Servant of Chaos

Funnel Conversion: Make it About Your Customers

It’s one thing to have a marketing insight, but quite another to do something valuable with it.

Living as we do with an abundance of data, what marketers increasingly need is a way to filter the information, distil it for insight and apply their business and brand knowledge in a way that creates value for both the business and their customers.

But where do you start?

Eloqua has compiled 40 infographics covering a swathe of marketing disciples from the back office to the front of house. There are charts on analytics and marketing automation, social media, email marketing and lead management.

Armed with this data:

• Consider your own marketing challenge
• Find a chart that speaks to your problem
• Compare and contrast the chart data to what you know about your business

Now … think about how you can close the gap or solve your challenge. Do you need help? Resources? Budget? What can you do within the next three weeks and what can be delayed until 2013?

STOP.

All this makes perfect sense. But before progressing, consider how this plays out with customer experience in mind. Which of your priorities also provide wins for your customers? What does it mean to recast your efforts through the lens of the customer?

With an abundance of data we can easily lose sight of our customers. Marketers must continue to maintain focus not on their marketing processes but on the constantly changing customer landscape. If you aren’t focusing on your customers, rest assured your competitors are.

Who Really Uses Facebook?

When you think of Facebook, the scale can be confronting:

• 1 billion members
• 45% of the North American population
• 42% of Oceania
• 35% of South America
• 270 million members in Asia

But who really uses Facebook? What do they look like? How would you characterize them?

The clever folks from Soap Creative have done us all a service by providing this neat snapshot of the 36 Faces of Facebook. See which one you are. And see if you can see your grandmother too.

36 Faces of Facebook Fans. The Good the Bad & the Ugly from Soap Creative

Asian Connections: Embracing the Digital Trajectory

Fifty four percent of the world’s population lives in Asia. That’s 3.7 billion people. And according to We Are Social, Singapore’s recent report, Asia is home to over 1 billion internet users – 80% of whom use social media (see full report below).

The numbers are impressive. And yet, they tell only part of the story.

The most compelling aspect is the trajectory of digital consumption across Asia:

• New internet users every month: 11,350,000
• Videos watched (in June 2012): 45,000,000,000
• New Facebook users each month: 10,000,000
• Mobile internet users now outnumber PC-based internet users in China: 388 million vs 380 million

Consumer Adoption is Disrupting Patterns of Media Consumption and Impacting the Buyer’s Journey

The shift to digital in Asia is characterised by the widespread use of mobile and smartphones. Almost half of the people in Asia are willing to make transactions on their mobile phones (43%). And 60% of internet users in Asia use social media to inform purchase decisions. This combination is impacting not just the top end of the marketing funnel but various points across the buyer’s journey. 

Digital Adoption Will Drive Marketer’s Thirst for Mobile Solutions

Given that more than half of Asia’s population is under 30, marketers seeking to engage these high spending, younger audiences will need to develop new digital approaches.

However, with 82% mobile penetration across Asia – and a growing population of mobile internet users - digital approaches should increasingly follow a Mobile First with a Social Heart strategy.

Marketers Will Turn to Marketing Automation to Scale Execution

While digital and social media marketing promises one-to-one conversations with customers, the rapid growth in the population of “Connected Consumers” challenges marketers’ capacity to scale. As a result, marketers will begin turning to marketing automation vendors to provide personality rich brand communications at scale.

The Shift to Digital Requires a Re-casting of the Marketing Funnel

While the information in the We Are Social report focuses on Asia, we are seeing similar shifts in markets the world over. Marketers can no longer rely on past practices as a relevant method for predicting future outcomes. Forward thinking marketers will need to begin rethink their understanding of their consumers from the outside-in. This will require a re-casting of the marketing funnel.

Look for my upcoming report CMOs: Re-casting the Marketing Funnel for Consumer Engagement, available for free later this month to all Constellation Research clients. Want to know more? Email me.

We Are Social’s Guide to Social, Digital and Mobile in Asia (2nd Edition, Oct 2012) from We Are Social Singapore

Trust is the Gateway to App Sales Success

When we search on the internet we are investing a small amount of trust in the speed, responsiveness and accuracy of the search engine that we are using. After all, the future of your brand is micro. We trust that Google or Bing is reliably trawling the web for the latest information, indexing knowledge to the deepest level and connecting the dots between what we need to know and where it can be found.

Both Google and Microsoft invest significant resources in improvements to their search engines. But it’s not just about the information source – it’s vitally about relevance. This is the scary truth about search – that the search engines already connect a vast amount of information about us and make it available to the public – to people, brands and businesses.

But this fantastic chart from Silicon Alley Insider reveals that when it comes to recommendation – specifically for app discovery – social referral accounts for almost as much as search. The research carried out by Nielsen indicated that 63% of Android and iOS users use search to discover new apps in the various app stores – only slightly in front of personal recommendation from family or friends at 61%.

But the thing that drives both of these figures is trust. We trust search and we trust our friends and family. We trust search and social. And together they can be a powerful driver of sales – for whether we like it or not – we are all retailers now.

"Australia" is Australia’s Largest Brand on Facebook

Social media can seem to be all about “me me me” – with plenty of commentary on “personal brands”, “citizen journalism”, bloggers, Twitter celebrities and the like, but some brands understand the broader trend of which social media is an enabler. With the right approach, some brands can actually use social media to bring their customer-centric strategy to life – demonstrating that social BUSINESS is about “you you you”.

Recent analysis by analytics platform SocialBakers.com reveals that a massive 25% of total Facebook users reside in Asia. And that in Australia, fashion and eCommerce (yes, more fuel for my Social Retail crusade) are the clear winners – with one exception. Australia’s most popular Facebook page is See Australia with just over 3.3 million fans.

I Know What You Did in the Last 60 Seconds

Our actions can come back to haunt us – as movie makers, novelists and storytellers the world over remind us. But what happens when the time between action and reaction reduces. What happens if we don’t have a whole summer to forget about what we did, why we did it and how it happened?

Welcome to the world of social media.

Following up on this infographic on the volume of data and activity that takes place across the web each and every minute, I thought it might scare/intimidate/excite you to know that happens to that data. The folks at Baynote have pulled together this infographic that goes some way towards explaining how your data, information and behaviour is mapped against a series of business outcomes:

• Target advertising
• Location based services
• Notifications
• Lead generation
• Account authentication

But the big question for brands and for marketers is not even “what did you do”. It is “are you ready to be held to account for your actions”. It seems that despite our personal use of social media technology, precious few companies are ready for the social web at an organisational level. How about you?

Every Minute on the Web: Statistics to Amaze You

Remember when we used to think about how many “messages” people were exposed to during the day? Some would say hundreds, some thousands. Some of these messages would be subliminal – some would be “in your face”. Many of these would be difficult to recall – others would stand out, be unforgettable. Fewer still were remarkable.

But then along came the web with its banners, text ads, affiliate links, sponsored tweets, branded content, apps and dedicated websites.

The big difference between the pre-web and post-web world is not just measurement. Sure we can capture the number of actual impressions and clicks from online advertising – but we can capture so much more. We don’t just know how many, we often know who. We know when. We know what happened before you clicked and where you went afterwards. We know who you know and what you like.

It’s called “big data” and there’s a whole lot of behavioural information trapped in the clicks and links that we all make each day on the web. The challenge we face as marketers is to sort this data in ways that are meaningful for our businesses.

But what can all this data tell us? This infographic from business intelligence platform Domo explains what’s happening with each and every minute.

Via theCuriousBrain.

For B2B, Google+ May Be Your Best Friend

For years I worked in business to business marketing in one form or another. I understood how all the different channels worked, loved the way that the newly emerging web brought immediacy to my communications and got a sense that the concept of “branding” was shifting under my feet.

And then I landed in the world of business to consumer marketing – working for an agency on big FMCG/entertainment and QSR brands. Despite years of experience I felt out of my depth. And one of the most challenging aspects was understanding the nature of SCALE. In the B2B world, your focus is on much more narrowly defined audiences – whereas for large consumer brands, scale is what works.

Over the last 10 years there has been a lot of cross-pollinating between B2B and B2C. Much of this has been driven by social media – or by our new appreciation of audiences that are a by-product of social media. Yet, I can’t help feeling a little disappointed that we haven’t learned another lesson of social media – that it’s not scale or reach that is important. It’s the engagement – and the potential to impact BEHAVIOUR – that is vital.

Take a look at this infographic from Pardot comparing Google+ and Facebook brand pages. The numbers are huge. The scale is amazing. But think about it – in B2B you often know WHO you want to reach (I don’t mean “who” in terms of a persona – I mean actual people working in actual businesses). The challenge is to find innovative and creative ways to not just reach, but to engage and prompt them to action. And if you think about that rather than the being dazzled by statistics, you might just find that Google+ is your new best friend.

Internet Trends 2012

Each year, venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers release their research and analysis into the trends they are observing across the web. Compiled by Mary Meeker, it’s packed with statistics and pithy one liners – and will provide plenty of fodder for your upcoming client presentations – especially where you need to reinforce the reports key themes - “internet growth remains robust and rapid mobile adoption is still in early stages”.

There were a few items that caught my attention:

• Growth in internet user numbers is being driven by emerging markets – with China, India and Indonesia in the top 3, with the USA down the list at number 8
• Australia ranks 14th in terms of mobile 3G subscribers – with 76% penetration and 21% year-on-year growth
• While iPad adoption is astonishing (3x the iPhone) – Android is outpacing all devices currently running at 4x the iPhone
• Mobile web traffic now accounts for 10% of all internet traffic

And while the statistics are fascinating – especially for the data nerds out there – the compelling part of this presentation is the focus on the “Reimagination of almost everything”. The report covers a wide variety of consumption habits, technologies, cultural and artistic production, information and so on – announcing what many of us already know – that the magnitude of change that is coming (or is already upon us) will be stunning.

KPCB Internet Trends 2012

Google Visualizes Your Brand

One of the benefits – and strategic advantages that Google is able to tap into each and every day – is the huge volume of data that is generated by our collective use of the free website measurement tools known as Google Analytics. Not only do these tools provide rich data and analytics capabilities to organisations and individuals the world over, that information is also aggregated by Google.

So while we are able to learn more about how people find, use, convert and engage on our websites, so too is Google able to tap this data store to reveal trends, understand behaviours and make sense of our globally connected work and life styles.

Add the abundance of information that comes from our daily use of the Google search engine, and this data store is awe inspiring.

Over the last few years, Google has made a range of tools available to tap into this data. Google Trends provides fantastic insight to search data – but the new Brand Impressions tool from Google thinkinsights team takes it a step further. You simply enter a brand name and wait while information is drawn from Google+, YouTube, Google Images and Google News, Google Maps and of course, Google Search. And in a few moments you have a nice, interactive infographic built specifically for your brand (or your clients’).

Here’s what was revealed when I queried global software brand SAP. Fascinating. And I am sure this is only the beginning. Over time, this tool is bound to improve – making it a great addition to your strategic insight toolbox. After all, data is great, visualisation can be breathtaking, but true insight is divine. Time to put your thinking caps on!