Businesses have taken notice and as a result, have been utilising online channels to promote their products and services. Through these mediums, businesses can increase their visibility online, encourage engagement with their target audience and increase sales. As marketing becomes increasingly more digital there is a greater ability to monitor its performance and make informed decisions based on data. Perhaps one of the most valuable outcomes of the digital movement is the ability to use data to inform marketing activities. There are also many independent online tools that can be used to gather and analyse data from these marketing efforts. In the past traditional marketing expense was more difficult to justify, now digital channels enable businesses to monitor exact figures on things such as impressions and ROI. This level of data can be utilised to inform such things as a marketing strategy, channel recommendations, budget allocations, and even provide information on the characteristics and motivations of the target market (and many more).

Not all businesses have taken advantage of this opportunity. In fact, based on new research, 87% of the businesses surveyed consider that data is their organisation’s most underutilised asset. It also revealed that 49% of respondents feel “significant pressure” to increase data’s role in their current strategy. Data analysis, however, is becoming increasingly less daunting with free and easily accessible tools available. It’s the act of selecting the relevant information from the mountains of data and what to do with this information that could be quite intimidating.

The trick is to always go back to why these marketing activities were implemented in the first place (i.e. goals and objectives). Then, narrow down the information to focus on based on the purpose and goals of the marketing efforts. Outlined below is a step-by-step guide on how to leverage the tools and data available to grow your business.

1) Set your goals and objectives – Before even embarking on any marketing activity, it is important to identify the goals that you want to achieve from your marketing endeavours. Such goals include increasing awareness, boosting sales, encouraging customer engagement, generating leads, increasing website traffic, etc. It would also be ideal to set (realistic) measures for each objective. These goals and objectives will later be used to gauge the success of your marketing activities.

2) Determine and set up the tools to use – There are many free and paid tools available for collecting and analysing data from campaigns, especially those executed online. In fact, some channels are equipped with their own data analytics tool. For example, Google Analytics is a great tool that can collect and measure data on your website activity as well as ads implemented through AdWords, Google’s advertising arm. The information that can be gleaned from the tool includes demographics of a site’s visitor, sources of traffic/clicks/views, tools used to view the site, the most viewed content and so on. Similarly, social media platforms like Facebook have their own analytics tools that can uncover data such as demographics and user behaviour.

There are also online data collection tools such as SurveyMonkey, Zoho Survey, Dub InterViewer and Google Forms that allow users to collect information about their target audience via surveys. Some of these platforms may be accessed for free and are equipped to aggregate answers and present the information gathered in a report.

3) Select the data to focus on and interpret – As mentioned earlier, there are mountains of data that can be uncovered using analytics tools. Among the information made available, how would you know which ones to focus on? Well, the answer lies within the goals and objectives previously set. The data that should be closely monitored are those that will offer information that may help determine if these goals and objectives are being missed, have been met or were exceeded. Some of the metrics that are commonly used are in this article.

4) Use the data to make informed business and marketing decisions – When data collection and analysis are done habitually, you will be able to uncover trends in your customer’s demographics and psychographics. The information will then enable you to make calculated decisions when it comes to future marketing efforts and business decisions.

There is an old proverb that goes, “knowledge is power.” This saying is especially true in marketing. Knowing insights and using data to drive marketing and business decisions will enable a business to operate more efficiently and reap rewards from their marketing efforts faster and in a more cost-effective manner.

The post How Technology is Impacting Marketing appeared first on Reload Consulting.

This has made it important for brands to establish a presence online, specifically in social channels where customers come together to find, explore and interact.

For any marketing to be effective, there is a need to develop a strategy behind the efforts. Where does one begin? Below are some steps to follow for creating a Social Media Strategy.

• Identify your goals – Keep in mind that marketing is effective if results meet or exceed goals or objectives previously set. Thus, the first step in developing a strategy is to identify the business’ digital marketing goals and tie these to the organisation’s overarching goals. The marketing that will be developed will then aim to achieve the goals set.

• Define target audience – The second step is to determine who the customers are. This involves defining your customer segments, making profiles of each segment then mapping out their customer journey. This will allow you to determine, what messages and tactics will be most appropriate and effective.

• Conduct research to see what’s working – Chances are, your competitors are utilizing social to create awareness and increase conversions. The beauty in this is that you can conduct a competitor check to get a glimpse of how they are using social to see what is effective. You can then consider the findings when deciding on the tactics and social media channels to infiltrate.

• Select the most appropriate social channels and tactics – Once you have gained a full understanding of who your customers are and their purchasing behaviour, it is time to select the most appropriate social channels to be active in. Some research may be beneficial at this stage to match the demographics and interests of customers to the social channels.

• Confirm message – What is it that you are trying to relay to your customers and what action would you like them to take? Based on your customer understanding, develop and confirm a message that will appeal to your target audience to entice them to act on your prompts.

• Create a content plan – The content published through your social pages should always be relevant to your target market and should always offer valuable information.

• Measure results – Gather data on your efforts. One way is to enlist in tools that have analysing capabilities.

Social Media Marketing can become an effective marketing method. However, engaging with customers through social media should be calculated . There should be a plan behind it for it to be useful.

The post What you need to know about Social Media Marketing appeared first on Reload Consulting.

Titus Maccius Plautus, a roman playwright who lived from 254 BC to 184 BC once said that “You must spend money to make money.” Not everyone agrees with this saying. However, if you are a business owner and you are spending money, you would want to know if the investment that you’ve made was worth it. Marketing is often an expense that a business cannot do without as it is the means by which a company can get the word out on its product/s or services. It can get very expensive especially in the first year of the business. For this reason, it is vital that all marketing efforts are monitored to see what kind of results are achieved for the dollars spent on the activities or campaigns. With the various tools available for measuring the output of marketing, especially those conducted online, you can easily track the performance of your marketing activities. However, if you are not selective with the data that you monitor, you’ll end up with mountains and mountains of information, some of which you don’t really need. What then are the marketing metrics that matter? Below is a list of the marketing metrics that you should be measuring according to your preferred channel for promotion.

Traditional Advertising

Traditional advertising generally refers to promotion done through mediums such as TV, print, billboard, radio, phone, and direct mail. In measuring the effectiveness of the campaign advertised through these mediums, it would be essential to set key performance indicators or goals prior to launching the campaigns. The effectiveness of the campaign can then be determined based on whether or not these KPIs were met. For each of these traditional channels, good indicators for the level of awareness that can be achieved are the number of listeners (for radio), number of viewers (for TV), number of subscribers (for direct mail), number of cars that pass (for the billboard). On the other hand, if the goal is to increase sales, then the number of sales (relative to the goal set for this) after the campaign was launched is a good indicator of how successful it is.

New/Current Methods

The internet has broadened the playing field for reaching people. The online marketing channels and methods that are commonly used as well as the metrics by which to measure the effectiveness of a marketing activity or campaign are discussed below.

Website

Nowadays, having a website is crucial to the success of any business. It is a means by which customers find your business and an avenue for conducting marketing and sales activities. The most important metrics to measure on your website include:

• Total Sessions – This refers to traffic that your website is getting. Total sessions measure the number of times your website was visited over a period of time. An increase in sessions is an indicator that your website is performing better and that your business is achieving broader brand awareness.
• New and Returning Visitors – New visitors pertain to the first time users of your website during a given time frame while returning visitors refer to those who have already been to the site previously. Having a large portion of returning visitors is an indicator that your customers find reasons to go back to your website whether to get more information, engage or purchase (if an e-commerce site).
• Traffic Source – Users arrive at websites from many different sources. Measuring the traffic source will tell you if your users were led to the website via an organic search, through a referral, from social site, through a paid campaign (such as AdWords) or if a user came direct.
• Bounce Rate – This refers to the percentage of users that leave your website without generating a second interaction (generally a page view). A high bounce rate may indicate that the entry page is not as effective as it should be in capturing the interest of the user to explore your site further.
• Conversion Rate – This measures the rate at which users covert on the site. Conversions are set up to be the desired action that you would like a user to take that generally represent an action of value to the business. Examples of conversions include; filling out an enquiry form, subscribing to a mailing list, purchasing a product/s, making a donation among others.
• Time on site – The length of time a user stays on a website is a good indicator of the user’s interest in what the website has to offer or. Users tend to stay on a website longer when they find its contents engaging or are on the website to perform or complete a transaction. This depends on the purpose of the website however as support sites aim to solve problems and answer questions quickly so a lower time on site would actually be a positive metric.
• Page Views per Session – The number of page views a user makes on a website is said to point to the engagement level of the user on that website. The more pages a user views, indicates his or her interest in the contents of the site. However sometimes having a lower number of pages per session actually means that users are finding the information they are looking for more effectively.

Email Marketing

Marketing through emails is an easy and effective way to reach customers. The metrics that you would want to monitor are:

• Click Through Rate – This lets you gauge the performance of each email that has been sent out to your customer by looking at the number of people engaging with your content and how. What they click on in an email will determine what content they are interested in.
• Conversion Rate – As stated earlier, is the rate at which a customer performs an action that you want them to take. These actions may include filling out a form, downloading content or visiting your website.
• Growth of Email List and Unsubscribe Rate – A growing email list gives you a chance to reach more people and deliver targeted messages. A declining list points to problems with the content that you are disseminating.
• Hard and Soft Bounces –  An email that “bounces” is an email that has not been delivered due to varied reason. Hard bounces are caused by a permanent issue such as invalid email addresses while soft bounces are due to a temporary issue such as when a recipient’s mailbox is full.

Social Media Campaigns

• Engagement – This refers to actions done within a social media account such as likes, shares, and comments.
• Inbound links – This will allow you to determine the effectiveness of your social activities and campaigns in bringing people to your website.
• Sentiment – The feelings, attitudes, and opinions of your brand can be measured through the conversations that take place within the social media accounts. This will give you a chance to understand your customers better and see how your brand is perceived.

Paid Search and Display Metrics

• Click through Rate – This will indicate if your ads are relevant to those searching and whether or not your key word or creative representations are effective. Moreover, the click through rate will have a major impact on your Quality Score (Google’s measure of your keyword’s relevance).
• Conversion Rate – The number of people who clicked your ad and went on to perform an action determines the conversation rate a customer.

Overarching Marketing Metrics

Outlined below are the marketing metrics that you should be monitoring regardless of whether or not the promotional activities are done online or offline.

• Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) – As marketing is a big expense, it should be treated similar to an investment wherein, the returns will only materialise after a certain period of time and the cost is somewhat amortised over a period of time. Return on Marketing Investment measures the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. The computation to get the ROMI is gross profit minus marketing expense divided by marketing investment.
• Cost per Acquisition (CPA) – Simply put, this is the cost that you incur to acquire a customer. This metric is important as it can indicate the scalability and profitability of your company. To get your CPA, divide the marketing spend on a particular activity or campaign by the number of customers acquired. Essentially, you would want to retain the activities that cost less to retain a customer in order to have a higher profit margin.
• Customer Attrition Rate – Customer attrition rate or customer churn rate is the number of customers that drop from your client base. By knowing your customer attrition rate, you will know your customer retention rate. Being aware of your attrition rate will enable you to determine what you need to do to compensate for this loss (i.e. how many new customers need to be acquired to make up for the loss). It is ideal to keep your attrition rate down as this will mean a higher number of customers in your pipeline, higher sales and therefore, higher revenue.
• Lifetime Value of a Customer (LVC) – This is the average lifespan of your customer or how long a customer remains loyal to your company. There are multiple ways of computing the lifetime value of a customer. One way is to multiply the average amount that a customer spends per transaction by the number of repeat sales and by the average retention time.

The above are the core metrics that should be measured based on our experience and is not a comprehensive list of metrics that can be measured for all marketing activities. An important point to remember that when choosing the metrics to measure, these metrics should be aligned with the goals that you have set for your marketing activity or campaign from the get-go.

The post Marketing Metrics which matter most (Part 2) appeared first on Reload Consulting.

Increase in sales – Selling is the ultimate goal of operating a business. The sales performance for both online and offline activities – whether it is increasing, on a plateau or not meeting targets – should be measured. This should be done periodically and measured against previous months or against sales made on the same period in the previous year/s. Online sales will be easier to measure as e-commerce websites have the ability to track revenue through e-commerce tracking. On the other hand, offline sales might need to be monitored manually.

Increase brand awareness – Brand awareness can spark curiosity among potential customers. This may encourage them to get more information about your business. For online activities, the metrics to keep an eye on are website traffic, page views, downloads, mentions on social media and referral links. Offline, you can measure foot traffic, prompted awareness and unprompted awareness.

Generate new leads – If the end goal is sales or brand awareness, leads are generally a secondary goal in order to fill the sales funnel or indicate interest in your brand offering. To determine the number of leads generated, you can look into form submissions, email sign-ups and phone calls.

Customer retention – It is more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to retain them. Thus, your business will benefit from having loyal customers. To be able to track your customer retention, you can use metrics such as renewal (membership or subscription) rates, re-orders, and re-visits to the website.

Engagement – By getting a sense of how customers perceive your product and/or service, you will have an opportunity to see what is currently working in terms of your marketing efforts and what needs to be improved or removed. Blog comments, the number of inbound links, likes, shares, etc. can give you such insights.

As discussed above, tracking the results of traditional marketing activities is more difficult than monitoring the output of marketing activities done through online channels. To be able to gauge the success of offline marketing activities, here are a few ideas.

Landing pages – When advertising via traditional channels (via print or television), include a different URL for each channel that potential customers can visit. You can then track which of the channels are the most effective by the amount of page views generated on each unique URL.

Discount codes – Discount codes are an effective way to track which offline marketing activities and channels are most effective. To monitor which of these bring in the most revenue, designate a different code for each marketing activity and track through your POS the performance of each.

Hashtags – Including hashtags in your offline marketing campaign gives your audience a chance to use them across social media platforms. You can then monitor on social media where and how the hashtags are used.

Survey – A short survey, whether conducted online or offline, asking customers where they first discovered the brand will give you an idea of which marketing activity or channel has the widest market reach.

Key performance indicators or goals should be set prior to launching a marketing campaign. For each of the marketing activities in the campaign, goals should be set. Corresponding metrics should also be assigned to each of these goals. The results from the metrics should then be compared against your target goals as well as numbers from previous marketing activities. Over time, the data that you will gather from all of these will paint an accurate picture of where your business stands in the minds of your customers. This will then allow you to make better-informed marketing and business decisions in the future.

Watch out for an upcoming article, which will delve into the meaning of key metrics by channel type.

The post Marketing Metrics which matter most (Part 1) appeared first on Reload Consulting.

• A channel to promote your business;
• Educating your readers on specific topics;
• Helping your website rank better in search engines;
• Establishing yourself as an expert in your field; and
• A means of engaging with your target audience.

The more diligent you are in keeping your blog, the more effective it will be; however, if you don’t have the time and resources, a simple blog is better than no blog at all.

Know your audience

When blogging, it is important to know who your audience is and select content suited to them. This is important as the content you write will keep readers coming back to your blog. Your target audience will develop expectations for your blog and your reader loyalty will increase as you meet these expectations.

Be Consistent

Your company blog is directly related to your business and its brand and you need to make sure that the brand messages you are sending as a business and also as a blogger are consistent. Update your blog as frequently as possible without compromising the quality of the content for the frequency of posts.

Choose relevant topics

It is important that you choose topics that are current and relevant to your business and the industry you operate in. This will ensure that you are attracting the right audience and will spark interest in your readers.

There are also a number of additional online benefits for writing on relevant industry topics such as helping your business rank better in search engines through the addition of fresh relevant content to your website and through expanding your network of online links to and from your site.

Be Honest and Original

When writing blogs, give your honest opinion and don’t be afraid to incorporate your personality. You also need to make sure that you are original and not merely producing a simple list of facts or a news article that could be obtained from a range of other sites. Your style and tone of what you write will set you apart from others.

The effectiveness of your blog depends largely on the time and resources you devote to it and the strategies you implement in optimising your blog to have maximum online impact. It doesn’t matter what stage you are in developing a blog, there are always strategies to better utilise this resource.

The post How to start up and ace writing a business blog appeared first on Reload Consulting.

In fact, Social Media is well on it’s way to becoming the next economic bubble.

And what’s remarkable is that we’re only just a decade on from the dot-com burst, which saw Internet stocks wiped of close to three-quarters of their total value in a matter of weeks. The lessons from this crash have seemingly been forgotten amid the mad scramble for social media stocks.

Before looking at the numbers, a quick crash course in stock valuation. Most companies (particularly those without tangible assets – like a lot of web companies) are valued based on revenues and profit margins, taking into account growth rate and the potential for future profits to continue long term. That’s an oversimplified explanation, but it’s worth keeping that in mind before looking at the actual numbers being thrown around.

The real key point is the “potential for future profits to continue” because that’s what essentially causes a bubble. Overconfidence in a stock’s future or “speculation.”

Let’s look at the facts:

LinkedIn

LinkedIn went public in May. Initially, it set an asking price of $32 per share. At the time, analysts were calling this overpriced, as it valued the company at around $3 billion, a giant amount when you considered the company’s total revenues were just over $240 million (meaning profit would likely be around a third of that).

Despite this, the asking price was increased to $45 per share just days before the float (adding another billion or so to the company’s value). At this stage, everyone who could work a calculator was double checking their maths.

However, what’s incredible is that on the opening day of trade, the stocks opened at $83 and soared to a high of around $120 per share by midday. At that point, the company was valued at $9.7 billion, close to $7 billion more than what it was worth before the day’s trade and a whopping 40 times its annual revenue.

Social Games

Rumours are currently circulating that social games developer Zynga (think Farmville) is currently filing for an IPO with speculation they’re aiming for a market value of between $15-$20 billion. This would make them the most valued games developer in the world, surpassing Electronic Arts (which incidentally has revenues of around $4 billion) and putting their total value at the same level as Yahoo.

Again, what’s staggering is that Zynga’s revenues are estimated at $850 million (with a rumoured $400 million in profit).

Around this time last year, they were valued at $5.5 billion. So a threefold increase in less than 12 months.

On a smaller scale, PopCap games (makers of Plants v Zombies), have just been acquired (by EA Games no less) for $750 million, despite the company turning over just $100 million in revenues.

Facebook

Speculation is also mounting that Facebook, Social Media’s current champion, is also planning for an IPO worth somewhere in the vicinity of $100 billion. This is despite the company reporting revenues of around $4 billion.

Now Facebook has been growing at an incredible rate, so some might call that valuation justified. But consider that Facebook growth has slowed worldwide for two consecutive months now and total user numbers have actually dropped in the US, UK, Canada, Russia and Norway.

Facebook says they are now focused on increasing “time on site and engagement” rather than raw user numbers but the simple fact remains that they are basically hitting the ceiling of how many people are getting onboard.

This, coupled with the new threat of Google+, makes the 25 times multiplier of revenue to company valuation seem ludicrous. Having said that, my prediction is that their actual IPO valuation will be much higher than $100 billion by the time it rolls around.

The other big consideration with Facebook is how Mark Zuckerberg will deal with the scrutiny of being a publicly listed company. Zuckerberg has already publicly said that he wants to keep his hands firmly on the steering wheel, but that raises another question. Is he going to continue as CEO?

CEOs of publicly listed companies have enormous responsibilities to shareholders and boards, not to mention all the compliance and regulatory requirements that come with it.

This was exactly the reason why Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page brought in Eric Schmidt to be the company’s CEO in 2001, as software engineers rarely make good CEOs.

It’s hard to see Zuckerberg making that call, which also brings into question their long-term revenue potential.

Google+

Even Google is not immune from social media speculation, with Google shares adding $20 billion to the market cap in the first week after it was announced.

Google+ has so far grabbed around 20 million users in its first few weeks following launch, and whilst the revenue potential for Google+ is apparent, it’s yet to make its first dollar.

The Warning Signs

MySpace anyone?

The once great social media site was bought by Rupert Murdoch for $580m a few short years ago, only to be sold for $35 million earlier this year.

At one point, analysts were valuing it at close to $1 billion, and it’s now at less than 4% of that. However, MySpace revenues were at $600 million at the time of that valuation, making its valuation a modest 1.7 times its revenues. Yet, despite the relatively low valuation (by 2011 social media standards), it still turned out to be about 25 times too high.

And then, of course, there’s the fact we’ve been through this before. In the late 90’s all a business had to do was add an ‘e-‘ to the start of their name or a ‘.com’ to the end and watch the masses fight for shares.

At the peak of the boom, Yahoo shares were worth $118 a piece. Following the crash, they were worth $4.

So When Will it Happen?

If I knew that, I’d be keeping it to myself and making a fortune on stock trades.

My best guess is around two years from now. It won’t happen until after the Facebook float and is likely to be triggered by a high profile collapse or downswing in revenues with one of the biggest players that causes a mass exodus.

We’ll have to wait and see… but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The post The Great Social Media Bubble appeared first on Reload Consulting.

Their discussion outlined how businesses can formulate a complete digital strategy that will position them for online marketing success, and provided practical tips to help businesses avoid the common pitfalls made online and improve their marketing ROI.

The post Networx Presentation – Integrated Digital Strategy appeared first on Reload Consulting.