I virtually met Ellen Hoenig Carlson several months ago through Twitter. As I have continued to work on social media initiatives in Rosetta‘s Healthcare practice, Ellen’s blog has continually been a tremendous resource to gain insight on the subtle (and often not so subtle) intricacies of marketing in healthcare and pharma. Ellen reached out to me to be included in her ebook for Pharma marketers, entitled “The Gift of Learning for Pharma and Healthcare Marketers in 2010.” First, I’m very grateful to be able to contribute and be included. But second, my background is more traditional retail and high tech – so it’s great to read the themes from some of the top healthcare social media strategists included. Below are the other contibutors; One of my goals in 2010 is to meet as many of them as possible in person, Ellen included.
Phil Baumann, Phil Baumann online blog, CareVocate Interactive Media Solutions
Themes the authors wrote about include, from Ellen’s blog summary:
1) e-Patients are at the center and critical to learning and design;
2) Authenticity isn’t a ‘nice to do’, it’s a ‘must’ (and you won’t be the one who decides whether you’ve succeeded);
3) Don’t get distracted by ‘bells and whistles’ – remember the basics and keep your brand core strong;
4) New marketing challenges require new ROI thinking…the ROI of connection, authenticity and compassion;
5) The marketing cycle of life is going through unprecedented change requiring all marketers and communications people to unlearn much – the movement from paid marketing to earned marketing requires a different mindset and skills; and
6) Effective marketing and engagement will require new kinds of leadership skills.
A lot of these themes apply to other industries – so I think it’s a great gift for all marketers. Download a copy of the ebook, share it, and drop by Ellen’s post to let her know what you think. Thanks again Ellen for including me.
A few months ago I had the opportunity to visit the offices of Tipping Point Labs. After some great discussions on Twitter with Andrew Davis, TPL’s Chief Strategy Officer, we agreed to meet and grab lunch to talk further. I quickly learned how smart Andrew is. TPL has a unique perspective on content marketing as a strategic platform to drive business results. I thought Andrew would be a perfect addition and unique perspective to the Marketing Hot Seat, and I was right.
You’re the CMO. You have a marketing budget of $1M. Your company is a consumer product company, relatively unknown / early stage. Customers who know the product like it. CEO wants ROI within 12 months. What do you do?
The Client: Mimoco
When Adam invited me to participate in The Marketing Hot Seat, I immediately started looking for the perfect ‘client’ to apply our methodology. As Adam specified I needed to find someone who was relatively unknown or early stage, but someone who had enough potential that we could move the dial significantly in twelve months or less. That’s when a friend introduced me to the perfect client: Mimoco.
“…Fused the art of contemporary characters with the functionality of personal data storage devices making its name known in both the pop-culture driven Art Toy underground and the savvy high-tech ‘tronic world.”
In order for something like Mimobots to generate a million more in sales, we’re going to focus on one, extremely well-connected community: those chic geeks. We must walk like them, talk like them and, most importantly, work with them to make Mimoco relevant in their world. Part of the allure of a brand like Mimobots is that the brand must straddle the divide between mainstream (read sell-out) and exclusive (always cool,) so mass marketing is out of the question. (Just look at what Johnny Cupcakes has built by exploiting this niche.)
The plan:
Strategy – Build a strategy that focuses entirely on the Chic Geek market: the e-commerce platform, a content platform, strategic partnerships and even monthly custom designs by ‘famous chic geeks.’ We’re going to set some goals, build an influence pyramid, find the content opportunities and create an editorial calendar. ($120,000)
Build – We’re going to reinvent the Mimoco e-commerce experience to focus on the designers behind the designs; to tell better product stories and to drive deeper relationships with the geeks we’re going after. We’re going to build a new digital universe and distribute content on channels that geeks adore (channels like Vimeo and Feedly.) ($250,000)
Create – Using our editorial calendar, we’re going to create the best geek chic content on the web. We’ll profile the best of the best, partner with prominent geeks to deliver high-quality content designed to deliver on the brand’s promise. We’ll attend events, produce a weekly podcast, distribute weekly video content, shoot images and write – write a lot. ($300,000)
Measure & Refine – Our strategy will remain intact while our tactics, channels, content and platforms shift. (Gone are the days when you can launch a website and walk away.) With weekly and monthly reports to measure our effectiveness the strategy team will refine the methodology. Perhaps we’ll try exclusive offers like StuffedRobot.com or enhance the post-purchase experience with more geek chic on-device content. ($120,000)
Create More – Invariably, content opportunities, new product development concepts and smart partnerships emerge the more we dive into the strategy. Perhaps something like printing a Geek Chic magazine (yes, we believe in the power of print) that includes a Mimobot with each issue works. With that in mind, the final portion of our budget is dedicated to exploiting those opportunities. ($210,000)
The Outcome: 90 More Sales A Day (On Average)
At the end of the day, our entire strategy will be successful only if we generate about 100 more Mimobot sales everyday (At an average of $30.00/sale). Will it happen overnight with a strategy like ours? No. However, we know that a powerful, underground brand like Mimoco has too much to lose if we grow too fast. With our plan in place, this time next year they’ll be selling 1,000 more Mimobots than they are today (enough to make up for the slow-grow strategy.) Guaranteed.
Let Andrew know what you think of his approach in the comments. Thanks Andrew!
If you don’t know Rachel Happe yet, you are missing out. I’ve had the sincere pleasure of getting to know Rachel in the local Boston social media scene, and it was clear from my first conversation with her that she knows social media and the power of community unlike most. With a background that includes working as a research manager at IDC and a senior director of social media products at Mzinga, Rachel brings a refreshing, thought-provoking view to what challenges large enterprises are facing with Web 2.0. Before reading her point of view on the Marketing Hot Seat, I’d recommend subscribing to her blog, the Social Organization and taking time to learn more about the business she is building with friend Jim Storer. The Community Roundtable is a tremendous wealth of value-add resources for social media practioners. (My agency, Rosetta, is a big proponent and partner, and I’ve been referred to as a CR Cheesehead – read on and you’ll see Rachel lives what she preaches). I’m grateful that Rachel has offered to weigh in this week on the challenge – please let her know what you think in the comments.
You’re the CMO. You have a marketing budget of $1M. Your company is a consumer product company, relatively unknown / early stage. Customers who know the product like it. CEO wants ROI within 12 months. What do you do?
Adam has graciously pulled out his marketing wizard wand and given me the role of CMO at an upstart consumer products company – not a likely scenario but fun to play with none-the-less! I’m lucky because I don’t have to deal with a lot of organizational complexity, legacy systems, or legacy structures set up for a vastly different information environment than the one that exists today. And luckily, I understand a bit about what’s changed. The cost of content creation has dropped, the cost of distribution has dropped, and the cost of customer discovery has dropped – all dramatically. That means that my investment will pay off relatively quickly.
My marketing focus is split between two key constituent groups. My first important constituent group is the channel partners who actually sell my product to the end customer. The second key constituent group is the consumers themselves – driving demand from consumers will help me negotiate more and better contracts with my retail partners. My goals for the year are to execute 1 exclusive large partner deal (think Target), 5 mid-size partner deals (regional chains, Zappos.com, etc), and 50 niche retailer contracts. Our channel manager will use our website including a blog, an email newsletter, and trade shows as the primary means of outreach to this audience. All of those touch points will be richly supported with online media from our customers and secondarily supported through our Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube outreach done with our end customers.
On the consumer end, we’ll start with research and capturing user interaction with our product. We’ll give our small team of young enthusiastic media makers the gear to video tape, podcast, and take pictures as they talk to users about their reaction to the product and how they use it. We’ll use that content for regular posting to YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter but we’ll also solicit content generated by the users themselves and post that. We’ll also use the research to design two online games – one individual and one team-based – that integrate with Twitter and Facebook. We will use a vendor like Bunchball that makes these games personalized, competitive, and branded. We’ll build a cheap-to-execute but unique version of our product to reward contributors for completing different tasks. Our team of media makers will also be charged with engagement – proactively and reactively interacting with people who are in our target audience and packaging the best of the resulting interactions and media for re-use. We will identify our cheeseheads and promote them.
Roughly, our marketing spend will look like this:
I’m expecting the following unit flow from each type of retailer:
Large = 60,000 units
Medium = 12,000 units
Small = 600 units
The profit from each unit is $9 and if I hit my planned goals, we’ll have $1,350,000 in profit by the end of the year. Covering my marketing costs by a bit but building a great foundation going into the following year.
What an awesome year!
…And what an awesome post, thanks again Rachel. What do you think of her approach?
Building a social media strategy is not something that can be whipped together overnight. For context, any company that is looking to develop a strategy for leveraging social media should first check out the POST methodology from Forrester Research. The “People” part of the approach (followed by Objectives, Stategy and Technology) has a short description:
Don’t start a social strategy until you know the capabilities of your audience. If you’re targeting college students, use social networks. If you’re reaching out business travelers, consider ratings and reviews. Forrester has great data to help with this, but you can make some estimates on your own. Just don’t start without thinking about it.
This is smart, practical advice. Yet it doesn’t go deep enough. Here are seven inputs, recommended by social media management experts that need to be considered before defining objectives and developing a strategy to leverage social media tactics.
Social Media Monitoring. There are many self-service tools out there beyond Twitter search and Google blog search. Two that work well are Radian6 and SM2. No software is perfect, especially when it comes to analyzing sentiment of what customers are saying, but “hunting and pecking” using point-in-time search tools isn’t going to give you the broad array you need. These tools also can review data back in time to compare tone and conversations year over year or before and after a key event like a product launch. It takes time to sift through the chatter, but there are gems in there that constitute unfiltered customer feedback worth paying attention to.
Market research. Survey your customers and ask them what tools they use. If you are a large company, consider leveraging a segmentation that addresses the needs, wants, attitudes and behaviors of your customers. This can be a significant source of insight to drive marketing strategies – not just social marketing ones.
Forrester’s Social Technographics. Forrester has a great tool to stratify how your customers are actually using social media. Do your customers heavily index against the average for Creators or Critics? Perhaps a user-generated content idea or approach would be more suitable. While the tool doesn’t give you the answer of what to do, it does provide some data points that help justify approaches down the road. If you know some basic info about your customers, you can get useful data easily using this tool:
Competitive Analysis. What are your competitors doing? Are you behind the pack or leading by deciding to engage in social technologies to drive your business? It’s important to know where you stand – better yet to know where you want to be.
Stakeholder Interviews. Some tactics in social media will require different departments to work together – perhaps some that aren’t used to collaborating. Talk to the following groups: Marketing, Market Research, Innovation, Product Management, IT, Legal, Customer Service, PR and HR. Chances are they will all have something to say about social media and what they would hope to get from it.
Corporate Objectives. What is your company’s marketing objectives in 2010? Are you undertaking a brand refresh? Have some major product launches teed up in Q2? Any seasonal or cyclical impact to plan around? Don’t think you can develop social tactics without considering what is going on in the company.
Corporate Culture. Does your company thrive on innovation or on chopping down new initiatives? Social media tactics can be measured, effective and game-changing – yet the industry is not as mature of a marketing tactic like pay-per-click search marketing. “Making the leap” requires top down executive support and a bottoms up desire to make initiatives successful from the teams that will own the strategy going forward. (Or fail quickly and learn from it, as I’ve heard Todd Defren say – this space is still new).
Frankly, I don’t see how the rest of the POST methodology – Objectives, Strategy and Technology – can be developed without these inputs. Do you agree? What did I miss? Have anybody tried the Web 20 Ranker’s top rated white label SEO so far?
Marc Meyer is one of the few folks who agreed to participate in the Marketing Hot Seat I haven’t had the pleasure of actually meeting in person. I hope that changes soon. If you don’t know Marc, his blog is a continual source of thought provoking discussion in social media. With his experience consulting in both social media and search, his background provides a powerful combo. Marc is also the co-founder of hashtagsocialmedia, a series of amazing chats over Twitter with folks who are making a big impact in the industry.
Below is Marc’s answer to the Marketing Hot Seat challenge. I’d recommend you put on some light jazz, turn off your phone, take a few minutes and really digest his post… and be prepared to have your brain challenged. While Marc went way over the 500 word limit (cough), it’s just good content and shows how deep his marketing mind runs. The content is so good that, marketing authority sites like https://www.konstructdigital.com/ have reposted what he says on multiple occasions. Let him know what you think in the comments. Thanks Marc for taking so much time to make this a thoughtful post. (Some emphasis added by yours truly.)
You’re the CMO. You have a marketing budget of $1M. Your company is a consumer product company, relatively unknown / early stage. Customers who know the product like it. CEO wants ROI within 12 months. What do you do?
What I know is that I have a million dollar budget which is cool, Wooohooo…!!! and I have a pretty decent CPG that the customer likes, double Woohoo…!!! But, I have one year to make some money. Oh boy…
So I have a couple of options I can try and leverage as many channels as I possibly can, or I can focus on one channel or maybe just a few. The bottom line though is that I only have a year to make it work. So for me I want to have reach, depth and breadth and do it somewhat quickly.
Historically I’ve worked for a direct response marketing agency and I’ve launched a “few” CPG commerce sites, along with some that had DR hooks in them. So I have to seriously consider DR as a viable channel. Why? Because it’s fast, it does work and it’s very measurable. The numbers are black and white. That includes, DR radio, DRTV, direct mail and direct email…Could this alter or affect my spend? Knowing the power and effectiveness of good DR? Absolutely. But I have also seen many big spend DR campaigns fall flat on their face with products that were supposed to be can’t miss. So it’s tempting.
But wait…There’s more.
I also have a solid background in organic and paid search with CPG’s. The power of those two combined can really stretch a budget or tap one out real quick, depending on what you know, what your strategy is and how you roll it out. As well, over the last 3 years I’ve been rolling out social media programs for companies and their products, and thus I know what social media done right, can do. I have to seriously weigh how I can incorporate this into any product launch. Is it the focus of the marketing, a spoke on the hub? Do I even consider it?
Couple of things right out of the blocks that I need to find out or determine though. What’s the message? What’s the price? Who or what is my target audience. What has worked and what hasn’t? And why? I also want to know as much about my target audience as possible like psychographic, demographic info. And next, what is my competition doing? What are they doing right and doing wrong? Then I want to know what people are saying and where they are saying it- both customers and competition. A lot of this work can be done by implementing certain social media activities into my fact gathering. i.e. listening, monitoring, participating etc. etc…but the gist is, I want to live and breathe this product and really understand the why. Why would someone buy this product and why would they tell someone else to buy it? What are the triggers? CRM anybody? Social CRM anyone? 🙂
At this point I haven’t spent much money. But I know a whole lot more now than I did before. And thus I can start thinking about strategy. I have a team in place I assume…right? If not then I’m hiring a team. As everyone should know by now, all of these activities require a solid team with solid skill sets that span across a lot of the digital disciplines.
My point is, we’re gathering data so that we can make more qualified decisions. Research, due diligence and knowledge make it easier to determine the spend.
So it’s strategy time: Make money. Make it in 12 months. Get people to buy the product. Get people to repeat that process. Get people to tell their friends to use the product. Get people talking about the product. Promote the greatness and effectiveness and the value of the product in less than 12 months. Increase sales. Increase buzz. Increase traffic. Increase conversions. Grow. Rinse. Repeat.
Possible areas with associated spends. Note: I didn’t want to get into specifics about measurement so thus we went very high level here.
Paid and Social Media-maximize budget with a combo of both paid and social outreach 10k per month. 3 months. Measure. Go or No Go.
Broad reach geo-targeted, long-tail, PPC campaign to reach target audience 10k per month. 3 months. Measure. Go or No Go
Assuming I don’t have a web presence with this product I’m going to build out a number of sites. First and foremost, there will be an e-commerce site with all the requisite bells and whistles. Site will also include cross promotional contextual upsells with partner products and sites.- Cost- No more than 35k for development.
(5) Informational micro-sites built around and optimized for specific key words 25k for development
SEO management 1k month
E-mail campaign tied back to e-commerce enabled landing pages, includes building out individual landing pages and buying lists-50k for development and programming. Test, test, test. Measure. Go or No Go
Radio campaign 30k for 3 months development and media buy. Measure. Go or No Go
Direct mail campaign includes, creative, design, lists and postage 50k test, test Measure. Go or No Go
DRTV- 150k(optional)
Mobile phone campaign-text to win 50k 3 months Measure. Go or No Go
Creation of online community/forum 20k Ongoing. May have to hire manager to grow community. 4k/month
Creation of Facebook campaign/widget as well as fan page to generate buzz in product and win, trip, prize etc. 20k for development
Creation of Twitter accounts to monitor buzz, consumer outreach, and customer service.
Create Blog contest on most creative way to spend a million dollars to promote product<grin>
PR blitz and Blogger relations and outreach for product testing 5k per month
Product reviews and recommendation engines submittal and management 1k/month
Celebrity endorsement and spokesperson and sponsors (optional)
YouTube video contest on the many ways to use the product with associated landing page 3 month duration. 20k development and management
I-phone app 20k
So as you can see I went the route of “let’s approach as many channels as we can and let’s test and then measure them equally.” Most of the channels were essentially a 3 month test. This gives us enough time to evaluate the results, continue it or bag it and move the money and resources towards channels that are performing. The thing to understand with all of these channels is that collectively they all perform the function of branding and marketing on an ongoing basis. So even though we are testing, we are also reaching, we are also penetrating and we are always measuring. Positive movement.
What some might find of interest is that I didn’t throw all of my efforts towards social media, or all of it towards search. I think what some people need to understand is that if my budget was less I would start to really look at the channels that would give me the biggest bang for the buck. Perhaps why social media for example seems so appealing to a lot of people, is that the barrier of entry is relatively low. But what people fail to realize is that the investment in time and labor can be substantial to generate the results that some of the other channels can do. So yes, I am a social media evangelist and I write and speak about it daily, but that doesn’t mean that you ignore all other forms of digital marketing. It complements and enhances, it doesn’t solve your problems.
I want to thank Adam for throwing this out there. It was fun to actually think about what could be possibly be done with that kind of budget, and even more challenging to keep this post short enough to meet the needs of spending that budget! I could easily have seen this stretching out into quite a detailed document. But nevertheless, I’m honored to have the chance to throw my 2 cents in with some really, really smart people.
I first met Kevin Ertell in early 2007 when I took over as Rosetta‘s account executive on our engagement to build the new Borders.com. It was clear to me right away that Kevin had the marketing and ebusiness savvy to lead a large scale initiative to change how Borders takes on eCommerce. Now as Foresee’s VP of Retail Strategy, Kevin is continuing to make his mark in online retail. Kevin’s been a great partner to work with and I’m grateful that he was willing to be the first victim contributor on spotlight for The Marketing Hot Seat. As a reminder, the challenge:
You’re the CMO. You have a marketing budget of $1M. Your company is a consumer product company, relatively unknown / early stage. Customers who know the product like it. CEO wants ROI within 12 months. What do you do?
Here’s a very thoughtful response from Kevin.
OK. Setting aside all the caveats about the fact that I don’t know what the product is, what it costs to make and what our margins are, here’s generically how I would approach the situation:
Strategy
Thoroughly understand the customers who like our product
The customers who know our product like it. We need to find out why, in their words, and determine what personality traits, hobbies, demographics, etc. in those customers are relevant to their liking our products so that we can speak to others like them.
Get our online destinations right
With a relatively small marketing budget, we’re going to need to maximize our online strategy. (Actually, we should do that even if have a large marketing budget.) We need to make sure our website and our retailer websites are highly usable and highly effective in merchandising our product and providing the ability for customers to easily spread the word about us.
Drive traffic with whatever budget is left
Only when we have ensured that we have solid destinations for our traffic will we start to actively search for traffic.
Tactics
Learn as much as we can about the customers who most love the product.
Why do they like it? What are there personality types; let’s use the Myers-Briggs personality test and really get a thorough understanding of these folks. How do they describe our product? Let’s pay attention to the words they use as we’re going to reuse those words in our copy.
Hire ForeSee Results to measure our site’s effectiveness from our customers’ perspectives. I realize this may seem self-serving since it’s my company, but I was a client for seven years before joining the company three months ago, and I’ve see how well it works. So, I want it in this role. So there! We’ll use measurements, analysis, Session Replay and usability audits to ensure we’re providing the best experience we can.
Hire Bryan Eisenberg to develop archetypes and to implement the Persuasion Architecture on our site.
We need to speak to customers in language that resonates, and Bryan understands how to do that. We’ll also use that language for product descriptions and other content we give to retailers for their sites.
Create a high quality product video.
We’ll use this video on our own site and we’ll give it to retailers for their sites. We’ll focus on the key aspects customers love and use copy that includes words that resonate with those customers. We’ll also show real customer testimonials.
Launch customer reviews and customer forums on our site
We need to make sure our customers can openly provide their thoughts about our product, even when they’re negative.
Launch several blogs on our site Since we only have one product, we need to provide some fresh and compelling content on our site to give people a reason to come back. The content doesn’t need to be about the product all the time. It can be able anything, as long as it’s compelling. I’ll focus on general marketing, our CEO can blog about leadership, and we’ll find some people to blog about topics our customers are interested in. All of this blog content will also be great for SEO.
Launch a marketing campaign to retailers informing them about key customers and teaching them how to sell the product
Our initial marketing efforts will essentially be internal. Let’s get the sellers pumped up and doing their jobs well before we send customers their way.
Develop a widget for retailers that gives customers the ability to easily share information about the product
We need to give our customers ways to share information about our product on their own in a way that is easy and positive. Let’s create a fun widget that people want to share on Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.
Get our SEO right, buy search terms, send emails, run re-marketing campaigns, etc. I don’t want to minimize the value of these techniques, but we really need to make sure our destinations are right before we add lots of traffic.
So there you have it. My main point here is to focus on the customers first, the destination second and the traffic driving last.
This was a fun exercise, Adam. Thanks for allowing me to participate.
Thank you Kevin – I look forward to a good discussion here.
I virtually met Ellen Hoenig Carlson several months ago through Twitter. As I have continued to work on social media initiatives in Rosetta‘s Healthcare practice, Ellen’s blog has continually been a tremendous resource to gain insight on the subtle (and often not so subtle) intricacies of marketing in healthcare and pharma. Ellen reached out to me to be included in her ebook for Pharma marketers, entitled “The Gift of Learning for Pharma and Healthcare Marketers in 2010.” First, I’m very grateful to be able to contribute and be included. But second, my background is more traditional retail and high tech – so it’s great to read the themes from some of the top healthcare social media strategists included. Below are the other contibutors; One of my goals in 2010 is to meet as many of them as possible in person, Ellen included.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://i2.wp.com/img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?w=730)
Building a social media strategy is not something that can be whipped together overnight. For context, any company that is looking to develop a strategy for leveraging social media should first check out the 
