11/26/12

Online Market Research can turn ugly if you don’t follow the following……..

It’s not easy…..But it’s definitely worth the effort…..

Online Market Research has earned the repute of being one of the best and convenient methods of collecting information about customers. But if gone wrong in the slightest of measure, can result in a complete disaster.

Some online tools are available right away – questionnaires, feedback forms, web searches, web analytics and what not. All of these help you to analyse the latest trends and happenings and help you understand your customer, industry and competitors as well.

Following listed are a few tools to carry out successful market research:

1.  Keyword Search: Just type in your brand name on Google or Bing …and Bazingaaaa……!!! You’ll know all that people out there think about you. You’ll get to know how many competitors you have, how famous you are. As the editor-in-chief of a search engine guide mentioned, keyword searches can help you recognise niches and an insight on how many competitive sites use the same phrase for search. It can also help you search competitor offerings and online marketing strategy.

2. Blogs: These are more opinionated in nature and thus shall open up both the goods and the bads about your company/product. Careful look into blogs of influencers can help know potential improvements and give a specific set of people whom you can impress so as to build positive word-of -mouth.

3. Surveys and Feedback: I personally find Survey Monkey as the best and the easiest way to gauge customer preference, opinions, likes, dislikes etc.  Its a useful tool, like many others out there, where you can design your own surveys and questionnaires and thus collect and analyse data.

Designing of questionnaires requires great skill, as opposed to what a number of organisations might be trapped into thinking. A short survey is preferred, limited upto 25-30 questions. Avoidance of open ended questions and being persistent without the introduction of any bias from the surveyor’s part is important. The first few question should be demography related to keep the person on the other side at ease. Enticing the people towards a reward in return to answering a survey can be helpful at times too.

There are various research tools and techniques that are used so as to elicit information. Audience research is one such technique which is aimed at discovering who is listening to you. The others are product research, brand analysis, psychological profiling, scanner research, database research and post-sale or customer satisfaction research.

Defining an objective, designing an appropriate questionnaire to the correct target of customers and collecting the data obtained, analyzing it and making inferences – can be summarized as the broad steps of carrying out online market market research. So what are you waiting for……..

 

11/21/12

Measuring Target Market Behaviour: Content Relevance

One fine day, you post a video of your new line of product on your website/facebook page. Thousands “like” it, and number of them comment on it and hundreds share it. This was just another day and you happened to think how good your e-marketing efforts have been  in connecting with the desired audience. How would you do it?

Laura Patterson, in her book,Metrics in Action: Creating a Performance Driven Marketing Organization talks about a simple 3-step procedure for measuring how relevant your posted content is. The procedure goes as follows:

1. Count the number of every single piece of content you posted this week. If you posted the same video on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, count it as 3 and not 1.

2. Count the total number of interactions, like shares, comments, re-posts, likes etc. (for all the content) from your target market. For this, you’ll have to define your target market clearly beforehand.

3. Divide the interactions by the number of contents posted ( that is 2 by 1). This will give you the relevancy measure.

Please note that relevancy is different from response rate.

A number of researches explain and establish the relationship between relevancy measure and intended customer behaviour. The author furthermore talks about the importance of analytics in this respect. Collecting such data over a period of time, a pattern can be identified in the target market. You can increase sales, engage in conversations or practically whatever your objective is by posting “the” relevant content. Also, Relevancy is a better measure as compared to response rate as it takes into account all the instances of interactions with the intended customer base. As Laura Patterson correctly mentions , by tracking relevancy, you will not only be able to set benchmarks and performance targets for your content but can also build a model for content relevancy for intended behaviour.

 

11/17/12

Symbiosis in Online Marketing!

P&G : Proud Sponsors of Moms……

It struck me as a weird  catchphrase to use. Proud sponsors of Moms?? What are they sponsoring Moms for? A trip to Hawaii or Vegas? I didn’t know, so finally decided to figure it out.

P&G, the largest is the largest multinational manufacturer of personal care and household cleaning products, laundry detergents, prescription drugs and what not. P&G products are present in almost every country of the world and form an indispensable part of the lives of millions of people. With just 100 days remaining to the start of the London 2012 Olympics, P&G launched their global “Thank You Mom” campaign. Well aware of the fact that the decision makers of household products is the “mother”, and with the world eagerly waiting for Olympics to start off, P&G planned to leverage both these situations and came up with the biggest campaign in their 175 year history.

With a series of around 25 ads, P&G advertised the contribution and sacrifice of mothers by showcasing the Olympic champions, right from US to Australia, Africa to India, and of course, their mothers. They made sure that the advertisement retained the native language component (they did not mind subtitles…..) and ‘connected’ with the multilingual audience that P&G targeted through social, online and offline advertisement. And they sure did connect…..

Here’s one of their adverts:

The P&G Campaign “Thank You Moms” – India version

A small organisation named Zizo helped P&G make it possible. The Zizo Group (www.thezizogroup.com) was started in 2006 and visiting their website was a fun experience. It seems to be a very value driven organisation, and use adjectives like “honest”, “inspired” etc. to describe themselves.

It made one fact very clear to me. E-marketing, however easy or hard it might seem for an organisation, still requires companies to come close and work together. It was surprising to find how dependent P&G was on Zizo (when you actually compare the 127,000 employee strong P&G to 11-50 workers at Zozo)…and inspiring that a small organisation can do wonders. This is the reason why millions of companies, with the expertise of branding, video-making etc. are budding, both in developed and developing countries. This symbiotic relationship between the big names and the start-ups is bound to continue for at least a few years now!

11/5/12

E-marketing or no E-marketing? If that’s the question, here is the answer….

The buzz surrounding Internet Marketing was expected, and evident was well. Afterall, the percentage of adults using internet in US is a mind-boggling 78% (more than the literacy rate in most countries; Source Infoplease.com).The particular interest in Social media marketing, which forms a major chuck of the internet marketing efforts can be seen today too, with more than 50% of the above population having an account in one or more of the social networking websites. Organisations are raring to go ahead and spend on social media marketing, which has been described in the following words by a marketing professor at the University of Cincinnati:

“Social media marketing is the ability to use non-traditional communication and connection to build a brand”

I am not sure whether the purpose is always to ‘build a brand’. The main purpose of an organisation might range from selling products or to provide information to its customers or even to ‘save a brand’. Though, whatever the purpose may be, it might, as a consequence result in the brand being built in the minds of the customers.

The same professor also mentioned: “It doesn’t matter if people are talking about your product in a good or bad way; you’re getting your product out there anyway”. I shall again, not agree with this statement of his completely. Social media is as powerful a tool for customers, as it is for marketers. According to Systems thinking, Counter Intuitive type – II error results when your product has negative features, people talk about it, criticize it and hence, out of curiosity, tend to buy the product. But with the social media tool in hand, people will not stop at this point. They would tell the entire planet about their negative experience after consuming the product, resulting in a dent in brand image, and psychological change in the consumers who might actually be satisfied with the product or the brand as a whole. The dent caused to the brand image, as a result of this, would be sustained and talked about, and would dive out of the ocean of internet, once in a while to remind both the customers and the organisation about the failure. This would result in a changed perception of the brand in the minds of the customer, which would be there to stay.

The question arises, why do some organisations, even after splurging millions of dollars of social media marketing, or Internet marketing as a whole, fail to succeed and build their brands. The article talks about the following reasons as to why your e-marketing efforts might go astray:

Technology vs. People: The article talks about the biggest mistake that the organisations tend to make is focusing on the technology part of the marketing efforts and not on the end users. It can be drawn in similar lines to Marketing Myopia, or short sightedness, where the importance of customers is ignored in the process of building a marketing strategy. The outcome should be recognised using surveys or feedbacks from customers and solution must be designed keeping in mind these outcomes.

“If you build it, they will come” only happens in movies: It says that customers won’t contact you themselves even if you have a fantastic site in place, a signup sheet, a blog and a social network presence. You have to approach the existing and prospective customers – by participating in conversations and initiating conversations. Importance of understanding the psychography and sociography of the target market is of utmost importance, as the conversations would be directed and written in the manner appropriate.Another point I would like to add on is that approaching and communicating with customers is a tricky task. The frequency of communication should not be such that the customer finds it interfering or irritating after some point. When to talk, what to talk and how much to talk must be evaluated by the organisation.

Product development is not marketing: It talks about avoiding being too entrepreneurial in nature. I agree that not focusing on the decreased sales of a particular product is not very healthy, but I do not agree on avoiding being entrepreneurial. Great ideas come only to people who experience a pain point, and try to solve it. Also, if an organisation wants to be sustainable, it has to innovate continuously. A single product in their portfolio won’t earn them revenues for the next 100 years (stories like that of Coca-Cola happen rarely….). Believing in the theory of Product Life Cycle, I believe it is necessary to innovate (and that too in-house) and keep your marketing department strong.

Marketing Gurus promising riches are the only ones getting rich: I had a hearty laugh after reading this, not only because of the statement per se, but also because the person writing this article is himself kind of, a Marketing Guru!! Strange but true, a number of books are available, both on-line and off-line that tell you the “secrets of on-line success” or “recipes to success” etc. etc. The author talks about building the mailing list/directory and it’s importance in on-line success. I couldn’t agree more.

Are you answering the door when people knock? : The author talks about having the “correct” information on your website/Facebook page, which is absolutely true. Out of the clutter of information available on the internet, it becomes difficult for a customer to search for the required information. Online chat, FAQs, contact information on the landing page etc. help. Website layout, design and structure plays a huge role.

The importance of social media in building a brand, therefore, cannot be denied. But should it be the only means of building your brand? If you are a brand, expanding in the mass markets of developing countries, social media marketing, or internet marketing as a whole, should be one of the two doors to open, the other being that of traditional marketing methods.

While carrying out marketing through internet, according to me, the following points should be kept in mind by the organisation (along with the above stated):

Be honest, build credibility: People know when an organisation is lying. Customers have resources to figure out the facts of the matter, and if caught lying, organisations will have a very heavy price to pay à Permanent brand damage and loss of trust.

Communication = Talk + Listen: The purpose of e-marketing should be more to listen and engage with customers, not to load them with information.

“Earn” the marketing: Let e-marketing be a small portion but highly effective, so that people carry forward your marketing efforts through word of mouth.

Stop Bragging, be humble: This will help organisations connect better with customers. This will also help them understand that it is not the social media they are interacting with, but humans.

Be the shoulder for your customers, build their trust for you: Let the customers rely on you, and come to you when they face any problem. Don’t let them go about talking negative about your brand. Find solutions for them, make them happy.

Be Human: Let the customers know that it is not the computer system they are interacting with, but with humans, just like them.

Therefore, go in for e-marketing, (your organisation won’t survive for long otherwise) but with a well-planned and a well-executed e-marketing strategy.

 

My report is based on : http://emarketingstrategist.com/internet-marketing-articles/why-doesnt-emarketing-work

References:

http://www.slideshare.net/guest55b505d/social-media-marketing-paper-2

http://marketing.balihoo.com/blog/susan-tormollen/new-micro-study-national-brands-will-continue-to-prioritize-local-marketing-local-digital-tactics

http://marketingwhitepapers.s3.amazonaws.com/SocialMediaMarketingReport2010.pdf

http://www.internetmarketingjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Research-paper-on-onlinesocial-media-marketing_by-Tejal.pdf

http://www.emarketingandcommerce.com/section/internet-marketing