For digital marketers, it’s the actions (or lack thereof) that our customers take that speak the loudest.
The latest neuroscience research is crystal clear: it’s our emotions, not our intellect, that drives our decisions. As Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel’s Kahneman’s characterized in his book, ‘Thinking Fast and Slow,’ the intuitive parts of our brains work super fast, like on ‘autopilot’, while our reflective frontal lobes plod along methodically, like a ‘pilot’.
For digital marketers, of course, it’s the actions (or lack thereof) that our customers take that speak the loudest. So we need ‘full spectrum’ tools — ones that capture, analyze and report on everything from affect to action.
The good news is, with the latest tech, we can now scientifically measure whether or not our ‘stimuli’ (our marketing creative, user experience designs, etc.) are generating both the intended effect and affect.
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Digital marketers need experience-based metrics
If you’ve been a digital marketer for more than a quarter, you know your key performance metrics by heart - things like Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and, of course, Conversion Rate (CR). These are what I call the ‘hard’ marketing metrics - the ones associated with money.
But there are other ‘soft’ metrics you should be tracking as well - ones related to the customer experience you’re providing. Why? Because they represent the feelings that ultimately cause your visitors to click that call to action or complete a purchase.
It has become increasingly clear over the past few years that fast-changing consumer expectations and rapid technological advances have raised the bar. ‘Good enough’ no longer is. To survive - and, ideally, thrive - you need to know…
Customer listening is now essential
Ever talked with someone who doesn’t seem to listen to you or let you get a word in edgewise? Pretty annoying, right?
The same is true in digital marketing. In order for you to market and, ultimately sell better, you need to listen as much as you talk. Only then can you capture the critical customer feedback you need to inform the tactical tweaks and strategic transformations you need to make to take your business to the next level. The best way to do this is by listening – at first manually if that’s all you can afford to do – but eventually in a deep, analytics-based way. This is the realm of customer listening (CL) platforms.
What’s a Customer Listening Platform?
A customer listening (or CL) platform is a SAAS-based app that allows you to listen to all the streams of customer data you have available so you…
How Coca-Cola could have foreseen the 'New Coke' crash
It's 1985. For the past 15 years, the Coca-Cola Company has seen market share decline for its flagship product.
After conducting blind taste tests with more than 200,000 consumers, the soft drink brand discovers that consumers prefer a new formula to Pepsi and even to the old Coke. That summer, Coca-Cola rolls out 'New Coke' with an all-star ad campaign.
The product bombs. Badly. Consumers clamor for the classic formula, which Coca-Cola quickly brings back.
How could Coca-Cola, which decidedly did its homework in terms of tasting, fail so spectacularly? The issue is that Coke consumers slurp the soda down for more than taste. Coca-Cola forgot that every time someone pops the top, they're drinking from a well of emotion.
Asking the Right Questions
Since 1985, the power and prevalence of market research has only grown. In 2017, U.S. companies are slated to spend about $16 billion on market…
Predictive Analytics is the future of marketing
Okay, so that title might be a tad misleading. Especially when you consider my knowledge of football is on a par with my knowledge of forensic mineralogy (a rock is a rock, right?). But I do know about predictions. The hyperbole about Predictive Analytics and its potential power to affect marketing has really ramped up in the last few months. Current industry commentary places Predictive Analytics, in terms of power and effectiveness on the far side of miracles, and in terms of its complexity, on a par with Stephen Hawking’s ‘A brief history of time’.
So, I agree with the general thrust of one of those.
The results. The results are phenomenal. They really are startling – to the extent that I’m looking at our client’s results and going back to our Head of Insight because there’s clearly a mis-type here (there isn’t). But if we…
Chart of the Day: The importance of having quality marketing data
Data is the not-so-secret weapon of each and every marketer across the land. Data-driven marketing takes the guesswork out of your daily decision making. Should you place more budget into Facebook Ads, more resource into email marketing or cancel your latest campaign early? It's hard to know unless you have accurate data at hand to inform your decision-making.
In a recent research report, Ascend2 asked marketing influencers "what are the most important objectives of a marketing data strategy?" Leading the way with 62% was improving marketing data quality. This result is encouraging because if you don't have accurate data you could be making worse decisions than if you had no data at all.
In a follow-up question, they asked "What are the most critical challenges to achieving marketing…
Use NPS follow-up insight to convert Detractors and Passives
The ability to quickly gauge your enterprise’s overall health with a single NPS score is useful to let you know whether you need to make any changes. However, a lone NPS score is not enough to tell you what changes you need to make.
The Net Promoter Score has become a popular customer loyalty metric, but you need more than a simple measure of the likelihood of receiving customer recommendations to help you identify organizational problems in enough detail to chart a course for corporate success.
That’s why the metric’s proponents are now recommending you ‘close the loop’ with follow-up questions that get to the root of your customers’ neutrality or lack of satisfaction.
‘Close the loop’ with a NPS-integrated solution
Enterprises looking to transform their Net Promoter Scores into actionable insight should be considering…
Customer surveys may not be exciting, but they're still crucial to business success
Customer surveys are a traditional marketing research method. The advancement of technology has attempted to push them to the side in favour of other means, such as email. However, there are many reasons not to renounce this particular practice and instead, see them as an addition to the typical advanced strategy. Customer surveys are not a novelty, but they are still relevant in today’s digital marketing environment. Here are 10 good reasons to convince you.
1. Offer Better Services
The primary purpose of any customer survey is getting feedback from clients. However, this feedback is only the means to an end. Just collecting your client’s opinion is useless if you don’t do anything with it. The expected outcome of any marketing research is an improvement. If you have struggled to…
Analysing time spent on various platforms highlights where engagement is going
As marketers, we're always beeing told to check out a new platform to see if it is worth the company using it to promote itself. When it comes to social networks, we tend to use size as the key metric when we assess if it will be worth using. By size me mean the number of people using the platform, but is this really the best metric? There is a massive difference between someone that logs in to a network one a month to have a quick check of their messages, and someone who spends hours a day deeply engaged with the platform.
So marketers should also consider this less talked about metric shown in the chart below, hours per user per month, or HUM as I'd like to call it.
As we might expect Facebook does well on this metric, but…
How to better examine customer behaviour to assess their readiness to convert
Today’s marketing funnel is a lot more intricate than it once was. There are now more elements to consider when it comes to awareness, throughout the process of lead nurturing and up until the point of sale. Before closing, buyers are exposed to your brand via a variety of touches, often spanning several devices, media formats and channels.
The idea is that no matter what route your prospects take along this journey, and no matter how long the journey takes, if they remain engaged, then they’re always getting increasingly closer to the point of sales-readiness.
But what does it mean for an anonymous audience member to “engage” with your brand? Richard Sedley once wrote that engagement refers to “repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological or physical investment a customer has in a brand.” This definition is just one of…
