Give away an iPod and voila your hashtag is trending on Twitter, all the contest junkies are giving you funny answers to win that iPod. But are they your real customers? Did your brand reach the real audience? Did it make any impact? Was spending your marketing budgets on giving away those iPods gave you any returns?
These are the question that arise in every entrepreneur’s mind today while trying to assess the success of a social media campaign; the challenge increases when it comes to doing other digital media campaigns like SEM or banner campaigns.
The funda of return on investment (ROI) on digital and social media is starkly different from measuring ROI on other marketing initiatives. The difference is due to the engaging nature of digital medium as opposed to print and TV which merely broadcast information.
The power of a ‘Like’ and ‘retweet’ are indeed unique to social media, they require customized yard sticks to measure and benchmark; a CTR percentage is unique to each campaign.
Google Business Group (GBG) Mumbai brings you a unique opportunity to learn the techniques of measuring ROI on digital and social media marketing; for a SME, every rupee matters, we aim to help you get maximum bang for your buck.
Three industry experts are presenting interesting cases studies over an interactive session, they will demonstrate accepted methods of calculating your return on digital and social media marketing investments. What more, you could interact with the speakers to learn more; build your network with fellow GBG members over a high tea.
Join us on the Saturday, 21st of December
Venue: Seminar Hall, 1st Floor, Harkisan Mehta Institute of Journalism, Mithibai college campus, Vile Parle, Mumbai.
Time: 5pm to 8pm
Registration: Free and by registration only. Fill the form below or (click here to register)
We all know how important smartphones are in our lives, how our lives have become dynamic. Allow me to take you through an extraordinary journey, actually an evolution –At one point of time a mobile phone was for voice calls only, it progressed to games, internet, camera, chat, storage device, social media, and apps by the time we realized it was already a “smartphone”.
How consumers have adapted to this rapidly changing mobile technology? Today’s consumers behave in a different way and consume content on a smartphone.
Gone are the days when they would trust the retailer blindly, today they are more inclined to see the opinion of colleagues, friends or acquaintances before making any major purchase or even a general set of reviews online. How will this govern the purchase or user behaviour in near future?
Isn’t it interesting and simultaneously important for marketers/companies to understand?
A very basic question to you, what would consumer research online about a product or service?
Simple, a consumer will research about the prices, features, other user’s feedback, coupons, and any additional offers or promotions.
Why is it important? What should a marketer do?
How will ROPO (research Online, Purchase offline) help/harm? ROPO will enable creating informed consumer behavior. Internet will be the enabler to research. Get smart about alternatives, read reviews, look for coupons, or compare before deciding a purchase. Today each one of us is carrying an intelligent device with social media apps. Have you ever seen anyone with smartphone in hand and researching about the product in a store? The answer would be “yes” many times, we ourselves do that and so does a smart consumer. Research before purchase is expected to grow exponentially in coming years with increase in number of “smart handsets”.
Role of Smartphones in ROPO effect:
Today the mobile device has evolved many folds and is better in terms of looks, speed, data connectivity, processor and possesses uniquely advanced features which fuels the ROPO.
Smartphones are available in various technology versions from business phone “Blackberry”, to newly jazzed up “Windows 8”, elegant and style icon “iPhone”, not to forget the game changer and exponentially growing “Android” based devices, along with better data connectivity, 3G, introduction of 4G and WiFi, smartphones have brought a mobile revolution. Graph below shows smartphones influence on purchase decisions. (Graph source: ThinkWithGoogle)
Usage of Smartphone in Purchase Journey.
ROPO is also termed as O2S (Online to sales) behavior of consumers. It is evident 4 out of 10 people research offline before purchase. Most of the digital properties help consumers formulate a stand and impact offline purchase.
Search and Social as enablers for ROPO:
Mobile data evolution has become advanced growth of “social media”. Few years back this was considered as tool to promote brands, later on it evolved into reputation management tool. But now, it has formulated a “Customer Voice” on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and various other social platforms. Where customers interact with brands, share their reviews, which are further crawled, indexed, and ranked by various search engines.
Mobile phones have enabled a concept of research on the go. Google conducted a comprehensive study with shopper-sciences using 5000 shoppers across 12 categories called ZMOT “Zero Moment of Truth”. This gives the guidelines on how companies can sway online decision making process of consumer till the very last goal “purchase” through various touch points.
What should a marketer/company do? Marketers need to think locally and plan holistically for all the touch points, right from stimulus (TV/Print ads) to digital (website, mobile site, social platforms, review sites, deal sites, classifieds, blogs, videos etc.), there has to be good marketing mix.
Innovative marketing strategies especially for mobile devices, as mobiles have changed the way people search, behave. Now it’s on to conversions, registration on mobile are hectic, instead they can be replaced with “app like” permissions, resulting in better impact. Placement of QR code at essentials offline touch points will lead the consumer to the information which you want them to read.
It is difficult to track each and every touch point of your present or potential consumers. The basic rule remains the same “Top of Mind Awareness” (TOMA).
Just to sum up the article, increase in penetration of the smartphones across geographies will have dramatic impact on ecommerce and retail business, keeping marketers on the toes as they understand this behavior is poised to increase.
The web comprises over 60 trillion pages, and is constantly growing at a tremendous pace. From the 5 page static website of a mom and pop shop to the excessive downloadable whitepaper stuffed Fortune 500 Company’s portals, everything is now indexed by Google. What are the odds that your website appears on top for a given set of keywords when a prospective customer is searching for?
The freelance SEO expert you hired last summer sure did his best, you probably got listed in the 1st page for a few keywords, but then, the search algorithms have changed at least thrice since. The Googlebot will probably be laughing at the silly link building tactics you deployed to achieve some miraculous results and spoil your premature celebrations of SEO success.
Im not trying to intimidate, im just trying to set the stage clear for this blog post, it’s not just another post on how to optimize, there are zillions of articles and slideshares about that topic; what I what you to realize is very simple. Have you understood your prospective customer enough? I believe that is the foundation on which your SEO strategy and tactics should be built upon.
So, how to understand your customer better?
Whatever the business you might be in, an individual ‘searching’ online broadly has three clear ‘intent’
Do – Users want to “do” something, a goal or engage in an activity, such as download software, play a game online, send flowers, find entertaining videos, etc.
Know – Users want to find information. These are “know” queries: users want to know something about a business, a service or just plain information
Go – Users want to navigate to a website or webpage. These are “go” queries: users want to go to a specific page or a website
Which of the above intent are addressed by your website? The right answer should be ‘all three’ in an order of importance as above.
You could be a school, a clothing store, an information portal (tech, movies, hotel reviews), corporate website, an app for download, a NGO in constant need of donations, whatever maybe your business, a prospective customer is looking forward to gaining firsthand information, meaningful reviews and reliable recommendations; and in bulk of the cases, this doesn’t happen by searching directly for your brand name. (Besides, optimizing for brand keywords is a cliché)
While understanding the intent is one thing, putting a context around that is quite another.
Consider the following search queries in Google ‘CBSE vs ICSE’ or ‘Apple vs Android’ or ‘Job vs Career’; in all three cases, the search results do not lead to a school, Android’s website (despite owned by Google!) or a job portal respectively. Here, Google clearly knows the intent and context of the user search; it aims to provide most popular news or blog articles for all of the three search cases.
If we tweak the search query a little ‘best cbse school’ the results are quite different, we get a page full of results with maps and reviews, and ofcourse, Google knows from which city you are searching from, so CBSE schools from your city will be displayed.
Once you have understood your customer’s context of search, here’s how to optimize:
Start with analysing your content and keywords and constanstly ask yourself “does your site has contextual message or is it just plain sales brochure like information?”
Have a entertaining, interesting and relevant content startegy that address the ‘know’ intent; your social media presence comes to help here, and do not ignore G+, genuine guest blogs and wikipedia (if you qualify)
Create compelling landing pages that addresses the ‘do’ intent, have rich media integration like videos and slideshare in the landing page explaining why your are the best.
Have error free links, and frequently updates sitemaps to optimise for ‘go’ intent.
End note: Intent is what you should to undertand clearly, it is for the context that you must otpimize.
