MarTech: The Marketing Tech Conference is right around the corner and we’re excited to share this incredible experience with you. If you haven’t registered yet, take a moment to review the top 7 reasons you should attend this year’s conference in San Francisco, March 21-22:
Actionable content. MarTech sessions will help you:
Maximize the return on your marketing technology investments;
Implement a marketing culture that is responsive, agile and drives business success;
Manage people and processes to create brilliant online experiences for your customers.
Accomplished presenters. Conference Chair Scott Brinker and the MarTech advisory board selected speakers based on their expertise and willingness to share. You get two days of presentations, case studies and expert panels – so many that Scott Brinker, our conference chair wrote an insider’s guide to this year’s conference.
Vendor agnostic. MarTech isn’t tied to any marketing platform or technology. MarTech will help you choose the technologies, and effectively implement the culture and processes that ensure results.
Active community. MarTech will be the largest independent gathering of marketing technologists in North America. Connect with others who speak your language and are facing and overcoming your challenges.
Meet more than 100 solution providers. The MarTech expo hall will be packed with companies providing comprehensive marketing clouds to task-specific point solutions. Need a solution? See who’s exhibiting.
Score a FREE copy of Scott’s book. Every paid full-access attendee will receive a complimentary copy of Scott Brinker’s new book, Hacking Marketing. Scott will be doing book signings at the opening reception on Sunday evening and during the networking reception on Monday evening.
Save big as a team. Make this year’s conference a team affair! MarTech is an ideal experience for executive and marketing management, marketing operations and IT staff to share. Take advantage of our team rates and save 10%-20%.
Register for an All Access Pass and pay just $1695. You’ll get access to all of the sessions, networking events, expo hall, breakfasts, snacks and hot lunches at an exceptional value.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
From Search Engine Land:
SEO & The Zero Moment of Truth
Feb 29, 2016 by Marcus Miller
Columnist Marcus Miller discusses how the customer journey has changed in the digital age and recommends ways to reach consumers at each stage of the journey via SEO.
Customers normally conduct online research on their mobile devices, and then call businesses to make an offline transaction.
“Marketers are allocating more time to understand how to reach mobile consumers, especially millennials. Our data shows that for many types of purchases, millennials prefer to contact a business directly by phone, and then are following through with purchases,” states John Busby, SVP of Consumer Insights for the Marchex Institute.
A study by Digital Strategy Consulting found that consumers trust ecommerce businesses more when a telephone number is present. An unlisted phone number may discourage shoppers from purchasing products.
Capital One offers their customers the option to call service reps directly from their mobile apps. So, if an individual has questions about an account, he or she can immediately receive help.
Similarly, Redfin, a residential real estate company, gives home buyers the chance to speak to a local agent about specific listings. It’s a convenient solution for customers who need answers immediately.
However, some businesses are missing the click-to-call commerce opportunity.
About 20% of phone calls are abandoned due to poor customer service and sales practices. For example, shoppers may wait 10 minutes on hold or experience trouble with automated telephone systems.
“To really reap the returns from this type of marketing, companies need to take customer connection seriously — customers want staff to genuinely understand their needs. One sign that businesses are beginning to understand this is the migration of U.S. company call centers back in-house,” writes communications consultant Shellie Karabell.
So, how do you improve customer service over the phone? Here are a few ideas to help your team:
1. Eliminate the need for customers to wait on hold
Customers expect a personalized shopping experience. If possible, assign a designated representative to handle the buyer’s individualized needs.
3. Give decision makers actionable data
Customer satisfaction is a company-wide responsibility. Using data will help executives adopt new policies or upgrade initiatives to deliver a better customer experience.
This infographic shows us the trends behind click-to-call commerce and the opportunity to increase lead conversions.
Bing is gearing up for tomorrow’s Super Tuesday state primaries with the launch of its new “Search Wave” feature, a search tool that showcases search volume for each of this year’s presidential candidates.
Building on the Bing Elections that rolled out in December of last year, Bing says the new election feature provides a “window into public search interest for each candidate.”
The new feature offers at-a-glance candidate search numbers overall, as well as the ability to break down candidate search volume by state, age and gender.
Here’s a look at the “Search Wave” feature, filtered by state and party:
Users can also drill down to see overall search volumes for individual candidates:
Powered by its Bing Predicts technology, the “Search Wave” feature is part of the site’s broader election experience which includes candidate pages, a political index and election timeline. Users can access the tool by searching on Bing for “candidate search volume.“
BuzzBoard’s research found that 47.3 percent of SMBs do not have mobile-ready sites. The report also notes another 2015 study by RBC Capital Markets that reflects an even lower rate of adoption — it found 67 percent of SMBs’ sites are not mobile-ready.
Those with mobile websites arguably stand to double the audience of those without mobile sites. According to comScore’s “Global Mobile Report,” virtually half of all traffic to the top 100 digital media properties are mobile only.
The LSA and BuzzBoard report notes that in October 2015, Google stated that over 50 percent of search globally is on mobile. And surveys by LSA and Thrive Analytics reflect that mobile is even more important for local search — 60 percent said they usually use a mobile device (smartphone or tablet) when looking for local information online.
The problem for those without a mobile site is twofold. First, consumers demand it. Google reports that 57 percent of users won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site, and 40 percent go to a competitor after a bad mobile experience.
Second, you’ll get fewer visits with a non-mobile site. Three months after Google launched its new algorithm last year that penalized the mobile search rank of web pages that were not optimized, almost half of non-mobile-friendly web pages experienced a loss in page rank.
Yet Google is constantly tweaking and updating its algorithm. So what’s next? How can savvy SMBs stay ahead and maintain their competitive advantage? One area to review is the speed of your mobile website. This is an area Google is taking an increasingly closer look at, especially with the launch of its new Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), discussed in more detail below.
Below are seven observations and tips about the importance to a local business of its mobile website’s speed and how to outpace your competitors by maintaining a positive and responsive user experience.
1. Consumers Want Speed
Consumers don’t just want mobile websites, they want fast mobile websites. Consumer attention spans are growing shorter. Consumers abandon websites if they take too long to load, with 40 percent abandoning a site if it takes more than three seconds to load.
And their patience with mobile sites is even less than that for sites accessed via a desktop. Yet the median load time for the top 100 retail mobile sites was 4.33 seconds, as measured in 2013 by Radware, increasing to 4.8 seconds in 2014.
That 1+ second might not seem like much, but slow pages was the number one user complaint about mobile sites. According to Radware’s 2014 State of the Union for Mobile eCommerce Performance, every one-second delay impacts bounce rate, conversion rate, cart size and page views.
2. Speed Is A Google Ranking Factor For Mobile
Early reports stated that page load speed did not affect page rank on mobile websites as part of Google’s Mobilegeddon. Yet, anecdotally, observations about Mobilegeddon seem to contradict those reports.
Based on an analysis of client sites, Colin Guidi, director of SEO at 3Q Digital, said, “Visiting these sites via a mobile browser and slower processors shows that page speed and load time seems to be a heavier weighted ranking factor over this new mobile-friendly update.”
Studies also appear to support those observations. Searchmetrics released a report post-Mobilegeddon that demonstrated a strong correlation between page speed and page rank.
And now, Google itself has come out this year stating that Google favors faster sites. Further, David Besbris, AP Engineering of Google Search, asserted on the AMP Project page that “Speed has always been a cornerstone of Google Search.”
I think it’s safe to operate under the presumption that speed matters when it comes to local mobile search.
3. Google Has Set The Bar High
Google wants to maintain its market share in search by making sure that consumers like their user experience with sites pulled up in its search results.
Since consumers want a fast web experience, Google is pushing websites to make sure they meet those expectations, and it has set the bar high. Google’s standard is for mobile web pages to render in less than one second on a mobile network. One second is an extremely high standard when you consider, per above, most retail mobile websites mobile take more than four seconds to load.
It might also seem unfair given the number of factors that website operators do not have control over, such as the user’s network speed. Nevertheless, Google offers a PageSpeed Insight tool to measure a website’s performance and provide tips on improving poor scoring areas.
The illustration below is an analysis from that Google PageSpeed tool of a website that scored poorly. It provides both recommended and suggested fixes that would help speed up the site.
Source: Google PageSpeed Insight Tool
4. New, Speedier Mobile Web Page Formats Are Being Introduced
Google is competing to keep users on the mobile web when they are increasingly spending time on apps. Platforms like Facebook and Snapchat are developing more ways to consume content within their apps and are providing a slick user experience to take user time away from the web, where Google dominates.
Facebook isn’t even trying to be discreet about its goal for Instant Articles, a format developed for publishers last year to speed up content delivery. It states, “We built Instant Articles to solve a specific problem — slow loading times on the mobile web created a problematic experience for people reading news on their phones.”
Google quickly fought back by announcing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), a new open-source framework that renders web pages to load almost instantly by making pages lighter-weight in data and by having Google cache the pages on their server.
Google also is beating Facebook to the punch by announcing the official launch date for AMP as February 24, 2016, ahead of Facebook’s April 12 release of Instant Articles to all publishers.
The videos below demonstrate the difference between AMP articles and regular mobile web articles. The demo was done on my daughter’s Motorola G (2nd Gen) smartphone using AT&T’s 3G mobile network.
The first video is of me using Google’s live demo at g.co/ampdemo with the search topic “Sports” on Chrome. In the second video, I click on links to web pages from the search topic “Sports” using regular Google mobile search on Chrome.
It is clear that the AMP articles loaded much more quickly and smoothly, usually in just a second or two, even with video. The regular mobile web pages took much longer, and I experienced quite a bit more jerkiness waiting for images or video to load. The user experience is night and day, as you can see for yourself.
5. Local Businesses Must Adapt, Too
Much of the initial push for almost instant page loads such as AMP are being tested by the large publishers. It’s easy to foresee, however, that the formats offered by Google and Facebook will quickly be adopted by national brands and become the consumer standard.
Unfortunately, once consumers experience the speed of these new formats, it will be tough for them to look back. Consumers will soon expect all their online mobile experiences to match that. Failing to keep up will result in losing customers who grow increasingly impatient.
According to a 2013 Harris Interactive survey, when faced with a negative mobile shopping experience, 33 percent of shoppers head to a competitor’s site, and 30 percent will never return to the offending website.
That negative shopping experience is a moving target, though, and consumer expectations change relative to what they become accustomed to. Soon, having a mobile website won’t be enough — local businesses will need to adapt their mobile websites to load as quickly as those of national brands.
6. Heavier Content Is Dragging Us Down
Contrary to public perception of the advances in technology, many online mobile experiences are actually getting slower.
According to Radware’s Mobile eCommerce annual reports, the median time to load increased from 4.33 seconds in 2013, to 4.8 seconds in 2014, to 5.5 seconds in 2015. The reason for that decline in speed is that today’s average web page contains much more data than before, as graphics, video and more complex functions crowd sites.
Radware found that the median page increased by almost 70 percent in both size and page complexity between 2014 and 2015. The extra data makes improving load speeds a technical challenge.
Even today’s recommended format, responsive design, can struggle with page load times. While the format does adjust for better viewability on mobile screens, behind-the-screen adjustments might slow down the user experience sufficient to affect bounce rate.
7. Some Basic Tips For Speeding Up Your Website
Nevertheless, with some sound website planning and savvy web tech expertise, there are many ways to ensure your mobile website is not cluttered with speed-killing weight and inefficient functions. Here are some tips to help you explore ways to speed up your mobile website.
The weight or size of your web page is a key factor in affecting load times. Minimize the number and size of files that must be downloaded when your page is loaded.
Images and video are heavy. Use compression tools and other size-reducing utilities to lighten the amount of data that must be loaded.
Avoid heavy formats for your page. Flash is already strongly discouraged for most mobile applications, but Google’s AMP also controls third-party Javascript so that it doesn’t interrupt page load.
Optimize your font for page load. Some fonts can be surprisingly large, and being smart about your selection and strategy for how they are used can improve speed.
Optimize the timing of when certain items on your page load. For example, content below the fold that isn’t viewable until the user scrolls down the screen can be delayed to load after content above the fold. Also, preloading can be timed so that content is loaded during inactive breaks before the user gets there.
Conclusion
These are just a few of the ways Google recommends to improve web page performance and that it utilizes in AMP to speed up the mobile web experience. Much of the “how” is rather technical, and you should consult with your web developer to execute your strategy to speed up your site. He or she will likely have additional solutions to suggest.
But understanding the issues is half the battle. Ideally, you can continue to make sure customers have a great user experience on your site that will reward you with more business. Outpacing your competitors is one sure way to stay ahead.
Today is Leap Day, and Google is marking the special occasion – an extra day that comes around every four years – with an animated Leap Day Doodle featuring three bunnies in a row.
As explained on Google’s Doodle blog, Leap Day happens every four years (unless the year is divisible by 100) to keep our calendar in sync with the Earth’s rotation around the sun.
Without Leap Day, we’d be out of sync by about six hours per year.
Today’s Leap Day Google doodle is being displayed on Google’s homepages around the world and leads to a search for, “why is there a leap day?”
Designed by doodler Olivia Hyuhn, Google shared some of Hyuhn’s early 2016 Leap Day Doodle sketches, like this one:
Another draft was closer to the final Doodle, with a leaping frog jumping from one lily pad to the next.
In the end, Hyuhn switched out the leaping frog with three bunnies, one marked with today’s date squeezing between the usual last day of February and first day of March.
In addition to being a leap year, Google notes 2016 is also special because it’s 11111100000 in binary.
Mobile companies understood mobile-specific strategies long before the widespread adoption of mobile devices and increased adoption of smartphones and tablets. With more than three years of experience and state of the art mobile expertise, there is a lot that can be learnt.
Fred Joseph, COO of S4M, offers some takeaways for planning and executing campaigns for the mobile era:
1. When it comes to creatives, keep it short and catchy
Some brands are used to creating long scenarios as used on desktop (i.e. a 25 second video). However, what we’ve learnt from the mobile user experience is that users have short attention spans. Very short. The shorter and the stronger the message, the more likely a user will be engaged – and bearing in mind that our attention spans have dropped from 12 seconds (in 2000) to 8 seconds (2015) according to a survey conducted last year by Microsoft you really need to make every decisecond count!
Keep things short and sweet and move away from disruptive banner ads that have a tendency to distract users in a negative way rather than enhancing their mobile experience. See a recent example by Adidas here: Adidas ‘Superstar’
Smart marketers need to think more along the lines of immersive augmented app experiences, where they are giving something enhancing to consumers.
For example, this Christmas, S4M’s in-house team created a 3D cube interactive format for mobile devices (the cube is interactive on desktop by clicking and dragging the cube: on mobile it’s tactile) which was used as a holiday greeting for their clients, a format that is only interactive when viewed in a mobile browser.
2. Location is the new cookie
Geo-fencing and geolocation are key to targeting the right individual due to the intimate and individual nature of the smartphone. They allow for a clearer understanding of user behavior by following the entire customer journey. There’s also the benefit of being able to measure mobile investments and mobile store campaigns enable the measurement of direct ROIs. Geolocation can also deliver personalized advertising scenarios and transform ads to a service. For example, presenting a store locator or helping users locate the nearest point of sale can prove an extremely helpful service. There’s no imitating users or delivering irrelevant ads when efficiently dealing with location data.
A great example of this is the Adidas mobile-to-store campaign. The goal of the campaign was to drive sales to Adidas brick and mortar stores, assign a value for mobile in store-conversions and prove that mobile brings incremental value to the business. They pursued this by leveraging location extensions in the search ads, which meant users were directed to the store locator page and thus boost in-store traffic. They then pulled pertinent information from the Adidas retail stores, plus relevant industry data and developed a unique way to report an applied conversion rate. The results proved that mobile ROI brought a 680% incremental increase in ROI and a 20% conversion rate from mobile store locator to in-store visits. For desktop marketers, location is one of the biggest considerations to start making when planning a campaign.
3. The power of now
Users increasingly expect to get what they want in the immediate context and in their exact moment of need. There is a huge battle waging for a customer’s attention and it’s being battled out in ‘mobile moments’ (anytime that a user pulls out their device). The power of immediacy must be harnessed and understood properly by marketers, who need to make sure their customers can get what they want in that precious mobile moment.
A great example of this is played out in how we search. Google processes an average of over 40,000 search queries every second, or 3.5 billion searches per day…or putting it into a wider context that’s a staggering 1.2 trillion searches per year (Google search states here).
This recent post from Think with Google discusses the idea of the “micro-moment” (or mobile moment), the small everyday moments in life that prompt us to search the web with an intention of acting immediately.
Your juicer just broke. You need to search to find a new one, or research the best or most economical ones currently available.
You just watched a news report about the snowfall in New York. You search to find out what you can do to help.
You see a product you’re thinking about buying in a store. You search to find out if you can get a better price or find a better option.
Your child wants to play in a park but it’s pouring with rain. You search online to find out where to go.
Each moment where a customer is engaged with their mobile device provides an opportunity to impress or disappoint.
Fail to deliver timely ads and not only do marketers risk losing out on immediate sales but on a longer term they also risk their brand equity and being shut out by consumers irked by invasive messages that would otherwise have been useful had they been properly timed.
4. Cross-channel
When marketers truly understand their customer’s journey they can better adapt the channel mix taking into consideration multiple mobile devices. Companies need to ensure that their marketing departments are set up to effectively orchestrate the cross-channel mix and that the ad can follow the user whatever mobile device they are using (be that a smartphone, tablet, watch or other wearable).
When designing a creative that’s headed cross-channel, check that it works across devices (iOS to android to desktop) and that any calls to action are integrated and flow across the campaign.
For example, when you create a video ad on desktop, it can’t be used on smartphones as it won’t play and deliver the same way. The same applies for smartphones to tablets. This means that not only does a marketing strategy need to be mobile-dedicated, the creatives need to be device-specific too.
Marketers also need to take into consideration the cross-channel operating systems (OS) between iOS devices and Android devices. Never assume that just because a customer has a MacBook that they’re also using an iPhone – increasingly customers make frequent daily journeys between iOS and Android devices so creatives that play out well on both will reach the customer whatever their OS of choice is. The brands that follow this journey with ease will reap rewards.
5. Don’t hide from the mobile world
Desktop marketers need to bear in mind that desktop users are also mobile users. Even if the user started and ended their journey on a desktop, there will likely have been mobile device usage along the way. This doesn’t mean that a desktop strategy will suffice for a mobile advertising campaign, however.
Digital strategy campaigns need to contain a mobile-specific strategy. With the increasing adoption of wearables, mobile devices are not going away; in fact, more are being added to the mix. The brands that are already responding to this explosion are the early adopters who will win the trust of consumers. They will be respected rather than reviled by users as their content will be relevant, useful and timely.
Conclusion
The companies that will excel with marketing strategies that truly reach their customer with the right message, well presented, executed at the right time and in the right context will doubtless win the trust and respect of the consumer while increasing sales and customer retention in a way that is second to none.
Mobile marketers are now adopting strategies that include such a powerful mix of consumer considerations to capture that small “mobile moment” and the desktop marketers who embrace these new power tools will similarly reap rewards. The pupil has certainly become the master!
About the Author: Fred Joseph is the COO of COO of S4M.
Frustrated by the lack of demographic data available for search ads? Contributor Andrew Ruegger shares his method for obtaining demographic information at the keyword level.
Content marketing is a popular practice right now, and it’s easy to see why. Interruptive advertising simply isn’t working, and as a result, creating content people actually choose to read, watch, and interact with is becoming an increasingly attractive alternative for brands. This guide from Contently outlines the Why, When, and How of content marketing and shows: Why content […]
Looking to start building those citations for local SEO? Columnist Lydia Jorden shares her strategy for determining which local business listing sites are worth investing in.
In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more. View From Google’s San Francisco Office: Source: Google+ GIF: Google Cardboard From Coca Cola Box: Source: […]
Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:
Content marketing is a popular practice right now, and it’s easy to see why. Interruptive advertising simply isn’t working, and as a result, creating content people actually choose to read, watch, and interact with is becoming an increasingly attractive alternative for brands.
This guide from Contently outlines the Why, When, and How of content marketing and shows:
Undertaking local listing management can be a daunting task. We all understand the importance of standard local listing management: update your local listing profile on a variety of websites to ensure visibility in the world of local search. Simple enough.
The challenge arises when determining where to focus your local listing management efforts. Claiming profiles and taking ownership over ones that were previously managed by someone else can be a lengthy process (sometimes taking months), and it is important to understand which local business listing sites to focus on when initiating a local listing management strategy.
I determine which local search websites are worth pursuing profiles on through two specific means:
First, I consolidate top local business listing sites (for my specific industry) by Domain Authority. Those sites that have a high Domain Authority take precedent when claiming and creating profiles because, in conjunction with my local listing optimization strategy, I can also strengthen my inbound link profile.
The second method involves exploring searcher behavior in Google Analytics, then utilizing this data to seek out opportunities to increase local online presence based on referral traffic sources.
Method 1: Local Business Listing Site Domain Authority
Moz defines Domain Authority as a metric “that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines.” It is measured on a 100-point scale.
We can use the Domain Authority of specific local business listing sites to determine which of these sites should capture user attention — or, put another way, which sites are more likely to rank higher in search results, allowing a searcher to click through and find Business XYZ through barnacle SEO methods.
The chart below shows the Domain Authority associated with popular local business listing sites, as measured by Moz’s free Open Site Explorer tool, which helps marketers research “behind the scenes” of a link. I use this tool to determine if garnering a local profile on the site is worth exploring.
Local Business Listing Site Domain Authority
Based on this information, I would prioritize building my local listing in Google My Business and Yelp before I would explore opportunities with Superpages and Best Of The Web.
Of course, the above is a high-level overview of sites that all have relatively high Domain Authority, and honestly, I would likely prioritize all or most of these sites.
However, if you are working within a specific niche (e.g., healthcare) that has a variety of industry-specific local business listing sites that your customers use to find you (e.g., ZocDoc, Healthgrades), the Domain Authority method can help you determine which sites are worth investing your time in to build a local profile.
Method 2: Local Search Behavior In Google Analytics
Data pulled from Google Analytics can provide deep insights into determining where to focus local listing management efforts, as well as if there is potential to further meet your business goals through advertising on local business listing sites.
In conjunction with the Domain Authority method, I’ve always used Google Analytics to help me determine where to begin my local listing management implementation, and it’s important to keep in mind that priorities will be different depending on your business’s target market and the websites your customer base utilizes for local search.
Navigate in Google Analytics to Acquisition, then All Traffic, then Referrals.
Referral Path
In this display, you can see where the majority of your traffic is finding you. This can show if there are any local opportunities you can capitalize on to achieve your business’s goals — whether it be brand awareness, conversion optimization or streamlining local search for a better user experience.
For example, I can deduce that the business is “review-driven” if I find that the majority of referrals are coming from Yelp and Angie’s List. In this case, the next move would likely be advertising on Yelp, or perhaps launching a review-generating campaign in an effort to boost the business’s organic listing on local review sites.
Conversely, if you find that most of your referral traffic is coming from sites like BBB.org, you may want to pursue local business listing sites that have strong credibility for your specific industry. Once you’ve compiled a list of sites that fit this description, cross-check them through the Open Site Explorer to further determine if advertising there is worth your time and money.
Track Your Efforts
Monitoring the local profiles you’ve created is a critical aspect of understanding their value and determining where to hone your efforts.
Many local sites, such as Google My Business, provide deep insights to allow you to determine your local listing’s performance. Yelp provides a dashboard telling you about searcher behavior on your page. Local, industry-specific business sites will often offer similar data (sometimes even free of charge) to those who build an online local profile.
You can then use this information, gathered over time, to seek out additional opportunities. These opportunities could range from advertising on specific local business listing sites, if those sites garner strong referral traffic, to creating a retargeting campaign for those who clicked from specific local sites and then bounced from your site.
We can all agree that the importance of local search should not be understated, regardless of the options that you choose to explore when executing a local listing optimization strategy. Still, these two techniques are sure to jump-start your strategy or give you some ideas as to where to begin.
Strategies for boosting customer retention and fostering customer loyalty abound. But among companies that seek to build, sustain, and grow their customer relationships, few seem to talk about community outreach.
It’s kind of understandable. In a marketing climate that’s increasingly data-driven, it’s sexier for execs in the boardroom to talk about, say, analytics and funnel optimization than about employee volunteer programs and corporate social responsibility. Or: sure, let’s talk about outreach for two minutes — then let’s wrap up this meeting.
This shouldn’t be the case, though. While it may not always seem clear how disaster relief efforts and 3R campaigns would translate to reduced churn and improved retention, community outreach can, in fact, work wonders for your customer relationships.
Outreach improves corporate image and brand reputation
People are less likely to do business with companies that are perceived as irresponsible — according to Cone Communications, 9 in 10 global citizens say they would boycott a company if they learned of irresponsible behavior.
On the other end of the spectrum, companies that are able to visibly demonstrate their ethics and show a commitment to the community are more likely to have a stronger reputation and attract customers who care deeply about what a business stands for.
In a study by Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business about how outreach can influence consumer attitudes, a grocery retailer experienced a one-unit improvement in customer perception and a 1.8-point increase in share of wallet after it invested in employee fairness and local sourcing as part of its community initiatives.
Behavioral science researchers found that consumers tend to reward companies with outreach activities by being more loyal to them. Community outreach was even shown to have a stronger effect on customer loyalty than did service quality.
According to Harvard Law research, community outreach and corporate social responsibility programs create distinct value that leads to increased customer loyalty, willingness to pay premium prices, and lower reputational risks in crisis situations.
A separate study revealed that 56 percent of US consumers will travel an extra ten minutes out of their way to buy a product associated with a cause they care about.
Clearly, community outreach can make a positive impact on your corporate image and brand reputation. It improves how customers perceive the value of your company, which in turn increases their satisfaction and heartens them to stay loyal to your business.
Outreach bolsters your local presence
Whether you’re managing a small business or an enterprise-level organization with multiple locations, community outreach establishes and improves your relevance in local communities where you operate.
Note the success of Small Business Saturday: first held in Roslindale Village, Massachusetts, sponsored by American Express, and organized in partnership with a non-profit (National Trust for Historic Preservation).
The campaign also revived local economies in the US and invigorated a customer base of millions of consumers to shop local: on the second year of Small Business Saturday, consumers spent approximately $5.5 billion at local stores and restaurants in lieu of the holiday.
Community outreach doesn’t necessarily have to be about saving the sharks or ending famine in the Horn of Africa. The key is to strategically invest your resources in efforts that help your organization create meaningful connections with customers in the local community. So find a cause that matters to them.
A campaign as simple as allowing neighboring schools to hold fundraising evenings in your stores or developing a localized procurement program amidst gentrification can resonate powerfully with customers, inspiring loyalty and brand advocacy.
Outreach enriches the customer experience
In the Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business cited earlier, customers of the grocery retailer were found to be less enthusiastic about the company’s commitment to environmental friendliness. This attitude wasn’t so much a matter of an active refusal to save the planet; rather, the outreach wasn’t sufficiently tied to anything that directly benefited the customer experience or responded to immediate needs.
Contrast this to a successful program devised by British retailer Tesco, which rewarded shoppers who used reusable bags with loyalty points. By attaching a customer experience benefit (savings) to its outreach, Tesco not only attracted consumers who shared the same values; it also added a kind of affinity and reward component that, in the eyes of people looking for a place to shop, distinguished the company from the competition.
Who knew these could make such a difference for a company?
Whole Foods Market has a similar reusable bag program. If a customer uses a reusable bag, they have the choice of getting 10 cents off per bag or giving that 10 cents to a charity.
It could be that you’re managing a luxury development brand whose beach resort locations attract divers, in which case a coastal cleanup sends a better message than organic agriculture. Or you could be managing multiple casino properties, in which case consumer trust can more effectively be earned with a responsible gaming program than, say, carbon offsetting schemes.
In terms of boosting customer retention, it is important to tailor your community outreach efforts in ways that enrich the customer experience. Listen to customer feedback and analyze your data: these are excellent starting points for identifying relevant causes and customer experience opportunities. The more beneficial the causes are for your customers, the greater the impact community outreach will have on customer retention.
Outreach makes your brand less vulnerable on social
It can go wrong so quickly for organizations that experience communications crises or ethical lapses, especially when these come to light on social media. When customers leave, and leave because they believe you did a Bad Thing, it’s not easy to win them back.
In one fell swoop, a three-minute song on YouTube turned an unresolved customer issue into a national embarrassment for United Airlines, prompting a Harvard Business School professor to write:
“In social media, an entity’s size and brand recognition make it more vulnerable to parody and attack, not safer.”
Community outreach minimizes that vulnerability. It provides a measure of insurance against any negative issues or customer experiences affecting your brand reputation — while also amplifying positive messages and emotions involving your organization’s ability to do good and right things.
Outreach enhances stakeholder value
A number of studies have explored the relationship between improved customer retention and increased stakeholder value. It certainly makes sense that satisfied, loyal customers can result in better market performance, a more stable customer base and reliable source of future revenue, and a more valuable company.
But it can be the other way around, too: stakeholder value serving to reduce defections and keep customers. Stakeholder value enhances a company’s investment prospects; these investments can then be focused to more effectively develop the business’ customer relationships.
This is where community outreach comes into play: it enables better access to funding and makes it more attractive for investors to commit capital to a business that sets high social and ethical standards. (Some even invest exclusively in organizations with a proven track record in community outreach — think sustainable supply chains, say, or adherence to labor or performance standards.)
And it’s not just the investors, either: employees of companies that are highly engaged in the community are more likely to stay, perform well, and make a positive contribution to the satisfaction and loyalty of customers.
Rutgers University found that employees who were able to participate in community, social, or environmental outreach while on the job were more satisfied with their jobs by a ratio of 2 to 1.
It’s clear that community outreach galvanizes external and internal stakeholders, acting as a powerful value creation platform. And the effect of such a platform does not go unnoticed by customers, who will certainly be drawn to companies that achieve strong market performance as well as to businesses with engaged, happy employees.
Community outreach as an executive decision
Community outreach typically involves giving your company’s resources — be these in the form of money, time, products and services, volunteer hours — to the local community in which you operate. But it’s not an exclusively philanthropic construct; it is also one of the most effective strategies for boosting customer retention and driving the growth of your organization.
Make commitment to community outreach an executive decision. Don’t treat it as an afterthought or leave it out of the discussion in your next meeting. How your business works and engages with the community will change the way the community does business with you.
About the Author: Chris Campbell is the CEO of ReviewTrackers, a review management and customer feedback platform designed to help companies efficiently monitor online reviews, manage brand reputation, and enhance the customer experience in ways that make a positive impact on the bottom line.
In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more.
Earlier this week we reported that the review stars began dropping out of the Google search results. Within 24-hours of reporting it, the review stars started showing up again in the Google search results.
This morning in a hangout at the 56 minute mark, Google’s John Mueller confirmed they are coming back and the reason they dropped out was due to a bug. Google said they fixed the bug and the reviews should all come back soon.
Here is the Mozcast feature report tool showing us they are now back to normal in the search results:
The reviews initially dropped out on the 16th of February and then starting coming back a few days ago after we reported the issue to Google.
Advertising in search is often difficult to conceptualize for many brands because of how different the live auction and targeting methodology is compared with traditional media planning and buying. Media strategies are built on market research, which always includes target demographics or personas.
Specialty channels like search — where the targeting strategy is based on keywords and not necessarily on demographics or personas — cause a methodological disconnect for some brands and traditional planners and buyers. The result is that search often becomes just another impression/cost buy, which is not how it should be used.
Google has made strides in providing additional information on demographics and the ability to target personas, specifically through the Google Display Network, but when buying on the search engines themselves, most demographic information is not great. However, here is a potential way to help you bridge that gap between demographics and search keyword strategies.
Using The Google Display Planner To Glean Demographic Info
Although this tool is supposed to be more for display, you can still get demographic information based on keywords. The data comes from Google DoubleClick network, but it still represents user cookies that are looking for and engaging in content related to the keywords you enter.
Once you go to the Display Planner, click the drop-down arrow that says “Search for new targeting ideas using a phrase, website, or category.” Enter the keyword for which you want demographic info, then click the button that says “Get ad group ideas.”
This will bring up a screen with gender, device and age bucket information — similar to the information that Google Universal Analytics provides. The benefit is that you can use this to be proactive instead of reactive.
Now, there isn’t a way to get a meaningful download with the demo data, even though it appears on the screen in these charts. The reason for this is that the purpose of this tool is to convince you to buy more by giving you additional display suggestions.
However, if there is a chart appearing, that means those numbers have got to be in the source code:
This means you can capture that information by extracting it from the source, which will provide you with nice, clean datasets of demographic information on your keyword.
[Click to enlarge]
Now, if you are like me, one keyword really is just not enough. I want the information on all of my keywords… and I tend to have a lot of them.
To get the information for ~700 keywords, it would probably take someone manually collecting it for four or five hours — which is what I had one of my tremendous associates do for me to see if there were any real insights, and there were! I’m in the market for a new smartphone, so that’s what we looked at: smartphones and providers.
To make the data easier to understand, I put it into TIBCO Spotfire (Tableau also is a good choice) and made this dashboard to see what we got:
[Click to enlarge]
We also created some filters by word type, brand, stage in the funnel, product type and so on.
Demographic data filtered by funnel stage [Click to enlarge]
Demographic data filtered by keyword [Click to enlarge]
It was interesting to note that people were more likely to search for purchase-based words on their desktops and that some brands had 10- to 15-percent difference in gender and age searches.
Additionally, MetroPCS and Google phones had the largest group of older searchers, while Samsung and Apple had the youngest and were also searched for 10 percent more on mobile.
Regardless, when keywords have the added benefit of some representation of demographic information, it creates a bridge of communication to traditional channels that buy based on cost, impressions and demographics.
Additional Options
If you want to collect this data in a more efficient way, there are several choices, but there are risks. We don’t allow any automated collection/scraping of Google for many reasons, including its terms and conditions, which you would be violating.
And Google is very likely to catch you if you don’t understand its systems, resulting in an hour ban of your IP address. This can be very bad, especially if you are buying advertisements in Google, as it disables your ability to do that.
With all that said, since Google collects everyone’s website content (unless not allowed in robots.txt), this is how you would be able to accomplish collecting their information. I would probably use something like Selenium (a browser-simulating add-on), unless you’re a senior Java developer, as the time control rates are easier to control and understand.
I would use the Selenium nodes in KNIME, as it allows you to import variables and manipulate and store data more easily than the web browser application. And that flow would look something like this:
Services such as Experian Audience View also offer panel-based demographic search query information. However, you’ll need to pay for such services, while the Display Planner tool is free.
John Mueller, a Google Webmaster Trends Analysts, said this morning in a Google Hangout at the 15:50 mark into the video that AMP is not yet a ranking signal in the Google search ranking algorithm.
We reported in December that AMP might become a ranking signal but clearly, that has not happened yet.
John Muller said, “Is AMP a ranking signal? At the moment, it is not a ranking signal.”
He went on to explain that you can use AMP to become mobile friendly but AMP itself is not a ranking signal.
AMP launched early on Tuesday and only shows in the mobile search top news box. Google likely plans to expand AMP beyond the news box and when it does, I can see it becoming a ranking signal then. But until then, I doubt it makes sense to make it a ranking signal, that is – until it is used in the core mobile web search results.
For paid search managers, Friday could be a bit of a frustrating end to the week.
Google AdWords reports aren’t downloading or printing. The issue started Thursday and continues into Friday. Users instead get the “red bar of death” informing them that “there was an error with your operation”.
Google has acknowledged the issue on Twitter and in the advertiser community form and says its engineers are working on it.
Yesterday, Bing Ads had reporting delays that affected the Web UI, mobile and API. Later in the day, most the metrics were up to date, except conversions and Bing Shopping Campaign (BSC) data.
As of 3:00 PM PST on 02/25/2016, Ad Campaign performance reporting (Impression, Clicks, Spend) is up to date and processing normally, whereas conversion and BSC data is still catching up and running 6 hours behind.
In the night, some Bing Ads advertisers also had their accounts paused for some period of time under an hour. Those affected will have received email notifications. Just a week ago, Bing Ads had a much more prolonged reporting snag, with historical data not being fully available for more than a week.
Where have all the search professionals gone? Contributor Andrew Goodman explores the state of the search agency industry today and wonders if we can be doing better.
Columnist Joy Hawkins discusses how you can fix issues with old business locations being marked “Permanently closed” — and what Google may be doing to address the issue.
When it comes to providing SEO for local businesses, it’s crucial to set realistic expectations. Columnist Jenny Foster discusses three points she likes to drive home with clients to ensure a strong relationship and a smooth campaign.
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Score a FREE copy of Scott’s book. Every paid full-access attendee will receive a complimentary copy of Scott Brinker’s new book, Hacking Marketing. Scott will be doing book signings at the opening reception on Sunday evening and during the networking reception on Monday evening.
