Social Media Marketing for the Small Business - The Data Dilemma

Social media marketing is a continually evolving beast. New avenues of contact and exposure for your brand keep emerging, with promise of being the next big thing that will bring your company legions of followers and a wave of incremental business. Mark me down as a skeptic. It can happen, but the probability is not likely to be in your favor. Innovation, which is what adopting a novel social media platform amounts to, is risky...very risky. There is no history of failure and success through the experience of others to serve as a basis for developing best practices in your own operation. Investment level in time and cash can be on a scale that seems inordinate for your business. Need I go on?

Let the big players, at least the other players, be the innovators. 

Being a lab rat is dangerous. Be the observer. Keep tabs on new avenues to deliver your message, get discovered, and build your online presence. These are necessary business activities, the essential part of growth. Adopt social media platforms and other promotional practices that fit your business. If a promising marketing activity would be overly burdensome or awkward for your staff, outsource it or abandon it. Your business probably works pretty well in its current form, so be cautious when considering business process changes that require a disturbance to your present level of success. Marketing activities will not likely be a direct revenue center in your smaller scale business. Pouring substantial company resources into an unproven high risk endeavor may not be a sound move.

Let's move on to the subject of this article, which is the use of data. Everybody wants to know what works in marketing, a field that relies far more on art than science. One line of thought, of which we are probably all afflicted at one time or another, is the "if it worked for them it will work for me" approach to decision making. How true is this, and is it a sound business decision technique?

There are many citations and displays of survey results and web analytics in free articles to be found all over the web. The results of some are quite stark, indicating great success with some particular activity, platform, or other element of a social media marketing program. But will your business experience the same euphoria if you follow in their footsteps? The answer is unknown, but let's take a look at some concepts that may help in evaluating what you read.

Wikipedia.org provides this summation of "analytics" and I thank them for it.

Analytics is the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data. Especially valuable in areas rich with recorded information, analytics relies on the simultaneous application of statistics, computer programming and operations research to quantify performance. Analytics often favors data visualization to communicate insight.

As it applies to social media marketing, analytics consist of data regarding visitors to a webpage and their relevant activities that can be measured as they browse. Surveys are aggregations of participant responses to questions regarding some marketing related subject.

For perspective

The targeted readership for this blog is small businesses engaging in technical selling activities in the industrial arena. The products they manufacture or distribute require special knowledge not generally held by the public. In the majority of the cases, there is consultation at some level between the buyer and seller to make sure the product delivered will meet the special needs of the customer. Few of these businesses have an online store.

Some suggestions for evaluating results of marketing activities you read about:

• Where does the article appear?
  There are marketing journals, just like there are scientific journals, that deliver well derived statistical results from large scale studies conducted by real statisticians and researchers. The articles are academic and very technical, not much fun to read. They do, however, often provide deep analysis of the data to determine how applicable it may be to the marketing efforts of others.
  
  Many of the articles found through a web based search for marketing savvy are authored by people (like me) working for marketing service companies. The articles are informative, often useful, but their ultimate purpose is to build business for the marketing services company. Data in these articles is not as rigorously gathered and analyzed, tending to be more anecdotal than statistical. How applicable the results may be to your operation is not readily available and can be difficult to determine.
• Is the subject matter of the research applicable to your business?
  Some research or survey information and conclusions may apply universally, others may not. Make a careful assessment of how the study and results may apply to your business practices and operation. Be cautious with your decision making when you cannot establish a convincing connection.
• Is the research based upon a subject group similar to your customers?
  Try to discern the demographics and other identifying characteristics of the participants or sample. If it does not closely match your customer base, or one that you anticipate pursuing, the research conclusions may not be useful and may even be counterproductive if incorporated into your efforts. 
• Is the behavior being tested one that is relevant to your target market?
  You know your customer base, your market. If the survey or research relates strongly to behavior or activity that is not characteristic of your market, the value of the conclusions is diminished for purposes of your decision making.

Avoid being whipsawed by every new piece of information or well written article. Collect it, digest it, discuss it, but be cautious when applying newly discovered insight (data) to your own marketing efforts.

In business, avoiding a move in the wrong direction can be equally advantageous to making the right move.

Marketing is a continuous process with many opportunities to make changes and try new methods. Keep in mind, though, that the goal is to build your brand and revenue stream. Operating on the cutting edge carries greater risk to your marketing expenditure. Also consider the time component, as any new marketing strategy requires time to develop effectiveness.

How to proceed?

• Be patient, collect all the information you can and build your knowledge of social media marketing. 
• Avoid blind experimentation with methods and tools you do not understand. 
• Be skeptical until whatever reasonable analysis you choose to apply indicates an acceptably high probability of positive returns for a course of action.
• Outsource activities that will require too much time from your current staff to effectively execute. Taking time away from current revenue generating tasks can increase the costs of new marketing activity.
• If you outsource, search for a vendor that will provide what you want, not what they want. You and the vendor should reach a common understanding on what the delivery expectations are to be. Avoid purchasing service levels that you have not yet evaluated for usefulness to your business model.

The bottom line.....Be calm, be patient. Make a thoughtful decision and evaluate it's impact. 

As always, follow, comment, contact me with your questions. I can be contacted directly at CMS4i by putting @TomO in the message section. At CMS4i, we are here to help you make things work, so contact us anytime.

Making the Social Media Investment Work - The Data Obsession

How applicable is your data to real decision making?

As small business operators, we continuously look for answers, confirmation that we are doing the right thing. In today’s climate, metrics are ubiquitous. There is a push to assign a number to every aspect of the business, compare some measure of performance to a benchmark or goal. When it comes to digital marketing and social media activities, it can be difficult to draw a straight line between impressions, clicks, or page views and revenue generating results. This is particularly true if your website does not have a commerce component where customers can buy your products. It is even more true when your scale is small, where a relatively limited number of outcomes can have a large impact on the data picture. Data is best for decision making when there is a virtual mountain of it. In any other case, treat it as informative, but not indicative enough to direct the helm of the company.

What is important, is that you see something happening in your social media and other digital marketing that can be considered positive progress in areas that lead to opportunity and revenue. 

Clicks and page views are not orders, and assigning some cooked up dollar value to them in order to judge performance may not be the best way to make marketing decisions. Most page views are potential customers checking you out, looking to see if your company appears to be one worth doing some business with.

You are in the sales and promotion business. You have a certain amount of intuition that relates to your field; otherwise you would probably be in another. Be careful about letting data overrule your intuition. Data is not inherently better than intuition; it’s just a different methodology for decision making. Data is useful when working to bring others into agreement with your view of things, to “bring them on board”.  When there is data, everyone can look at it and agree. You don’t need to have faith when there is data.

In recent decades, we have been increasingly indoctrinated to worship data. In many cases that adoration is well deserved. However, if you are not a statistician, or one with a firm understanding of statistics and how to determine the validity of a data sample, caution should be your watchword.

At its simplest, validity relates to whether data, and the research used to obtain it, is really measuring results related to some target aspect of your marketing program.

Is it really measuring what you think it is measuring, or are you just gathering numbers. If you are using your intuition to assess the validity of a data set, instead of statistical methods, be very cautious about making big moves based upon that information.

Don't overthink your website analytics reports

Another question related to your quantitative measurements is how reliable the collected information may be.

Reliability relates to how well the method of data acquisition leads to consistent results. 

For example, if you are looking at the monthly stats on your website analytics report, how do you determine if the deductions or decisions you might make based on that data would apply to every month, or a larger group of customers with a more normal distribution (sorry for the statistics lexicon). Essentially, are you seeing things that relate to just the group of customers contained in the data, or can what you see be applied to your entire customer base? There is a substantial amount of math involved in answering that question, not intuition.

Large marketers, with substantial brand recognition and market penetration, have to struggle with statistical validity and reliability continuously. Their challenge is to squeeze some incremental increase out of a market where they already enjoy a significant presence and share.

Here is the good news.

You, my small business friend, can ignore the statistical details and focus on things that will generate revenue. By that, I am suggesting that most of you are probably in the early to middle stages of implementing a digital marketing or social media marketing plan. For now, and probably quite some time into your future, bigger gains will be reaped from focusing on implementation and procedure, than data gathering and analysis. Put some reasonable assets and activities into action and get some results.

In order for your data to truly be useful, it must expand to a volume that will produce verifiable and reliable results. There are plenty of orders to be closed between now and then, so let’s focus on that.

If you are still with me here, I hope you are more astute and comfortable with the statistical aspect of your digital marketing and social media efforts. Those analytics that show how many visitors came to your website, pages they viewed, and how long they lingered are interesting and useful as gauges of activity. The desired long term trend of activity indicators is upward, with flat being acceptable, and negative giving cause for concern. No matter the case, don't stress about it

My next post will bring some insight concerning what you should expect to gain from your social media presence and Internet footprint. As always, comment or contact me with your questions. I can be contacted directly at CMS4i by putting @TomO in the message section. At CMS4i, we are here to help you make things work, so contact us anytime.

Control Equipment Company Gets Current with Great New Look and Improved SEO

Control Equipment Company (CEC) is a long time client of CMS4i. Their former site needed an upgrade to benefit from a CSS/XHTML layout and better search engine optimization. They asked CMS4i to provide them with a streamlined development process on an aggressive time-frame.

In a few short weeks CMS4i worked out the design with CEC and then "dropped" it on top of the existing product, vendor and capability database. With a few adjustments here and a few tweaks there, the new site was launched in record time.

Some nice comments by CEC:

"The development of our website was done quickly and professionally. Steve, Greg and their team are a pleasure to work with and will continue to be our web site development resource."

Flow-Tech Knows it Pays to Use the Process Industry's Leading Web Developer

Flow-Tech, a Hunt Valley, MD industrial Rep company selected CMS4i because of their market understanding and experience in process control.

CMS4i won out in a last minute, "Hail Mary", bid for the job because Flow-Tech saw the value a CMS4i site delivers. Most importantly, unlimited pages, having a true content management system at their disposal, and that CMS4i's background would save time and effort in launching the new site.

Check out the testimonial by Flow-Tech's President:

"We originally chose a well-known, local website company, thinking their experience would expedite our new site's development. Turned out they knew little about our industry and we never had the time to educate them. CMS4i approached us mid-project and convinced us to cut our losses and go with them. We did and it was a great move.

With their background in industrial controls and automation, CMS4i knew exactly how things should be organized and presented. In just a few weeks we had a beautifully designed, well-organized and intelligently structured site. Just about everything was in place. All we had to do was review and make a few small changes. Aside from their industry knowledge, the CMS4i team were very cooperative, eager to make us happy and priced very competitively.

I strongly endorse Greg, Steve and their team for any web development job, particularly if you're in the industrial market."