The other day Heather Pownall from Southern Energy asked me about a tweet I recently shared on Twitter:

RT @CMBlog: the Q is not what’s the best time of day to tweet- Q is does the time & date matter. BOOM! @webby2001 #soslam

— Devin Kelley (@DevinPK10) April 27, 2012

I would actually add one more question to the process: Do you need to tweet at all? The short answer is generally yes, especially given the current benefits of social for SEO.

Now assuming social does make sense for your audience, does the time and date matter? Again, I would say the answer is yes, but, I would guess not in the way most people are thinking. Lemon.ly has a great infographic on when to tweet. This infographic is really general and I would guess only helpful for people looking to que up tweets in something like HootSuite or ArygleSocial and hope they are getting more clicks by links.

While queuing tweets can be helpful, in my experience it’s not the best way to grow and convert on a social presence. There is a great article by a body builder about how most of the time people spend in the gym is only doing maintenance, not producing real gains. This initially sounds disappointing, but makes sense the most you think about it.

The bodybuilder says real gains are made when you are truly focused, getting enough sleep and eating right. In short, when you have the proper environment, you make real gains. In my experience I gain the most followers, get the most clicks and have the best conversations on Twitter when the environment is most conducive to my audience. Namely, live Tweeting conferences, Tweetups or live chats.

So does the time and date matter? Yes. But not the time of day that you can que tweets and get 2 extra clicks on bit.ly. The time and date matter when your audience is most engaged because that’s where sizable gains will take place weather you’re looking to add 2 reps to your bench press or 100 Twitter followers who are prospective customers. To find when your audience is most engaged there are certainly tools you can use like WhentoTweet, but better yet, I would suggest listening.

The people you follow on Twitter should be a reflection of the type of people you want following you. Are they people you’re following taking part in a Twitter chat this afternoon? Be there too. That’s the best time and date for you to Tweet. Are they heading to a conference? Be there. Can’t make it? Follow the hashtag and “borrow” content. You’ll gain followers, get more clicks and assuming you’re in the right places, that traffic will convert.

Remember that friendly fellow who you met in the coffee line before that conference started last fall who went from bleary-eyed to wide awake when you started tell him about your company? You got back to the office, sent a excited follow up, got no response, and there he sits. Now he doesn’t remember you.

Join Method Savvy Thursday April 19th for 10 minutes before lunch. Starting at 11am we’ll be hosting a 10 minute webinar on how to reinvigorate the stagnant sales leads through marketing.

The webinar will cover topics including:

• Aligning the lead nurturing process to your customer’s decision-making cycle.
• Use of digital strategies such as email marketing, retargeting & social media to increase sales and lower costs per acquisition.
• The integration of traditional and digital marketing techniques to achieve better results.

Because you probably have a to-do list as long as ours, we’ll spend 10 minutes talking lead nurturing strategies, and then shift the conversation to questions on tactics and execution for as long as you’re interested. Register to join us on the 19th at 11am.

Can’t make it on the 19th? We’ll spend 10 minutes with you anyway. Let Devin know when we can talk instead at devin (at) methodsavvy.com.

Real-Time + Content = Donations For Cancer Research

We’re running an experiment. We’re testing to see if by leveraging the power of the real-time web, social media and content sharing you can raise a significant amount of funds and awareness for a great cause. See, we’re working with Martin Smith, Atlantic BT and ClearSketch to donate $0.03 to the Duke Cancer Institute for every tweet, Facebook share, Google+ share, blog post or other social mention using the hashtags #MartinsRide or #ABTMEETUP. Pretty cool, huh?

Martin Smith Rides Again

Who the heck is Martin Smith? Well, he’s the Director of Marketing at Atlantic BT and a cancer survivor. Back in 2010 Martin rode his bicycle across the United States and in the process raised over $26,000 for the Duke Cancer Institute. This time around, instead of riding across the country he’s curating content and energizing the social media community behind this great cause.

2.21.12 Event At Atlantic BT

Martin will be leading a discussion about the real time web, Newsjacking and how these trends collide and intersect with the Mobile First and Social Media Marketing trends to change Internet marketing, online branding and effective go to market strategies. The event is taking place on Tuesday February 21st, 6:15pm, at Atlantic BT. We’ll have free pizza, prizes (even a scooter to giveaway) and a killer crowd.

Live in/near Raleigh and want to be there in person? RSVP at Meetup.com or on Facebook. Can’t be there in the flesh? That’s OK, we have you covered. We’ll live stream the event too!

Hope to see you there!

We spend a lot of time talking to clients about the data generated by advertising and marketing campaigns. We talk about what they should be measuring, the best ways to measure it and what to do with it once its all collected. More and more we’re hearing a common refrain – “we’re drowning in data.”

The Difference Between Marketing Data and Actionable Information

As marketers, we live in exciting times. More so than ever before we have access to tools that allow us to see not only how often customers are viewing our messaging, but also the actions they’re taking the conversations they’re having thereafter. And it’s not just limited to digital marketing either – the new systems becoming available to connect the dots between traditional advertising and real-world results are increasingly powerful. But as anyone who’s ever looked at a Google Analytics dashboard can tell you, there’s a big difference between marketing data and actionable information.

See, marketing data are things like the number of visitors coming to your website, your email marketing open rates, the paid media impression levels and your sales team’s call volumes. It’s the disparate data points often culled from a myriad of systems and (oh the horror!) paper reports that are typically good at validating the performance of that particular tactic but rarely provide the context required to help you understand what’s happening in relation to your business objectives.

Actionable information, on the other hand, are the insights that allow you to understand the performance of the marketing strategies in relation to your desired business objectives. These are the insights that allow you to draw accurate correlations and make optimizations to improve results. These are things like how many e-commerce sales resulted from that email you sent out last night, how your press announcement impacted customer discussion levels and how your email, search engine optimization, online banner ads and public relations campaigns are working together to increase brand loyalty and inbound calls from prospects.

Unfortunately, collecting data is easy. It’s the actionable information part that’s hard.

Beating Data Paralysis

I had a conversation the other day with the CEO for a fast-growing business based in the Midwest. He has a well-regarded and popular product that sells extremely well online. His number one complaint about his (now former) advertising agency? They loved to give him reams of web analytics, call-center reports and ad flight information; but all he really wanted to know was what strategies were generating sales (so he could invest more money in them) and what strategies weren’t producing the desired results (so he could stop spending money in them).

Moral of the story: beating data paralysis requires good analysis; the type that will empower talented marketers to make smart decisions about creative approach, tactical implementation and resource allocation. So what can you do to lay the groundwork for good analysis?

Focus On The Metrics That Matter Most
You can accomplish a lot, and quickly, by focusing on the key performance indicators that have the most direct impact on your business objectives. For instance, if you’re primarily interested in lowering your customer acquisition costs the number of people visiting your website as the result of an online ad campaign is much less important than the cost per lead resulting from the campaign.

Start With Proper Measurement In Mind
Ever hear the saying, “garbage in, garbage out?” It applies to marketing too. If you want to have a clean and clear understanding of how your campaigns have performed you have to design data collection and analysis in from the beginning. This includes thinking through your data collection methodology, establishing reasonable performance assumptions and structuring the campaigns to insure statistically relevant results.

Develop A Reasonable Attribution Model
Marketing attribution – that is the model outlining the amount of “credit” that each tactic or strategy should receive for the outcome produced – is a complicated topic. However I have a secret for you. In my experience, there’s no such thing as a perfect attribution model. Every one I’ve ever seen is flawed in a different way.

With that said, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have one. Unless you happen to only be doing one marketing or advertising strategy (and really, how many of us often do that?) then you should stay away from last touch attribution models as they over emphasize the importance of the last advertising channel that brings a customer to your storefront. Instead, evaluate multi-channel models that give a proportional amount of credit to the full range of marketing elements that your customer experienced.

Marketing Automation Is Your Friend
Marketing automation is the name given to software platforms that are used to automate repetitive marketing-related tasks that I’m willing to bet you rather not have to do anyway. These can be tasks as simple as emailing out scheduled marketing messages (e.g. iContact, Mailchimp) and managing social media updates (e.g. Hootsuite, CoTweet) to tasks as complex as lead nurturing (e.g. Marketo, Eloqua ) and social media sentiment monitoring (e.g. Radian6, Jive Software). Regardless of the purpose, marketing automation tools will not only help free up time within your organization to focus on distilling actionable insights, but these tools make it easier to collect the data you’ll need to conduct the analysis

A few months back our North Carolina neighbors, Newfangled Web Developers, asked an interesting marketing related question on their blog: What Is A Content Strategy Worth? In the post, Newfangled’s President Mark O’Brien writes…

“I was meeting with an agency partner in Chicago a few months ago. We were in an all-day planning session for a suite of new sites we’re building with them and the topic of website leads came up. I had mentioned something about the role of content creation in a lead-generation marketing plan, and the principal, in a kind but slightly challenging way, said something along the lines of “easy for you to say, Newfangled probably gets all its leads from referrals.”

I knew his assumption wasn’t correct, but I realized at the same time that I didn’t have the data to prove it. I actually wasn’t sure what the lead origination sources of our closed new business were, exactly. Not having this data at my fingertips was a problem for a number of reasons, so I decided to trace all of the projects we closed in 2010 back to their lead source.”

I’ll let Mark’s post speak to what they discovered once they dug into the data (and if you have the time, its worth the read), but what I find more interesting is a statement he makes later on in the post:

“This data set is only as good as the honesty of the people who tell us how they found us, but if we can’t trust that then the whole practice of measuring lead origination would be meaningless, and I think measuring lead origination is not only meaningful, but crucial.”

Mark’s articulating a problem that we often hear from the businesses. Specifically, there’s no lack of good marketing and advertising options available to businesses. With a little money, creativity and sweat equity there are literally thousands of ways to reach customers through print, television, radio, out of home, online, through their mobile devices or even in the streets. No, the problem isn’t options its accountability. It’s making sure you understand the results of your various marketing and advertising endeavors and applying the value of those efforts proportionally to the tactics.

The Problem With Last Touch Marketing Attribution Models

Most people have bad memories, or at least are too busy to remember exactly where they first learned about your company (much less all of the different times they saw your advertising). They may tell you they called after being referred by a colleague, but they may have also seen your advertising, visited your website and read your content. Unfortunately, most analytics platforms – Google Analytics included – over-emphasize “last touch wins.” Meaning, they give the last point of interaction all (or a disproportionate amount) of credit for the transaction. After all, that colleague referral may have been the nudge needed to get the prospect to pick up the phone, but that doesn’t mean that the early marketing messaging didn’t impact the prospect’s decision making behavior.

Unfortunately, building a more complex attribution model is well… complex. You can begin to tackle multi-touch attribution modeling, or what’s also called multi-channel funnels with Google Analytics, but while that’s is a step in the right direction that doesn’t give you the whole picture either.

Why? Because most of us don’t only rely on online marketing to achieve our goals. We’re talking with our customers, advertising through traditional media channels and experimenting with new strategies. We’re not only trying to measure the impact of each marketing and advertising strategy, we’re trying to measure the impact of using the strategies as a group.

Does Marketing Attribution Matter?

John Wanamaker has a famous quote: “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” The problem with the way most companies attribute credit to their marketing efforts is that at best its an incomplete view. For instance, are your brand’s 20,000 Facebook fans an asset that are converting into increased sales or is Facebook acting as a customer service platform?

When the rubber meets the road, if you don’t have a reliable attribution model then you’ll never know which half of your advertising budget you’re wasting. And if you can’t answer that question then you can’t lower your customer acquisition costs and enhance brand value because you won’t fully understand where you should be investing your resources.

Apply Your Key Learnings To Constantly Improve ROI

Developing a more complete marketing attribution model is an ongoing process that will take time. The more information you have the better informed your model will be; but just because you don’t have that now doesn’t mean your data isn’t useful. Instead, recognize that your current analytics are providing a partial view of the bigger picture. Challenge yourself to apply your current key learnings to constantly optimize your marketing and advertising campaigns. Then, you can incrementally build a more all-encompassing attribution model that will allow you to lower costs and improve returns ever more aggressively.

Advertising ROI Doesn’t Have To Be Difficult To Measure

There’s little argument that measuring advertising’s direct return on investment is a lot easier with digital than it is with traditional. Sure, most traditional advertising vehicles will provide you with access to reach and frequency numbers; but too many traditional campaigns fall into the measurement trap of using a linear attribution model to evaluate impression levels and then correlate those impressions to purchases or customer inquiries within a specific time period. At best this time based model delivers a loose correlation (vs. causation) and at worse it’s downright wrong.

Digital marketers run into a similar problem with “last click” attribution models that only emphasize the last point of customer interaction. For instance, if a user clicks on a pay per click ad on Google and then makes a purchase from your e-commerce website, does that mean that 100% of the credit for that transaction should be given to the PPC ad? If you’re running other types of marketing and advertising than no – chances are the customer had multiple impressions across different media before deciding to click on that ad and make an immediate purchase.

I’ll leave the discussion of multi-channel and geometric attribution models to another blog post, but for today’s piece I’d like to pose this question: How can you get a better understanding of how your offline advertising and marketing activities are impacting your bottom line without building a more complex model? Let’s look a 5 easy ways to measure the ROI of your offline advertising.

#1 – Drive Customers To Take An Immediate, Specific Action

It’s a popular tactic among direct marketers, and for good reason. It works. Driving your customers to take a specific and immediate action after seeing your ad or otherwise engaging with your brand will help you understand response rates and get them into your lead funnel so that you can record (and measure) future interactions.

There are lots of ways to do this, here are a few:

• Have customers call a phone number to place an immediate order.
• Tell customers to visit a specific landing page (e.g. mycompany.com/printad) for more information.
• Have customers scan a QR code an immediately interact with a mobile web page.
• Have a timed event at your retail store – such as a flash sale. The amount of attendance can tell you a lot about.

While this won’t address the “last click” problem mentioned above, it will give you a solid sense of response rates – even down to the creative a media type.

#2 – Coupons & Promo Codes

Here’s one that we’re all familiar with. Since their first usage in the 1800s coupons and promotional codes have been an effective way to measure response rates and ROI from traditional media channels. The simple concept of providing a customer with an incentive (e.g. redeeming a coupon or promo code in exchange for a discount) will allow you to not only measure the effectiveness of various media channels but will also allow you to deploy controlled marketing experiments so that you can test different offerings and ad creative.

#3 – Brand Surveys

Brand surveys are a way to measure the change in awareness, affinity and loyalty that customers have for a brand following an advertising or marketing program. Specifically, these types of brand surveys need to be conducted at least twice; once before the ad campaign and once after.

If your goal is to elevate awareness and clearly differentiate yourself from the competition, than these types of surveys are an effective way to measure the impact of an advertising campaign on your customers. Just keep in mind that in order to have a clear understanding in the change in customer sentiment the audience you’re surveying should not have been exposed to tangential messaging during the same time period. Otherwise you risk receiving misleading results.

From a practical perspective, when developing your surveying methodology make sure to consult someone (or a team) with marketing research expertise. There are a wide range of ways to conduct these types of surveys – including online, via mail, by phone or in-person – and to have a statistically relevant result the research program should be customized to meet your organization’s needs and goals.

#4 – Social Media Monitoring

Let’s say you like the idea of the brand surveys but don’t want to invest the resources needed to collect primary data from your customers. How else can you measure the impact of an advertising campaign on your customers? One such way is to monitor social media chatter to see if there’s a change in the amount of discussion related to your brand, product or service.

There are a significant number of both free and paid tools that can help you monitor social media (e.g. Social Mention, Trackur, Radian6, Jive, etc.) but regardless of the tool the idea is the same. Essentially you want to look for two overriding factors:

1. How did the volume of discussion regarding your brand/product change before, during and after your advertising campaign. To do this you need to get a benchmark of discussion frequency before the ad campaign begins. Ideally you’ll want to understand the historical volume over a period of time (say 6 months or 1 year) in order to minimize the impact of seasonality on your benchmark.

2. How did the attitude, or sentiment, toward your brand/product change before, during and after the campaign. The goal here is to understand whether the discussion happening on social media is positive, negative or neutral to your brand.

The downside to using social media monitoring to measure the ROI of your advertising and marketing campaigns is that you’re only collecting data from a highly motivated subset of your customers. I mean, after all, your customer needs to feel strongly about your brand (whether it be in a positive or negative way) in order to take the time to talk about you online. Still, social media monitoring can give you good insight into how your customers have responded to an advertising campaign.

#5 – Search Traffic Volume

Similar to social media monitoring, the volume of search traffic related to your brand – and its change over time – can give you insight into the effectiveness of your advertising and marketing endeavors. Specifically, I recommend that you use Google’s Insights For Search tool and run queries bases around various terms, timelines and geographic regions. You’ll want to look at the trend in overall search volume as well as where the peaks and valleys are. If you can, take it a step further and correlate search volume to traffic to your website, pages read on your website and customer inquiries/purchases.

There’s No One-Size-Fits-All Answer

Ultimately, to get a reasonably complete understanding of the effectiveness of your traditional advertising investments it makes sense to build a multi-channel attribution model. However, as a short-cut, the above measures can give you a basic understanding of what’s moving the needle and providing value. What are your other favorite ROI measures for your traditional advertising?

During this year’s f8 developer conference, Facebook announced that it’s making some big changes. In the continuing evolution of the world’s largest social network (now counting 800+ million registered users), Facebook is expanding its big data play by making it easier than ever for users to share all of their likes, wants, thoughts and social interactions. I’ll let others go into detail on the specifics of the f8 announcements of Facebook’s new Timeline interface, enhancements to the Open Graph and apps. What I want to focus on is how the changes to the Facebook platform alter how brands can, and are, using Facebook for marketing and advertising.

Facebook Is a Social Platform, Not Only A Social Network

The days of Facebook being a place where users share only their thoughts and photos with friends/family are long gone. Facebook has diligently reengineered their service into a social platform that changes the way that all 800+ million of their users will interact and share. I think Robert Scoble sums it up well on a post made to Google+ (note: no irony intended):

+Mark Zuckerberg sure changed the world today and most of the press reports and folks aren’t understanding what’s going on here.

Three companies (Facebook, Google, and Salesforce) are going to know everything about everything. That might be scary to you, it is even a little scary to me, but we’ll all be willing participants because it’ll give us a lot of cool stuff in return.

The old world? You had to go to the news.
The new world? The news comes to you.

The old world? You had to go to Flickr to get photos from your friends.
The new world? Those photos come to you.

The old world? You had to go to Pandora to get music (or iTunes, etc).
The new world? The music comes to you.

The old world? Crappy looking photos and can’t look back very far in the timeline.
The new world? You scroll through your life with big beautiful photos.

Facebook has moved the goal posts in a way that doesn’t just change the user experience of the site but also how brands will interact with prospects and customers within the confines of the social network.

Dear Marketers, It’s Time To Move Past Your Facebook Wall

Up to this point way too many brands have approached Facebook with some version of the following:

Step 1: Create a Facebook Page, make it look pretty and start posting to the wall.
Step 2: Invite users to “Like” the Page and opt-in to receive branded messages on their News Feed.
Step 3: ????
Step 4: Profit!

The problem with this approach of course, and one that sophisticated brands quickly recognized, is that treating Facebook this way is little more than duct taping the email marketing paradigm onto an inherently socially integrated platform. And guess what? It typically doesn’t work.

What’s important about the announcements Facebook made at f8 is that they’ve accelerated the need for brands to rethink not only how they’re utilizing Facebook as a marketing platform but also the very goals they want to achieve on Facebook altogether.

Let me explain it with two stats:

1. 9 out of 10 fans never return to your Page once they’ve “Liked” it.

2. Only 3% – 7.5% ever see your Page’s posts even if you can get them “Like” your Page.

EdgeRank, Open Graph and GraphRank (oh my!)

Don’t get me wrong, there’s still utility in posting status updates to your brand’s Facebook Page. However those updates are only one small part of a truly effective Facebook marketing strategy. If you’re serious about marketing your brand on Facebook you need to understand that Facebook is primarily driven by two concepts: big data and the idea that companies need to build “social” into the very fabric of their products, services and brand positioning. This then is manifested within the confines of Facebook as EdgeRank, Open Graph and GraphRank.

EdgeRank

Learn to love EdgeRank - Facebook’s algorithm for the stories it displays on users’ News Feed.

To paraphrase, EdgeRank is a blended measure of affinity (the historical strength of the social relationship between users and the Page as measured by frequency of interaction), level of interaction (volume and velocity of Likes, comments, shares, etc.) and timeliness (how long ago the status update was created). There is also weight given to different types of content (status updates vs. video vs. photos, etc.).

Like Google’s famous PageRank algorithm, the goal of EdgeRank is to show users only the most relevant, useful and engaging information. It’s a way of cutting through the clutter by being helpful to your audience first. If you fail that test then your Facebook messaging won’t perform well.

Moral of the story: if you intend to have a Page for your brand you must optimize your messaging for EdgeRank and the News Feed. Anything else means that you’re wasting time and resources.

Open Graph

Over the years Facebook has grown into much more than a social network – they’re now a powerful social platform. With the launch of Open Graph in 2010, Facebook made it easy for websites to integrate themselves into the Facebook ecosystem by placing Like buttons on web pages so that the content could then appear within Facebook and on a user’s profile.

At this year’s f8 conference Facebook took this idea one giant leap further allowing brands to reduce the “friction” users encounter when tying their off-site experience into Facebook. Think of it this way:

• Old way: you visit Rdio.com (a music subscription service) and click the “Share” button on a song to post that you’re listening to that particular song on your Facebook Wall.
• New way: because you opted into the Rdio.com Facebook app everything you listen to on Rdio, whether you’re using their website, desktop app or mobile app automatically shows up within Facebook. Even better, it shows up in the users profile using nouns and verbs. For instance: [User] listened to [song title] by [artist] on Rdio.

From the perspective of marketing there are two important shifts that are happening here. First, Facebook has allowed brands to build high level of social sharing straight into the actual use of the product/service. While this is a no-brainer for a web service, there are still significant opportunities for more traditional businesses to increase customer discoverability via the Open Graph. For instance, are have an accounting practice? Create a free tool that leverages Facebook’s Open Graph every time its used. Or have an commerce website? Use the Open Graph to allow users that participate in flash sales to automatically notify their Facebook friends. The opportunities are really endless.

The second important shift to note is that Facebook is doubling down on big data. If use of the Open Graph increases the way they want it to then Facebook will have a huge data set that they can utilize to better understand their users; and then sell that data for targeting purposes to advertisers.

GraphRank

GraphRank is a new and (in my humble opinion, quite interesting) subset of the EdgeRank algorithm. The easiest way to think of it is as the mash up of EdgeRank and the Open Graph. As Facebook’s CTO, Bret Taylor, said during f8, GraphRank is “a personalized view of you and your friends’ interests” and will impact whether or not the Open Graph apps crack into users’ News Feeds. For instance, if a users and 5 of their friends are all reading the same article on NYTimes.com then (assuming all six opted into the NYTimes.com Open Graph app) Facebook will know that’s happening in real-time and will display it on everyone’s News Feed – instantly creating a draw for other Facebook users to visit NYTimes.com and also read the article.

That’s an incredibly profound opportunity for brands to increase discoverability via automatic sharing. Whether your company is hosting a webinar, you’re an ecommerce website hosting a flash sale, you have a video on your website that multiple people are watching or even just have a blog; the combination of Open Graph enabled apps and GraphRank can help you exponentially increase brand awareness, visibility and website traffic.

The Future of Facebook Marketing?

If your brand is interested in having a measurable ROI from Facebook then you have to move beyond simple status updates and custom tabs. Facebook has laid out a framework that enables you to integrate much more tightly into Facebook and, as a result, benefit from the “fricitionless” nature of the social network. It’s time that you consider not only how you can push out relevant content and updates on your Page that will generate Likes and discussion, but also how you can extend that social experience into other facets of your brand’s online presence. If you can do that effectively then you’ll be able to build an enormously valuable earned media channel that will have a direct impact on your bottom line.

And for those of you who aren’t ready to invest the time and money into a branded presence on Facebook, the f8 announcements are still good news for you too. How? Frankly, if users opt-in to the Open Graph (which, despite initial privacy concerns, I believe a significant number will), Facebook has a huge amount of data that will make advertising on Facebook that much easier and more effective.

So challenge yourself and your team to move past the establish paradigm of simple status updates to a Facebook Page. If you can do so, and aren’t afraid to experiment, Facebook marketing can be a big win for your company.

In case you haven’t heard the news yet, Netlix is spinning off its DVD-by-mail business under the new brand name Qwikster. Following a poorly handled announcement of a price increase a few months back that separated the video streaming and DVD-rental fee structure, Reed Hastings – Netflix’s CEO – has decided to double-down on Netflix as a streaming movie service:

As a marketer, I find this move fascinating. I’ve always admired Netflix for their willingness to sacrifice their cash cow DVD business in the service of their long-term vision, but I think only the Netflix faithful would say that they’ve communicated the recent changes in an effective manner. Not that, in theory, the move is a bad one. Ostensibly, splitting the services will allow those who want DVDs an easier, more streamlined way to access them while freeing up cash flow for Netflix to improve the (often lagging) streaming catalog.

But What Happened To Being Customer Focused?

I’m sure if you asked Netflix they’d tell you that they’re making this move in the service of the customer, but they seem to have forgotten an important factor: Their customers don’t view them as a DVD or streaming service, they see them as an entertainment service. This is a critical difference and one that goes to the core of why customers love(d) Netflix – ease of use. You pay a reasonable monthly fee, get whatever movies or shows you wanted, and it was simple. Adding streaming to the mix only added to the value proposition. Now you could access your entertainment instantly and didn’t have to mess with the envelopes. Genius! Of course, the catalog was a little hit or miss, but who cared when you always had the DVD-by-mail option to fall back on?

Then somewhere along the way Netflix took on a “company” worldview instead of a “customer” world. What I mean by this is that they started to justify moves that they wanted the as a company – namely to get rid of the complicated logistics and expense of the DVD business – as being good for the customer. But they forgot to ask the customer… and you know what? Customers just want to have access to a wide catalog of movies and TV shows at an affordable monthly price. They don’t want a streaming service.

Company vs. Customer

That’s not to say that the customer is always right. Steve Jobs famously told BusinessWeek, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” But notice that there’s a key difference between “show it to them” and what Netflix has done which is “ruin an otherwise good customer experience by making it more complicated…” and then not doing much other than apologize when customers express their unhappiness?

Furthermore, Netflix has done a so-so job at best of managing the public communications surrounding these changes. The above video is flat and lacks sincerity, as Reed himself admits they’ve too often been silent when they should have spoken and worst of all the result of these changes is the perception among a significant number of their customers that the “value” of the Netflix service has decreased.

With that said, I’m the first to admit that I’m still a Netflix customer and have been for nearly 10 years. I switched over to their streaming only option when it first became available and plan to stick with my subscription for the foreseeable future. However that doesn’t mean that Netflix has handled the situation well from the perspective of marketing.

Marketing Lessons Learned

At some point all businesses have to do something that their customers may not like. Perhaps your production costs have gone up and therefore your prices need or increase. Or maybe there’s a new government regulation that makes the customer experience more difficult. Regardless of the cause, Netflix’s predicament offers an interesting case study of how to manage the public when announcing an unpopular decision.

1. Before you say anything, frame your thinking in the customer perspective. Get outside of your head, go talk to a few loyal customers and get their input. Learn from this early group if the response is what you anticipate it to be. What does the proposed change(s) mean to them? How does the change impact how they think and feel about your brand and product? Are they frustrated? Do they understand? Why?

2. When you announce the change be prepared to empathize with your customers, frame it in their perspective and advance your changes slowly. There will be a period of time when your customers will gripe and you need to allow ample time for addressing their concerns. People tend to be resistant to change (just ask Facebook) and therefore you need to anticipate complaints and be prepared to address them proactively.

3. Demonstrate how the change benefits the customers. Unless you can clearly articulate how and why the changes you’re making will benefit the customer, you’ll lose business. Its just that simple. And if you can’t articulate this clearly then you need to revisit the purpose of the change in the first place.

4. Engage in discussion with your customers in an integrated fashion. In today’s world your customers hear from you in a variety of ways: via email, on social media, at your store front and through the media. If your announcement proves to be unpopular you have to have a plan that allows you to speak with your customers through every available channel. If you can own the news cycle then you have a much better shot at clearly explaining your company’s point of view and getting buy-in from your customers.

5. Be comfortable in taking a beating and then moving on. Do you remember when Nintendo announced the Wii video game console or Apple announced the iPad? Remember all of the jokes about the name and how they wouldn’t succeed in the marketplace? Both products faced push back initially but quickly found success in the years following release. Why? Because they were good products and neither Nintendo nor Apple dwell on negative feedback. You should do the same. If your product or service is fantastic your customers will forgive whatever changes or hiccups you face. But you have to quickly move on. Making new changes (like Netflix’s Qwikster announcement) are always bound to backfire.

There’s no arguing that content marketing is a hot topic these days. In fact, according to the Top Rank Blog every 60 seconds: 1,500 blog post, 20,000 Tumbler posts, 600+ YouTube videos and 79,000+ Flickr images are posted to the web… and that’s not even counting the hundreds of thousands of tweets and Facebook status updates made every minute. Businesses (both B2B and B2C) have largely embraced content marketing as a powerful tool for generating website traffic, sales leads and brand differentiation. In fact, according to a Junta42 and MarketingProfs B2B content marketing study [PDF] 90% of marketers utilize original content, and the budgetary investments in the strategy continue to grow.

Why Is Content Marketing So Popular With Businesses?

Companies have turned to content to supercharge their marketing for a number of reasons – good content draws people to their websites, positions the brand as a trusted resource in their industry and helps to differentiate from competitors both in tone of voice and quality of information.

In fact, that Junta42/MarketingProfits report [PDF] found that the marketers surveyed invested in content marketing because 78% believe it helps build brand awareness, 69% believe it helps improve customer retention/loyalty and 63% find it improves lead generation. Hard to argue with measured, positive results.

Even so, with 9 out of 10 marketers producing original content this has quickly become a crowded space. But with 53% of all time on the Internet dedicated to content consumption its one strategy that most businesses can’t ignore.

Stand Out From The Content Marketing Crowd

Both the beauty and the curse of the web is that it’s so darn easy to publish content. If you have something to say and the resources to write, video or otherwise record it there are nearly zero barriers to entry to getting it out there. Even in the offline world, over time its become less expensive to print and distribute branded content. Which has made it ever more difficult to stand out from the crowd.

So given the competition and noise, what’s a marketer to do?

#1 – Act Strategically.

Don’t produce content for content’s sake. While there are numerous dimensions to the value of branded content, at the core you’re telling your company’s story; and to do that effectively you need to have an understanding of flow and destination.

You can add a strategic framework to your content marketing efforts by doing three things. First, at the onset define your business objectives in measurable terms. This can be anything from a certain number of sales leads, a specific Cost Per Lead or even measurable level of brand awareness. Next, build an ideal customer profile (if you don’t have one already) and detail the buyer’s decision making process. Third and finally, develop an editorial calendar that maps your content to your goals and customers’ decision making process.

#2 – Be Brilliantly Uniquely

OK, so this is a lot easier said than done, but its important. Your content should project a unique point of view and tonality. It should feel like your brand. You also need to inform, educate and/or entertain your audience with every piece. Companies like Woot.com are amazing that this. Given the competition simply pushing out quality content isn’t enough. You need to differentiate your content in terms of voice and usefulness.

How do you accomplish this? There’s no easy, one-size-fits-all answer. Great content, like most things worth doing, is hard work. That doesn’t mean that you can’t create good content in-house, but if you don’t feel like you have the skill set there’s nothing wrong in talking to outside consultancies, agencies or freelancers. There are a lot of talented copywriters and artists out there who would love to help.

#3 – Embrace Search Engine Optimization & Social Media

Making your content easily discoverable and sharable online will vastly increase the likelihood that the content piece will achieve your business objectives. Specifically, make sure that any content you post to your website is optimized for search engines. In general terms, this means organizing the content on the webpage in such a way that it is easy for the search engine “spiders” to index while maintaining a high level of human readability. With that said, SEO is a deep topic and if you have an internal or external resource to help you optimize your content you’ll get much better results.

Furthermore, your content should always strive to be social media friendly. Meaning, does the resource page have easy social share links and include information so compelling that people will want send it to friends? And don’t forget to make it easy for readers to share via email as well – there’s data that shows as much as 17% of social sharers still use email to share links with peers.

#4 – Leverage Less Competitive Formats

Just about everyone these days can or has written a blog post, but not nearly as many have created videos, presentations, mobile apps or podcasts. However these, and other formats, are quite popular and are an opportunity for you to connect with your target audience in a different and unique way.

Furthermore, you can repurpose content from one format to another in order to get more mileage out of it. Have a series of blog posts on a particular topic? Turn it into an eBook. Did you resident subject matter expert just do a speaking engagement for a trade association? Record the session and edit it into an entertaining and informative video. If you put on a creative hat the opportunities are really endless – and you’ll get much more mileage out of your content marketing efforts because of it.

It’s always exciting when your company is growing, but it’s especially great when you have the opportunity to add a smart, accomplished and all-around good person to the team. And that’s exactly what we have the opportunity to announce today.

Everyone, meet Devin Kelley – Method savvy’s new Director of Client Services.

In his senior role at Method Savvy, Devin will lead business development and account services, helping our clients to strategize and implement cost effective marketing programs that increase sales and lower customer acquisition costs.

Prior to joining Method Savvy, Devin worked as the Sales Strategist at Blogads, where he helped businesses develop unique digital communications and advertising strategies across blogs targeted to parents and residents of major metropolitan markets. Devin also previously worked with TEKsystems supporting national wireless carrier networking development.

Please join me in giving Devin a warm welcome. He’s available by email or on Twitter.