Apr 11th, 2012 by Deepak
We mostly hear about the successes in the media – how hootsuite is striving to be a billion dollar buiness. However, we don’t hear a lot about the over 90% of them who fail. It could be anything from sloppy financials, feeble demand, operational inefficiency, regulations, technology advancement etc – here are the top 10 - Top 10 Reasons
Mar 13th, 2012 by Deepak
I remember when I was a lot younger, I used to consider Britannica a treasure of knowledge. Disruptive technology has made the treasure more accessible. Now, turning through physical pages and reading a print book is a novelty – no more Britannica – article
Mar 6th, 2012 by Deepak
If you think you have obstacles in your life, problems to overcome, or rejection getting you down – you gotta watch this video. Kyle Maynard was born without any arms or legs. His story is truly inspirational.
Mar 5th, 2012 by Deepak
Perhaps Facebook users will start un-liking pages they are not interested in anymore. Ad screeners (most non-tech savvy users are unaware) may not work as the messages will show in the news feed. With real time analytics, advertisers can adapt and monitor their ads better.
more here - Techcrunch
Mar 4th, 2012 by Deepak
My professor, Paul Cubbon has an excellent and detailed blog post on the type of market research Steve Jobs / Apple did - link
Drawing on qualitative data from focus groups, interviews, and shadowing are ways to know your customer and to tailor your product innovation. Researching competition products and identifying their blind spots / frustration areas can be a great way to give a boost to your product. Apple is excellent at choosing the right approaches for the right tasks.
Dec 10th, 2011 by Deepak
The motivation to write this post was to look for ways to maximize the bang for your effort and money. I found Google heat maps which are charts that show us where most people look when they are using a search engine. The Golden Triangle is an SEO industry term referring to the sweet spot on a search engine results page. The sweet spot is determined by tracking of eye movements of the end user. As I’m the curious type, I wanted to know more about how this is done – I found an excellent YouTube video that shows how eye tracking is done.
According to usability studies, visitors tend to click first on what they see first. People don’t generally browse a number of listings and then make a considered click. The usability studies produce heat maps as shown below:
Based on the Google heat map (the golden triangle):
There are several resources on the web on “how to place your listing in the upper left corner of the page for free?”
Once you have the visitors land on your website, how do you track their behavior. There have been studies done to find correlation (approximately 85%) between eye tracking and mouse tracking and there are also disagreements. To track visitor’s behavior, tools like crazyegg use mouse-tracking to track which links visitors click on a website. Here is a video, which explains the tracking.
Eye-tracking or mouse-tracking gives us valuable information about our users’ focus of attention. Targeting these attention areas will help maximize your search engine traffic and increase your conversion rate.
Nov 28th, 2011 by Deepak
Recently there was an article on TechCrunch. claiming that social proof is the new marketing. Well, social-proof is the best leverage you can have to market your product or service but this pitch is just an old wine in a new bottle.
Social Proof is a term Robert Cialdini coined in his book, Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion, to describe a kind of herd behavior in humans (Cialdini, 1984). The general principle is that people tend to search for what others are doing if there’s any uncertainty about what the right thing to do is. A month ago, my friends and I were hungry and looking for a fast food joint, we ended up at a place where there was a long lineup. Although we were hungry and tired, we chose the place with the longer line even though there were other options but those joints were empty. This goes to show how the human mind works.
The TechCrunch post does have great insights relevant to eMarketing. It categorizes social proof into five categories.
The key theme is to use influencers to connect to the community you are targeting. Tools like “Klout” can help identify these influencers. Once these relevant active bloggers or twitters are identified, they can cause a ripple effect to increase awareness and brand image. In fact, influencers with high Klout scores in design, luxury, tech and autos were swayed to promote test-drive of the new Audi A8. These influencers sparked 3,500 tweets, reaching over 3.1 million people in less than 30 days – a multiplier effect of over 14,000x.
Yet, at the end of the day the product really matters. With social media it has become really easy to spread the word – good or bad.
Nov 24th, 2011 by Deepak
I ran into a TED Talk by Dan Cobley: What physics taught me about marketing. Dan Cobley is a marketing director at Google. In this video he takes concepts in physics and applies them to marketing.
This video triggered my inner geek and inspired me to write this post. There were a couple of concepts I really liked and I’ll try and focus it more on Internet marketing (as his video is targeting general marketing).
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: It is impossible, by definition, to measure exactly the state, i.e., the position, and the momentum of a particle, because the act of measuring it, by definition, changes it. This can be seen in the disparity between consumer surveys and what people actually do. “By measuring it, the act of measurement changes it.” For example, if you think about the number of people who claim in surveys to regularly look for porn on the Web, it’s very few. Yet, at Google, they know it’s the number-one searched-for category. Fortunately, marketers don’t have to rely on surveys alone. There are tracking tools like Google analytics, Facebook Insights, Socialmention.com and so on to tell the real story. Now, consumers’ behavior can be measured and marketing efforts can be adopted to increase return.
The second law of thermodynamics: This says that entropy, which is a measure of the disorder of a system, will always increase. The same is true of marketing. In earlier days, marketing was more controlled and one marketing manager could pretty much define a brand. With the advent of social media there is lot less control. The distribution of brand energy gets your brand closer to the people, more in with the people – a good thing. So, the lesson from physics is that entropy will always increase; it’s a fundamental law. The message for marketing is that your brand is more dispersed. You can’t fight it, so embrace it and find a way to work with it.
Nov 9th, 2011 by Deepak
I was recently looking at booking a dog sledging adventure in Whistler.
Yet, the memories of the gruesome story from early this year of dog killings after Winter Olympics are still fresh. If you don’t know what dog sledging is then see this video starting at 2:50 or if you have missed the story, here is a story on The Globe and Mail. Needless to say that the company involved with the barbaric act has ruined their brand and reputation. There are facebook groups, YouTube videos, and tweeter feeds condemning the company and the people involved. This is a similar case to the Vancouver 2011 NHL Riots were the society has shown its outrage through social media.
However, there are other Whistler Dog Sledging companies who were not involved in the dog culling and who need to do damage control because of this association. The obvious thing to do is to disassociate them from the story and become transparent on how they treat their dogs.
Listen: Damage control has to start by collecting information and evaluating. Monitoring online events related to your brand is important in this e-World. A good strategy is to start with free online tools and see if they are sufficient and then move onto paid tools (you need lots of traffic to realize ROI), if needed:
Things to look out for are negative sentiments about the business and then evaluating what needs to be done to converse.
Converse/Engage: One of the great ways to converse is to have user-generated reviews on travel sites like TripAdviser. In fact, one of the company’s satisfied customer has posted a review on the travel site of their experience. It is important to find the people who are passionate about the adventure and use influencers (online travel board reviewers) to help soak the positive message in the community of travelers interested in winter holidays. One way is to crowd-source their past and present customers, encouraging them to post reviews.
To this end, online reputation management should be an integral part of corporate strategy. Furthermore, BP is famous for its oil spill and has done a good job doing damage control via facebook – here is an excellent post.
Nov 7th, 2011 by Deepak
When was the last time you downloaded a free app on your Smartphone and got bombarded with ads? Are these ads really effective and achieve their objectives?
“By the end of this year, eMarketer estimates, 38% of US mobile users will have a smartphone and 41% will use the mobile Internet at least once each month. These developments mean an increase in the opportunity for mobile advertising—and an increase in spending. This translates to $1.23 M mobile advertising in the US.”1
The mobile marketing channel seems to hold great potential for marketers to improve their firm’s top line revenue. This motivated me to explore more on how mobile marketing is different from traditional marketing and if companies are spending money in this space at all and whether they are spending because everyone else is doing it.
eMarketer did an interview with Maria Mandel, Vice President–Media & Marketing Innovation, AT&T on September 20, 2011. She mentions that companies are moving away from pilot programs and towards mainstream use with more budgets allocated towards mobile advertising. Two areas that are hot in this space are mobile web and in-app advertising. Other interests include rich media, video, location-based advertising, and SMS.
A key criteria used to spend the money is to go where their consumers are. It also depends on the advertiser and the type of audiences they are looking to reach, but certainly scale and reach are of interest to advertisers. Initially, the Apple iPhone environment was the favorite but when Android got traction and market share, advertisers redirected their efforts on the Android Platform. She predicts that the tablet space will likely follow a similar pattern. Yet, the Tablet application inventory is fairly limited because of their limited reach.
The early movers were more focused on direct response-oriented, performance-based advertisers. The current trend also includes rich media and mobile video usage by brand advertisers. The top industries advertising are automotive, consumer package goods, retail, entertainment and technology.
According to Maria the area that is still under exploited is the location-based targeting, which sets the mobile channel apart from other media channels. The ability to reach somebody exactly where they are with a message that is relevant to them at a specific time is very intriguing for advertisers. Although the potential is enormous, there are still concerns with technology delivery mechanisms and privacy issues.
Analyzing the interview reveals that the key strategy used to decide on spending seems to target where the most traffic lies in the mobile web and app use. This ad market is still in its early adopters stage. The mobile space provides a couple of advantages over traditional media. Firstly, the tablet allows marketers to leverage the touch interface to create unique and interesting experience for the user. Secondly, as mentioned by Maria, the location-based targeting is unique to this form of marketing.
Marketing fundamentals in the mobile space are still the same as in traditional marketing. Companies should not just go for the scale or reach and fall for the “Bright Shinny Object Syndrome”. It is crucial to evaluate the goals of the marketing campaign, understand the psychology of the target audience, and finally construct a strategy to achieve the goals and convert potentials into buyers. It can also be called the GPS Method.
G = Create goals for the campaign (including metrics to evaluate success)
P = Understand the psychology and behavior of the target customer
S = Construct a strategy for success
It is important to understand the customer and what they use their mobile device to do. If you use a Smartphone, you can relate to using it to look up direction, play angry birds, or find a restaurant. Forrester has a technographics ladder for the mobile space, which helps to understand the mobile customer better.
Once the target is identified for the product that is being marketed, it is essential to offer the value proposition to the target. For example, if a user is searching a restaurant based on his or her GPS location, they are half way into the buying process. A smart strategy will be to have an in-app ad offering a Groupon type discount for a nearby restaurant. Therefore, there is potential for restaurants and Groupon type companies to collaborate and use data mining to offer better value to their potential customers. Mobile phones are personal devices carried on the consumer. Data mining involves the use of information about the consumer such as location, time of day, or past behavior to deliver targeted marketing. Obviously there could be privacy concerns but the users of the mobile device have to “allow access” to be able to see the ads.
Mobile marketing is an evolving segment with both consumer behavior and technology changing at a rapid pace. There are some areas unique to this space like touch based experience and location based targeting. Yet, the fundamentals of marketing are the same – by using the GPS method as described in this article, marketers can maximize their return on their investments and narrow the sales funnel.
Sources
Deepak