eROI Survey Study – Integration of Social, Mobile, and Email

Jul 26 2010

It is hard these days not to notice the amount of people on the streets, in their cars, riding buses and even enjoying a meal while navigating through a mobile device.  What does this mean for marketing? The amount of time consumers are spending on mobile devices is increasing day by day. What have marketers done to tap into the new, dynamic phase of mobile marketing and how does social media fit in?

eROI decided to find out by conducting a study of over 500 marketers to see what their current attitudes were towards mobile marketing and social media trends.

Get a brief on our study from ClickZ

Our study was geared towards learning:

  • The interest in mobile marketing to marketers, if any.
  • The importance of mobile marketing and social media to the marketer.
  • How the marketer is integrating the media and how much research is being done to optimize it.

The study was successful and informative if not a bit surprising. If 91% of the US population uses a mobile device, what are the marketers really doing to access those consumers? Get the full study here…

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Adapting Your Brand for Marketing’s New Landscape

Jul 13 2010

Slowly fading are the days where consumers only learned about brands and products through one-to-one word of mouth and advertising. Social networking has done away with one-way conversations and created an ecosystem of open, candid dialogue. To be truly successful, brand managers and marketers must embrace this; they must do more than speak – they must listen, they must engage, they must adapt. They must stop pushing their brands to consumers and start pulling consumers to their brands. They need to be open to letting their consumers co-create their brands with them.

This notation can be a hard one to embrace. For many, it is the complete opposite of how they are used to managing their brands – a well orchestrated set of controlled messages that consumers experience where, when and how the brand chooses. For many, it feels like giving up all control, and that can be an uneasy feeling. But it need not be.

Sure, this new landscape of consumer empowerment means that there are things a brand can no longer control, but that doesn’t mean a brand can’t have an influence on those things. By fostering dialogue and building strong relationships with your consumers, you  empower them to do more than just complain. By giving them forums in which their voices can be heard, and showing them that their opinions do matter, not only will they be less likely to post unconstructive criticism all over the web, but they will be more likely to share positive feedback and advocate for your brand.

Making this shift isn’t hard, but it’s not something you should dive into blindly. Taking some time to understand the dynamics of this strategy, plan your approach and align resources will be key to success.

Here are a few things for you to consider as you being down this new road…

  • Extend beyond market research. Simply trying to predict what consumers want isn’t as effective as having them tell you first hand. And they will tell you. Listen attentively. Ask their opinions. Engage with them.
  • Form REAL relationships. Remember that “fake” girl in high school who was really nice to everyone’s face – don’t be her. Everyone saw through her and they will see though you too. You need to have real, meaningful dialogue with your consumers. If they trust that you really care, they will openly share their thoughts and opinions with you, they will want to deepen their personal relationship with your brand and many will become your brand ambassadors.
  • Prepare for a long-term commitment. You must develop your marketing and communication strategies around an ongoing effort to listen and engage. This is not a short term initiative; there is no “project completion” date for it. Your consumer’s lives, needs and wants are ever changing and the most successful brands will be those that pick up on those changes as they happen and adapt as need to support them.
  • Know what you want to acquire and what you will do once you get it. Before you being creating your new relationships, make sure you have a plan for the information and insights you will receive. Determine the ways in which your consumers can a help to mold your brand. What information and feedback is most valuable to you? What will be your process for aggregating and passing along the information internally? How will your company actually use the information? These are just a few things you should consider in your strategic plan.
  • Determine what you want to relay. You can’t control all of messaging around your brand, but you can certainly control some of it. Solidify the main messages you want to put out there. Make sure they are precise, easy to understand, easy to remember and easy to share.
  • Create a custom execution strategy. There is not a one-size-fits-all strategy that you can follow. What works best for one brand, may not work at all for another. There are countless channels you can use to build and foster your relationships with your consumers, you just need to determine which of them to use. From LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, to industry blogs, custom online communities, feedback tools, live online support, profile based content delivery, sharable content, polling and surveying and so on, you have many options for customizing an execution strategy. In deciding which channels to use, consider the plan you’ve created for the type of information you want to acquire. Consider the resources (time and budget) you are able to allocate. Consider your primary and alternative target audiences – What are their current online habits? Where are they spending their time online? In what ways do you anticipate they will interact with you most? Are they already talking about your brand? If so, where? And consider what other marketing and communication tactics you will use to support these relationship building efforts.

If this is a completely new approach for you and your company, there is no doubt that it may take  time to make the shift. You will need to start with some discovery and planning before diving in, and as you begin the cycle of listening, discussing, learning and changing, your strategy will likely shift and improve along the way.

There are a lot of great reads out there on adapting your brand to this new landscape, a favorite of mine is “The Open Brand” by Kelly Mooney and Nita Rollins, Ph.D. (http://theopenbrand.resource.com/). I encourage you to do your own research, have your own conversations and do all you can to fully understand this new landscape. Don’t be overwhelmed by it. Embrace it, commit to what you can for now and grow from there.

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DO’s and DONT’s of Mobile – Jason Grigsby

Jun 17 2010

Loved this presentation at Online Marketing Summit in Portland yesterday. I’m also waiting on a lead nurturing presentation from Maria at Marketo as I took about 4 pages of notes on the metrics and strategies that they shared about a transparent case study on themselves.

On the mobile front, it’s really cool to see Portland develop this niche of mobile strategists, developers, and platforms. Jason Grigsby is leading the way among mobile thought leaders – tons of great mobile facts and insights in this presentation.

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5 Email Marketing Tools You’ve Never Heard Of

May 11 2010

I gave this presentation at Innotech Oregon last Thursday and talked through some really useful tools that email marketers should consider using: Flowtown, Unbounce, Which Test Won, Email2Mobile, Email on Acid. Check out the presentation below to see some visual examples of what these tools can accomplish for you.

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Q & A with Rich Nevins, eROI

May 03 2010

Last week eROI welcomed Rich Nevin, our new Product Manager, to the team. He’s a great guy to have around the office, and we’re excited to introduce him to you.

eROI: What do you do here?
Rich: I am the Product Manager for all eROI software products and services.

eROI: What did you do before?
Rich: Most recently I built a personalized children’s book company – a mash-up of a web-driven personalization interface, children’s picture books/content, and on-demand book publishing. Behind that I have a pretty varied (I like to call it “dynamic”) career, like: driving product development for a video-based e-learning company; creating a sales/marketing team for a medical device company while developing a medical device; sales engineering big streaming media deals with a little company called Enron; knowing way too much about optical microlithography and its implementation in a high-volume semiconductor manufacturing environment.

eROI: So far, what’s the coolest thing about working at eROI?
Rich: It’s an easy answer – the people. I think having smart, motivated people excited to create and deliver greatness is pretty cool.

eROI: What do you feel that you’ll bring to your team?
Rich: Having been on the customer side for these products and on the development side of other (reasonably similar) software products, I think I have a unique perspective and skill set that I hope can help make these products great.

eROI: What was your first job?
Rich: During a teachers’ strike in high school, I took a job as a bark spreader. I got in trouble for spreading the bark too quickly, which was a great lesson in “work environments to avoid.”
Read the rest of this entry »

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