Is Your Company Ready for Intercept Marketing?

Traditionally, companies have had a love/hate relationship with search. Yes, they loved being at the top of a Google search page and getting lots of traffic, attention and sales. But they felt forced to use search engine optimization (SEO), where dense terminology and poorly-communicated concepts left execs feeling they were entering an arcane world of dark arts—they hated the typical push/pull relationship with SEO practitioners. But you can’t escape reality: Search has become marketing. As Google’s traditional first page fragmented into increasingly personalized search verticals—Google Now, Google Local, Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Image Search, to name but a few—so has search become the predominant means through which the enterprise and customers connect.

Enter Intercept Marketing 

What if you could bring a potential customer’s search process to an abrupt halt, and close the sale before your competitors have even been invited to the table? That’s intercept marketing. But it requires a shift in the traditional corporate search-marketing mindset. In a semantic Web, being found relies on many different factors—chief amongst them being prevalence and serendipity. Translated from search-geek speak, these two are simply being everywhere and being connected with people:

• The more places where your company, content and brand surfaces, the more likely you are to be found by people. For more, see How to Jump to a Social Business model
• The more that people talk about your brand and its values, the more likely that your company will surface, thanks to friend-of-a-friend connections. For more, see: Search Is Dead… Long Live Search!

The better these two work, the more likely you are to intercept the attention of your online audience—an audience that moves across screens and clicks away from anything that fails to engage it at a glance. The issue is this: What sounds easy to do at the level of the lone webmaster working from home, is hard to implement at a corporate level. An environment of department heads, corporate hierarchies, performance reviews, and line managers is not the setup usually associated with semantic search success. However, solving this conundrum need not ‘break’ the corporation. Here are four deceptively simple steps to get ready for intercept marketing: 1. Get Back To Brand Basics  In order for your content to be everywhere, and for your brand to have enough connections for successful intercept marketing, you need to have a clearly worked out corporate identity. This includes knowing:

• The values your brand stands for,
• the ‘voice’ it needs to speak with on the social Web, and
• the attitude and style of your every online communication.

The key here is consistency—which means that corporate guidelines and best practice-sharing need to go into overdrive. 2. Understand How Search Works No one goes into a corporate environment so they can become a SEO geek. But then again, if the principles of marketing are something that every MBA knows inside out, it should be no different for the principles of search: Search is marketing. Get to understand the basics of the semantic Web, the way search and social work together, and how to best use them to intercept busy, potential customers. If necessary, appoint a “search champion” within your company: Someone whose job it is to make sure that lessons learned are shared, best practices are followed, and that every department is in-sync with the company’s search goals. 3. Get Out Of The Numbers Trap The classic pitfall that corporations fall into when they outsource services like search is the numbers game: They play metrics bingo. ‘X’ number of pages on Google’s first page, ‘Y’ visitors on a website, ‘Z’ Likes, +1s and Tweets. But what may look great on a spreadsheet rarely delivers actual results. Instead, start off with real propositions: “We want to increase sales of product A,” or “We need our brand to be seen by more people,” and listen to the steps required to make them happen. 4. Form Partnerships, Not Transactional Relationships This is the hardest thing to do. Traditionally, corporations are great at using contracts to establish the parameters of exchange: An SEO’s agency time in exchange for some cash, the achievement of a particular milestone as a metric of success. Corporations aren’t so good at helping an agency understand what the company does or learning from those they outsource services to. This old “out of sight, out of mind” approach now needs to go. If you hire an agency, help it understand what you need to achieve—in detail. Ask the difficult questions about how the goals can be reached and how you can assist in the process. See the relationship as a symbiotic one—as your corporation acquires new knowledge, the agency role will also evolve and change with time. The Bottom Line  Behind these four deceptively simple steps hides an entire shift in corporate thinking.     AP

Six rules to boost your marketing ROI with video content

For starters, don't try to plan for a 'viral' campaign. YouTube users view more than 4 billion hours of video every month. Video content drives communities, commerce and increasingly, CMO agendas. But can brands and their agencies, who have been making TV ads for over 60 years succeed in creating engaging, shareable online content that delivers any kind of marketing value without looking like a regurgitated commercial? Working with the leaders in the field, we have devised six simple rules to creating, predicting and amplifying video content that will finally reconnect your consumers’ appetite for video content with your marketing ambitions. 1. Don’t plan for a 'viral' campaign According to David Waterhouse, global head of content at video technology company Unruly, “trying to chase the next viral hit is the strategic equivalent of sticking your hand in a haystack and hoping to find a needle”. Instead, marketers should focus on creating and distributing highly shareable content, repeatedly. 2. Do it with consumers Consumers are already populating YouTube with a staggering 100 hours of video every minute. Consider getting them to produce your content, but don't expect all of them to be creative geniuses. Alexandre Olmedo, co-founder of eYeka, recommends working with the 1 per cent of content creators whenever fresh ideas and quality of creative execution matters. Schick Quattro recently asked eYeka’s community to produce short videos illustrating the benefit of titanium in daily life. When these videos ran alongside sponsored video-content from one of the most popular Anime franchises on Google TrueView in Japan, they achieved the highest View-Through-Rate (21per cent versus 17.1 per cent for sponsored videos). Crowdsourcing is not about cost-efficiency but about creating content that truly resonates with the target audience. 3. Aim for a strong emotional reaction As a general rule, your content should be arresting enough to elicit a strong physical reaction from the viewer. Unruly’s ShareRank, a predictive tool for shareability found that a target audience’s emotional response to a video and the social motivations to share it are the highest predictors of success. Online videos which elicit powerful, positive emotions are shared 30 per cent more often than others. And they are remembered three times more. A crowdsourcing project calling on the eYeka community to "illustrate Coca-Cola as an energizing refreshment, in their own style" generated worldwide buzz with over 6 million online mentions, and several high energy videos scoring in the top 10 per cent of all-time best ads in sample markets. Get out of your brand’s comfort zone to produce content that consumers will actually want to

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watch and share.

4. Seed! Don't wait for people to discover it There is no secret sauce to “virality”. Without good distribution, even good content will struggle to make a mark. Social video seeding uses paid distribution to ensure that content is visible and easily shareable on native content environments, where people are already discovering, watching and sharing video content. This means the right content can find its target audience where viewers are more engaged. You can boost viewership with the support of an overall media campaign to get maximum awareness. 5. Create a consistent and shareable experience According to Kitt McCurdy, Director at Thismoment, creating a highly interactive experience around your content immerses consumers even more into your brand. Ensure your experience is optimized for audiences across all social channels and devices to further increase reach and time spent. Making it easy for users to share your content, being part of the conversation and submitting their own content should be a key part of the overall strategy. When your video goes beyond your control and starts to get mashed-up, it is a sign that your one-hit-wonder is turning into something more: an Internet meme! 6. Get your timing right At the conception stage, capturing the mood of a nation, a generation or a target audience will provide a solid foundation for viral activation. At the amplification stage, you will need to be in the right places at the right time. You will need lots of views to happen fast after upload if you want to make most viewed of the day or week on YouTube or other distribution platforms. Likewise, you'll need people to blog, tweet, and digg your video within a short space of time. That is because, according to Unruly “a quarter of the average online branded video shares occur in the first three days of its launch. While the occurs on the second day, when your video will attract one in 10 of its total shares across the social web.” Don’t let long production and bureaucratic approval processes get in the way of the zeitgeist!   AP

How To Jump To A Social-Business Model

Business is a warzone: If you stand still, you die. No matter how good your product or service, you’re at the mercy of cause and effect. The market’s evolving needs must be met by evolving products. Those needs are increasingly expressed not in the classic focus-groups of yore, but in today’s vibrant social media forums. This fundamentally changes the game between a company and its customers. Read this article to discover how to play the new social-business game. It can be a huge culture shock for unprepared businesses. Take Microsoft as an example. The coming Windows 8 Tablet and Windows Phone are classic examples of the evolution of market needs. The Microsoft that produced Windows 95 would be history had its products not evolved. Love it or loathe it, Windows 8 is a direct response to the needs of its target audience, which asked for mobility, touch-centric form-factors, and compatibility with legacy software. But perhaps companies like Microsoft aren’t like yours? They deal in products that constantly change and have a short shelf life; change and fluidity are normal in their particular market. So what happens when you’re not one of these companies? How do you deal with the speed at which social media and the spread of connected devices has changed the balance of power between a company and its customers and made it difficult to market using traditional advertising tools? Brian Fetherstonhaugh, CEO of OgilvyOne, argues that the challenges faced by digital companies are also experienced by everyone else. The market has shifted from product to experience and those who are still product orientated are fighting a losing battle with ever diminishing returns in revenue and market share. In the transition from Jerome McCarthy’s 4Ps of Product, Place, Price and Promotion to what he calls the 4Es of Experience, Everyplace, Exchange and Evangelism, we also see the morphing of traditional businesses into social ones:

Marketing is in the hot seat. So many of the tools and assumptions we grew up with are no longer valid. … We need a new framework. And a new tool kit…creating a mission and brand experience that are so inspiring to consumers that they engage with you—and share their enthusiasm with others.

 

How do Traditional Companies Adapt?

This kind of change can be difficult to handle, if what you sell is not computing devices and smartphones but baby powder, soft drinks or contact lenses. Your company may be governed by a hierarchical, top-heavy structure that makes it difficult to maneuver in a social media environment. Social media and social business are two sides of the same coin. One uses social networks to reach an audience; the other creates a borderless world within the enterprise itself. Key to both is honesty and accountability: As the seminal social-business textbook The Cluetrain Manifesto said:

Markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. … The human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

To be made to work, both require a clear understanding of business goals and social media purpose across the entire business. When I talk to executives about this, they see that their customers are increasingly socially active. They understand their market is changing; they know they need to change with it. The dilemma that executives face is to effect change—changing their business to meet the demands of their market—but without tearing their existing company apart.  

The Social-Business Solution

One way is to look at how social networks function, and put the model to work inside the company. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter start off with a set of connectivity tools that disrupt the norm of personal communications. Enthusiastic early adopters become power users who then drag along their friends, colleagues and families; then the social network begins to take a life and shape of its own. Translated into a corporate environment, this model starts with the use of communication tools such as Yammer, which disrupt the corporate hierarchy and kick-start a collaborative culture. It’s followed by the re-training of mid-level executives to act as change agents within the company and it’s crowned by the company leaders becoming conversant in the language of social business. While pundits suggest that this isn’t nearly enough, the very inertia which corporations experience when it comes to change, works for them once change is adopted and new working practices are put in place. Tomorrow’s business is changing—from the inside out. By the time the changes are apparent, the companies that didn’t adapt will be mortally wounded… or dead.   AP

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