Podcast: How Product Experience, Marketing, and Community Coexist with FreshBooks

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On this 250th episode of “Marketing Today,” host Alan Hart speaks with Paul Cowan, the CMO of FreshBooks, a cloud-based accounting solution for small businesses and self-employed professionals. Over the past 20 years, Paul has marketed everything from booze to SaaS products, learning that product experience and marketing go hand-in-hand.

In this episode, Alan and Paul discuss the symbiotic relationship between product experience and marketing while touching on the intersection between marketing and community. They even talk of activism — or really slacktivism — and what it means for businesses.

The conversation begins with an overview of how FreshBooks came to be and how Paul stepped into his CMO role during a company rebrand. Like any good CMO, Paul believes it’s important for your customers to understand the pain you address, but it’s even more essential for them to understand what makes you different. From a brand standpoint, Paul says marketers need to look internally and find what he calls the “bits of goodness” that exist within the product experience and communicate that to customers.

Paul goes on to explain how to use that pain to build a community, what slacktivism means, and how it impacts business, for better or worse.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to take a pain point and use marketing to exploit it

• How to find your company magic and use it as your superpower

• What the symbiotic relationship is between product, customers, marketing, and community

• What role slacktivism plays in marketing and in pushing companies to be purpose-driven

Podcast: The Importance of Customer Data Marketing for Modern Marketers

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I spoke with Bernie Borges on why marketing professionals need to have a strong grip on data. These uncertain times have inspired modern marketers to rely less on qualitative insights and more on data-driven insights.

• Why we invested in a direct sales force

• How we are targeting international markets

• How to focus demand generation to accelerate growth

Synopsis:

Paul says that after 15 years of operations, FreshBooks realized they were sitting on a lot of data they had not previously leveraged. For instance, they had a tremendous amount of invoice and expense data within the SMB universe ― 15 years of historical data on how small businesses have either created revenue or spent their money.

For example, looking at the data, they discovered some interesting trends and published a report on the impact that Covid had on women business owners and how it took them longer to recover than their male counterparts in many different industries.

“When we talk about the opportunity in data marketing,” Paul says, “we’re sitting on this huge resource to be able to turn that to our customers or to prospects in the industry in general and say hey, here’s how your business should be performing, here are all the historical norms that you should be expecting your business to do.”

Besides reports on specific trends, FreshBooks has created gated microsites with specific information related to particular verticals and industries.

“People can go through and see how their vertical looks, how it has changed and be able to drive insights into their business so it helps them with their planning and then eventually, we all assume that it’s going to then help drive activity back to us and convert through the funnel.”

This focus on great content marketing using data has been driving leads for FreshBooks. Furthermore, data on their engagement with the content brings even more insights on their customers that then they can use to improve their marketing efforts.

That's right, #marketers are sitting on a lot of historical data to help them understand how to drive leads. Thanks, @cowanpkc CMO at @freshbooks for this episode of the @MMEnginePodcast with host @BernieBorgesCLICK TO TWEET

“The cool thing is that it’s like this virtuous data circle where it all started with knowing something about our customer and then bringing other people in and then progressively knowing more about them because they engage with customer data. We’ll bring them all through and then at the end of it all it helps us improve our overall funnel efficacy and in our conversion rates overall.”

We also discussed the dynamics of the current marketing team and why it is important for marketers to understand data analytics and the sales process.

Listen to this episode to learn more about how FreshBooks is using customer data to improve marketing and how they incorporate the feedback from their sales teams.

The Growth TL;DR Podcast: Building a 12 Month Growth Plan

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I chatted with Kieran about my experience at FreshBooks over the past 16 months and the things I’ve done to help drive growth.

By listening to this show, you'll learn:

• How to think about building a 12 to 18-month plan as a new CMO of a fast-growth company.

• Understand how to test brand messaging by focusing on specific cities

• What channels to prioritize for growth

• With the cost to acquire a customer increasing across all marketing channels, what it means for the future of marketing.

4 Reasons Why a Starting a Business Isn't for You

Over the years I have met and interviewed many self-proclaimed ‘entrepreneurial’ people.  These people often talk about starting a company and doing it on their own, then settle down snugly to their predictable job running TPS reports at a regional outpost for a global conglomerate.  Yes, truly ‘entrepreneurial’.  

Lots of folks often talk about 'going to a start-up' or building the next great business.  I generally chuckle and then try to give them a glimpse into what working at a start-up is really like.  A start-up with lean resources, with high expectations and a need to prove its business model.

I’m not professing that I am a pure entrepreneur, but here are my credentials:  I’ve started two companies, consulted as my only source of income three times, and worked in several start-ups. So if anything, it gives me some credibility to say I have entrepreneurial 'traits'. So as a pseudo expert, here are 4 reasons why start-up may not be your thing, and one piece of advice.

1. Your Ego

After all these years of working in a pyramid structure with several direct reports, big budgets and expense reports - are you really willing to have to do the actual work again?  I don’t mean sitting down and writing a deck, I mean are you actually willing to administrative work, pack boxes, sell your product, build budget models, empty a garbage?  Start ups aren’t all foosball tables and catered salmon rolls - there is actual work required to build a company and often limited resources to do so. So just ask yourself if you are all set to crawl under a desk to fix the router settings or fill your car with chairs to move offices (both of these things I've done).

2. You Are Too Slow

In the immortal words of Darth Vader “Your powers are weak, old man.”.  The sweet corporate life has tainted you for good.  You’ve lost your ability to make a decision and make it happen in a day.  Every decision you make now has to go to a steering committee, go through three levels of approvals and takes six months.  

In a start-up you need to be nimble and have the ability to make decisions based on some facts, but often your gut.  And these decisions have real impact.  Corporate decisions often have little consequence.  Sure, you may have had to fire people and that's never pleasant, but when the decisions you’re making can impact the life and careers of everyone your are working with, they feel a tad more real.  And if the decision you make isn't panning out, you need to shift again to make things right.  Fast.

3. You’ve Lost Touch

You are really disconnected to how things work. Your life in the ivory tower has numbed you to how people actually live their lives and consume products.  You live in an echo chamber of silly decisions.  You haven’t actually practiced anything in years, rendering you quite useless and outdated to do whatever it was that you were good at once upon a time.  

4. You’re Not Creative

This is not in the ‘I painted a picture’ type of creative, I mean people who can think laterally and problem solve.  Zag instead of zig, pivoting, solving problems with the resources at hand, MacGyvering and what have you.  You may think you’re very creative on a daily basis, but are you really reinventing anything?  Are you doing things differently and stretching budgets as far as they will go?  Creative problem solving is a skill that is required everyday in a start-up.  It is an exhausting exercise and it one of the easiest skills to loose.  Creativity is what drives successful start-ups.  Thinking about new product approaches, ways to grow customers, ways to engage customers - all with an eye on how to do it on a dime.

But all is not lost.  

I'm sure you can get in the right headspace if you really try.  Get back in touch with the way the world works.  Go ride a bus.  Hang out in a food court. Then go and run a program at your current job - don’t just direct people to do it but actually run it on your own - roll up your sleeves.  Write an ad, do your expense report, book some media, analyze some data.  Start-ups need people who do things.  People who set an example. People who lead, not point.

So the one piece of advice if you want to start a business: Have self-discipline.

Avoid going into rabbit holes that don’t require that much headspace. Don’t focus on the thing you want to do, focus on what you need to do. Move away from tasks that you feel are important and move on to the ones that you know are important.

UberFlip Podcast: Achieving Product Market Fit

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Product and marketing have always gone hand in hand. In most cases, product exists to address pain points that your customers are feeling, and marketing helps you communicate these solutions to your market. In this episode, I interview Paul Cowan, CMO at FreshBooks, about understanding your addressable market and using your marketing toolkit to refine your product strategy.

Key takeaways from this episode:

• Growth is a mindset—you need to focus on scale, find new avenues for your business, and be constantly figuring out new revenue streams in order to remain relevant

• Stick to what you know and love but look for waves! If your roots are in tech, don’t be afraid to explore a wide range of tech companies in your career from startups to tech giants

• Face-to-face interaction with your customers can transform the way you understand your product

SEMRush Podcast: How to double organic reach and increased sales through SEO

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Paul Cowan, CMO of FreshBooks on how they doubled their organic reach and increased sales after firing their agency: Marketing Scoop Podcast by SEMrush Today we are spotlighting Paul Cowan, CMO of FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the best cloud-based small business accounting software having served over 24 million people.

Key Topics Discussed: - How to build an effective internal SEO team - How long it takes to see results in increased site traffic - How to create a community for customers

DMN Podcast: How to Scale On Brand Content

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Every brand has a unique story to tell, and marketers are multi-media storytellers. Visual content is arguably the most compelling format for storytelling, so having a well-established visual identity for your brand is crucial: it will help your content resonate with your target audience while differentiating you from your competition … it’s every marketer’s dream.

You’ll hear:

• How to create consistent and differentiated content

• Building blocks for a visual identify

• How to scale the creation globally and locally

My Banana Had a QR Code. You Won’t Believe What it Told Me.

I was going to enjoy my daily potassium and vitamin B intake the other day and I couldn’t help but notice that my banana has a QR code on it. Normally, I would ignore the sticker on the banana and proceed with peeling it, but that day I felt entirely inquisitive.

The delicious banana I was about to eat

Now I have to credit Dole for taking advantage of this unique packaging opportunity to deliver marketing messages.  I can’t say that I have seem much on fruit advertising lately, but this is right up there with ‘back-of-parking-receipt’ ads and ‘dry-cleaner hanger’ ads in terms of media innovation.

After being told by Dole that this banana is great on the grill and that I should “Peel the love”, I was wondering what lay behind that QR code?  Grilling recipes?  Some sort of NSFW banana stripping game?  My mind was racing…

So I snapped a shot of the QR code and was whisked away to here: www.dolefoodservice.com/bananas.  And this is where I question what marketers are thinking when they launch a bunch of tactics like this. 

I hit the Dole website and was greeting by their Labor Day promotion.  They get points for integration, as they clearly were able to integrate the “Peel the love” program in both on-banana advertising as well as online.  

Intrigued, I continued to scroll and found out more about the promotion, albeit the tour dates had long passed and were not locally relevant given my location being in Toronto, Canada.  I’ll give the marketing team the benefit of the doubt and blame the distribution centre for shipping the wrong crate of bananas.  Still, there was nothing for me to action.

A promotion! Too bad I live in Canada.

I continued scrolling and came across some recipes, which I was kind of expecting.  But to my surprise, there wasn’t any grilling recipes featured!  Kind of a let down, I actually was wondering how to grill bananas.  Their sticker had me intrigued, but didn’t close the deal

Hey, recipes.  Where are the grilling ones?

There is clearly a lot of effort here and Dole is doing a lot right.  Mobile.  Check.  QR Code.  Check.  Content Marketing.  Check.  Integration.  Check.   But I wondered what the objectives of this program were?  Continue my banana loyalty?  Get me deeper engaged in Dole as my beloved banana provider?

The challenge is that the continuity with the overall experience.  I took the effort and it delivered me info that wasn’t relevant to me and didn’t give me any additional value. 

In today’s day and age of attention deficient consumers, providing the tightest experience possible is paramount.  Guide me from step to step and give me more value along the way.  I need rewards, not hurdles.

The banana was eaten.  Straight up.

A Comparison of the Top Canadian Brands and their Social and Programmatic Presence

The following analysis was completed for my work at Performance Content.

Today’s marketing briefs are often tasking agencies to come up with ‘digital centric’ ideas or marketing campaigns that are channel agnostic.  Agencies and brands often face a multitude of challenges in developing programs against this ask, ranging from the gathering of relevant consumer intelligence to the measurement models that are put in place to gather the relative performance of the various elements of the campaigns.

We decided to analyze how some of the top Canadian marketers were doing across their paid and social activity, analyzing their programmatic spend and their social presence.  The resulting comparisons are quite interesting and illustrates that social success is not indicative of any type of programmatic spending or attempts at driving awareness or engagement through paid media.  (See Infographic below)

In terms of the methodology, we took the top 25 Canadian brands as ranked by Canadian Business 2013 annual study and evaluated their social media performance and programmatic media spending of the Q1 2014 period (this is important to note, as there are other higher spenders in the programmatic space and those with better social scores).  The social media performance was evaluated on their fan base size and overall engagement, using Socialbakers for data and processing, and Casale Media to supply the programmatic data and ranking. 

Social Performance Does Not Equal Programmatic Exposure

Of the top 25 brands analyzed, Canadian Tire is the only one to occupy a top 5 spot in both social and programmatic performance.  Canadian Tire has amassed a good social following of 1.2M fans and achieves relatively good engagement rates across both Twitter and Facebook.  WestJet is the only other brand to achieve similar results, ranking 2nd in social performance and 7th in programmatic spending.  This makes sense, with WestJet’s commitment to social content creation  and the lead up to the spring break buying season in the travel industry.

Finance Rules the Roost.  Retail Is Non-Existent.

It is interesting to see that some of the top marketers who dominate the real-time bidding market are categories that you would expect.  Finance lends itself quite well to this market and over the Q1 time frame would have hit the tax season along with juicy credit card offers around travel rewards.  Other categories that one would expect to dominate are less involved, with retailers in the retail grocery space being fairly non-existent.  Loblaw is the only brand to be active in the programmatic space, ranking number 8, while Sobey’s and Metro (as well as Rexall and Shoppers Drug Mart) don’t register any spending.

The Top Brands, Are They Really?

Five of the top 10 brands ranked by Canadian Business have no programmatic presence (Jean Coutu, Shoppers Drug Mart, Saputo, McCain Foods, and Rona).  Additionally, five don’t crack the top ten when it comes to social presence and engagement.  I can understand reasoning behind the programmatic piece and that some brands may not have had a digital presence, but the social side puzzles me.  Granted, the Canadian Business ranking is a score based off reputation, corporate culture and other factors, but what is a better indicator of affinity than social media?  A place where fans need to seek out and like the brands they have the most affinity for?  It seems like the top brands in the country should have a much stronger social fan base. 

So, What Does This Mean…

Programmatic buying is a scalable way to drive targeted reach in cost-effective ways.  The category is on the rise in digital and will continue to find its way into other channels.  Social is now a mainstay and offers intelligence into some of a brand’s best customers.  Layering these data sources should be a key element to any marketing plan. 

Leveraging the likes, interests and affinities of social audiences is a great way to help scale content marketing plans in the programmatic space.  By understanding audiences as a much more granular level, it provides the foundation to help build much more robust profiles of your most valuable customers.  This, coupled with more look-a-like modeling tools offered by the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Google, provides an unprecedented way to build solid look-a-like audiences at scale.  It isn’t easy, but it isn’t hard either.  The industry just needs to think more like direct-marketers in the deployment of their digital activity.  It just takes some planning and a desire to test, learn and test again.

View fullsize

Infographic: Canadian Social and RTB Performance, Q1 2014

17% of Twitter Posts are Promotional, Here’s Who Make the Top 10.

This post originally appeared in Media in Canada

The great part about analyzing data is the surprising things you stumble across.  My company conducts analysis on programmatic ad purchasing and social data to help marketers understand content consumption behaviours of their audiences.  This helps marketers understand who their key targets are and the content they consume in an effort to have more effective messaging.

 Recently, we’ve noticed an abundance of promotional content appearing on Twitter and decided to investigate it further.  We took a sample of over 1 million followers of 52 Twitter accounts from various Global, Canadian and US brands and analyzed the content that those followers shared.  Specifically, the links that the followers wanted to spread across their network.   

We saw that 52K of 308K URLs that were being shared were promotional in nature.  The top 10 URLs shared (see below) was an interesting mix of  ‘unfollow’ platforms, promotional platforms pimping out contests, and Mom’s pimping out giveaways.  At first glance this may seem fine, but it raises the question on whether marketers really know who their social audiences are what are they doing to ensure they are attracting the right audiences and communicating the right messages.

Who is it: The Vain and Contest Spambots

The Vain 

The unfollower tracking phenomena seems to be generated through the app publishing to their customer’s newsfeed.  It is not a huge surprise, but the fact that so much sharing activity is generated it gives quite an indicator on the obsessiveness of people tracking their follower activity and the fundamental self absorption of today’s social consumer.  

Contest Spambots 

These people (or bots, sometimes its very hard to tell the difference) are quite prolific in sharing giveaways and contests.  From a brand standpoint, the most frequent companies shared over the past few months are Canadian Tire, Lowes and Wonga.  We don’t know if these people are being paid or they are doing it for their love of contests, but many of their profiles only contain posts pertaining to contests and giveaways from other companies.  The main thing to note is that these people don’t appear to be the most loyal customers, if they are customers at all.

So what?  Well, this may jut be a death rattle.

 We need to make sure we are watching the canary in the coalmine. It is easy now as a brand marketer to use social to push out content according to a calendar and drive engagement through contests. The danger in this is losing relevance for your audience and becoming one of those publishers who become wallpaper in the ebb and flow of content newsfeeds.

 What can you do? Understand Your Audience.

 This may seem obvious, but as marketers we often get absorbed with the brilliance of our content strategies that we forget about the audience and their core motivations.  We also often don’t spend enough time segmenting our audiences into actionable clusters, but instead focus on generic conceptual targets or target descriptions.

 Invest in understanding your customers and segmenting them based on their life-stage, interests or value. Present them with content that they want to engage with based on their historical engagement; utilizing the data you have at your disposal to help predict content relevance.  

 Oh, and make sure that you aren’t paying for spambots to promote your contests.

The Best Olympic Hockey Post. Ever.

Alexander Keith's wins for one of the best posts supporting Team Canada's win over the USA.  I don't know if they produced this or just jumped onboard, but this thing is making the 'viral' rounds.  Why it is so good?  It looks like someone snapped the pic walking down anystreet, anytown, in Canadaville.  Relevant, timely, and a big in-your-face to the US losers.  Go Keith's Go.  And Go Canada Go!

5 things marketers need to do in the age of 1:1 marketing

The growth of marketing technologies, micro-targeted ad platforms and audience intelligence systems has created unprecedented opportunities for advertising to become significantly more sophisticated.   Here are the top 5 things a marketer need to prioritize:

1.     Build an audience

Many marketers today have little or no data on their customers.  Some are sitting on a ton, like banks and wireless companies.  Then there are those with very little, because transactions happen through retail channels and there is little data on their actual customer behaviors.  In this case, the most they can hope for is data from a loyalty program (first or third party) or sweepstakes.  But often this data has expired or is sitting in multiple locations around an organization.   Building out a rich database of customers and prospects is key to feed insights into the marketing and media planning efforts.

In building any media plans, the funnel should be flipped, purchasing media against those who are actively in the consideration and purchase mindset, then spend against awareness and brand.  But if a company doesn’t know who it’s customers are, targeting is a massive challenge and is often starting from square one over and over again.

Building an audience is key.  Implementing programs to be able to track and understand people’s behavior across media channels and with your product are paramount and requires a significant and focused investment on determining how to get individuals to give you access to their data.  Whether this is through purchasing lists, loyalty programs, or other tactical initiatives, you must weave together the transactional and behavioral events that help you understand your best and worst customers.

2.     Go Mobile, Now

If you are not buying any media in mobile, start doing it.  If you have no means to connect with your customers while they are not sitting in front of a TV or computer, build it now.  Carve out 10% your budget and focus it on mobile.  If you are already doing that, carve out 20%.

The statistics are shocking.  Facebook Mobile usage 751M users and 60% of Twitters usage is via mobile.  1 in 3 people are researching products in store.  If you are not intercepting customers in a medium that they are spending a massive amount of engaged time, you are setting yourself up for failure.  Mobile is the web and the web is mobile.

3.     Experiment in Real-Time

Everything is a test.  Marketers need to approach everything as an opportunity to learn and continually improve.  But, this is hard.  47% of advertisers are not set up to react in real time.  This has to change.

To develop the appropriate tool sets to automate ad buying and creative placement is hard.  To develop the multiple variants of creative units is hard.  To manage multiple platforms, tools and agencies is hard.  But it needs to be done and those who accept the fact that it is hard will win.  Optimizing everything needs to be the mantra within organizations and settling for purchasing ‘awareness’ and ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ campaigns needs to become a thing of the past.

4.     Personalize Messaging

All experimentations should be focused as much as possible at segmenting users to deliver the most timely and relevant messaging to a person at any given point in time.  Unfortunately, today's systems don’t make this easy. 

Google and Facebook don’t make day-parting easy to do, because is goes against their business model to sell impressions.  Identifying users across the web and mobile is nearly impossible, but there Twitter, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are all trying to solve this problem as well as start ups like Drawbridge.

The more a company can train itself, its ad agencies and media partners to behave in this manner, the easier the change will be once all the tools are available.

5.     Let Go

Marketers need to empower their customers.  Despite the desire to intercept people with the most relevant message at the right time and place, the most powerful voice is not that of the brand, but that of the consumer.  65% of consumers research products online before purchase and the top driver of decision-making is family and friends.  Giving consumers of your product the ability to voice their opinions and give their opinion of a product/service is the most compelling and influential way to drive product interest. 

And brands are letting go.  Starwood implemented and industry first by enabling rating and reviews on their own sites – both good and bad.  And McDonald’s have been more open to answering questions that have become stuff of urban myths.

It is a time of foundational change in the advertising industry.  Tools are making it much easier to apply CRM methods to traditional media, but the pace and magnitude of the growth has made it challenging to keep up.  Those that do, will win.

Operationalizing Agile Marketing

I recently posted a presentation titled "Increasing Relevance in an Always On Marketing World" (link below).

I've received some positive feedback and wanted to expand on the notion of Agile Marketing.

What is Agile Marketing?

The 'Agile' approach is a term stolen from the software world where it is commonly used to describe a process of rapid iteration and incremental improvement on previous versions of the product.  The advantages of this are faster-to-market products and a system of real-time learning and improvement.  The growth of real-time marketing and ability to optimize communications using algorithms has led to markers looking to adopt these approaches.   

The Biggest Challenge.  Traditional Marketers.

Marketers have been doing Agile Marketing for some time, they just didn't know it.  Email, .com, Search Engine Marketing and Optimization were the first disciplines that took this approach.  Digital and direct marketers have been employing iterative approaches to communications by pivoting messaging based on user response for years.  The reality is that most senior level marketers have never been exposed to the actual deployment of these approaches and those executing have not had to seek senior level approvals for their test & learn approaches.

But the evolution of marketing is making everything digital, and thus, also creating optimization capabilities in real time.  But this is a new concept to traditional marketers who are used to highly rigid brand architectures, logo guidelines, annual planning cycles and traditional agency briefing processes.  

As brands need to create more contextually relevant content in owned properties (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc), they have to move away from the traditional communications process of; 1) Brief agency, 2) Agency produces ads and 3) Weeks of making it 'pop' 4) Move through matrix of approvals.  Instead, companies need to empower employees and their agency representatives in the production of real-time content that drives relevance.  Both of these groups need to be able to break away from the traditional processes that they have established and move toward a newsroom type of approach in pursuit of consumer attention.

Change.  Easily Said.  But Not Easily Done.

Harvard Business Review echoed the need for brands to move to the newsroom approach

.  This approach is very easy to adhere to in theory, but the reality is that no brands are structured to produce content at the volume and frequency in which it can be deployed.  This structure needs to combine the structure of a newsroom, with more responsive and agile reporters/photographers who can deliver messages that deliver against daily (or hourly) relevance, and traditional marketing by mapping back to brand messages and key product pillars.  The structure requires that an editor-in-chief has the latitude and authority to publish on behalf of the brand, but also gives reporters the freedom to act as Agile developers - in a nimble and iterative manner.

Oreo has had it's SuperBowl post lauded as the pinnacle of Agile Marketing, responding to the power outage and posting through social channels.  It drove significant engagement and was highly relevant to a current cultural event.  But, having a team of people amassed during key events, or trying to predict when cultural movements will happen are both very challenging for marketers to scale.

 The key to scaling a newsroom+brand approach is to determine how to best harness technology, consumer insight models (predictive models, optimization engines, etc) and publishing/advertising tools to make the production and delivery components manageable.

Is the End of Marketing As We Know It Here?  No, Not really...

So with this being said, traditional marketing still has a place in the overall marketing schema.  Developing a positioning with emotional appeal to the target segment is still the cornerstone of any marketing plan.  The tactical deployments are changing.  Television still remains the most effective mass reach vehicle available.  But with increasing fragmentation of consumption (Cable, Satellite, Online, PVRs, Streaming, etc) and the impending ability to purchase advertising similar to digital (buying audience engagement instead of potential exposure), the deployment systems that exist tomorrow are going to demand the real-time iteration that the digital world is experiencing today.

Marketers need to develop new organizational structures that are going to be adaptive to the shifting deo current events and key marketing messages.

The Facebook Engagement Paradox

Marketers have been flocking to Facebook as a means to create direct relationships with their customers.  This has been an excellent means to break down the barriers between customers and brands, but recently have been under much scrutiny due to the inability for marketers to directly engage with fans.

The following infographic illustrates this problem.

The stats are shocking.  Under 1% of fans engage on brand pages.  Facebook even acknowledges that the newsfeed only reaches 16% of fans, but recent newsfeed changes in September 2012 have been noted to reduce newsfeed impressions even more (which has been validated in studies I have done for clients, most achieving in the range of 5 - 10%). 

The reality is that in this channel there is no 'loyalty loop'.  It is much more like a galaxy, with fans constantly spinning off into space with no gravitational force to pull them back to your content.

The question for marketers: Why invest in this channel if I continually need to reinvest?

I still see Facebook as one of the most viable channels for driving engagement at a very targeted level.   Marketers can do some very simple (or complex) things to help create a smart social strategy.

1. Use Facebook as a Key Component to CRM

Build programs that are designed for customers to give you access to their Facebook data, creating some sort of value exchange for this information (loyalty programs, exclusive content, etc). 

2.  Mine Data and Build Custom Audiences

Use the data you are getting access to and build discreet segments.  Tie this into your existing database if you can understand the type of customer that they are. 

3.  Deploy Media

Use custom audiences to upload your segments and experiment with messaging.  Target these fans with specific messages, using tactics like 'dark posts' to publish to micro-segments.  Develop the most relevant messages to the right audiences.