However, as time went on and Facebook and Twitter began to dominate the social space, a shift began in the kinds of things people were talking about. As Facebook evolved and started offering “fan pages” where someone could create a page on something or someone they really liked, a new idea was born: Businesses now had a social venue that allowed them to brand themselves in a social space and best of all, get instant reader feedback.

“Listening” became a corporate norm, and with it hundreds of vendors and software solutions were created to form an entirely new industry. With all of this information available for businesses to gather feedback, it was essential to understand what people were saying about their brands. And, brands needed to determine how and/or whether or not to respond to negative or positive comments. Today, most businesses have mastered the listening phase of the social revolution and taken advantage of the multitudes of software solutions that are available to help them react to and monitor what consumers are saying. But how does one respond effectively and also isolate subpopulations of negative consumers against a broader positive consumer base?

If someone posts about relaxing with a glass of wine, an organization can find out what the consumer’s wine brand or taste preference is.  Also, if someone posts about a new membership club they joined, an organization can determine if this caused others to follow suit.

This is where we are at today. Businesses are now realizing that just listening to what is being said about a certain topic, product, service or brand and responding to everyone in the same way isn’t as effective as they had hoped. So what’s a marketer to do? They profile their social consumer to understand key differences between those that are high-value and loyal brand advocates versus those that are low-value, negative consumers. By combining social data with traditional data, a brand can now understand their consumers across social media and other online and offline channels. If someone posts about relaxing with a glass of wine, an organization can find out what the consumer’s wine brand or taste preference is.  Also, if someone posts about a new membership club they joined, an organization can determine if this caused others to follow suit. This allows marketers to see if social media has any correlation in customer loyalty or consumer purchasing patterns. With this next evolution in social media marketing, brands are now able to make even more sense out of the vast amount of social data that exists in the social sphere. Once a brand understands more about the specific segments of consumers that are socially active, it’s time to move on to “publishing,” the final phase of social marketing.

With profiling, publishing becomes far more effective and efficient and a brand no longer has to blast everyone with the same social messaging.

When publishing, a brand has the opportunity to reach out to its consumers in a smart, targeted way. Utilizing the information learned in the listening and profiling phase, brands can target certain messages or ads to specific sub-segments of consumers. For example, if a brand’s high-value, socially active segment has been recently complaining about a new product line, the brand can take corrective action and target the individuals that fit into that segment with messaging similar to, “We’ve heard you and now we are working to make things better.” Whereas, if a brand’s low-value, non-socially engaged segment is complaining about a service, a brand may just want to send them a coupon or “sorry” message. With profiling, publishing becomes far more effective and efficient and a brand no longer has to blast everyone with the same social messaging.

Listening, profiling and publishing all work in harmony to provide the most impactful social marketing communication. Each one alone has its value, but together the three are worth more than the sum of the parts. As brands grow and continue to evolve their social communication, these three phases need to become more interconnected in the overall marketing plan.

Register for this webinar titled Harnessing Social Media for Accelerated Multi-Channel Performance  on June 21^st and find out how to get started. May The Force be with You!

“Yes but I have a well designed, highly creative site” you boast. That’s great, I’m sure it will win many creative awards while someone with an uglier more customer centric site keeps taking your business. It’s not your fault.  For years big creative agencies have promised that slick, graphical, flash and other creative “wows” will increase your competitiveness while you sit back seeing the same conversion rates and scratching your head about what happened. The only thing your slick non-customer centric site is doing is keeping up with other slick non-customer centric sites.  While the organizations who put the customer and usability first and the creative second are stealing market share and increasing their conversion rates.

Ask yourself this, has all the money you spent on creative, creative strategy or even long-term business strategy paid off. If you say “Yes”, how do you know?  Did you set out to measure the results over a control group? Did you do any type of statistical analysis pre/post your massive new undertaking? If not, then you really can’t say for certain you know if that money you spent brought you anything in return. “But my competition just added this new technology to their page. I need to keep up.” If your competition decided to charge twice as much as you do for the same product, would you try to keep up with them as well? My guess is no.  And more times than not, it’s these types of creative site changes that actually hamper and slow down the customer engagement than speed it up. I’m sure you have seen site changes made to your competition only to see it changed again 6 months later. That typically happens when their decision was based on creative agencies or whims and not customer focused.

“OK, so what am I supposed to do then?” First and foremost, understand your customer from every angle. You need to understand how your potential and current customers perceive you. Understand how they think, what they look like and what makes them purchase. Next, remove the blinders by understanding what your competitors’ visitors look like, how they think and what makes them purchase. Find out what current and potential customers are saying about you on social media sites and incorporate all of the above findings into a strategic roadmap and game plan.

Once you fully understand your visitors, and your competition’s visitors, you can develop strategic messaging and site layouts tailored to the different segments within your visitor universe. Then, you can apply the fancy creative to the site, but only as long as it meets the guidelines of what each segment is looking for. Finally, test, test, test.  You need to show the world (and your boss) the benefits of being a customer-centric site. As long as you have a well thought out, strategic testing plan in place you will be able to confidently show whether your changes work or not and continue to build on those changes to compound the conversion improvements.

keep your mind on the customer and the customer will keep their mind on you

To summarize, non-customer centric sites lead to unhappy customers, same or lower ROI, same or lower sales and empty pockets.  Customer centric site designs lead to happy customers, improved ROI, increased sales and happy bosses.  As always, keep your mind on the customer and the customer will keep their mind on you.

Questions / Comments contact me
@dkimrey (twitter)
David Kimrey (LinkedIn)
David.kimrey@experian.com (email)

“But last in is how my company and others like it have been counting conversions for centuries (or maybe a decade)” you object. True, but does your company still have every Friday off and hand out thousands of stock options to every employee like they did back in early 2000? Probably not. Look, there is nothing wrong with counting conversions based on last in or first in. In order to assign a value to some channel, you need to have a method that is quickly implemented in your web tracking tools and usually, by default, it is last in or first in. It is the first step in the evolution to truly understanding how all of your marketing efforts, across all of your channels, are really impacting conversion. But, that is all it is, a first step.

So intuitively you ask, “OK, I’m listening, what’s the next step?” Excellent question. We consider truly understanding how all of your marketing spend is impacting conversion in a 3-step process. We’ve already covered the first step of assigning value to different channels by some method to get the process started. The second step is capturing all of the data for each channel that drove the conversion. The first type of data that needs to be captured is direct data or data that is directly traceable to a conversion, such as email data, website data and click-through data from affiliates, display ads and social media. The second type of data is indirect data or data that has to be inferred to have driven a conversion. This data can be derived from TV ads, billboards and the infamous display ad view-through. Some of these two types of data can be captured using web analytics tools, but most inferred data is stored in separate databases and needs to integrated with the rest.

“Wow! That’s a lot of data to look at,” you say, “so what am I supposed to do then?” Simply put, understand how your channels are influencing different customers. You need to understand how your potential and current customers will interact with you and how effective it is to send them an email, show them a display ad or do nothing and let them come to the site. This is Response Attribution – , taking all of the data mentioned above and building strong, robust highly executable models that will allow you to truly understand what channels you should continue to spend money on and which ones you should increase or decrease your spending on. The decision on spend will not be the same for all people. For instance, you may have a group of people that see display ads but never click them, receive emails but never open them and get catalogs but never order by phone. However, that same group of people contains some of your top customers. Does this mean that all of the other channels are ineffective? Maybe, maybe not. Response Attribution will give you the insight you need to understand which of those channels you should spend more or less on. For instance, view-throughs usually aren’t that effective, so perhaps you can pull back on that, or maybe emails are annoying to this particular group; so why annoy them if they will continue to spend anyway. These are the kinds of answers you can only get from building sophisticated models and looking at all of your data across all of your channels.

keep your mind on the customer and the customer will keep their mind on you

To summarize, last in wins, isn’t necessarily a bad philosophy, just not the right one. Truly understanding how each channel a consumer touches impacts conversion will help you increase your ROI across all channels and lead to a better marketing experience for the consumer. As always, keep your mind on the customer and the customer will keep their mind on you.

Questions / Comments contact me
Linkedin: David Kimery
Twitter:  @dkimrey
Email:  david.kimrey@experian.com