8. Test everything.
The most important factor enabling SEM experts to get fast-track promotions is their excellent 'learning method' and 'verification.'
"I learned something really important through search. Every customer interaction is an opportunity to gain customer insight. Customers tell you what they're passionate about through their behavior."
"The only constant in the search industry is change. It changes every day, sometimes every hour, every minute. ROI targets keep changing, content keeps changing, competition keeps changing."
"As CMO, my daily life is spent planning and accepting change, constantly 'selling' new things to my team and to my CFO and CEO."
Bill Wise had his 'aha!' moment when he witnessed that CMOs spent more time in the CFO's office than in the CEO's.
Matt Spiegel said search marketing helped him "understand the importance of using data to build strategy and tell stories, and using technology to automate and improve productivity."
Lance Neuhauser says he came to understand "how to use digital not as a standalone solution but as a solution platform" and "the need to support every solution to customer behavior and business desire."
Building a test culture.
90% of tests fail. What decides winning or losing is whether you use the other 10%. (Bill Wise)
Manage imperfections through continuous and rapid innovation. (Matt Spiegel)
"Never assume you've reached the best result. Keep developing new experiments and always beat the control." (David Szetela)
"Lather, rinse, repeat." (Michelle Pribbe)
9. Track everything.
"What doesn't get measured doesn't get done." (Jeff Campbell)
"Analytics isn't a tool, it's a discipline." (David Gould)
Strong uses a football analogy. He reminds us of the offensive linemen "blocking and shoving, doing the dirty work." But when you look at the scoreboard, their work doesn't show up directly in points. About this:
"Attribution isn't about taking credit from quarterbacks, receivers, and running backs. It's about understanding that players whose contributions don't appear on the scoreboard are making huge contributions to the game."
What he ultimately reminds us of is that if we only focus on scoring, we end up with a team made entirely of quarterbacks, running backs, and receivers—a team that can't win many games.
** Slam Dunk's Hanamichi, Park Ji-sung, midfielders, middle managers, experience...
Branding, employee studies and external activities
10. Let data decide.
p.212
One-to-one marketing: marketing that databases individual customer demographic info (gender, age, income), hobbies and leisure info, and purchase patterns, then delivers the most suitable products, ads, and information to that customer.
13. The Unique Selling Proposition (USP) matters.
p.243
Effective slogans
set1
Timely yet timeless
Universal (translates well)
Cannot be swapped for another company or product (optimized for you)
Lets the viewer think, but not too much
Defines a new reality or a new way of life
Prompts action
Conveys social identity
Conveys the promise of change
Gives the brand a human touch
set2 (Wikipedia)
Tells potential users or buyers the main benefit of the product or brand
Implies differentiation from competitor products
A simple, direct, concise, punchy, well-crafted sentence
Has wit
Has a distinct 'personality' of its own
Gives the brand or product a trustworthy impression
Makes consumers feel 'good'
Makes consumers feel a desire or need
Hard to forget
Sounds good
"Only you can define yourself. Don't let others tell you who you are or what you can be." (Chris Copeland)
p.251
Branding box (an exercise for discovering your own USP)
[What is it?] [What does it do?] [What does it mean?]
[Who is it?]
Each of these represents:
Product features
Main benefits delivered to consumers and customers
Ultimate benefit
Optimal emotional benefit
-> Ultimately becomes the brand's trait.
"The key to a USP is identifying 'unmet needs' in that category or service."
Start small and grow big.
13. Your competition is broader than you think.
p.279
Items to assess the competitive landscape
- How many visitors and buyers do competitors have?
- What do they buy?
- What are their demo tapes?
- How did they come to visit that site?
- Which competitors are taking market share away from me?
- How are they taking it?
- What search and display strategies are competitors using successfully to build their brands at my expense?
- Is the market growing? How is market share being divided?
14. You can learn a lot from queries.
Query matrix
p.285
Rooted in ads and content, through search and post-search, build a 'database of intent' to prove brand relevance, expand brand discoverability, re-connect with the audience, and drive audience action.
Neuhauser says: search isn't media, it's an action you can handle. So you can test, learn, and adjust these actions accordingly. Just by listening to a customer's spontaneous thoughts or queries, you can identify preferences and change the experience.
Quentin George says, "Search lets you sense the authentic way people see your brand and their sincere purpose. If you use search as a wise business tool, you'll find clear intent for how customers want to experience your brand and how they see you."
16. Sell altruism
p.336
Machez of SocialVibe explains, "As a social marketing platform, we don't pursue values that marketers unilaterally decide to support and expect people to follow."
In other words, SocialVibe helps people help each other on their own.
17. Make your brand assets stand out
Eric Schmidt's position on the lawsuit by the Association of American Publishers and others
p.342
Imagine the cultural impact when tens of millions of books that were previously inaccessible are indexed into a vast catalog, so that anyone—rich or poor, living in a city or the countryside, in an advanced country or not—can naturally search every word for free. (…) This kind of equal distribution of information is exactly what the web does best. It's what connects creative communities with powerful new business models. That's exactly what copyright law should ultimately support.
20. Don't bet on just one thing
p.406
The link between social media and search is far stronger than we thought. Internet users exposed to both search and influential social media had a 94% higher click rate than users exposed only to paid search. Why? Copeland's answer is very simple: "Because people exposed to brand-influential social marketing are far more likely to search for product features."
"The biggest opportunity to move forward is understanding the influence of interrelationships between media." (John Kaplan)
Online travel agency Orbitz said, "Google got a lot of extra credit, so it could turn a profit."
If you only judge by strict ROI and last-click attribution, the impact of media display ads can't be accurately measured, so the marketing budget shrinks, and then the brand weakens, which means search performance also struggles. That's because people no longer search for the brand. The best performer stops getting good searches, so of course it struggles.
"People don't just magically start searching." (Jill Bellis)
Bellis emphasizes that the media driving people to search for a brand must be recognized by customers. "And marketers need to understand what drives search and be empowered accordingly. Set the right metrics you can measure."
Manage your silos properly. (A silo originally means a grain storage tower, but in marketing it's a metaphor for departments that build walls, don't communicate with others, and chase only their own departmental self-interest.)
To manage silos for marketing teams, first adopt the Groupon reward model. The attractive thing is that the offer doesn't activate until a minimum number of people gather. Set the corporate goal most valuable to your business, and tell employees and partners they won't get their bonus until that goal is achieved. That's how you align incentives.
Meanwhile, agency groups should be customer-centric, not discipline-centric or profit-center-centric.
Then, through data integration (a central platform that becomes the standard), split silos along data-system lines.
21. The age of the appssistant (app + assistant) is coming.
Gord Hotchkiss, president of Enquiro, argues that "search providers will have to replace relevance with usefulness."
"Relevance is a great yardstick for judging information, but not a very good yardstick for measuring usefulness."
That's why he says the future of search is "applications." And he describes that app as "a little personal assistant that lets you do something with information." "From here on, information itself will become less and less important, and the apps that make information useful will become more and more important."
Further, "Thinking of search as a destination is an outdated mindset. What matters isn't search. It'll be the platforms and apps where search happens. The trend going forward is the ability to find the right app matching your intent and use it right away."
He points to the iTunes App Store as 'a signpost for marketing's next phase.' Here search becomes "the engine, or utility, underneath (the information itself)."
"The mistake we always make is thinking success in the next ten years will look like success in the past ten years. Major companies always miss this." (Eric Schmidt)
Ambient Findability (a world where you can freely find people or things anytime, anywhere) is defined as the sum of all the ability to locate or steer. It's defined as a rapidly-arriving world where we can find who or what we want anytime, anywhere. This phenomenon is called information interaction.
Like Hunch (Google), Siri remembers your preferences (it gets personal context—Kittlaus), so the result, or rather the action, gets more and more tailored to you personally over time.
But unlike Hunter and Google, Siri completes actions on your behalf. "It can go all the way. That is, down to negotiating prices and completing the purchase." (Gordon thinks Siri will profit by tapping into the 'just-in-time purchase' trend.)
Kittlaus explains: "Search takes you to a source of information, then says, 'Good luck! Next question!' Siri holds your hand until you get the job done."
Gordon sees Google and the PageRank algorithm as the first era of internet utility. "Era 1 was the economy of links. It was one more evaluation yardstick."
Era 2 is "the API economy. It wipes out the last traces of the walled garden. You don't have to come to my destination site. My destination site will come to you. We're used to going where the action is. Now the action comes to us."
** Check my old post (reasons why people use iPhones/smartphones)
APIs let computer programs interact with each other without human intervention, except for initial setup and program modifications. In other words, APIs allow the information of one company or website to flow directly to others.
Gordon argues: "The API economy makes apps more useful. Apps will learn your preferences, desires, and patterns. Apps rely on APIs to drive transactions. Apps don't just find and book airlines, restaurants, and movie theaters—they inform others about your schedule. An app is literally like a personal secretary."
"Apps are not decision engines; they're thinking partners." (Keith Kaplan)
"Google is so successful because it worries about building community, not building the business." (Mark Goldstein)
Like Google, Hunch and Siri both prioritize building massive value for the people using their products, and worry about profit afterward.
You'll have to figure out how to make APIs profitable. In a world led by ambient findability and search and action engines, apps will do what brands used to do. In the future, we may not even recognize the marketing being done. (Professor Marty Core) Ultimately, building an API and distributing assets will become the real marketing activity.
** What will be the hub?
Apps & content (capturing personal context): calendar, text scan, real-time, couple, solo apps
Offline or device: diary, cafe
Links (RFID, QRcode): taxi, subway, traditional market, restrooms
