Category Archives: ROI

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Fortune 500 Companies Achieve ROI with LinkedIn

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Money at HandA recent Fortune Magazine article, How LinkedIn Will Fire Up a Career, provides a great example of social media delivering significant financial savings to Fortune 500 companies. 

The article initially talks about how Accenture, a major player in management consulting, plans on hiring tens of thousands of new employees in 2010.  Then, the author asks its readers "will Accenture be able to find you" and further discusses the importance of online visibility (specifically through LinkedIn).  The article states: "If you don't have a profile on LinkedIn, you're nowhere." 

I agree with this opinion and have commented on this point in previous posts.  However, I believe there are other relevant insights from the article particularly LinkedIn's success in generating tangible return on investment (ROI) in Fortune 500 recruiting: 

 

1. LinkedIn Saves Fortune 500 Companies Significant Money and Time
According to John Campagnino, Accenture's Head of Global Recruiting, a major recruiting firm's fees can cost $100,000 to $150,000 per person.  Campagnino goes further and says: "Start multiplying that by a number of senior executives, and you start talking about significant numbers of dollars very quickly."  In addition, online services like LinkedIn decrease the time it takes to fill positions by nearly 50%.  Arlette Guthrie, Home Depot's Vice President of Talent Management, says time to fill a position is an important metric among recruiters.

In my opinion, these significant cost savings in money and time clearly demonstrate the financial value of social media.  Having a well-respected business periodical like Fortune publicize these results will increase the credibility and adoption of social media in America's largest corporations. 

2. Other Fortune 500 Companies Recruiting Successfully with LinkedIn
Here are some of the companies mentioned in the article on how they're successfully using LinkedIn (and these are major brand name corporations):

Accenture.  Campagnino further elaborates that he plans to make as many as 40% of Accenture's hires in the next few years through social media.  He says: "This is the future of recruiting for our company.

IBM.  Annie Shanklin Jones, Head of IBM's U.S. Recruiting, says LinkedIn "is a great equalizer" and "gives the recruiter an opportunity to reach out directly to a candidate."  She says, "LinkedIn is the most important social media site for reaching prospective hires."  Also, the article points out that IBM was a first-mover in experimenting with social networking particularly for recruiting talent.  It uses Twitter to broadcast job openings, and the company organizes its own talent communities.   

Oracle.  The firm found its CFO, Jeff Epstein through LinkedIn in 2008.

Home Depot.  Guthrie says Home Depot uses LinkedIn to find candidates for difficult-to-fill jobs such as supply chain, information technology, and global sourcing.  Their recruiters use LinkedIn to research potential hires, engage with them in groups, and respond to inquiries.

3. Fortune 500 Companies Target "Passive Candidates" by Using LinkedIn
Fortune 500 firms perceive that the most talented and sought-after candidates are those currently employed.  Headhunters categorize these individuals as "passive candidates," and LinkedIn provides a target-rich population.  Finding these candidates is difficult and explains why the recruiting industry is an $8 billion industry.

LinkedIn currently has 60 million members.  A typical member's profile is a college-educated 43-year-old making $107,000.  More than a quarter are senior executives.  According to the article, every Fortune 500 company is represented on LinkedIn — and that's why recruiters rely on it to recruit high-caliber talent.

In May 2009, JobVite published the results of its second annual Social Recruitment Survey.  Here are some findings relevant to this post:

* 77% of respondents said they use social networks to reach passive candidates who are not actively seeing employment
* Among online sites used to research candidates, LinkedIn was first (76%) followed by search engines (67%), Facebook (44%), and Twitter (21%).

Bonus Round: Helpful Resources for Achieving ROI with Your Own LinkedIn Profile
I hope you feel this post made a good case for the financial ROI Fortune 500 companies are producing with LinkedIn.  Here are some additional resources you may find helpful in achieving ROI with your personal LinkedIn Profile:

* Mashable — HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn by Dan Schawbel
* HubSpot Internet Marketing Blog — 4 Minutes to Optimize a LinkedIn Profile for SEO by Mike Volpe

Photo Credit: From Flickr by Don Hankins

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Avinash Kaushik’s Rules for Insightful & Actionable Web Analytics

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Picture of Avinash Kaushik Amazon Profile Avinash Kaushik, is THE defacto thought leader in web analytics.  I study his blog, Occam's Razor, and his books, Web Analytics an Hour a Day and Web Analytics 2.0.  I've also attended his webinars and am always grateful for the insights he generously shares.

In this blog post, I'll discuss what I've learned from Avinash's webinars.  His insights explain how companies can reinvent measurement of their online marketing initiatives.  Also, I've added extra notes by including content from his books.

 

Rule #1: Review & Take Action on Your Bounce Rates

Avinash is passionate about how marketers can improve the performance of their websites.  This is why he espouses implementing metrics that will reveal when your site is performing poorly (e.g., your site sucks).

J0422750[1] Bounce Rate: A Powerful Measurement of Website Performance and Visitor Behavior.

Avinash defines bounce rate as an "audience behavior" metric that tells you (1) if your visitors are coming to your site and leaving right away or (2) if they're staying longer to read more of your site's content. 

From Web Analytics 2.0, he defines bounce rate as "the percentage of sessions on your website with only one page view." 

 

Examine Your Bounce Rates and Take Action.  Bounce rate benchmarks that he recommends in monitoring and evaluating your blog / website:

  • Good: 25% to 30%
  • Not-so-Good: 50% or higher
  • Low bounce rates may provide clues on undiscovered referral traffic (is that traffic valuable?)
  • High bounce rates provide an indication that audience engagement may be low for particular pages or specific content 

For blogs, a bounce rate might be high for a particluar page or post because the visitor reads the post and then exits.  That's not a bad thing, but if you want to learn more valuable insights your blog, Kaushik recommends examining and segmenting the bounce rates of your new visitors.  Based on his sample screen shots, it looks like segmenting new visitors can be performed in Google Analytics.

Here's a great video by Avinash explaining Bounce Rate.  In particular, I admire his highly technical explanation that Bounce Rate is an indication of your website visitor saying, "I came, I puked, I left."

 

 

Rule #2 Move Beyond The Top 10 & Monitor Statistically Significant Changes/Events

J0439363[1]Look Below the Fold. Too often, marketers focus only on their Top 10 Performing Content Titles or Top 10 Performing Pages for insights (Yes, I plead guilty as charged).  Avinash recommends looking deeper by examining items demonstrating significant statistical changes:

* Keywords that are increasing or decreasing
* Top 10 rising content pages / titles
* Top 10 decreasing content pages / titles

Significant Statistical Changes Can Inform Your Content Strategy Choices.  Monitoring these changes results in evidence for altering content strategy.  He suggests setting up "Alerts" in Google Analytics and experimenting with the alert sensitivities.  By drilling down further, we can uncover insights about:

* Referral Source
* Date
* Geography
* Content Type

Demand More From Your Data So You Can Take Action.  Avinash says he often finds important revelations such as new websites that are driving high referral traffic.  One of the first questions he asks is "was it because someone new is linking to me?" If you're not looking for these types of changes, you may lose great marketing opportunities.  That's why we should all "dig deeper" and "look beyond The Top 10."

Rule #3: Segment, Segment, Segment

J0442403[1] Many Different People have Many Different Intentions.  I love the simplicity and power of that statement.  This is a key insight of well-performed web analytics.  Marketers should always strive to understand why the audience visited their websites and even more importantly try to figure out what the audience was trying to learn during its visit.

Analyze the Depth of Visit.  Avinash defines the "depth of visit" as a distribution of the content consumed (e.g., the number of pages people are reading on a particular visit).  In particular, he likes to look at visitors who are consuming three or more pages.  These are the audience members he defines as "Loyalists," and they are visitors to be cherished.

 

Create and Manage Advanced Segments so You Can Love Your Loyalists.  The example Kaushik described here looked like it could be implemented in the "Manage Advanced Segment >> Create Advanced Segment" of Google Analytics.  This form of analysis will tell you the specific type of content that's preferred by specific visitor.

This type of analyses will help you build simple bar charts that you can analyze by what I'll describe broadly as:

* Number of Content Pages of Topic A, B, or C
* % of the Overall Visits Those Content Pages Garner

By looking at your content this way, you can understand:

* Am I emphasizing a particular topic too much?  Look at the % of visits here and determine if they're low (especially if you've dedicated a high number of content pages to this topic)

* Do I need to create more content around a particular topic?  See if you have a low number of dedicated content pages to this topic but the % of overall is visits high.

Rule #4: We Don't Get Love Because We Don't Make It a Goal

GoalLearn How to Set Up Conversion Goals.  This was a key takeaway and another powerful feature I need to learn and set up in Google Analytics.  Avinash defines conversion rate as "the percentage of people who take action on something that's of value to you."  In the case of blogging, these valuable actions could include:

* Subscribing to your blog or newsletter
* Giving you an email address
* Reading the "about page" of your blog 

 

Rule #5: Silence the HIPPOs by Experimenting and Learning to Fail Fast

HIPPOHIPPOs Make a Website Suck.  Avinash defines HIPPOs as the Highest Paid Person's Opinion.  These folks can make a website suck by imposing their opinion (and this opinion may not represent the voice of your customers).  This is why you should conduct experiments and see how they perform.  Point being, if you're going to fail, "fail well" by failing fast.

Google Web Optimizer allows you to perform A/B testing (and you can test for free!).  Even better, you can learn the results in as quickly as 6.5 minutes — now that's fast! 

A sample experiment might be testing how well a certain type of email campaign performs (i.e., includes all images because that's what the HIPPO wants).  You could test different types of emails such as:

* Text only
* All image
* Hybrid

At least this way, you can validate how well different options work with measurable data.  If you have data to back you up, the HIPPO is dead in the water!

If you have some favorite Avinash Kaushik quotes or learnings from his books or presentations, please post them in the comments.  I would love to learn more pieces of wisdom about web analytics!

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5 Insights from HubSpot’s The State of Inbound Marketing 2010 Webinar

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Number 5 

HubSpot conducted a webinar on February 18th titled: The State of Inbound Marketing 2010. The webinar focused on key trends in inbound and outbound marketing uncovered from a survey HubSpot conducted in early 2010.  Hubspot's analysis reveals many insights on how businesses are using inbound marketing to reinvent and improve their marketing strategies. This is great content so I've posted the slides in case you didn't have the opportunity to attend the webinar.

The State of Inbound Marketing 2010

Mike Volpe (VP Marketing @HubSpot) and Adam Blake (MIT-Sloan MBA Student) presented many thoughtful insights.  Here are some golden nuggets that really hit home:

Insight 1 – Cost Per Lead for Inbound Marketing Channels is Significantly Lower Versus Outbound Marketing Channels
(Slide 5) Inbound marketing channels (i.e., social media, blogs, SEO – organic / natural search, PPC – paid search / Adwords) cost per lead averaged around $134.  Outbound marketing channels (i.e., telemarketing, trade shows, direct mail) cost per lead averaged around $332 per lead.  Thus, inbound marketing lowered costs per lead by 60%.

Insight 2 – Almost All Inbound Marketing Channels Generate Lower Costs Compared to Any Outbound Channel
(Slides 6, 7) 63% rated social media and blogs as "below average cost" for generating leads.  43% rated SEO as "below average cost."  In addition, these three inbound marketing channels performed better than all outbound marketing channels.  In slide 7, Mike observed that the outbound channel 2010 results for "below average cost" were better than 2009 for all categories.  He noted customers are probably negotiating better terms due to current economic conditions (e.g., a short-term benefit).

Insight 3 - Social Media is One Component of a Healthy Inbound Marketing Mix
(Slide 8) The lesson here: Don't put all your eggs in one basket.  Although respondents rated social media as their most important source of leads, SEO and blogs rated second and third respectively.  In fact, SEO was rated only 1% lower than social media (i.e., 59% to 60%). 

Successful Google results via organic search will continue to be important.  The eMarketer article, Organic Search Still Reigns, reinforces why landing on the first page results of Google, Yahoo!, and Bing is huge.  The rationale: 95% of search-referred traffic comes from first-page results.  Less than 2% of search-referred traffic comes from visitors willing to keep looking after the second page of results.

Insight 4 - Blog Post Frequency Significantly Impacts Customer Acquisition
(Slides 16, 17) Most respondents said they blog primarily once per week.  However, the firms most successful at customer acquisition were those who blogged more (i.e., two to three times per week, daily, multiple times per day). 
Mike and Adam think this is a result of gaining more experience in blogging.  When a firm blogs more frequently, it gets better at writing.  This yields better content which attracts more site traffic (and firms begin investing more time in their company blog).  When HubSpot was a smaller firm, Mike noted it blogged once per week.  When the firm started growing, their blogging frequency increased and they now create blog posts on a daily basis.

Insight 5 - Smaller Companies Implement Inbound Marketing (Larger Firms Not So Much)
(Slide 13) 44% of smaller firms utilize inbound marketing (versus 32% for larger firms).  Mike and Adam cited how smaller firms have more limited marketing budgets (i.e., many are start-ups).  In addition, the larger firms are more established, and they probably achieved their status through outbound marketing.
Insight #5 doesn't surprise me.  It makes sense why smaller firms would look to blogging, social media, and organic search as natural marketing vehicles.  The biggest expense is the investment and prioritization of time to inbound activities.  For the larger firms, I think they look at inbound marketing as additional channels to augment traditional marketing activity.
Check out this blog post: The Fortune 500 and Social Media by Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross from reputationXchange.com.  It provides some great statistics and data on social media adoption (or lack therof) by the largest US corporations.
What do you think of these findings?  Do these results surprise you?  Please comment and let me know what you think.

Photo Credit: By psd via Flickr

 

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Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah Levels the Marketing Playing Field

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J0105220[1] I am a huge fan of HubSpot and its founders, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah.  Their team members, Mike Volpe and Rebecca Corliss, generously share outstanding content and services (i.e., Inbound Marketing University) to help all marketing professionals continuously improve and reinvent their marketing skills.  This organization is the epitome of a social media core value: “It is always better to give than to receive.”

 Inbound Marketing Book Cover Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs is an outstanding and practical marketing strategy guide targeted to small and startup businesses.  Halligan and Shah have written this book with small and startup businesses in mind because their book shares numerous insights from their own experiences as entrepreneurs (i.e., Tips from the Trenches).

The Value of This Book.  Inbound Marketing makes a convincing case that marketing success is not limited by the size of our respective marketing budgets.  Instead, these limits are now a function of our own creativity and investment of time.  Inbound Marketing practically explains how small or startup businesses can practically and effectively compete with larger competitors by executing:

* Social media strategy via channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
* A lead nurturing and conversion process
* A sales marketing funnel process to measure campaign ROI


Inbound Marketing Versus Outbound Marketing

What’s Inbound Marketing?   Halligan explains the differences between Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing in this blog post: Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing.

Outbound Marketing = Traditional, “Push / Interruption-Based” Marketing.  The marketer pushes the message out far and wide hoping that it resonates far and wide with the target consumer.

Outbound Marketing tactics include:

  • Trade shows
  • Seminar series
  • Email blasts to purchased lists
  • Internal cold calling
  • Outsourced telemarketing
  • Advertising

Inbound Marketing = “Pull” Marketing Leveraging the Internet.  Any marketing tactic that relies on earning people’s interest instead of buying it.  Inbound marketing focuses on helping yourself “get found” by people already learning about and shopping in your industry. 

Inbound Marketing tactics include: 

  • Search engines
  • Blogs
  • Social media sites

The Inbound Marketing Process Transformation.  Three (3) business activities provide foundation for marketing transformation:

  1. Getting found online
  2. Converting visitors and leads
  3. Analyzing and improving

 

The 6 Practical Benefits of Studying Inbound Marketing

1. Understanding how/why Google plays a signifcant role in your marketing success.  Here, Inbound Marketing explains in non-technical terms why inbound links (e.g., links from other websites that connect to your site or blog) play a vital role in your website’s  “Google Juice” or Google Authority (e.g., the number of inbound links to your web pages and the authority of those pages linking to your site).

2. Executing practical and actionable “to-do” lists at the end of every chapter.  The suggestions are hardly rocket science but they require personal commitment, preseverance, and time.

3. Learning social media marketing tactics for use across all major social media channels.  Halligan and Shah ably provide specific examples on how to effectively deploy blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, and YouTube.

4. Measuring the effectiveness of your social media marketing initiatives by channel.  For example, the book guides you on how to compare the effectiveness of a Twitter campaign versus a YouTube campaign.

5. Implementing a lead nurturing process in all marketing campaigns.  Why is this important?  Every prospect is at a different place in the buying cycle for your particular product or service.  Therefore, you want this prospect to have your organization at the “top-of-mind” even when they’re not ready to buy from you (because one day they will be).

6. Informing marketing decisions (e.g., ROI) by creating a sales marketing funnel process.  This process will enable your organization to measure and evaluate campaign yield along with ROI.

 

The 3 Audiences Who Will Benefit from Studying Inbound Marketing 

1. Amateur Bloggers.  You will learn how to build Google Authority for your blog by understanding why you don’t want your blog’s URL address to include the name of your blogging platform.  For example, if your blog’s URL address is www.myblogname.typepad.com or www.myblogname.wordpress.com that’s not good.  Make sure to address this problem — I did and my search engine results are all the better for it.

2. Marketing Professionals (especially CMOs).  You will make better marketing decisions by creating a sales marketing funnel so you can measure campaign effectiveness per channel using campaign yield and ROI measurement techniques.

3. CEOs.  You will learn how to monitor your competitor’s activity and progress by tracking seven (7) attributes.  These attributes can be tracked using free tools on the Internet.  These attributes or tools are:

* Website Grade via WebsiteGrader.com
* Number of Delicious.com bookmarks
* Number of inbound links
* Number of Facebook fans
* Website traffic via Compete.com
* Google Buzz of your brand name relative to a competitor’s brand name

If you’ve read Inbound Marketing, please leave me a comment and let me know what you thought of the book.  I’m curious to know what you found helpful or valuable.

 

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Executive Summary: What Any Business Can Learn About Successful Online Marketing and Audience Engagement from Tina Brown and The Daily Beast

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Thank You to MarketingProfs.com for The Digital Marketing World Fall 2009 Virtual Conference

J0105220[1] For the past 6+ months, I've been a Premium Member of MarketingProfs.com.  I am incredibly grateful for the outstanding content and  services that Ann Handley, Allen Weiss, Beth Harte, and the entire MarketingProfs team GENEROUSLY deliver and share with the professional marketing community.  MarketingProfs does an outstanding job in ensuring that all marketing professionals continue learning and improving their professional performance.

One of the many services they graciously provide for free is The Annual Digital Marketing World Virtual Conference.  The Fall 2009 Conference was stellar and a phenomenal example of the collective excellence The MarketingProfs Team consistently delivers.  The MarketingProfs Digital Marketing World Conference is available as an onDemand archive until December 16, 2009.  I highly encourage you to check it out and let Ann, Allen, and Beth know what you think.

The Tina Brown Keynote Address

Tina Brown MarketingProfs Tina Brown, the renowned magazine editor, best selling author, and founder of TheDailyBeast.com shared her insights and experience on successfully competing for the attention and engagement of online audiences.  I found Brown's observations highly instructive, and Ann Handley deftly facilitated the thought-provoking and entertaining Q&A session. 

I've written a series of five (5) posts detailing my interpretation of the many applicable business lessons from Brown's keynote address.  They're hyperlinked from this home page so you can easily access the different topics of greatest interest to you.  In addition, I've added some of my own commentary from studying the content on The Daily Beast website.  If you're strictly looking for the highlights here you go, and I hope you'll jump in the conversation and add any additional lessons you picked up.

Executive Summary of the Key Lessons Learned from Tina Brown and The Daily Beast

Part 1: Success in Online Publishing and Social Media Requires ReInvention (Even for a Tina Brown)
* In the Online World, We are All in the Business of Sharing
* Social Media is How You Invite the Audience to Join the Conversation
* Participation is the Currency of an Audience-Driven Marketing World

Part 2: Tina Brown and The Daily Beast Understand the Importance of Buyer Personas in Online Strategy
* Understanding Your Audience Starts with Personally Meeting Them
* "Read This, Skip That" and "The Daily Cheat Sheet" Focus the Attention of a Busy, Overwhelmed Audience

Part 3: Tina Brown of The Daily Beast — Online Differentiation Starts by Establishing Your Point-of-View (POV)
* If You Don't Have a Budget, Get Yourself a Point of View
* The Daily Beast Defines Its Point-of-View Around "Where News and Culture Collide"
* Emotion Further Differentiates a Point-of-View
* Generating the News Drives Audience Engagement. Aggregating It — Not So Much

Part 4: What Tina Brown and The Daily Beast Measure to Drive Competitive Advantage and Audience Engagement
* Employ Metrics that Increase Your Organization's Competitive Advantage
* Evaluate How Specific Audiences Interact and Engage with Your Content

Part 5: The 3 T's According to Tina Brown — Team, Trust, and Timing at The Daily Beast
* Combine the Talent of Media Veterans with the Tecnological Savvy of Digital Natives
* Delegating Trust Allows Tina Brown to Directly Focus on Brand Extension Strategy
* Timing is Everything Because the Right Story at the Wrong Time is the Wrong Story

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Part 4: What Tina Brown and The Daily Beast Measure to Drive Competitive Advantage and Audience Engagement

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I've been blogging since August 2009.  It's a continuous learning experience that's all about trial and error.  That process goes beyond understanding what content people find interesting and includes figuring out a writing process for ideas, setting weekly writing goals, experimenting with the TypePad blogging interface, registering a domain name for this blog (sometimes to great frustration, but that's the topic of a future blog post), and getting better at promoting my blog to more people than just my wife.

On a daily basis, I study the Google Analytics results that measure traffic for Social Media ReInvention Blog (even though I already know the traffic volume is small — Ha!).  For now, I'm okay with that because my 12 month goal is to continue learning how to improve my blog's content and promotion.

The starting point for all improvement is measurement.  One of my favorite professors in business school, the late Dean Kropp (and a great guy too), passionately shared the following mantra about operational strategy to me and his students: "What Gets Measured is What Gets Done."  Those words continue to have a lasting influence on me.

For Tina Brown, one of the reasons she measures and evaluates The Daily Beast's performance is because her primary investor, Barry Diller, wants to know how his investment is performing.  She didn't go into specific detail about how they measure ROI at The Daily Beast, but it's clear they're implementing metrics.  Here's what I took away from Tina Brown's keynote address regarding performance measurement.

Learning #1 Employ Metrics that Increase Your Organization's Competitive Advantage
J0400509[1] According to Tina Brown, The Daily Beast books ~59 television appearances per month for its contributing writers.  In addition, she estimates that ~30,000 blogs link to The Daily Beast per month!

It's very telling that Brown mentioned her love of working with talented writers. She remarked how so many people have so much to say, but they lack a credible and visible forum to voice their views.  There's no question Tina Brown wants The Daily Beast to become the writer-driven forum of choice.

My rationale for that opinion: The Daily Beast measures and promotes metrics showing why a talented writer professionally benefits from The Daily Beast's reach and exposure.  Tracking and espousing these outcomes gives The Daily Beast a competitive advantage in attracting outstanding writing talent.  If you're a writer searching for an influential and visible forum to expose your ideas/opinions, these metrics demonstrate why The Daily Beast is a compelling professional destination.

Learning #2 Evaluate How Specific Audiences Interact and Engage with Your Content
J0382632[1]It sounded like Tina Brown and The Daily Beast are trying to measure audience engagement via a process similar to BusinessWeek.com's current audience engagement initiative (i.e., ratio of writer output to reader input and segmented by topic, author, etc.).  If you'd like to learn more, here's a link to the August 2009 eConsultancy interview with John Byrne, Editor-in-Chief of BusinessWeek.com. 

Brown believes authentically engaged readers "participate in the day's conversation."  I agree because engaged Web 2.0 participants (or is that now Web 3.0) exhibit engagement through measurable social media behaviors. 

In my opinion, a back-of-the-envelope list of these measurable social media behaviors could include but are not limited to:

* Tweeting or retweeting specific article links on Twitter
* Writing blog posts inspired by a specific topic (like this one)
* Document content links in those blog posts (e.g., inbound links)
* Sharing content through social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, and Stumble Upon
* Uploading and distributing the selected content via YouTube or Vimeo
* Sharing content and cataloging it in URL shortening services like bit.ly
* Posting discussion questions or opinions about the content in LinkedIn Discussion Forums (and the member comments these questions or opinions generate)