Marketing Forward » Nancy Shaver

Unlocking the “social silo”: leveraging social insights across channels

Nancy Shaver — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 19:24:02 +0000

As with many newer channels, social media teams often exist in their own silo of the marketing group. Theirs is a specialized skill set that enables them to excel at listening to social dialogues, managing positive and negative sentiment, creating engaging social campaigns and making smart ad buys. So how do you effectively leverage that insight and make it actionable for other marketing efforts while maintaining a seamless customer experience with the brand?

First, it is imperative to determine what lies in the “social silo” that will impact other channels. For example, data-driven profiles, plus segmentation and models of highly engaged high value Facebook fans, can be used in all channels. We know that all fans are not high value, but high value customers are often fans — and socially active. So it’s important to be able to leverage social intelligence in customer marketing strategy and plans, thereby making the intelligence actionable for improved program results.

So what’s the best way to do this?

Let’s look at a Facebook roadmap for social intelligence:

Leverage Open Graph in Facebook with offers to encourage fans and customers to connect, not just to increase the number of fans, but to gather opt-in data. Make a compelling offer in customer emails, on your website or on your Facebook page. (Make sure the privacy policy and the permissions you display cover as much data as possible.)

Once you collect this valuable information don’t just file it somewhere. Treat it as a valuable feed of customer information. Using email or other collected data, link the Facebook information to your customer, compiled demographics, attitudinal, and behavioral data.

Flag this insight within your customer database so that you have a more complete view of your customers.
Understand which social connectors are prospects, leads or existing customers.

Create profiles and add to models and segmentation frameworks.

This roadmap allows you to use social intelligence anywhere in your marketing programs across all channels for activities like:

Developing marketing tactics for prospects, leads and customers.
Targeting high-value social customers with tailored offers and messaging.
Creating campaigns in the social space targeted to higher value fans.
Adjusting campaign messaging in all channels.

Since social activity is very dynamic, you’ll want to manage the Open Graph opportunity on an ongoing basis, rotating offers and placement. And remember you can offer a discount, for example, but a sweepstakes or other offer aligned with your brand can also be extremely effective. The data you gather gives you a dynamic portrait of your most engaged customers. You can use it for more refined and effective marketing investments. You might also want to leverage a marketing services partner with linkage, quality data and analytic expertise to get started.

The payoff…

For the social team:

A clear, data-driven picture of your brand’s most engaged fans, leading to smarter social display ads and campaigns.
A way to communicate clearly to marketing colleagues about the social customer ¾ beyond likes, posts and sentiments.

For the CMO:

An understanding of the types of customers invested in social media helps calibrate marketing spend.
A sound way to evaluate social media investment.
A more complete picture of customer behavior.

For other marketing teams:

A valuable customer attribute that can be used to help refine segmentation and targeting strategies.
Clear understanding of how to target customer segments and which channels are likely to be most effective.

Knocking down the “social silo” is necessary to gather compelling data that’s useful in every marketing channel AND to be able to improve the customer experience. Building social intelligence is a key activity to keep in step with today’s dynamic customer, and to make sure your marketing is relevant and timely.

The high cost of marketing silos – and the requirement for flawless execution

Nancy Shaver — Thu, 10 May 2012 20:31:42 +0000

I confess… I’m a nut for performance cars. And, I’ve been following a car line from an international manufacturer for some time, awaiting its arrival in the U.S. I have watched the introduction at the Los Angeles auto show on YouTube over and over, not to mention the Super Bowl commercial about the car. Of course, I am a fan on Facebook too. I ordered my own car on the very first possible order date for the U.S. release. And now, I am breathlessly awaiting its arrival in 14 days.

So as you can imagine, I was delighted to get an email, which I assumed was part of a special communication, congratulating me on my purchase and welcoming me to the car manufacturer’s community of discerning drivers. But instead the email was actually an invitation to participate in a sweepstakes to win a day at the track for a competition among five teams—you just had to pick the winning team to enter. So, as a former Skip Barbour driving school graduate, I was thrilled. That is, I was thrilled until the link didn’t work. It didn’t work even after four tries and I got no response from the numerous emails that I sent to the manufacturer.

And worst of all, the team I had picked won.

I certainly don’t feel special now. This manufacturer is a great auto maker and I know that I will love my car, but a car that good deserves a better social media campaign!

The lessons:

The primary objective of a retailer is to acquire, SATISFY and retain customers, profitably
Marketers MUST link their customers to their prospect lists so that they can treat their customers uniquely and ALWAYS recognize them
A great offer REQUIRES superior execution
Marketers must communicate with their customers in a SEAMLESS, consistent way that earns trust, is relevant and drives trips to the stores, website, call center, etc.

A wonderful product’s aura can be tarnished by not paying attention to the basics. Today sophisticated technologies let you link your customers and prospects by email across social media, and ensure you always have the basics covered.

Quite simply, missing and incomplete customer identity data diminishes response and the ability to drive customer relationships. Solutions exist today that enable marketers to identify a customer with a single piece of personally identifiable information (PII), such as an email address, and then match it to the person’s physical address, alternate emails, social, mobile and even cookie data. This cross-channel identity resolution helps marketers to better understand customer preferences, as well as gain a better understanding of the efficacy of their marketing budget. Layer this on a solid loyalty program, and marketers will ensure they know all available touch points for a customer and can leverage those touch points to communicate the right message at the right time.

For more information about cross-channel identity resolution, download a copy of The 2012 Digital Marketer Report.

If it ain’t broke, you’d better still fix it

Nancy Shaver — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 16:34:02 +0000

There’s no question that consumers are choosing the marketing channel to engage with that works for them—and that they are using many ways to gather information or make a purchase. Someone in the market for a new flat screen TV may research on the web, visit a store and make a purchase, or return home and buy on-line. An Eileen Fisher brand loyalist might receive a mailing from Eileen Fisher, spot items in a Neiman Marcus catalog, order on-line in multiple sizes just to make sure of the right fit—or she might go the nearest location where Eileen Fisher is sold, which might be Nordstrom where she has a proprietary card and is rewarded for shopping.

The customer’s world is truly cross-channel—but marketers, sadly, are often only “multi-channel” leaving significant marketing return on the table.

But what about marketing organizations? Most organizations today are still siloed by channel, and success is measured by how well a “channel” performs. Budgets are often allocated by organizational bias or historical spend patterns. A holistic view of how the customer behaves across an organization and a robust understanding of consumer attitudes and preferences is often missing. The customer ‘s world in truly cross-channel—but marketers, sadly, are often only “multi-channel” leaving significant marketing return on the table.

So it’s time to break open the silos. And it’s a CMO’s (or the CEO’s) job—it can’t be done by anyone else.
First: align measures of performance, bonuses etc. for all channels around customer measures—lifetime value, customer satisfaction, engagement measures
Second: make sure you have a customer intelligence platform that supports integrated planning and execution—and reporting.
Third: include product and service development, customer service –anyone who touches the customer – in strategy and planning.

Not easy, but definitely necessary. It’s far better to break down the silos now and start reaping the benefits of integrated data driven marketing, than to watch your marketing performance erode slowly over time.

Questions / Comments contact me
Email: nancy.shaver@experian.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/nancystrat
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/nancy-shaver/0/177/7bb

The squeaky wheel shouldn’t always get the oil

Nancy Shaver — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 17:32:10 +0000

The global footprint of consumer organizations continues to expand despite economic challenges. Many firms now have well-articulated marketing operations and reporting in various regions/countries. However, this reporting is usually financially and/or product or service centered, and frequently cobbled together from different countries or regions. Global customer insight is often limited and fragmented. Customer differences and similarities are often only understood anecdotally, limiting strategy and planning—and often the largest region (or marketing channel) or the “squeakiest wheel” drives decision making –rather than solid global customer understanding.

So, what’s a better approach?

Create a global customer intelligence platform for insight and analysis. In addition to robust samples of customer information –name, e-mail, transaction, web, social, along with any marketing program results from all channels and all operating regions – you’ll need:

A partner with global customer management bonafides—a track record of global customer data management, currency and language translation, address rationalization.
A resource with global consumer information to add to your customer data, demographics, Mosaic, customer survey research—and the skill to integrate it.
Skillful analytic staff (in-house or consultants) with a track record of providing relevant useful insights from complex and incomplete data.

You’ll invest much less effort, cost and time with this approach than by building a global customer management database (although you may decide to do that once you understand your global customer) You’ll be able to add solid customer knowledge to your strategy and planning processes. Marketing, sales, and customer service will clearly benefit. However, product and service development, operations, finance will also gain—although there will still be “squeaky wheels”, of course. You’ll be able to confidently make better marketing investments by adding a true global customer perspective to your plans, and improve your bottom line.

Questions / Comments contact me
Email: nancy.shaver@experian.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/nancystrat
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/nancy-shaver/0/177/7bb