Marketers - Re-assess Your Marketing Plan Now!

With a quarter gone, marketers ought to be digging into business performance and results. The lessons learnt and course-correction (if needed) should be clearly outlined for the remainder of the year. While the lessons are one for the books, the insights about course-correction dictate how we end the year. And, irrespective of how deep we are into our marketing commitments for Q2, I have found that this is a crucial time to revisit the marketing plan. Slow down after the frenetic pace of Q1 (as it often is in many industries), and spend some time to analyze and level-set the expectations for the rest of the year. Yes, I am suggesting slow down – just think of the benefits:

1. You will most certainly have a better sense of any corporate-level tactical shifts, and their likely impact on revenue projections and upcoming marketing campaigns
2. You will likely learn something new about your product performance and customer-buying propensities
3. You will be able to devise tactics to ensure revenue commitments stay on-course, based on 1 & 2 above
4. You will end the year with a bang – guaranteed!

So, what are we to consider now? 

• Analytics – make sure Q1 results are in and being analyzed for ROI by product, customer segment and marketing channel, not only for attribution, but also for tactical moves in Q2 and Q3. What is going to be the marketing goal based on these results? Is it better engagement with customers, or drive more sales, or brand promotion, or product updates? The answers to these will greatly impact your acquisition and retention models for 2016!
• Seasonality – you probably have a good grasp of the seasonality in your industry, sales, etc. But, make sure that there are no extraneous factors that may warrant changes to your campaign strategy. For example, consumer-spending tends go into a lull in Q2, before picking up again in Back-to-School and Holiday seasons. How is it being projected to be this year for your line of business?
• Customer Targeting – with slower months, it is also imperative that, to maintain a healthy ROIs and CPAs, more valuable leads are targeted with relevant offers. Sharpen your mailing list and tailor the products to the segments that are more likely to buy now. Predictive acquisition and retention models ought to be able with better campaign design and retention efforts!
• Communication Channel by Product – In my multi-product environment, I always look at what products are more likely to appeal to a buyer, through which channel. It could be based on demographics, geography, interest, etc., but that email, or content marketing, or newsletter that is in the works, better be "more" relevant. For example, online Travel used to take precedence over online Shopping during these months. What makes sense to sell to your target customers during the lean months?
• Budgets – understand the budget spends and make adjustments based on any new corporate imperatives. Usually, any over- or under-spending in Q1 could be corrected quickly during this phase. The ROIs and attribution by channel will shed more light on how is each channel performing for the brand.

A little postmortem of marketing performance from Q1 is probably one of the more important projects that are often inadequately addressed or staffed. If done right, it instills discipline and focus, which in turn, promotes efficiency and effectiveness of marketing operations. As I said above, we want to end the year with a bang!

Social media can drive ROI ... NOW!

Even as companies try to understand how to generate revenue out of their social media campaigns, there are other ways to define the ROI. Let us first simplify the dynamics of the social media – a whole lot of people sharing, commenting and blogging about their likes and dislikes. The positive – we are learning a lot about our users. The negative – our users are highly fragmented in every which way possible. So, how do we go about making sense of the feedback through social media and communities? After all, 10,000 visits from Twitter into our site that gets an average 5MM visits a month is not going to move the needle in revenue or traffic terms - for the most part that is the scale of variance we are talking about!

So where and how can we apply the findings for a greater return?

Presence in social media was often promoted as a way to build your brand recognition and image. However, marketers and product managers can utilize the data more robustly to develop new products and targeted campaigns. Consider social media as focus groups that are providing valuable insights into your products and services, albeit on wider and less cohesive manner than traditional focus groups. But herein also lies the advantage – if we can categorize the data into viable and logical buckets that best define our user base, we will have a much more specific knowledge that can be used to develop targeted offerings.

For starters social media findings (demographics, geography, product like/dislikes, interests, etc.) should be categorized into user data and product data. Product managers should work with analysts to define the current and future needs of the consumers, while marketers should think more targeting and localization of their campaigns. Take for example a shopping site – users look for latest offers, research about and seek approval for their next purchase, share the joy and frustrations from their new product, etc. – all the while also seeking for a relevant and targeted experience that caters to their whims and fantasies. If we can take the data from the social media voices of our consumer, we can make appropriate product tweaks, provide targeted offerings, edit our website navigation, make product related recommendations for up-sell/cross-sell, create more localized and focused experience, and so on.

The ROI of social media efforts would then be in-built with the ROI of product and marketing efforts, which will be a much more positive story, than the few hundred clicks it may be generating to our website. And, if positive word-of-mouth was to be factored in, our social media presence will find more internal support and add more to our P&L’s bottom-line.