function across the enterprise – approach, tools, metrics, sharing of best practices.
  • Provide a customer experience that’s consistent with the rest of the enterprise.
  • Increase efficiency / reduce waste of resources, avoiding duplicate tools and roles.
  • Increase coordination and communication across functional business areas.
  • And, increase the likelihood of producing greater outcomes and accountability.

Leave a Comment » | Customer Experience, Media, Social Media Marketing, Strategy, Thoughts | Permalink
Posted by Mark Ogne

Your #Content is the currency of your #marketing

February 1, 2014

interruption-based-advertisingThe unfortunate truth is that most people reading this will think that I’m referring to a white paper or an article. Not really. It may, but content is really used here in the context of the information you’re trying to deliver to your audience. There are many styles and a growing number of formats, but the point is to add value to the life of your audience. The good news is that many people already see this and understand that the objective is now placed on the audience and not you.

I believe the best marketers really try to find those intersections where audience value aligns with company value. Bingo! 

The reality is that what a brand says to their audience (content) is equally important as how they say it (creative) and both are probably more important than where it is said (channel). I understand that creative people are going to argue that the big ideas are paramount. I don’t disagree. I’m merely saying that what you say is equally as important. Also, I always hear mobile experts saying that you need to use more mobile, and similar from social media folks. Maybe.

Why do I feel this is the case? The role consumers play in the process of buying has literally done a 180. Consumers, really buyers in generally, now operate as a filter of information… just 15 years ago they struggled to find information. Their hurdle for what constitutes good information, content, has been rising steadily for the last decade. Evidence the erosion of media effectiveness, banner blindness, or whatever you want to call it. The days of interrupting people to tell them your message, expecting them to grant you the permission to even pay a small amount of attention, is just gone.

1 Comment | Media, Online Display Ads, Strategy | Permalink
Posted by Mark Ogne

#Facebook is making it happen with their #advertising program

September 18, 2013

adage-digital-logoWhat a difference a year makes! Facebook appears to have really turned around their advertising strategy and offering. A recent survey published in #AdAge Digital identifies some 74% of ad budgets including a line item for Facebook and most indicate that ROI has increased in the last 6 months.

The article brings an interesting thought to mind… why do we refer to ads placed in a site that is primarily social to be social media marketing? Do we indicate that ads placed on Yahoo! or through Google somewhat social media marketing? Of course note. I may be standalone here but that identification needs to change. Social media work done by brands and agencies on Facebook is distinctly different that their advertising work on the same property. The role of the efforts are different, don’t lump them together.

1 Comment | Marketing Data, Media, Online Display Ads, Social Media Marketing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Mark Ogne

Is #marketing actually upside down?

July 15, 2013

marketing-up-side-downThe last 15 years of marketing innovation are indelibly etched in history, yet the prior 30 years set the groundwork for why this all makes sense. Mass marketing strategies that drove tremendous advertising growth in the 60’s and 70’s gave way to targeted audience based concepts by the late 80’s. Around this time marketers crowded consumer choice, proliferating brands and even non-brands, in an environment where consumers already faced tremendous friction in their ability to gather information for evaluation and purchase.

Then in the early 90’s we all partook in the greatest, most timely invention of all, the Internet.

More than a new technology or a new advertising channel, the Internet cast a milestone that marks the shift in consumer objectives forevermore; from acquiring information to filtering information and increasingly creating information. This consumer shift is the primary wedge inserted to marketing and advertising, especially for brands that have yet to realize this change; exacerbated by waning consumer response rates, many brands have upped the ante by driving even more impressions, using new technologies to drive efficiency and reach.

More than a retro-futuristic steampunk story, if we were to sit down and examine what’s available would we again build the rigidly siloed marketing systems of today? Of course not. Marketing starts with audiences and objectives, not channels and data siloes. In a sense, I’m advocating a righting of the marketing equation, placing the consumer rather than channels as the primary concern. Viewing the equation from the this dimension, we eliminate complexity and increase targeting accuracy, experiential consistency and measurement accuracy.

Leave a Comment » | Media, Multi-channel marketing, Online Display Ads, Strategy, Thoughts | Permalink
Posted by Mark Ogne

Survey – Is Facebook the next Apple or the next MySpace?

August 13, 2012

In a blog entry last March, Is Social Media a Consumer Haven or Marketing Channel?, I discussed the disconnect in value exchange between social properties and their consumers. I went so far as to identify the pressure Facebook will feel when they become subject to quarterly earnings expectations after their IPO, and hypothesized the situation where they will increase the exposure of personal information to encourage marketers to spend with them. Well… the game is getting started…

Today, Digiday featured the article “Brand View: Facebook’s New Targeting Options” and identified new elements of consumer data that will be available for marketers to leverage. I’m a firm believer in data driven marketing, this blog entry is not a comment about that. Rather, I point back to my initial conjecture that Facebook will do this and emphasize that this action will end up making no sense to consumers. Opposed to content rich sites like Yahoo or Microsoft properties, Facebook has no content, consumers create all of it but don’t yet recognize that it is their content and their profile are being monetized.

Mark my words… within three years, we’ll either see a Facebook with a dramatically new approach to monetizing their platform or a dramatically smaller company. Maybe both.

5 Comments | Marketing Data, Media, Online Display Ads, Social Media Marketing, Strategy, Thoughts | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Mark Ogne

Practice what you preach in your #advertising? Google puts money on offline ad investments:-)

March 27, 2012

I get it, it makes total sense. To expand their market they need to find people who aren’t currently / frequently using their services… to capture competitive share they need to go where their competitive set hunts. But you have to agree that this is optically weird. At least heavy up on some display ads off of your core site, or mobile ads. Here’s the article, WSJ… http://on.wsj.com/HbF3t5… Google’s spending on traditional advertising grows four-fold to $213M.

1 Comment | Media, Online Display Ads, Strategy | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Mark Ogne

Enterprise – has the word lost its’ meaning?

March 12, 2012

Yester-year I worked to connect large direct response retailers to their first ecommerce experience – integrating commerce and content systems into “enterprise resource planning” systems (ERP). While we hear less about ERP systems these days, the point of those solutions was that it really did connect all aspects of the business… finance, inventory, customer service, billing, and more.

Today, we use the word enterprise to describe something that we either want a VC to perk up and hear, or something that involves merging a few disparate things. I read a MediaPost article today, “Enterprise DMP Will Require Companies to Merge Data Silos“, and was reminded of this point.

While I thoroughly agree with the authors premise that data silos  are on their way out, I disagree that having a larger silo is substantively better. Or, that it represents the “enterprise”. Combining more digital data for the purpose of sending more, or even better, digital messages is a great ideal but is not the right answer. Two points to consider…

  1. To rightfully use the term, enterprise, it should at least cover a majority of the average media spend, if not all of it. Combining all digital channels, the best we can see in this digital coverage is about a 25% of ad spend and 40% of the consumption of media.
  2. Consumers exhibit multichannel behavior, 70% research and purchase in different channels, online versus offline. Being better at just the online part of this equation match well with consumer expectations or marketer needs.

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Posted by Mark Ogne

#Digital #Attribution is a misnomer

March 9, 2012

The concept of “last click” is as flawed as attributing the purchase of an adult beverage to the neon sign hanging outside the liquor store. The concept of “Digital attribution” simply tries to count the number of beer signs the person saw. What about TV, bill boards, demographics and socioeconomic factors?

While reading a Digiday article this morning, “The Last-Click Attribution Dilemma“, two arguments presented by the author struck me as worthy of comment…

  1. Authors point – Brand marketers are staying out of display ads because of the inherent inability to properly attribute spend to results. Really?!? Is TV a good example of being able to attribute spend to results? Of course not. Yet, this has been the haven for brand dollars for generations. I suggest that while attribution is AN argument to this issue, the main argument is that display ad technologies target consumers very poorly and that those targeting capabilities have little to do with the knowledge and needs of brand marketers. Comscore identified that 80% of targeted ads fail to reach their intended audience. Pause for a second… yes, 80% failure. Why? They all rely upon poor proxies of the real, underlying predictive insight required… bad and incomplete data. 3rd party cookies, context and behavior are not sufficient. Individually or collectively.
  2. Authors point – focus on expanding perspective of digital touch points to do attribution properly. Three research points come to me: 1) about 40% of ad impressions occur in digital channels; 2) Forrester estimates that 70% of consumers exhibit multichannel behavior – researching in one channel and purchasing in another; 3) multichannel customers contribute 4-5 times the revenue per customer than single channel customers. Doing a perfect job at assembling all digital touch points will never be enough. I suggest it’s a false objective. It misses the perspective of consumer behavior, information necessary to support executive media mix decisions and simply creates focus on the minority of ad spend.

All of this makes me thirsty… Sierra Nevada’s my favorite beer!

1 Comment | Customer Experience, Differentiated Value of a Customer, Marketing Data, Media, Multi-channel marketing, Strategy, Website personalization / targeting | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Mark Ogne