Grieben vs Small Business

I was recently reading a post on MarketingProfs about marketing analytics(See here). The focus was on using the right analytical tool, not all tools are created equal, and while quantitative analysis is the most concrete and measurable, it’s not always the best choice because it doesn’t allow for the same intuitive observations primary qualitative research allows. Now I am a marketer whose position is based on funnel reporting and CRM support so reporting is my lifeblood making what I’m about to say feels controversial, what if you don’t care about analysis.

When looking at marketing from an operations perspective, the best tool is the one that is most efficient and trackable, but when you look at the from the end user/consumer the best tool doesn’t matter as long as expectations are met or exceeded. One of the great things about the web is its ability to level the playing field for small businesses. Entrepreneurs can take advantage of so many digital solutions that can incorporate rich media and functionality into their online web presence that a prospect would never know you were a one man shop unless they showed up at your physical address. Small organizations need to realize this and leverage it rather than feel overwhelmed by their lack of resources.

The power that lies in marketing tools like Eloqua and Salesforce.com are in its ability to track the sales process so you can build buyer profiles to help predict who is most likely to become a customer. Startups often don’t have the time to collect, analyze and produce reports that are so vital in the corporate world, they are to busy getting things done. Templates, automated responses and robust tracking/reporting that are only valuable if you handle the volume to drive sample sizes big enough to make the results meaningful and use it to become more efficient and save time. If you are a small org, say 50 employees or less, chances are the volume you are handling is low enough that a couple people can manually manage all that traffic, and too low for any reporting you tried to give you any meaningful insight.

What most small operators don’t realize is that their mammoth competition is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to look small. Online, visitors expect fast response to requests and real time conversation and billion dollar orgs invest in these tools so they can meet the need to reply. They are fighting to look like 1 person replying to 1 email something entrepreneurs are doing simply by being small.  As long as your site is perceived as delivering the content in the same way, you are no worse off. Your users don’t care if their name is in an activity report or not as long as their white-paper is delivered.

When you take the need for all that granularity out of it, your available low cost solutions explode. Marketing activities drive revenue, the need for reporting exists only to convince unbelievers of its value. Let the corporations with employees like me worry about reporting on results, you already know your activities are vital so stop making excuses and get to work.

Grieben vs Social Marketing

In the wake of Yesterdays Breast cancer awareness viral campaign, I’m reminded about why I love social networks and social media in general.  It creates an environment for users to connect and share things that they care about, disseminate information quickly if you can reach the right influencers and above all provide another way for those who care about your product/service/charity to feel engaged and contribute on a daily basis. It also reminded me of why so many marketers have trouble embracing social marketing in their day to day campaigns, I mean honestly, who cares as much about the widgets they buy as they do about breast cancer?

For those of you aren’t sure of the campaign I am talking about here is the gist of it, yesterday on facebook, females everywhere started changing their status to a color. Seems harmless enough right? It all started with this message popping up in mailboxes.

“Some fun is going on.... just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. And send this on to ONLY girls no men .... It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in their status... Haha .”

As you can imagine, guys everywhere started asking what was up.  Some caught on, some didn’t, most of the time girls let the cat out of the bag ruining the fun for everyone, but it was wildly successful and spread like wildfire. It was interesting before you understood it to see people in your network who had no other connection but through you posting similar mysterious things. It got people talking. Why did it work so well? Why did so many women jump on board? I’m sure an number of people will give some more detailed analysis but I think it comes down to the old sex sells adage. The fact that it was for a good cause (breast cancer awareness) is a given for adoption, but it also made it fun, an inside joke to play on the boys, mixed with a little harmless dirty talk(the color of your underwear). It was like being in the schoolyard again. It was simple, genius and damn near impossible to replicate in a normal business context.

Some have tried and succeeded, the IKEA store opening comes to mind see link for video(IKEA Store Opening) where the first people to tag themselves as  items in a showroom gallery to win the item, or Burger Kings Drop 10 friends get a free Whopper campaign(Drop 10 Facebook Page) and of course the most widely touted campaign of all, the Obama Presidential Campaign. Each of these all managed to make their offering note worthy, sometimes a difficult task if you sell certain items.

That’s why there is so much “spam” out there. Countless facebook pages and twitter accounts devoted to organizations that know they need to be there, but aren’t sure why and instead post special promo codes or press releases. As a user who’s there to be engaged and interact would you be interested in this info? Many marketers haven’t figured out how to use social media channels to their advantage yet, so they are just extending their normal batch and blast behaviors to new channels.

If you don’t have a product that your customers and prospects can’t stop talking about to promote you, or don’t care enough about to spread throughout their networks, there’s still a lot of value in social networks as a tool for customer service and intelligence. Companies need to be sure they don’t ignore it, because if your customers aren’t actively out there promoting you, you can be sure there are some that are badmouthing you. Becoming a part of the discussion is important so if you aren’t going to respond to complaints’, you will at least be aware of these issues your customers and prospects are talking about.
If they haven’t already, organizations need to invest in the resources to monitor and respond to what’s happening out there, and vendors are stepping up to provide tools to aid in these efforts.  Eloqua has stepped up to include sharing and reporting tools to integrate social media into their automations suite(ELQ Reporting) and CRM giant Salesforce.com has integrations  for twitter and facebook, and is even taking a social approach to its operations with apps like Chatter.  The shift is coming and its not a bad idea to get prepared now.

Like when the boys on facebook didn’t know what was going on with color status updates, you and your organization don’t want to be out of the loop when its your company that the in crowd is talking about in the school yard.