Posts Tagged ‘media’

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Questions to Ask Your Clients

Monday, November 12th, 2012 by Harry Gold

Asking the right questions is often as important as giving the right answers.

Asking the right questions not only arms you with the information you need as an agency to create a successful social media marketing strategy and media plan, it gets the client thinking along the same lines as you. It helps them to look at success in the same way you do and aligns your priorities.

So in this week’s column, I thought I would relist some of my favorite questions we ask when we are pitching or on-boarding a new client for media planning and social media marketing. Of course, many of the questions can be applied to any agency service.

Some of these questions seem obvious. But the reality is that many of these questions are never asked – we often assume that we already know the answers. Also, if you are on the client side, these are questions you should be asking yourself and using to prepare agency briefs. (Please know that I am 100 percent sure I am leaving many questions out, so email me any you think I should have listed and maybe I’ll put them in a future column – of course I will make sure to give you credit!)

Service/Relationship

1. What qualities and behaviors do you want to see in your agency team?

2. What qualities and behaviors do you not want to see?

3. What is not working about your current vendor relationship or in-house solution?

4. What are common mistakes and misconceptions agencies make or have about your business and brand?

5. Do you have a wish list of initiatives that are not part of this program but you would like to see come to fruition in the future?

6. How do you measure the quality of your agency relationships?

7. What are things you would like to see your agency take more responsibility for or go over and above the call of duty on?

8. What is the most often you can meet with us for status and planning meetings?

9. Do all the people in your company who need to know what we are doing understand what we are doing?

10. Are there any training or informational seminars you would like us to give to different groups in your company (online media, search marketing, social media marketing, etc.)?

Goals/Metrics

11. What are your metrics for success? CPM, CTR, CPC, CPL, CPA, ROI, page views, engagement time, brand recognition?

12. How about for social? Fans, followers, chatter, shares, social site traffic/leads/revenue, etc.?

13. What is the most important action on your site? What is the least important action on your site?

14. What will make this campaign successful in your eyes? How about in your bosses’ eyes? How about in your sales team’s eyes?

15. Do you have any historical or current benchmarks for these metrics we can trend against? (Often, for example, a client is at a $50 cost per action and they are hiring you to get it to $25.)

16. Can you elaborate on things you have tried in the past? What worked well and why do you think it succeeded? What didn’t work and why do you think it failed?

17. What is your average margin on a sale or what is your average cost of goods sold? What are the expenses that go into the cost of goods sold?

Tracking and Reporting

18. How do you currently measure ROI?

19. What tracking systems and social reporting systems are you using now?

20. Are you able to trace offline actions and sales (call center, retail, post-lead conversion) to online investments? If so, how?

21. Are there any security compliance regulations we should know about that will make it hard to get our tracking code onto your site? If there are, who should we start talking to now?

22. Are there any in-house reports or dashboards you will want our data integrated into? If so, can we see them so we can deliver data to you in the right format?

23. What can we provide you to help express your success within your company and promote the good work that you do?

Media

24. What media properties do you know you want to be in? Why?

25. What properties do you know you do not want to be in? Why?

26. What are your geographical constraints?

27. Are you asking for online value added placements with your offline media buys?

28. Do you have any proposals from media reps that contacted you directly?

29. Do you want to have a media day to meet with the reps of the larger properties we are buying on?

Social

30. Why would anyone want to be your friend? Why would they want to connect with you, listen to you, and share what you have to say?

31. What fears, compliance issues, and workflow issues are holding you back from doing more social media marketing?

32. Do you have a companion steady state social advertising budget?

33. What social properties do you have up and running?

34. How do you handle naming conventions, URL conventions, and management for various brands and regions throughout the world in order to avoid clutter?

35. How do you encourage your employees to produce great content that expresses your company’s expertise, good corporate citizenship, and human side?

36. When you produce content, where do you centralize and archive it?

37. What are the internal and external sources of content around your industry? Staff experts, industry experts, blogs, media, government agencies, etc.?

38. Who is managing social now?

39. Can you describe your workflow and approval process related to your social publishing?

40. Do you have an internal training and policy on how employees talk about the company and brand on their social platforms?

41. How do you handle password management for all your social properties?

42. How do tweets, status updates, and other posts get created and approved?

43. Do you know what types of posts and content spark high levels of user engagement?

44. Do you have standard operating procedures and rapid response legal/customer service resources for moderation?

45. What are some of the bad things people might say about your product or brand and how do you address those issues in the real world?

46. How are you measuring success in social media now?

Audience

47. Who are your target customers broken down by product?

48. Do they have any seasonal or geographic buying patterns?

49. Please provide all the customer analysis data you can to us?

50. Who are your best customers and what do they have in common?

51. Who are your average customers?

52. Who are your worst customers?

53. What are common mistakes and misconceptions consumers make or have about your business, products, and brand?

Messaging/Offers

54. What are all the benefits of your products broken down by product and target audience? How do you help people?

55. What are all the offers you can realistically make to your different audiences broken down by audience and product? What can we give them right now?

56. What has worked and not worked in the past for a benefit and offer messaging standpoint?

57. Can we see all the creative (banners, search ads, email, and landing pages) you have ran in the last couple years? Do you have the results for these various executions?

58. Can we talk to your sales people about what closes a deal? Can we hear a pitch from your top sales person?

59. Do you mind if we secret shop your competitors and hear their pitch?

60. What makes you different from your competitors? Why are you better? Why was your product developed?

Now it is important to note that you do not need to ask your client this whole list of questions or give them a questionnaire to complete before you meet them. The last thing you want to do is give clients homework.

This is a list for you to complete gradually over the course of several conversations, emails, and meetings. However, once it is completed it is nice to send them all the questions you have asked them and what their answers were – just for “clarification” of course. They will love this document, guaranteed!

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Media Fragmentation and the New Media Multitasker

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012 by lblock

New media consumption habits are emerging amongst consumers as a result of the rising popularity of smartphones and tablet devices. According to a recent study conducted by the Harvard Business Review, the average person is now consuming twelve hours of media in only nine hours.

While it was once feared that digital would compete against television’s share of consumer attention, studies are finding that, instead, consumers are simultaneously using both platforms. Reported data indicates spikes in tablet and mobile usage during primetime TV viewing hours, as consumers research and interact with content related to what they are viewing.

Though digital is not necessarily eating away at TV viewing hours the way it was once expected to, studies are showing that the new digital platforms are competing against the traditional desktop computer. A recently study by comScore found that digital platform usage varies widely by both the day and the time of day.

During the work week, desktop usage is at its highest during typical business hours, meanwhile, mobile and tablet usage tends to spike during primetime TV viewing hours.

On the weekends, usage tends to spike for desktop, tablets and mobile in the early morning when people first wake up, but declines during the remainder of the day as people spend time socializing or catching up on errands.

Media Fragmentation and the New Media Multitasker

How do you currently use your digital devices?

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4 Questions for Media Success

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011 by Harry Gold

This week I’m collaborating with Leah Block, our newest media team member, to bring you this column. One of the things I always try to do as a manager and entrepreneur is identify easy-to-remember approaches, questions, and exercises that can consistently be applied to complex situations. The idea is to embrace daily exercises that, if applied uniformly, can cover the majority of situations people run into and get organizations to apply a universal set of best practices and standards. For an example, you can see my previous column “4 Questions for Agency Success.”

So when Leah showed me some of the questions she asks herself when creating a media plan, I thought this was a perfect concept to place in my column: a library of daily questions and exercises we as marketers must ask ourselves. So we co-authored this column and came up with four questions for media success.

The Setup for the 4 Questions for Media Success

A comprehensive media approach shouldn’t necessarily be about maintaining the same messaging or goals across all media channels and placements, but rather, it should focus on the full brand embrace and customer journey. It requires a keen understanding of all media tactics being used and how each one affects or leads into the other; guiding the consumer through the conversion funnel from awareness to purchase to loyalty. Oftentimes, marketers and media people are wrapped up in individual parts of this process, or a singular metric like acquisition of new customers. As a result, they don’t connect all the phases in the customer journey to create a lasting brand embrace or focus on driving sales from existing brand loyalists. For example, what may be deemed a display acquisition campaign will never just be as simple as that. An acquisition banner not only drives direct conversions, but it can also keep brands and products top of mind with consumers in the purchase consideration phase. So while display and search can be used to connect with new customers, remarketing can be used to stay in touch with prospective buyers after the first engagement or lead capture event to actually close the deal, or encourage brand loyalty and repeat sales.

In a nutshell, it’s not all about one goal or metric, but all the goals and metrics that need to be applied throughout the customer journey. If all you are pushing is a lead capture call to action or brand building engagement, you’re not accommodating the continuing dialogue requirements of converting a consumer into a loyal or repeat customer. If most companies just relied on the first-time purchaser or even the first click to close a deal, they would be out of business pretty fast. This is especially true for consumer packaged goods – they are super reliant on brand loyalty!

So how do marketers keep the requirements of the full customer journey top of mind and not fall into the trap of boiling their campaigns down to a single metric? When planning a new campaign, marketers and advertisers alike need to consider the larger picture and full customer journey. So at a minimum, always be asking these four key simple questions:

  • Who am I trying to reach?
  • When am I reaching people?
  • What do I want them to do?
  • What’s next?

4 Questions for Media Success Exploration

So let’s dig deeper on the four questions and see where they should lead the people asking them.

  • Who am I trying to reach? This is totally standard and the question that all marketers and media people ask when creating a plan. So we won’t go that deeply into it because it’s obvious you really need to do your homework on this question.
  • When am I reaching people? Now this is a question that’s asked much less frequently. Think about paid search and why it works so well. It’s as much about “when” as it is about “who.” It gets people right when they are looking for what you’re selling. So why not try to apply some of the magic of “when” to display? By asking this question, it forces you to identify where people are in the purchase consideration phase or branding process. It makes you ask questions like, “Do the people I am targeting already know my brand or product and what it does? Have they already engaged with my brand or filled out a lead gen form? Are there other forms of advertising like television providing air cover and support and can I surgically synchronize with those campaigns? Should my ads mirror the traditional advertising or complement it? If you are doing retargeting, should you be hitting people with the same ads as those who have not been to your site lately?” These are all the secondary questions asking “when” forces us to think about as media and marketing professionals. So, when we target consumers with online display, we’re very often looking at “who” when targeting but we also need to be thinking about “when.”
  • What do I want people to do? Now that you have thought about both the “who” and “when” of your targeting, you have to focus on exactly what you want them to do at the very moment from that particular campaign or placement. This will drive two very important decisions – what action or behavior should your creative be trying to encourage and what are you going to measure? So in the case of a branding campaign where there is lots of air cover from other media and no possible transaction, you may be looking at engagement. In the case of a post-conversion retargeting program where you already collected a lead, you don’t need them to fill out the form again – you want them to keep your product top of mind. If it’s a brand loyalist, maybe you can encourage them to share your message in their social networks. So what do you want people to do and measure against that goal?
  • What’s next? This is another question that is rarely asked by many media people and in fact a lot of marketers. Now that you reached people in one environment and they took an action, how will you reach them in the next phase of the purchase funnel and what messages and offers will you present to them? What behaviors will you encourage? Again, do you want to show people the same message or offer through the whole purchase consideration process or should your media message actually help to escalate people to purchase and brand loyalty? Think about how search, display, retargeting, social, packaging, and even in-house email all string together. That is what you will need to think about and piece together by asking, “What’s next?”

Clearly there are more questions and factors that one can apply to their media program, but starting by asking these four questions will lead you to open a lot of unexplored opportunities, strategies, and tactics. As always, please comment to let us know what you think and of course share this column with the above social sharing buttons!

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