What is Agile Marketing ?

I use the term Agile Marketing quite a lot these days and regard it as an approach that organisations need to adopt.

Here's what I mean by this:

1. Embrace test & learn

The days of "fire & forget" for a campaign are over. If you are launching a digital marketing initiative lasting longer than a week, then you really need to consider how you're going to improve it over time. For example... Sending an email out to more that a handful of people? Then test multiple subject lines first

Note: This approach also goes hand-in-hand with the philosophy that...

2. You need to understand that you're not going to get it all right first time

In much the same way as your developers create an MVT (minimum viable product) that releases working but evolving software to customers, learn that your marketing campaigns are never going to be the best they could be unless you change them based upon insight and understanding. And rapidly....

3. Use data to gain insight and understanding

If you are not using your digital analytics tools to their full capability, they you are doing you and your organisation a disservice. Use clack tracking, surveys and even the raw data to understand & refine what your users want (and are not getting). Then also Learn who are your true social media influencers and online friends. The finally...

4. Become your digital agency's best friend and worst enemy

Unless you have in-sourced absolutely everything to do with your digital marketing & development (from programmatic display media through to website testing) then you're going to be using an agency. Therefore get to know their strengths and their weakness... and play to them to get the most of out them... ideally for the best value possible.

Understanding the Third Moment of Truth

Last week I posted my thoughts on whether there was an extra  'Moment of Truth' in the online & multi-channel purchasing cycle. One where users get the product home and only then decide to return some or all of them.
This Third Moment of Truth is key to an eCommerce site's revenue and stock management, as returned inventory can significantly affect a product line's profitability and add a lot of effort to the entire back-end process.

In the diagram above I have also tried to tie together this Third Moment of Truth (TMOT) with the other moments and then to align them with my previously-used model of influence & action... AIDA.

Hopefully now, regardless of which model is used, there should now be some alignment of these different pivotal moments.

The Moments of Truth

Most savvy marketers should now be familiar with the concept of the first and second ‘moments of truth’. The idea (pioneered by P&G over a decade ago) that there are several key points in the shopper’s journey which should be recognised and supported, is now pretty much part of the vocabulary of modern retail marketing.

The First moment of truth (FMOT):
When a shopper decides to purchase an item (e.g. reaches for the product sitting on a supermarket shelf)

The Second moment of truth (SMOT):
When the shopper gets the product home and starts to use it.

More recently Google identified the Zero Moment of Truth. This was explained as being the online decision-making process that takes the multi-channel shopper from the initial point of stimulus through to the first moment of truth.

The theory is that by being aware of these stages in the buying process means, we can craft message and experiences around these points to encourage and persuade shoppers to buy.  However Google’s Zero Moment of Truth, or ZMOT as it is referred to, needs more than a brief explanation of how it actually works  in practice across the a digital world. Google's model highlights that there is now a new critical moment of decision that happens before consumers get to the supermarket shelf. That regardless of the products sold, customers and shoppers (the two terms here are pretty-much interchangeable) decision on what product to buy is made up. However, it is not necessarily persuaded by just one factor or one message via a single source… but by a complex combination of lots of messages, many of which are via digital marketing channels.
You can find out more about it here: http://www.zeromomentoftruth.com

However these models aren't really that new or revolutionary. Back several years ago I used the acronym AIDA in several posts to refer to a very similar marketing concept. This explained that there are 4 steps along the path to purchase of: awareness, influence, decision and action. This process takes the shopper up to the point when they commit themselves to purchasing… in other words up to the first moment of truth (FMOT).
In my opinion… What Google has done with ZMOT is to give a name to the two steps of influence and decision, shaped for the modern generation of multiple channel users.

Or to break it down in a way that I find easy to understand, I've created the following diagram which shows how I think these different approached come together:

Multi-channel shopper marketing

A couple of months ago I write a post about how I saw the discipline of shopper marketing (SM) evolve into digital shopper marketing (DSM) and then into Multi-Channel Shopper Marketing (MCSM).

Now I've had a little while to think about this some more and work with clients on this, I thought I would share some more of my thoughts and observations.

1. Shoppers are now multi-channel
It is not simply the case that online marketing influences online purchases and traditional marketing influences in-store transactions. Online and offline are now just different channels, each potentially contributing to the acquisition and retention of the customer over a range of time.

2. Influence has a huge part to play
The path to purchase starts with initial awareness and continues up to the point that the shopper reaches for the product. In between these two events, there is a wealth of channels, touch-points and devices that the shopper uses to make their purchasing choices. Google calls this the Zero Moment Of Truth (or ZMOT for short) and has produced a number of studies to show just how many information sources a modern multi-channel shopper uses before they commit to a sale.

3. The shopper is getting more savvy
We now live in an age of austerity for most people, where nearly everyone is watching what they spend (in a way, this is the way it always should have been). This translates to a change in shopper behaviour, where they now search around for the best price of brands / commodity products and a lot more now look out for discount codes and promotions. This has a clear effect on eCommerce sites, where a lot more visitors now jump out of the transaction funnel just before they compete the payment process...to look at voucher sites and to hunt down any relevant offers.

In the future I hope to dig into the ways that brands and  retailers can utilise this behaviour and get the maximum benefit from the new ways that multi-channel shoppers act.

What exactly is a good Klout score?

I've recently had my Klout score drop a couple of points. Apparently I'm now only valued at 59, whereas only a few weeks ago this was at 61.

But be honest, I've no idea what this means... Is 59 good, bad or middle- of-the-road?

For those that don't know, Klout is one of several services that tries to gives you a value of your online (and primarily your social media ) influence. There was even some mutterings in the past that these sorts of metrics would be used by potential employers to short-list candidates for specific roles.*
However, in my opinion it doesn't seem to actually be a measure of anything valuable.

Firstly, how am I to compare two different people, with different roles, but with the same score? And secondly, I've never blogged more, built up more followers on Twitter or had more traffic to my company website than in the last few weeks... And yet I've had a 3-4% drop in my digital influence dished out.

I hardly think I'll worry if my score drops further.

* In my experience, most companies looking to hire social media savvy staff haven't a clue how to measure their modern market impact.

Digital Shopper Marketing - the new influence

The world of retail is now multi-channel and customers now shop across a number of different devices, at times of day to suit them and in different ways to how they used to (convenience vs. cost, etc.).

 

The area of Shopper Marketing, which originally looked mainly at things such as the in-store path to purchase has now started to merge with the eCommerce / multi-channel retail and even online marketing. This has formed the relatively new discipline of Digital Shopper Marketing.

Here's my take on this:

1. Brands, by placing themselves between the channels of influence and the point of retail (e.g. the store), can affect the buying decisions of the customer
2. A lot of customers now use the Internet to inform their buying decisions (e.g.recommendation and comparison sites, social media, brand micro-sites, etc.)
3. The digital influence doesn't just happen at home and in-front of a static PC these days. Users search sites at work, they have laptops when on the move, they use tablets in bed and over half of the UK population now has a smartphone.

So how can brands disrupt a consumer and get the maximum affect? Well this depends a lot on what consumers you are targetting, their shopping preferences and the mix of marketing that is required.
For example, a particular segment (let's call them "shopper savvy mums") are more interested in ways to:

• Saving: Using vouchers to make the family budget stretch that little bit further
• Sharing: Commenting and gaining opion via Social Media
• Sampling: Trying new or improved products to optimise spend and overall family well-being

The secret for digital shopper marketing suppliers is to find out what works for their client's target audience. And I''ll leave you to find out how to do this for yoursleves.

Where does the customer journey begin?

If you're selling either a product or service for even a reasonably sized company, its a good bet that someone has looked at understanding the main customer journey or journeys.

For a multi-channel organisation, selling across several devices and physical presence (store, branch, etc.) it soon becomes clear that the customer journeys are numerous and difficult to map out.

To make matters more complex for those doing this exercise, it soon becomes clear that the path to purchase doesn't start at the last physical or digital touch point... But that the user journey actually starts way back when a customer becomes aware and interested in what's being sold. In other words, the channels that create an understanding and desire for the product or service have an influence on the transaction too.

So the question posed as the title of this posting becomes a very important one to answer... Just how far back into the awareness and influence do you go to fully map your customer journey?

For me there's only one answer... As far as you possibly can! The route down the path to purchase must have started with a first step, with several paces forward being made before the transaction was made . If you can identify these and model them, you can build up a better understanding of what your customer is doing and hopefully influence their decision along the way.

Multi-channel digital attribution – what's next?

If you had read the recent eConsultancy report called‘Making Sense of Marketing Attribution’, you would know that the majority of websites are either not carry out any form of attribution or are still apply a last click approach. In this report the client-side marketers responding said that only26% were doing marketing attribution beyond last click … where the last channel used gains all the credit for the acquisition.

The online sector has been gradually moving towards digital multi-channel attribution, although it is still early days. The aim of these efforts is to understand the different online channels or touch points used by customers in their online paths to conversion on eCommerce sites, but:

• There is still little maturity of the attribution market, meaning there are several bespoke offerings and no real common standards between suppliers

•  The current attribution methods used are basic in their mathematical modelling

•  They are online-only, with no consideration for other non-digital channels (e.g. TV or outdoor)

In my experience, there is very little being done to look at the bigger picture that appropriately considers not just the journey and interactions across the disparate online channels, but also the offline ones…and it is here I think there is an opportunity.

I really think that businesses and their agencies need to move away from single channels of data (e.g. website analytics. TV viewing figures, etc.) and also beyond the basic online only attribution models. They need to understand the entire user journey that leads not just to a transaction, but to a longer-term relationship. Only then can business truly understand the influence that different devices, channels, proportional activity and other factors (such a peer recommendations) have on purchasing and subsequent behaviour.

Social Media Bullshit Bingo – some suggestions

I’ve had a bit of feedback on my earlier post about Social Media Bullshit Bingo and a few people have asked me for suggestions of words they can use to play this game. So here is a list I have put together from my own experiences (plus a few from some Twitter buddies who I asked back a few weeks ago when this whole idea initially took shape).

Facebook
Twitter
Social Graph
Google+
Crowdsourcing
Transparency
Influence
Authenticity
and finally Amazeballs (thanks to http://twitter.com/bobblebardsley)

Note: This is not an exhaustive list, as I am sure you will have your own and terms will evolve as new products and services emerge or grow in prominence (for example, Google + would not have been on the list just 3 weeks ago).

However, if you think there are any blindingly obvious ones that I have missed and that other game players could benefit from them, then please feel free to add them in the comments section below

The standards for company influence

Who are the people that have the most influence on your company's brand, reputation and sales? How can you identify those that play the biggest role in the success of your business?
These are simple enough questions to ask, but need a lot of thought and information to answer correctly.

I've been looking at the role of customer influence now for a few years and have seen various ways of finding, showing and measuring influence, but have yet to see the definitive and 'industry standard' way of doing this..... I guess its for the reason that it is complex.

You see its difficult to agree on a standard for influence, not just because every product or brand out there has a different profile in the minds of the end-user, but also because different business people (your managers and stakeholders) will want different figures or metrics:

1. eCommerce department
They want to find out which influencers create the most revenue on your site, either directly: (actual customers) or indirectly (people they encourage to buy, via whatever means)

2. PR department (Brand / reputation)
They want to identify those that have a positive or negative sentiment (at a particular time, for a particualr product or service) or are more likely to pick up on what yoir company does and report / blog / tweet / etc. about it.

3. Marketing department (Search Engine Optimisation)
They just want to reverse engineer the whole Internet to track back links from other sites to yours and to then see the traffic and search engine "juice" this provides.

With each of these different bodies wanting different measures of influence, is it any wonder there's been no standard way of measuring it yet?

Do friends really influence purchases?

The answer: It depends

Earlier this year the Harvard Business Review published a working paper entitled "Do Friends Influence Purchases in a Social Network?" They set out to examine the questions of :
1. do friends influence purchases of users in an online social network
2. which users are more influenced by this social pressure
3. and can we quantify this social influence in terms of increase in sales and revenue

The findings were that there was a range of revenue increases between three distinct groups of people categorised by status and interaction with others. The lower and middle groups had zero and 5% rise in purchases due to this social influence, but the revenue of the higher group actually declines by almost 14% .This has been explained as follows:

This finding is similar to work on characteristics of opinion leaders or the elite in the fashion industry, who tend to abandon one type of fashion and adopt the next in order to differentiate themselves from the masses

(in other words they seek to make themselves different from others by chosing / buying different things.. perhaps because they can afford to).

However, I'm not convinced. Maybe its because the sample size was quite small (Number of users = 208; Number of observations =2080) or because the figures used were from a Korean Social network (Cyworld), but I personally would like to see some further research done on this subject.

Believe your eyes - digital media influences

You hear so may stories these days about huge brands and life-changing things being influenced by digital media. However even the more mundane stuff is now being affected by online advertising.

In a report just published by 'Ad-ology Research', 42 per cent of US customers said they wereaffected by influences such as Internet sites and web search results

A significant minority of people are influenced by online marketing when they purchase contact lenses or spectacles,

Further information is available here: http://contactlenses.co.uk/contactlensesnews/article10598/digital-media-influences-contact-lens-buyers.html?catid=4&pageNo=1

Digital influence - can you afford to ignore it?

A lot of companies have realised that they need a website and even use it as a channel for selling/publishing. But how many companies actually understand influence online?

Well....I've come to realise, perhaps not many.

Customers now participate online and enter into dialogue about companies & brands with others. They only involve the actual product owners when either that company gets involved positively (such as participating in discussions, etc.) or negatively (e.g. when 'cease & desist' notices get delivered).

Surely its agencies or consultants and not companies/brands that drive a lot of online engagement models? It also makes sense for the specialist to... errr... specialise in this sort of thing. Online is still quite mysterious to a lot of tradional marketers or internal corporate PR people, who have been trained in traditional methods or gained their experience in that way... so far. But for how long can they afford to ignore it?

Oh, and if your agency isn't cutting it, don't fire them immediately.

Buzz monitoring: why are you doing this?

We at Ideal Interface have recently started some new work for a particular company to understand the blogosphere buzz about them. Whilst this may seem like a simple-enough request, what became clear was that unless clients understand and answer the initial question"why are you doing this?", they won't get the most from this work.

So... if you are a client, before your digital consultant asks, why not ask yourslef "why are you doing this?".

Note:
Just saying the generic response "We want to see what our customers are saying and writing about us online", is really repeating the brief. To get a fully answer, its best to understand what you will do with the information once you have it.

Here are some of the most likely/possible answers:

1. We want to quantify the amount of comments or mentions about us over time
2. We want to identify our prominent bloggers / influencers out there, with the aim of engaging with them
3. We want to quickly spot trends or identify issues and respond accordingly
4. We want to understand the general sentiment or tone of the buzz

Replies and further questions in response to these likely/possible answers to follow in subsequent postings.

Opinion leadership - 1950's style

Influencers have been described for years as 'Opinion Leaders'. These are people who are sources of information on a particular subject and have followers who listen & embrace what they say (or do).

Katz and Lazarsfeld way back in 1954 within their book "Personal Influence" claimed Opinion Leaders should be

"spelled with a little 'l'. As everyday influentials, they are ubiquitous"

I take this to mean they could be anyone or everyone; with each person applying their own influence to their own sphere of contacts (at the time, this was generally by word-of-mouth or by simple one-to-one communication methods).

However Katz and Lazarsfeld also refered to some Opinion Leaders as "Great Disseminators" (a wonderful term that). This categorises people who have an important forum— national or international— and who are respected and listened to by a number of people.

Perhaps these early thoughts on an individual's social graph and the different scales of influence aren't too dissimilar to what we're now trying to do on a global scale and in the digital domain.... I for one whould like to know who our Great Disseminators are these days.

blogs have more impact than social networks

A report of a survey done by Buzz Logic & Jupiter Research back in the Autumn of this year shows that over half of all US blog reader (sorry, it doesn't seem to have a global reach) find blogs useful for purchase information. (Full press release here)

And suprisingly, blogs have more impact on purchasing decisions than social networks because blogs are more trusted!

Its even better news for niche blogs, as of those who found blog content useful for product decisions, over half of them (56%) said niche focus blogs and "topical expertise" sources were key. Unsuprisingly this information was most useful for technology-related purchases:

So had blogging actually come-of-age now?

Well it seems that for a certain segment of the population that answer is "yes", as blogs now rival search as a means of navigating to information that influences their decisions.

What's the opposite of celebrity endorsement?

I mean... what's the official term for the situation where a person in the public eye and a key influencer of significant amounts of people decides put down or generally voice a negative view about something?

Celebrity derisement perhaps?

Now I've previously commented that Celebrity is not to be confused with influence, but when a person has both of these and they start giving their opinions, people listen and act accordingly.

This was once-again brought to my attention yesterday when Rory Cellan-Jones mentioned Stephen Fry's negative Twitter comments about his new Blackberry Storm on Twitter. It seems that one man is able to make a difference in the successful launch and selling of a product.

The topic must therefore get around to the question of "which celebrity derisement do you need to avoid?" or "which key inflencer's negative sentiment causes the most impact?". How do you find this out?

A theory:
By understanding, measuring and plotting your company's corporate social graph, you can specifically identify your celebrity influencers as well as other key figures (journalists, officials, etc.) and appropriately deal with their positive and negative endorsement.

The influential millennials

There's no getting away from them, the Millennial are a defined generation, typically born in the Thatcher & Reagan years and beyond (or the 'Eighties & Ninties' if you prefer). They're also referred to as 'Generation Y' (the one that came after Generation X, obviously) and the biggest generation in numbers ever.

So just how influential are they?

Well, in Europe they make up about eleven percent of the workforce despite having higher costs for higher education than previous generations.

Having never known a world without the Internet, they obviously spend a great amount of time online and 18-24 year-olds make up 19% of the adult online population. But despite their apparent stereotype, they do not demonstrate the impatient, self-absorbed and disloyal characteristics sometimes labelled to them, but instead they are more optimistic, more loyal and less rebellious than previous generations .

Even though these tech-savvy young adults may still live at home with their parents, they do strongly influence many adult consumer buying choices (e.g. parent shopping habits) particularly the family technology preferences and habits. In a recent Motorola study Millennial were shown exerting: considerable influence on parental decisions about cable, DSL and satellite service, as well as on which HDTV to purchase, and even which programming packages to buy.

A slightly older piece of research from 2006 showed they influence household purchases in the fol owing ways:

• 81% of clothing and apparel purchases
• 77% of groceries purchases
• 76% of movie, video, DVD purchases
• 69% of video games and systems purchases
• 68% of computer purchases
• 66% of cellphone and computer software purchases…

And lets not forget that they are now politically active. For example in January 2007 Farouk Olu Aregbe, a student government coordinator at the University of Missouri, launched a Facebook group, "One Million Strong for Barack."

As mentioned by Brad Sago, in his report on The Online Shopping Psychology and Expectations of Millennials:

Over the next few decades, Millennials will continue to stamp their own unique imprint on business and society.

The Super Influencer

As part of a piece of research I've been doing for a startup I'm working with, I've revisited the Universal McCann research 'When Did We Start Trusting Strangers?' that I mentioned in a previous post.

Peer-to-peer influence is a strange thing when you investigate it further. Now, thanks to social media and the 'always connected' society, everyone has the potential to influence everyone else. However, "not all influencers are created equal" as the report says. This has therefore created a new breed of Super Influencer! (Fabio Turel goes into more analysis about the report's findings here).

However, what the report does mistakenly do is depict the network of connectivity between individuals as a set of 1-to-1 connections .





I'm sure the visuals done were not meant to be exactly representative of the exact web of connections the report goes into more detail about, but were done by a graphic artist to a brief. However, had his/her brief been a little more realistic it may have looked something more like this:





http://infosthetics.com/archives/2006/03/social_network_physics_visualization.html
(a social network data visualization based on a model that is based on "mobile particles that randomly bounce off each other")

Google to research social influence

According to a recent BusinessWeek article, Google has a patent pending on technology for ranking the most influential people on social networking sites. Althought Google is declining to talk about it further, it is understood to be based on similar solution to Google's PageRank algorithm (Not named after the ranking of 'web pages' but after 'Larry Page', the person who developed it and one of the top 3 people at Google).

If this works as planned, it could give an influence ranking of you and your contacts, potentially charging more for the advertising on the pages on more influential people (and therefore potentially appying a value to the individual's social graph).