Using analytics to measure impact of video

Forrester Research recently released a report highlighting the growth of online video into a preferred medium for consumers and the resulting efforts of advertisers to better understand how their audience is engaging with their branded videos “(HINT: It’s not just about getting YouTube views.)”

The author of the report, Darika Ahrens, notes that many marketers “enthuse that video ‘can work better than text’ but struggle to validate or quantify how that can be. And most successful viral marketers seem to rely on gut instinct to create the next social video hit.” But the Forrester report puts “the data, or the science bit, behind the online video opportunity, hopefully convincing even the most hardened C-Level executive of the commercial benefits to brands using online video content.”

Unruly, a social video advertising platform that worked with Forrester on the study, offered that online video gets such attention from advertisers because:

Branded online video content is consumers’ preferred social medium. More than 50% of American and European respondents admitted to watching user-generated video at least once a month—more than blogs, music and photo-sharing sites.

In terms of user engagement, branded online video content is almost on par with display advertising.

Generating branded video content doesn’t always have to mean creating new content. Some Forrester recommendations: (1) Repurpose assets at different stages of a campaign, for example, distribute TV spots and enable fans to share them through social media channels, and (2) extend offline campaigns by releasing short, online exclusive teasers of upcoming campaigns.

With video content and improved analytics tools come new metrics that organizations should pay attention to measure the impact of online video in multiple ways—looking at more than just total view count. For example, advertisers should distinguish between paid views and views that originate from social sharing—the sharethrough metric.

Improved video analytics also allow advertisers to determine how long viewers are watching their videos, and which parts are most popular. In addition, advertisers are increasingly using in-video calls to action, which allow viewers to engage with the brand online in much the same way as display ads. This means that video is becoming more of a direct driver of demand, rather than just a branding tool.

The perfect storm for the rise of a new breed of marketer

Entrepreneur Andrew Chen blogged recently that “coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer.” We have called ourselves “marketing technologists,” but Chen’s term for the new tech-savvy marketers is “growth hackers,” who represent a cross between marketer and coder who look at the traditional question of“How do I get customers?” and answer with: “A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. On top of this, they layer the discipline of direct marketing, with its emphasis on quantitative measurement, scenario modeling via spreadsheets, and a lot of database queries.”

…all in an effort to determine what’s working. In short, this new breed of technical marketer has an engineering, not marketing background – skills that can be used to “make your product market itself.”

Projects like email deliverability, page-load times, and Facebook sign-in are no longer technical or design decisions – instead they are offensive weapons to win in the market.

Consumers are now using what Chen terms “super-viral communication platforms” that speed the adoption of new products, which means, according to Chen, fast adoption is now achieved “using APIs, not MBAs… Whereas PR and press used to be the drivers of customer acquisition, instead it’s now a lagging indicator that your Facebook integration is working.”

As examples, he cites the rapid trajectory of companies’ products that go from zero to tens of millions of users in a short span, such as Pinterest, Groupon, and Dropbox. He also takes an in-depth look at Airbnb, which used an integration with Craigslist to reach its consumers. As Chen notes, “A traditional marketer would not even be close to imagining the integration… there’s too many technical details needed for it to happen. As a result, it could only have come out of the mind of an engineer tasked with the problem of acquiring more users from Craigslist.”

When R3R’s Jeremy Reither tweeted to marketing technologist, Scott Brinker, about Chen’s article, he responded with a piece entitled “Silicon Valley Marketing Technologists: Growth Hackers.” Brinker was an easy sell: he already cited five forces that have created the perfect storm for the rise of the marketing technologist:

• the migration of money from old media to new media
• cloud computing and the migration from IT to SaaS
• the measurable nature of digital to demonstrate ROI
• a greenfield of opportunity for new entrants
• the high-velocity economics of software innovation

No matter what names we use for this new breed of marketer, Gartner’s report that by 2017 the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO tells us that technical knowhow is an increasingly critical component of any marketing executive’s background.

Government turning to cloud-based SaaS solutions

Cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (or “SaaS”) solutions are rapidly becoming the de facto standard for many businesses – especially in marketing and communications departments. But according to a study by Microsoft, one-third of small and medium organizations still aren’t using SaaS at all – some not feeling secure about having their data in the cloud. However, SaaS may be getting a credibility boost from the U.S. government, which has begun looking to the cloud for its IT needs.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) recently announced that the agency plans to rework the way it does business with its software vendors, saying its old way of contracting for proprietary software was inhibiting its flexibility and making it harder for the agency to keep up with the big data accumulated by high-tech U.S. military drones. Intelligence agents use the drone data to spot trends and provide warnings to the President of the United States and other decision makers, but the agency needs to be able to review the data quickly to aid users within mission timelines. That’s where SaaS comes in. SaaS delivers complete applications from a third-party data center over the Internet – which will give the agency more flexibility, be easier to deploy, and will result in cost savings since the agency will be using the service on a pay-as-you-go basis.

CRM company Salesforce.com, which is well known for its sales, customer service, and collaboration software, is one vendor working with the government to develop products that will allow it to adopt SaaS. Vivek Kundra, formerly the U.S. Chief Information Officer and now the Executive Vice President of Emerging Markets at Salesforce, says the company plans to help the government use SaaS to “adapt to the ‘social revolution that is taking place in the public sector.’”

Likewise, for “SMBs that want to maintain their size, but want to become more profitable, seek cost-effective, efficient solutions that match their needs for predictability and low overhead cost. Cloud services can serve both sets of criteria,” according to the Microsoft report. SaaS enables organizations – both government and private – to scale IT resources more easily while reducing costs, and focusing resources on core operations. With growing adoption in government SaaS security is getting the kind of credibility boost that may help accelerate its adoption among smaller businesses as well.

The new featured clients page - R3R.com v3

You know the feeling when you’re wearing that old jacket, and it’s time for a new one but you’re just used to the old one? And hey, those frayed sleeves aren’t that noticeable, right? That’s how we were feeling about R3R.com for the last couple years. Some nice people said there wasn’t anything “wrong” with it, but we knew better. The content and the design were dated and no longer representative of our brand, our growth, or of our focus as a service provider. A new content strategy and a website redesign was imminent, and we knew it even back in 2011. But we also knew if we were going to do an overhaul into version 3.0 we were going to do it right. So, of course, we put it off – focusing instead on more deadline-driven client work. Eventually the v3 project moved up the priority list, though, and last Friday we launched – hooray! New jacket!

First we took a step back, re-evaluated our messaging, and created a new content strategy that guides all our external communication on this blog, Facebook, Twitter, and other outlets. Then we got started on the website re-design, where a few significant changes include:

• A new color scheme. We moved away from the louder red/white/grey palette to a cooler blue and earth tones. Red is reserved for accents and calls to action (and the logo, of course).
• A responsive design. A growing percentage of our visitors are using mobile and tablet devices to visit the site. We knew we had to be more accessible to these folks. Rather than building a mobile version and a standard version of the site, however, we built this site’s layout to adjust to the size of your browser – so it should be easy to use on any device.
• A new blog layout. The old school chronological blog style has been converted to a more image-oriented, grid layout (a la Pinterest).
• A new clients page. Our client work and satisfaction defines us, so it was important that we showcase the brands we work with, and some examples of the projects we’ve done with them – in a way that allows people to check out multiple clients and work samples without navigating a bunch of different pages. It’s all organized on one page now. Much simpler.

This is the kind of work that’s never really done, but we have at least caught up to where we should be – for now. Hope you like it.

If you have any thoughts about the new design, or anything else for that matter, please leave a comment or send us a note.

The game-changing analytics of Moneyball

In Moneyball, the 2002 Oakland Athletics had to assemble a competitive baseball team, but they were facing a critical disadvantage when compared against a number of larger market teams. Hamstrung by a budget of just $41 million for player salaries, the Athletics were able to compensate for their budget shortfall and were ultimately able to compete with the larger franchises (such as the New York Yankees, which boasted more than $125 million in payroll that season) by making data-driven player picks.

Much like businesses that fail to focus on the right game-changing metrics, traditional baseball teams relied on subjective measures. In the movie, traditional scouts sometimes even evaluated potential players based on their girlfriends’ looks. The Athletics’ data-driven analytics represented “a completely new set of metrics that bore no resemblance to anything you’d seen,” according to Paul DePodesta, currently the Vice President for Player Development for the New York Mets and the engineer behind the Athletics’ data revolution. DePodesta explained that his revolution “didn’t solve baseball. But we reduced the inefficiency of our decision making.” Instead of looking at traditional stats such as batting average, RBIs, and stolen bases, the Athletics chose to focus on deeper analytics, called sabermetrics, such as on-base and slugging percentages. These statistics seemed to be more reliable indicators of success.

For organizations looking at data, many rely on performance measures that seem to matter but that may not actually drive results. For example, they look at website traffic and social media followers and draw the conclusions that their campaigns are working, when they really are having little effect on the bottom line. Instead, they should find ways to unearth more meaningful data by examining other statistics that reliably indicate ROI. According to DePodesta, one key strategy that organizations can take away from the movie is to ensure they have “a clear-eyed view of the data—which often involves filtering out emotional responses to data.” He explained that decision making is often flawed because “we constantly seek causal relationships, and we can be tricked by them.”

Moneyball presents a striking model for how many organizations, which are forced to do more with less in today’s economy, can use the wealth of tools and data available to them. But in marketing, most organizations are still using the old ways of looking at data and subjectivity in determining their strategies. By modernizing the way they apply the data at their disposal, organizations may be able to use it to identify low-cost/high-value opportunities and enjoy more success, much like the Athletics, who ended up taking the American League West Division title while winning 20 consecutive games in 2002.

Measuring success the wrong way

Earlier this year, the BRITE-NYAMA Marketing in Transition Study, conducted by Columbia Business School’s Center on Global Brand Leadership and the New York American Marketing Association (NYAMA), revealed that most organizations are still struggling to mine key trends from their data–primarily due to marketing departments’ inability to adapt to the new technology landscape.

According to the survey, 91 percent of marketing leaders—and 100 percent of chief marketing officers—think successful brands use customer data to drive marketing decisions. But the data required to make these decisions in real time is going largely uncollected. An average of 29 percent of marketers across all verticals surveyed report having “too little or no customer/consumer data,” while 39 percent believe data is collected “too infrequently or not real-time enough.” In their responses, 39 percent of marketers also acknowledge that they do not know how to “turn their data into actionable insight”; 36 percent report having “lots of customer data,” but they “don’t know what to do with it.”

And despite an overwhelming majority of the surveyed organizations deploying the latest in digital media for marketing purposes, they aren’t taking advantage of the panoply of data these tools offer. For instance, only 14 percent of companies using social network marketing “are tying these efforts to financial metrics.” In general, the marketers are focusing on traditional data, such as customer demographics, transactions, and usage in lieu of collecting customer data from mobile channels (19 percent) and social channels (35 percent).

The senior marketers also indicate they are under greater pressure to measure the return on their marketing efforts. But they are confused about how to measure the ROI: nearly a third believed measuring the audience reached is the same as measuring the ROI, while more than half do not base their marketing budgets on an analysis of ROI. Rather, 28 percent use their “gut instincts” to develop their marketing budgets; 21 percent fail to employ financial metrics in developing their marketing budget.

The report closes with several instructive recommendations, including suggestions that organizations “invest in getting some kind of data relevant to your measures” and “set specific measurable objectives for all your campaigns.” We couldn’t agree more.

Innovation Summit at Woodbury University

This weekend I stepped outside of my comfort zone to speak on a panel about the future of video in marketing – in front of an audience of fashion and lifestyle marketers in Los Angeles (at FMM’s Innovation Summit). I know next to nothing about the fashion and lifestyle industry. But that’s actually why I was invited. The event organizers asked me to contribute based on my experience in other industries. So, I came fully prepared to discuss things like data-based marketing and solutions for relating video marketing to offline and online revenue (and I fully expected to bore the fashion crowd to death). But our 30 minute panel session pushed on for nearly an hour with questions. The audience was truly engaged. But what surprised me most was how much of the insight on tap from the speakers on stage before and after me offered valuable lessons to businesses outside of fashion.

Peter Kim, CEO of Hudson Jeans opened with a session in which he described the growth of his denim brand into a multi-million dollar enterprise. His focus from the beginning was on creating a brand that resonated with consumers. The business side of things, he implied, was basically prescribed. What I assume he meant was that there are clear best practices for operating a profitable business, and so that part was easier than creating and maintaining the brand that drives Hudson. Clearly Hudson wouldn’t be able to sell as many $200 jeans as they do without consumers identifying strongly with its brand. And although I could talk all day about the benefits of running a more efficient business side of the house, most organizations simply don’t have this kind of brand resonance.

André Warren Presenting

Raman Kia, Executive Director of Digital Strategy at Conde Nast Media also gave a great presentation in which he used examples from brands like Burberry, which demonstrate well executed cross-platform (aka: transmedia) marketing campaigns using Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instragram, Tumblr, YouTube, and more to promote and create dialog around a single fashion event – each media platform showing a different perspective on the same event. This type of integrated marketing approach has been mastered by only a handful of brands, and organizations of all kinds can learn from the way they create a consistent consumer experience across multiple media outlets.

So while the fashion and lifestyle industry may be slower to adopt some of the business and technology best practices we implement in, for example, the finance and medical spaces (co-panelist Shauna Mei, founder of AhaLife said the fashion industry’s inefficiencies make it attractive to data-focused business people like her) their world of uber-creativity and critical brand focus offers some important lessons to other more stodgy industries. And let’s face it, that’s pretty much all of them.

Take a minute to reflect

Organizations able to measure the return on their marketing investment have a competitive advantage over those that can’t–or don’t. But a recent marketing survey revealed a significant gap between most organizations’ executive expectations for marketing metrics and their ability to use those metrics to show a return on investment.

The 2011 State of Marketing Measurement survey by voice-based marketing automation platform Ifbyphone revealed that four out of five executives expect every marketing effort to be measured. As Irv Shapiro, CEO of Ifbyphone, remarked, “The ease of tracking online metrics, coupled with the lagging economy, has driven the expectation that every marketing dollar needs to be accounted for.”

However, the results also showed that fewer than one-third of those surveyed know how to evaluate the return on investment of their marketing efforts. For example, under half measure the return on e-mail marketing. Even fewer—26 percent—believe they can measure the ROI on social media marketing. And only 24 percent of respondents said that they measure the return on their investment in search engine optimization.

Of the organizations that claimed the ability to measure their marketing efforts, 62 percent attempt to determine ROI by looking at the overall increase in sales, while 57 percent measure success according to the number of leads acquired. Though this report focused on private sector businesses, non-sales organizations, such as government and nonprofits, usually have measurable goals by which they can measure campaign success as well.

Many of these organizations’ inability to measure ROI results from failing to use even the most fundamental of marketing technology tools: analytics. Only 48 percent of respondents use web analytics, while 47 percent use e-mail marketing software analytics. Fewer than one-third—30 percent—use social media monitoring.

Some smaller organizations may lack the human capital or the knowhow required to measure and report the results of their marketing initiatives. But often the main issue is that organizations dive into new marketing initiatives without first setting benchmarks or considering how they will measure success. The result, of course, is that they are unable to review any completed campaign to determine what worked and what did not.

Measuring the impact of marketing efforts takes upfront effort and foresight, but it’s not just an optional competitive advantage–it’s critical to long-term success. Shapiro commented, “It’s concerning to hear that many of the future marketers of tomorrow don’t understand the importance of measuring the success of their campaigns.” He cautioned that “businesses can only get better at marketing if they are held accountable for improving upon what didn’t work in the past.”

Going nowhere fast

A new infographic reveals the results of a survey conducted by online identity management firm Vizibility, Inc. and LexisNexis on how law firms use social media to market their services. The infographic also builds upon interesting numbers about social networking from the American Bar Association 2011 Legal Technology Survey Report, which showed that 37 percent of law firms use LinkedIn, 19 percent use Facebook, and 7 percent use Twitter. Very few know what they’re getting out of it, however.

As noted by Larry Bodine, Editor-in-Chief of Lawyers.com and author of LawMarketing Blog, “You have to measure the results from social media to justify it.” And by results, he means leads and new clients: metrics that relate to real business revenue.

The majority of law firms and other organizations stop short of measuring the return on their social media investment. A majority of the respondents—nearly 57 percent—claim they’re estimating success by monitoring only the number of followers and online connections they generate. And 64 percent decide whether their campaign is effective by measuring just the resulting website traffic. Followers and visitors are straightforward and easy to track, but they have zero impact on the bottom line.

Worse, roughly 30 percent of survey respondents currently do not measure the results of their social media efforts at all: almost 22 percent of the respondents are “not sure yet” how to track their social media program’s success, and 7.5 percent don’t try.

How can organizations know whether any marketing efforts measure up if there is no yardstick? They can’t. The failure to track the metrics that matter stems from a lack of coordination within organizations between the creative team, the IT department, and the C-suite. The organizations that are more effectively coordinating marketing and technology efforts, however, are able to measure results, set performance benchmarks, iterate, and provide actionable data to decision makers—and that helps translate social media statistics into growth in an organization’s bottom line.

Full infographic below (click to view full size)  

Take small bites

The question for organizations today should no longer be “will we use analytics” but “how can we get the most out of analytics.”  Analytics can provide organizations with valuable business intelligence and insights, but a 2011 study by Gartner found that only 20%-30% of companies successfully implement their analytics solutions. The lesson learned from the success stories? Start small.

You’ve no doubt heard how unleashing the potential of analytics can benefit your sales and marketing efforts:

• Find out where you can cut costs without sacrificing performance
• Discover where your business processes can be more efficient
• Uncover how effectively your marketing efforts are driving conversions
• Understand who or what efforts are bringing in the most revenue at least cost
• Figure out what makes your customers tick

Sounds great right? Why not go for all of it – all at once? Perhaps it’s not surprising how many organizations try to do just that, and how many analytics projects end up failing when organizations try to answer all these questions simultaneously.

Gartner’s study shows between 70 and 80% of analytics (or Business Intelligence) investments end up “dying under their own weight”. This high failure rate is almost entirely because organizations try doing too much, while unfortunately achieving far too little.

Yet the proven approach is astonishingly simple. First, firmly establish your single most immediate need, and then figure out what information is missing to address that need.

Look at the above list again and pick one. That’s right – just one (to start).

As nice as it sounds in theory, you don’t actually need to solve all your problems right away with analytics—especially when deploying a new technology with which you have little experience.

It is much easier (and easier to justify) expanding a successful analytics deployment, than it is to attempt to do it all right away and risk having the whole project collapse. This can be catastrophic in larger organizations, and potentially crippling in smaller ones.

Misconceptions

Aside from the perceived complexity of analytics projects, there are a number of reasons most small to mid-sized organizations haven’t attempted to implement analytics.

It is commonly assumed a “big” IT Investment in needed to get started with analytics. This usually means buying expensive software licenses, a powerful server, and other new infrastructure to handle all the storage and processing requirements. In short—way too much for SMBs to justify on a tight budget.

The truth is since the emergence of cloud computing services, most smaller organizations don’t need to store their own data. And those that do can simply rent all the capacity needed in an instant (unlike waiting days or weeks for that new server to be installed).

Similarly, with regard to software licenses, much of the core analytics software you need is available for free or nearly free. Web analytics tools from Google and Yahoo offer a strong foundation, while CRM services like Salesforce.com include analytics features in their service packages. If you’re running social media marketing campaigns, Facebook offers free tools, with Twitter soon following suit. Beyond that there are powerful consumer analytics tools such as Kiss Metrics and Optimizely with free trials and starting costs under $30/month.

With so much analytics technology readily available for organizations, the issue is not whether you can feasibly deploy the technology—but rather figuring out which business intelligence question you want to answer, and which tool(s) you’ll use to answer it.

Scale it down

But again, the more you try do with analytics, the more complex and costly a project can become. So what do you actually need to do with your analytics investment? Answer these questions before launching an analytics program:

• What business problem(s) do we actually need to solve right now? (see above)
• What specific data do we need to solve that problem?
• How can we get this data as quickly, reliably, and/or cheaply as possible?

The goal is, of course, to produce tangible results and actionable decisions based on your analytics efforts. And reducing the scope of your project helps improve the likelihood of success.

The trend

An estimated $33.9 billion will be spent in 2012 to harness and analyze as much data as possible to reduce costs, improve sales, and aid strategic decision making. Laura McLellan from Gartner has even predicted that marketers will be spending more on technology by 2017 than their IT counterparts.

Organizations of all kinds are increasingly using analytics to aid business decisions. SMBs now also enjoy the same benefits as larger enterprises using analytics, but it pays to keep scope realistic and stay focused when implementing a new system.

Some of the material in this blog post was adapted from an online webinar by MarketBridge, on the subject of the myths of implementing analytics into sales and marketing efforts in Fortune 1000 companies. You can register for MarketBridge’s webinar here.

Power in numbers

Not long ago, when it came to collecting consumer data, a business had limited options. If the customer had an open account with the store, or if the customer volunteered some information by request, his or her name went on the store’s mailing list. As data collection options have developed, so have the marketing technologies that allow companies to mine consumer data in countless ways. Some high profile mis-steps in the use of consumer data, however, still has consumers wary of giving it up.

If a customer swipes his or her loyalty card at the supermarket, orders products online, or pays for purchases with a credit card, information about the transaction finds its way into at least one database. Personal information is included, as well as data regarding the time of day and the exact items purchased. After processing the raw data of large numbers of consumers with marketing analytics, a company can produce a surprisingly accurate picture of customers’ preferences and buying habits. This information may enable a business to predict with some accuracy what a group of customers is likely to buy, as well as when and how he or she will make the purchase.

Careful analysis of the data allows companies to make uncanny predictions. For example, Target has used its data to determine the odds that a customer’s buying history indicates a pregnancy. Such “segmentation” means that the company can spend its advertising dollars where they are likely to produce the greatest return on investment (ROI). If the data indicate the likelihood of a pregnancy, Target can send coupons for baby products, for example, or prenatal vitamins.

Getting to that level of understanding of your consumer data requires more than merely installing the latest marketing automation system. It is first necessary to define which indicators – of all the data available – provide accurate, measurable, and actionable insights. You can amass endless records of raw consumer data, much of which may be useless, so focusing on the statistics that matter most produces the best results.

Also essential to making accurate decisions – proper staffing. Someone with the ability to interpret the math behind the data must convert the numbers into language that decision-makers (executive officers and marketing directors) can understand. And all company stakeholders must coordinate efforts driven by the new findings, so as not to inadvertently sabotage another group’s plan. Key players must be effective communicators who are able to work across departmental boundaries.

Put it all together and you start to see why companies like Facebook, with its database of 800 million registered users (aka: non-paying customers), might be worth as much as the market says it is.

Consumers are protective of their personal data, and the government is getting involved to protect them. Many people feel as if companies are spying on them and invading their privacy, so it is important that companies to be accountable for the data they collect. Collection and use of consumer data must be legal, ethical, and secure, or risk quickly eroding customer relations, and erasing any benefits.

Targeting Consumers with Content

According to a B2BOnline, more than 80% of business-to-business marketers use content marketing as part of their overall marketing strategies. Content marketing now exceeds event marketing and public relations in the B2B marketer’s toolbox, according to a survey conducted by HiveFire Inc. B2B marketers are also now twice as likely to use content marketing as they are to buy print, TV and radio advertising.

The “B2B Marketing Trends 2011 Survey”  polled 366 marketers in August 2011. Participants included business owners as well as marketing executives and marketing specialists. For purposes of the survey, “content marketing” is the creation and publication of original content, such as blog posts, photos, videos, website resource pages, case studies or white papers to enhance a brand’s visibility.

Because content production is less expensive than many other types of media buys, companies are incorporating content marketing more heavily into their lead generation marketing strategies, all while optimizing the content for search engines, in order to take advantage of the long term benefits of online content publication.

78% of respondents cited driving sales/leads as the most important marketing objective for their organization. This was the number one goal of the polled marketers but they indicated that they were challenged by budget and staffing limitations. 28% of respondents cited limited budget as a top marketing challenge. 23% cited limited staff as a major concern. The survey results suggest that these are among the reasons content marketing is increasingly utilized by these companies as a cost-effective method of generating leads.

 * photo via alexmandossian.com