The Evolution of Marketing Data [Infographic]

Being a marketer, I am always a big fan of personalization of communication. Actually, its far easier than what most marketers think. The basic fundamental ingredient to this is how you manage your data and databases at the backend. Subsequently, its imperative for marketers to understand the touch points and the activities history/log of your consumers. If you can bring these ingredients then successful campaigns can only be a by product of that.

The below is an interesting info-graphics that shows an interesting evolution to personalization of communication. Though, I have to say, with all the tools and segmentation available, if marketers are still sticking to the 1960 then please don’t expect results of today. For being successful, you need to match the consumer to the channel to the message…and ensure you move from dissemination to conversation….. 

Basics to using your website as a marketing tool

It’s no more a secret that a website has emerged as the single most effective marketing tool in the hands of a businessperson today. Through a website, one can effectively tell customers about themselves along with their products and services. The wise thing is to focus one’s efforts on a website to ensure increased internet traffic, which will ultimately lead to increased sales. Here are some of the basic things that will help you use your website as an effective marketing tool.

Old news is no news. This is true for a website also. It is important to update the content on a website on a regular basis. By adding a few new things at least once a week, you can be sure to attract people, who will keep coming back on a regular basis to see what's new. Attracting people is one thing but what is more important is to retain them. To keep visitor’s interest alive, provide them with interesting reading material instead of boring business details.

Care should be taken to make the website search engine optimised (SEO). The content, the images used and even the name of the website (read company) should be search engine optimised! SEO has become an indispensable tool, which ensures thousands or even millions of hits a day. It can be safely concluded that no other kind of Internet marketing can be as effective or is capable of driving as much traffic as search engine optimization is.

When using website as a marketing tool, it is important to go beyond branding. It is important to create a unique logo or image for a website that is memorable and is also able to say much more than words can.

In today’s border-less economy where customer interactions are not hindered by geography and time zones, websites should be made more personal and interactive. Using blogs and being active on various online communities will help you get in touch with customers from anywhere in the world and at any time of day. Your posts will keep you in people’s memory and will help sell your products and services even while you are not around.

For more personal touch, mentioning yourself by name and using pictures is a great way to go about it. It only makes things easy as people like to know there are human beings on the other side of the screen. It’s also a good idea to run your own ads on your site. One can use different ads that link to services and products available on your business website.

One should consciously work towards making their website an authority site on a niche topic. This will help the site getting noticed much easily than when one tries to appeal to a broad audience. By catering to a limited audience, it is easy to attract that niche market. Though its sounds small but remember on a global scene, a niche also translate into millions of people all over the world!

Google, Social Networks, And The Future Of Search

DJ Francis articulated a nice article on at Social Media Today. Following is his article :

Would advertisers pay more to reach you rather than your mother? How much are your clicks worth?

These are the questions posed by Heather Green in a recent BusinessWeek article: Making Social Networks Profitable. Green lays out intriguing possible scenarios in which Google could redefine advertising through social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

It represents either trivial speculation or one of the more profound changes in modern advertising and PR.

I’ve developed one theory about Google’s possible plans. It seems to make sense given Google’s track record and recent trends. But really, I’d love to hear from you - whether you think this theory is guaranteed to come to fruition, completely bunk, or just so-so.

But first, let’s examine influence ranking and then go through how Google could use this to revolutionize search and social networks.

The Problem of Influence

Google has a patent pending on technology for ranking the most influential people on social networking sites. Take a moment for the implication of this to sink in.

While intriguing, this prospect and Green’s article start with some questionable assumptions. For instance, what is influence?

Two ideas are particularly tenuous. “Well-connected chums make you particularly influential. The tracking system also would follow how frequently people post things on each other’s sites.” However, we all know from personal experience that just because a person is vocal and has a lot of friends on MySpace does not mean they are influential. Quantity of friends and frequency of interactions are not specifically markers of influence.

Her third and final idea of influence - that of getting your friends to click on articles or videos you send - may be worthwhile. Unlike quantity or frequency of social networking activity, your friends’ clicks do indicate their trust. However, as an advertiser, I would be less interested in clicks and more in the resulting purchases. It’s an incomplete metric at least.

(Just before I was about to hit “publish” on this piece, I saw Joe Marchese’s excellent piece critiquing Green’s take on influence and the use of measuring it at all: Google To Decode Social Networks. It’s a must-read if you’re interested in influence ranking - especially the last paragraph.)

What’s The Use?

Green hypothesizes that Google could identify the most influential members of groups and both sharpen and expand advertiser’s targeting. She believes they will better target with the same old display ads they’ve been using.

I respectfully disagree.

The hypothesis of sharpened and expanded targeting is hardly a departure from Google’s current practice. Sure, social networkers tolerate banner ads now, but this makes the ads more invasive and especially abuses the most influential (”[Nike] could work with Google to plop an interactive free-throw game on the profile pages of the community influencers”).

This course of action would set off twin firestorms from privacy advocates and those concerned about social networking monetization (they aren’t getting paid by Nike, after all). Plus, it’s not really an advancement. Google tends to make bold leaps, not timid advances into an area they already dominate.

Maybe there are other ways Google can use social network information.

Google Today

So how could Google use a patent that ranks influential people (assuming they can) on social networking sites?

I started sketching out at a very basic level what Google does. This is what I came up with. Primarily, Google organizes and prioritizes information on websites and display ads.

• Google parses information about websites:

User provides search terms + Google provides search algorithm = SERP

• Google parses information about search terms:

User provides search terms + Google provides ad serving mechanism = AdWords

Google Tomorrow

This is how the system currently works. But if the next step moves forward as Green describes, the user will tacitly provide social networking profile information rather than a search term. So the equation becomes:

User provides social networking profile info + ? = ?

What would Google provide and what do they hope to achieve?

Well, it seems likely that they will provide some tool to sort data - in this case to determine an influence ranking. If Green is correct about their patent filing, the equation becomes:

User provides social networking profile info + Google provides influence ranking/search algorithm = ?

And what could they serve up? I think it’s going to be experiences.

User provides social networking profile info + Google provides influence ranking/search algorithm = Real-life experiences

Experiences?

Right now, Google dominates the web. They have the most robust search and ad serving capabilities. Since 99% of their revenue is derived from advertising, where can they go but into the real world? How else can they provide something worthwhile for their advertising partners?

Imagine this:

I’m walking in my neighborhood, chatting on my new Gphone. At the same time, Mastercard is sponsoring a concert featuring my favorite band just a few blocks over. All of a sudden, I get an ad on my phone with information about the concert and a digital coupon if I can bring along two more friends. I use Google to locate a couple of my friends in the area and we head to the show.

In this scenario:

• I win: I get to see my favorite band and get a cheaper ticket to the show.
• Mastercard wins: By delivering uber-targeted messages, they get more brand exposure (along with the residual effect of pleasing the influentials). Plus, they don’t get charged for ad impressions that don’t result in a ticket purchase.
• Google wins: They rake in the money for all of the ads served.

This advertising scenario takes the best of what Google does (parse and deliver information) with what advertisers want (targeted messages and accountability) resulting in a very pleased customer.

Influentials could be rewarded by the discounted tickets I described or a number of other ways. Perhaps initial messages go out to them a week ahead of time to build buzz. Maybe their ad reception radius is larger.

Think of all the information contained in a social networking profile. You’ve got location (ad: the store you just passed is having a sale!), alma mater (ad: another Stanford alum is sitting at the bar!), favorite books (ad: Borders is having a Nabokov sale!), and much, much more.

Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems possible, if not likely, that Google would take a giant leap to extend their reach. What do you think? Am I totally off-base? Feel free to leave your comments below.

Technorati Tags: Web Strategy,Advertising,Media 2.0,Marketing,Web 2.0,Blogs,Blogging,Social Media