Marketing Metrics, Messaging, and Madness

Using Twitter to Stay Ahead of the Competition

If there is one great thing about Twitter, it is the competitive analysis that can be accomplished by following your competitors and their distributors. By following competitor's Tweets I can find out instantly when a new sale has gone live, if they've released any new features, are working with a site I didn't know about, or even about trade shows that I may not have known about otherwise.

Out of the few people following each of these companies/distributors is the information they give up to us really outweighed by announcing a sale to 50-100 people?  

Another great way to follow the competition is to set up feeds for any mention of competitor names on Twitter. We've all done it for years on Google, but this is a must-not-miss opportunity to find out what others are saying about your competition (as well as you).

All You Need to Do is Mention 'Twitter' in a Press Release

To prove that the media will run any story that mentions Twitter, regardless of the value or information in the story:

I just ran across a story on Salon.com:

Study: CEOs Not Doing Enough On Social Networks

NEW YORK (AP) -- A new study says top CEOs should do a better job managing their presence online, on social sites like Twitter and Facebook and even Wikipedia.

Sharon Barclay, who runs executive PR firm Blue Trumpet Group and the blog UberCEO, took Fortune's 2009 list of the top 100 CEOs and found what she calls a "miserable level of engagement" when it comes to social networks.

Barclay only found two CEOs with Twitter accounts, and only 13 had profiles on LinkedIn, the social network for professionals.

Though Barclay did not poll the CEOs themselves, she says the results question whether these executives are managing their online reputation

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Personally I think I'd prefer my CEO manage his reputation by staying off Twitter to keep him from saying something that he shouldn't. But that is besides the point...she managed to get me to read a completely worthless release that basically just gets her company's name online. Personally, I wouldn't have done it until after I had a website for my company that people could visit after reading my release, but that's just me. 

MakerFaire 2009

Last weekend our company attended one of my favorite events - MakerFaire, the world's largest DIY festival. It is an amazing group of people that attend this show, and this is the show to go to see some of the most innovative inventions (and inventors) that are out there. We have several exhibitors at the show that already own lasers (many of which bring their machines to the show), and are developing more clients in the industry everyday.

This is a great example of a marketing vehicle that might not be within our typical demographic, but by sponsoring a great event of which people are huge advocates we have been able to create an incredible marketplace that we didn't necessarily see developing a couple of years ago. By developing a place for ourselves in a niche (but influential) market, we've been able to place ourselves ahead of the curve for the consumer side of marketing our product.  

Keep an eye open for shows like this that bring in the media and the very best of bloggers and even as a marketer of a small- to medium-sized business you can be a hit among some of the big players.  We saw signs with our logo next to (and often above) Yahoo, Google, HP and Radio Shack. That is a very exciting thing for a marketer to see when much of your advertising is done through trade publications.

Twitter and Facebook are Not Necessary For Every Marketing Initiative

"What does it mean that none of Apple’s demos today involved Twitter or Facebook, the hottest two sites on the Internet? It means Apple hasn’t internalized the social networks craze...Instead, Apple’s onstage ignorance of social networking shows how slow-moving and out of touch the company can be. It’s easy to find Microsoft shortcomings to mock. It’s harder to recognize your own." This was written by Paul Boutin at VentureBeat in his article 'The Three Things Apple Didn't Say'.

Thank goodness. A company that doesn't find it necessary to Twitter in their demonstration. Maybe they see the future of companies trying to find a way to use Twitter and know that the future is bleak. I've tried following several companies that are noted for their "compelling" Twitter posts, but let's face it...they just aren't that compelling. None of the ongoing content is keeping me involved. I'm a Mileage Plus whore, so I read the posts from United, and aside from the Twitter Fares (twares? ugh.) I scan the posts but don't read anything of interest. Would I be willing to fill up Twitter by following five companies? six? More likely one or two. You'd better be giving me something of interest to stay in the top two.

I understand Boutin's point that a Twitter demonstration would have been a good fit with the iPhone's ability to post video and photos easily on these sites, but I don't know of an iPhone/Twitter user that doesn't get that fact without having to be hit over the head with the fact. 

I guess what brings this post up is that right now, I feel hit over the head by Twitter. I attended a search engine summit last week and heard over and over how you aren't creating a full marketing campaign without working Twitter into the mix.  While I see a definite place for incorporating Twitter or Facebook into a marketing campaign when it is a fit - especially when trying to reach your advocates - it is not a necessity for every campaign.  I didn't hear anything about the fit of the audience to the sites, just repeated jokes about "finding your voice" on Twitter. 

My company has a Facebook Fan site where we enjoy posting engaging content, but it is to build the loyalty of the advocates, not to try to be cool. Not to try to prove that we "get" social media. And not to (blatantly) sell products. It's to have a truly useful site for our customers. It's not there yet, but hopefully we're getting there.

Thank you, Apple, for not being as obvious as to include Twitter in your presentation. This is one of your advocates that appreciates it.

Filter Columns in New AdWords Interface

I was annoyed with the new AdWords interface because I couldn't see all of my columns on the screen without scrolling horizontally.  I finally found out the very easy fix - check out the Filter and Views button at the top right side of the screen. Choose the second option, "Customize Columns" and choose which columns to hide.

Unfortunately it won't let me hide the two columns I use the least often: the enabled column and the status column, but it makes the interface much more user friendly.

What's the Right Lead Form Length?

My company's website was recently reviewed by a blog for the Internet Marketing Report.  If you haven't checked the publication out, it's worth a look. It's an eight page newsletter that quickly discusses articles covering all aspects of internet marketing. It's a great compilation of articles covering what is working for other companies, but the reason it gets passed among my staff is that it has short reads that reminds everyone in the department on the fundamentals of marketing on the internet. I highlight the points I want to make sure my team see, and they look forward to seeing the newsletter.

While the review provided some good feedback, the writer and I got into a discussion of one of the larger points of their review - form length. The premise of the review revolved around the fact that we ask for a lot of information on our brochure request form. The writer felt that we should be asking for a few basic fields and everything else should be collected later, which got me thinking about what led us to the form length that we currently have. We've tried multiple iterations of the form over the eight years I've been with the company, and there are reasons for each and every question, but also reasons why.

I explained to the reviewer that, as a manufacturer of an expensive product, our distributors don't want to receive thousands of unqualified leads that aren't willing to fill out a few fields in the form. The value the customer receives for their information is well laid out on the page - brochure, cd-demo, engraved samples, and even a start your business guide. 15 fields that ask for their contact info, how they learned about the company, and a few other questions isn't too much in my opinion. We've set up the form with no required fields, allowing the prospect to provide as much or as little information as they want. Once the distributor receives the lead, they get an instant feel for how qualified the lead is by how much information they were willing to provide.

Sometimes, as marketers, we get so fixated on lead generation that we forget that what makes a lead good for one company is not the same for another company. An address gets me only so far. If the lead also has provided me with a comment that they are interested in glass etching or wood engraving, I can customize the packet I send them with specific samples and brochures that they never would have seen otherwise. Or I can focus the packet on our starter laser if that seems to be the best fit for their application. Or if they ask a question, we can start an immediate conversation that gives the lead a great first impression of the company for being extremely responsive.

The other part of the equation when making a decision on form length needs to be what can the infrastructure of the business handle?  In this blog I talk quite a bit about how to market a mid-sized manufacturing company, and current lead management personnel will determine what kind of lead generation you want to target. Our leads receive an extensive lead packet, which means that we want to do more qualification of the lead than someone that is just sending a response email to the prospect. It's important to keep this in mind because if you get in over your head, the entire reputation of the company is affected by slow response times.

I am currently testing some different setups of the form, taking into consideration what they said in the review and I'll be curious to see if it increases the response rate. I'm definitely appreciative of the review and the feedback on the site, (and definitely check out this great resource!) but this is one change I won't be making. It's different for every company, but we've found that our situation demands lead qualification over lead numbers.

Ineffective Use of Twitter by a Business

I've been watching a company that seems to have decided that they will devote their entire marketing budget on social marketing - especially Twitter.  They are a smaller player in their industry, but produce a high-quality product. Unfortunately they've never put the effort into marketing that the rest of the industry has. Yes the monetary investment in Twitter is low, but think about how much time you have to devote to posting the content.  If after three months of constant twitters you have only 25 people following you, it's time to rethink your marketing plan. How many of those people are employees, distributors or competitors? Calculate it out and you'll find the worst ROI of any of your marketing initiatives.

I stay away from Twitter for one reason, and one reason only: time.  I think our company has enough name recognition now that we could get people following us by providing industry news and comments that provide value, but as a marketer in a small company, I just can't devote the resources that would be necessary. If there is one thing that quickly becomes a time suck, it's having to come up with original content to post. We run across it with our newsletter and e-newsletter, as well as providing new technical articles about our machinery every month and a free downloadable file. After the third or fourth month, it's time consuming to think up new ideas every month, much less every day. And you can only post so many links to your online videos. If you're not willing to devote time to writing content that is interesting and engaging, no one will be following you for long. 

One of my biggest pet peeves is watching a company misuse social marketing. I think there is a right and a wrong way for a business to use a blog or twitter to expand their marketing, but it astounds me how badly it is used sometimes.

A few examples:

• Linking to a video that your company has posted on youtube and pretending you just "ran across it". People aren't stupid.
• Calling out a competitor that is following your Twitter.  You're in the public domain, get over it.  Guess what, I check out your website as well.  And your e-newsletter. And you watch mine as well.
• Pointing out what keywords you're targeting and celebrating when you get to #1. Really?  You're going to tell me that?  I'll happily take that position away from you in a month or so. 
• Having other people in your company comment on your postings and pretending they have no relationship to the company.

Be honest and provide something of value and people will follow you. Do the things above, and we'll just mock you.  ;)

Weathering the economy with smarter marketing...

It's been a long time since I've been up here, but I'm going to try this again. We've been releasing new products and a new website at the same time, and it just was a bit too much to try to control all of that and a blog. But anyone marketing a small company knows how that goes.

We've been weathering the economy pretty well, and a lot of the credit has to go to the company understanding that marketing is not the place to cut back. We're refocusing our marketing dollars and finding better ways to spend money, while keeping a wider presence than our competitors.

Keep in mind:

• Now is the time to renegotiate your advertising. From top to bottom, magazines are desperate for your ad dollars. Don't take the first, second, or third offer - wait for that great deal that you never thought you'd get. Blame your choice on the powers that be, but let them know you're still interested so they keep coming back to the table.
• Tradeshows are also much more willing to negotiate than we've ever seen before. Tell your contact that you're having to cut back shows this year, and you'll find them jumping at you with lower prices on your booth space.
• Do not ignore your Google Adwords! Competitors are dropping out (or reducing their presence) in the advertising race on Google, and you can take advantage by dropping your bids on many of your most expensive keywords.

When your boss says cut the budget, there are many ways to do this. It doesn't have to mean reducing your ads, tradeshows or online presence - just find better ways to spend!

IWF Atlanta Wrapup

I attended IWF in Atlanta last week and it faced the same problem we've seen across the board for trade shows this year - poor attendance. The trade shows that are getting hit the hardest are the ones that attract people from a wide geographic area. The more local the show, the more we've seen attendance stay steady from past years, but if you have the expense of traveling, people are going to use the Internet to do their research.

Like it or not, long days on the trade show floor are part of the job. But 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.?  I don't understand who thinks opening a trade show floor at 8 a.m. is necessary, but they obviously don't actually attend the shows. The floor is empty for the first two hours, and anyone that is traveling from another time zone is in for a world of hurt as they get up at 6 a.m. Atlanta time (4 a.m. Denver time) to get to the show on time. Then we face ten hours on our feet. Ugh.

Even with low attendance we sold machines at the show and talked to a lot of good prospects. We sell a product you need to see in person to really experience the excitement that turns a looky-loo into a buyer, and trade shows give us the opportunity to introduce our laser systems to a whole new audience. But please!  Keep the hours in check!     

Business Directory Scams

I am sick and tired of business directory scams wasting my time. Recently it's been about one call a day which makes me wonder, whose list did I get on for this?  They are at least getting a little more creative with their directory names. It's not "US Business Directory" anymore. Today's was Saturn Direct Business Directory.

I find the best way to make sure they don't call back is to shame the caller by asking them how they live with themselves working for a scam. It tends to get the job done and I don't hear from them again.

I know everyone in my hallway gets a kick out of hearing me yell at them. Anyone else out there having fun with the business directory callers?