Customer Acquisition Management: Your Key To Success In 2013

MediaPost Blog by Neil Rosen, Jan 8, 2013, 8:26 AM If you’re reading this now, it’s because you know—and care—about the importance of great customer relationship management. Congratulations: that’s the best way to maintain and grow your business in 2013! But a mistake that many marketers make—and that you may be making as well—is in believing that great CRM starts after a customer comes on board. This position relates to cold calling or prospecting for new business, which now, in 2013, has a new name: Customer Acquisition Management says sales training guru Dr.Philip Jay LeNoble of Executive Decision Systems, Inc., Littleton, CO The reality is that if you’re not putting the same care and attention into managing your relationships with potential customers as you are with current ones, you may be missing out on a lot of significant opportunities. Management expert Peter Drucker has said that the sole purpose of a business is to create a customer. That may be true, butas you are with current ones, you may be missing out on a lot of significant opportunities. Management expert Peter Drucker has said that the sole purpose of a business is to create a customer. That may be true, but as businesses have understood and acted on the importance of retaining customers, they’ve tended to take the emphasis off Drucker’s customer creation. A balance of both is necessary for companies and brands alike to be healthy and thriving. Solid customer acquisition requires, first of all, a financial commitment. A study by Buttle Associates found, surprisingly, that only 34% of companies in its survey had dedicated customer-acquisition budgets, and that, contrary to the assumptions companies make, merely putting a process in place and dedicating a person or persons responsible for acquisition was not enough to create a robust customer acquisition management program. Shifting both money and prioritization to the campaigns was what the researchers found worked. Another study found (as advocates of customer relationship management have always known) that “acquiring a customer depends on how effectively the organization is able to build a comprehensive relationship with that customer.” Hardly a big surprise. Yet, too often the methods and channels used for new-customer acquisition don’t take any CRM principles into account. Lured in by advertising, pay-per-click search marketing, or co-registration campaigns, new customers too often find themselves either overwhelmed by too much contact, or underwhelmed by too little; given too many choices, or too few; and generally not listened to at all. Not good CRM. Not good customer acquisition management. CAM—customer acquisition management—should be a total solution streamlined into your company’s CRM efforts. It starts with the front end of obtaining a lead, and takes you through the process of creating a customer out of that lead, then finally passing the customer on to CRM people so they can move forward with the ongoing customer experience and relationship, just as a runner might pass the baton on to the next person on the team. It therefore makes absolute sense for CAM and CRM teams to work together to ensure an invisible transition for the new customer, consistency in the way that the company or brand treats that customer, and an overall smooth and positive customer experience. At its best, this experience will engender such loyalty that the customer will eventually become a brand advocate or evangelist, steering other potential customers into the company’s CAM and beginning the cycle over again. Moreover, all of this makes good financial sense. Customer-acquisition strategies can help determine where you spend your promotional money, but only if you have a CAM solution that affords you excellent metrics so that you can strategize campaigns and tweak them as results come in. Getting well-qualified leads and nurturing those leads into customers cannot happen if you don’t have a way to measure your progress, to see what works and what doesn’t, and to change strategies if one isn’t working. The results of these metrics will be different for every company, but the most important factor is being sure that the changes and adjustments you make in response to what you learn are on the back-end … not in the customer experience area. That needs to be smooth, clear, positive, and consistent. Making CAM part of your CRM will tell potential customers a great deal about how they can expect to be treated once they—should they!—become your customers. Don’t you want to make that the best experience possible?

Management is Still Not Leadership

Harvard Business Review by John Kotter | 11:00 AM January 9, 2013 A few weeks ago, the BBC asked me to come in for a radio interview. They told me they wanted to talk about effective leadership — China had just elevated Xi Jinping to the role of Communist Party leader; General David Petraeus had stepped down from his post at the CIA a few days earlier; the BBC itself was wading through a leadership scandal of its own — but the conversation quickly veered, as these things often do, into a discussion about how individuals can keep large, complex, unwieldy organizations operating reliably and efficiently. That's not leadership, I explained. That's management — and the two are radically different. In more than four decades of studying businesses and consulting to organizations on how to implement new strategies, I can't tell you how many times I've heard people use the words "leadership" and "management" synonymously, and it drives me crazy every time. The interview reminded me once again that the confusion around these two terms is massive, and that misunderstanding gets in the way of any reasonable discussion about how to build a company, position it for success and win in the twenty-first century. The mistakes people make on the issue are threefold: Mistake #1: People use the terms "management" and "leadership" interchangeably. This shows that they don't see the crucial difference between the two and the vital functions that each role plays. Mistake #2: People use the term "leadership" to refer to the people at the very top of hierarchies. They then call the people in the layers below them in the organization "management." And then all the rest are workers, specialists, and individual contributors. This is also a mistake and very misleading. Mistake #3: People often think of "leadership" in terms of personality characteristics, usually as something they call charisma. Since few people have great charisma, this leads logically to the conclusion that few people can provide leadership, which gets us into increasing trouble. In fact, management is a set of well-known processes, like planning, budgeting, structuring jobs, staffing jobs, measuring performance and problem-solving, which help an organization to predictably do what it knows how to do well. Management helps you to produce products and services as you have promised, of consistent quality, on budget, day after day, week after week. In organizations of any size and complexity, this is an enormously difficult task. We constantly underestimate how complex this task really is, especially if we are not in senior management jobs. So, management is crucial — but it's not leadership. Leadership is entirely different. It is associated with taking an organization into the future, finding opportunities that are coming at it faster and faster and successfully exploiting those opportunities. Leadership is about vision, about people buying in, about empowerment and, most of all, about producing useful change. Leadership is not about attributes, it's about behavior. And in an ever-faster-moving world, leadership is increasingly needed from more and more people, no matter where they are in a hierarchy. The notion that a few extraordinary people at the top can provide all the leadership needed today is ridiculous, and it's a recipe for failure. Some people still argue that we must replace management with leadership. This is obviously not so: they serve different, yet essential, functions. We need superb management. And we need more superb leadership. We need to be able to make our complex organizations reliable and efficient. We need them to jump into the future — the right future — at an accelerated pace, no matter the size of the changes required to make that happen. There are very, very few organizations today that have sufficient leadership. Until we face this issue, understanding exactly what the problem is, we're never going to solve it. Unless we recognize that we're not talking about management when we speak of leadership, all we will try to do when we do need more leadership is work harder to manage. At a certain point, we end up with over-managed and under-led organizations, which are increasingly vulnerable in a fast-moving world.

Online Radio Will Start Serving Ads Based on Your Web Browsing

SUBJECT: Behavioral-based Advertising Online Radio By Jeff John Roberts January 9, 2013 Summary: Websites show you ads based on other sites you visited. Now, online radio stations will start playing you songs based on the same information. This could spike growth in the radio ad industry and mean it won’t be weird to hear a tofu ad after a country song. Picture yourself sitting in Cleveland and using the internet to explore places to visit in France. Later, you pull up online radio service Pandora on your web browser to listen to Motown songs and what do you hear? Ads promoting cheap flights to Paris. While marketers have long targeted online radio listeners baed on their zip code or gender, this type of interest-based targeting is new. The ad options, which are the result of a deal between radio service Triton Digital and data provider eXelate, mean radio ads are about to get a lot more specific. According to Triton Digital COO, Mike Agovino, radio ads represent a $17 billion industry but one that relies on out-dated metrics and that offers little accountability to ad buyers. He thinks that letting brands sell to listeners based on their web surfing habits will drive a new wave of automated ad buying and increase the value of the radio ad market. The possibilities for radio are intriguing. Recall that, in the recent Presidential election, the parties launched a barrage of political ads in swing districts by using Pandora’s ability to play ads based on a person’s zip code. Meanwhile, their neighbors across the street who lived in a different district might have heard ads for trucks or lollipops based depending on their age and gender (Pandora garners this information when you sign up for the service). Now, radio ad targeting is going to get even more focused. For instance, the new data tools mean Ford might sell pick-ups after a teenybopper song because the company knows a listener was just looking at truck sites. Or Tampex may find occasions to pitch its products in the midst of a heavy-metal marathon. According to eXelate CEO, Mark Zagorski, radio is the “last bastion of context based advertising” but that this will change quickly due to online radio’s growing popularity and the capacity of behavioral-based advertising to scale quickly. As with other situations in which marketers use big data techniques to pitch products, there is a creepiness factor here. For instance, do you want marketers to know you’ve spent the last two hours researching gonorrhea and play you radio ads accordingly? Zagorski addressed the privacy concerns by saying that eXelate doesn’t touch so-called PPI (private personal information) but simply overlays online activity onto a streaming service. The new interest-based ads will help brands reach users of Pandora, which makes up about 74% of the online radio market, but also the web streams of more traditional radio stations as well.

The #1 Career Mistake Capable People Make

Greg McKeown, Entrepreneur and Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum December 2012 I recently reviewed a resume for a colleague who was trying to define a clearer career strategy. She has terrific experience. And yet, as I looked through it I could see the problem she was concerned about: she had done so many good things in so many different fields it was hard to know what was distinctive about her. As we talked it became clear the resume was only the symptom of a deeper issue. In an attempt to be useful and adaptable she has said yes to too many good projects and opportunities. She has ended up feeling overworked and underutilized. It is easy to see how people end up in her situation: Step 1: Capable people are driven to achieve. Step 2: Other people see they are capable and give them assignments. Step 3: Capable people gain a reputation as "go to" people. They become "good old [insert name] who is always there when you need him." There is lots right with this, unless or until... Step 4: Capable people end up doing lots of projects well but are distracted from what would otherwise be their highest point of contribution which I define as the intersection of talent, passion and market (see more on this in the Harvard Business Review article The Disciplined Pursuit of Less). Then, both the company and the employee lose out. When this happens, some of the responsibility lies with out-of-touch managers who are too busy or distracted to notice the very best use of their people. But some of the responsibility lies with us. Perhaps we need to be more deliberate and discerning in navigating our own careers. In the conversation above, we spent some time to identify my colleague's Highest Point of Contribution and develop a plan of action for a more focused career strategy. We followed a simple process similar to one I write about here: If You Don’t Design Your Career, Someone Else Will. My friend is not alone. Indeed, in coaching and teaching managers and executives around the world it strikes me that failure to be conscientious about this represents the #1 mistake, in frequency, I see capable people make in their careers. Using a camping metaphor, capable people often add additional poles of the same height to their career tent. We end up with 10, 20 or 30 poles of the same height, somehow hoping the tent will go higher. I don't just mean higher on the career ladder either. I mean higher in terms of our ability to contribute. The slightly painful truth is, at any one time there is only one piece of real estate we can "own" in another person’s mind. People can't think of us as a project manager, professor, attorney, insurance agent, editor and entrepreneur all at exactly the same time. They may all be true about us but people can only think of us as one thing first. At any one time there is only one phrase that can follow our name. Might we be better served by asking, at least occasionally, whether the various projects we have add up to a longer pole? There is an illustration showing Passion, Talent and Market wherein the center of each of the three core attributes came together showing the highest point of contribution. I saw this illustrated some time ago in one of the more distinctive resumes I have seen. It belonged to a Stanford Law School Professor [there it is: the single phrase that follows his name, the longest pole in his career tent]. His resume was clean and concise. For each entry there was one impressive title/role/school and a succinct description of what he had achieved. Each sentence seemed to say more than ten typical bullet points in many resumes I have seen. When he was at university he had been the student body president, under "teaching" he was teacher of the year and so on. Being able to do many things is important in many jobs today. Broad understanding also is a must. But developing greater discernment about what is distinctive about us can be a great advantage. Instead of simply doing more things we need to find, at every phase in our careers, our highest point of contribution. Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D. says, "In media marketing while trasactional business is an important part of the overall revenue picture, having a core of long-term local-direct clients involving mobile, digital, SEO and SEM brings togther one's competencies expression the highest points of contribution.

From mobile to taking on newspaper paywalls, 3 big moves for local TV in 2013

Lost Remote: The Home of Social TV By Cory Bergman on December 31, 2012 1:52 PM Local television remains a good business, but most station execs agree that tough, uncertain times lie ahead. As we enter 2013, it’s the ideal opportunity for TV station groups to make bold moves to invest in future growth — or just protect the current bottom line. Here’s my crack at the top three: 1. Triple investment in mobile “Mobile is huge,” everyone admits, but I don’t think we fully realize the revolution that’s upon us. If current trends continue, mobile will not only soar beyond the desktop (mobile already runs 4X over desktop where I work), but challenge TV news in reach in the next several years, as well. Desktop growth has been flat for most TV stations, and soon that traffic will begin to decline as consumption shifts to devices. Mobile is just as big as a threat as it is an opportunity. Advertising CPMs are a fraction of the desktop. I can watch an increasing number of network TV shows on any device in my house — without going through my local affiliates. And just about everyone I know no longer looks to local TV brands for the weather (unless it’s a big storm) because it’s built into the start screen of our iPhones and Samsungs. We’ve seen some promising mobile experiments in local TV — for example, the coalition of local television groups working with ConnecTV’s social TV app and on mobile DTV — but I worry it’s far from enough. Most local media companies still outsource their core mobile development to third parties, enforcing a templatized approach across their brands. Just like the early days of the web, this restricts innovation. It’s time to bring your core mobile development in house, either by buying that third-party development house or hiring up on your own. (I still like the partnership/coalition approach to larger, more complex endeavors.) Yes, it’s expensive, and that’s the biggest challenge of all. The best new mobile products don’t merely display information; they solve problems (both for users and advertisers alike). They have to be good or consumers will shun them. Experiences must translate elegantly across different devices. That makes mobile development labor-intensive and risky. You not only need enough resources to build your core products, but experiment on top of that. Hence the triple investment. This is a bigger deal than you think. 2. Capitalize on newspapers putting up paywalls and meters A paid content revolution is underway at newspapers across America: 360 of them are expected to charge for content — some as paywalls, more as metered content like NYTimes.com — by the end of the year. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize this is an unusual opportunity for stations to go after audiences frustrated with the new restrictions. Newspaper folks will be quick to point out they produce a higher quality and frequency of online coverage. This is certainly the case in most markets, but local TV stations can attract a larger share by stepping up coverage a notch and marketing themselves as a free and everywhere alternative. Here’s KTVB.com in Boise going straight for the Idaho Statesman’s jugular in this 30-second spot: A few ideas: A) diversify coverage by curating the best stories in the market (link the competition!) and cutting deals with indie pubs/blogs to host a subset of their content B) go deep in sports opinion witing — a big traffic driver for newspapers — by contracting with local sports blogs or even hard-core fans; C) redesign your sites to be lighter, more responsive and a bit more “newspapery” while still showcasing video D) avoid over-populating home pages/screens with crime stories, and tone down headlines and ledes a notch E) make it just downright simple and convenient to access coverage on mobile and social. You get the idea. This is not about replicating the newspaper’s coverage or design, but providing “good enough” coverage across a broader array of content and platforms. In most cases, this will require an modest injection of new web staff to pull all these content pieces together and produce them in a compelling fashion. Then follow it with a big on-air push and a “switch pitch” surge from the sales team to pick off the best online advertisers from the paper. 3. Create an indie video startup As convenient viewing opportunities explode — Netflix, Hulu, smarter DVRs, cable/satellite tablet apps, Xbox, etc. — local TV stations are in a poor position to compete for attention. The vast majority of local TV programming is live news, which translates poorly to on-demand playback. Stations need to create more original programming that people will seek out and watch on their schedules. Local programming that people will tweet about, that stands above the avalanche of original national content. That can be distributed on new platforms. And this isn’t another newscast or talk show. I propose creating an indie video startup at the group or station level that experiments with digital-first, social-savvy programming. (If this sounds familiar, I proposed the same thing two years ago.) By startup, I mean a small (3-4) group of people who are carved out from the organization and report straight up to top management. Hire people outside of the newsroom: small production houses, local YouTube producers, etc. Give them low-cost gear and a long runway to experiment with digital, shareable shows. Create a concept, distribute via social media, see what happens. Repeat. The concepts that resonate are given a chance to grow into digital distribution, and potentially, turn into a linear show, as well. This is not about creating “broadcast quality” shows, but shareable, mobile-friendly “infotainment” or entertainment that will keep local TV relevant in the new world of ubiquitous video. Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D. remdinds owners and managers to continually build local-direct revenue which not only protects the bottom line but adds growth to more profitable revenue, market share, and reduces turnover. He reports that Michael Guld of The Guld Resource Group is teaching local stations a sales training device that is a simple-to-integrate, academic approach to media marketing that helps stations own revenue share, averaging $624,000 in new business among 455 reporting stations. The program is called System 21. Michael Guld may be reached at 804-360-3122.

2013 Predictions For The State of Today's Networked Mom

MediaPostPublications By Holly Pavlika Friday, Jan. 4, 2013 It’s that time of year when we reflect on the year’s accomplishments and start thinking about what the next year will bring regarding today’s Networked Mom. Will marketing to moms look different? Will there be any less emphasis on her and her continuing power? Here are our thoughts: Moms will continue to be at the forefront of global citizenship. We’ve seen what we can do by using words, our voice and technology. There is a global motherhood at hand as well as the realization that the challenges and issues are all connected regardless of geography. More women and mothers will run for office. We influenced the election, and we’re realizing that when there are sufficient enough women in power, we will be able to create meaningful change. Television, social media, and motherhood will come together. Television, social media, and motherhood will learn they need each other. It’s already happening with blogger integration. Television is the second screen to her, and it will be interesting to see how apps like Zeebox, which integrates television shows and social media, do. It could be an exciting year. Technology/smartphones: She’s not giving up her tech toys. They’ll become more and more a part of her life. Brands need to get ahead of the curve with mobile. Brands will continue to try to reach us through “pinked” and specially designed products. And they will fail miserably. Pink cars named “She’s,” pink laptops, and more are just dumb in the U.S. Pink is for lipstick, little girls and breast cancer awareness ribbons. Adding glitter to something hardly raises its ability to effectively meet the buyer’s needs. Brands keep failing to remember we buy many products for the same reason a man would. Focus on features, benefits, providing value, and superlative customer service for her, and you’ll win her over. There will be more and more advertising featuring moms. Till we scream enough. Advertising and marketing to moms is so blatant right now, it’s almost laughable. So brands will continue to think putting a mom in the picture will attract moms to listen their pitch. Again the emphasis shouldn’t be in “hey, mom,” messaging but in what are you trying to sell. Does she need it, and how does it fit in her life? Then connect with her emotionally and pragmatically. More growth in the Latina mom market. Brands need to get ready for the Latina mom now. She’s highly social and has huge spending power. And she’s ready to use her voice. She led her family to the voting booths -- Latinas helped Barack Obama win re-election. Generally speaking, 12 million Latinos voted in this election, and, of that number, 76% of Latinas voted for Obama. There will be a growing interest in the Boomer Mom. Research is showing the Boomer Mom to be very different than moms in this age bracket were in previous generations. This “me generation” has the time, desire, the capital, and is ready to use her purchasing power to enjoy life. She’s a lot more tech-savvy than you may think, and her use of social media is growing each and every day. She’s eager to dole out her wisdom, mind and advice. Kudos to the brand that understands that. The Networked Mom will continue to adapt and use technology and social media to share ideas and connect with others. As much as it may seem a drain on her full schedule, its positive attributes outweigh the negative. She loves the ability to share her passions and use her voice. The term “mommy bloggers” is simply not indicative of today’s Networked Mom, and she will continue to be a focus of the media and brands in 2013.

The Year Ahead, What We Can Learn From 2012

MediaPostNews OnlineMediaDaily by Cella M. Irvine, 9 hours ago (January 4, 2013 Many of the trends we saw in 2012 -- from the ongoing rise of social advertising to the success of video beyond pre-roll and in-stream -- didn’t stop when the ball dropped. 2013 will be a challenging year for the industry. Programmed for success? The shift to programmatic advertising, buying and selling will accelerate, putting downward pressure on display CPMs and CTRs. There’s simply too much inventory of a commodity nature, and our reliance on data vs. brand expression and creativity only emphasizes the commoditization of the underlying content. The top-shelf publishers will continue to attract premium -dollars, but we’ll likely see the “mid-tail” getting squeezed. This won’t lead to less reliance on data and automated platforms. But it should spark a reevaluation by brands, advertising technology partners and publishers about how to push the creative envelope and find the right mix of programmatic and custom creative/in-stream solutions. Three out of four advertisers, marketers and publishers surveyed by the IAB said that big data management tools would play "either a 'critical role' or a 'major supporting' role in bettering marketing and advertising efforts over the long-run." That’s no surprise; there are clear efficiency benefits to doing so. Better news is that according to a recent study of marketers and advertisers from IBM and Oxford University, "roughly half of respondents’ big-data activities are focused on customer-centric outcomes." Looking closely at what users gravitate to moves the needle on true consumer engagement and involvement. Visually Creative Programmatic buys are an effective way to deliver strong reach. Conversely, publishers such as Quartz and Buzzfeed, are chasing native, integrated solutions on a smaller individual scale. These solutions are often – like the TV spots in the late ’60s/early ’70s – funnier and more engaging than the content itself. There’s a great opportunity to create those integrated, highly impactful solutions at scale. We’ll see venture dollars chasing that opportunity this year by funding ad startups, revamped content studios and new authoring tools. Creating template-heavy ad units and the “Buzzfeed” model of custom content will plateau, but we’ll see the development of more interactive, involved solutions that can scale – offerings that are more relevant to a user's interests and create a stronger relationship with brands on a larger scale. The furor over Instagram’s attempt to monetize user images points the way forward to a more visual, impactful brand engagement experience. People want to engage with images, and we don’t yet have a great solution to monetizing that content. Another strong opportunity for 2013: solutions such as in-image formats leverage the power of pictures in the content stream (read: native advertising), helping sites monetize untapped image resources and brands get their messages across. Pinterest is making moves toward launching an ad platform of its own, and we’ll expect it to gain traction. We’ll also see continued growth for online video. Look at what Facebook has planned to underscore how ubiquitous this ad format will be. Mobile Matters For the longest time, no one knew how to make money on mobile – and finally in the latter half of 2012, that began to change. On phones, expect to see heavy focus on localization solutions that span the gap between the mobile ad and in-store or in-establishment activity. On the tablet, we've been uncomfortable with interruptive formats, such as interstitials. However, I expect these kinds of formats to gain traction and hopefully deliver on the creative promise that the tablet holds for content and advertising. Of course, there is Facebook, which finally seems to have cracked its mobile woes with sponsored stories. Third-quarter advertising revenue totaled $1.09 billion, according to Facebook’s most recent results – a 36% increase from the same quarter last year -- and 14% of that came from mobile. By 2017, Sony Ericsson has said that 85% of the world will be covered by 3G mobile Internet and half will have 4G coverage. If we begin to lay the groundwork for better mobile engagement now, the potential for immersive advertising experiences on phones and portable devices will only increase.