David Scott Joins Integrati Marketing as our Social Media commentator and expert.

We are pleased to let you know after lengthy negotiations (quite a few lattes) and discussions that we welcome David Scott to the Integrati Marketing Blog.

David is an Australian Media expert and active commentator with all things Social Media. David is a professional media specialist having worked in commercial TV and broadcast journalism.

With David’s extensive knowledge and insight about not only the Australian media landscape but also the trends, best practice observations and “what not to do” in Social Media, we are sure you will find David’s weekly updates of interest.

Even better, as you would expect David being a professional communications expert brings an engaging and easy to read  style of writing to this site which we greatly appreciate. So, welcome David and we look forward to reading more from you about Social Media in the coming weeks.

Clinton

Integrati Marketing.

I have written about advertising and the importance of advertising to become accountable since the inception of Integrati Marketing. Marketing accountability is really core to marketing effectiveness today and will in the near future be considered a ‘hygiene factor’.

This is not because I believe that advertising does not work, it means that we know that mass media advertising has become less effective in the 15 years I have worked in Marketing and now as an Integrated Marketing practitioner.

Back in 2006 McKinsey and Co published a report that provided a clear measure that advertising via mass media was not only losing audience numbers but even more worryingly there was little engagement which means reduced effectiveness.

In fact they predicted by 2010 that TV Advertising would be 1/3 less effective than it was in 1990.

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer Engagement (CE) is not a unique term invented with the creation of the Internet. The notion of customer engagement was present in retail and customer service businesses marketing prior to the Internet and web metrics.

Our take on Customer engagement is the connection of both on and offline marketing information which lets us understand how into our content they are.

A definition presented by Eric Peterson’s work on Customer Engagement provides what is an excellent working definition:

Engagement is an estimate of the degree and depth of visitor interaction against clearly defined set of goals.

The key points here are that an agreed way to measure the engagement exists and that the visitor interactions can be many and varied with our marketing communications.

So what?

OK, so we have a clear understanding of what Customer Engagement is how does that help my business and support our objectives and marketing practices.

Customer Engagement is important.

Customer Engagement measures when agreed by your team and in your business enable you to define targets and measure the effectiveness of your marketing communications (digital marketing and Offline Marketing) or rather conversations with your Clients, Customers and Followers.

There are many options available to measure engagement, but one of the best channels is your website.

Tracking engagement measures such as; bounces, time on page, number of visits, bookmarking, tweets, Likes, are all different levels of engagement.

With Google Analytics or other web analytics services you can set up simple dashboards that enable reporting of your website and tracked advertising links to campaign pages or your sites content pages.

This is important as you may want to answer questions like; “Which keyword in my Search Engine Marketing provides the best conversion and longer term engagement”.

Looking at Ghuniem’s degrees of engagement we can look at a framework that can be created in Google Analytics to measure web site and advertising in the stages of the Degrees of Engagement.

So, with this criteria we can now look at Google Analytics for instance and build out segmentation that allows us to monitor customer engagement with Ghuniem’s criteria from the Customer degrees of Engagement continuum.

We can do this via the Google Analytics Advanced Segmentation section.

If you would like help understanding your web site and customer engagement metrics then feel free to contact us to talk to you about your business. We’d love to talk Marketing with you!

The Event-Driven Marketing Handbook

A few months back now I caught up with an ex-colleague of mine from Procter and Gamble when I was working in FMCG marketing in Europe.

I was keen to hear what Ed had been doing the last couple of years and was pleased to hear that he had continued to improve his skills as a very successful CRM Consultant and Direct Marketer. In fact, Ed had been very busy indeed with a new venture Failsafe and had also recently completed an epic task of writing what we think will be a key marketing text for direct marketers for the next decade.

Ed Sander has teamed up with Egbert Jan Van Bel and Alan Weber to deliver a great discourse about the evolving world of one to one marketing through to CRM and now the holy grail of Event Driven Marketing. The book came as no surprise to myself after working with Ed at Procter & Gamble. Ed was instrumental in creating a direct marketing program that was years ahead of its time and delivered incredible results.

We’re Inspired by Follow That Customer!

We’re still happily reading the handbook on Event-Driven Marketing or Follow That Customer! but what we have read to date is inspiring. Reason being, is that the structure of the text further demonstrates a rational approach to understanding customer engagement and through good process and practiced marketing experience and nous.

What is commonly forgotten in the modern world is the idea that ‘we’ are rational all the time (Marketers and Customers). Humans, we think are both rational and irrational, particularly when it comes to marketing. As marketing practitioners we have to ensure that we create frame works that create continuity and leverage technology to remove some of our irrational moments and mistakes that can happen.

With Follow That Customer! the text lays out a logical and practical way to structure Event Driven Marketing best practice and some sound advice and case studies.

Permeable Segments and the right moment

What we really like is the idea of ‘permeable segments’ (Ch. 1 pp. 11-12) and in fact the idea that as your Event Driven Marketing matures that segmentation becomes less relevant and that it is all about “the right moment in time”. Indeed these ideas are important as we move into a more dynamic web and Social Media which is instantaneous allows for great customer understanding and engagement. Being able to ‘know’ the right moment will become all the more attainable with the right Event Driven Marketing strategy.

The upcoming interview

We are well on our way to finishing the book and we will be interviewing Ed Sander with some questions about the book and what he sees as important for direct marketing in the next ten years. We would also like to wish Ed all the best for his year away from the Netherlands as he heads off to Xi’an China to work with the VSO (an NGO) to help them with of course their marketing as a Marketing Advisor!

We will have the post in a few weeks with the interview from Ed and the team.

You can have a look at some of the reviews for the book here and also the homepage for the book is here as well so you can Follow That Customer!

By the way… we’re also hoping to obtain a copy or two to give away to a readers here and we have been told by Ed that there may be a download of the 1st Chapter available soon.

We will up-date you with the next post about Follow That Customer.

Understanding Social Media and what tools to use to make it easier to manage your brand in the world of Social.

Social Media is a networking tool that allows for rich conversations by including all sorts of media types (video, images, text, web pages, sms etc.) into an interoperable platform. Or, in Plain English you can access your Social Media anywhere anytime and pretty much from any web enabled device like an iPhone/PC or laptop for instance.

Networking or the term networking is not new, it was popularised in the1990’s but has really come into its own with the advent of Web 2.0 and the maturing Internet. We all have heard of sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and all sorts of new real-time services starting up like Twitter and Foursquare.

These services are really important now due to the fact that with these networks large groups of consumers, organisations and movements are building large and vocal groups. These social networks and groups within the networks are turning the power of communications around from what has been the traditional owner of the message (corporate/marketing communications) to the Social Media Networks users. These users can either love or hate your brand and services. Social Media users and groups are not afraid to spread the positive or negative critique of brands through these communities, on mass, as quick as you can type the message in fact and hit “send”.

So how do you monitor what is being ‘said’ and ‘sent’, how should your business engage in Social Media and what tools are available?

Before you jump in and start signing up and broadcasting on social networks you need to have a plan as to what your objectives are. We believe that social media is a great way for ‘real organisations with real people people’ to have real interactions and to humanise the conversation between companies and customers.

In effect, the opportunity is to create a open and interactive channel for people to be ‘real’ whilst still representing their organisation in an open and trusted manner.

We also believe that social media is a great way to manage the customer and to understand what is important to different customers who interact with your brand.

So how do I start to manage what is being said?

We will look at Twitter first because there are a lot of FREE tools available for Twitter now and it is also one of the best examples of real time customer management opportunities.

Twitter has grown at an exceptional rate and does allow for 1-to-1 discussions as well as 1-to-Many with tweets to people who follow you, or lists that users make about topics and then here is the whole of Twitter messages via the tweet stream 1-to-All!

So, how do you find people talking about your brand and service on Twitter, there are many tools out there but we use one which allows for multiple users in your business and can actively create reports and insight about your brand. We use a service called Co-Tweet.

Co-Tweet enables you to search the ‘tweet stream’ of what is being said about your brand and for you to ‘listen in’ to the conversation and consider a meaningful response.  Then implement a response from one of your team members back to the user(s) tweeting about a your brand and service. The great thing is that you can set up multiple users on a single account for your company and append initials so you know who said what and when it looks like this:

“Integratidirect said: We use co-tweet to manage all our Twitter conversations IM”

This is very helpful as there may be several people working in the business and in the rush to respond a team member may not be aware that a response had been made or if one had who had sent the tweet. Co-Tweet removes this issue. The last two characters at the end of the message stand for Integrati Marketing, but these can of course be a team member’s initials or Department.

What is even better is that you can assign ‘tweets’ to team members to follow up, as it may be a Sales question instead of a Technical Question. This way the tweet goes to the right department so that the customer gets the right information the first time.

Also, you can schedule ‘tweets’ for future dates (think of promotions and breaking news only for Twitter!), review tweets from people who your business is following, save searches and all in a single easy to use dashboard.

So what this is the beginnings of is really a Social CRM space for customer relationship management and real time engagement.

This is important for Small Medium business as it means your team will have access to the same tools which large corporate like Ford (a Co-Tweet customer) have access to and use now.

To review Co-Tweet check it out here. It is a great opportunity to manage your brand online and currently it is FREE to register.

Another service which allows for really simple network syndication of your updates from Twitter to Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin etc and Twitter itself is Ping.FM.

Ping.FM is a dashboard of all your Social Networks tools that you can enable via secure Application Programming Interface or API. What an API does is allow a secure connection between Ping.FM and the chosen Social Network using your Social Network log-in and the API string which is a secure code or public key that is encrypted. Your API is unique to you so no one else should be allowed or be able to access your public API key.

What you will need to so is spend about 15-20mins on each service you want to include in Ping.FM. But this is time well spent, when in a single ‘Tweet’ you can send up-dates to all your social network sites through Ping.FM in one ‘send’. Great stuff! But you have to use the Ping.FM Portal to do so.

So, as a wrap up,

Social Media is a great opportunity to engage with your customers by listening to what they have to say about your business, and then you can choose to respond to their conversation and engage with them.

Even better, through the engagement you have an opportunity to build your brand, save and retain customers and win on other potential customers who are listening in.

Also, the all through this discussion I have not mentioned one important factor, time. There is no way around it but it will take time to both build your Social Network and also participate. Like all good online tools and services you need to choose how much time your business can invest in managing your brand and when to engage. But at the very least you should be listening to what people are saying about your brand so you are aware and can then choose to engage or not.

I am positive we will see an immense growth in online solutions offering Social CRM applications and value to Small Medium business in the next couple of years. We will keep you up-to-date with the best tools available and will also be looking into some solutions for our clients that can help them manage this new space where word of mouth and reputation management is King.

Recently Integrati Marketing have been in discussions with Adam Ramshaw from Genroe about the importance of looking after your existing customers in these difficult economic times. Customer loyalty is a fundamental driver of profitability and importantly it does not matter what size your business is. All businesses can implement strategies to improve customer satisfaction. And given the experience of 2009 with the Global Financial Crisis for everyone in business this guest post from Genroe should be of interest to your business. So, for 2010, think how implementing some of Adam’s customer experience strategies in the article below may help your businesses.

Guest Post by Adam Ramshaw from Genroe, customer experience consulting.

Practical Strategies for retaining customers in this difficult economic environment

Competition is tougher than ever before and many companies are out prospecting like mad for new customers. However, most don’t realise that the fastest, cheapest and lowest risk way of protecting their business is not finding new customers but nurturing existing customers. I know you’ve heard the old adage that it’s easier to sell to an existing customer than a new one; well it’s true and now is the time to take it to heart.

Right up front though there is one founding approach to customer retention management that will dramatically increase your effectiveness: have a bias towards action.

Planning is always important but it is better to start with an initiative that is,say, 80% right and improve it over time than wait until it’s 100% right. While you plan, your competitor is making inroads into your customer base.

But remember that because not everything is perfect when you start and you need to fine tune as you go. Test different approaches, try different ideas, keep the ones that work and discard the others. This also helps you to adapt to the changing market and business requirements.

Which are your valuable customers?

Before you start on any customer retention initiatives you first need to determine which customers are more valuable and which are less valuable. This is important to ensure that you really look after the most valuable customers.

This can be as easy as ranking your customers by annual revenue, gross margin or profit. Then you can split them into three equally sized groups: A, B and C. “A”: customers are the most valuable.

Measure your customer retention

As the old saying goes “What gets measured gets done”. Make sure that you measure your current customer retention in a meaningful way so that you know when you are having a positive impact.

Often, effective customer retention strategies are stopped because no-one thought to measure the baseline and success rate. Without measures to demonstrate success, management and staff lose interest and the initiatives are often discontinued or fall by the wayside.

Retention Strategy 1: Onboarding

You can set yourself up for good customer retention at the very start of the customer relationship though effective customer on-boarding. This is the process of introducing new customers to your company in an organised and effective manner. It generally commences at the time of order placement and may continue for up to three months, depending on the complexity of the product or service.

Done properly, customers that are on-boarded have a substantially higher retention rate, lower cost to serve and higher cross sell rate than customers that are not.

To apply on-boarding to your company think about the very start of the relationship when customers are not familiar dealing with you. How could you make the experience easier?

For example you could have a staff member call each new customer, outlining the order and delivery process, contact names and details, etc, with a follow-up email that includes a reinforcement of the benefits of your product or services. Not only will it make the customer feel more comfortable with your organisation but they will also probably buy more long term. Also, you may find you have fewer order entry problems and delays which means fewer opportunities for customer dissatisfaction.

Retention Strategy 2: Pro-active complaint management

Organisations often give little thought to their complaint management process; it’s just another cost of running the business. However, managed properly this process can be an excellent way to build strong customer relationships; it’s a little known fact that if you help a dissatisfied customer and resolve their issue they are often more loyal than customers who were never dissatisfied in the first place. Strange but true.

So you must get your complaint management process right and it’s not that hard. There are just a few key elements:

• Make sure that you actively seek, manage and resolve complaints don’t hide them. Let staff know that you want to hear about complaints. If have to, change the organisation’s culture
• Remember that just recording a complaint is not enough: you actually have to do something about it. Give staff the accountability and responsibility to act on complaints immediately. This sounds risky but in practice the vast majority of employees want to do the right thing by the company and the customer. So long as you have a few sensible controls in place, the risks are quite low.
• Make it easy to complain by using a range of processes and tools: web forms, paper forms, etc.
• Train staff in how to respond to complaints. Receiving and managing a customer complaint is a skill just like any other and you need to provide staff with those skills.

  There are training courses available but in summary when managing a complaint staff need to; listen carefully, agree that the issue exists (denial is never a useful option in this case) and then ask the customer what they want done to resolve the issue.

  Then they need to fix the issue, thank the customer for their feedback and follow up a few days later to ensure that everything was resolved to their satisfaction.

  This sounds simple but poorly managed complaints can escalate customer dissatisfaction to anger and a customer to ex-customer status.

Retention Strategy 3: Understand what customers want and give it to them

This sounds like the easiest thing in the world and most organisations think that they are doing exactly that but often they don’t really know what customers care about.

For instance one IT company Genroe helped had a great technical support desk. When a customer had an issue they jumped on it and solved it quick smart. They weren’t however, as consistent with calling or emailing customers to close the loop when the problem was solved. After some customer interviews, surveys and data analysis it turned out that having the support person close the loop with the customer was a bigger driver of customer loyalty than getting the problem solved in the first place. It then took some explanation and training of the technical support staff so that they understood what customers really wanted and how to deliver it consistently.

Another client was about to embark on a major technical training program for their on-site staff, believing that customers wanted more highly trained on-site support personnel. Again, some research and analysis demonstrated that customers valued support staff that were responsive and “did what they said they would” more than pure technical training. So the training was changed to target interpersonal skills and customer satisfaction improved.

So if you aren’t sure what your customers care about, and even if you think you do, take the time to do some good customer research and then act on it. Knowing what your customers really want pays excellent retention dividends.

Remember that improving customer retention will add substantially to your business bottom line, even if it is just in having to spend less to acquire new customers. Implementing a few customer retention strategies like these is not difficult and will help you to keep your customers coming back year after year.

Check out Genroe’s blog at http://genroe1to1.genroe.com/ for more practical approaches to customer management.

About Genroe:
Adam Ramshaw is a Director of Genroe Pty Ltd (www.genroe.com). Genroe’s expertise is in practical customer management strategies and their implementation. We help our clients to derive more profit from their business though developing and implementing proven customer management strategies.

About Integrati Marketing:
Integrati Marketing Consulting are specialists in integrated marketing communications for Small Medium Business. Integrati Marketing help SMB’s to engage their target market, create demand, and gain customer insight to create value with proven integrated marketing techniques. Learn more at About Us.