Interested in speaking at this year’s EE Roadshow in Seattle?
The ExpressionEngine Roadshow 2009 will be held in Seattle, WA, on October 2nd.
The EE Roadshow brings ExpressionEngine users and developers together in real life to share what they know about this incredible web publishing system.
We’re looking for volunteers to speak on panels, moderate sessions or give presentations. If you’re an ExpressionEngine developer with some great insights to share with the community about building sites with EE, add-on development, dev approaches, or anything else you think other EE developers would love to learn or hear about, we want you to speak at the Roadshow.
About the Video riiPlay.tv, a Vancouver-based video and web production company, filmed the Internet Marketing Conference held in Vancouver last year, and they have kindly sent me the video embed code for my session on Writing for the Web.
Have you ever missed an event and wished you could attend?
Have you ever held an event and wished that someone was filming it?
Have you ever attended an event and wished that you could send your co-workers links to watch the “best of” clips?
riiPlay.tv is answering this by providing the filming of live events, the production of watchable video segments, and the hosting and delivery of those videos online through free or pay-per-view means.
On the Coast was covering aspects of the recession this week and Jeremy and I were asked to speak about marketing practices during the recession. The introduction to the session mentioned that FedEx is offering free resume printing and Hyundai is willing to buy back cars that were purchase before a layoff, and a fellow in North Vancouver has opened up his aikido classes to the unemployed, who can attend for free.
A couple of examples I didn’t get to mention are below:
Kodak: Web and tv ads for their All in One Printer position this product as one that uses “fairly priced ink”. One of the tv taglines is “if you don’t have ink, you don’t really have a printer.“
Coca-Cola: Offering a 16 oz coke for 99 cents in the US. The food industry is using smaller packaging, volume and weight in order to drop prices but still make margin.
WebEx (online conference calling): Ran tv ads in the US with messaging on “spend less time travelling.“ The ads were clearly aimed at cost cuts to travel budgets but the messaging focused on the positive, which is business travel can be a pain, it takes you away from your family, it can set you back in terms of the amount of work so why not relax, stay in the office and still get the face-to-face time. Need tips for weathering the economic crisis? Check out the February Underwire newsletter.
And if you’re interested in further articles, here are a couple that the CBC producer Michelle Eliot and I were talking about in advance of the interview:
At the BookNet Canada session “Defining Success: Accountable Online Marketing for Book Publishing”, I was asked about how I start creating an online marketing plan and if I think about the tools first.
I always have the tools in mind (Twitter, Facebook, Delicious), but I start with the 7 Sentence Plan, which really is about the business goals.
1. The purpose of the marketing plan is [specific, measurable goal here].
2. The target audience is [Who does this campaign need to reach? Where are they online?].
3. The niche in the marketplace is [What’s special about this book, how is it different, what are its benefits, competitive advantages?].
4. My identity is [Who and how are we representing ourselves online? Is the author blogging and commenting and the publicist doing the research? Is the publicist representing the author and the house? Are we using our Facebook profile, website, blog?].
5. Our tactics and strategies are [list here the tools, based on what’s going to work best for the target audience].
6. We will devote [percentage or amount of time, people, money] to this project.
7. We are measuring [specific, measurable goals here] and we understand the value of our goal conversions to be [enter values here].
If you’re not measuring the results of your marketing efforts, then you are wasting money. Here are 3 steps to planning, measuring and improving online campaigns.
Step 1. Establish measurable indicators (or KPIs, key performance indicators) for every marketing effort.
Make sure they are measurable! For example, saying “we want to increase sales” is not something you can measure. Many factors influence a person’s decision to buy. Sales are an indicator of success but the exact marketing effort that led to a sale is not measurable. Sending out a postcard and driving people to a specific URL is something we can measure. How many people came to this page. Further to that, if the page has an online form, how many people completed the form. These 2 things are specific and measurable.
A specific, measurable goal might be:
* visiting a certain webpage
* signing up for a newsletter
* completing an online form
By using free tools like Google Analytics you can precisely track how many people complete your goal and where they came from.
Step 2: Determine your cost per conversion.
A conversion is any time that someone completes a desired action. It doesn’t have to be a sale. A conversion is the completion of a measurable, specific goal.
Your cost per conversion is the amount of money you spend divided by the number of conversions you achieve.
If your campaign involves mailing out postcards that direct people to a specific URL with an online form, your goal is getting people to fill out the form. The campaign costs $500. You track the number of online form submissions and receive 50 submissions.
Cost per conversion = $500 / 50 submissions
$10 per conversion.
If your campaign involves sending out an email newsletter that directs people to a specific URL with an online form, your goal is still getting people to fill out the form. The campaign costs $200. You track the number of online submissions and receive 16 submissions.
Cost per conversion = $200 / 16 submissions
$12.50 per conversion
Now that you have this information you can make some better judgements about how to spend your marketing dollars. With the cost per conversion, you can see that the postcard generated a better (cheaper) cost per conversion than the email newsletter, even though the total cost of the postcard was more.
Cost per conversion helps you determine the actual cost instead of just looking at price. (It is like the cost per pound when buying meat.)
Step 3: Determine the Value
To determine if your marketing effort is worth the money or a waste, you need to determine the value of your activities.
Is it worth it to spend $12.50 to get one person to fill out an online form? Maybe yes, maybe no. It depends on the context. If the form is an order form for a product costing $100, maybe yes.
The value per conversion is $100. The cost per conversion is $12.50.
With both sets of numbers in hand, you can look at all your marketing efforts and decide where to allocate your resources: people, time and money. Don’t stop just at the online marketing activities, look at the offline marketing activities.
It drives me mad when online is asked to justify a spend but offline is not. In these scenarios, you’re wasting money. You are making decisions based on gut instinct and experience. We have experience doing x, y, z and it makes us feel good. It’s safe.
Safe can also be a waste of money.
When a conversion is not related to a sale, how do you set value?
Create a point system. You’ll assign an arbitrary number, but it works as a comparative measurement. You always want specific, measurable goals.
1 person opening and reading your email newsletter = 5 points
1 person viewing a specific video = 5 points
1 person signing up for a newsletter = 10 points
1 person creating an account on your ecommerce site = 100 points
Looks arbitrary, but it works.
If you run Campaign 1 and have 300 people viewing a specific video:
300 people * 5 points = 1,500 points
If you run Campaign 2 and have 200 people sign up for your email newsletter:
200 people * 10 points = 2,000 points
The $ value of each campaign is unknown, but we can see the relative effectiveness. Instead of saying, “we should do more of Campaign 1, it drove the most people”, we can see that Campaign 2, although it drove fewer actions, these actions are of higher value.
Before spending any money, always consider what your specific, measurable goal is worth. As long as you can measure relative effectiveness, you can evaluate whether you are wisely spending money.
Armed with the cost per conversion and the value per conversion, you can make a lot of sense out of the results data. You can easily determine which marketing activities are most effective.
Having trouble figuring out a point system?
Understand the relative value of your online and offline activities. Start with your gut instincts, set the arbitrary numbers, and, as you collect accurate, specific and measurable results, refine those arbitrary numbers into actual dollar values.
For example, if your gut tells you that in-person networking events generate a value of 10 points, but posters only generate 5 points. Then you have the beginnings of a scale.
If you and your marketing and sales team can agree that online networking and social media is equal to in-person marketing, then online networking is 10 points. If your team is skeptical, then you can negotiate. If online networking is of greater value than posters but lesser value than in-person networking, agree to give it 8 points.
Here is how I’d pair off some common online and offline marketing activities. You have to determine the value order and points based on your business context, but you can use these pairings to help those who operate on gut instinct, or those with little experience online, begin to create a point system.
Advertising (radio, print, direct mail) • Online advertising (email ads, banner ads, search ads
Articles in print (circulation numbers) • Articles Online (unique visitors to site)
Marketing messages with telephone hold music • Email signatures
In-person networking • Online networking
Posters • Web badges and widgets
Press releases • Electronic press releases
Letters to the Editor • Blog comments, Online reviews
Referral program • Online affiliate program
TV ads • YouTube videos
Word of Mouth (real world) • Word of Mouth (virtual world: blogs, forums, wikis, email forwards)
September has been a month of conferences. First the Internet Marketing Conference, then Defining Success: Accountable Online Marketing for Book Publishing hosted by BookNet Canada and the Association of Book Publishers of BC, and this Friday
ExpressionEngine Roadshow.
As a speaker (and chatty soul) at each of these conferences, I have talked to a number of people struggling with the same question. How do you define a successful internet marketing campaign? Most understand why they want to be online but are having trouble showing success and getting budget dollars.
The first step is to dispel myths held by those gripping the pursue strings.
Just because it is online, does not mean it is free.
If you want successful internet marketing campaigns, you have to put money, people and time into them.
Even using free tools, you still need to invest the time in using that tool properly.
People, process and technology.
You do not have a successful campaign without all 3. The tools and technology are available to do really great things, but the tools are only as good as the people using them.
Plan. Measure. Improve.
You cannot express success without agreed upon metrics.
As a company, you have to understand the cost of the campaign and the value generated. The cost is easy to measure.
It is the assignment of value that we often overlook.
How much do we value the new email subscriber, the new Facebook member. What do they mean to our business? How do we measure these indirect benefits across
all campaigns so we know if the email newsletter is actually of greater value to the business than the blog or the twitter feed?
Sit down with your team and define the value of each marketing action (online and offline). Even set arbitrary numbers to use as a baseline until you have historical data.
Internet Marketing Is Hard and Only for Kids.
Internet marketing is not hard. Doing things you have never done before is hard.
Solutions Research Group produced a report last June (2007) to
show the age groups of Canadians visiting social networking sites: places like Facebook and MySpace.
70 percent of 12-19 year olds visited a social networking site within the last month.
72 percent of 20-29 year olds
44 percent of 30-49
29 percent of 50+
That means 23 million Canadians are online. 8 million are in Facebook. The numbers are huge!
Corey Rollins and I live blogged the Internet Marketing Conference (September 11 and 12) for TechVibes. Links to our posts are below:
General Interest
IMC: Keynote Address by Eric T. Peterson.
Author Eric T. Peterson says that if it is worth doing, it is worth doing analytically. Why web analytics is important and what it means to your business.
Monthly Newsletter
QuickLearn Training & Events
3 Steps to Measuring the Success of Online Marketing Campaigns
What we’re talking about 
Project Highlights
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Vancouver internet marketing strategists James Sherrett and Monique Trottier are experts in online marketing strategy. Talk to us about internet marketing, web design, search marketing
and online business strategy. 
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