Digital Marketers Are Wrong to Focus Only on ROI
If you work in digital, you’re probably getting a bit tired of the ROI question by now. We are all tasked with justifying our pitches and projects with proving where the ROI lies directly. We need to show that whatever ad, video or app we run, directly leads to X number of sales online, or X number of conversions.
However, we’ve all been making a huge mistake. We (marketers, brands, agencies) have assumed that because you ‘can’ buy online, whatever you run online ‘should’ lead to direct sales. TV never had this problem because you could never get into the TV to buy the product. Billboards, radio ads, cover-wraps, inserts, advertorials all never had this problem for the same reason.
Since it’s physically possible to buy from the place that you’re running your digital campaign, we’ve assumed that this is how we judge success. That’s where we’ve gone wrong, and where we will keep going wrong. We’ve thought that because you can just be a click away from buying a product or converting on a website, if users don’t do that straight away, it’s a failure. So the ‘trust’ remains in costly methods such as TV, which will never be expected to prove this because they can’t. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by eBrand Media Research Department in eBrand Interactive, eBrand Media, Medianista, Strategy on April 21st, 2013
Congratulations! Tom Polanski has one of the top 10% most viewed LinkedIn profiles for 2012!
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Posted by eBrand Media Public Relations Department in Guest Contributors, Social Media, Success Stories on February 11th, 2013
The Internal Netflix Management Policy
The radical management policies of Netflix as a reflection of the digital economy. They’re a lot different than the those implemented by the companies Dad worked for during the Industrial Age.
For example:
1. No vacation policy (take as much as you want, as long as you’re doing a great job and covering your responsibilities).
2. “Outstanding” employees only- Doing an “adequate” job leads to your getting a “generous severance package,” so the company can hire an A-player in your place.
3. “Freedom and responsibility” vs command-and-control: Good managers give their employees the right context in which to make decisions–and then the employees make the decisions. Poor employee behavior is caused by misunderstanding – “Managers: When one of your talented people does something dumb, don’t blame them. Instead, ask yourself what context you failed to set. High performance people will do better work if they understand the context.”
4. No “brilliant jerks” – Star performers who also happen to be hell to work with are sent packing.
5. Prioritize Discovery Over Job Security – “Many people love our culture, and stay a long time. They thrive on excellence and candor and change….Some people, however, value job security over performance, and don’t like our culture.”
6. Creativity is Most Important – “ In procedural work, the best are 2x better than the average. In creative/inventive work, the best are 10x.”
Click here to see the whole Powerpoint. (You might have to hit the refresh button for it to load.)
Posted by eBrand Media Research Department in Trend Tracker on January 31st, 2013
3 in 4 Retailers Use SocNet Sites; Only 40% Text
When it comes to non-traditional marketing, North American retailers have mostly cottoned on to hosted social networking sites (75%), but are far less likely to have implemented other strategies such as SMS (40%), 2D barcode scanning by customer smartphones (30%), and location-based social networking (29%), details Boston Retail Partners [download page] in a January study. The results also show that many retailers aren’t interested in blogs: 42% have no plans to implement their own hosted blogs, and 39% won’t monitor external blogs.
The researchers point out that the percentage of retailers hosting their own social networking sites has risen slightly from last year, while the proportion monitoring external sites has fallen. By “controlling their own destiny” on social media, retailers are more able to “react quickly to any issues that may occur and more readily reward loyal customers.”
Customer Service Most Important to Retailers
Perhaps retailers will cotton onto the trend of using social media not just for marketing but also for customer service. Given a list and asked to identify the items by importance, a leading 86% of respondents rated customer service as being very important to their organization, ahead of efficient processing at the register/speed of service (64%), employee product knowledge (50%), and in-stock position (50%).
About the Data: The Boston Retail Partners data is based on a survey of more than 500 top North American retailers conducted in October through December of 2012. Close to two-thirds of the respondents to the 14th Annual POS Benchmarking Survey are in the specialty category.