Commentary

The Marketing Petri Dish

In a recent article by Richard Levey in Chief Marketer, (http://www.cmo.com/acquisition/life-cycle-analytics-may-change-acquisition-thinking-forrester), Srividya Sridharan made some great points about lifecycle analytics and the fundamentals of acquisition marketing out of alignment.   I believe customer acquisition will be an oxymoron in the future. We will have all the customers available to us through some form of data that we own or have rights to.  Acquisition will not be front of the funnel solely as it is seen today or measured as such.

To play this out, I'm going to engage in a bit of priming.   Think in terms of "What do we know?

We Like the Internet

We Like to Connect

 We Like to Tweet

We Like to See

We Like to Know

Say, Like 5 times.... What do you LIKE?  

............  Facebook come to mind?

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Think about this:    

·       There are 1.9Billion people using the Internet today, that's a 14% increase since 2009. 

·       There are 255 Million Websites, 21.4 Million were added since 2010, 152 Million Blogs. 

·       Facebook has 175 million users logging in every 24 hours, with 65 million accessing via a Mobile Device and they place 30 Billion pieces on content through Facebook. 

·       Microblogging is the most widely adopted social media tactic used by 78% of companies and 745 of agencies (eConsultancy), 25 Billion Tweets were sent in 2010, 7.7 Million following LadyGaga (me included, just for kicks). 

·       , 3,000 photos uploaded per minute on Flickr, 3 billion photos uploaded to Facebook per month.

·       84% of Internet users view videos online, 2 Billion videos viewed on YouTube every day, Top Mobile Video channels:  YouTube, FOX, Comedy Central, ESPN (My favorite) and MTV.

·       Linked in has 50 million members worldwide, Wikipedia has 14 million articles online today

http://www.onlinemarketing-trends.com/2011/03/2011-us-media-consumption-top-5.html

·       38% of Mobile phone usage is spent in email, triple that of social media, News/Current events, Search, Portals and Entertainment. 

·       The average household has 2.5 TVs, 31% have 4 + TVs today. 31% of mobile phones are smartphones.  The average number of apps per smartphone is 27.

·       Not surprisingly to me (living in a house of three women of different generations), but women talk 28% more on the mobile phone than men; they also text more (I can also attest to the nasty grams I get when I'm late or not picking up the phone when my wife rings).

As you run through these facts and contemplate the sheer SCALE of the challenges we face and how marketing your business in not about a web page and email anymore, don't project yourself on this or your own habits.  Put on your marketing hat now and what is the first thing that comes to mind?  SPEED of Marketing and Decisioning will change so dramatically. 

How we consume content, how we develop and manage our networks, how we buy, and our purchase patterns/habits are shifting.  As  Srividya indicated, measurement through a channel lens is not going to direct your success as a marketer in the future. 

It's like measuring your pulse and temperature, which may have nothing to do with the disease that's making you sick. It's a symptom, not a way to cure. With changing consumer dynamics, Srividya's statement "It's time to bury the marketing funnel" is absolutely valid.   Engagement is going to be too hard to keep up with through this view. I don't necessarily agree that the fix is preference management and all about message management.  I don't believe we'll keep up there either.  We'll keep up by creating the environments and watching the consumers like a petri dish of engagement.    Our challenge won't be figuring out whom to market to, what to say, or even which channel to use. It will be timing.  We try to muddle this with relevance and they do tie, but timing is going to be so intermittent it will stress all measurement paths we have in place.

  I believe the organization of the future, will have a marketing function that is solely focused on the customer experience and measurement will be a derivative of this function.  It will be responsible for connecting the experiences, measuring the consumer shifts, taking an outside-in view of the marketing efforts and having some authority to connect all through sound "value" based measurements that take into account more than a direct purchase.

Creds to UK Agency Omobono for developing this fun reel where I pulled some of the stats.  (http://michelleshaeffer.com/weekend-fun-2011-world-of-social-media/2011/07/30/)

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