Insights for Marketing in a Digital World

I know how much I use my iPhone and how often I check my surf forecast and weather apps, but some recent stats published in the MediaPost Mobile Insider newsletter are worth considering for a moment.

"the iPhone version of GQ magazine is seeing almost the same levels of monthly engagement (65-70 minutes) as the print magazine (80 minutes). Compare those numbers to GQ.com, which gets a measly 10 minutes a month."

A colleage of mine here at The New Group, Adam Boettiger, just dug up this gem. I couldn't resist sharing it:

88% of shoppers do not read the Terms and Conditions of a website before making a purchase

Should you or should you not mine the deep social connections between your customers and their friends as a source for finding new customers? This appears to be the next wave of socially-targeted advertising that is happening on the web, and based on a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, with impressive results.

Do you know the psychological profile that your trail of tweets tells about you? TweetPsych just may be able to tell you. Another new entrant into the ever expanding world of Twitter measurement tools,TweetPsych is uniquley different in that it seeks to provide a psychological profile of a person through deep linguistic analysis of their tweets. I'm always looking for tools that can provide insight into people's mindset and provide data that helps to build a more accurate persona, TweetPsych is a facinating discovery.

I was recently blown away at seeing the sophisticated measurement and real-time optimization systems of a large multi-channel retailer and their ability to not only measure, but influence in real-time the metric of revenue per minute. It was almost like watching a highly active trader on the stock exchange make minute-by-minute decisions on buying or selling stock. Very cool stuff.

Not every interaction or engagement with your brand by consumers has equal value. Especially if your goals are to influence consideration of your brand or ignite word of mouth sharing about your products.

So do you have a schema for measuring engagement with your brand across online social channels? If so, how have you determined which actions and points of interaction are the most valuable? Which get higher weighting than others?

A recent study has found a linkage between social media engagement and financial success and profitability. In the first study of its kind, Engagement DB has provided the marketing community with some compelling directional findings. While the study findings can not show true causality, it's very exciting to see the linkage between deep engagement within social channels and the financial performance of some of the world's leading brands. Some key findings include:

Recent consumer research regarding online video consumption behavior combined with production trends expanding beyond the 30-second spot are ushering in a new era on the web for online video. Where once it was thought that the Internet was not the venue for such content, apparently many of us are now choosing to watch longer-form online brand videos and short films. In this 12-minute piece the Schweppes brand only appears twice. The content is an engaging story. It would be great to hear from Schweppes how they measure the impact of this investment on their business.

Hopefully it's a no-brainer that closing deals and generating revenue from leads is directly tied to the quality of the leads you generate. What's the focus of your lead gen programs? And how are you cultivating a stream of sales-ready, high-quality, qualified leads?

Here's an interesting recent study by MarketingSherpa that points to the necessity of optimizing your digital media for organic search as well as ensuring that your PPC search ads are sending visitors to content that delivers on the expectations set by your ad copy.