How Pinterest Will Evolve for Business Marketing

Pinterest will be the hottest social media platform for business marketing…in a year from now. 

Despite the hype and the record-breaking growth rates, as it exists today, Pinterest is not ready for business marketers; the demographics are wrong, the categories are too consumer focused, and there are significant copyright and measurement issues to overcome.   

As it stands today, Pinterest is following the “next big social media thing” strategy of getting the audience first, and figuring out the business model later.  That audience for now is mostly women, who are, as Ryan Deshazer, VP of Search and Social at GSW Worldwide described in a recent post, doing “social scrapbooking.”  However, within that audience there are also business decision makers.

As Pinterest’s internal analytics capabilities evolve those business decision makers will become known, and when they do, the marketers will follow.   As a result, Pinterest could quickly become the best social platform available for business-to-business content marketers. 

While other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, are mostly content distributors (sharing), Pinterest’s platform has the potential to offer far more value as a content aggregation and curation tool, as well as a content destination and repository.   Here’s why:

• Scalability and Scanability – the rate of which new content is being added to the “www” is mind-boggling.  According to Hubspot, 70% of bloggers add new content weekly or daily, 500,000 new posts are added everyday alone on WordPress.com   As a result, it’s becoming more difficult to find high quality, relevant content.  The “internet” must evolve in order for audiences to navigate faster through this growing mass of content to find what they are looking for, which opens the door for Infographics and Pinterest.  By making content visual, it also makes it more scanable.  The average person reads between 200 to 300 words per minute, but visually it takes only 1/20th of a second to process an image.  Pinterest platform accelerates the process by aggregating and organize images by category or theme making it easy to search. 
• Valuing Content – business marketers are constantly wrestling with trying to understand the value of their content (relevancy, insight, utilization, etc.) based on how and when it’s consumed by various audience segments.  Lacking a closed loop system to provide feedback, it’s been difficult to know exactly what resonates, with what audience, and why. Curating content naturally within Pinterest provides marketers the opportunity to capture deeper insights into audience consumption habits.   For example, business marketers tend to organization content along the “buying process,” which is typically defined by steps within the sales process.  Marketers may find that business audiences within Pinterest organize and consume content by categories defined as “applications” -- how they intend to use the product, and not how they will buy it.  This insight could help define the real purchase path and key influences along that journey.    
• Audience Insight - lastly, and perhaps most interesting, will Pinterest have the ability to provide “affinity data”?  As Scott Bayer, CTO of Baynote wrote“individual pinning choices are interesting, but there is even greater opportunity to analyze segments of people who express an affinity for a product or category in aggregate.” 

If available, this information could allow marketers to create new segmentation clusters based on common interests, which could help improve messaging and targeting.  “Clustering” could identify brand advocates, key influencers and connectors, local “hot spots” and new ideas for reaching them.   

While we still have some time before Pinterest evolves there are few things to consider now:

1. Integrate “Pin it” button into your website - it will do nothing for conversions, but it may drive some traffic that could provide some insight.
2. Make your content more visual – if content marketing is part of your marketing plans,  experimenting using Infographics (visit Visual.lyfor a starting point).
3. Experiment – whether or not you’re a believer in social media platforms, the fact remains that Twitter and Facebook have impacted how we go to market.  Pinterest also holds the same potential to change the way we create, produce and consume content.  Start to brainstorm on what that change might be and/or what you might like to change given its functionality. 

I realize that there are skeptics out there, I might even be one, but as we’ve learned with other social media platforms, if you don’t think it’s valuable tool, then you’ll be right…it won’t.  Pinterest holds great potential for business marketers, but that “potential” will only realized by those who seek to define it by experimenting…or dare I say, “pin it.”  

The Best Digital Campaign of 2011

It’s that time of the year when the “best of” lists start coming out, so here’s another one to add to the group.  While I’m no authority on all things digital, working at an Agency provides me more exposure to campaigns than most folks.

The opinion for best digital campaign is my own and based on what I have seen this past year. I’m sure that I’ve missed a few, so please feel free to suggest your favorite in the comment section.   There is no “science” to the process.   The criteria for selection came down to four key components:

•  Boldness – How big was the objective of the campaign?  How significant was the insight?
• Innovation – How unique or innovative was the application of the technology
•  Value Proposition – How compelling?
•  Impact – Was it significant?  A Game changing?  Will it have a lasting impact on the industry, consumer and marketers? 

Overall, 2011 was good year. We saw companies becoming more humanly relevant with their messaging, like the Microsoft ad in my last post.  And the use of new digital technology was everywhere; Adidas and Hyundai wowed us with the use of 3D Building Projection Mapping. 

Intel launched their new Core i5 chip through a well-crafted video experience in the form of a short film highlighting the chip’s power for gaming and social media use.  And integrated social media campaigns, such as Volkswagen and Heineken became commonplace.

However, based on the criteria above, my vote for the digital campaign of the year goes to Tesco for a campaign executed in South Korea.  It had a big, bold and aspirational objective -- takeover the leadership position in the market from the domestic competitor with more retail stores.  And in its wake, left the retail industry rethinking the shopping experience.

But the part of the campaign that truly separated it from the competition was the compelling value proposition.  Using technology platforms to improve what I’ll call the “utility of time.”   For marketers, this is an unexplored gold mine of opportunity.  Finding and exploiting “unused or wasted” time by giving it purpose or utility, and going beyond just putting an ad in front of eyeballs to engaging consumers in a meaningful way. 

Home Life (Tesco) customers are, well, busy. South Korean productivity is near the highest in the world, so “freeing up time for them” is a true value-add. Tesco took commuters wait time for a train, and turned it into something useful…shopping for groceries; a task that is viewed as a chore and conducted during a consumer’s precious weekend time. 

Tesco creates the opportunity for commuters to use “low value” wait time, for what they believe to be a “low value” task, in the process freeing up “high valued” personal time to be used at their discretion. 

Earlier this month, Pew Research Center released the results of a study that tracked young adults online behavior over the last 11 years.   In 2000, 16 percent of young adults went online for amusement or to “pass the time.” 

On any given day in 2011, 53% of young adults, and a third of adults, said that they went online for “no particular reason, just for fun or to pass the time.”  The takeaway for marketers is that people are looking to fill their time, so give them something useful and meaningful to do with it.

And don’t settle for the safe and small next year; push your teams to go beyond Facebook “likes” as a metric.  Aim high, go after what might seem unattainable, and dream big.  Dare to change your industry, redefine the buyer journey, and/or challenge the conventional wisdom.  

Have a great holiday season and go BIG in 2012! 

Guest Article: Using Search and Social to Win Business

The following post is written by gyro client Jeff Vail of Siemens Enterprise Communication.  

When I started at Siemens Enterprise Communications, we took broad-brush strokes with search and social advertising for “impression” purposes. This approach tended to align with the traditional view of search and social marketing that served as an awareness and consideration builder for top-of-the-funnel activities. However, as a field marketer who owns search, I was interested in using it for more tangible results.

To put this idea into action, Siemens Enterprise Communications turned to the experts at gyro to develop and execute the plan to push search and social “down the funnel” and align it against supporting an identified opportunity. Instead of focusing on getting in the consideration set, we set our sights on developing a program to help influence decision-makers at the point of purchase.

Driving Search Down the Funnel

Click here to continue.

Sales and Marketing Integration Post Recession and Social Media Adoption

For the last few months, I've been leaking sections of an upcoming white paper we've been writing.   Well, it is now ready for prime time and available for download.   To complete the tease, I'm giving the ending away.
OUTLOOK //
With smaller marketing budgets and aggressive user adoption of Web 2.0 tools, social media will continue to make progress on the fringes of the sales process (see Figure 7). Companies will find new application of social media for increasing awareness and opportunity creation with targeted audiences and continue to deploy tools to listen, interact and support customers.

As a result, sales and marketing teams need each other more than ever: Sales needs the customer insight and connection that marketing captures to accelerate the buying process; and marketing needs sales results to be able to show measureable evidence to defend and expand social media deployment and activities.

GETTING STARTED //

Buyer behavior has shifted permanently, and a result, companies need to adapt to this change. Research shows that 70% of companies will increase their social media investments in 2010 and 61% of marketers do not know how to get started . Included below are seven recommendations to consider while responding to the latest economic and technological changes:

1. Recognize that a permanent change has occurred. 

Social media and the effects of the recession are not going away any time soon. Customers are now more likely to start their buying process on a social media site than a company site, and that trend will only continue. Budgets will remain tight and customers will need to know that they are making the best decisions for their respective organization. As a result, they will continue to rely on objective third party experience with products and services.

Figure 7

2. Do not ignore the opportunity. 

The value of social media is not that it fills an existing gap, or breaks new ground, as much as it is an enhancement to something that already exists—for B2B organizations social media enhances word of mouth, customer engagement, and relationship management. To determine the value of social media, business leaders have to experiment with applying social media to those three areas. According to the Marketing Leadership Council, CMO’s who advocate for and lead social media efforts are three times as likely to drive business results as those who do not.

3. Understand the difference between inbound and outbound. 

Customers may share information with other customers, as well as employees in the organization that are not their Account Manager. Enabling the organization to digitally listen to customer conversations can provide the sales force with a whole new view into customer preferences and opinions.

4. Plan and coordinate the Customer Experience. 

Social media offers a host of new channels for customers to interact with the organization and with other customers. Companies will need to determine how they will interpret, filter and aggregate inbound information, and if, how, and where they will respond. According to recent research, the customer experience has four times more impact on preference and intent to repurchase than does the quality of individual touch points.

5. Make it about them. 

Business executives primarily use social media to stay current on news, network with other peers, and to advance their careers. As a result, organizations need to understand how to meet this need, and how facilitating this interaction can help them better understand customer’s behaviors, interests, and motivators. Sales and marketing should work together to determine how the organization’s products and services could support and enhance the customer in their role.

6. Demonstrate the value to sales. 

The sales organization will want to understand how social media activities will create a tangible business impact on leads, sales, and retention. Marketing will have to translate how customer engagement can have an impact—current research will further this aim as leading work is already demonstrating a strong link between engagement levels and retention.

7. Think about Relationship Management 2.0. 

Moving forward, sales,marketing, service and customer communities may all play a role in managing certain components of customer relationships. As a result, organizations should segment and map customer buying behavior and channel preferences on a regular basis, which may challenge the way organizations currently cover and manage their customers.

To download the full report click here.  

6 Steps for Getting Control of B2B Social Media

A version of this post can also be found as a featured article on the Demand Gen Report website. 

I had the opportunity last week to speak on social media at a couple of B2B conferences. It gave me a chance to get out of the bubble and speak with folks in the trenches. It turned out to be an eye-opener.

Attendees at the conferences were marketers representing original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) heavy industry, and the financial services industries. As a group, they market complex, long sales cycle products to a well-defined B2B audience. As a result, understanding the value of social media is more difficult.

I found that many of the marketers I spoke with to be somewhat exhausted by social media. From trying to stay current to learning the application in their business, they felt like they just couldn’t stay current.

Based on what I experienced, I’ve put together six tips that might be helpful:

1. False Prophets – Combine high employment with a fast-moving space like Web 2.0, and suddenly everyone is an expert. Buyers beware. If you need outside expertise, go with a firm that has experience in this space.

Click here to read more

Is B2B Web 2.0 Over Before It Ever Started?

Not yet, but it’s getting close. The potential suspects in its death…the recession, the CFO and the Legal Department.

Suddenly, every legal department around the country has become the de facto Web 2.0 governance committee. What doesn’t get killed, modified, or mangled is left to the CFO to cut. Senior executives, who for the most part lack an understanding of the tools, are growing tired of all the noise around Digital, Web 2.0, Social Media, etc. 

They are now directing their organizations back to what they believe to be proven strategies (as they say in the FS industry "past performance is not indicatve of future results) and tactics (core products, best customers and traditional sales & marketing tactics, like DM). It’s back to the future.

You’re mission, if you choose to accept it, is to find proven “sweetspots” for Web 2.0 in your organization now…and put it in your 2010 plan.  Here are a few “no brainers” and/or proven areas that have shown to be impactful and/or demonstrate measurable value:

• Twitter - customer services applications, awareness building for events, new content, etc….no brainers
• Blogs – thought leadership, using them to help explain applications of products, credibility and audience builders…all winners and measurable.
• VODcast – similar to blogs, keep them short and on point, and work on getting the cost down. 
• Wiki’s – defining internal nomenclature, taxonomy, and knowledge management all winners and well worth the effort.

As for social networks, I have a few thoughts that I’ll share in my next post. Here’s a preview.

Recently I met with David Godes, a professor at the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. David and I got together to discuss our shared interest in sales processes, sales & marketing integration and social networks (we first meet when he was an associate professor at Harvard Business School, after he wrote a case study on the work we did with Avaya on managing integrated sales and marketing pipelines).

David and a colleague wrote an article published in the Harvard Business Review in 2006 on Sales Networks.  After reading the article several times, I think it’s a useful guide for leveraging Social Networking tools to enable the sales forces. Although the study of social networks has been around for years, and it served for the development of social networking tools, the application for sales hasn’t really been developed. I believe this holds tremendous opportunity to discover “killer applications” for social media tools.

For now, think about this, the first wave of Web innovation (Web 1.0) was followed by a recession (Dot.com bust) that separated the “winners” from the “losers”.  Successful technology innovations need a “killer app” to take hold. Often times it is very different from what the technology was originally designed to do (Myspace, as an example). We are now making our way (hopefully…and slowly) out of a recession that was preceded by the second wave of web innovation…what “killer applications” have you discovered - are they sustainable, and can you defend your investment in them going forward?

Do it quickly…time is running out.   As Tim Washer said at the B2B Social Communication when asked about IBM's very funny video series "The Art of the Sale"; “things have changed in our social media governance and policies. I don’t think I could do this again given the current environment.”

Insights and Epiphanies from a recent B2B Social Communication Event

I attended the B2B Social Communications Case Studies and Roundtable event in New York last week, my first live event since the downturn. Got to admit, I was impressed by the attendance (probably close to 250 folks) and list of companies presenting included; Microsoft, Amex, Intuit, Dupont, IBM, Deliotte, Pitney Bowes, and others. I came away with some great new insights, not only of social media in a B2B world, but also regarding the structure of the event itself.

1. Get In, Then Get Out - In my last post I failed to mention the impact of online trends on offline events which I witnessed at this event. Speakers at this conference presented for 20 minutes, a long way away from the old days of hour-long presentations…and there were no breaks. The conference was over by 1 pm…love it. Rapid fire information that allowed the audience to assess the value in hearing, or not…that’s when you take a bathroom break.
2. What Happens In The Event…Doesn’t Stay In The Event -This was the first event where I watched the impact of Twitter on those presenting. Many speakers were noticeably conscience of the impact of Twitter, not only because the large screen monitor on the stage featured Twitter for the entirety of the event, but also because they knew their comments could immediately be broadcasted around the world. You could see how the realtime capability to broadcast ideas and comments impacted how each speaker responded to questions from the audience.
3. Who’s Googling You? - I watched several folks checking out speakers on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, etc., as the speakers presented their information. In the future you could eliminate the speaker bio’s from the event material altogether. This growing trend should make you think about what you’re putting out in the public domain and what it might do to your credibility, reputation, etc. Then again…you should always be thinking about that.  
4. All The Cool Kids Are Doing It… - The audience demographic was interesting. The crowd seemed to be the same folks that used to say; “I don’t get it”, to whatever new Web 2.0 technology came out. Saw lots of bald and grey heads (including yours truly) in the audience taking copious amount of notes.

Aside from my initial observations on the atmosphere of the event and those attending, there were, of course, some great points from the presenters themselves.

1. Play Hard to Get - The best Social Media campaigns I saw were very subtle (as they should be) in their messaging (almost hidden). Why is this important? Instead of overly broadcasting a message, they presented in a way that the viewer/reader “discovered it.” This subtle, but difficult approach I think can make all the difference in the acceptance, retention and comprehension of your message. It also sets itself up nicely for word of mouth marketing. 
2. Ethics (Have Them) - Speaking of word of mouth, I learned that Dupont uses WOMMA ethic guidelines to guide their social media activities, particularly blogging. Good source. 
3. Share With Others - I can’t remember which speaker presented this, but their research found that if customers viewed video on the corporate site they also expected to find it in the public video domain…a la YouTube, etc. Same presentation also showed that corporate websites are the preferred location for video. 
4. Go Viral - All the videos I saw were initially launched through existing blogs with the goal of driving blog traffic. 
5. Start a (Useful) Conversation -The most interesting insight came from a case study on fencing. Companies have been struggling for years to do effective application/solution marketing. In this example the fencing company, Loius E Page Inc., developed their blog (link below) to help fence builders understand what type to buy based on what they want to build…brilliant. Want to build a horse paddock? Visit their blog and they can tell you to use a Farm & Field fence if you want X, Y, Z, and if you want to do A, B, C, to use a Horse fence. The lesson? Instead of the product marketing department wrestling with how to message an application or solution, the company put the product out there and let the engineers blog about how best to use it. 
6. In With The Old, Out With The New? - Many of the presentations were dated. There were very good presentations by IBM and Dupont (see links below), but they presented campaigns, video, etc. from 2006 & 2007. And here is where the concern comes from:Tim Washer from IBM said it; “things have changed in our social media governance and policies. I don’t think I could do this again given the current environment.” When I attended a roundtable later that include marketers from other companies, they express the same concern…”don’t know how he got that video approved…that would never happen in my firm/company…”

This topic will be a future blog post entitled: “Is Social Media in B2B Over Before it Ever Started? “ Look for that soon.

Best practices from the presenters:

• Best Leverage of Existing Assets Award goes to Dupont. They went back into their video files and found product testing videos showing bullets hitting Kelvar, things blowing up and/or on fire…simply brilliant.  New information added 10/28/09
• Best Use of Social Media for a Campaign Award goes to Intuit. They ran a great campaign aimed at SMB - helping them use Social Media to promote their businesses.
• Best Use of Comedy in a Video Award goes to IBM - The Art of the Sale
• Best Use of Blogs to Increase Customer Spending – Louis E Page

I didn’t get a chance to catch all of the presentation… had some problems getting into the city so I missed other “best of’s.” To see all the presentations, check out the event site for the presentation.

Digital Insurance Agents - The Future is Now

We just finished research on the independent agent channel in the insurance industry. Here are some interesting highlights:

• The independent agent channel is responsible for nearly 95% of small and middle market insurance, which contributes 72% of revenues to carriers, according to the Independent Agents of America 2008 Agent Universe Study.


• The average age of an insurance professional is 54, and 60% of insurance professionals are older than 45, according to the same study. With 60% of the industry’s professionals set to retire in the coming years, the profile of the insurance agent and his/her customer is about to change drastically.


• Will the industry and its traditional, stodgy image be able to attract the necessary talent it needs to replace its most productive agents? Unfortunately, as our research indicates, it typically takes 3 years for a new agent to become productive, and over 2/3 of new agents fail.
• This means that with roughly 160,000 independent agents in the market today, agencies would need to hire 30,000 new agents annually to account for the productivity lost by retiring agents.

This is industry is about to undergo a major shift in how it does business. The learn more see the following links.

• To read more on the topic download the Executive Brief on the research


• Register for the May 7th Webcast on the topic

Here's the funny part: after we completed the research and shared the Executive Brief with others in the firm they said the same trend is ocurring in other industries, for example, in Hi-Tech business partners (in particular, VAR's) are aging at a similar rate and at least half are looking to retire over the next 5-10 years. Stay tuned for more on the "greying" of the channel to come.

Creating a Trend

3/4/09 - Click on "Twitter" in the 5th paragraph for an update on this story...we're getting closer.

What if you could create a trend that could make your product “THE” hot product? Think it’s impossible? Maybe now, but in less than two years IT WILL HAPPEN.

I saw something a few weeks ago that gave me chills when I thought about the potential uses. The tool is...in a sense...the world’s largest and most sophisticated digital listening device. It was built to monitor chatter by those "not so friendly" folks that see the US as the “evil empire”. (Let’s just say that Homeland Security has got this one nailed.) Yes, other companies have similar tools but nothing reaches the size, scale and scope of this one (consider this, it has archived ALL the web pages in the ”www” for the last three years).

Anyway, we’re helping to develop a commercial use for the tool and I as was watching the demonstration, I couldn’t help but think about Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. Many of the concepts he wrote about, I was now seeing play out in real life. This gigantic ear could easily determine who the “connectors” of the digital world are (in real time), “The Power of Context” as Malcom refers to it (in over 20 languages), and when something is going “viral”….all with very sophisticated algorithms and complex math.

It got me thinking, could it also determine how to create a trend? According to the team that developed the tool , it can’t yet because it doesn’t assess and/or integrate a number of important factors needed to understand the audience and what drives behavior. But if you combine the power of this tool (and other similar tools) and social networking…I believe that we are getting close.

A few days later a colleague sent me this post. Facebook is studying “sentiment” behavior. Right now it’s limited to things like how “nasty news is impacting stock” and when folks are “going out” but it can, and will evolve quickly. To this point, Zuckerberg has not really monetized his platform yet, unlike Murdoch with MySpace. So could this be the “killer” app that drives Ad sales into Facebook? It's too soon to tell at this point but it sure sounds good. With 222 million unique visitors sharing very personal information with most of it in the public domain this might be the next piece to fall. Throw in Twitter and marketers will soon have the ability to understand what’s “hot” or has the potential to be “hot”, who says it’s “hot”, why they’re saying it, where they like to buy “hot”, etc.

So the question to marketers is…if you have the opportunity in the near future to make your product the “hottest” thing…could you? You currently have the ability to access massive amounts of consumer data today and that will grow dramatically over the next few years. What are you doing with it now and what might you do with this information in the future? One thing is for certain, it will require new capabilities, vendors, and tools to interpret and draw out insight. Get ready now, it’s coming… and in this situation there will be a clear early mover advantage.

For now, go back and re-read The Tipping Point (replace Hush Puppies with UGGs) and start dreaming about the possibilities, especially what it would take to make it happen. Think about this for a second: you could start a trend for a product that doesn’t exist…demand before supply…yea, that’s “HOT.”

From Webcast to VODcast

In July 2001 our cost per attendee for a public or private event skyrocketed to $589 per attendee from previous year average of $70. Attendance at our events dropped like a bag of wet cement… from an average of 125 to 25. The change happened almost overnight and we knew that the recession was ”ON”… as you probably and painfully know travel budgets and event spending are one the first things to be cut.

As a professional services firm that sells services through the dissemination of intellectual property we couldn’t just turn off speaking at events. Seminars and events drove close to 40% of our leads so we made the decision to shift almost everything online. Typically, we would do at least 30 plus events a year. In the second half of 2001, we ran 14 web events and 2 live events. It turned out to perfect timing because 9/11 put a nail in the coffin of live events. By the end of the year we were able to double our average attendance and our cost came back down to $100 per attendee plus…we add 700 names to our “opt-in” list.

Fast forward to 2008, we haven’t done a webcast in the last three years. Why? Because the format became overused and the effectiveness of reaching our key audience has been severely limited. Also, business has been good…we didn’t need to.

Yesterday we did our first VODcast and more are planned. Why? Because what is old is new again but this time you can see the presenter. A bad economy means the business slows, pipelines begin to get thin and business development using events is uneconomical…see above. But here’s something else we have noticed, people are going back online looking for free advice that they used to get from “experts” when they had budgets to pay for it.

We also learned during the last down turn that when you use a new technology there is the “novelty” factor. People will tune in just because they’re curious which boost your registration/attendance rate but it doesn’t last long…you have maybe 6-8 months before the novelty wears off.

So I happened to be the lucky guy (if you want to call it that) that got to go first. I found the experience to be very challenging… much harder than doing a live event and/or traditional webcast. Here are a few things I learned from the experience…starting with the basics.

• What is a VODcast – it stands for “video on demand” and it’s a pre-record video that may or may not have other assets integrated into it.


• Shorter is better – the VODcast came in at a little over18 minutes, for a 45 minute presentation I did live at a conference…and it’s still too long. If I had to do it over again, I’d chop it up into 2 minute segments and make it a series…still might.


• Personality/Sizzle – you need it, and I obviously had none. I get energy from the audience…the camera gave me nothing and it shows. Got to work on that, rehearsing into a mirror sounds hokey but I think it will help. Open to suggestions here…


• Color and lighting matter – we used a conference room with bright lights and burnt sienna colored walls…not good. Learned that lesson the hard way.


• Bandwidth matters - depending on the length of the video and the number of viewers you may need to check with the IT folks on the impact on your IT infrastructure. We had to move the video to a host server to handle to the load.


• Communicate the format – because this is a new format you have to explain how it works…a lot. We had calls from folks asking for the dial-in number. Communicate instructions often and on everything (email, registration page, under the event listing on your website, etc.).

All in all, this is the future, so you might as well try it. I’m convinced that it will soon replace traditional web and podcast. Additionally, it provides the viewer with a much better experience…there is no call-in number, no applet to download, it eliminates many of the technical issues of the past. In fact, I’m doing a webcast today for client. I’ve already received three emails asking for the call-in number….it was sent to them days ago. Bring on the Video!

Digital Dissonance

The Digital Disconnect in Financial Services

I’ve just returned from the Financial Services Marketing Symposium in Orlando where I saw and heard some really interesting things.

First, I saw an affinity card program from a company called ServerSideGroup that can be issued for small groups, like a church congregation or a local school. Second, I heard the CMO of CapOne, Bill McDonald declare that “Web 2.0 is about consumers selling to consumers” which I think is great way to describe it. So if you look at these two things together you see a potential revolution in the way credit cards are marketed. In one scenario, you have the marketing scientist at CapOne trying figure out the “killer” value prop that will get you to open the third DM piece they sent you that week and fill out that credit application; all based on sophisticated models that try to figure your “profile” based on various data sources that really don’t know you from Eve.

In the other scenario you have Betty, who teaches your children at Sunday school, calling you about the new St. Joe credit card that will become a valuable fundraiser tool for your church…you don’t need divine powers to figure out which value prop will win. Look around your industry and you’ll probably find a similar analogy.

So you would expect FS companies to be all over Web 2.0 right? Well you would expect that, but you’d be wrong according to our research. MarketBridge just completed an industry research project on the use of Digital Marketing in the Financial Services industry. The research was conducted in partnership with SourceMedia the publisher of American Banker , The Bond Buyer and other FS focused publications. The study drew nearly 250 respondents across a variety of titles and functions within financial services. Nearly 40% had executive-level titles and close to 20% had marketing budgets of $100 million or more.

Here’s what we found out;

• Marketing is in the Driver’s Seat… More than 60% of respondents said they had a “reasonable” to “very good” understanding of digital marketing. When asked how organized their companies were to plan and implement digital marketing strategies, more than half said they were “adequately” to “well organized.” Over 90% of the respondents said Marketing was the key influence in driving the Digital Strategy. Nearly two-thirds of the group said that a Centralized Marketing organization owned the strategy, and nearly that many said Marketing owned execution.


• But it’s using Web 1.0 tools and platforms… Half of the respondents said they spend 0-10% of their budget on digital. The majority of respondents (65%) are spending the most on what they are familiar with, mainly their own Web sites. Relatively few (15%) are spending toward “Web 2.0” vehicles like blogs, social networks, video, etc. The situation in the Insurance industry is even worse, with Insurance companies on average only spending 2% of their advertising budgets on the Internet.


• Why? It’s not the reg's or the legal department, only 35% cited regulatory issues as a top concern. The majority of respondents said their top concerns were lack of experience with new digital marketing platforms, and the inability to prove ROI.


• The Root Cause… They’re not investing enough time, money and resources to do the necessary piloting to learn how to use the platform and tools, develop processes or do reporting . It’s a chicken and egg thing. Spend on those things that have a proven result even though they are, for the most part, only measurable at the tactical level and not at the campaign or program level. Show short term results vs long term success.


• The Fix... Long term programs (…and I’m talking a year or more) aimed at key market segments with clear value props. By taking a long term approach marketers will be able to experiment with Web 2.0 tools because they work best over time, not in a short term campaign. Think I’m making that up? We’re working with a leading Insurance company now on a 3 year long program. It involves a dozen or so partners, aimed at Boomers for a product that they won’t be able to sell to some folks in the segment for another 2 years.


• Why? In the current environment, FS institutions have to be focused on creating deeper more meaniful relationships with customers. They need to be focused on creating customer “advocates.” Firms that take a “wait and see” approach to going Digital will see their customers disappear and their traditional marketing tactics become less and less effective as they sit on the sideline waiting for the perfect ROI. Creating Customer Advocates for the brand, products and services is the goal because it's all about…or soon to be all about Consumers selling Consumers.

Got to go, Betty’s on the line…