BarnRaisers

Buy it or build it?

This is a primary question that involves thought for any business. As it relates to marketing, there’s no shortage of ways to buy it from ads to affiliate relationships to list buying.  But with social media, you build it. And it often comes with a better return on investment because you’re taking out the middleman and building a more direct relationships with your customers.

Want proof? Here are 9 case studies where social media took out the middleman.

1. CLEVELAND CLINIC: Heavily regulated category like healthcare usually shy away from social media but not the Cleveland Clinic. By structuring a cross-functional team to enable education, collaboration, and smart governance, the Cleveland Clinic deepened engagement with its consumers around the globe – both providers and patients. They used Facebook and Twitter for daily wellness tips; LinkedIn for professional recruitment and YouTube for content on diseases and patient stories. Since the Cleveland Clinic established social media as a cross-functional discipline, it has seen a noticeable increase in website traffic, attendance at health lectures and new patients making and keeping appointments.

2.  EDIBLE ARRANGEMENTS. Through their Facebook page, Edible Arrangements offered consumers a voucher for free chocolate dipped strawberries. But to redeem the coupon, fans had to visit an Edible Arrangements store providing Edible Arrangements franchisees the opportunity to promote their store to a slew of new customers. This campaign  generated 170,000 new fans and a double-digit increase in sales versus year ago.

3. FOILED CUPCAKES: Has shown extraordinary growth, strong ROI and built a social community where 95% of their customers come from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. When Foiled Cupcakes had their first Groupon promotion, the promotion went live at midnight and fans bought 800 dozens by 8 am.

4.  HARLEY DAVIDSON: (HDTalking.com): Harley owners created a website and social community of over 3 million Facebook fans and 62,000 Twitter followers that runs entirely on user-generated content.  Here, Harley owners trade photos, jokes, where to find hard to find parts, advice on Harley models and ownership plus there are at least 7 mechanics on-call at all times.  HDtalking.com now has 58,000+ Harley owner participating and cost to Harley for operations is negligible.

5.  H&R BLOCK: Used Facebook and Twitter during the tax season to provide immediate access to a tax professional for Q&A in the “Get It Right” social media campaign.  The effort secured 1,500,000 unique visitors and answered 1,000,000 questions for a 15% lift in business versus the prior year when there was no social media “Get It Right” program. Here’s how Amy Worley explains how the company got it right.

6. IBM: Let employees set up internal blogs to promote collaboration and innovation within the company on a global scale. There was no external blog and no pressure on employee to participate in internal blogs but but there were 17,000 internal blogs, 100,000 employees participating regularly and as many as 500,000 participants involved in company crowd-sourcing “jams.”  Crowd-sourcing identified the 10 best incubator businesses, which IBM funded for $100 million and generated $100 billion in total revenue for a 10-to-1 ROI with a 44.1% gross profit margin.

7. MELROSE JEWELERS: An eRetailer sold high end watches like Rolex and Breitling where the average sales is $5,000. They offered consumers $100 off on their next purchase if they “Like” them on Facebook. They had an app on their Facebook page that functioned as a simple quiz where, after taking the quiz your “watch personality” was revealed at the end (e.g. you are James Bond 200o Breitling man) to engage and secure email addresses of potential customers. You also got $150 off after your purchase if you took a picture of your new watch and posted it on Facebook.  As a result, Facebook fans went from 30,000 to over 180,000 in one quarter and sales went from a few hundred thousand to over $2,000,000.

8. PRETZEL CRISPS: Launched a$1.00 coupon on their Facebook page. Within 36 hours, their fan base grew from 5,000 to 12,000. So, they launched another coupon – Buy One, Get One Free. Only this time they didn’t tell their fans. No matter. Fans found out on their own and the “letting you in on a secret” factor had a viral effect that built the fans from 14,000 and 29,000 and now it’s at over 62,000. But fans just tell one side of the story.  The redemption rate for the fist coupon was 87%; the redemption rate for the second was 95% and annual sales increase was 93%.

8. SETON HALL UNIVERSITY: Was discovering that prospective students went to their Facebook page before their website to find out whether this was the right school for them. So, they engaged on Facebook to increase enrollment and revenue and tagged whether Facebook played a role. Tuitions increased +18% and deposits increased +25% with 2X as many students coming to website from Facebook.

9. TORTILLALAND: Found social media was a great resource for building a database and conducting market research with consumers for their fresh, uncooked tortillas. In the space of a few months, they ran a sweepstakes; then, a free coupon on Facebook that created a database of over 14,000 and insights into target consumers through survey research. They built brand assets that would have cost 100′s for thousands of dollars through suppliers for a very small fraction of that amount.

When developing your brand’s growth strategy, will you buy it or build it and take out the middleman?

“How do I measure social media return on investment?” This is the #1 question over 3,300 marketers ask Social Media Examiner every year in the Annual Social Media Marketing Report.

Pictures, however, tell a different story. The first one below from Google Trends measures the year-to-year change in search volume for the phrase, “social media marketing,” which is increasing significantly.

But the second, from econsultancy, says what isn’t increasing is marketers measuring Social Media ROI, even though they say it’s their #1 priority. Hmm…

According to Marketing Sherpa, the top reasons that marketers use to explain this behavior are:

• Lack of knowledgeable staff
• Inability to measure ROI
• Management resistance
• Technical complexity

To help, here are 8 steps to demystify Social Media ROI.

1. BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND: Since it’s called return on investment, begin by identifying the return you want at the end. Define and quantify your expectations. For example, do you want to: 1) Increase sales by 50%, 2) shorten the purchase cycle by 1/3, 3) double leads, 4) increase conversion by 40% or 5) decrease customer complaints by 75%.  Be as specific you can be at the start; it increases the success you have measuring ROI at the end.

2. IDENTIFY WHO TO ATTRACT: Social media is one of the best channels for building 1-to-1 relationships. Take the time to identify who you want to attract and find the social networks where they spend their time. There are are great tools to help you. For blogs, there’s Technorati and Alltop. For Facebook, there’s Your Openbook and Booshaka. For Twitter, there’s Twitter Search and Kurrently. Just go to the search box in any of them and type in the product or service you offer. In fact, put the words, “buy” or “need” in front of it and you’re one step closer to a 1-to-1 business relationship.

3. FIND OUT HOW THEY FIND YOU: As you succeed with who you want to attract, your audience is going to want to find out more about you. The first place they are going to go is your website which should have an analytics tool like Google Analytics. Look at your “Traffic Sources:” then, look at “Referral Sources” to see which social networks provide the greatest number of visitors. Assess if this is in line with the social networks where you spend your time and resources.

4. ESTABLISH YOUR VALUE EXCHANGE: Companies ask that you “Like” them on Facebook. Ok. Now what? This chart below tells you consumers are motivated to “Like” you if you show them some “Love,” first.  It also tells you, if you take this step, they show their support for your brand in return. If you need some help showing some promotional “Love,” Wildfire offers some great social media apps that are effective, affordable and make the value exchange easier for you to execute.

Consider these facts:

• 80% of consumers find your website by first writing a query into a box on a search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing)
• 42% chose the first site listed in organic search
• 90% choose a site listed on the first page

These facts suggest, for anyone doing business on the internet, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a first orders of business.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website in search engines via the “natural,” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”), search results, as defined by Wikipedia.

Although there are plenty of SEO case studies, it can be hard to find case studies that directly prove return on investment (ROI). In the quest for a top rank on Google and increased website traffic, it’s easy to forget the most essential question to ask: What action(s) do you want consumers to take when they get to your website?

To show what’s achievable, here are 10 case studies that prove the ROI of SEO.

1. COMPLETE PLUMBING SOURCE: An e-commerce online source for homeowners and do-it-yourself plumbers who want quality and affordable plumbing supplies and tools from leading brands, completeplumbingsource.com’s number one goal was to drive targeted traffic to their site and generate product sales through a seamless online buying process. Keyword discovery led to an optimization of the top revenue-producing pages and  landing page optimization. Within four months, website traffic increased +169%, conversion increased +202% and sales increased by +300%.

2. DICKIES: An online store for Dickies Work Wear focused on the quality and quantity of organic search traffic. They focused on keywords and phrase for those reaching the DickiesStore website with “Dickies” related phrases as well as more generic phrases such as “workwear” and “safety boots” etc. Within six months,  DickiesStore dominated the SERP’S (Search Engine Results Page) for “Dickies” related keywords; an extremely competitive niche in which many suppliers of the Dickies brand are constantly competing for top rankings. Within a year, the SEO strategy resulted in an increase of 63% in non-branded traffic and 47% increase in sales.

3. DOLLAR DAYS: An online e-commerce wholesaler that helps smaller businesses compete against larger chain, dollardays.com used videos for its eclectic product offering to capture long tail key words. They also video indexed each product video for Google’s search algorithms using a video sitemap. The result was a huge and immediate +75% increase in sales.

4. ENTREPRENEUR: Sought to increase site traffic and downloads of it huge number of articles at entrepreneur.com. That’s because increases in site traffic and involvement increased advertising rates and revenues. They instituted an SEO program in three stages: In Stage 1, they optimized the web page. In Stage 2, they optimized keywords, links and content for descriptions of the articles. In Stage 3, they integrated SEO into the entire business process. The result was an estimated return of over $2 million dollars PER MONTH (calculated by determining the revenue from additional number of click-throughs since they began the SEO program, minus the SEO expenses incurred).

5. MILLENIUM HOTELS:  A prominent hotel chain with over 110 hotels and resorts located in over 60 different destinations in 18 countries, Millenium used SEO to: 1) Achieve higher placements for highly competitive generic search phrase, 2) attract seasonal traffic and 3) promote seasonal offers online. Within a year, Millenium saw increases of: 1) 250,000 visitor per month, 2) 84% in organic traffic and 3) 70% in online reservations bookings.

6. PHILLYDENTIST.COM: Dr. Ken Cirka, DMD, had no relevant keywords on his website in the areas of  title tags, body copy, and headers, some of  the most important factors in search engine rankings for on-site optimization. During this time, he received one new patient per week. However, after making these changes, he rose to the #1 position for the keywords, “Philadelphia dentist,” and  received nine new patients each week. Nine month later, Dr. Cirka hired another dentist and additional staff.

7. ROTTEN TOMATOES: A movie review site that started out as a hobby, rottentomatoes.com was built by SEO. The Rotten Tomatoes team observed that most people searched for movie reviews by searching on the movie name or for actors in a film, not for a movie review itself.  Therefore Rotten Tomatoes architected the site to give each individual movie its own Rotten Tomatoes mini-site to boost natural search rankings. The SEO strategy was so successful that features such as “Tomatometer” are now a high volume keyword and Rotten Tomatoes is one of the top 5 movie review sites in the world.

8. VICTORIA INN:  a resort inn in a unique heritage building on the south shore of Rice Lake at Gore’s Landing, Ontario. Victoria Inn wanted to use its website as a reservation sales tool to attract new bookings for the inn. For the broadest possible sales and bookings, the keyword phrases needed to work with local and regional geographical locator terms. Victoria Inn achieved more than 370 top ten ranking positions and 152 #1 ranking for an 85% increase in reservations bookings.

9. VOICES.COM: One of the leading marketplaces for voice-over talent, voices.com studied competitive sites, keywords, visitor intensions between those looking to hire and those looking to hire voice-over talent. The resulting site overhaul and SEO keyword discovery increased conversions rates on the site by 400%.

10. WATER GALLERY: An internet-only business that offers handcrafted, indoor water fountains that are designed to fit on walls or floors and made with stones, pebbles and marble, watergallery.net did a full site redesign to make it more search engine friendly and added PayPal buttons so people could pay online. Sales increased +500% within 6 months and gross margin increased +300%.

These case studies prove, whether  company is large or small, selling something that is familiar or new, SEO is foundational for business building.

But the #1 priority is focus on the desired business because SEO strategies and tactics vary based on a business’s goals. If you’re clear about who you want to attract and the action(s) you want them to take on your once they get to your site, you’ll see the results and ROI a lot faster.

What do these 10 case studies on the ROI of SEO prove to you?

Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are one of the most over-used and little understood terms in business development and management. They are too often taken to mean any metric or data used to measure business performance.

The role KPI’s play is much bigger and more important. In fact, KPI’s are one on the most important guideposts for any business. Every business should have them.

Here’s one of the best definition I’ve heard: KPI’s are an actionable scorecard that keeps your strategy on track. They enable you to manage, control and achieve desired business results.

This is something to benefit every business. This brief video from Erica Olsen of mystrategicplan.com not only explains them clearly but shows simply how to set up the road map for keeping your business strategy on track, the “KPI Dashboard.”

You don’t need a lot of metrics, but you do need to carefully select, report and take action from the handful you choose.  Let’s break down this definition so it’s useful for your business, especially considering the guideposts available on the internet.

DESIRED BUSINESS RESULT: Always begin the construction of KPI’s with a clear understanding of the desired results. There’s nothing wrong with starting by saying you want to sell more of what you make. But try to be a little more specific. How will you do it? Will you: 1) Shorten the sales cycle by half, 2) Generate 50% more leads, 3) Create a new usage occasion or 4) Get loyal customers to buy 30% more. If you are clear about where you are going, you can construct KPI’s that get you there.

ACTIONABLE SCORECARD: (“Raw #’s:” The top left portion of the Whiteboard): Now, pick the handful of measurements (generally no more a half dozen or so) that you believe are most important to the achievement of this goal. For example, if you wanted to shorten the sales cycle by half, you could measure: 1) Keyword search for the term(s) that describe the need your brand meets, 2) unique visitors to your website 3) “Bounce Rate” to determine if your site is relevant and people view more than one page, 4) sales (if products are sold on site) and 5) “Average Shopper Value” since buying more can help show if you’re getting to your goals.

KEEP YOUR STRATEGY ON TRACK: (The rest of the Whiteboard): Figure out the “Source” for the “Raw #’s” and how frequently (“Freq”) you report. Then, in the second column, set goals to measure “Progress” to seem realistic to the achievement of the desired results. Finally, in the third column, pick a comparison period like the previous year or the previous month if you are a start up. Now, the key measurements are more than raw data; they are actionable metrics.

Of course, that’s one opinion but there are others. Here’s how 12 experts define Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).

1. “A metric that helps you understand how you are doing against your objectives.” – Avinash Kaishik
2. “Measures that help decision makers define and measure progress toward business goals. KPI metrics translate complex measures into a simple indicator that allows decision makers to assess the current situation and act quickly.” – KAIZEN Analytics
3. “A KPI: 1) Echoes organization goals, 2) is decided by management, 3) provides context, 4) creates meaning on all levels of the all organizational levels, 5) is based on legitimate data, 6) is easy to understand and 7) leads to action!” – Dennis Mortensen
4.  ”The most important performance information that enables organisations or their stakeholders to understand whether the organisation is on track or not.” – Bernard Marr
5. “The selected measures that provide visibility into the performance of a business and enable decision makers to take action in achieving the desired outcomes.” – Aurel Brudan
6. “The data necessary to understand the implications of whatever he/she sees and the wherewithal to take appropriate action.” –  Shalin Shah
7.  ”Measurable industry, department or task relevant performance metrics that are evaluated over a specified time period, and compared against acceptable norms, past performance or targets.” – Allan Willie
8. “Measurements of activity that is a vital gear in your business machine.” - John Standaloft
9. “Help organisations achieve organisational goals through the definition and measurement of progress. The key indicators are agreed upon by an organisation and are indicators which can be measured that will reflect success factors.” – Bruce Clay
10. “A set of quantifiable measures that a company or industry uses to gauge or compare performance in terms of meeting their strategic and operational goals.” – James Oh
11. “High-level snapshots of a business or organization based on specific predefined measures.” – Amit Mehendale
12. “Should not constitute every company metric for analysis and evlaution. Rather, KPI’s should reflect the most important objectives of the business.” – Evan Godfrey

It’s been said we watch the Super Bowl as much for the commercials as the game. Maybe that helps explain why this year advertisers, on average, paid $3.5 million (+$500,000 versus last year) for a :30 commercial.

This year’s Super Bowl reached a record 111.3 million viewers; 300,000 more than last year, the previous record holder. Social media proved commercials were the most talked about topic according to Networked Insights.

Super Bowl commercials don’t sell products so much as entertain, often with great storytelling. Even considering the cost, a primary benchmark for success is the Water Cooler Factor, the brand buzz and many conversations that occur after the game that cause us to like the brand and keep it top-of-mind throughout the year.

Super Bowl commercials are measured mostly by media metrics – Reach, GRP’s and Nielsen Ratings.  But, because “Like,” “Buzz” and the Water Cooler Factor are success metrics, shouldn’t social media measurements play an important role?

Here are 7 social media measurements that matter for Super Bowl commercials.

1. USA TODAY/FACEBOOK AD METER: This year, for the first time, USA Today and Facebook teamed up to create a People’s Choice award for Super Bowl commercials. People rated commercials by logging into their Facebook account on a 1 to 5 scale. Here was the people’s top choices for 2012 and the commercial voted #1: