Collecting and using data is a sensitive subject. On one hand, you want to collect as much data as possible so that you can fully understand your customers and personalize marketing messages – the end goal being customer influence.
On the other hand, leveraging what you know about a customer can be pretty creepy. Remember the Target example – when Target knows a girl is pregnant before her father does. Well, that’s an example of how a company can get to the creepy side.
Ultimately it’s about being transparent and respectful at all times, but don’t let it decrease your creativity. Below are 5 ways in which you can capture and leverage big data, while maintaining your level of creepiness low.
Everyone wants to write content that goes viral and spreads like wildfire. However, it doesn’t always happen. Mostly by luck, I was able to create some content that went viral.
1. Say something controversial in the title (but use the best objective and logical statements to support it)
People love controversial stuff. As long as you truly believe in what you say and can back it up, throw up a controversial posts and give people a reason to click on it. If you just say something like, “Seesmic Desktop emerges as an alternative to Tweetdeck”, people won’t care, and they won’t share it.
2. Include at least one name that people have heard of in the title
A lot of websites out there just measure traffic. Traffic is a quantitative number that is easy to measure and helps you see important trends and how successful campaigns are. However, especially for sites that need some kind of conversion like signing up or buying a product, undifferentiated traffic can be misleading.
A visitor is a real person
Traffic is the amount of visitors on your site. When you say “visitors”, these are actually real people, and everyone has their own personalities, their motives, and their own wants. Yes, sometimes it’s just a numbers game where a small % of your traffic will convert. However, wouldn’t you actually want 100 people on your site that are looking to really buy things than have 1000 people who are just surfing?
Stumbleupon gives high quantitative but low qualitative traffic
This misconception in traffic-success is most obviously seen with StumbleUpon. When you get “Stumbled”, your traffic that day will increase gigantically. However, chances are your average time on site will decrease dramatically. That is because Stumble can get you a lot of traffic, but not a lot of quality traffic. Even if people did read your post or article, they’re in a pure surfing mode and will likely not signup or buy your services.
In that sense, I came up with three qualitative metrics that is important to consider when driving visitors to your site. These metrics are: Relevancy, Timing, and Trust.
1. Relevancy
Relevancy is whether this person is actually part of your target market. If you own a sports site that is looking to get subscription and merchandise purchases, but the visitor on your site is not really that interested in sports and never buys anything online, this person is not relevant. It doesn’t matter if you have 10,000 people like that on your site. You won’t convert anything.
CrowdBooster is one of the best Twitter Apps that analyze how your Twitter account is doing and how to make it even more effective. It’s the perfect balance between not having overwhelming statistics on every little ratio, and having enough depth that it actually becomes useful. A lot of tools out there are more like info-porn, where it’s fun to watch all the time, but you don’t really get anything out of it. CrowdBooster actually allows you to make info useful and do better with your campaigns.
The Interview
In this interview, I talk a lot about the myths and misconceptions about Social Media, how to do social media marketing correctly….and how I got so many followers.
When you run a social media competition when people submit pictures or videos and one person wins a free prize, DO NOT use your own service as a free price. You want to use something that people already want. Usually these are things like Apple products or cameras. If your service is so valuable that it will incentivize people to submit for a competition, they like your service anyway and for you this “marketing” campaign is redundant – only people who already think you have the best service ever would participate.
Also, don’t give out the prize quietly. Make it the biggest announcement in the world. It’s special.
Some readers have asked me to provide some specific numbers on social media instead of just saying that it works. I have mostly been running RewardMe these days so I don’t have time to do more research on that, but last year I found a few interesting numbers so I’ll post it here. They’re a bit old but pretty concrete and can be used in school reports or benchmarks. Hope this helps!
Of course, social media is starting from a smaller base. Forrester estimates that $716 million will be spent on the medium this year, growing to $3.1 billion in 2014. At that point, social media will be a bigger marketing channel than both email and mobile, but still just a fraction of the size of search or display advertising ($31.6B and $16.9B, respectively).