Category Archives: Measuring Engagement

Desirability, Satisfaction

DataBase Marketing, Measuring Engagement, Web Analytics,

I didn’t talk about Satisfaction, the 5th component of the AIDAS model, in the last post on Desirability.  That’s because it’s the most difficult for folks to get a grip on and I wanted to treat it separately.   There’s a reason for this difficulty: Most Marketers (and many analysts) think they’re “done” when they get through the Action part of AIDAS.

They achieved Engagement, don’t you know.

So even though Interactivity is different, these folks are still using the old offline models to run their Marketing programs.  “Satisfaction” isn’t their problem, Action is.  Satisfaction is somebody else’s problem, a longer-term issue.  Marketers have no control over it.

Now, I’m pretty sure most folks reading this know Marketing plays a big role in Satisfaction and have seen live examples of it.  Everything from over-promising in the Sales pitch to Products with known faults that are still sold to Service Policies that don’t make any sense.

And most Marketers say, “That’s not my problem, my job is selling.”

This attitude is so old school, offline thinking again.  Interactivity is about the Exchange, it’s not a one-way, always Outbound kind of thing.  Interactivity, by definition, says there is a Relationship.  So if you are going to be an Interactive Marketer, you have to be in the Relationship business.

And this means Satisfaction is part of your job.

You’re not only responsible for creating Engagement, you are responsible for managing / correcting Dis-Engagement as well.  Because that’s how you have a Relationship, that’s Interactivity – you analyze, and react.  If you don’t, this is what can happen.

You wanted Interactivity, right?  What part of the Interactive premise says you can walk away from the Customer Relationships you have created?  That you’re “finished” after the Relationship is created?  That attitude is so old-school Marketing.

For many Marketing folks, what this all means they need to change from understanding “who the customer is” (demographics) to “what the customer does” (behavior) as being the primary segmentation concern.   Understanding Desirability means understanding how people use or consume products over time.  It’s about the behavior of consumers, regardless of how old or young, rich or poor, or what their zip code is.

What’s happening at a higher level is this:  There are business models that are truly customer-centric, and there are those that are not.  People prefer dealing with a model that is customer centric – and they always have.  But over the past several decades, they have not had much choice in this matter.

Insert your favorite “Corner Grocery Store” tale here.

Then came the web.  The web represents interactivity on a mass scale.  People like interactivity.  But it’s a different kind of relationship, and demands a customer-centric business model to be really successful.  You can’t just put a topping of interactivity on the old mass Marketing model most folks are using online and expect it to work for you.

That’s called a Meatball Sundae.

In the past, the number of companies in the “not centric” category dwarfed those in the “centric” category.  Then the web happened, and companies that never had contact with the end customer before, and were insulated from interactivity, now all of a sudden had to open contact centers.  Interactivity was forced on them.

It’s not that customers did not want direct relationships, and the web somehow gave them “power” or put them “in control”.  It’s just now people have experienced these kind of relationships with more companies than they ever could before, and they want this kind of relationship with every company they deal with.  So the environment at companies not used to the customer-centric idea feels like customers are taking control.

The customer is only in control if you are using the wrong Marketing model in an interactive world.  If you are using the right model, there should be no reason customers would want to take control in the first place.

This is what customer-centricity really means.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Choose Your Marketing / Business Model.

——–

Now that we’ve powered through the Strategic landscape, on to the Tactical “OK, so what do we do now?” part of the program in the next couple of posts.

Comments on these ideas?  Or are you all waiting for the Tactical stuff to jump in?

Want Engagement? Get Desirability

Analytical Culture, Brand Management, Marketing thru Operations, Measuring Engagement, Web Analytics,

Forrester’s Marketing Forum this year covered Engagement, but not the kind of Engagement so often discussed in web analytics.

Nope, Engagement from a Marketing perspective, you know, surprise and delight leads to better customer experiences leads to better customer retention and higher profits.

The presentation came complete with some nifty offline Engagement examples, e.g. the more a patient is Engaged in their healthcare the better the result.  The improved results came from, get this, “improving doctor usability”.  And yes, there was a test on this business optimization effort with tangible results generated.

You can get a good feel for where this conversation is headed from Jeremiah Owyang’s blog by listening to the 2 Forrester keynotes, each about an hour long.  For those short on time, pick one, depending on your interest:

Strategic Level: platforms, frameworks, etc. from Brian Haven

Tactical Level: examples, “how to” etc. from Kerry Bodine

No time for a video?

For a bulleted list of the key points you need to understand in order to optimize your Marketing model, see the “Five Fundamentals of Integrated Marketing” ClickZ article here.

I’ll have more to say on why these ideas are so important in the next couple of days.  For now, I will leave you with this:

If the customer is taking control, it’s only because you’re using the wrong Marketing model, maybe one like this one.  No customer wants to have to “take control” in the first place.

The more Engaging you are, the less old-school “pray and spray” Marketing  – online or offline – you should have to do.

That’s the whole point of Engagement.

Comments on the videos or article?  Anything ring a bell for you?

Perfect Google-Click World

DataBase Marketing, Measuring Engagement, Web Analytics

So, what would a universal cookie across both Display and PPC give us?  What could we look forward to, what’s the wish list of the online “ideal marketing world” we could live in when we really understand how Display and PPC interact? 

I’ll give it a start, feel free to add to this wish list…

1.  From a macro web advertising perspective, all available Google-Click “space” is capable of being optimized for performance – whatever your definition of “performance” is.  That means an end to the idea of the space being attached to a pricing model – for any given space, you might see either a PPC ad or a Display ad. 

Hopefully, the advertiser would have some control over this allocation, deciding if / when which pricing models are used in which spaces, similar to the controls over pricing model existing in AdSense today.

I realize running Display units in Search inventory may seem counter-intuitive, but the key is pricing control.  The web desperately needs a more effective way to expose people to ideas they have never heard of in context.  Running random display units across opaque networks is not a particularly good way to do this; running targeted display units based on search history – a more advanced form of behavioral targeting – would do the trick.

Likewise, running PPC ads in tightly segmented display spaces can lead to big payoffs, as it did in the Lab Store example.

2.  A real gift would be some cookie-based sense of where the visitor is in the funnel, probably based on the search phrases they are using. 

“Level 1” would be no prior interest, “Level 2” would be “uses single word searches” on the topic, “Level 3” would be “uses multi-word phrases” on the topic, and so forth.  Visitors in the unknowing or shallow knowledge Levels would be exposed to cheap Display units – both in Search and in Display inventory.  Those expressing active interest (Engaged, if you will) would be exposed to PPC units, again, both in Search and in Display inventory.

You’d need some kind of history control on this, because the data set would probably get too huge.  Say for example, trailing 30 days interest, so you make sure the visitor is still Engaged with the topic.  As active searching on the topic dropped off, you’d kill the data off, because it’s no longer relevant.  If it starts up again, so be it, but a restart is a new profile.

Other ideas from the crowd?

Given cross-site tracking already exists for Display, do you think there will be any Privacy problems if Search History was used to target outside of Search?  People are pretty used to seeing ads based on searches in the search space…why not bring that over to Display?

Do you think Google-Click will give us a “universal cookie”, or will they keep the Display side in the dark for the sake of Brand-oriented folks who only care about impressions?