Mandi Bateson discusses measuring success in digital marketing and the importance of collecting comprehensive customer data beyond basic contact information. She defines success individually for each business based on their goals and offers to discuss strategy in more detail. Contact information is provided for those interested in discussing digital strategies or having questions about digital marketing answered.
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Whether you want to clarify our approach to
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twitter.com/digitalmands
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twitter.com/mab397 mandi.bateson@mindshareworld.com
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Hinweis der Redaktion
You’ll have different objectives and strategies to reach your overall business objective. You have different data sets available to you. Your challenge is to use the data effectively and report on the metrics that keep you on track to achieve your objectives. Data collection goes beyond the standard identifiers of name, DOB and email address.Social networks are data merchants and by engaging with them we’re willingly giving them information down to granular detail. As marketers, it means we know not only if we’ve delivered an impression but if they like it, if they saw it because a friend recommended it, if they shared it with their friends, how they identify themselves (tags or categories – food, fashion, melbourne, F1). And that’s just the social aspect.
Gaming is taking on a new life. No longer simply about first person shooter games or quests, geo-social applications are using gaming tactics to fuel the popularity of recommendation engines. You are rewarded for checking in to venues and events and leaving tips for those to follow in your footsteps. And the app owners get all the delicious data along the way. Chromaroma is another example of geo-social gaming, where Oyster Card users can compete with other London commuters to earn points for swipes, achievements, discovering new places, variety of stations, modes of transport or even recording the fastest journey time from point to point. The Oyster Card data is provided by the user and every time they swipe their card on a tube, bus or bike journey, they are sharing their daily commute with the teams and people they choose to connect with on the site. This kind of “as it happens” data gives us so much more information but is it more valuable?
Facebook thought so. This kind of data set is why Facebook acquired Instagram. You know so much more about a person if you can catch them in the moment. However there is a downside. This puts us in data overload and the consequences include:The confusion of correlation and causation. If you’ve captured an audience through a niche platform it doesn’t necessarily mean this is a true representation of your audience. App or game users would be early adopters, up until a month ago Instagram would have been only iPhone users. It also makes it easy to dump data without context – Facebook has external measurement tools that release details of the most engaging pages – they haven’t taken into account whether a page has a high number of comments or wall posts because it runs it’s page like a customer service channel. It doesn’t even look at the sentiment of the comments. It’s too easy to see the percentages churned out by tools and taking them at face value. So how do you determine the importance of data you have collected?
Bedpost cheekily claims that they understand that this is potentially the most personal of data-sets you will ever keep outside of financial records. This is optionally-supplied data and used for future features on the site and promises to never be sold or rented to a third party.Turning this data into a report of sorts is a great interest hook. Facebook did this earlier this year when they released the top songs people post as they’re changing their relationship status from single to in a relationship and compared it with songs posted by people changing to single. This might not make your end of campaign report to the board but it’s certainly interesting for any data ned.
Context – here we see a range of comments on Twitter regarding the NSW election – people are telling us when they’re voting, they’re questioning politicians directly, they’re making glib comments, they’re sharing moments from the election trail. Of these 6 tweets, 3 of them are capturing a time and place as well as an opinion – time to vote, in traffic and on the street. Are you aware of how many interactions people have with your brand are happening away from the laptop or desktop computer.
So with all this data, how do you define success? Too many marketers are hung up on what they can measure not what they should measure. We’ve done too good a job of convincing brands that they need to build relationships in social rather than push the sale. While that’s still true it doesn’t mean you need to abandon the sale.So while other reports are highlighting how many likes have been received, you should be including how many people found your fans’ testimonials when they were searching for information on their mobile before making a purchase or how you used an offer to convert fans to buyers because they were in the area.
And don’t worry too much about not embracing “social”. People don’t want to be friends with brands.Out of the top 5 things consumers want from businesses or brands the top 4 are conversion focused – giving them a reason to buy right now or providing the right information at research/consideration phase of the funnel.If you want to move from fluffy brand or awareness tactics to conversions, this is how you do it and this is what you measure.
Social media gives you the opportunity to take both a micro and macro view of the overall business objective. Segment the data you have access to and know what gives you insights to deliver better campaigns vs the kind of activity that tracks the success of your campaigns. Confusing these metrics will put all of this fabulous data to waste.