MySpace also recently laid off 30% of its workforce.

Sign 1: You bought the tool a year ago, and you’re still not measuring your business objectives.

Sign 2: You still have to remind the executive team what your company’s KPIs are (hint: key performance indicators).

Sign 3: You create these beautiful dashboards, and no one knows what they mean.

Sign 4: Your boss is always asking about the number of “hits” your company’s website is getting.

Sign 5: You’re still scratching your head wondering what you should segment and how it will help.

Sign 6: Even though your homepage has an 80 percent bounce rate, your boss doesn’t want a change because he/she likes the way it looks.

Sign 7: You’re running multiple online marketing campaigns, and you have no idea which performs better.

Sign 8: The one time you ran an A/B test, a winner was chosen — but no improvements ensued.

Sign 9: You still can’t figure out why total site visits don’t add up in all the reports.

Sign 10: You still design with HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) standards in mind.

Read the full article.

Here are the top three social networks in some of the worlds major markets:

Australia: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter
Canada: Facebook, MySpace, Flickr
India: Facebook, Orkut, Hi5 (Twitter is a close fourth)
France: Facebook, Skyrock, MySpace,
China: QQ, Xiaonei, 51
Germany: Facebook, StudiVZ, MySpace
Italy: Facebook, Netlog, Badoo
Russia: V Kontakte, Odnoklassniki, LiveJournal
Spain: Facebook, Tuenti, Fotolog
United Kingdom: Facebook, Bebo, MySpace
United States: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter

The full map (click to enlarge):

AIR TouchPoints is an electronic online branding and marketing communication platform that will enable companies to fully engage and educate customers on the depth and appeal of their products, cross-sell and up-sell among brand choices, and grow additional revenue.

TouchPoints leverages the Cyclone (database) platform to optimize the impact of customer data on marketing. This integration of customer data helps to extend the company brand beyond a single purchase and can help deliver repeat business. TouchPoints will also provide a value proposition to new customers by allowing them to receive personalized offers, promotions and opportunities.

TouchPoints enables clients to consolidate their various affinity and partner marketing programs under one umbrella and streamline the marketing and rate distribution process to maximize efficiency and results. This allows clients to fully merchandise partner opportunities and guide customers into the TouchPoints solution.

Given the fiercely competitive and economically volatile environment, implementing a sophisticated and highly-personalized customer loyalty and customer acquisition initiative may yield many benefits for companies, including:

• Ongoing communication with customers with targeted and specific messaging, allowing us to create stronger relationships with our customers
• Support a portfolio of brands with a strong, integrated corporate marketing effort
• Cross-sell and up-sell the brands in the portfolio, increasing awareness of, and affinity for, the overall company
• Better understanding of the buying habits of customers
• Effectively supporting the “experience” of product attributes and features
• Providing content and information related to customer preferences
• Increasing incremental revenue spend
• Mitigating use of third-party channels and additional expenses
• Maximizing marketing dollars and reducing costs to acquire new customers

How AIR TouchPoints Works

AIR TouchPoints is comprised of both a loyalty program and ongoing corporate automated e-communications. The loyalty program can be promoted on the website, where customers can sign up and provide preference information. All brand-based loyalty programs, e-clubs and email sign up platforms can ultimately link under the umbrella of TouchPoints, but will still maintain their individual identity and value proposition.

Automated corporate e-communications and special promotions will be developed through the use of profiles and predictive modeling from Cyclone. TouchPoints will provide personalized customer communication and offer relevant, value-based packages and promotions in addition to dynamic and original content in the form of articles, podcasts, videos and other third-party content.  A set of business rules is developed to ensure that each customer is provided with the information they desire, when they want to receive it, ensuring that customers are not spammed or receive excessive communication.

AIR TouchPoints can be customized for each company and can be adapted to meet its particular marketing and sales goals. So naturally, this is only a very high-level view of its features and capabilities.

The things that make a tribal leader (which we should all aspire to be if we’re interested in success) requires going against the norm, identifying with the culture of the tribe and committing to it. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to Seth Godin.

Lorraine Bergman, CEO of Caliente Construction, Angela Leavitt, director of marketing at Telesphere, and Elaine Ralls, president of Air Marketing, are finalists for Tempe Chamber of Commerce’s 2009 Business Woman of the Year.
…

The winner will be honored at the 14th Annual Women In Business Conference & Trade Show May 21 at The Buttes in Tempe. For more: www.tempechamber.org or 480-967-7891.

Congratulations Elaine!

Pat McMahon, long time host on KTAR, was the master of ceremonies, introducing each part of the evening, while poking fun here and there. Each of the business ethics finalists were announced on stage to accept their “finalist” award before dinner began.  The Arizona Biltmore staff provided impeccable service throughout the evening; dinner and dessert were equally delicious.

Keynote speaker

Ken Blanchard, author of several books including The One Minute Manager, served as the keynote speaker, delivering a speech relevant to business ethics in the marketplace today. Mr. Blanchard is the namesake to the Ken Blanchard School of Business at the only private university in the state of Arizona - Grand Canyon University - and possesses an entrepreneurial spirit that has led him through a number of ventures over the years. He now owns businesses in three countries and is a sought after speaker and author.

Ken reminded business owners that it is imperative to respect your employees to gain their trust. Without respect, they will not trust you. And without trust, the energy in the room turns negative.   There are three things that Ken and his colleagues ask themselves before making any business decision:

• Is it legal?
• Is it fair to all involved?
• Would you want to be recognized for it? Would you want it printed in tomorrow’s newspaper?

“It all goes back in the box”

Ken told an endearing story about playing Monopoly with his ultra-competitive grandmother as a child, who often won the game without leaving a thing for Ken. Ken met a kid in his new neighborhood who was excellent at Monopoly strategy, and agreed to teach Ken. He then went head to head with his grandmother, winning the game! But at the end, his grandmother said “Ken, what you need to remember is this: at the end, it all goes back in the box”.

Ken was kind enough to give each attendee a copy of his new book: The One Minute Entrepreneur, and he signed copies  in the lobby at the end of the night.

Wells Fargo has been the corporate sponsor since the event began 8 years ago, and provided the table prizes - a Wells Fargo stage coach cookie jar. Our own president, Elaine Ralls, won the prize at our table!

AIR Marketing was honored to be a winner of the 2006 BBB Business Ethics Awards, and last year Elaine Ralls served as Chairman of the Board of Better Business Bureau.

In today’s economy, every CMO, marketing manager and director is being questioned on the value of each marketing program. The days of free-flowing campaigns with non-defined goals are long gone. Today, it’s all about running highly focused campaigns with direct, measurable results. To that end, the best way to ensure maximum ROI is to have a clear definition of your target audience. Marketing campaigns built on effective customer/prospect targeting have a much better chance of delivering a significant ROI.

That is why I asked Fred Pratt, Vice President of Marketing Analytics & Technology at AIR Marketing, to share some of his insights on what makes targeting an effective marketing tool.

MY QUESTION: How do you determine the parameters to effectively target prospects?

FRED’S ANSWER:  It’s always best to clearly define the objective for the initiative: Is it customer acquisition, retention or growth (up-sell/cross-sell)? Once this is defined, it tells you the type of data that can be used. For example, acquisition targets cannot be based on transactional data, so you must rely on demographics or other data enhancements. The strongest attributes that any company can use is their own data. These will be most predictive and should definitely be used for retention and growth targeting.

Also, in selecting target criteria, it is important to exclude attributes that are directly correlated to the behavior being targeted. For example, if a resort is trying to target past guests for an upcoming summer stay, they should not use ‘months since last stay’ as an attribute because guests that visited last summer would, by definition, have a defined number of months since their last visit.

Q: How do you know when your target parameters are working?

A: You can measure the strength of target criteria in advance by using adequate sample sizes and predictive models. The models will only bring in target variables that are statistically significant. Once the model is built, it should be tested against a separated random sample to ensure the strength of the target. When applied to a campaign, it is always recommended to set up a control group to measure the real world performance of the campaign.

Q: When you develop a customer profile, how much information do you include?

A: That’s a difficult question to answer because it depends on the type of attributes and the number of possible outcomes within each attribute. Generally, a sample size of 10,000 or more will enable you to develop a solid customer profile, although a sample of 5,000 can be at least directional. The actual number of criteria used in a profile is usually from 7 - 12. Keep in mind that these are the result of sifting through sometimes hundreds of possible variables. Predictive models can sometimes bring in up to 20 variables; however, the most robust models have just a few variables.

Q: Is this dynamic? Meaning, do targeting definitions change with time?

A: Profiles do change over time, and as a result, should be updated at least annually. Some types of profiles are much more dynamic and require quarterly or monthly refreshes. An example is the profile of online resources or search keywords that a prospect uses when making purchase decisions. Some profiles actually get stronger over time, which can be limiting. This can happen when all marketing initiatives are based on the profile; then the only conversions fit the profile, thus it gets stronger and stronger. In this case, companies need to watch performance results carefully and recognize that trends are changing if campaign performance begins to fall off. This can be avoided by constantly testing and having multiple tiers of profiles.

Q: How dramatically does targeting improve marketing campaigns?

A: This can vary dramatically. Depending on the data and type of product/service profiled, campaign results will generally show a 40% - 60% lift compared to a non-targeted list. As with anything, there are tradeoffs. If you have limited marketing funds, a product/service that appeals to a specific type of customer and a large potential prospect market, then using predictive models can yield 100%+ lift. Targeting produces the best performance for companies with finite marketing budgets (almost everyone) and products/services that are not commodities.

Day-parting, as it is known in the industry, is an essential component to any successful PPC strategy. Day-parting means you alter your keyword bid prices depending on the time of day and day of week. So, you can bid $1.00 for a keyword during your highest traffic times and reduce that bid price to $0.50 during off peak hours (this is just an illustration).

Effective day-parting involves knowing when your high value prospects are conducting searches and ensuring your ads are displayed at that exact moment. The goal is to identify the most “conversion-rich” days of the week and times of day. The daily budget is then allocated to those days and times in an effort to truly maximize ROI. The best source to get this data is your organic traffic data from Google Analytics (or other site traffic monitoring software). Below is the hour by hour traffic pattern for one of the campaigns we manage. As you can see in the chart below, 80% of the traffic to their website arrives during normal business hours and evenings (until 11pm). There is very little traffic during the wee-hours of the night.

Additionally, the day of week traffic data below reveals that 80% of the traffic is between Mondays and Fridays.

Once a proper analysis has been conducted, the information can then be incorporated into your bidding strategy. So, in our case, we may choose to do the following:

• Weekdays: 9 am – 11 pm maintain bid price
• Weekdays: 11 pm – 9 am 60% of max bid price
• Weekends: 9 am – 11 pm 60% of max bid price
• Weekends: 11 pm – 9 am 30% of max bid price

There is no hard and fast rule on how to alter the daily bid prices. I suggest starting with a reasonable number and then making changes as your campaign progresses.

While day-parting can be very effective mechanism to maximize the daily budget, it is important to take into consideration purchase cycle latency and the purchasing funnel. Not all consumers are ready to purchase when they conduct a search, and we certainly want to be under consideration as they evaluate their options. To counter act this, we often analyze past customer behavior to estimate purchase lead time as well as any other factors which may be relevant to making adjustments. We will also set up different campaigns with different day-parting schedules to make sure we are observing alternate patterns to obtain insights on how to improve day-parting schedules.