Biz360's Deborah Eastman tells us why analyzing blogs and news can provide insight on messaging effectiveness, brand perception, product quality and emerging trends.
Biz360 provides market intelligence to businesses about their brands, market and competitors. In August, the company launched Auto Discovery, a technology innovation that automatically surfaces the people, products, companies and topics mentioned most frequently in a company's market. Updated hourly, it leverages natural-language processing to aggregate similar terms and rank their prevalence across thousands of news articles for a given subject. The company's Chief Marketing Officer Deborah Eastman explains the necessity for this type of monitoring.
iMedia: According to a CMO Council report, 90 percent of marketing executives believe measuring marketing performance is a top priority, yet less than 20 percent have developed meaningful, comprehensive metrics for their marketing organizations. Why is there such a disconnect on the issue of marketing measurement?
Deborah Eastman: Most companies are still figuring out how to build a comprehensive picture of their marketing efforts with metrics. Technology can help you do this, but it still requires human strategy to use those metrics effectively. Every company will have different needs in terms of marketing measurement, so there isn't a cut-and-dried approach. We've learned that the more successful marketing measurement programs have several things in common.
First, it's important to measure with a purpose, don't measure for the sake of measuring. Marketers should start with the business goals and work their way down to the key indicators they need to measure to know if they're meeting those goals.
Second, be sure to build a sustainable program. Don't design something too complex to conduct ongoing. The key to a successful program is consistency. This allows marketers to benchmark, monitor progress over time and continually fine-tune their marketing programs. Remember, the market is always changing, so companies also need to regularly monitor the metrics they have in place.
Third, if you invest in technology, make sure you have the resources, either internally or through the provider, to get the value you expect from that investment. Technology has come a long way, but understanding how to apply market intelligence to meet your business goals still requires human analysis.
iMedia: Why should marketers monitor and analyze public content such as news and blogs? How will this help them fulfill their business strategies?
Eastman: Consumers are much, much more in control of brands these days. The fragmenting of media channels and distribution options gives consumers more choices than ever in reading about and discussing brands. In order to guide the market's perception of your brand, you need to be able to identify threats quickly and understand who your brand proponents are. Your customers, prospects, partners and key influencers are likely voicing their opinions through the blogosphere and mainstream media. Analyzing these sources can provide insight on messaging effectiveness, brand perception, product quality and emerging trends.
A market intelligence solution can help organizations measure the impact of a marketing campaign, craft strategy for an upcoming initiative or provide ongoing analysis of potential threats and opportunities. Developing a consistent tracking and monitoring strategy also helps marketers prioritize efforts. With millions of sources of print, online and broadcast media, plus blogs and message boards, identifying the largest or fastest growing threats to companies and brands can be difficult. Organizations are putting processes in place to mine and analyze this growing data source because they realize that every day their company and products are being discussed, whether they like it or not.
iMedia: What are some new technologies that allow companies to measure and analyze content?
Eastman: There have been some exciting technological developments that have enabled companies to gather market intelligence. To take a step back, one of the legacy ways of monitoring a company in the news was through print clipping services, but there was no intelligence culled from these stacks of information. It was marketing by the pound. Then, powerful databases, such as LexisNexis, helped to organize the information and make it searchable. In the last few years, free monitoring services through search engines, such as Google or Yahoo!, have provided widespread accessibility for tracking news and blogs.
None of these services, however, have the text analysis power to tell you about the tone of the content, track concepts like "innovation" or automatically surface the topics that will help you understand your brand attributes. There is a rise of new companies that pull together and analyze content from all of the separate content databases to provide a single customized "dashboard" of market intelligence for marketers. These tools track the people, products, companies and topics that make up an organization's individual market "space."
iMedia: How can real-time market intelligence help marketers better manage their brands?
Eastman: Market intelligence can help companies identify hot-button issues before they get out of hand so you they influence the outcome. It also can help monitor what people are saying about a brand, whether those people are your consumers, partners or competition. It also gives marketers a sense of what influential groups such as the media, analysts, industry experts or early adopters are saying about a brand. This knowledge helps you to better craft brand messages targeted to the right audiences, measure the impact of those efforts and track the perception of your brand.
iMedia: Can you give an example of how this is done?
Eastman: A research team at Biz360 analyzed a fast food marketing campaign to illustrate best practices when tracking brand messages. When CKE's Carl's Jr. launched a new advertising campaign featuring Paris Hilton in May, the company realized there would be no shortage of publicity. The controversy over the risqué ad drove more public discussion during its first month than similar campaigns from its competitors.
The multi-million dollar ad campaign may have generated more awareness of Carl's Jr. among its target demographic of 18- to 34-year-old males, but as sales numbers indicated, that awareness turned out to be passive. Same-store sales were only up 1.5 percent by the end of June.
Capturing attention and turning it into action still requires compelling brand and product messages, but those appeared in only 30 percent of the impressions of the campaign coverage.
*MediaSignal is a weighted reach metric that adjusts the impression count for each article by how prominently the subject is featured. In this chart, MediaSignal is measured in millions of impressions. Note that the reach of the "Paris Hilton TV Ad" topic is over three times as great as the MediaSignal of the "Spicy BBQ Six Dollar Burger" or "Spicy Burger" topics.
Carl's Jr. missed an opportunity to leverage that publicity by failing to turn attention back to the product it was promoting. In the end, the CEO of CKE, Andrew Puzder, found himself explaining why sales were less than analysts expected, given the amount of publicity surrounding the campaign. Puzder told Advertising Age that Carl's Jr. had four million web hits during the campaign, but his remarks about the publicity were simply that "the coverage has been incredible." With deeper data on the publicity, he could have said that the press coverage from the campaign generated 96 million impressions, but the brand messages only accounted for 30 million of those impressions, so expectations were not as high for product sales.
With increasingly integrated marketing campaigns, understanding the impact and effectiveness of each channel requires objective measurements. Having quantitative data allows you to evaluate the marketing mix and reallocate funds to where they are most effective. Benchmarking against the competition can assist in goal-setting for future campaigns.
In advertising, you know what the message is because you decide it. With publicity, that message isn't always in your control, but measuring it, benchmarking it and influencing it with the right insight at the right time is. Estimating the return on investment from publicity is easier when you have quantitative information on the penetration of your brand or product messages. It gives you the insight you need to adjust campaigns on-the-fly and tweak the marketing mix for a higher impact on sales.
*MediaSignal is a weighted reach metric that adjusts the impression count for each article by how prominently the subject is featured. In this chart, MediaSignal is measured in millions of impressions. Note that in May, the "Paris Hilton TV Ad (Carl's Jr.)" topic had more MediaSignal than any of the other campaigns for any of the other months.
iMedia: How has the internet boosted word-of-mouth chatter about brands, and how does that impact companies? What are some trends in how marketers are monitoring blogs, for example?
Eastman: Customers have been talking about brands for as long as there have been brands. As an evolution in this behavior, blogs are helping people leave a digital trail of those thoughts that anyone around the world can access. So, if there are a high percentage of people who find a product to be low quality, there's a good chance there's a digital trail in the blogosphere about the product's shortcomings.
Marketers are monitoring and analyzing the blogosphere as another feedback channel, helping them stay connected to their customers, and the market as a whole, to drive product development and outbound communications.
For example, for product marketers, blogs and message boards are a great way to monitor product discussions for quality issues and trends in feature/functionality of a product. For web marketers, it allows them to track messages and monitor for new messages to integrate into their campaigns. Advertising managers monitor the blogosphere for trends that tie to their products and to measure buzz around campaigns. In Corporate Communications, they're researching and identifying the most influential bloggers so they can form relationships with those influencers in the same way they have relationships with many professional journalists. They're monitoring their mindshare (or share of voice) against the competition.
Blogs, as one form of consumer-generated media, not only spread buzz on the web, they also represent a growing source of information that feeds mainstream media. You not only have to worry about the direct effect of blogs on your brand and reputation, discussion in the blogosphere can translate to mainstream media and at the point has an even greater impact on your company.