B2B research - brand verses demand gen

I was extremely interested to see some coverage of a research piece between Ziff Davis Enterprise, Forbes and B2B agency Stein Rogan and Partners. The article link on B2B magazine can be found here.

Firstly the findings that a majority of B2B marketers (64%) are giving equal weight to branding and demand gen is reassuring. Over the last 2 years we have found the tech market has shifted heavily towards lead generation, many times at the expense of more identifiable branding initiatives. This is also compounded by a shift to more digitally based, response focused media, often as we know at the expense of traditional media formats like print.

Now don't get me wrong - it's my personal opinion that lead gen and branding are entirely compatible, indeed the assets used to generate leads are often the "deliverable proof" of some higher brand promise (proving a technology leadership position, innovation in the field, improved servicing of a market segment, better customer service, etc).

However there's a mind set question here. In many companies lead or demand gen is operated separately from corporate or brand communications. For marketers to realize the joint goals they set forth in the research, it's going to be critical to see more integration of these two components.

As a second side note the views on mix of media used for branding is fascinating. OOH at 72% and social media at 69% ahead of broadcast and print 68% and 64% respectively bodes well for the OOH industry but really throws up another key point.

Social media is, by it's nature unpredictable. My opinions here could in theory attract negative views from the market and may impact on my company brand. With social being a much more dynamic environment and less controllable, are marketers taking a huge risk by giving it such a huge role in brand development? It absolutely has a role to play. Giving it the right weight in the mix is where the questions lies.

These are interesting and highly dynamic times. B2B marketing departments and service companies as well as publishers are indeed set for exciting changes. The real winners will be those that get the media mix right and successfully integrate all the components. That change will need to start internally, with bigger broader campaign initiatives, real vision and use of appropriate metrics.

LinkedIn grows up.

Had a great meeting with the folks from LinkedIn today and for the first time I'm actually excited by the prospect of discussing social media with a client with some actual real solutions that are both realistic to execute upon but leverage the social aspect of the network.

For those not familiar, LinkedIn ,unlike the consumer social networks Facebook and MySpace, is a white collar, B2B social network which allows people to establish contacts and a network with business associates. The key aspect is that users almost entirely avoid out of work contacts (family and friends) and therefor the usage is almost entirely devoted to ones business life with profiles devoid of pictures of kids, partners and strange animals. How refreshing!

From the advertisers perspective this audience is a goldmine. The information is constantly updated by the individuals in question and targeting is possible by all manner of demographics - job, company, industry, etc. The problem has always been how to use this appropriately.

Like most agencies our early clumsy attempts of using traditional ads produced results comparable to running ads on content sites - proving context and general functional targeting are about even in efficiency. However now LinkedIn is providing solutions that really enable to advertiser to get up close and personal and frankly I can't wait to start playing with this.

New items include polls, question and answer programs and highly targeted personalized edm. New group capabilities will be added soon and the site also announced plans to open itself to some very carefully vetted apps (hopefully applying lessons learnt by Facebook).

Finally we may see B2B social networking growing into a youthful child - still innocent and unspoilt but open to fresh ideas and inspiring those around it. Lets hope it remains this way for a while before old advertising hacks like me turn it into a troubled teenage - all frustration, anger and bitterness.

Social media and linear metrics

I read with interest this article on the problems marketers are struggling with in relation to the use of social media at the recent DMA conference.

This highlights well the existing problem faced by social media and indeed online media in general as we move into 2008. The "Google effect" means that marketers are now expected to provide clear performance reports showing that dollars invested can track directly to specific actions - ultimately sales - for every online campaign.

But as we all know, advertising and marketing does not always line up in this way. Social media especially is not set up to work in this way. Even a strong interest from users may not result in any direct measurable sales and in many cases the campaigns are about users enjoying some kind of brand experience rather than a straight 'click, review, buy' model.

So finally online marketers are being asked the same questions that traditional media has suffered from for years...prove this is working !!

It's interesting the article makes reference to seeking out the help of academics. I have no doubt the future for social media campaigns, online brand campaigns and traditional media in general will be measured by clever statistical analytics of: Y% change in brand preference = x% increase in sales. Until this is done no CEO/CFO is going to get the answers they now want. They are also unlikely to back 'brand campaigns' the way they used to without a second thought.

Hey online media community...this problem is only going to get worse before it gets better. As you start pulling higher percentages of media dollars away from traditional media you better start getting ready to answer these types of questions more frequently. Online can no longer hide behind click rates and cpc's. The questions will now get more demanding and we as an industry have set ourselves up to fail by relying on linear numbers to set expectations.

Thanks goes to Google for helping educate executives just enough to become a right royal pain in the backside!!

"linear ROI" - defined (by me) as the directly measurable link between ad and action, typically through a click on an advertisement and subsequent activity on the client website.

"Non linear ROI" - defined (by me again) as the indirect action or responding to an advert - such as hear radio ad...go to store and buy product or engage in online social media activity and three weeks later buy product via online store.

"Google effect" - defined (by guess who) as the expectation by executives that all online media activities will be able to demonstrate a tangible linear ROI metric or clearly defined performance based metric. This effect has resulted from the original pay per click search model, so strongly championed by Google, which has set unrealistic expectations as to what web based marketing campaigns should always be delivering.