'Tis the Season For Social Data Mining

With Halloween now a faint memory, all of 6 days past, the retail holiday season is already in full swing. My inbox, like most people's, is absolutely full of red cheerful holiday sale messages. But, this year, much more front and center than in previous years, are the integrated social media contests/giveaways and general begging to be followed. More importantly, ever so slightly behind front and center is a new 2014 trend - explicit personal data gathering through social logins.

Today I received an email from Cost Plus World Market about a holiday giveaway. Here are some screenshots about the giveaway:

At first glance, this seems like a lovely holiday giving campaign - why not enter to win and have money given to a charity! How nice.

As I scroll down, I see that they are attempting to use this giveaway to drive additional social following. Look, you get more entries into the contest (perhaps a light version of a bribe?) if you follow them on Twitter and Instagram, and you get even more entries if you actually submit content to Instagram and hashtag it with their contest name. So a handful of people who are willing to do this in order to get a reward will be giving them some desperately needed following (at least they believe they need it) on Instagram and Twitter.

So, I click again to see what their user funnel is if I follow them on Twitter. After all, for 25 contest entries, following them doesn't seem like too much to ask ... Bang! I'm dropped into a funnel, run by a third party (Smartify) without any Cost Plus branding, that is requiring not only that I follow Cost Plus (which was the original requirement), but that I also give them access to read tweets from MY timeline. OK - if they follow me they can read my Tweets anyway, after all, the point of Tweets is to say stuff to the public.... But that's not all, they are just getting started in what they are asking me politely to give them. They want to see who I follow and follow new people on my behalf (say what!!!), update my profile (SAY WHAT!!! THEY can update MY profile on my behalf!), and POST TWEETS FOR ME! Seriously? So for 25 entries to a $500 giveaway, I am being asked to give basically FULL ACCESS to my Twitter account, including allowing them to tweet on my behalf, to a random 3rd party (not even the company that I have a relationship with).

Please, Cost Plus email users - DO NOT DO THIS! To all consumers - READ the permissions they are asking you to give and consider whether it is truly a fair trade for what you are trying to get.

Please, from one marketer to another, Cost Plus, review your contest user experience funnel, and don't let this 3rd party take advantage of you and your consumers.

My guess is that they probably don't even know that this screen exists. They probably signed up for this vendor because it was cheap and enabled them to do this contest on a short timeline with limited resources, and they didn't even check to see what their users would be asked to do (I've seen this happen way too many times, especially around the holiday season). At least, I hope that's what happened, because if they knew that they would be using their email list to feed this 3rd party's data mining at the expense of their valued customer relationships, they are probably in serious strategic trouble as a company, and I really like buying my moroccan harissa and dusseldorf mustard from them.

This whole experience has given me a reason to take a step back and think about the state of marketing and social data as we enter into this holiday season. This experience, while anecdotal, is not unusual. It is a representation of a new norm that itself is representative of our society's quickly changing tolerance for data access and gathering among companies. And that change has huge implications for marketers and consumers.

Social Media Marketing - Not Just for Brand and Sales Goals Anymore

As the social media landscape has changed, users and companies have evolved in their activities. That is not a huge surprise, although it is always interesting at the beginning of a season to identify the iterations from the previous year. Instagram, while a dot on the horizon two years ago and a faint whisper for the most advanced last year is now front and center in many of these contests, despite the fact that they don't actually have a robust ad platform or an easy way to manage contests that follow the legal requirements to disclose rules clearly.

Now, do these Instagram/Pinterest/Facebook/Twitter contests work? What is the long term value of an instagram follower acquired through participation in this type of contest? Will their seasonal, contest-driven participation result in an on-going deeper relationship with the brand and deeper pockets when it comes to purchase time?

Probably it will for some, but the bigger question that brands need to ask is for how many of the primary target audience will a contest/giveaway strategy work, and could that level of engagement have been achieved with an alternative, more authentic long term engagement strategy. When limited time and money are on the line, as they always are during the holiday season, brands MUST not only focus on what a particular initiative can achieve (look we gained 50 Instagram followers!), but what other results their teams might achieve with a range of potential campaign strategies (perhaps a thoughtful Facebook story series with targeted ads would have gained 5,000 followers who would be more likely to share and buy for the same cost).

Analyses of social media contests/giveaway success in the past leave a lot to be desired both in good data and in clear impact on revenues. Many brands know this, yet they also know that they need to check the social media box when they are presenting their seasonal strategy to their skeptical board, and they know that there is something untapped yet incredibly valuable lying within the heaps of consumer social network data, which is why they have become more and more aggressive in using said contests/giveaways as an underhanded way to gain more data about consumers.

Suddenly these contests are not driven so much by branding or sales goals, they are driven by data acquisition goals, and THAT is what makes 2014 so truly different than previous years. "Want to enter our contest? Great! Now just give us access to your social media accounts in order to enter. No purchase necessary... but you must pay us in data... and we're not even going to pretend that that's not what's going on."

The New Online Currency that's not Bitcoin

Now, depending on which side of the line you live on, either as a marketer or a consumer, this environment can be either really good or really bad. Many marketers are excited about how increasing consumer participation and comfort with sharing social media access has enabled them to build their prospective customer base and engage with their existing base at a deeper, more personalized level. All brands who do this will argue that this is a clear benefit and improvement for the consumer.

Despite groaning in the WSJ and other media, I would argue that many, perhaps even most consumers at this point would agree with the marketers' assertion in practice - they like getting a special coupon for a product they were going to buy anyway - but they would still disagree in principle. We are still uncomfortable with the black box of who is doing what with our data, and we're pretty sure Facebook and Google are up to no good, we're just not totally sure how. Scenes from "Minority Report" stream through our minds as we open Facebook only to be re-targeted with the exact products that we looked at an hour ago on the Sak's Fifth Avenue website. "How did they find me!" many consumers wonder, as orwellian visions dance through their heads. We can delete or mark as spam emails from these brands as they hit our inbox, but as they follow us around our social networks, busting their way into our newsfeed as we look at pictures of our adorable puppies and babies, they are inserting themselves into a different part of our online lives, in a more insidious way... and in a way that brands find exceptionally valuable.

The Value of Social Data to Brands

Let's talk a little bit about the value to brands. First, there is the obvious example that when they re-target me on Facebook, showing me a product I was interested in, in some % of cases I will buy that product, and I may be more likely to buy it than had I not been followed around the internet. When I follow a brand on a social network, it is like a personal endorsement of that brand to my friends, and I am more likely to receive and share their organic content, which is a good deal for them.  However, what are they actually getting from me when I login to their website or enter a contest through a social media login, that they wouldn't have otherwise had? How can they use that data to their advantage?

When I, as a member of their email list, engage with a brand contest and login through Facebook or Twitter to enter (despite the fact that I already have an account directly with the retailer), they are able to learn infinitely more about me than they ever would have been able to get purely from my interactions with them. Up to this point, they know what I have given them - potentially my name, address, email address - other info that I was required to give them in order to complete a purchase. Now, they can already pay third party companies that will match this data with online profile data anonymously, but with a simple social media login that has certain permissions bullet points, they will be able to add to their picture of me in a very specific way: who I follow (people and brands), what I like, who I'm related to, and all sorts of other juicy details that can paint a very clear picture of who I am. If I'm a big sharer, they might even know what I ate for dinner last night. Oh, and if I'm not paying attention, they can post on my behalf...

Managing Your Data

Now to a certain degree, how much data marketers can get from me as a consumer depends on two major factors: 1) whether I am willing to check the terms & conditions box when I sign up for their contest, since it is legally required that they specify what access they are getting to my account and 2) how much information about myself I keep on social networks. Both of these require effort on the part of the consumer.

Managing the first means that if I see a brand or company asking for permissions that I don't want to give, I can't enter their contest or engage with them. In many ways, that is a loss for both of us. If they didn't ask to have full access to my profile, they would have had a longer term relationship with me - but with their obvious data fishing, I was turned off to both their contest and their brand as a whole. While I am one example and there are millions of people who sign up for everything without reading the Ts & Cs, there are also millions of otherwise qualified consumers who would be willing and interested in starting a relationship with a brand that doesn't require such a commitment of personal data.

Managing the second also requires sacrifice and effort on the part of the user. Like many consumers, I was a die-hard Facebook user when I first got my account (way back in 2003 when I was a student at Stanford, one of the first schools to gain access to the social network that was named after our freshman "facebook" - a printed paper booklet with pictures of our fellow students that we could use to learn the names and faces of our classmates and/or decide who we wanted to invite to parties based on superficial characteristics). By about 2007 with the increase in spam and unclear privacy policies I'd pulled it back, and now I use my personal account primarily to communicate with those who insist on using Facebook instead of email and to voyeur old connections who I don't know well enough to send a friendly email to or meet for coffee in person. Yet, this costs me something - it means that every time I post on Facebook I have to think about whether I want random strangers and brands to have access to my info. I would certainly be more active if I wasn't optimizing for my own privacy, and I would like to be able to offer better updates to my global friends who I can't communicate with en masse through any other medium (at least until another one comes along). I didn't even post my wedding pictures until others at my wedding did it for me. It would have been nice to be carefree in posting, but I didn't want to give them the satisfaction of another nugget of my personal data. That was my choice, but one that I would prefer not to have to make.

There is a wide spectrum of what consumers are willing to do with social media, and having run many social media communities and campaigns as a marketer, I have seen the full range of consumer behavior: there are the many who don't ever click, there are those who click but don't take a further desirable action, there are those who share but don't participate themselves, and there are those who click, share, enter, comment, repeat. Depending on the behaviors, demographics, and interests of the target audience of the campaign, a brand's audience will distribute into these buckets differently. The clearer the reward and relevancy to them, the more the brand can nudge them into the action buckets, and yet, as relevant as the campaign and as enticing as the reward is, there is still a barrier in the user experience, that if done in a sloppy/creepy/obvious way, will also limit a brand's success.

In short, when a brand makes it clear that it is using social media to blatantly take advantage of the consumer's data, they are less likely to gain the warm and fuzzy benefits of social media, ie, the authentic brand advocacy that comes with a follower and advocate who believes in the brand and shares their love of it with their friends and networks. And that authenticity cannot be bought, not with dollars and not with data.

Key Takeaways for Both Sides

Marketers:

1) Lay out numerous campaign options for the holiday season. Estimate impact on core metrics before deciding what to do, because the opportunity cost of choosing the wrong option is high, even if you can't measure it. Campaigns with an authentic human element that is expanded over the course of a multi-week timeline are most effective at driving engagement. 

2) Don't choose campaigns/initiatives/platforms just because they will help you check a box on your road map. Just because everyone is asking you about Instagram, doesn't mean that it's the best platform to engage with your target audience, or that it is most effective at driving your holiday goals. Stand up for the initiatives/platforms/implementations that you truly believe will work the best with your target audience. 

3) Don't alienate your existing audience by pushing too hard for them to give you the keys to their data. If you build an authentic, trusting relationship with them, they will willingly share what they want to with you. Don't buy it, and don't try to force it. 

4) Vet 3rd parties. Review the entire privacy and data policy of any vendor you work with. Vet the user experience before you launch. Demand real examples of similar contests or other campaign experiences so that you can decide if you want your valued customers to have that experience under the auspices of your brand. 

5) DO NOT ask consumers to give you full permissions to post and act on their behalf on social media. You won't even benefit from doing this, and you will risk ruining your relationship with them. Do not use 3rd parties who ask for these permissions.

Consumers:

1) READ all permissions that you are being asked to give to an app/contest/company. DO NOT give them access that you don't think they should have. If that means not moving forward, then don't move forward. You will find another contest/app/company to engage with that won't require such permissions. If you do move forward, it will become harder and harder in the future to find alternatives that don't require so much data - after all, you were willing to give it, why would they pull back on future initiatives?

2) Think about what data you are putting on social networks. Don't put data that you don't want to have used for ad targeting. 

3) Reward brands who don't employ sketchy tactics. Engage directly with and advocate for brands you like that treat you right. It will encourage more of them to act that way and will reduce the temptation in the future for brands to employ more aggressive tactics to drive your engagement. 

Stay tuned for more from the DigiMarketeer blog! 

For custom marketing consulting services that will add solid foundations and integrated, consumer-oriented approaches to your 21st century marketing visit us at www.DigiMarketeer.com. 

Conversion Funnel Series: Action & Advocacy

Today we've made it to the final installment of our "Marketing Planning with the Conversion Funnel" series, and we are rounding towards the finish line with Action (ie Conversion!) and Advocacy (getting your customers to tell everyone how awesome you are). Review the previous posts: Intro, Awareness, Consideration & Interest, if you'd like more background.

To set the stage one last time: the core concept is that different marketing channels reach users at different stages of their decision-making process, and therefore, you need to understand the user's mindset, the Conversion Funnel, and each marketing channel's strengths and weaknesses, in order to be successful with your marketing. 

As a reminder, in the world of the Conversion Funnel, you basically reach larger, less-targeted audiences towards the top of the funnel and smaller, more-targeted audiences towards the bottom of the funnel. Each end of the funnel comes with its benefits and its drawbacks, so you need to understand where your goals and strengths lie and optimize all of your channels to work in the ways that they are designed to, together.

Here's our nifty visualization for reference:

Sealing the Deal

In the case of Action and Advocacy, at this point your users have already arrived at your conversion location (website, brick & mortar store, etc.) at least once. Your upper funnel marketing activities, including brand awareness marketing and the digital collection and cultivation of qualified users, have primed your users to want to continue the process with you, and now it's your job to escort them seamlessly through the final conversion path, straight into the land of satisfied returning and advocating customers. 

If you have done your upper funnel activities correctly, then the experience at this stage only needs to continue the positive experience that has already been initiated. As long as you don't give them a reason to distrust you or jump out of your funnel, then you've got this part covered! That said, a disruption of the user's expectations at this point can be a fatal mistake -> they have already invested time and energy in you, so if they feel betrayed in some way, that betrayal may feel personal. 

For example, if a company set unattainable price expectations at the Consideration phase on SEM (Google ads) by saying "Up to 50% off" in their ad text when almost nothing on the site is actually 50% off, they may get the CTR and the click, but the conversion will be tougher, because the user could be annoyed that they are not getting the advertised 50% off -> it makes the company seem dishonest. "What else are they misleading me about?" the user may ask. This type of tactic can immediately change a happy potential customer into a disillusioned one, and the data on whether this is happening will only show up in the on-site metrics (because CTR will generally be higher). Only by reviewing bounce rates and conversion rates will the marketer be able to tell that this type of language is alienating customers who may have otherwise converted (check out the post on the epic battle between ROI v. CTR for more examples of this conflict and how to resolve it). 

And so, before marketers rest on their laurels, counting their qualified traffic and calling it a day, there are some final steps that must be taken if the company is to achieve the maximum value from their investment in the entire funnel, and if the marketing team is to achieve their goals for revenue and ROI (after all, without the conversion, neither of these metrics will be very good, despite amazingly ingenious marketing strategy up to this point).

Enabling and motivating your users to convert to customers

1) Make sure that the landing page from all digital Interest & Consideration pathways is ideal for the user. Examples:

• Match user specificity with landing page specificity: Generic users should go to generic pages, specific users should go to the most relevant specific pages. 
• If an email advertised a certain product category, the email should go to the most relevant page. 
• If any advertising featured a specific sale, language about that sale and how to receive the discount should be very clear on the landing page and throughout the funnel. 
• Look & feel should be highly aligned with all external marketing material -> a noticeable change in tone or sentiment can jolt the user out of the process and make them question whether you are the company they thought you would be.

2) Make sure that last-minute decision-making factors are clearly addressed. Examples:

• If you have good reviews, make sure those reviews are clearly visible. 
• If you are primarily targeting sign-ups and profile creation, make it VERY clear what the value of a sign-up/profile is and what a good one looks like. 
• Make sure that the user has all of the product/service info they need right in front of them when they are making the "add to cart" decision.
• If you feel the need to charge crazy shipping prices, set some expectation before the $80 shipping price tag slips up on the final screen (consider not doing this in today's competitive landscape, you'll be hard pressed to properly compete, but of course, there are always exceptions). 
• Does your % discount have an absolute $ maximum limit (generally, it shouldn't)? Make it VERY clear before the user puts in the 25% off coupon code for their $500 purchase only to be extremely annoyed when they only get the max $100 off instead of the 25% offered. 
• Be careful using up-sells/add-ons in the final funnel. You may make money from these, but if they annoy a certain % of users enough to bounce and never return, you need to look at the opportunity cost of this strategy as it relates to immediate conversion and LTV (Lifetime value). Use real data to get a balanced understanding of whether the add-on complexity is helping or hurting you. If you are not A/B testing, it will almost always look like it's helping you, because you are not measuring the opportunity cost of the bounces. 

3) Make the conversion AS EASY AS POSSIBLE! Examples:

• The navigation on the site should make it exceptionally easy for the user to follow the path that you've initiated through to conversion, yet it should make it possible for them to jump out of that path if they have accidentally been pushed in the wrong direction (for example, making your "home" and left nav clear). 
• Does the user need to use an app or tool to customize something before they convert? Optimize the hell out of the UX of that tool. No matter how glossy it looks, if it gets in the way of conversion, it's hurting not helping. 
• Avoid negative surprises of any kind. Higher price, longer shipping time, too much personal information required, etc. While these decisions are rarely owned by the marketing team, they have a huge impact on conversion. Marketers will need to work cross-functionally to make sure that the company is aligned on the strategy around these issues, and to make sure that if the company sees value in them, that the marketing strategy and ROI goals are adjusted accordingly. 

Transitioning Action to Advocacy

When the above rules are followed, the company has a unique and valuable opportunity in today's climate -> they can enable their newly converted customers to become their direct brand advocates. This allows the conversion funnel to become more of a cycle, with the happy customers serving as a valuable (and free!) addition to the Awareness top of the funnel. Lots and lots of studies show the impact of "word of mouth" advocacy on customer decision making, and with the state of social media today, it is easy for companies to funnel their happy customers into megaphones of brand advocacy across their entire social networks. 

However, in order for this to work, customers have to be willing and able. This means that:

• The UX of the entire funnel needs to be of such high quality to the user that they are motivated to share their new love of your brand with their networks.
• The sharing UX post-conversion needs to be easy to use and comfortable for the user's sense of privacy. Don't ask them to share the exact product that they bought. Don't ask them to say anything specific. Don't automatically share on their behalf! Do ask them to follow your brand on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest -> this will both create a headline on some platforms that they have followed your brand (the first stage of advocacy) and set them up to receive your social media content in the future (which they will then be able to share and engage with on an on-going basis). 
• Never let an external entity or partner muddle your post-conversion UX, even when you get a kickback from them. The post-conversion screen is your first opportunity to make your customer feel warm and fuzzy that they converted with you, and they should feel nothing but happy and confident that their trust was well-placed. Featuring a spammy affiliate website with "great offers" or a partner whose service is not clearly relevant could make your new customer question whether their personal info (including credit card info) will be safe with you. Your partners reflect on you, so be wise and control this UX tightly. 

Hopefully you found the Conversion Funnel series useful! Stay tuned and subscribe for more posts on many other topics near and dear to the 2014 Digital Marketer's heart!

For help customized to your business needs, contact us at: www.DigiMarketeer.com!

Conversion Funnel Series: Interest & Consideration

Today we've made it to Part III of our "Marketing Planning with the Conversion Funnel" series (part 1 here and part 2 here), and we've entered the territory where digital marketing really shines -> driving user Interest and Consideration. 

To set the stage again: the core concept is that different marketing channels reach users at different stages of their decision-making process, and therefore, you need to understand the user's mindset, the Conversion Funnel, and each marketing channel's strengths and weaknesses in relation to those stages, in order to be successful with your marketing. 

As a reminder, in the world of the Conversion Funnel, you basically reach larger, less-targeted audiences towards the top of the funnel and smaller, more-targeted audiences towards the bottom of the funnel. Each end of the funnel comes with its benefits and its drawbacks, so you need to understand where your goals and strengths lie and optimize all of your channels to work in the ways that they are designed to, together.

Here's our nifty visualization for reference:

In the case of the Interest and Consideration sections, which I am combining into one discussion because they share many qualities and can sometimes blur together, your target user will likely already have some awareness of you or your product/service, and be scoping the marketplace for more information. 

The main difference between Interest and Consideration is intent, with interested users entering into the first stage of proactive action (remember, this is after they have been made aware of you or your product/service) and now they are taking the next step to become more acquainted. By the time they reach Consideration, there is a stronger intent to move forward and the question is not whether they want to take an action but how, when and where. This is the point at which you need to most actively convince them to take the action with you versus your competitors, and at which your higher-up conversion funnel activities could make or break you, unless you are clearly, consistently the lowest price competitor in a fully commoditized market (in which case, may the cheapest price win!).

For these stages, the marketer should be focused on initial relationship acquisition and user engagement for "Interest" and relationship reinforcement for "Consideration" -> this is the point when the established relationship and brand feelings feed directly into action. 

While there is a very wide range of Awareness marketing options that differ heavily based on a marketer's goals and industry, the marketing channels best suited to driving Interest and Consideration are quite consistent. 

In most cases, marketers should have all of these bases covered:

• Search -> casting the net to collect the fruits of "Awareness" and funnel the user where you want them to go. Setting the tone and the direct landing path for the actions to come.
• Social Media -> building the relationship by providing on-going value before and after a customer converts. Solidify your access to the two-way conversation with the user by motivating them to follow you, and then following through by consistently providing them content that they want to engage with and share. When successful, this will then feed back into the Awareness and Interest segments through their word-of-mouth. Note that you cannot "force" them to follow you or engage, you must provide them with an experience that motivates them to choose to take these actions, and therefore to be successful you must put their needs and wants before your brand's (and ideally your brand messaging should be solidly aligned to your target user so that there is no conflict here. If you find that your brand messaging is not resonating with your audience, then you need to dig in and re-align -> no one wants to be JC Penney...).
• Contextual Display -> reiterating your message and brand while the user is browsing related content such as articles and reviews.
• Reviews -> showing the considering/comparing user that you are objectively the best choice.
• Your website -> showing relevance and trust elements that motivate the user to sign up for your email list (another form of the long-term relationship), follow you on social media, return for purchase, and/or follow-through with purchase right now.
• Retargeting -> after the user has been on your site, reiterate your brand and message in an even more targeted way. Be careful about whether your target user will be sensitive to privacy issues. If so, avoid this option, as it will likely backfire. 

Let's use GoDaddy as an example:

I like GoDaddy as an example because they cultivate users throughout the entire conversion funnel, starting with awareness not just for their brand, but for their entire category. 

GoDaddy sells domains and a number of add-on services for people who want to have a website, especially smaller businesses and individuals. They are one of many services who do this, and in many cases they are not the most convenient or the cheapest. Yet, they have done a fantastic job of building awareness for their category among average individuals -> people who otherwise might not know how to buy a domain at all. Their Awareness outreach is notable due to their splashy Superbowl commercials and other television advertising, which are unusual for a product/service that would otherwise be considered technical. But, they know their target audience, and their target audience are people who watch and respond to TV commercials.

And so, once the user has emerged from becoming aware of 1) the fact they they can buy a domain, 2) the fact that they should buy a domain and 3) the fact that GoDaddy sells domains, now it is up to GoDaddy to coax them along, all the way to the end of the conversion funnel. They definitely understand this, because they have cast an appropriate net for users entering the Interest and Consideration stages. 

Let's take a look at the Google search results for a typical search by a user who is somewhere in the Interest/Consideration space:

You'll notice that GoDaddy is dominating both Paid and Organic search results in top positions for both. Their ad text for both SEM and SEO is highly customized for the value propositions that their newbie target audience will care about -> low price, customer service, largest domain name service. They even have a call-to-action in the headline -> "Compare us" -> which is a perfect call-out to the Consideration user. 

Also notice that GoDaddy has 74k followers on Google+ (they have another 636K on Facebook with a current 28k "engaged" which is a pretty good engagement ratio), and so they have set up all of the additional social nets to capture and cultivate potential users through social media. 

Once on their website, the primary conversion action is the first thing you see (the domain name search box at the top):

And it is followed up by trust elements:

Their social media content strategy is focused on information that is useful to their target audience, perfect for cultivating an on-going interest and a long-term relationship. Their content features information and tools for small businesses and individuals with websites, and you'll note, as is true for almost all successful social media programs, they are not aggressively upselling their own products. They are sharing useful and interesting content to their target user, and therefore, their users are choosing to follow them and share their content. 

If they were to post coupons or "buy a domain now" language every day, they would not be using their social media channel successfully - they would likely be alienating the customers that they were hoping to cultivate. Do you want to receive aggressive marketing language every day? Would you trust and love a brand that made you? Probably not, unless that's what the brand is supposed to do (like coupon affiliates). 

GoDaddy's social content is sending a message to their interested potential users that they are a trustworthy partner who goes the extra mile to help small businesses thrive. The next time that small business owner needs any sort of web service, they will be more likely to check out what GoDaddy has to offer, and they will be more likely to purchase that service from them. Maybe it won't happen today, maybe not tomorrow, but when the user's need arises, it will happen, and the social content strategy can gently cultivate that action over time. 

Also note, that the social content strategy here works for both potential customers in the interest/consideration phase as well as for CRM. The info is equally useful to users who may have already purchased from GoDaddy in the past as it is for users who are considering it in the future. Therefore, all of the budget and effort that goes into this social channel will pay off doubly, both in the acquisition front and in the retention/lifetime-value front. Given that posting this content is free, except for the cost of the team leading it, it's possibly one of the best deals in all of marketing. 

Key Takeaways:

While the GoDaddy example is only one company in one industry, they demonstrate excellent execution (and successful results), from properly using the conversion funnel and optimizing messaging for users at their point in the funnel. 

Just remember, you can't force the user down the funnel faster than they want to go! Doing so will likely nudge a sensitive user out of your funnel, because aggressive marketing can be a turn-off during the important relationship development and cultivation stages. 

That said, many users are ready to push quickly through the conversion funnel on their own, sometimes jumping in so fast that they breeze through all stages in one quick slalom. For these users, you must make the path as easy and enticing as possible. 

It is possible to address both the jumpers and the meanderers successfully at the same time, but knowing how your customers typically push through the funnel will help you prioritize your marketing channel planning and your user experience. Do they like to take a long time? Optimize more heavily to communicate with them regularly while they decide. Do they like to jump through quickly? Optimize more heavily to help them skip through to the end of the conversion on the spot. Knowing your customers will be the key to making this prioritization correctly. 

The farther down you get in the funnel, the more you need to know your user and accommodate their wants and needs. When you are successful, you can drive revenue at a great ROI, because the marketing channels at these stages are cheaper (usually CPC and/or organic/free) and more targeted than the awareness stages. But, if no one knows enough about your company or category, you may have trouble finding enough people to start the journey with you, so you need to balance that need with your ROI considerations. 

Stay tuned for the final installments of the Conversion Funnel series and many more topics near and dear to the 2014 marketers heart!

For customized advice & strategic consulting services visit us at DigiMarketeer.com.

Conversion Funnel Series: Audacious Awareness

We recently kicked off a series of posts about how to use the 2014 Conversion Funnel to improve your marketing strategy and goal-setting. Today we will jump right into the top of the funnel with Awareness.

To set the stage again: the core concept is that different marketing channels reach users at different stages of their decision-making process, and therefore, you need to understand the user's mindset, the Conversion Funnel, and each marketing channel's strengths and weaknesses in relation to those stages, in order to be successful with your marketing. (You can read the full kick-off post here). 

As a reminder, in the world of the Conversion Funnel, you basically reach larger, less-targeted audiences towards the top of the funnel and fewer, more-targeted audiences towards the bottom of the funnel. Each end of the funnel comes with its benefits and its drawbacks, so you need to understand where your goals and strengths lie and optimize all of your channels to work in the ways that they are designed to, together.

Here's our nifty visualization for reference:

Introduction to Awareness

Awareness is a complex topic because it is both the easiest and the hardest element of the Conversion Funnel to fully understand. 

At a peripheral level, it is easy to understand - for many people, this is advertising. Driving awareness is about getting your target audience to know about your product or service and about you as a brand. This is the stage where you can reach the most potential customers.

Awareness can be so powerful as a goal that it motivates advertisers to pay for the production and airtime of Superbowl commercials and all of the supplemental costs associated with it (measurement, additional air-time, related marketing initiatives, etc.). It's what Mad Men is all about. It's the source behind the millions of billboards all over the country. It is what most people were exposed to as children watching Saturday morning cartoons before DVR, Netflix and internet television exploded a few years ago. Awareness advertising is ingrained in our culture. 

Awesome, where do we sign up? you ask...

Not so fast, unfortunately....Channels that drive Awareness are also generally the most expensive channels. They require higher up-front investment than lower-funnel digital channels, and they are the hardest to measure accurately. Therefore, while the creativity and wide reach is often attractive, they are also a risky investment that is not in any way guaranteed to pay off. 

Is Awareness Marketing Necessary?

These days, many companies can achieve sustainable success with minimal investment in the Awareness channels, which is a phenomenon that has developed with the emergence of the digital age. Think about companies like Zappos and Amazon, both of which invested minimally in traditional marketing channels like television and print. Instead, they built their success through being very savvy in converting a higher % of fewer users (who were more highly targeted) lower down on the funnel through digital channels like Search combined with an awesome user experience and competitive prices/policies. 

Over time, they built great relationships with their users throughout all stages of their user interactions, which allowed them to develop a higher lifetime value per customer, which has now allowed them to develop strong brand clout without the help of a Superbowl commercial (they are great examples of the arrow on the Conversion Funnel chart that shows the cycle between post-conversion customer advocacy and brand awareness). Interestingly, now that Amazon has become a more diverse brand, they invest in Awareness channels for new products like the Kindle and Amazon Prime, but at their core they developed primarily with the digital-focused strategy.

Amazon's transition into more Awareness advertising demonstrates an important point: whether similar success is possible is highly dependent on industry and business model. When Amazon was a price-competitive e-commerce company, they were able to be quite successful with lower-funnel advertising. When brand is established somewhere else (such as at the product level, ie you're buying a Nespresso machine from Amazon, so Nespresso has taken on the brand burden and Amazon is winning as the middle-man) or isn't important at all, this technique can work. But now that they are a media company who is launching new-to-market products, they are investing more in traditional Awareness channels, because if no one is aware of and therefore searching for their e-reader, those lower-funnel channels will be severely limited in their scope.

Driving Success

Most traditional marketing formats are optimized to achieve the Awareness goal. They cast a wide net of potential customers, and thus, if successful, they make the entire Conversion Funnel bigger, which could result in a big win, maybe even category ownership.

This is the stage where the magic of a Mad Men creative brainstorm comes in, and where many non-marketers focus their view of what marketing/advertising is as an industry. The creative strategy can make the difference between the Superbowl commercial that people love and keep talking about and the one that falls flat and creates backlash against the un-cool brand that came up with such a stupid concept. 

Life is tough at the top of the funnel. Success can be hard to predict, and while artistry plays an important role, one could argue that truly understanding the customer and the competition and following up with the appropriate budget, focus groups, market research, and measurement strategy may be more important to the full picture of success (check out the NPR Planet Money podcasts here and the follow-up here for an interesting assessment of Lincoln v. Audi's brand strategies to get some background).

Within this unpredictable, expensive environment, while a very successful awareness strategy can simultaneously push users through Awareness, Interest, and Consideration, seamlessly escorting a user closer and closer to the conversion goal, one thing is very predictable: Awareness channels can never take the user all the way through the funnel on their own. 

This is where the hard part comes in: in order for awareness to work, all lower elements in the funnel must be in place to assist and coax the user into reaching their final destination, or else a leak may let all of those users fall out before they make it through. 

Basically, despite a creatively awesome Superbowl commercial, if Cheerios aren't on the shelf at the store when the user wants them, if the price isn't right, or if any number of other elements stands in the way of the conversion, then the creativity and emotional punch of the commercial is meaningless. It's a great starting-point, but it needs to pass the ball to the rest of the channels in order to make the goal.

Real World Examples

Here are two quite different real world examples to demonstrate Awareness channel function and dysfunction:

1) The Big Brand Car case:

In the last conversion funnel post, I mentioned that when I worked at Google, we had a famous case study of a large car company who invested heavily in a Superbowl commercial to launch awareness for their new hybrid car, but didn't invest in marketing channels that supported the rest of the funnel. From a creative perspective, the ad was a win - it struck a chord of nostalgia perfect for an emotional dive deeper into the funnel from Awareness right into Interest. People were talking about it and were taking actions to learn more by Googling terms related to the ad. 

However, this car company did not coordinate its brand and digital channels, and they didn't invest in the digital marketing presence in Search, Display, Social Media or their own website that would have enabled them to seamlessly escort their newly aware and interested prospective customers deeper into the funnel - perhaps through a Search Engine straight to their main brand website, into an engaging social media contest, or to their local dealer's websites with a special Superbowl sale.

They didn't do any of these things. They didn't coordinate internally and didn't support any sort of complementary Search campaign. In the meantime, their primary competitor did somehow anticipate their creative strategy and did create a Search campaign. When engaged users searched for terms relating to their Superbowl commercial, they clicked on the competitor's ads and went straight to the competitor's website. Not only did the company that paid the cost of production and air-time for a Superbowl commercial that was creatively successful not gain the benefits from their investment, their competitor did!

Had they invested in the additional, lower-funnel channels (a Search campaign, contextual display targeted to relevant conversations, a complementary Social Media campaign/contest boosted by Social ads) and optimized them to support the big-budget Awareness campaign, they could have made an epic win. Instead, they wasted the fantastic creative idea and funneled the positive user sentiment to their competitors.

2) The B2B SaaS case:

B2B SaaS companies typically shouldn't run a Superbowl commercial or television commercials at all. Their target audience is such a niche group (professionals with the power to sign contracts & make vendor decisions), that casting the wide, expensive television net is not going to be worth the money for them. The closest example to this would be GoDaddy's yearly Superbowl commercials, however their target audience is not CMOs or CTOs of successful companies, rather it is more an average person or small business owner who does not yet have a web presence - a much wider net than a typical SaaS target customer.

Add to that, the often complex nature of what makes a B2B SaaS company's value proposition stand up against its similarly complex competitors. This is a very different problem than what a big brand CPG company is solving with their Awareness campaigns. A big CPG marketer (like General Mills) is focused on creating a warm and fuzzy feeling that will stick with the user and translate to their purchase of that brand's products over other very similar products at the grocery story (Ex: the Cheerios commercial). A B2B SaaS company doesn't need many tiny purchases from high volumes of people, they need a few large contracts signed by educated professionals. 

So, the B2B SaaS company will first need to identify which Awareness channels are even relevant to them - if not television, then perhaps PR, Trade Events, and LinkedIn Display ads or similar. But before choosing the channels and allocating budgets, the company must understand how their chosen channels are likely to interact. 

Any strategy will need to be targeted to a clearly identified target audience. In the case of targeting higher level marketers of mid- to large- size companies, relevant PR (like a shout-out from Tech Crunch) can help legitimize and get to thousands of industry eyeballs, but likely won't be enough to motivate most target users to actually take an additional action. This is a good awareness channel, but without additional help, it may not coax enough users lower into the funnel. 

LinkedIn Display ads could potentially add to the awareness pool and they can be targeted to users with the appropriate profiles. When paired with mentions in Tech Crunch that already added some legitimacy to the company, these could be even more powerful, but these too are likely not engaging or noticeable enough on their own to motivate most Fortune 500 CMOs to proactively seek more info on the spot (they're busy!). If they do click, the Saas B2B marketer should be ready to pull them into the funnel with an awesome website targeted to their needs and desires. 

Let's now add Trade Events to this mix. Perhaps a group of users has already been exposed to the brand on Tech Crunch, has maybe seen the LinkedIn Display ads, but now they are attending the biggest industry conferences and they can meet the people behind the name. This is an important moment that will bridge the gap between the other awareness channels and the rest of the funnel, and a logo pen is not going to cut it.

In this industry, companies must compete on values like quality of the service -> whether it actually meets the client's business need, and can the client trust that the service and the team will continuously meet their needs and bring only good things from the partnership. 

If the B2B Saas company has the budget and resources, rather than simply representing at existing trade conferences, they have the opportunity to really make a splash - by hosting their own conference. This can the B2B equivalent of a Superbowl commercial, and like a Superbowl commercial, the emotion that the event arouses in the user will be paramount to success or failure. 

If the conference is able to bring respected experts to discuss relevant and timely concepts in a modern, comfortable atmosphere, then the brand has the opportunity for all of the attendees to associate their sense of value with the hosting brand, even when that brand is not the primary speakers. In fact, in general, the brand should not be the speakers, or else the conference will just seem like a marketing ploy. Just like brand awareness tactics for other industries, the key is to plant a relevant, positive sentiment into the target user population based on a targeted assessment of those users' needs, and to then use the awareness foot in the door to coax those users all the way through to the end of the funnel. It won't happen overnight, and indeed, it is not expected to, but with a successful event that drives value for the target user, the B2B SaaS company has its biggest opportunity of the year to associate its brand with expertise and eminence in the industry. 

Addressing these industry requirements should be top of mind in the marketing strategy across all channels, starting with the Awareness ones  - it should permeate the tone of the Display ads, ring through in the PR, and define the marketing materials, case studies, white papers and talking points that are being pushed out through Trade Events and the content of the conference. Content (presentation x substance x relevancy) in this case is going to be key. This is the moment when "sales" and "marketing" are working seamlessly together, with the "sales" team articulating the impeccably planned "marketing" concepts in perfect harmony. The "Sales" team at this moment are themselves a marketing channel. 

Since all of these channels should also have a link to the website, it must also be considered an important representation of these value propositions - in this case, the website itself is marketing, serving as a resource for many weeks or even months while the client considers their options. This is where interim conversion actions can help cultivate the audience, but that is a discussion for a future post about channels farther down in the funnel. 

Conclusions

In describing these Awareness examples, it is almost impossible to discuss the top of the funnel without immediately diving into the follow-ups lower down in the funnel. This is because siloing a discussion to only one section of the funnel just doesn't do justice to the primary importance of understanding and optimizing how all stages of the customer journey work together to coax a newly aware user all the way through purchasing and advocating your service. 

In the end, Awareness channels can be a useful but expensive tool for increasing the pool of potential customers for a company, business or product. In some cases, it is absolutely necessary in order to create a market for something completely new or for breaking into a highly competitive space where big players are already playing with big budgets. In other cases, it is possible for companies to be successful by focusing more heavily on the lower segments of the funnel, while acknowledging that by doing so, the funnel and potential scope may be smaller. 

In upcoming posts, we'll go into more detail about the other sections of the conversion funnel to add more meat to the discussion with more real world examples.

Stay tuned and subscribe for more posts on many other topics near and dear to the 2014 Digital Marketer's heart!

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