Google search data reveals how brands can help during the coronavirus pandemic

/0 Comments/in , , , , , /by

Tara Walpert Levy/April 2020/Research & Data,Thought Leadership

considered baking my own bread the other day. Seriously. And I’ve bought over a dozen DIY projects. I even completed a few. For anyone who knows me, these are sure signs of everyone’s new favourite phrase: unprecedented times. And I’m not alone. No doubt many of you now find yourself doing things that you would have never anticipated just months or even weeks ago due to the coronavirus. Search interest in “do it yourself” has spiked globally in the past few months, especially in the U.S. and Malaysia. And while some of this is about making your own hand sanitiser or protective equipment, there’s also a rise in topics like sprucing up your patio or building your own greenhouse.1

While a silver lining to all this turbulence may be finding hobbies or nurturing new skills, the stark reality is that the normal course of business and daily life is … well, no more. All organisations will be touched by this pandemic. Consumer behaviour is changing daily, and the question I’m getting most often from people right now is how we as marketing professionals can be more helpful to our customers in these fluctuating moments.

Google data can give us insight into that. At a high level, there are five behaviours we see playing out in Google data across markets, reflected in how people are searching.

5 behaviours reflected in how people are searching during the COVID-19 pandemic

Assembling critical information and content during coronavirus outbreak

The coronavirus has made normal life anything but normal these days. With retailers adapting to delivery or online models, schools closing, and much of the workforce staying home, people are looking for clear, specific information about where, how, and when to get the things they need.

Search interest related to retail has spiked globally over the past few months as people try to find things they need.2 And as people limit their trips to grocery stores, there’s growing search interest in things like “can you freeze” ‘(“mrozić“) in PL3 and “home delivery” (“livraison à domicile”) in France.4 We’ve also seen rising search interest for “short term work employee” (“kurzarbeit arbeitnehmer”) in Germany5 and “mortgage rate suspension” (“sospensione rate mutuo”) in Italy,6 for example.

How brands can help consumers: Be useful as people’s needs evolve

  • Acknowledge the new reality.
  • Give people credible, detailed, and current information about your operations. Reinforce that you’re there to help.
  • Regularly update communications across your website, blogs, social handles, and even your Google My Business page to ensure people are in the know.
  • Be flexible. Help customers with cancellations, refunds, and customer service.

For example: Cottonelle, one of the world’s largest suppliers of toilet paper, is encouraging people not to stockpile. Hotels.com is using its fictional spokesperson, Captain Obvious, to encourage social distancing.

Discovering new connections and nurturing relationships

Even as people physically distance themselves, they’re discovering new connections and nurturing relationships, whether virtually or in their own household. On YouTube, for instance, we’ve seen a rise in “with me” videos, where people film themselves going about ordinary tasks like cooking, cleaning, or shopping. In the U.S., views of videos containing “study with me” in the title are 54% higher compared to the same period last year.7 And YouTube creators are inviting audiences to join them by creating content like “bulk cook with me” or “disinfect with me.”

People are also looking for new ways to connect with people from afar. Search interest for multiplayer video games has spiked globally in the past few months, especially in Italy and Canada.8 And search interest for “virtual happy hour” is rising, especially in the U.S.9

How brands can help consumers: Forge new communities and connections

  • Look for ways to connect your customers, locally and globally.
  • Consider if your brand has a role to play in creating or enhancing shared experiences, virtually or otherwise.

For example: Ikea in Spain is tapping into the emotions associated with home to encourage people to stay inside. (English version)

Adjusting to changes in their routines

As routines and schedules change to meet the demands of isolation, so do people’s online habits and expectations. For example, search interest for “do it yourself” peaks midday on the weekend in the U.S. and Canada, but sees a slight uptick nightly around 10 p.m. or 11 p.m.10

Workout routines are getting an overhaul all over the world too. There’s growing search interest for “stationary bicycles” worldwide, especially in Spain and France,11 and “dumbbells, exercise bicycle” (“hantle, rower stacjonarny“) in Poland, for example.12

One adjustment we’ve all noticed whether consuming local news, national news, or even late-night shows, is that production value is necessarily taking a back seat as people film in their homes. And people seem to have an appetite for this scrappily made content, as we’ve seen Jimmy Fallon’s and Stephen Colbert’s homemade late-night shows trending.13

How brands can help consumers: Adjust to people’s nonroutine routine

  • Let people know that solutions are available whenever, wherever.
  • Assess when people need you most, whether through your own first-party data (like site analytics or email opens) or Google Trends, and adjust your communications strategy accordingly.
  • Update or publish often. There’s a need for content that informs, entertains, connects, and promotes wellness.

For example: State Farm insurance recognises the new normal and is encouraging customers with financial burdens to speak to a rep so they can help.

Praising everyday heroes

We’ve all noticed a growing appreciation for the new everyday heroes among us. Whether health care workers on the front lines or cashiers and delivery people keeping us supplied, many are risking their own health or safety to help others.

For instance, there’s been increasing search interest worldwide in “clap NHS workers” as the U.K. recently celebrated its National Health Service workers in a moment of solidarity. And even beyond the U.K., the notion of “thank essential workers” has taken a sudden upturn in search interest worldwide.14

How brands can help consumers: Support heroes

  • Look for people who are helping, and find ways to support or celebrate them.
  • Consider who the heroes are among your employees, your customers, or even your local community.
  • Consider whether you have nonhuman heroes that can contribute, like your technology, your operational rigour, or your equipment.

For example: Walmart is celebrating and thanking its employee heroes in towns across America. Deliveroo partnered with 20 Hong Kong shopping malls to help food and beverage tenants expand delivery service during the crisis. LVMH is converting its factories into hand sanitiser production lines.

Taking care of themselves and others

As boredom, anxiety, and uncertainty set in, people are taking care of their own physical and psychological needs as well as those of friends and loved ones. We’ve seen rising search interest in “puzzles” in the U.S., Australia, and Canada especially.15 And between the hours of 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. in the U.S., search interest has been peaking for “relaxation,” perhaps as people need help falling asleep.16

There’s also rising search interest in “virtual tour” (“visita virtual”) in Spain17 and “live zoo” in the U.K.18 as people look to experience something beyond the walls of home. And even outdoor home projects seem to be trending with rising global search interest in landscaping, especially in Australia and the U.S.19

How brands can help consumers: Find ways to enrich people’s lives

  • Facilitate virtual collaborations with outdoor spaces and the cultural institutions people yearn to visit.
  • Join the conversation about home-based health and well-being.
  • Pivot to platforms and formats that make sense for people staying home.

For example: Guinness is encouraging folks not to toast physically, but virtually, and raise one another up in this time.

The more helpful brands can be, the better they’ll fare now — and even more importantly, in the long run. Eighty-four percent of U.S. consumers surveyed say that how companies or brands act during the current market is important to their loyalty moving forward.20 These are trying times, but we’ll all get through it together and hopefully come out even stronger on the other side.

Why are marketers still breaking the first rule of marketing?

/0 Comments/in , , , , , /by

Source: MarketingTech

Now that the end of the year is in sight, many marketers will look back and review the flurry of activity that was 2018. GDPR. Fighting for budget. New platforms. Avoiding potential crises. Metrics. More metrics. 

It’s been a busy year – and for that reason, it’s arguably forgivable that the majority of digital marketers today are still breaking the very first rule of marketing: build the brand.

Digital marketing gives us access to a vast plethora of tools for communication, but many organisations are still getting it wrong and annoying customers and prospects, advertising products that consumers already own, or the same product, repeatedly, across different platforms. This unambiguously and actively damages the brand. Often, this is because digital marketing tools, which usually provide what are believed to be good metrics, drive marketers towards conversion when they should be nurturing.

Of course, the mid-funnel is the mountain stage of the tour de marketing; it’s tough. It’s easy with a new prospect because you don’t know much about them, and it’s easier when they convert because they’ve just bought something, which gives you something really tangible to work with. The middle stage, where a buyer has expressed an interest, visited the site, put something in their trolley and then moved on, is ambiguous and difficult.

This is further complicated by the fact that most marketers still can’t do one-to-one marketing. They work with segments, email addresses and cookies. None of these are real, individual people – or in fact, often they’re the same person across multiple devices. As such, this makes it much more difficult to build a relationship with the people you’re aiming to target. Furthermore, it makes it difficult to justify yourself at the other end as well, because you can’t trust your metrics. In a perfect world, all advertising should generate a measurable, incremental return above and beyond your average brand performance, and should be personalised to a genuine individual, building brand value. But how do we do this?

 

I’m not a number, I’m a free man!  

In today’s post-GDPR world, we can’t track comprehensively against people’s names – and respecting consumer privacy is, rightfully of the utmost importance. However, we can maintain privacy by tracking against pseudonymised IDs, which allows us to create individual profiles that contain an understanding of what that person is interested in, their age group, their life events, how much they might earn and so on.

Once you’ve got this in place, you then need a healthy dose of human intelligence and – perhaps more surprisingly – manners. My mother always told me, ‘you’ve got two ears and one mouth. Listen for twice as long as you speak!’ Digital marketing is exactly the same – if you can refrain from shovelling product down a consumer’s throat, you’d be surprised by how well they react. In fact, our own research has shown that 56% of consumers click on an ad to find out, yet only 2% click to make a purchase.

Moreover, it’s important to build up this information over time: if your best friend forgets the name of your child, you’ll likely be a bit offended and it will have damaged the relationship. If they remember your wedding anniversary, that’s bonus points. In marketing terms, it builds incremental value.

So, what does this mean for marketing campaigns? It means that we need to use the intelligence we have. For example, if someone buys a sale item at a particular discount, we should advertise follow-up items within a similar sale bracket. If they belong to the VIP club, don’t advertise discounted products to them – instead, promote the benefits of the VIP club and more brand-led communications, reinforcing the prestige of the brand.

Technically, this does require some legwork; if you use different DMP and DSP technology, for example, then it’s really hard to unify the data and make sure that everything is working together. It’s much easier to use one platform that can ‘talk amongst itself’ and leverage the data collected in other parts of the same system.

What does a 1,400-year-old Zen proverb have to do with digital marketing?  

Similarly, there are a few other considerations that marketers need to take into account. Whenever you’re experimenting with new approaches, you need to do ‘test and control’, but not everyone does this right. For example, it’s important to:

  • Have clean samples; you can’t do test and control if one (or more) of your samples is actually the same person on different devices
  • Continue testing over a long period of time. Any one test can be unreliable because of seasonality changes, sales patterns, new technology and more. Good marketers watch trends and don’t generalise from anecdotes
  • Use machines to randomise the samples. Humans are intrinsically biased towards success, whereas machines can help to make sure the test is valid

As the Zen proverb says “if you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions” – and this is exactly what test and control does. It will show up very quickly if you’re serving ads to the wrong group or to fraudulent accounts – and similarly, if you do it right, and you serve the right ads to the right people, then you will see a return. One case we have seen – the well-known retailer Dune – showed an improvement in customer value of +64% over a fifteen-month period, and drove up conversion rates by 33%, allowing the marketing team to show a real benefit to the ecommerce team.

So, when you’re wrapping up 2019 and setting your New Year’s Resolutions, make it a priority not to break the first rule of marketing.  By communicating in a smart fashion, using the tools at your fingertips, you can finally be objective and constantly build on your knowledge because you’ll know it’s rooted in fact, not guesswork and segments. Furthermore, you’ll know that you’re improving the brand, because you’re building long-term relationships – and even better, that you’re building long-term revenue too.

5 Steps to a Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

Source: Digital Marketing Institute

According to a ‘Managing Digital Marketing’ study by Smart Insights, 46% of brands don’t have a defined digital marketing strategy, while 16% do have a strategy but haven’t yet integrated it into their marketing activity. But here’s the thing: if you don’t have a plan in place how can you expect to grow and innovate, to measure meaningful results and to learn from past mistakes?

It’s time to stop panicking about next year or next month and start crafting a plan that can pack a powerful punch. We’ve selected the 5 most important steps that you, the decision maker should take to ensure that your digital marketing efforts create a real impact on your bottom line.

1. Know What You Want (& Set the Objective)

Nail Your Mission:

  • Define your business’ overall mission/objective first – your digital marketing mission must fit into your grand plan.
  • Answer this question: what is the overriding objective you want your digital marketing efforts to achieve (for example do you want to position your company as the go-to online provider for computer parts in Europe)? This is your mission.

Set & Measure Your KPIs:

  • Get specific with your KPIs by identifying the figures you will be held accountable for achieving.
  • Get realistic with your KPIs by analysing your previous digital marketing efforts first – this will ensure you aim for a positive increase on your current results, while helping you to avoid setting your expectations too high.
  • Identify a method to help you measure each of your KPIs – for example, will you use Google Analytics to measure your conversions, your individual social media analytics to track engagement or a tool like BuzzSumo to assess the success of your content marketing?
  • Here’s a handy KPI template for you to steal: (Insert goal, e.g. ‘Increase traffic’) by (insert figure)% in (insert number of months).
  • Before you begin planning your KPIs find out which metrics matter most to your CEO.

2. Analyse Your Past (& Learn From Your Mistakes)

You don’t have to (and shouldn’t) go into the planning period in the dark. Analyzing your digital marketing strategy’s past success and failures can help focus you on setting the best KPIs for your business. You, therefore, might want to complete step one and two together.

Choose a time period you’d like to analyse (it’s best to set this time period as the same length of time you plan for your new marketing strategy) – for example decide on whether you’re going to analyse the previous year, quarter or month.

How to Analyse:

  • Determine the time period you would like to analyse and set your Google Analytics calendar to match this timeframe.
  • Try out Google’s Benchmarking Reports in your Analytics account to compare your progress to your competitors.
  • Don’t forget to analyse your competitors’ marketing strategy too – create an analysis spreadsheet of their online activities (you can use SEMrush to identify the SEO strategy of a competitor, i.e. what keywords are driving the largest volume of organic traffic to their website. It can also be used to compare the organic and paid traffic of different websites so again quite useful to see how aggressive they’re being with their paid spend.)
  • Ask yourself this question at regular intervals: is there anything else I need to analyse that I haven’t thought of before – e.g. should I be testing the times I post my content or the types of images I use?

 

3. Remember Who You’re Talking to (& Speak Their Language)

Don’t let the planning take away from the people you’re trying to reach. You already know who your audience are (at least we hope you do) but sometimes they’re the first thing a digital marketer can forget amidst the KPI setting, budget fretting and channel selection.

You’re not going to make this mistake – not this time. Instead you’re going to put your audience at the heart of your digital marketing strategy, cater to their emotional needs and satisfy their deepest desires. How? Through the creation of well fleshed out and well thought out personas, of course.

Develop Useful Personas:

  • Start with the basics and note down all the demographic information you know about your target consumer – like age, gender and location.
  • Then dig a little deeper and Identify the problems you can help your target persona solve.
  • Delve into their emotional desires, goals, aspirations and fears and document all of the factors that could make them tick (think about their conscious and unconscious desires).
  • You can dive deep into the ‘Audience Reports of your Google Analytics account to identify key characteristics of your target persona like age, sex, career, etc.
  • When creating your personas this is the perfect time to identify the people who will be of influence to them – these will be the influencers your marketing strategy should target.

4. Identify Your Means (& Stick to Your Budget)

Three things are important for identifying your means: these are your budget, your digital channels and your team (or people). It is important to take stock of all of your resources before deciding on what else you might need for the next period.

For example, now is the perfect time for creating an audit of your existing digital channels and to decide whether you’re going to outsource specific sections of your digital marketing and whether you need to set budget aside for a new hire or two.

How to Identify Your Means:

Your Budget:

  • Define your overall digital marketing budget.
  • Look at the historical data of what has worked before (for example, have any specific channels brought you quality leads at a low cost?)
  • Decide whether you will use paid promotion (for, example Adwords or paid ads on social media).
  • Allocate a specific portion of the budget for each digital channel you want to use for paid promotion (delve into your Analytics to help you assess the most cost effective digital channels with the largest reach and conversions and the lowest Cost Per Click).
  • If a certain element of your paid promotion strategy isn’t bringing you the results you desire, revisit it and invest the allocated budget figure into the channel that’s bringing you the best results.

Your People:

  • Look at your current team and assess what you are capable of achieving (be realistic here and ensure that no-one will be over stretched or over worked).
  • Identify whether you need to hire more people and whether you have the means to do so.
  • Decide whether all of your digital marketing activity will take place in house or if you’ll need to outsource some elements to a third party agency.
  • Get each of your team members to review their digital marketing activity and brainstorm a few ideas for their future marketing strategy (the more autonomy your employee has in their role the more they’ll be on board with your new plan).

Your Channels:

  • Review your current digital marketing channels and decide which channels to keep and whether you’d like to invest in any new ones (this depends on where your customers are and the time you have available).
  • Clearly articulate what each digital channel is trying to achieve.
  • Make sure you have at least one KPI attached to each of your digital channels.

5. Make the Plan (& Don’t Stick to It)

‘Create a plan and don’t stick to it? But, but, what do you mean?’ Before the panic sets into the most organised of digital marketers let me explain…your plan is never going to be perfect from the outset. Not every assumption you make is going to be correct.

And although you’ve taken every care to craft a carefully constructed plan based on a set of insightful assumptions and analysis you still can’t predict exactly how your customers will behave. It is, therefore, essential to continuously measure and monitor the performance of your digital marketing strategy and to change elements where needed.

Create Your Digital Marketing Calendar:

  • Try creating your timeline using Google Calendars – that way you can share it with your team members and allow them to edit it where necessary.
  • Highlight the key campaigns you’ll create and promote throughout the year and allocate a timeframe for each.
  • Document the digital channels needed to ensure the success for each campaign.

Review Your Marketing Strategy & Identify Changes Needed:

  • Create a measurement and monitoring plan (this should fit in with your KPIs).
  • Check the success of the individual elements of your digital marketing strategy at continuous intervals.
  • If something is not working (i.e. you’re not achieving the KPIs you’ve set out) isolate the different elements and try to identify what is not working (e.g. is it the time you’re posting content or the taglines you’re using for your ads?).
  • Revisit your previous analysis, personas and budget allocation and try something new.
  • Create a clearly defined KPI for your new venture.

How to turn reviews into revenue: Making the most of positive customer feedback

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Source: MarketingTech The rise of online communities, peer review sites and social media has forever changed the impact of the customer voice. Customer feedback has evolved from something owned and managed by customer service teams to a force that influences every department across an organisation: product, HR, finance, IT, and marketing. Marketing agencies are experiencing this shift more acutely than most as often, in these types of companies, all these functions fall within a single person’s responsibilities – anyone from the CEO, the agency’s own marketing lead or even the office manager. In many cases, you’ll find the same person ticking off jobs that belong to very disparate job sets: everything from tracking leads to scheduling invoices, issuing marketing communications to chasing late payments. Running between tasks to put out one fire after another, it’s not difficult to see why customer feedback can fall to the bottom of the pile. It’s a classic case of the cobbler’s children having no shoes – agency heads and their teams advise clients on best practice but struggle to find the time to define their own approach to customer feedback.

A new currency

Not managing to engage with positive feedback could be costing marketing agencies:

  • New leads – customer testimonials = customer referrals
  • A greater number of sales – 88% of customers have been influenced by an online review when making a buying decision
  • Higher profit margins – highly-engaged customers spend 60% more per transaction

Missing out on the extra potential is one thing but, in the age of social media, failing to act in the face of a negative response could spell a serious nosedive to the bottom line for any business. It’s a new currency. Customer service experiences have a long-lasting impact with 24% continuing to seek out vendors for two or more years after a good experience. The distaste for bad customer service, however, has a bigger impact that can last even longer. The same survey found that 39% of customers continue to avoid vendors two years or more after a bad experience. Social media drives the majority of reviews and comments on customer service experiences. Unfortunately, it’s the bad experiences that drive the kind of viral social communications that brands would ordinarily crave.  45% of customers share bad service experiences on social media, surpassing the 30% who post about good ones.

Directing the roadmap

Feedback should always be welcome. Inviting and actioning feedback shows customers that their business is being taken seriously and that their custom matters to a company. Beyond just the financials, it can be an important health check for performance against a number of internal and external metrics; it takes satisfied customers and happy employees to create a positive brand image. However, even with all this wonderful information, many companies fail to utilise and manage their feedback to further propel themselves ahead of their competition. Tech-led approaches like ‘the lean start-up’ and DevOps have infiltrated mainstream business culture and entrepreneurship, particularly in small to mid-sized agencies, advocating iterative product development models fuelled by customer insight. In this way, customer feedback can be used to inform the roadmap, arming companies with the confidence to launch new services, safe in the knowledge of product-market-fit. Some organisations, like Salesforce, have taken this a step further by co-creating new offerings with their customer base. Last year, this led to more than 50 new ideas for product development, signposting opportunities for new revenue streams through services that have already been endorsed by loyal customers.

Where to start

But this level of engagement can’t be manufactured overnight. Surprisingly, 60-80% of customers who describe themselves as satisfied do not go back to do more business with the company that initially made them happy. Often, it’s due to the lack of connection. It takes time to create genuine loyalty – resources that small to mid-sized sized businesses often don’t have. And managing customer feedback can be daunting, especially as the functionality needed to tackle such a big task can often lie amidst a mix of the company’s existing tools and platforms. The first step is understanding where you’re starting from. Small to mid-sized agencies looking to leverage customer insight for growth need to have full view of the customer lifecycle, the sales pipeline and the finances. Only then will they be able to develop the holistic strategy required to drive engagement and loyalty from customers.

What brands are built on

A company’s approach to customer feedback is an important consideration in the company’s culture, brand image, and communications strategy. Failing to make it a priority could risk alienating existing customers, losing the engagement of current employees and countering the brand image that other aspects of marketing have worked so hard to achieve.