The Hourglass Funnel Changes Everything

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the hourglass funnel. Most funnels stop at the thin bottom, when a customer “drops” out, having made the journey through awareness, interest, desire and action. After the “action,” or purchase, the customer gets put into a CRM to be included in more traditional marketing outreach efforts, such as calls, e-mails, and catalogue mailings. In the past, marketers often thought about how to turn customers into advocates, but couldn’t figure out how to do it at scale. Companies that were really good at multi-level marketing, like Amway, didn’t have easy-to-replicate business models.

Today, the situation has changed. Social-media platforms give marketers tools to engage customers in their CRMs and bring them back through the bottom of the funnel, turning them into brand advocates — and maybe even salespeople. This is why Salesforce has been snatching up social-media companies like Radian6 and Buddy Media, while Oracle bought Vitrue and Involver. These platforms can help get people talking about your brand– and, in turn, you get to listen to what they have to say. These platforms also can help you understand what it takes to get your customers to move from liking your page to actively sharing your content and to actually recommending your products and even selling them as an affiliate.

The ad-tech revolution of the last several years has supercharged our ability to drive people through this hourglass-shaped funnel. But instead of enabling this movement, we have instead – for the most part — focused  on wringing efficiency out of reaching the customers we’re already very close to getting. For example, programmatic RTB makes it easy to bid on people in the “interest” layer, who behave like existing customers. Additionally, it’s a no-brainer to retarget those customers who have already expressed “desire” by visiting a product page or your website. And technology also makes it increasingly easy to invite customers already in your CRM to “like” your Instagram page, or to offer them incentives to “recommend” products through social sharing tools.

But what about the very top of the funnel (awareness) and the very bottom (advocacy)? Those are the two most critical parts of the marketing hourglass funnel, but the two least served by technology today. While we have tools to drive people through the marketing process more quickly or cheaply, technology doesn’t create brands or turn social-media fans into brand advocates.

However, the right strategy for both ends of this funnel can still boost awareness and advocacy by creating a branding vortex that is a virtuous circle. Let me explain:

Awareness

You can’t start a customer down the sales funnel without making he or she aware of your product or service. Despite all of the programmatic promise in display, technology mainly emphasizes reaching our known audience most efficiently. It simply hasn’t yet proven that it can create new customers at scale. That’s why TV still gets the lion’s share of brand dollars. Cost-effective reach, pairedwith a brand-safe, viewable environment, is what TV supplies.

In my opinion, the digital answer for raising awareness is starting to look less and less like programmatic RTB and more like video and “native” formats, which are more engaging and contextually relevant. Also, new programmatic direct technologies are starting to make the process of buying guaranteed, premium inventory more measurable, efficient and scalable.

Programmatic RTB advocates will argue that you can build plenty of awareness across exchanges, but it’s hard to create emotion with three IAB standard units, and there still isn’t enough truly premium inventory available in exchanges today to generate a contextual halo for your ads. New “native” display opportunities, video and tablet advertising are where branding has the biggest impact. Adding those opportunities to social tools, such as Twitter and Instagram, would help you leverage your existing brand advocates and amplify your message.

Advocacy

Great digital branding at the “awareness” level of the funnel not only helps drive potential new customers deeper into the sales funnel, but also can help engage existing customers. This amplification effect is extremely powerful. Old-school marketers such as David Sarnoff understood that folks make buying decisions through their friends and neighbors. He also understood that, when you’re trying to sell the next big thing (like radio), you have to leverage existing media (print). Applied to digital marketing, this simply means leveraging awareness media — TV, video and “native” advertising — to stimulate word-of-mouth advertising, which is still the most powerful type. By using Facebook and other social sharing tools, the effect of any campaign can grow exponentially in a very short period of time. This virtuous circle of awareness media influencing brand advocates, who then create more awareness among their own social circles, is something that many marketers miss when they lead their campaigns with data rather than with emotion.

Everything In Between

I’m not saying that marketers can simply feed the top of the funnel with great branding and ignore the rest. That’s not true at all; the middle of the funnel is important too. I think it’s relatively easy, nowadays, to build a stack that also helps support all the hard work that brands are doing to create awareness. Most large marketers reinforce brand efforts with “always on” programmatic RTB that targets based on behavior, and all brands employ as much retargeting that they can buy. Once customers are in the CRM, it’s not hard to maintain a rewards/loyalty program, and messaging to an existing social fan base also is relatively simple.

But marketers are making a mistake if they think that this kind of programmatic marketing can replace great branding. With so many different things competing for customers’ attention, capturing it for more than a second is extremely difficult, and the challenge is only going to get harder.

The Datalogix Effect

So what does all this mean for for ad technology? The best way to think about this is to look at the Datalogix-Facebook partnership. Datalogix’s trove of customer offline purchase data essentially enables brands to measure whether or not  all their social-ad spending resulted in more online sales. A few studies have pretty much proven that media selling soap suds on Facebook created more suds sales at the local Piggly Wiggly. In fact, ROI turns out to be easy to calculate, as well as positive.

This type of attribution seems simple, but I don’t think you can overstate its impact. It’s the way we finally move from clicks and views to profit-optimization metrics such as those offered by MakeBuzz. And this method of tying online activity with offline sales is already having a vast impact on the ecosystem. It shows, beyond doubt, that branding sells product.

Getting the attribution right, though, means that brands are going to have to care about creative and content more than ever. It means big wins for video, “native” ad approaches, and big tentpole marketing campaigns. If quality premium sites can be bought programmatically at scale, then it may also mean big wins for large, traditional publishers.

It also likely means that many retargeters, programmatic RTB technologies and exchanges could end up losing in the long run. Don’t get me wrong: These technologies are needed to drive the “always on” machine that powers the middle of the funnel. But just how many DSPs and exchanges does the industry need to manage its commoditized display channel?

As marketers realize that they are spending money to capture customers that were going to convert anyway, they’re likely to focus less on audience targeting and more on initiatives to create new customers — and turn existing customers into advocates.

[This post originally appeared in AdExchanger on 7/31/13]

Pubs that Want Reach Extension Need to Own the Programmatic Channel

Should publishers go beyond the boundaries of their own inventory to sell “reach extension” packages to their clients? Publishers have long struggled with the problem of how to deliver a $100,000 campaign when they only have $90,000 of inventory. Without a strong partner network, the natural answer to that question used to be click arbitrage, an expensive and risky method of campaign fulfillment that often came with less than desirable site visitors.

These days there are several major factors that make reach extension a great opportunity for publishers, rather than a sales mechanism that strays outside their sore realm of expertise.

Publishers with premium inventory sell in three principle ways: Their best inventory is sold in large, customized “tent pole” sales; their standardized premium IAB units are sold through the transactional RFP process; and the rest is sold programmatically, through their remnant daisy chain. They do the first thing really well, especially for big branded advertisers, where they act like a mini creative/media agency to build custom programs. Publishers are also getting much better at the transactional business by leveraging great tools to bring efficiency to RFP response and enabling better demand-side access to their premium inventory (AdSlot, iSocket). The third thing (“remnant”) is the ball publishers continue to fumble, even though enabling an “owned” programmatic channel is getting easier for publishers every day.

Data management is the obvious solution. With the right tools, publishers no longer have to rely on third parties to understand the composition of their audience. The combination of a publisher’s CRM data and site tag data, ingested into one of a dozen amazing DMPs can enable them to segment and target their audience on the fly. Want “auto enthusiasts” on my site? Not only can I sell you a highly creative, customized program and back it up with a large share-of-voice in standard IAB banners within the site section—but now I can find your own customers right on my site…and on Facebook as well.

The last part of that equation (leveraging the client’s first-party CRM data) is where today’s reach extension differs from sending your excess buy to ContextWeb or AudienceScience, as you would in the old days. Now, publishers can find advertisers’ customers within their own site or publisher network and retarget them.  Better yet, pubs can help advertisers put that same first-party data to work on exchanges, including FBX, where match rates (and performance) are high. Really advanced publishers will leverage their DMP to model the audience advertisers are trying to reach, and build a custom lookalike model which can find “alike” audiences within the publisher network itself, or across the exchanges.

Publishers are acting more and more like agencies when it comes to the big premium sales that take multidisciplinary talent to pull off (sales, media, creative, development). Why shouldn’t they act like an agency (or, more specifically, an agency trading desk) when it comes to helping their clients with reach extension goals? If I am a publisher, and my client comes to me looking for the audience I specialize in, I should be able to tell the advertiser how to reach that audience—starting on my own site, but also across the Web in general. The right data management strategy and tools enable publishers to cover all three legs of the buy: sponsorship, transactional, and programmatic.

[This appeared as part of AdMonsters invaluable Audience Extension Playbook, available here.]

What I Learned Writing Best Practices in Data Management

Today data is like water: free-flowing, highly available, and pervasive. As the cost of storing and collecting data decreases, more of it becomes available to marketers looking to optimize the way they acquire new customers and activate existing ones. In the right hands, data can be the key to understanding audiences, developing the right marketing messages, optimizing campaigns, and creating long-term customers. In the wrong hands, data can contribute to distraction, poor decision-making, and customer alienation. Over the past several weeks, I asked over thirty of the world’s leading digital data practitioners what marketers should be thinking about when it comes to developing a data management strategy. The result was the newly available Best Practices in Data Management report. A few big themes emerged from my research, which I thought I would share:

Welcome to the First Party

Digital marketing evolves quickly but, for those of us working as digital marketers or publishers for the past 10 years, we have seen distinct waves of transformation impact the way we use data for audience targeting. Early on, audience data was owned by publishers, who leveraged that data to control pricing for premium audiences. The Network Era quickly supplanted this paradigm by leveraging tag data to understand publishers’ audiences better than the sites themselves. Buying targeted remnant inventory at scale created new efficiencies and easy paychecks for publishers, who found themselves completely disintermediated. The DSP Era (which we are still in) continued that trend, by completely separating audiences from media, and giving even more control to the demand side. Today, the “DMP Era” promises a new world where publishers and advertisers can activate their first party data, and use it for remarketing, lookalike modeling, and analytics.

The ubiquity of third party data (available to all, and often applied to the same exact inventory) makes activating first party data more valuable than ever. Doing so effectively means regaining a level of control over audience targeting for publishers, and being able to leverage CRM data for retargeting and lookalike modeling for the demand side, as well as a deeper level of analytics for both sides. If there has been one huge takeaway from my conversations with all of the stakeholders in the data-driven marketing game, it is that getting control and flexibility around the use of your own first-party data is the key to success. As a marketer, if you are buying more segments than you are creating, you are losing.

The New Computing Paradigm

In order to successfully activate all of the data your company can leverage for success takes a lot of work, and a lot of advanced technology. Whether you are a publisher trying to score audiences in milliseconds in order to increase advertising yield, or an advertiser attempting to deliver a customized banner ad to a prospect in real-time, you need to store an incredible amount of data and (more importantly) be able to access it at blazing speeds. In the past, having that capability meant building your own enormous technology “stack” and maintaining it.  Today, the availability of cloud-based computing and distributed computing solutions like Hadoop has created a brand new paradigm or what former Microsoft executive and current RareCrowds CEO Eric Picard likes to call the “4^th Wave.”

“Being a Wave 4 company implicitly means that you are able to leverage the existing sunk cost of these companies’ investment,” says Picard. That means building apps on top of AppNexus’ extensible platform, leveraging Hadoop to process 10 billion daily transactions without owning a server (as Bizo does), or simply hosting portions of your data in Amazon’s cloud to gain speed and efficiency. As digital marketing becomes more data intensive, knowing how to leverage existing systems to get to scale will become a necessity. If you are not taking advantage of this new technology paradigm, it means you are using resources for IT rather than IP. These days, winning means applying your intellectual property to available technology—not who has the biggest internal stack.

Social Data is Ascendant

One of the most interesting aspects of data management is how it is impacting traditional notions of CRM. In the past, digital marketing seemed to end below the funnel. Once the customer was driven through the marketing funnel and purchased, she went into the CRM database, to be targeted later by more traditional marketing channels (e-mail, direct mail). Now, the emergence of data-rich social platforms had actually created a dynamic in which the funnel continues.

Once in the customer database (CRM), the post-purchase journey starts with a commitment beyond the sale, when a consumer joins an e-mail list, “friends” a company’s page, follows a company’s Twitter account, or signs up for special offers on the company’s site. The next step is an expression of social interest, when the consumer agrees to make public his “like” for a company or brand by “friending” a company’s page, following a company’s Twitter account. Beyond the “like” is true social activation, wherein the consumer actively (not passively) recommends the product or service, through commenting, sharing, or other active social behaviors. The final step is having the consumer sell on your behalf (directly via affiliate programs or, in the softer sense, as a “brand ambassador”).  This dynamic is why Salesforce has acquired Radian6 and Buddy Media.

For digital marketers, going beyond the funnel and activating consumers through social platforms means understanding their stated preferences, affinities, and that of their social graph. Most companies already do this with existing platforms. They real key is tying this data back into your other data inputs to create a 360 degree user view. That’s where data science and management platforms come in. If you are not ingesting rich social data and using it to continually segment, target, expand, and understand your customers, you are behind the curve.

[This post originally appeared on the EConsultancy blog. Get the paper here.]

SalesRants 14: Pigeon Feed

Swat ’em away, but they’ll still keep coming — those ‘pigeons’ of corporations that can’t stop flocking to consultants’ birdseed

Remember that television commercial featuring the two consultants talking to a corporate guy? It went something this like this:

Consultants: First you need to optimize your sales force using a state-of-the-art CRM tool, align your marketing message across multiple media to drive your quarterly goals, and implement a company-wide monitoring system to insure message optimization across multiple business units, resulting in huge gains across multiple metrics. This plan is sure to turn your business around.

Corporate Guy: Great! When can you start doing it?

Consultants: [Break down in gales of laughter]. We don’t actually do anything… we just tell you how to do it! [They dissolve in paroxysms of malevolent laughter].

Anyway, you get the drift. Despite the almost universal reckoning that corporate consultants do little more than sell glorified PowerPoint presentations full of the latest business jargon, companies such as my beloved Big Media Company continue to employ them. Let me introduce you to the very best consulting scam ever invented, one that Big Media Company fell for hook, line and sinker.

 

RELATED: All ‘SalesRants’ features

Scarily enough, it’s called “SPIN Selling.” “SPIN,” of course, is an acronym. Let me save you $500,000 and give you the S.P.I.N. Selling overview in a nutshell: First, find out what people want before you try and sell them something. Then, tailor your sales pitch to address their needs. Sounds simple, right?

Instead of barging into some agency, breaking out your media kit, and telling your customer your circulation, readership, and what special issues you have coming up, why not sit down over a cup of coffee and ask him a bunch of questions. Like: How is your business? (a Situation question); Is the price of paper leading to an increase in your costs? (Problem); Why is it important to solve this problem (Implication); and, If I lowered your rate, would this help you reach more potential customers? (Need/ payoff).

So, you SPIN a customer, slowly walking him through his situation, how it affects his business, and how you — his savior — may solve his problems using whatever it is you happen to be selling. It’s how probably 90 percent of all salesmen and 100 percent of successful ones approach their business. It’s called consultative sales or, put more simply, selling something that people need. What the company that sells the SPIN program offers, however, is more ingenious than anything that’s gone along with products I’ve ever hocked. They take what is a very straightforward and simple sales process (ask questions, provide answers) and pile a bunch of meaningless process and acronyms on top of it, creating a sales pseudoscience that, like Boggle, is “easy to learn, impossible to master.”

Let me tell you how it works (applicable not just to SPIN, but all bullshit media sales consultants and sales consulting in general): The Consultant comes into Big Media Company (the Pigeon) with a long list of corporate stooges who have used their product (IBM, Honeywell, or any Fortune 500 client whose size exceeds that of the Pigeon, and whose CEO is likely to be impressed by). The Consultant says they can increase sales by 20 percent a year using their new patented sale methodology. The Pigeon’s CEO cuts that estimate in half and still figures he’s up a few million net, even after paying the Consultant a healthy $500,000 fee. Soon enough, the Pigeon signs up, and mandates sales training for everyone on staff.

Naturally, since the test is based on the yet-untaught sales principles offered in the coursework, the results are terrible. Pigeon’s people are way behind the curve!

The Consultant comes in for about a month, and trains everyone, 20 at a time, using the same off-the-shelf Powerpoint presentation, with Pigeon’s name sprinkled throughout for that customized look. People are asked to take a test before the training to establish a “baseline” of sales effectiveness. Naturally, since the test is based on the yet-untaught sales principles offered in the coursework, the results are terrible. Pigeon’s people are way behind the curve! Compared to (insert Fortune 500 company’s results here), Big Media Company is a non-player in the 12th percentile!

The training commences, filled with obscure terminology and acronyms designed to turn what is essentially an easy-to-understand concept into something on which you can slap a patent. After the trainings are complete, another test is administered to make sure Pigeon’s salespeople have absorbed the expensive, mandated training. Lo and behold, the results come in, and Consultant has really made an impact! Compared to the initial baseline results, the latest monitoring shows that Pigeon’s staff is really embracing this new sales dynamic! Sadly, however, there is still work to be done. We show that IBM’s salespeople achieved a 15 percent higher result on their post-training assessment, so we recommend a further dose of advanced training (at a discounted rate of $250,000).

You get the gist. By the time Big Media Company — or any other Pigeon — realizes that their sales are about the same as last year, and that Consultant’s package is perhaps better suited to selling something like consulting services, rather than classified advertising, it’s too late.

Moral of story: Never buy something from a salesperson who is full of more shit than you.

[This post originally appeared in MediaBistro, 8/30/2006]