According to Mashable, Pinterest receives an average of 1.36 million visitors each day, 68 percent of whom are female. While Pinterest’s traffic has declined in recent months, it still presents a huge opportunity for companies to expand their reach.

Business Benefit #1: Traffic

One of the site’s most obvious business benefits is referral traffic. The third-party measurement company Shareaholic recently found that Pinterest referred more traffic to sites than Google Plus, YouTube and LinkedIn combined.

To harness Pinterest’s referral power, first make sure your content is pinnable. You can test how well your content transfers to Pinterest by installing a “Pin It” button to your bookmark toolbar and using it to pin images from your own site. You can also install a “Pin It” button directly on your site.

Business Benefit #2: Insights

Traffic isn’t the only benefit Pinterest can bring to your business. The site is also a great source of consumer insights. A quick keyword search can tell you what your audience is discussing and sharing.

Check out what’s being pinned from your competitors’ sites, and how your products and services compare. You can also search Pinterest by category, or use the pinners you follow to see what’s trending at any given moment.

Business Benefit #3: Connections

Honda recently used Pinterest to connect with influencers, offering top Pinterest users $500 to take a 24-hour break to actually experience the stuff they’ve been pinning about.

“We’re just dipping our toes in the water here with our first campaign,” said Lauren Ebner, assistant manager of social media at American Honda Motor Co. “But it will be a good opportunity to market some of our vehicle launches.”

In a similar campaign, Kotex identified 50 influential Pinterest users and sent them each a customized gift box based on their pins. These efforts led to 2,284 online interactions and 694,853 total brand impressions, according to Adverblog.

Business Benefit #4: Inspiration

Many companies are using Pinterest as a place to gather ideas and inspiration. Here at JPL, employees use the site to research everything from food styling to color palates and video production techniques. You can use Pinterest to generate new product ideas, identify trends and even zero in on business opportunities.

Sharing what inspires you not only inspires others. It can also establish you as a thought leader in your field: someone others look to for news and information about your industry.

Pinterest Business Benefit #5: Recruitment

A growing number of HR departments use Pinterest to recruit top talent. After all, it’s a great place to connect with people over shared interests.

But don’t stop there. Use Pinterest to share your unique company culture. Create a board that highlights area attractions, and invite employees to contribute their ideas. You can even pin employee profiles, and create your own office “yearbook.” You’re limited only by your imagination.

How have you seen Pinterest benefit your business? What ideas would you like to implement in the future? Let us know in the comments section!

No doubt Wanamaker spent plenty of money on advertising to drive traffic to his store, and he used the best techniques of his day─target as best you can, hope your message connects and get corresponding results if you’re lucky. Ironically, this basic marketing approach lasted from Wanamaker’s day until just a few years ago. But times have changed and so has the opportunity to target and measure marketing with precision. You’ve heard of Google right? Paid search is the most fundamental change in ad targeting in 100 years. And now Facebook enables ad targeting with arguably even more precision.

But here’s the thing:  Using these remarkable new marketing tools is not enough. To get the most out of them requires a new marketing approach that lets you benefit from the precise targeting and measurability. We call this approach Marketing Intelligence.

Marketing Intelligence is a way of using data-driven decisions to guide the planning, implementation and adaptation of marketing campaigns.

Better Messaging

Think of how you develop the marketing message. You do some research (if you’re lucky enough to have time), write the creative brief,  and then develop messaging by interpreting the brief. Sounds thorough, but the reality is you’re guessing. The only way to know if a message connects is to run the ad and see if it works. Suddenly that’s possible through Google Ad Words (and other paid search services like Microsoft adCenter).

With paid search campaigns, you can create a bunch of ads with different messages, run them all, and constantly adjust your spending. You’re able to increase your investment in the strongest ads so your plan is constantly improving.  But you can also do this as a way of testing messaging that you’ll use in other media. Why not run a quick paid search campaign and test three headlines to see which works best; then use the winning headline in a print ad or radio campaign.

Better Targeting

You’ve seen the old media kits. They detail months-old survey data that projects audience delivery. And you’ve heard the standard voice over, “Oh and by the way, the numbers do include  ‘pass along’ because we get multiple readers in doctors’ offices.” Then you run the ad and hope that you’ve reached at least as many prospects as the media plan said you would.

Targeting with paid search is totally different.  Rather than reaching the most, you want to reach the best. There’s no point in having poor prospects consume your media budget with their clicks if they’re not going to convert. So this is where the Marketing Intelligence approach applies.

First, track website visitors you gain through paid search all the way to their conversion point (maybe a  form submission or an online purchase). Then, increase spending behind ads and search terms that convert, not ones that merely drive traffic. Again, you are constantly improving your campaign as it runs.

Another targeting technique that digital media has suddenly made possible is to target based on psychographics instead of just demographics. For example, we recently ran digital advertising related to March Madness that targeted prospects based on their team allegiance. Using data from Facebook profiles, we delivered ads with headlines that included team names, “Go Bulldogs!” And as teams were eliminated, corresponding ads were turned off. In terms of results, the campaign converted site visitors to promotion participants at a healthy rate of 19%. Interestingly, site visitors who were active fans of the top four teams converted at a rate of 30%!

Better Results

John Wanamaker couldn’t tell what part of his ad budget was wasted. Today, not only can you tell, but better yet, you can keep from wasting it before it is gone. Messages can be tested before they run, or adjusted in real time based on actual results. And audiences can be targeted based on fleeting interests and momentary online activities.  Clearly the marketing tools have changed. And the techniques need to change with them. Marketing Intelligence is how.

Only 16% of your fans see your Facebook content

A study by Allfacebook.com revealed that less than 0.5% of your fans visit your page after they have “liked” it. This makes sense because after they have “liked” your page your content will be pushed to them via the news feed. Well, a second study conducted by comScore shows that brands are reaching only 16% of their Facebook fans each week through the news feed. This is because Facebook’s news feed only shows those brand pages that you and your friends have recently engaged with. This is referred to as Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm, and it is directly responsible for the visibility of your Facebook content.

Sixteen percent and 0.5% are extremely low numbers based on the time that it takes to manage and maintain your page. Bottom line, this is low ROI. So, what can be done to increase your page’s visibility?

The Facebook page paradox

Increasing the visibility of your Facebook page is a simple formula. Increase content engagement and you will increase your content’s visibility within news feeds. But, how do you increase engagement if someone doesn’t see your content in their news feed in the first place? This is the paradox of marketing through Facebook brand pages.

Increasing visibility and engagement through Facebook ads

The good news is that there is a solution to increase your Facebook content’s visibility. The answer is Facebook advertising. Here are a few examples of what JPL has done to increase visibility for our clients’ brands through Facebook ads.

Sponsored Posts
Target existing fans with Facebook ads featuring your most engaging posts from the past, or create a new post based on a question or poll. The goal is to initiate a conversation with your fans who have not seen your content in some time. When they respond to your post, engagement has begun and your content should start appearing in their news feed. By doing this with a client’s brand, we were able to increase reach by 290% and engagement by 580%.

Target the Friends of Fans
By targeting the friends of your current fans, you can increase your fan base and regain awareness with your current fans through the connections that your fans have with their friends. When a friend of your fan likes your page, this will appear in the news feed because your fan is connected to two entities – their friend and your page. We conducted a campaign focusing on this targeting and increased daily reach by 8,200% and total content impressions by 10,000%.

Conduct a Facebook Promotion
Develop a promotion that encourages your fans to visit your page or website to enter. The click to visit the promotion counts as engagement. This engagement will help your page appear in the news feed. Within a month, we were about to increase overall post impressions by 750% and increase content engagement by 237% by advertising a sweepstakes targeted at current fans of a page.

Reach Generator
Soon Facebook will be releasing a new version of their ad platform that will guarantee posts will reach around 75% of fans. It is called Reach Generator and is essentially a pay-for-placement model. It increases visibility by placing ads directly into an individual’s news feed even if they have not engaged with your content in some time.

Facebook is no longer free

Marketing on Facebook has changed. Fundamentally, marketers must think of their Facebook initiatives in a different way. Marketing on Facebook requires new tactics including creating more engaging content and greater investment. The free ride is over.

Additional Resources

Can Brands Market on Facebook Without Actually Spending Money on Advertising?

One way to cut through the clutter is to take the path followed by great artists: simplify, reduce and focus.

Too often, we try to say too much. In the noisy world we live in, we just need to say less. No matter how much you tell them, most readers remember only one thing. By simplifying our communications to just one or two main points, and presenting them in a memorable way, we improve our chances of retention.

“Impression: Sunrise,” Claude Monet (1872)

Artists – such as poets, painters, playwrights and even cartoonists – strip away the confusing parts of the human condition to reveal its essential truths. Their work usually focuses on one idea that reflects their point of view on the world.

In design terms, they remove the clutter of everyday life and replace it with white space to help us focus on what’s important. They make the complex simple.

As marketers, we should do the same: Figure out the single, most important idea and strip away unnecessary information so the main idea comes through clearly. And frame it in an engaging package (story and design) to make sure our audience enjoys spending time with it.

We call ourselves modern, but we process information in traditional ways. Marketing communications can benefit from classical form as taught by the ancient Greeks and recreated by artists over the centuries. According to Aristotle, stories should have a beginning, middle and end. Plots need excitement. Characters should be appealing and sympathetic. Focus is everything.

Our world may seem more jumbled than ever before, but that’s all the more reason to return to simple, recognizable forms in our marketing communications. Structure and form promote clarity and understanding, especially in our over-stimulated environment.

The show in question, “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory” took a critical look at working conditions of Apple suppliers. It was based on a one-man show by performer Mike Daisey, “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.”

The Invention of Lying

Since its broadcast in January 2012, “Mr. Daisey” had become the most popular podcast in “This American Life” history, with almost a million downloads to date. But when other journalists noticed inconsistencies in the story, Daisey’s story began to unravel.

Additional fact-checking revealed that Daisey had fabricated many of the details about Apple’s employees, from their ages to their work-related disabilities. In doing so, he joined a long list of writers who have taken liberties with the truth. He also sparked a PR nightmare for “This American Life.”

The Art of the Apology

Host Ira Glass and his team could have chosen not to respond. They could have issued a quiet retraction, and pulled the audio from their website. Instead they took ownership of the situation, creating a new episode that admitted fault, investigated the fabrications and revealed where the truth went slant.

“The episode is agonizing listening,” writes Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. “In an interview with Ira Glass … Mr. Daisey is evasive, obfuscatory and occasionally contrite in responding to questions about how his version of events differs from that of the interpreter.”

While Glass doesn’t downplay Daisey’s responsibility for the fabrications, he does take full ownership for the situation.

“I can say now in retrospect that when Mike Daisey wouldn’t give us contact information for his interpreter, we should have killed the story rather than run it,” Glass said on air. “We are not happy to have done anything to hurt the reputation of the journalism that happens on this radio station every day. So we want to be completely transparent about what we got wrong and what we now believe is the truth.”

Many appreciated this transparency. Listeners flooded the program’s Facebook page with support. Comedian Steve Martin tweeted, “A standing ovation and a boy scout salute to the dignity of ‘This American Life.’”

Crisis Management at its Best

The show’s response boils down to three steps: acknowledge the problem, embrace transparency and take corrective action. By doing so, “This American Life” turned a PR crisis into opportunity: an opportunity for learning. For discussion. For more hard-hitting journalism.

Dan Marovitz of Time Back Management compares the show’s response to Johnson & Johnson’s handling of the 1982 Tylenol scare: “swift, clear, unambiguous — clearly placing the interests of the consumer first. It’s a model of crisis management. And a model of leadership.”

But the power of these steps doesn’t stop at public relations. They can be applied to almost any area of business. Customer service. Human resources. Even marketing.

You don’t have to be responsible for a problem to find its solution. But you do have to acknowledge its existence. After that, transparency and swift action can help you take ownership of the situation and transform it into an opportunity for positive change.

On the surface it makes perfect sense. Why invest time and budget resources into marketing when you are already turning away 50 percent (or more) of your applicants?

It’s a good question. But here are some other questions that we ask of those marketers. Wouldn’t you like to have your admissions team spending more time with highly qualified prospects? Would you like to be in the position to be even more selective?

Done right, a strong higher education marketing program can do much more than just drive MORE prospects. It can, and should, drive the RIGHT prospects.

Who are the right prospects?

The ones that best align with your brand
When you read your mission statement, what type of students come to mind? Which students are the ones that your institution is best prepared to serve? Those are the “right” students. Your brand is different than your competitors’. The experience at your institution is unique. It isn’t for everyone. The right students match your brand. And vice versa.

The ones that finish their degrees
Retention is important to every institution. The “right” students are the ones who have the best chance of being successful at your institution. From the outset, these students just “fit.”  They belong there. And they stay there to graduate with a degree.

Why do the right prospects matter?

Positive representatives of your institution
When your students graduate and enter the real world to start their careers, they carry your institution’s name with them. When you have the “right” students, you are proud to have them represent your brand. And they are proud to be associated with your institution.

Positive influencers
The “right” students leave your school satisfied and excited about their experience. When others are looking for input, your students – the ones who align with your institutional strengths and focus – are likely to share those positive experiences and serve as brand ambassadors for your college or university. We know that prospective students often seek input from current students and graduates. If you have the “right” students, they will say the “right” things.

Long term engagement
Lastly, the “right” students are likely to stay engaged with your school for years to come. They become members of your alumni association. They help with mentoring and career services programs. They may even become financial supporters. This long-time relationship pays ongoing dividends on the investment that you’ve made in the students.

How do you find them?

Here are a few ideas to help you find more of the “right” students, and keep them:

• Segment your market and defining the specific kinds of students who align with your institution’s direction and strengths.
• Define your brand strategy – your student experience – specifically for those targeted students.
• Form an integrated, metrics-driven communications program that engages those students in a way that is relevant and meaningful to them.

In the end, you’ll end up with better alignment between your institution and your students. You’ll have more students who are positioned for success. And you’ll form those long-term relationships that continue well beyond graduation, and benefit your institution for years to come.

Since many of you did not have two hours to attend the fMC webinar, here’s a summary of what you need to do to update your Facebook page and what these changes mean to you as a marketer.

 

Getting your Page ready for Timeline

Your Facebook page is where your brand connects with its fans by sharing news, posting events, gathering feedback and creating unique content. Similar to the transition Facebook has made for individual profile pages, brand pages will now have the Timeline. This transition will happen March 30, 2012. If you have a brand page, there are a few things that you need to do to be ready for this change.

• Create a cover photo (B1). This is the main image at the top of your Timeline. It should capture the essence of your brand. The photo cannot include pricing, contact information, calls to action or reference Facebook actions such as “Like our page.” Optimal photo size is 851 x 315px.
• Update your profile image (B2) to the new size of 180 x 180px. This is the image that will appear next to each of your  posts.
• Prioritize your tabs and applications (B3). By default Facebook will only show 4 tabs under the cover photo, one being your photos. Others will be viewable by clicking an arrow, but the top 4 will be the most visible. Determine which of these applications are the most important to you and your fans and make that tab first.
• Review your historical Facebook posts and content (B4). The Timeline provides you with the ability to “Star” important posts and content which will allow these posts to be visible to all visitors. Hide posts that are not as engaging or relevant. Create Milestones on your Timeline with a large photo for such things as product releases, important events and brand announcements. Update the date of your posts to reflect when things really happened and “Pin” your most important post to the top of your page.
• Allow more time for management and analytics. Engagement is key to success in Facebook. With the launch of Timeline, Facebook updated the admin panel to allow for further insights into individual post performance and page demographics. With these metrics, you will be able to determine which posts are the most effective in reaching your audience and creating engagement among your fans. Use this information to create more engaging posts in the future. Secondly, individuals will now have the ability to message brand pages directly which means that marketers will need to spend more time answering messages and responding to fans than ever before.
• Post your new page. If you are ready, you don’t have to wait until March 30. Post your page immediately and let your fans know. Get their feedback and start driving traffic to your page and generating additional engagement.

Additional Facebook Resources

Introduction to Facebook Pages
Facebook Pages Introduction Video
Facebook Pages Training Course
Best Practices for your Facebook Page and Media Strategy
Best Practices by Verticals

However, implementing this valuable technology isn’t easy. In that same study, IT issues such as implementation and reliability are cited as a major barrier to usage.

So what’s a marketer to do?

You’re getting pressure from the top to show results, but the subsequent meetings and cost to implement tracking technology can nearly break you.

Enter IT.

Partnering with your information technology team will become increasingly critical as demand for measurement increases.

Gone are the days of Marketing and IT divided by several flights of stairs and a front room, back room mentality. To implement the technology that marketers want and need, they need IT beside them every step of the way, not only supporting them, but advising them.

How do you make that shift in your organization? Here are a couple ideas:

Get IT involved early

• Invite them to the planning meeting, instead of bringing them in after a direction has been determined. Allow them to be part of the process so they can become another champion for your initiative and think through issues from the start.

Share the big picture with them

• Express why this initiative is important and ultimately what it can achieve for the company.  And, outline your plan for how to use and manage the data after the implementation, since stability and security are some of their biggest concerns.

When this happens, here’s what you can expect: Technology will get implemented faster with fewer complications leading to savings in time and costs.  And if issues do crop up, you’ll have another partner engaged and willing to help you resolve them.

When IT is willing and able to participate in this approach, it’s a step in changing their perception as a potential roadblock to an invaluable partner ready to help the company blaze new technology trails. Not only marketing will benefit. It’s a win-win for everyone.

How is your company bringing Marketing and IT together to improve technology implementation? What’s worked for you? What hasn’t?

The challenge is how to derive insight from all the data. In other words, what can you learn about the customer who left their digital footprints? Start by looking at the data from your website. It is easily available and it paints a picture of customer behavior based on thousands of recent customer interactions. And look at these three metrics:

1) Traffic flow
2) Bounce rate (% of website visitors who leave from the first page they visit)
3) Most popular website content

Traffic Flow

Traffic flow is the first line graph you see when you open your website’s Google Analytics account. The line graph will probably show a consistent up and down wave pattern, which represents the predictable ebb and flow of website traffic during every week.

Google Analytics Traffic Flow

This report may also show some spikes which are dramatic increases in traffic. Investigate these spikes to learn something useful about your customers’ behavior. You may learn:

• Your ad campaign is creating interest in your brand
• Seasonal buying patterns are in effect
• Or, some other factor is at work like a weather event or a news story

Once you identify the cause of increased traffic, you can activate a plan to repeat that.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who arrive at your home page, then leave without going any deeper into your site. A high bounce rate means that your home page is failing to pull visitors into your site.

To learn more about bounce rate, use the “in page” report in Google Analytics to see a depiction of your home page with the click-through percentage shown for every interior link as an orange box. This shows you graphically which links draw traffic.

Insight from this report may impact your online and offline marketing approach by enabling you to emphasize content and messaging that triggers real consumer action.

Most Popular Website Pages

This report tells you the number of visits to each page on your site. From it, you can learn how customers are interacting with your website and about their preferences overall.

Let’s say you are a hospital. This “pages” report might show that some of the most popular pages on your site are: careers, locations and find a doctor. From this, you can deduce that your website is serving a utilitarian purpose for your patients and the general public. And you might decide that you can improve your website by making these pages even easier to find.

But let’s dig deeper by looking at what pages related to health issues are the most popular. You might see that the page devoted to coronary health is the most popular. And you might see that blog posts by physicians related to this topic garner almost four minutes of “average time on page”─twice the website’s overall average. Now you have learned something about customers’ preferences, something that can help you plan and target your overall marketing efforts.

With the “data explosion” that is happening for marketers, the problem is not that customer footprints are hard to read, the problem is that there are so many of them. I suggest you start with the customer data that is fresh, free, available and easy to read─ the customer data that your website is already providing. Start there and see what you learn.

1: Gartner from Ad Age, 2/13/12: “When CMOs Learn to Love Data, They’ll Be VIPs in the C-Suite; ”  http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/cmos-learn-love-data-c-suite-vips/232699/
2 “From Stretched to Strengthened,” IBM Global CMO Study, 2011

Do we know that our competitors plan to steal our customers while we continue with “Business as Usual?”

Managing brands and marketing departments is challenging when work loads are high. From daily meetings to status reports, keeping the business moving is what we do.

Taking time to see an outside-in view of our brand can seem like an impossible task.

Brand audit

A well-choreographed brand audit can improve your competitive position. It will also provide clear direction for future growth.

A well planned brand audit includes:

• Messaging – Does your current message still resonate with your target audience?
• Industry and Markets – Does your product and service offerings still meet the needs and demands of your target?
• Communications – Are you on top of the ever-changing digital landscape? Are you using these new tools effectively?
• Competition – Are there new competitors, services or products you need to know about? How are they marketing against you?
• Visual Identity – Are you presenting your organization in a progressive, compelling way that connects with your target market? Does it break through the clutter?
• Your Promise – Are you still delivering on your brand promise at every customer touch point?

Taking the time to conduct an objective review of your business is critical to developing your brand and making sure you are positioned to capitalize on growth opportunities.

A brand audit is vital for any business.

Stop functioning with the “Business as Usual” mindset, and put your organization in a better position. Conduct a brand audit and re-define your brand strategically. It will re-energize and re-focus your business and serve as a powerful driver for success.