thefunnel

One way to measure social media is through using NPS as a metric. Think about it. Social media is all about customers having conversations about your brand, and the ultimate question is, would they recommend your product, service or brand, or do they fall into the category of talking negatively about you? So if you track the conversations, and develop a way of rating these conversations, you have a metric. The metric is about your brand, the communication channel just happen to be social media. Combine this with some other marketing best practices, such as unhappy customersare each likely to talk about you with 10 other customer, which has a compounding effect on the negative conversations about you. Example. Let’s say your promoters % is 80 and you detractor % is 20, leading to an NPS score of 60%, quite good. However, lets now imaging that all the detractors talk to ten of their friends, therefore amplifying the negative message to 200%, while only two of your promoters talk positively about you leading to a a score of 160%. Suddenly your real NPS score has turned into a negative 40%. Using this math, you need 8 out of 10 of your customers to be a promoter, and a maximum of 1 out of 10 to be a detractor to hit a NPS of 60%. This really shows the power of social media, and the importance of customer satisfaction, and the importance of participating (by at least listening) and helping to create positive conversations. It’s could also be a way to determine what your social media strategy should be. If for example you have a really high NPS score, you need to go all out and capitalize on this. If your NPS score is low, and although you can’t control social media,  you need to consider a different approach.

A company’s website is the intersection where the business needs, the community of visitors and the technology that support this all comes together. In order to create an effective website strategy all these elements have to be clearly understood and agreed upon.

In order of priorities, it could be argued, which one comes first, business needs or visitors? What is clear though is that technology comes last. Every business obviously has its objectives, but without visitors there is no business. Therefore a careful analysis has to take place, where the website is looked at, not in isolation, but as part of the whole customer buying /selling / support cycle, to see where the best fit is, what new functions the website could perform or replace, and also accept that depending on the business, the web might not always be the one all solution. Only then can a comprehensive strategy with its accompanying roadmap be formulated. Many times in organizations the web strategy almost has a life of its own only loosely connected to the business. Goes without saying that this is a waste of resources and doesn’t maximize any business benefits. Once the core of the strategy has been formulated attention can be turn towards to “widget world”, and even then it’s not about widgets, it’s about how to maximize the user /visitor experience. The website has a function to play in the cycle and the questions is  how can this be achieved, in the most cost effective way, with the highest visitor satisfaction, and at the same time assuring that there’s some type of additional benefit to the business, such as converting the visitor to a lead, increase likelihood of visiting again etc. On the web it’s all about the smallest details and the voice of the customer can never be underestimated. Therefore a comprehensive usability analysis needs to be performed prior to implementation. One amazing thing is, that the web being a reasonably new marketing tool, and the best way to introduce all your new products, the expectation from the customer base goes much deeper than this. Many customers expect web support for legacy products that were introduced even years before the web, and will rate their satisfaction of a company based this. The website therefore becomes primarily a sustaining marketing tool, which many web marketers don’t like, but it all makes sense for an established business taking care of their existing customer base first, before trying to acquire new customers.

It’s all basic marketing. Understand the needs of your customers. Analyze how you best can serve these needs, while still making money. If it is the web, that’s ok, if not, that’s also ok. If it turns out that the web is the tool, and you can delight your customers with cool widgets – it’s a bonus.

The saying goes, “The only reason you need advertising is because the market isn’t talking enough about you”.  So, how do you get buzz going? All sorts of PR is definitely one tactic that you could use, but there’s another one that’s even better – WOM.

WOM (word of mouth marketing) is in some industries one of the most effective, but also one of the most under utilized marketing tactic. Why is that and what are some of the challenges?

The biggest problem in some B-2-B industries is that the customers aren’t emotionally (emotional branding) attached to the product . The product is often just a tool for them to get the job done.  Consider this. Not too many people walk around talking about, for example their measurement gear, unless of course there’s a problem, which would mean bad WOM. Then there aren’t that many opportunities or incentives for customers to publicly express their opinion, sometimes by design and sometimes by default. By design, many companies aren’t allowed to share case studies or comments for confidentiality reasons. Some companies ban endorsements completely, and a WOM without the source (a credible source) is only a marketing ploy. By default. Some industries are slow to adopt social web for business purposes, because they don’t see the business value in it, or going back to the branding point, they are not interested talking about their tools. There’s also another challenge in making WOM successful, which goes back to endorsements. When asked to rank information sources in a survey, many customers state that WOM is one of the top 3. The problem is that when you drill deeper into the sources of this WOM, it often comes from within the company, rather than from other companies. This means that it’s really hard for marketers to capitalize in a larger scale on WOM. Problematic particularly for products that are somewhere in between commodity and strategically critical to a business.