You can get the same level of insights from your off-line marketing as you can your online marketing!

We’re here to talk if you’d like to brainstorm how you can get a hold of your off-line marketing performance.

(Originally posted by HubSpot and tagged under their Analytics and Cartoon archive.)

This short video provides an overview of a research methodology one can use to measure the possible annual revenue a telecommunications company might expect from an IPTV solution within a given market.

The video provides some background, two sample analyses that demonstrate actionable information, and an overview of the research methodology along with schedule and base costs.

If you are your team are trying to decide if now is the time for an IPTV solution, this might be the most important 5 minute video you can watch.

Download the Presentation (Right-Click & “Save As”; PDF; 1.05mb)
Download the Video (Right-Click & “Save As”; Zipped MP4; 6.03mb)

Video Highlights/ Speaking Points

• How to know how many current customers might switch to your service and what they might possibly pay.
• There are two key pieces of information required to make an informed IPTV decision: 1) knowing the size and value of your potential IPTV market, and 2) understanding what portion of that market would move their business to you.
• A three step solution: 1) Identify prevalence of pay-TV (i.e., cable) in your market, 2) Estimate current annual revenue generated from pay-TV services for current providers, and 3) Uncover the potential revenue that would be available for you.
• This is not a marketing strategy or retention research methodology.  It is an approach that will do two specific things very well.  It’ll tell you how big your potential IPTV market is and what it’s worth to you.
• In this example, a rural telecommunications provider’s market may have 3,358 household currently paying for television services at a rate of 2.23 million dollars per year.  A new IPTV offering in this this hypothetical market could expect upwards of $454,383 in annual incremental revenue.

You’ll find that  only some of the content on your or a Client’s site is delivering most of the traffic.  I haven’t tested it but I’d bet you that the 80/20 rule applies (that’s 80% of your traffic coming from 20% of your content).

That’s why there is one critical principal you must use with your content to maximize the impact.

Marketing success comes from maximizing your reach.

When I audit marketing programs (on-line or off) I look first for the data that indicates or will indicate the program reach.  You never know which part of the marketing will have the greatest impact.  But if your reach isn’t all it can be, it doesn’t matter.  A great bit of creative that no one sees is no better than a terrible bit of creative.

With on-line marketing, the secret to great reach is re-purposing your creative.

Blog Content Strategy

It starts with a good content strategy. Choose 12 monthly themes that flow with the seasons and work for your market niche. Then break those 12 themes into two primary topics that in and of themselves represent common problems people in the industry have that you can solve.

Next break each of those primary topics into six sub-topics that help define and resolve the problem. These six sub-topics represent your blog posts (three a week). Each sub-topic will need 300 to 400 words of original, jaw dropping valuable content (we’ll call each one a micro-article).

Maximizing Your On-Line Marketing Reach

Write these articles all at once or on an ongoing basis. Pull out three to four 120 character or less “sound bites” from each article and use them for Twitter/ LinkedIn updates.

Once a week, the micro-articles should be rolled-up and re-written into a single 600 to 1200 word article that can be submitted to the article sharing sites. This article should then be converted into a PowerPoint style presentation and posted to slide-sharing sites.

Every two weeks, the two PowerPoint presentations should be re-written and combined into slides to support a bi-weekly webinar. The webinar should be recorded , cleaned up, and converted into two video lengths: full (less than 10 minutes) and 2 to 3 minutes.

The two videos should be posted to a YouTube channel, other video sharing sites, and promoted through micro-blogging and social bookmarking. The full length version should have highlights and sound bites transcribed and serve as blog post. The sound-bites can also serve as micro-blogging updates.

Once a month, the four articles should be combined into a white-paper that can be made available for download from your website after registration and/ or posted to professional directories. The article can also be modified for professional off-line publication and /or press-release.

This strategy will allow you to generate a large presence on-line without building a large pool of content. When a car company creates an image of a car, they use that image in commercials, on billboards, in magazine print, and in web banner ads. They don’t create a new piece of content for each medium. Your written content should be no different.

At Portland Marketing Analytics we assist companies of all sizes develop an on-line marketing strategy that is based on sound marketing principals and supported by clear anlaytics. For a free 30 minute consultation on your website and how we can help you make the most of it, give us a call at 207.619.2297 or visit website auditing services for more information.

In this article, I read a quote I don’t entirely agree with.

“Sampling mitigates risks for brands,” says VP and gm Brian Pear. “It’s less risky for mom because she’s able to sample it for free.”

Having reviewed and analyzed the sales data for 100+ retail brands over the past four years I have to say that this simply is not true for all brands.  There is a lot that needs to be in place for an in-store sampling experience to directly create incremental sales.

Check Your In-Store Inventory

It may sound basic, but the first thing you need to assure is that you have the inventory to support any up-take in off-the-shelf sales.  It’s not uncommon for an in-store demo/ sampling program to stock the event set with inventory from the shelf, leaving the shelf itself bare.

More than once I’ve looked at sales volume data, subtracted what the demo staff bought, and found nothing left.  If the brand and store buyer are not organized before hand, there won’t be extra inventory and the whole thing will be a flop.

Don’t Ignore Product Use Cycles

Next, the consumer use cycle needs to be considered.  Household products tend to have a longer purchase cycle than food items.  A consumer is less likely to buy paper towels after a demo than frozen peas.  This doesn’t mean that there won’t be an up-tick, it just tends to be recognized after the demo has been completed.  Often on the next regular stocking-up trip for the consumer.

The tendency for a brand is to analyze the data immediately after a demo.  Sometimes you have to wait 30 or even 45 days to get a true measure of the impact.

Use cycle is also impacted by the volume of units typically sold and demonstrated.  If the demo is for a product that typically contains 30 items and average use is one item per day, sales may not increase for 15 to 30 days.

Watch For Product Hoarding

Finally, even if you do find an up-tick in sales, it’s not always a good thing.  There are three possible sources of incremental sales.  You either attracted new consumers to the category, won over customers from a competitor, or your current customers are hoarding.  The first two are what you want.  Bringing new customers to the category or winning over a competitor’s customers is great.  Hoarding can be a problem, but not always.

Hoarding is when a customer buys more of a product on sale yet avoids buying down the road because they’ve already “stocked-up”.  This is obviously more common for products that keep well (e.g., cleaners, dry food items, etc.) and less common for products that are bulky (e.g., diapers, paper products, etc.).

Juice is a great example of a product that is subject to increased use.  While someone isn’t likely to increase their use of butter (unless educated about new uses), many drink products like juice, milk, and even alcohol can look in the data as hoarding but really may represent an increase in short-term usage.  The consumer will return to normal (or slightly increased) consumption patterns once the discounted or sampled supply has been consumed.

So, yes.  Sampling and in-store demonstrations can be a great marketing tool for CPG brands.  However, if you don’t have the right analysis strategy in place you will never fully understand if what you did worked and why.

When compared to December (the previous month) we’d expect to see January retail sales down around 16.2%. Not as bad as you’d expect but driven by due giftcard spending. (It usually gets steadily worse and bottoms out in May then takes a U-turn in June with “Dads and Grads”).

The latest from MarketingDaily (http://bit.ly/5hst2W) reports on JD Power’s comments on January sales in the Auto industry. Things look down. We’ll see how much this is a bellwether for other sales sectors.

For marketers, any means of reaching out to a potential customer is done with two objectives in mind.  You are always trying to either change consumer behavior or change consumer attitude.  The rules of marketing haven’t changed.

The players have gotten smarter, the equipment has been greatly enhanced, the field has been radically reshaped.  But the purpose, objectives, and opportunity remains the same. So…

Let the games begin.  Marketing has been in transition for some time but as an industry, marketing analysts are just starting to figure it out. Have you?

This video is a riveting 4 minutes that defines the challenge and opportunity better than I’ve seen before.

If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines because you don’t know how to justify the spend it’s time to start figuring that out.   We can help.

If you’ve been diving in but haven’t a clue if the spend is worth your effort it’s time to get that straight.  We can help.

Their goal was to identify spending patterns among residents versus tourists and segment this into categories that defined the key drivers of tax revenue from non-residents.  The public officials needed to accurately attribute tax revenue to different spending pools to evaluate budgeting guidelines for state-sponsored programs.

The challenge was how to measure when so many variables were in play.

By using the methods outlined in the two previous articles that make up this market research consultants’ secrets series, we were able to cross reference a number of variables to link those activities which generated incremental in-state spending, identify where state promotional dollars were best allocated, and advise on future spending that would generated the greatest return for state residence in incremental tax revenue.

The question of how to measure marketing performance may be daunting on the surface but anytime you can measure the delivery and result variables over time you will have the basis for a predictive model that can be used to maximize future performance.

Measure Marketing Case Study #1: Cell Phone Manufacturer

A major cell phone manufacturer wanted to understand the dynamics around sound quality for a new pre-market cell phone. Portland Marketing Analytics organized a control/test beta trial among a representative consumer base to look at usage patterns and call quality.

As a result, particular industrial sites were identified as containing materials that interrupted the quality of service (not the phone’s architecture) thus clearing the product for general market release.

Measure Marketing Case Study #2: Credit Card Provider

A credit card provider focused on consumer affinity cards needed to streamline it’s call center reporting.   At any given time the business had 2,400 customer service reps across 200+ teams and 7 call centers taking calls from US consumers.  The organization used this delivery and results positioning to understand the performance of their customer service function.

This laid the foundation for rep scorecard measurement and exception based reporting that allowed management to improve performance and streamline training.

Measure Marketing Case Study #3: Marketing Agency

An agency focused on the delivery of TV, Radio, and Print advertising organized their marketing execution around these delivery and results measures and was able to accurately project the performance of a marketing program while the marketing was still in the planning stages.

This allowed modifications to be made to the overall design that would maximize marketing performance.

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Portland Marketing Analytics is a team of market research consultants who specialize in creating custom measurement solutions that evaluate and predict marketing outcomes, product trial performance, and consumer behavior. Read below for some more information about how we can help you. Or use the comments box at the bottom of this page.

Your goal once you have collected your “delivery” and “results” data is to organize that data in such a way as to make it actionable.  (Note, this method also works well if you’re working with data that was originally collected for another purpose but is being re-purposed for a new need.)

Just organize the variables into the two groupings, “Delivery” and “Results.”

Nine times out of ten, your delivery data will be something you have control over.  By “control” I mean those aspects of your business that you can change pretty much at will.  When thinking about how to measure marketing results you need to keep in mind the things that define performance.  Last week we gave four examples of delivery data:

• Staffing
• Packaging
• Marketing
• Price

As a business manager, you or someone in your company has control over these four items (and the hundreds more that define your business operations).  For example, you can choose how heavily to staff the check-out counter, you decide the volume packaging segments, you know what type of TV buys or PPC online advertising you’ve bought, or when a discount is offered.

It would be fair to expect that each of these items will have some impact on your results measures.  For example, you’d expect staffing price to impact sales volume.

Here’s the Market Research Consultants’ Trick

The trick is to test these relationships (using the right statistical methods) to see at what levels in a delivery variable are associated with a meaningful change in a results variable.

For example, let’s say you measure a 10% increase in sales volume when you dropped the price by 10% in January.  In fact, you see roughly the same change in sales every time you drop the price by 10%.  Moving forward, you could therefore increase sales by 10% anytime you wanted to… just drop the price by 10%.  This finding is therefore “actionable.”

This is an obvious example.  It’s common for sales volume to go up when price goes down.  And for the most part, people don’t tend to consider the obvious as “insightful”.  However, there does exist a multitude of this same type of example in your business that is not so obvious.  These might include things such as:

• The relationship between packaging and seasonal sales fluctuation.
• The color of your “add to cart” button and how many people opt-out of the shopping cart.
• The placement of your 800# on a flier and the related call volume to your call center.

The goal is to hunt around your data to find these relationships.  And then to deliver them to the people who need to know in a way that they can then make positive business decisions.  This is the type of work we do at Portland Marketing Analytics every day.

Next week we’ll provide some case studies describing how other agencies and brands have used this process to make insights actionable.

The last couple of years, the field of business analytics has been ultra-focused on “consumer insights”; the art of understanding consumers at a level which reveals the underlying motivations behind purchasing decisions.

A lot of products and services have come to market and report to deliver “insights”.  However, even with the best tools now in hand, the process of applying these insights to real business problems is often no easier.

A Market Research Consultant’s Secret

How do market research consultants make insights actionable? Marketing professionals spend so much time, money, and effort to create a data flow, but so often don’t know what to do with it. And, in many cases, if you’re asking these questions once the data has been gathered and reported, than you may be too late.

This article is the first in a series of three that will explore how to measure marketing results from the angle of making facts and insights actionable.

The secret to making insights actionable is in how your organize the data collection process.

Often the task at hand is really, “how to measure strategy” and strategy starts with the deconstruction of things. All business data can be grouped into two categories that together define any business strategy.

1. Results – or that which we’re trying to impact or change (i.e., call volume, sales, coupon redemption, loyalty, revenue, widgets produced, etc.)
2. Delivery – or that which impacts the things we want to change (i.e., staffing, packaging, marketing, price, etc.)

So we have information that is “results” and information that is “delivery” by nature. If you were a statistician you’d call these dependent and independent variables. Another way to look at these are as cause (delivery) and affect (results).

When your information is organized in these two categories you’ll find that you’ve laid the foundation for converting data into actionable insights. Next week I’ll write about this process further and suggest some methods for organizing and reporting on the resulting data.

I’ll wrap up this mini-series with a set of case studies on how how others have tackled the question of how to measure marketing results and made insights actionable.

What do you think?  Do you organize your data with the end in mind?  Use the comment area below to tell us your technique or ask a question.

Are You Looking For a Market Research Consultant?

Portland Marketing Analytics is here to help. We’re marketing research consultants who talk to marketing professionals like yourself every day to solve measurement related challenges.

There is another side.  It’s the side that recognizes that you have a business analytic need, but not the technical expertise or time to learn a new business application.  Let’s bring the whole down thing down to earth.

Business analytics is all about organizing the past to understand what the future might hold.  This is because there exist patterns in the history of our business that if we can understand, we can apply to our future decision making.  Too many business decisions are made based on a manager’s “gut”.

With the application of some simple business analytic principles you can apply historical evidence to the decision making process (then check your “gut” and see if it still feels right).

To start to get a hold of the power of business analytics, you need to see that there are five universal truths:

(Note that these “truths” were adopted from the transcripts from of movie “Pi“. )

1. Anything can be measured.
   Anything.  We’re not using the term loosely here.  Truly anything can be measured.  You might say this is impossible.  That there are things so abstract that this simply isn’t possible.  Take “perspective” for example.  You can’t measure something so dynamic as a consumer’s perspective of your brand.

   Sure you can.  So long as you define it in a measurable way.  The trick to measuring everything is how you define anything.  We define things in their context.  So let’s say you are looking to understand the level to which consumers view your brand as the high-quality option.  If you defined quality as someone’s level of agreement to the phrase, “Brand XYZ is the highest quality option available to me today.” then you have a method of measurement.  Sure there are limitations and other things at play, but by defining the concept in a relevant and measurable way you’ve given yourself a starting point.  Surely you can build from there.

2. All recorded measurements can be graphed.
   You simply apply the variable of time.  If I’m measuring customer loyalty with a survey, all I need to do is take my loyalty score at different points in time and chart it.  With the month along the bottom of a chart (x-axis) and the score along they side (y-axis) you can get a clear graph of customer loyalty.
3. When graphing anything, patterns emerge.
   This is where, sometimes you need to lean on statistical techniques to help you uncover the pattern, but it is always there.  The alternative to a pattern is chaos and chaos simply doesn’t exist among the actions of people in groups.  (This is something I’ll back up in a later post.)  As humans we move in patterns and these pattens will come through when you’re measuring any type of human behavior over time.
4. Patterns hold the power of predictability.
   This is due to the very nature of patterns to begin with.  You simply extend the variable of time and apply the average measure.  Again, there are some fancy techniques to be applied here to help you control for things that influence the historical average (e.g., seasonality, marketing initiatives, competitor activity, roll-backs, etc.).  However, any pattern can be extended beyond its current end point to reveal the future.
5. Therefore, the future can be accurately predicted.
   And there-in lies the power of business analytics.  What happened in the past is the past.  There is nothing we can do about it.  The future represents only opportunity and the more we know what to expect, the more we can position ourselves, our brands, and our Client’s brands to be successful in that future.

The business analytic basics are truly powerful to business decision making and planning.  Too long it has been the domain of expert analysts and software training experts.  At Portland Marketing Analytics we work to bring the rationale of business analytics to the non-technical business professional.  This gives you the power to use these tools as you see fit.  When it comes to the heavy lifting you can always lean on the statisticians and software experts.  However, you’re the one who has to make the final business decision.