2010 is here and with a new year comes new expectations, especially when it comes to social media. Anyone who has been immersed in social media for the past few years have witnessed social media’s transformation from a richer form of harmless online chatter to one of the most powerful marketing channels today! Marketers are seeing the masses spend less time on traditional media and more time playing Farmville on Facebook (I’m referring to the black sheep on your Newsfeed phenomenon). So if 2009 was there year where social media social media got some double takes from the the usual critics than 2010 is the year social media reels in that critic and seals the deal (whatever that means to you).
Some of the emerging trends in 2010:
Top Trends for Businesses
The most apprehensive and most traditional companies will start dipping their toes in the water (cause everyone else will have already dove in).
Each business will begin to set metrics for measuring ROI instead of measuring obscure levels of engagement.
Companies will begin enforce social media policies (like the NBA).
Small business will begin to emerge in the space (via apps like FourSquare).
Media agencies will begin to expand their offering or partner-up with others who got the skill set they need.
Don’t just take my word for it…check out what the experts have to say!
Seth Godin argues the Internet has ended mass marketing and revived a human social unit from the distant past: tribes. Founded on shared ideas and values, tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change. He urges us to do so.
About Seth Godin
Seth Godin is an entrepreneur and blogger who thinks about the marketing of ideas in the digital age. His newest interest: the tribes we lead. Full bio and more links
“Seth Godin may be the ultimate entrepreneur for the Information Age,” Mary Kuntz wrote in Business Week nearly a decade ago. “Instead of widgets or car parts, he specializes in ideas — usually, but not always, his own.” In fact, he’s as focused on spreading ideas as he is on the ideas themselves.
After working as a software brand manager in the mid-1980s, Godin started Yoyodyne, one of the first Internet-based direct-marketing firms, with the notion that companies needed to rethink how they reached customers. His efforts caught the attention of Yahoo!, which bought the company in 1998 and kept Godin on as a vice president of permission marketing. Godin has produced several critically acclaimed and attention-grabbing books, including Permission Marketing, All Marketers Are Liars, and Purple Cow (which was distributed in a milk carton). In 2005, Godin founded Squidoo.com, a Web site where users can share links and information about an idea or topic important to them.
“[Godin] is a demigod on the Web, a best-selling author, highly sought-after lecturer, successful entrepreneur, respected pundit and high-profile blogger. He is uniquely respected for his understanding of the Internet.” Forbes.com
Forrester Wave Report Names Email Marketing Service Provider Leaders
As part of its Wave report on Email Marketing Service providers (ESPs), Forrester reviewed 15 vendors against 69 criteria and ranked Responsys and ExactTarget at the top of the pack. All eight Leaders were narrowly separated and achieved Leader status through innovation and a commitment to advancing client education and sophistication.
Forrester’s March 2009 US Interactive Marketing Forecast Online Survey found that 92% of respondents are currently using email marketing and spending is expected to balloon to $2 billion dollars by 2014.
When Forrester surveyed 218 clients of the vendors in this wave on how the current economic situation is altering their email programs, very few marketers cited budget cuts. Instead, clients are more demanding of their email service providers because marketers are increasing the relevance of their programs. Email marketing frequency is growing and marketers look to ESPs to offset staffing losses, according to Forrester. The full report included vendor and executive surveys as well as executive interviews.
The report found among the leaders best aligned for large enterprise deployments, Responsys was noted for its comprehensive offerings and functionality, as well as its client satisfaction with its innovation.
ExactTarget was noted for its ability to cater to any market segment. Forrester referenced the company’s “highly usable self-service application and growing services organization that offers the ability for its personnel to be deployed at the client location. With high satisfaction scores and online community, ExactTarget can successfully meet marketers’ complex business needs.”
Another vendors singled out in the report was e-Dialog for its comprehensive application functionality, the ability to quickly segment and query large amounts of data and automate the testing process. Acxiom was acknowledged for quick integration with mobile and social functionality to meet the growing needs of the email marketer. Acxiom is well equipped to manage large global enterprises particularly in a full-service manner.
Yesmail’s variety of self-service and collaborative self-service was called out for its ability to serve a vast selection of market segments. Forrester cited the vendor’s robust tool for managing all aspects of email campaign deployment, including visual tools, a marketing calendar, and OLAP analytics for campaign analysis.
Experian Marketing Services’ platform was credited for excellent production services capabilities as well as a comprehensive self-service application (Experian CheetahMail) that caters to the 40% of its clients that work with the vendor in that fashion. It earned a perfect customer satisfaction score and has a long history of complex data integrations as well as a global footprint.
Epsilon’s DREAM messaging platform was noted for its comprehensive offering all of the necessary functionality to manage and execute mailings. According to the Forrester report, 70% of Epsilon’s clients engage with them in a full or collaborative service manner. Overall, 60% of their clients are full-service, and most are satisfied with the overall account service.
The name “Content Farm” kind of describes it perfectly. What a strange concept, isn’t it? Or maybe not. Spammers and BlackHat SEOs have been auto generating low quality content for long tail search engine rankings for a while now. The content farm technique arguably takes this a few steps further by creating better quality (note – still questionable quality), user friendly content for the exact same reason.
Essentially certain companies have hired thousands of writers and video content producers to churn out content that is determined algorithmically:
The system starts with an automated process, crunching data and running it through an algorithm to identify story ideas that have the best chance of success. The algorithm factors in audience type, ability to attract advertising and potential for traffic.Source
The whole “Why” of the situation is pretty much easy to decipher. After all, there are over tens of billions of searches every month. That traffic has some serious value, especially for Informational Queries. After all, more than 80% of searches fall within this category.
Continue reading via Explicitly – Includes how to create your own content as well as what other professionals think…
Twitter was the story of 2009, growing from less than 5 million monthly users to almost 30 million in the course of six months. People joined, brands rushed in, and words like “Tweet” entered our common vocabulary.
Yes, overall growth is slowing—how could it not after posting 1,000%-plus growth in such a short time?–but the key for marketers is not the number of Twitterers but the habits, Technographics and psychographics of Twitterers. As Sean Corcoran and Josh Bernoff demonstrated in their December 2009 report, “Who Flocks To Twitter?,” Twitters are the connected of the connected, overindexing at all Social Media habits. For example, Twitterers are three times more likely to be Creators (people who create and share content via blog posts and YouTube) as the general US population. continue reading via the Forrester Blog
4 Steps to Successful Email List Rental & Email Display Advertising
Note: This post is NOT written for list owners and publishers. It’s written for advertisers that rent emails lists or advertise in email newsletters. If you’re an advertiser who has, or is planning, to include 3rd-party email into your marketing mix it will help to use the channel more successfully and get a better ROI, with smaller budgets. In the end, it will help list owners, too. After all a happy advertiser is a repeat advertiser.
Throughout my years in email marketing both on the agency and list side, I’ve had a few conversations like this, and I paraphrase, “I’m cancelling my campaigns because I’m not getting enough [clicks, leads, sales, or other tangible results].” The advertiser then pulls the campaign and leaves disappointed with the performance of the email list.
But there have also been instances when, before the advertiser (or their agency or list broker) pulled the campaign, they were willing make a few small adjustments and retest. And for those who once felt disappointed then saw an immediate improvement in campaign performance. I shared with them one tried-and-true secret to successful email advertising, which is:
“Match your creative and success criteria to your campaign objective.”
Marketing 101right? But I cannot tell you how often I have seen that the objective, creative, and measures of success are completely misaligned. And when they are, the campaign is nowhere near as successful as it could be. For reasons unknown this misalignment happens more often with email.
The good news is that it’s an easy fix that can quickly invert the ROI of email marketing. When looking at an email-centric campaign, start by asking yourself these four questions:
1. What is my goal for this campaign?
2. Does my creative and landing page align with that goal?
3. Does my offer, creative and landing page make sense to my audience and not just to me?
4. How will I measure the success of the campaign, and does it align with the goal?
What are you trying to achieve? Branding? Registrations? A sales inquiry? An immediate purchase? Whatever your goal is, make sure that your creative, landing page, and measurements all align with the goal and make sense from the perspective of your audience (which is often different than yours).
Is your goal branding? Email effectively achieves key branding goals: awareness, message association, favorability, purchase intent, etc. I’ve found that most advertisers, especially when using e-newsletter advertisements, have great success with branding ads in the email channel. Their creatives are engaging, their brand is prominent, and they reinforce messages that they want the viewer to associate with their brands. But the disconnect, when there is one, comes when the advertiser measures the campaign by clicks or some other metric when the creative was never intended to elicit that kind of response. Brand is measured by the impact that viewing (i.e., an impression) the ad has on the perception and intent of the viewer, not by an immediate response. Instead use open-rates as your barometer.
Want visits to your website or new registrations? Great! Make sure to design your creative to elicit that kind of response. If your ad’s message is, “WidgetTown: The best widgets around. Click here for more.” you may have impacted the prospects’ brand perceptions, but you are unlikely to get them to click. Why should they? They have all the information they need, and down the road, if they need a widget, they are more likely to call you. But they’re not going to click right now or they, by virtual of impeccable timing, have an immediate need. If your goal is registrations, give the viewer a reason to click. Give them something that’s truly valuable (to them).
Is your goal lead generation? The incentive and landing page is now a critical part of your campaign. Does the creative tie in to the landing page? Is the incentive promoted in the creative clearly and prominently shown on the landing page? Is it clear on the landing page what the viewer must do next, and is the incentive reinforced? Are there distractions (navigation, social network links, etc.) that would derail the prospect from completing the task? Any of these can reduce the effectiveness of a lead-generation campaign and reduce the number of leads you generate.
Maybe your goal is online sales. Is it a product that someone would buy on impulse or should your campaigns be centered on events, such as holidays? Have you gone through the entire checkout process? Is it clean and simple, or convoluted and cryptic? Are you tracking cart abandonment so you can see where the problem spots are? Does your email service provider (ESP) or internal email solution support cart abandonment triggers? Are you placing a cookie in the visitors’ browsers so if they come back in a couple days and buy that product, you can credit the ad that generated the leads?
By the way, don’t try to achieve multiple goals with one campaign. It will be like a futon—it doesn’t make a very good sofa or a very good bed.
These are just of few of the basic but ever-present factors that can affect desired actions and thus your evaluation of the ROI of your 3rd party email campaigns. Just remember, the line between and email marketing success and relative failure in a fine one. Use these steps to ensure that your messages and objectives are inline and you can instantly sway the ROI-meter to your favor.
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Scott Hardigree is CEO at Indiemark, a full-service email marketing agency and consultancy based in Orlando FL.
