Content Marketing Makes Sense of Social Media

I recently attended a webinar on content marketing hosted by +Tim Ash of SiteTuners and featuring +Joe Pulizzi.  Joe says marketers are not only publishers, but teachers and story-tellers as well.  The graphic above illustrates Joe’s concept that marketers are all story-tellers now and tell their stories across channels. Joe gave the example of one of the first content marketers as John Deere.  That company had a new concept, a steel-tipped plough versus iron and created its own company magazine, The Furrow, to get the word out.  That magazine now has 1.5 million subscribers in 14 languages.

Contemporary examples of those doing content marketing well include Red Bull, which has its own media house within the company.  Red Bull has a record label, its own video magazine and a content pool of sports, culture and lifestyle material that  that includes a full media catalog, “plug-and-play web clips, documentaries, news pieces, photo shoots, the latest interviews, and accompanying editorials.”  The content pool contains over 50,000 photos and 5,000 videos alone.  Also, The Coca-Cola Company has four full time writers and a team of forty freelancers devoted to content marketing and has documented its strategic plan for content marketing on YouTube as it moves from ‘creative excellent’ to ‘content excellence.”

This trend toward content marketing is not restricted to large consumer brands.  

Emarketer reports in a recent survey that content marketing is the top concern of client-side marketers for 2013, having tied conversion rate optimization and vaulted ahead of social media engagement.  Fully 39% of marketers surveyed indicated that content marketing was their top concern in 2013 and the Content Marketing Institute indicates that 91% of marketers are using content marketing in some form.

Content marketing to me finally makes sense of social media marketing.  Although social media marketing no doubt has some value, firms still wrestle with measurement, how to provide meaningful content, and how to get away from what I call “Groupon Syndrome,” or focusing on short-term promotion versus brand building and engagement.  Enter the concept of content marketing and now the marketer can focus on telling the brand story across channels; add the Integrated Marketing Communications concept of telling a consistent message across channels and it is no wonder marketers are starting to see the value of content marketing.

Content marketing means every brand is in the publishing business now, creating meaningful content to tell the brand’s story and engage the consumer.  Telling the brand’s story cuts across channels and involves not only social media but SEO, Lead Generation and other channels. The content we are talking about is media owned by the company, often times re purposed for many types of marketing communications.  Branding is more important now than ever as the web gives us access to so much information that products and services are in more danger than ever of becoming a commodity.

Part of my job as a professor of marketing is to help make sense of marketing trends and create meaningful frameworks to explain and describe them.  Although social media is fascinating and fun, social media marketing cannot operate in a vacuum.  Content marketing makes social media make sense as a natural vehicle for telling the story of the brand and allowing customers to engage with the brand.  Seeing social media in the context of content marketing, where the same stories are deployed through other media channels, to me legitimizes social media marketing and puts it in context of other media channels.  What do you think? 

 By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Tips from the FTC for Mobile Marketing

Mobile applications are critical to today’s marketing environment.  The number of Smartphone users is skyrocketing.   The Pew Research Center indicates that 45% of adults and 66% of Americans aged 18-29 have a Smartphone and 25% of adults own a tablet.   According to a survey by ReturnPath quoted in Joel Book’s Exact Target blog, nearly half of all emails are read on mobile devices.  What this trend means is that marketers need to get savvy about all aspects of mobile marketing, including best practices in privacy and security.  Mobile marketing has expanded to include SMS/text messages, in-app advertising, mobile action codes like QR codes, mobile coupons, check-in promotions, mobile payments or other aspects of digital wallets, emails, telemarketing calls to a mobile devices, RFID tags and much more.

Mobile Marketing has its challenges because fewer ads display on mobile devices and users are still somewhat reluctant to purchase on them (although they seem to be more likely to purchase on tablets rather than Smartphones).  All this will certainly change as users become more familiar with these devices.

I recently attended the Promotion Marketing Association Marketing (PMA, recently rechristened BAA, Brand Activation Association) Promotion Law conference in Chicago which covered some practical tips for launching mobile applications.  The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is only one agency involved in the oversight and regulation of mobile marketing is charged with protecting consumers and suggests these tips for implementing mobile marketing applications.

      1.  Tell the Truth.  Tell the truth about what your app can do.  False or misleading claims anger users and can land you in legal hot water.  If you have health safely or performance claims (i.e., our pedometer will help you lose weight), you need to back these up with solid scientific evidence.  Disclosure must be ‘clear and conspicuous,’ which is not always easy on small screens.

      2.   Respect Privacy.  The mobile application, unlike the company’s legacy applications, may offer the chance to incorporate privacy concerns from the beginning, which the FTC calls ‘privacy by design’  The FTC suggests only collecting the information you need, storing it securely and disposing of it when no longer needed.  Some other privacy tips include:

a.       Being transparent about data practices

b.      Honoring published privacy practices

c.       Protecting Children’s privacy by adhering to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and getting parental consent before collecting information from children under 13 years of age.

      3. Offer choices that are easy to find. Tools that allow for choices in how to use the app and have privacy settings, opt-outs and other ways to control their information is good business practice.  The standard should be ‘clear and conspicuous;’ make privacy choices easy to use and then follow through on your promises.

You can get more information from the “Marketing Your Mobile App Get it Right from the Start” and other documents available at business.ftc.gov.  How hard do you think it is it to follow these guidelines and implement a successful mobile app?

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Integrating Digital Marketing Thought into Digital Strategy

Hello everyone and Happy 2013!  After a brief break from blogging and a two week respite from social media over the holidays, I have lots of new ideas to share and welcome your comments.  Today I want to talk about how Interactive technology has changed the basic way we look at the marketing strategy framework. Instead of just thinking about digital strategy at the end of the process, or as another chapter, as many marketing texts do now, should we not be thinking about completely revamping the process of marketing strategy formation?

For example, we know that B2C consumers and B2B customers start their purchase process online, most usually using a search engine. How many marketing strategy books begin with the importance of search engine marketing? “Conventional” marketing wisdom states that wants became needs and then purchases. Is it not it now true that needs become searches and the results of searches become wants, which lead to more searches and ultimately to purchases? (See above graph).

This interactive marketing approach to strategy means taking into account not only the customer process for finding information but also what the customer is searching for when they search. I recently did a consulting project for a small company and they told me what they were good at, what we would traditionally consider to be a ‘core competencies’ from a marketing point of view. Unfortunately, the search trends on Google Trends indicated that search trends for these products and services were declining. Following a traditional process of identifying core competencies would not take into account what is happening with the consumer online and how they are looking for information. Would you agree as one step in updating how we think about marketing strategy that we need to incorporate digital strategy earlier into the search process?

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Students create search/social campaigns for real clients

This semester my students in Marketing 470 are creating search and social media campaigns to help one not-for-profit (the NIU Marketing Department) and two for profit firms, Allworld Machinery Supply (a top machine tool supply firm)  in Harvard, IL and Ideosity, Inc. (a boutique web developer) based in Elgin, IL drive traffic to their site through PPC and social media campaigns.

The students work with the firm as consultants to develop the paid search strategy and then are given a budget and three weeks to implement their campaign (five for social media) for the three clients.   Both Allworld and Ideosity have NIU grads in key marketing positions.  Tim Yapp is one of the key contacts on the project for Allworld and Kalli Bravos is heading up the project for Ideosity.  Each former student is applying what they learned about search, social media, other interactive principles and general marketing knowledge on the job.  Both Rich Dase, one of the Founders and President of Ideosity, Inc. and Dave Koepp, the President of Allworld Machinery, are also intimately involved in the process.

The company presented to the students in September and the students just presented their plans for approval on October 18.  All the plans represented that the students have a deep understanding of Interactive Marketing.  I was impressed by their knowledge of the interplay between web design and search engine optimization.  The students were also able to apply their knowledge of the keyword bidding process in Google Adwords and keep in mind the companies' strategy and overall marketing objectives.  Results will be measured using Google Analytics and other key marketing metrics.

Of course, these hands-on courses are not new to the Department of Marketing or to its students.  In our Interactive Marketing courses we have done similar projects and in every course give the students a real-life learning experience. By helping students to plan, implement and measure the results of search and social media marketing campaigns, NIU gives the students a real-life learning experience that they can take on the job market and show that NIU really is "Where the Classroom Meets the Business World."

Read more about the project in the Ideosity, Inc. press release and more about our program at our web site.

Internet Marketing Impacts B2B

One of the most important and misunderstood areas of interactive marketing is the broad area of business-to-business Internet Marketing.  For example, Oracle estimates B2B ecommerce revenue is about one and a half times as large as business-to-consumer (B2C) revenue.  Yet the submissions to the journal I edit, The Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing are primarily studies involving business-to-consumer (B2C) issues.  It appears from what is being published in other journals that the situation is the same.  Practitioner sources are of ten the same, emphasizing B2C examples.

The B2B sales area is positioned to be transformed by Internet marketing in at least the following four areas, all of which would be candidates for further examination by both practitioners and academics:

      1) The search process.  Business customers, like most customers, are relying heavily on the internet when   making purchase decisions.  Business customers conduct searches, visit industry social media sites and blogs (increasingly on mobile applications), talk to their colleagues and have a lot of information at their fingertips when the salesperson arrives at the door.  I have tried to illustrate what is happening in the graphic above, which shows all the places the B2B customer can collect information before the salesperson arrives.  In fact, I have seen estimates that the salesperson might now be only involved in two percent of the sales process.  Certainly it is time to explore how we might redefine the B2B search process and to consider extending the concept of the buying center to beyond the limits of the firm.

      2) The role of the salesperson.  This trend toward collecting more and more information before the salesperson arrives diminishes the critical role of the salesperson as the provider of information but potentially increases his/her role as consultative advisor and service provider.  However, lead nurturing systems such as those provided by Marketo now make automated decisions and hand the lead off to the salesperson at the exact right moment to close the sale http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2011/11/08/death-of-the-salesman-marketo-is-automating-sales-relationships-and-growing-like-crazy/

The relative effectiveness of these automated and their impact on salesforce size and structure are issues that need to be discussed in industry.

3) The role of content marketing.  The role of content marketing is another under-researched area of business-to-business internet marketing.  B2B marketers tend to rely on presentation and downloading of content for nurturing relationships.  The suggestion is that effectively placed content on a web site can lead the prospect through the sales process, educating and answering questions along the way.  However, many questions need to be answered about content marketing, including what types of content are most effective in each stage of the customer lifecycle.  For example, the relative effectiveness of webinars versus whitepapers and which content is most effective in what context.

4) The role of social media.  Business-to-business marketers are successfully using social media but the role of these new media is also largely unexplored in academic research.  We know intuitively and from practitioner studies that Linkedin and Twitter are more likely to be useful in B2B contexts than Facebook but we need to understand why and in what context each type of social media marketing tool should be used.  What companies like IBM are doing with internal social networks could also be productive areas of study and replication.

I want to close by noting again that there are also a lot of opportunities for growth and research in the area of B2B internet and interactive Marketing and ecommerce beyond what we have time to mention here. 

Reference:

Oracle White Paper (2012), 2012 B2B E-Commerce Survey:  Results and Trends.

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Conversion Conference Reinforces DM Principles

I am reflecting on the Conversion Conference held in Chicago at the end of June, where I had to chance to moderate and attend sessions with both eMetrics and Conversion Conference.  There was a lot of interesting material at both conferences, particularly the incorporation of psychological principles, 'The Lizard Brain" into web site design.  Tim Ash, President and CEO of SiteTuners and Amy Africa, CEO of Eight by Eight, both mentioned these principles and the fact that consumers make decisions on a sub-conscious level about a web site almost as soon as they see it.  So we have to keep the web site simple and non-threatening as a result.

A particular trend I noticed in most of the talks was the incorporation of direct marketing principles throughout web design to increase conversion.  There was continued talk about A/B testing, having a good offer and using time deadline or some sense of urgency to increase response.  Some tried and true principles for direct response such as the 'free offer' still work online.  I wondered how many of the participants at the conference realized they were utilizing direct response techniques?  One presentation event suggested that we view Facebook friends as a 'list' and I have long said the real advantage of Facebook friends is to get further contact information to nurture the relationship.

In our courses in our Interactive Marketing program we require a Direct Marketing course as it is the basis of so much that is done on the internet.  We also included a chapter on Direct Marketing principles in our Internet Marketing textbook.

What other examples can you think of where direct response is used  in Internet Marketing?  Can we have a true Conversion Conference that incorporates all channels?  Let me know your thoughts.

Learn How to Hire our NIU Huskie Interactive Marketing Graduates

I received this information from our Career Services folks.  We work closely with career services to place our Interactive graduates.  If you sign in to career services and create an account, you can then look at the Interactive Marketing Resume book and post jobs.


"We thank you for including Northern Illinois University (NIU) as part of your employment strategy by posting your positions in Huskies Get Hired and/or participating in the NIU Career Fairs. Please review the following information for the upcoming recruiting season.

1. Registration for the Fall All-Majors Internship and Job Fairs opens July 1 
http://www.niu.edu/careerservices

2. NIU Career Services Value Package Career Fair Sponsorships include

• Career fair registration fees
• Premium location near the candidates' entrance at our career fairs
• Your company logo and link on NIU Career Services' web site
• An advertisement promoting your company's participation in the career fairs in The Northern Star, NIU's student newspaper, both fall and spring semesters
• Dedicated shelf space in the Career Resource Center for your recruitment materials
• http://www.niu.edu/CareerServices/jobfairs/packages.shtml for more information

3. Fall 2012 NIU Football Sponsorship Career Fair package deal

• See your company name on the jumbo videotron scoreboard at 4 NIU home football games (home of the 2011 MAC Champions)
• Includes 2 tickets to one of the home games
• Over 20,000 NIU students, parents and alumni will see that your company recruits at the NIU Career Fair(s)
• NIU is the proud winner of the 2011 Mid America Conference Football Championship, 2012 GoDaddy.com Bowl, and currently holds the NCAA longest winning streak of 9 wins. http://www.niuhuskies.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/niu-fb-year-in-review.html
• This package is an add-on to the regular Internship and Job Fair registrations for $200.00.

To register for the fall 2012 fairs, become an NIU Career Services Value Package Sponsor, reserve interview space, review additional branding opportunities, or discuss your campus recruiting goals, visit our home page:http://www.niu.edu/careerservices or call             815-753-8346      . The NIU Career Services Employer Relations team is looking forward to another great year in partnership with you and your company."

Websites need to reinforce brand benefits

As I prepare to moderate two days of the Conversion Conference next Monday and Tuesday, I am reflecting on the blog comments and what people hope to get out of the conference.  For me, I have had several occasions this year to review web sites and still find that most small firms and some big ones, don't put what their company does and what the benefits are in clear language on the site.

Call it your benefits statement, key selling strategy, tag line or what you will, but it has to be on the home page of your web site.  Whether its service, selection or other benefits, let people know why they should buy from you.  New visitors need to know it and so do returning customers.

I like the Conversion Conference Website:  the Tag line is there and says it is all about the conversion and then there is another sentence restating that the benefit of attendance is to improve online marketing effectiveness.  By the way there is also a great call to action, 'Register Now.'

Sounds like a great two days and all part of a data drive business week in Chicago including the E-Metrics conference.  Want to join me here?  Say in YOUR blog why you should attend and if it is compelling, you can attending for $750! So ....join me on a speaker companion pass at Conversion Conference next week; Just send a blog post saying why you should go, pay $750! http://bit.ly/NgFwtN

Multichannel Attribution

I love this graphic from Joel Book, ExactTarget's Education Chief because it illustrates how the topic of multi-channel attribution often seems to me like the search for the Holy Grail (the Last Cup of Christ).  The result can be elusive. Given the proliferation of channels, the complexity of the issue, cross-firm differences in resource allocation and other aspects of implementation, is there likely to be a broad-based answer to the questions of how to 1) attribute marketing results to marketing actions and 2) develop marketing programs that maximize spending? 

The four ways that I see academics are addressing and can further address these issues are as follows:

• By investigating an industry:  In the Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice, Schultz, Block and Ramn have studied consumer media usage in three product categories, computers, automobiles and fast-food restaurants. (Schultz, et. al. 2009). In these studies as in other marketing studies elsewhere, we often see that where the marketer is spending their dollars (mass advertising) and where the customer is spending their time (social media) do not match.
•  By examining a company:   Recently in  the Journal of Marketing (May 2012), Avery, Steenburgh, Deighton and Caravella investigated data from a high-end retailer to see if introducing a retail store in specific areas would affect catalogue and online sales.
• By analyzing the customer:  Venkatasen and Kumar (2005) and Venkatasen, Kumar and Ravishanker (2007)  have developed a number of models from the point of view of the customer to explain and predict the adoption of multiple channels and discuss financial implications. 
• By analyzing multiple firms (strategy):  Neil Morgan in a recent issue of JAMS (2012) outlined a conceptual framework to link all the different elements of marketing strategy and business performance, including implementation, which is often overlooked in research but critical in practice.

Although these efforts are great first steps toward answering marketing attribution questions, none of them really provide guidance as to how to attribute the results of marketing spending on brand advertising, social media, search etc. to performance.  The type of research conducted to date is a good start, but usually does not focus on the complexities facing the marketer today in a generalizable way and certainly does not look at cross-firm differences and performance.  So we as academics have an opportunity not only to apply rigor to these issues but to work on topics of real relevance to marketers today.

And the question of how to measure performance in this context is interesting also.  Should we look at ROI, or event CLV, as practitioners do, in hard numbers way?  Wouldn’t customer equity ala Rust and Lemon and Zeithaml (2004) be more appropriate or at least a metric that should be evaluated in conjunction with other measures (Stahl, Heitman, Lehmann and Neslin 2012).

"The Latest Wave" Internet Conference a Success

Approximately 130 marketing professionals participated in "The Latest Wave" in Internet Marketing at NIU's Naperville Center on April 19. Included in the group were about thirty students from the Interactive Marketing Program, most of whom will be graduating in several weeks with our certificate in Interactive Marketing or another specialization that prepares them for a career in search, data analytics, social, etc. Check out our interactive marketing program and see how you can benefit by hiring students and interns.

The Opening Plenary Session featured keynote speaker Ron Jacobs, President, Jacobs & Clevenger and Co-Author of Successful Direct Marketing Methods. Ron shared his insights on measurement and the merging of digital and Interacitve. Ron claimed that marketers are drowning in data and that in fact:

• 1 in 3 marketers make decisions without critical information
• 1 in 2 marketers don't  have the information they need to perform their job
• Knowledge workers spend 19 hours each week searching for information

Ron went on to talk about the benefits and weaknesses of Key Performance indicators and how to measure some of the newer media channels such as social and mobile.

The conference had a special track on social media and a general track with a B2B emphasis and topics such as search, analytics and mobile. We featured speakers from Dell, CDW, Walgreens and other leading Interactive Marketing practitioners. The conference web site is here for more information on The Latest Wave in Internet Marketing 2012.  Check out what happened by monitoring the Twitter feed at #niuinetconf.  There are some good comments and questions on that feed.

Over lunch, there were networking tables set up on various topics and facilitated by our board members. The picture above shows our students taking advantage of the networking opportunity provided by topics such as how to make the transition from school to work during the first year or how to successfully navigate through agency life.

Also over lunch, attendees could choose from a variety of hands-on workshops demonstrating the basics in Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and HTML. The best part is that these sessions were taught mostly by our current students, Jenny Yam, Tyler Miller and David Delaplane. Everyone seemed to get something out of the event and it was a successful day. I am sorry for those who could not attend.