change  June 15, 2011

Elodie Bouneau, Marketing Intern

Is it just me, or are Americans spending more time than ever on social networks?

As it turns out, it’s not just me. In June 2009, Americans were spending 16% of their total online time on social networks. By June 2010, that number had risen to 23%. (For reference, Americans spend just 8% of their online time reading and writing emails.)

Advertisers are gradually waking up to this rapid growth. Between 2009 and 2010, they increased their social advertising spend by 20%.

But even their current budget of $1.68 billion represents only 6.7% of their total online advertising spend.

In other words, online advertisers are still, well, socially awkward.

Why?

The Challenges of Breaking Into Social Networks
It’s not that advertisers don’t want to socialize. It’s not that they don’t realize people are spending more and more time on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.

It’s just that breaking into these networks is more difficult than making a splash in other types of online advertising.

When you want to run a banner ad, for example, you create your ad, pay your fee, and voila’ – you’re getting your message in front of people.

But to break into a social network, you must figure out how to become part of the conversations people are having within that network.

As I said, this can be difficult – but it’s not impossible. To guide your efforts, try using what I call the Three T’s.

The Three T’s of Social Advertising
If you really want your products and services to become part of the conversations people are having online, just remember: Target, Test, Tweak.

1. Target. Social networks are all about communities and groups. This can play in your favor – if you’re willing to do the up-front work.

You can target your ads to a very specific audience that’s defined by gender, age, locality, and interests. But beware: social networkers have become spoiled by an environment that’s tailored to their precise wants and needs. If you’re not ultra-specific about how your product or service is relevant to this audience, they’ll ignore your messages.

2. Test. As soon as you begin investing in social media advertising, be sure to set reasonable daily budgets for testing your ads.

When placing your social media ads, make sure you put tracking tags on your ads to measure your important metrics. Depending on your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), you will be interested in testing and optimizing for different metrics. For example, if your KPI is to drive registrations for a newsletter, you want to track the click through rate from your social media ad to your sign up landing page, and your registration conversion rate for newsletter signups. You can then look at your cost/registration for each of your ad placements as a measure of performance. If your KPI is brand awareness, you can optimize your banner cost/click, since you want as many people clicking to your website as possible.

3. Tweak. Once your ads have been up for a while and you’ve gathered data in the form of metrics related to your key performance indicators, analyze and adjust your overall campaign to trim the fat and maximize your results. Bring your best-performing creative to the forefront, find the social media placements that give the best results, and always continue to test new approaches.

As you can see, there’s no shortcut to social advertising success. But by taking the time to craft messages that appeal to specific groups and continuing to optimize, you can dramatically boost your results.

Sean Shoffstall, VP of Innovation and Technology

Everyone says they want to reduce their sales cycle. But most of us find the task daunting at best. If we’re going to get serious about improving the way we move prospects towards a purchasing decision, we’ll need to break down some lofty concepts into actionable chunks. This is the first in a series of articles that will do just that.

So, where to begin?

I’ll start by expressing my fervent hope that you’re tracking your website visitors. Whether you’re using a free tool like Google Analytics or have invested in a powerful solution such as Adobe Site Catalyst, you’ve laid the groundwork to minimize the time from first customer interaction to sale.

We’ve touched on all these points before. This article will explain how you can use those tracking metrics to identify your hottest prospects and close the sales cycle faster. First, I’ll share two tips on converting faster through optimization and acceleration. Next, I’ll give you two ways to highlight the opportunities that are ready for your sales team.

Build a Follow-Up Strategy for Conversions
This tip is the most basic of the four. After your visitors have responded to an offer or downloaded a trial, provide them with an appropriate follow-on. For example, on the thank-you page that appears after you deliver the offer, you can supply a few additional offers to drive further engagement.

The key, of course, is relevance. If someone downloads an industry white paper, don’t follow up by offering a 5% discount on top-of-the-line server hardware. Your prospect is probably not ready to make a purchase decision.

Instead, the follow-on offer should be mapped along your nurturing flow. Offer something that will drive the visitor from awareness to interest, such as a case study or an interactive educational tool. Then use your web analytics to see which offer combinations have the highest take-rates and which also increase social sharing and return visitors. These metrics indicate relevance with your visitors and can help your sales team drive the direction of the conversation.

Analyze Funnel Conversion Drop-Offs
For this next idea, it’s critical that you take the time to set up your goal conversions and funnel path. We all hope that someone will land on our site, read a page or two, and then click to have a sales person contact them. Unfortunately, that rarely happens. It’s our job to lead the prospect, step by step, to that glorious conversion. But some of our prospects have SOS (Shiny Object Syndrome) and drop off our path to enlightenment.

That’s where funnel conversion analysis comes in. When set up properly, this analysis can help us understand where prospects are falling off. We’ll then need to take a look at our flow and see what adjustments we can make – in terms of how information is presented, what type of information is shown, and in what order – to optimize the prospect’s experience and drive better conversion performance.

Measure Multiple “Goal Page” Touches
This strategy plays off the previous one. After your prospect has converted once, watch to see whether they come back and convert multiple times. Start building a “hot leads” list (this is a basic scoring that we’ll examine in depth in a future article) based on people who have touched n goal pages.

A goal page is a page that contains high-value content. If a prospect visits a goal page, it’s an indication that they’re looking for information to help them make a buying decision. With Google Analytics or Omniture, it’s easy to create and apply segmentation, and then look into your Marketing Resource Management or Customer Resource Management system to generate your hot leads list. You can also use the segmentation to find optimal flows for your site – and then apply these learnings to other key pages.

Monitor Return Visitors or Multiple Visitors from the Same Company
WARNING: Custom coding ahead

This last strategy is the most fun. In the B2B space, I’ve worked with many clients who want to target not only specific customers for lead nurturing and scoring, but also their associated companies. Google and Omniture both have some basic domain reports that can help you find out which companies are visiting your site.

Want to take it to the next level? Capture IP addresses in a custom variable. Here’s where to do it in Google Analytics (Omniture also has this capability).

Why capture IP addresses? So that you can target specific companies. It makes sense that when a company wants to do business with you, multiple people from that company will probably visit your site for research. You may get visits from end users, Finance, IT, Legal, and possibly even an executive or two. Use your web analytics to set an alert that identifies any spike in the number of visits from a set of key accounts. You can then identify which pages and products they’re most interested in and have your sales team follow up proactively.

Next Steps
We’ve only scratched the surface here. You can easily take the foundation I’ve given you and create any number of different scenarios to leverage your web analytics. In future articles, we’ll explore how you can also use Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, and Testing and Targeting to shorten the sales cycle. Subscribe to our RSS feed to stay up-to-date on these and other topics.

Tony Molinero, Art Director

We designers spend years perfecting our craft and learning how to come up with elegant solutions to creative challenges. We describe our creations using words like aesthetic, gestalt, visual flow, and brand identity.

Do the suit-wearing people who employ us understand our jargon? Many of them understand our words, if not the concepts behind them. But do we understand the jargon of The Suits? As professionals trained in facilitating communication, we certainly ought to.

Now, if you feel the least bit icky about memorizing business acronyms and marketing buzzwords, remember this: when you learn how to talk the talk, you’ll be able to sell your designs much more effectively, thus expanding your creative freedom. The Suits will trust you more. They’ll think you’re a superstar if you can tie your design choices to better business performance.

And you may even be able to reason with that marketing manager who insists you use their favorite color instead of the approved corporate colors.

Sound like a deal? Let’s look at some common business acronyms and analyze what they mean for designers.

RFP (Request for Proposal) – A document put out by a client who needs work done. The RFP essentially tells designers, “Show me what you’ve got.” In response, you’ll want to submit a proposal that makes it clear you can do exactly what they’re looking for. Ideally, you’ll include a price quote that’s cheaper than your competition, but not so low that you end up looking like a rookie.

SOW (Statement of Work) – A contract with the client that explicitly states important project details, such as schedule, project scope, deliverables, and payment schedule. Why bother with a SOW? For one thing, it protects you when a client starts asking for additional deliverables in the middle of a project. By gently yet firmly pointing to the original SOW, you can make it clear that more deliverables will require more time and more money.

ROI (Return on Investment) – The value a client receives for spending their money. Depending on the type of project, this may be expressed in terms of revenue, website traffic, publicity, or sales leads. ROI measurements give clients a way to justify their budget and feel safer about spending cash. (Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to tie ROI back to specific design decisions.)

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) – A form of advertising that seeks to attract website visitors from search sites (Google is the biggest player). Marketers love SEM because it delivers an easily trackable ROI that’s often directly proportionate to how much they spend. You’ll usually hear about SEM when you design landing pages.

PPC (Pay per click) – The pricing structure used to buy ad placement on a website. The client only pays when a user clicks on their ad or banner – rather than paying for every “impression,” or appearance of their ad on a website. For designers, the upside to PPC banners is that they need to be visually enticing. The downside is that clients often want you to include huge, ugly buttons.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – The art of making a website appear as a top result from keyword searches on Google (or any other search engine). Clients who are heavily into SEO will want all the words in your web designs to be HTML text instead of images. They’ll also want you to include a lot of copy in the design.

CTA (Call to Action) – The link or button that urges the reader to click through to the next page. The CTA is often some variation of a big, red, shiny button that says CLICK HERE.

KPI (Key Performance Indicator) – Any really important metric that determines how successful a business is. Typical KPIs include the total number of sales or how many people open an email. Most design projects are intended to improve one or more KPI. The more you can move those numbers, the more they’ll love you.

CMS (Content Management System) – Any system, such as WordPress, in which web pages are created in two parts, with the layout structure handled separately from words and pictures. Most clients love using a CMS because they can update their website without going back to the designer. A CMS also enables you to serve up one website in several different languages, rather than creating several language-specific sites.

You’ll probably hear hundreds of other acronyms tossed around in meetings, but learning the ones on this list will give you an edge in communicating your designs. Once you add this business speak to your design arsenal, perhaps The Suits will accept you as one of their own (but with better fashion sense).

What have I missed? Do you have any business speak that you’ve translated to Designer? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.