I had a good conversation yesterday about the shift from traditional marketing to an interactive market (and all the things involved in getting “traditional marketers” up to speed). I think the “deer-in-a-headlight” syndrome that companies face when establishing interactive marketing strategies can be mitiged with good goal setting and a complete measurement strategy.
Baseline Your World
Imagine living in this world, but stripped of your five senses:
Not so fun, is it? :)
The same notion exists online, and most of us are only using one or two of our sense! With 0s and 1s, you need to make sure you watch:
- What your users did (analytics)
- How they did it (web interaction analytics)
- Why they did it (voice of the customer / survey)
- Could they do it (web performance monitoring)
- What did they say about it (social media listening)
If you make a web-based application, every employee in your company should have a strong sense of website visitors and associated analytics.
Of course, most people will pay close attention to a particular subset of metrics, but it’s crucial that the entire company be used to, and talk about metrics on a daily basis. We’ll talk about why this is important very soon.
If you’re scratching your head trying to figure out how to do the above, read my open letter to startups for a rundown of tools that you can use.
Once you’ve got tools in place, take the time to baseline your site so that you know what’s normal and not. Start by measuring your visitors’ entrances, places & tasks and exits. I’ll talk about this more extensively in seperate post – but grab a copy of our book or reach out to us if you’re impatient.
KthxGoals
Once you’ve baselined, the critical step in marketing is figuring out what the heck you’re trying to achieve. More people buying stuff? Brand awareness? New product launch?
It really doesn’t matter as long as it will help contribute to the following rules:
- Increase Revenue
- Decrease Costs
- Increase Customer Satisfaction / Loyalty
Avinash speaks volumes about this subject. If you don’t have this printed on your wall yet, go for it, and make sure you use the biggest font possible! :)
So, using plain english, describe what you hope to achieve.
“We’d like 3,000 users signed up and using the product in the next 30 days.”, “We want 10 celebrity bloggers/twittererererers to mention how awesome we are over the next 7 days” or “we want a 20% reduction in people stating that we’re the worst company ever”.
Notice how there’s a number in each goal? You’ve got to make your goal concrete, or else you won’t know how much is “enough”. At first, you may be a little bit off when setting your expectations. That’s ok. Make it up, and revise your targets for the next campaign.
Go Forth And Be Markety, For Tomorrow You Die (Or Make Techmeme.com!)
You’ve got your goals set, your analytics are in place. Now’s where you get to have fun. If you’re a traditional marketer, starts screaming! Maybe you’re more into the interactive thing? Cool! Start influencing. The awesome part about setting up metrics and goals is that any marketing campaign is fair game as long as you measure and learn from the results.
Even if you were with Motrin and launched its ill-fated ad-campaign, by setting goals and monitoring, you could have
- noticed the fall out
- waited a strategic amount of time (any press is good press, right?)
- made reparations
- turned the negative sentiment to great success.
And even if none of those things happened, that’s alright. Because all companies make mistakes. The smart ones make them faster. Some key takeaways that you may have learned boils down to common sense:
- People can talk about you. Try and be there.
- Maybe you should go hang out and build a presence where people talked about you
- Wow, that was tons of press. You should do that again!
And hey, if the crap hits the fan – we can help ;). Oh, and check out Alistair’s post on rednod.com for great insight about a campaign he led.
Always Optimize
So try wacky stuff. It doesn’t matter what kind of marketer you are and what kind of campaign it is.. Your measurement and goal setting should naturally lead to constant iterations. Though you should expect to make mistakes, learn from them quickly and encourage open lines of communication so others can to. Share the knowledge up and down the food chain.
The key to unlocking the potential of every type of marketer is by helping them learn from their successes and failures. A data driven organization wins by fostering this kind of potential.
And it makes for some fun and awesome marketing campaigns too ;).
Related posts:
