Asia: Opening Doors for Digital Marketers

As per the projections from Forrester Research, up to 43 percent of the world's online population will reside in Asia by 2013. This will result in the numerous online marketing developments in Asia, thus making this area central for digital marketers! Now is the time when digital marketers need to sit up and work out their best strategies about digital marketing trends, including search, mobile, social media, e-mail marketing, and analytics.

The emerging face of Asia's digital markets has made the world sit up and notice the changing scenario that this region presents. Asia boasts of unprecedented rise in the web users who access internet for a wide range of activities. This can include anything from information search to social networking and from ticket booking to writing mails.

The figures published by Forrester Research shows that almost 17 % percent of the global online population will be residing in China by the year 2013. China will also account for 1.3 billion mobile subscribers and 957 million mobile Web users by 2014. These figures shows that by 2010 more people in China will be accessing the Web on their cell phones than the entire population of the U.S. in 2010!

As per Asia Pacific Digital Marketing Yearbook, last year in 2009 internet users in Asia Pacific had spent more than 5.6 trillion minutes online. In doing so, they had bought almost $7 billion in virtual goods. India recorded year-on-year increase of 42 percent in 2009! The internet population in India grew to almost 71 million, which included 51 million active users. Also, maximum searches for products such as mobile phones and laptops are originating from India. A small country like Japan also has around 21.8 million social network users. There are more than 10.6 million Facebook users in Philippines, which is ranked eighth in the world in terms of countries with highest number of using the social networking site.

These and many more such encouraging data have made it apparent that marketers now need to focus their attention to Asia in order to make full use of the increasing online marketing opportunities. Marketers can now use efficient and effective digital marketing medium to reach consumers. This medium allows marketers to enter into a two way dialogue with the customer. Now it has become easy for marketers to get an insight into consumer’s interests and obtain an economical link with the current as well as potential customers.

What makes Asia truly amazing is its diversity. Over 2000 spoken languages, incredible wealth yet unforgiving poverty, political models including monarchies to democracies to authoritarian governments, and numerous religious traditions give Asia a unique identity. Yet, this otherwise stunning diversity is nothing but highly fragmented markets when seen from a communication professionals’ point of view. For any company, communication across such a diverse landscape is a challenge that must be faced. One who is able to manage this will surely be the king of digital marketing world of Asia!

Nine Strategies to Tie Your Social Media Efforts to Sales and Customer Service.

Social media is enough to make any Marketing VP think they’ve found the Promised Land. Online global communities with easy access, no cost to participate and literally millions of people and companies joining every month, driving traffic estimates to the stratosphere. Social networks and their blistering growth is everything a marketer could ask for.

Yet is it? Companies need to stop and ask, “How can our existing marketing, selling and service processes be strengthened by social media? Can they be strengthened, or is this a distraction?” Where companies have challenges is when they jump into social-media strategies complete with Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts and executives blogging with very broad, difficult-to-measure goals, if they have any at all. With so much potential to improve each marketing, selling and service process, it is better to take the time and define a set of goals first. The following strategies have proven to be successful at helping companies do just that.

1. Dedicate a person to making social networking work for your company. It requires constant focus and ongoing strengthening of relationships—either online or in person. If you want to succeed with social media, give someone the role full time. This is not a task that can be spread across a cross-functional team or given to someone to do only part of the time. If you want measurable results, get a person dedicated full time and also give them the authority to make decisions for customers quickly. Set them up to win in this role, and as a result, your company will come across as much more focused and responsive. The bottom line is that social networking is also all about connecting with people. Make sure your company is presenting a person—not just a logo—to interact with.

2. Benchmark the strategies that you plan to integrate social networking with. This will give you a baseline of how each strategy is working prior to integrating them into social networks. Common approaches to do this include creating landing pages that have specifically been designed for social-networking sites. Isolating the effects of Facebook or Twitter, for example, on a landing page optimized for the audience your company has on these social-networking sites will quickly tell you if you are converting clicks to prospects.

3. Match up individual social networks to strategies based on compatibility with goals and markets. Twitter has found a home in many companies’ customer-service strategies due to its rapid conversational pace and ability to take discussions private through direct messages if needed. Facebook fan pages work well for those brands that have a strong fan base – like Apple for example. Services companies are using Facebook to put more of a human face on their customer service, to make themselves more approachable and easier to buy from in the future. Choose which social networks best compliment a given strategy for best results.

4. Create a social-media roadmap that shows when and how each will be used in each strategy. This is important because it will be another data point you can use to measure performance of having social media involved in each strategy. Trending of each strategy’s results will show whether or not social-media strategies are paying off.

5. Use Google Analytics to get real-time results of strategies using social media. Once a given social media platform has been chosen to match the unique needs of a given marketing strategy or campaign, it is time to measure the results. Google Analytics is excellent at this. Using this free analytics service, you can measure landing-page performance by campaign—tying back to the original social-media platform you chose to use. Google Analytics provides free codes that are inserted in websites, microsites or landing pages.

6. Never stop adding valuable content to your microsites, websites, blog and Facebook pages. Offer free advice and over-deliver value. The companies that are excelling at social-media strategies and generating prospects do this with a passion. Just as it takes a dedicated, full-time person in your company to make social networking happen, consider how you can get your most prolific writers and content providers motivated to deliver content regularly. Be generous in the content you give away, and get the annoying opt-in screens that have so many options out of the way. Be a thought-leader and freely share knowledge and insight; don’t force prospects to fill out a massive opt-in form; it no longer works.

7. Don’t fall for the popular metrics including follower counts or just looking at Web traffic alone—both are incomplete. Influence is based on trust, not popularity. The ability to change a person’s perception then action really defines the meaning of “influence.” Follower counts, if anything, are a measure of churn. Pay no attention to this metric; it is really irrelevant to actually building a connection with customers and prospects. The same is true of Web traffic. Taken in isolation, it is meaningless, but in the context of landing-page analysis based on a targeted strategy, it means much more.

8. Lead nurturing in social media needs to focus on engaging and helping a prospect to solve problems, not sending them more white papers or collateral. This is why having someone dedicated full time to social media is so critical. The segments or groups of followers your company interacts with on each social-media platform will change over time, often becoming uniquely different from each other. Staying on top of this and devising ways of keeping your company relevant can be an excellent way to keep these target segments focused on what your company has to offer.

9. Use Google Analytics link opt-in pages by strategy and campaign to lead conversion.Tracking the landing pages that are dedicated to each specific media platform being used in your strategies can in turn be linked to lead conversion rates. An example would be the Twitter-specific landing page promoting a 15% discount on any follower who downloads the coupon in 24 hours. Using lead management and escalation systems, it’s possible to make this link between landing page opt-in and lead conversion. Tracking this also shows the effectiveness of the promotion in each social-media platform. From that, it’s clear to see which social-media platforms, running which promotions, are generating the greatest potential sales.

This is an edited excerpt from the Louis Columbus’ ebook “Using Social Networks to Increase Channel Selling.”

Courtesy – Louis Columbus

Turning Knowledge Into Gold

Companies winning new sales, gaining the greatest market share and creating the most value for customers all share a common trait: they deliberately turn blue-collar knowledge into gold.

The depth and extent of these workers’ knowledge has the potential to completely transform company brands, reputations and customer experiences. Capitalizing on the years of knowledge and experience can lead to entirely new approaches to selling, manufacturing, delivering services and creating lifetime value.

Consider how General Electric continues to lead with innovation in its core markets. It has discovered how to take the essence of its commitment to Six Sigma, which is their Voice of the Customer Programs, and combine it with the insight and intelligence of its production teams. The result continues to be market-leading products and profitable services that keep GE in the forefront of the industries in which they compete. In essence, it has found an entirely new way to innovate by capitalizing on blue-collar knowledge.

There are also companies tackling the quoting, pricing and configure-to-order problems slowing down their sales by capitalizing knowledge. They see the expertise of their production teams as a catalyst of greater competitive strength.

From manufacturers of drill equipment that are streamlining their quoting, pricing and product configuration to fight off Chinese competitors to manufacturers of emergency vehicles that need to produce quotes that lead to only profitable build-to-order configurations being built, each share a common thread. Each has redefined their selling strategies and strengthened them with the insights gained from blue-collar manufacturing, production, services and support teams. These teams are transforming companies with their deep product and process expertise.

The following ten steps are the path many have followed to turn blue-collar knowledge into gold.

Top Ten Lessons Learned

1.    Creating common goals that rely on collaboration and reward it are key.  Let’s get real about information. It’s the most potent political asset there is. Because of this, making people and processes change is very difficult. Overcoming this challenge needs to start with shared goals that are only attainable through collaboration. Setting the goal of increasing your sales team’s quoting accuracy by 50% can quickly translate into new sales and customers. It requires production and manufacturing to provide greater input than ever before. When companies have created these shared goals and hold teams accountable for working with each other, greater information-sharing happens. Common goals are critically important for transforming blue-collar knowledge into goals.

2.    Defining performance targets or metrics and measuring them to celebrate wins is the first step to making knowledge-sharing stick. Setting up the manufacturing teams to win for sharing their experience, insights and intelligence is a must-do. Bringing blue-collar workers to the strategy table can save you days, even weeks, of trial-and-error in redesigning your quoting, pricing and product-configuration strategies. When you do this, set reasonable, shared measures of performance that apply across sales, marketing, product management, manufacturing and service. An excellent set of metrics include measuring the accuracy of quotes, conversion of quotes to orders and quoting accuracy.

3.    Create a benchmark based on the performance targets or metrics to measure process improvement in quoting, pricing and product configuration. Often when companies have successfully brought manufacturing and blue-collar knowledge to the table, they see an increase in process accuracy and speed. Each step in a process is done faster. There is not the lag time waiting for information anymore. It’s because everyone that the process relies on to get done now owns it. Doing knowledge-sharing right will nurture and create ownership—and this is one of the greatest catalysts of performance gains any company can achieve.

4.    Piloting quoting, pricing or product-configuration strategies for thirty days will tell you how well knowledge-sharing is working. This is the most valuable activity of all, because it provides proof to those that felt they risked so much by sharing their knowledge to make a company more competitive. Make sure everyone who is sharing knowledge has ownership of the pilot too; share ownership during this stage. Companies that do see change to quoting, pricing and product-configuration strategies last.

5.    Owning the good and bad about the pilot makes knowledge-sharing more trusted. Pilots are never perfect. They are best used to find areas for further improvement in each of these strategic areas of a company. Be sure to share the good and the bad, because a pilot is the start of a cycle of continual improvement. Go to the blue-collar workers and ask them how it can be improved, go to each team involved and seek input. Build credibility by telling the truth, even if it means the pilot is only successful on a few metrics.

6.    Using the lessons learned from the pilot, change your quoting, pricing or product-configuration strategy. This is often the most gratifying step for the blue-collar and manufacturing team members who contributed their knowledge and insight. They get to see positive, permanent change in how their companies operate. Make a point of creating a storyline of how manufacturing, service, support—in short the entire team—were responsible for the improvements in quoting, pricing and product-configuration performance. Tell the story of how they changed the company for the better at company events and make it part of who your company is.

7.    Recognizing, rewarding and showing the sales increases due to knowledge-sharing are key to changing your company’s culture. The payoff of sharing knowledge needs to be made very clear. Reward and recognize how blue-collar workers contributed so much to changing how your company sells, services and keeps customers. Take the first step to creating a culture that values collaboration. By doing this, you will break down the barriers between departments and set your teams up to focus on what really matters—beating the competition.

8.    Choose competitors to make examples of and focus on the teams who shared knowledge on beating them. With your quoting, pricing and product-configuration strategies stronger from the expertise shared, choose competitors to target. Bring the entire team into a mindset of your company beating a competitor on quoting accuracy, pricing, product configuration and most important of all, customer experience. This has a tremendous galvanizing force on the diverse groups in your company. Be sure to report back monthly on how you are doing against competitors, and if you took deals away from them—fantastic! This is the type of focus that brings teams together.

9.    Making the performance of quoting, pricing and product-configuration strategies very visible all the time is a great motivator.  Providing the ongoing results of these strategies not only gives everyone who contributed more ownership, they will be constantly looking for ways to improve the process. It also shows where there is room for improvement. Be sure to share results with each member of the team so they can see how their contributions made a difference. Great ideas come out of doing this, as often those on the production line will see how a product configuration could be made more efficiently for example. Open up the creativity of your teams by doing this.

10. Share the profit gains companywide from the improved quoting, pricing and product-configuration strategies.  Be sure to mention when everyone gets a quarterly or yearly bonus that the revised processes made successful from knowledge-sharing contributed to profits and growth. Set this as one of the goals from the outset and recognize those contributors who gave the most time, expertise and insight.

Bottom line: The greatest competitive weapon any company has is the knowledge its workers have gained over years, and in some cases, decades of service. Unleashing that knowledge can make all the difference in winning new customers and keeping existing ones.

photo: http://www.strokenetwork.net/images/pot.jpg

Country – Louis Columbus

Nine Strategies to Tie Your Social Media Efforts to Sales and Customer Service

This is an edited excerpt from my friend/guide Louis Columbus’ ebook “Using Social Networks to Increase Channel Selling.”

Social media is enough to make any Marketing VP think they’ve found the Promised Land. Online global communities with easy access, no cost to participate and literally millions of people and companies joining every month, driving traffic estimates to the stratosphere. Social networks and their blistering growth is everything a marketer could ask for.

Yet is it? Companies need to stop and ask, “How can our existing marketing, selling and service processes be strengthened by social media? Can they be strengthened, or is this a distraction?” Where companies have challenges is when they jump into social-media strategies complete with Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts and executives blogging with very broad, difficult-to-measure goals, if they have any at all. With so much potential to improve each marketing, selling and service process, it is better to take the time and define a set of goals first. The following strategies have proven to be successful at helping companies do just that.

1. Dedicate a person to making social networking work for your company. It requires constant focus and ongoing strengthening of relationships—either online or in person. If you want to succeed with social media, give someone the role full time. This is not a task that can be spread across a cross-functional team or given to someone to do only part of the time. If you want measurable results, get a person dedicated full time and also give them the authority to make decisions for customers quickly. Set them up to win in this role, and as a result, your company will come across as much more focused and responsive. The bottom line is that social networking is also all about connecting with people. Make sure your company is presenting a person—not just a logo—to interact with.

2. Benchmark the strategies that you plan to integrate social networking with. This will give you a baseline of how each strategy is working prior to integrating them into social networks. Common approaches to do this include creating landing pages that have specifically been designed for social-networking sites. Isolating the effects of Facebook or Twitter, for example, on a landing page optimized for the audience your company has on these social-networking sites will quickly tell you if you are converting clicks to prospects.

3. Match up individual social networks to strategies based on compatibility with goals and markets. Twitter has found a home in many companies’ customer-service strategies due to its rapid conversational pace and ability to take discussions private through direct messages if needed. Facebook fan pages work well for those brands that have a strong fan base – like Apple for example. Services companies are using Facebook to put more of a human face on their customer service, to make themselves more approachable and easier to buy from in the future. Choose which social networks best compliment a given strategy for best results.

4. Create a social-media roadmap that shows when and how each will be used in each strategy. This is important because it will be another data point you can use to measure performance of having social media involved in each strategy. Trending of each strategy’s results will show whether or not social-media strategies are paying off.

5. Use Google Analytics to get real-time results of strategies using social media. Once a given social media platform has been chosen to match the unique needs of a given marketing strategy or campaign, it is time to measure the results. Google Analytics is excellent at this. Using this free analytics service, you can measure landing-page performance by campaign—tying back to the original social-media platform you chose to use. Google Analytics provides free codes that are inserted in websites, microsites or landing pages.

6. Never stop adding valuable content to your microsites, websites, blog and Facebook pages. Offer free advice and over-deliver value. The companies that are excelling at social-media strategies and generating prospects do this with a passion. Just as it takes a dedicated, full-time person in your company to make social networking happen, consider how you can get your most prolific writers and content providers motivated to deliver content regularly. Be generous in the content you give away, and get the annoying opt-in screens that have so many options out of the way. Be a thought-leader and freely share knowledge and insight; don’t force prospects to fill out a massive opt-in form; it no longer works.

7. Don’t fall for the popular metrics including follower counts or just looking at Web traffic alone—both are incomplete. Influence is based on trust, not popularity. The ability to change a person’s perception then action really defines the meaning of “influence.” Follower counts, if anything, are a measure of churn. Pay no attention to this metric; it is really irrelevant to actually building a connection with customers and prospects. The same is true of Web traffic. Taken in isolation, it is meaningless, but in the context of landing-page analysis based on a targeted strategy, it means much more.

8. Lead nurturing in social media needs to focus on engaging and helping a prospect to solve problems, not sending them more white papers or collateral. This is why having someone dedicated full time to social media is so critical. The segments or groups of followers your company interacts with on each social-media platform will change over time, often becoming uniquely different from each other. Staying on top of this and devising ways of keeping your company relevant can be an excellent way to keep these target segments focused on what your company has to offer.

9. Use Google Analytics link opt-in pages by strategy and campaign to lead conversion.Tracking the landing pages that are dedicated to each specific media platform being used in your strategies can in turn be linked to lead conversion rates. An example would be the Twitter-specific landing page promoting a 15% discount on any follower who downloads the coupon in 24 hours. Using lead management and escalation systems, it’s possible to make this link between landing page opt-in and lead conversion. Tracking this also shows the effectiveness of the promotion in each social-media platform. From that, it’s clear to see which social-media platforms, running which promotions, are generating the greatest potential sales.

How Much Does A Facebook Fan Cost? $1.07

Sharing an Interesting article by Geoffrey A. Fowler at WSJ Blog.

Money can buy you friends on Facebook, if you’re a marketer. But the price is going up.

A whitepaper by social marketing and analytics firm Webtrends, which studied 11,000 Facebook ad campaigns in the U.S., found that the cost of advertising on Facebook that encourages a user to become a “fan” on the brand’s Facebook page is $1.07.

Marketers are increasingly spending money on Facebook fan-acquisition ads. Why? Becoming a fan gives brands permission to market directly to a user, both through (free) messages sent to the user’s homepage news feed and through ads that specifically target fans on Facebook.com. It’s arguably better than the old-fashioned style of permission-based digital marketing, which involves gathering customer emails and then blasting them with messages that they might not ever open.

But the rates at which U.S. users are clicking on Facebook ads designed to generate fans are starting to decline, according to Webtrends. In 2009, the so-called click-through rate on such ads was .063%. In 2010, the rate declined to .051%.

At the same time, ads are getting more expensive, rising from 17 cents per thousand in 2009, to 25 cents in 2010. (By comparison, display ads can range from $2 to $8 per thousand on other sites, depending on the site and the type of advertiser.)

What could be causing Facebook advertisers to get fewer clicks for more money? Justin Kistner, Webtrends’ senior manager of product marketing for social had a few theories. One possibility is that the ads aren’t as effective these days at attracting users, either because the ad creative design is growing boring or because Facebook users are learning to ignore the ads. And ads could be growing more expensive because many of them are sold through an auction system that’s getting increasing competition as more advertisers turn to Facebook.

The lesson, Kistner said, is that the companies that have a head start now, with double-digit millions of fans, are going to end up spending much less money than others. “There is a competitive advantage to starting now,” he said.

Facebook spokesman Brandon McCormick declined to comment on the specific results of the Webtrends study, which the company didn’t participate in.

But he did say that acquiring a fan is “just the beginning” of how marketers can use Facebook. “On Facebook, the magic of marketing happens when brands activate their fans in ways that inspire people to share those messages with their friends,” he said.

Webtrends’ Kistner agreed that the campaigns that actually drive return on investment ads are usually built on top of a good fan base.

“There are a lot of studies trying to say how much is a fan worth,” Kistner said, “but the answer depends on the kinds of campaigns you are driving at that fan base.” His firm is currently working on a study about the effectiveness of different kinds of campaigns directed at a fan base, known as “fan nurturing.”

Are fans worth $1.07 each for brands? Digits sat down on camera with Michael Lazerow, the CEO of Buddy Media, a firm that sells software for brands that want to market on Facebook. Lazerow argued they’re worth far more. See highlights below.