Segmentation is the most powerful concept in marketing.

Site visitors respond (and buy) when they're presented with the things that they like AND communicated to in a way that shows you understand what's important to them.

To be able to do that, you need to put them into segments.

So, if that's the case, why is your website one size fits all? When your prospective customers makes the first visit (and potentially many subsequent visits), they all receive the same thing.

Meet Target Genius(TM).

It lets you segment new visitors in real time and then serve up content, offers, or advertising based on that segment.

Your digital marketing (and your conversion rates) will never be the same. Contact us to learn how we can help you can improve conversion (and of course sell more!) with the power of behavioral segmentation.

Rose Fiorilli is one of the smartest people I know. She brings together a rare combination of left-brained, technical business savvy and an incredible appreciation and talent for creatively-driven brands and businesses (Chanel, Nabisco, Schumacher). Her intuition borders on the intimidating.

She's the person you want in your corner if you're facing a personal "Rubicon" - anything from an entrepreneurial growth plateau to the traditional corporate battle.

I should know because I've been able to get to know Rose when we were both at Nabisco Biscuit Company and once again at Chanel. And, for full disclosure, we're also both graduates of the Wharton School.

Let's just say, I wasn't always smart enough to recognize just how insightful Rose's counsel was when she gave it.

Today, I know better.  Anyone interested in Executive Coaching in New York City (or really anywhere), would do well to at least invest in a brief conversation with her.

Rose came to us to help create a small, but well designed brand identity and informative web design that lives up to her exacting creative standards.

Importantly, we also worked together to make sure that she's armed with the analytical tools behind the scenes to help her grow and manage her business over time.

 

 

 

from flickr

I'm constantly surprised at how little effort companies apply to understanding their targeted buyer.

Big companies and small, and especially B2B companies, can be lulled into complacency by the notion that they actually can identify all of their potential buyers. By identify, I mean that they might easily be able to focus exclusively on a profession or members of an association.

Just because you're selling to a target that you can put your finger on, say you're selling something to doctor's offices, doesn't mean that they're all the same.

Behavioral segmentation can be the answer to help you identify where to place your next marketing investment and sometimes more importantly, where NOT to put your next marketing dollar. 

Here's a simple example:

Assume that you would like to sell software to physicians. It's relatively simple to purchase a list of every licensed physician in the country.

So, do you still need to segment the market (or really, discover the segments that already exist?)?

A resounding YES!

Some of those doctors could have a foot in the grave and not be interested whatsoever in your software. Others might have already purchased practice management software from another company and won't be in "the zone" for another purchase anytime soon.  Others could be on your list but really in a larger practice group, meaning that they don't have a lot of impact on software purchase decisions.

In other words, if you keep trying to reach every physician, you'll be wasting a lot of effort. Effort that should be applied to "fishing where the fish are."

So, this is where you can benefit from behavioral segmentation.

And, why behavioral segmentation as opposed to some other flavor. Well, you can create segments from a lot of different data sets. It comes down to the basic question - when it comes to figuring out what people are going to do in the future, which do you trust more - what they've done in the past or what they say they will do?

There really is no comparison. Behavior rules. Just think about it.

If you're interested in developing behavior-based segments to improve your marketing investments, there are some interesting options to consider. 

Using analytics tools like Omniture's Site Catalyst along with some of the usual statistical suspects like SAS or SPSS, you can begin to pull together all of the behaviors of your prospects and customers. This is a critical step to getting to powerful insights. You really must pull together information about current behaviors so you can gain insight into what behaviors are the good ones - meaning they lead to good customers (people who buy a lot and often).

Sometimes even more importantly, you can begin to create a profile of those behaviors that are bad - or don't lead to good customer behaviors.  There are lots of ways a bad customer can be more expensive than just a non-customer. Imagine someone who calls customer service constantly, or maybe buys and returns products constantly.

I've completed many classic segmentation efforts, those that include survey results, and can tell you that behavioral data enables an entirely different level of understanding into what prospects and customers are going to do.  Call me a marketing nerd, but this is what digital marketing analytics is all about.

Once you have a better sense of good behaviors and bad behaviors - and don't call me too judgmental - now what? Now you can refocus your marketing (and business) investments toward creating the good and limiting the impact of the bad.

What's that mean?

Getting back to our physicians example, assume that you figure out that a behavior that points to a potential purchase of your software is a combination of a specific keyword search, visiting certain parts of your site, and downloading a specific whitepaper - all combined with the age and specialty of the practice.

Now you have something to go on. With this understanding of your segment (and the behaviors associated), you can make the smart marketing investments that drive business results.

Pretty cool, huh?

It's hard work, but it's worth it.

Now that I've got the basics covered, I'll work on finding more detailed examples that can give you a better sense of what's possible.  Let me know if you're interested in learning more. Or, even better, send me a message if you have a great behavioral segementation success story that you would like to share.

 

 

 

 

 

 

from flickr

If you're managing a business with a long purchase cycle, perhaps something that requires a fair bit of contemplation (say, a new home, an automobile, or even life insurance), you're probably interested in moving the meter on CONSIDERATION. In other words, well before someone is actually going to make a purchase, you want to make sure that your target customer has your brand in the consideration set.

It's even more important if you're trying to develop a strong brand in a category with a lot of simple names or no strong brand presence.

So, say that you're marketing an apartment company and you would like to know if your marketing investments are improving your target customer's consideration of your brand. Given what can be a long sales cycle (people start thinking about moving long before they actually move), it's important that people consider your brand well before the purchase.

While there are many different options for measuring consideration (that I'll likely cover in the future), here's an interesting one that utilizes pay-per-click search ads for data gathering purposes.

1. Create two sets of search ads for your apartment complex.
   
   One will feature a generic title, something like  Luxury Apartment, and the other will include your brand name, Brand Luxury Apartment. The body of the ad will be exactly the same.
   
   
2. Monitor these two ad versions as an ongoing experiment to measure the power of your brand
   
   These two ads are a microcosm of the marketplace. You want to answer the question, am I increasing consideration of my brand (when people are actually looking for an apartment)? With this small (and ongoing) experiment, you will be able to monitor what percentage of people who have searched on terms that you've defined click on your branded search ad as compared to the generic ad. 
   
   

It's no different than selling store brand chocolate sandwich cookies next to OREOs . . . and monitoring sales results.

What we do with this data for our Managed Analytics clients is add it to your analytics software (Omniture, Google, CoreMetrics, etc.) so you can then use this data in your ongoing analyses.

If you're trying to move the meter on consideration of your brand, consider going to school at about 15 cents per click.

It's a new year and we're making some changes here at Digital Scientists.

First, we'll be making some changes to our blog.  In addition to letting you know what mascot Frances is up to and about the occasional new project, we'll be using our blog to help you do just what this post says - get marketing down to a science. 

And, even though we're digital scientists, we know that not everyone is ready to wade into the technical details. We'll keep things aimed at senior marketers (with just the occasional technical item that will always be linked to a helpful explanation). Our BHAG is to help you transform marketing into an analytics-driven discipline.

What does that mean?

We'll focus on how to use digital marketing analytics to do what every marketer wants to do - understand market segments, position your brand, and of course make and track marketing investments.

But that's not all.

Digital Marketing Analytics give marketers the power to rethink the role of marketing.  When I co-wrote Enterprise Marketing Management: The New Science of Marketing (you notice how science was a theme even then!) in 2003, web analytics were still little more than a way to track very basic web interactions like hits or simple visits.

In seven years, so much has changed. So, what's happened?  Something wonderful.

from youtube

 

It's at last possible to use analytical tools to create a real picture of customer and prospect behavior. If your financial results are your rearview mirror, then this analytical picture of prospect and customer behavior is your windshield. Given today's crazy marketplace, mastering leading indicators of sales and overall business performance are more important than ever.

So, what do we know about all of this - besides being a nerdy mix of marketing strategists, digital marketers, and people who have a certain affection for even those numbers that aren't 0's and 1's?

Well, we're in the thick of things in the world of digital marketing analytics thanks to our own Managed Analytics offering as well as our ongoing joint research effort with Heidrick & Struggles - The Digital Marketing Standard. We're practitioners if you want to sound all medical about it.

Of course, there are more tools than you can shake a stick at. While we'll talk occasionally about tools and software (Omniture, Core Metrics, Google Analytics, and many more - not to mention our own Digital Scientists Analytics helper application that works with the standard web analytics tools), we'll spend most of our time talking about how a senior marketer can put them to work. And the data that you'll find in them.

You can safely say that just about everything in these blog posts will be an opinion of some sort. However, I'm smart enough to know that there are a lot of smart marketers out there. And, I'll be working hard to help introduce you to them and to help you learn from them.

Stay tuned.

Up until now, it’s been hard to figure out how people are actually using an iPhone app. While we’ve been able to track what iPhone users do when they visit a site, we’ve not been able to get down to details inside an actual iPhone app.

Starting today, we can track visitor actions that go beyond simple pageviews. When your customer or prospect watches a video, clicks on a link, or even downloads a document - you’ll know and will be able to see it as an analytics overlay.

Now you’ll be able to create conversion events inside of an iPhone app and be able to provide more detailed insight into whether your app is creating the marketing results you’re after.

Contact us if you’re interested to learn more about Digital Scientists Managed Analytics offering and how it can help you create an integrated view of your customer behavior.

Digital Scientists recently launched a landing page for two local Monkey Joe’s franchises. The purpose was to create a simple web page where visitors could sign up for coupons off their next visit to Monkey Joe’s. To drive visitors to the web page, a one-minute radio ad (created by the client) would also be used in conjunction with natural search traffic.

The landing page was designed to look similar to the main Monkey Joe’s website. The main addition was an easy-to-use sign up form which allowed visitors to request their free coupons. In addition, Digital Scientists used the wonderful MailChimp application to send the coupons and manage the sign-ups and Google Analytics was used to track visitors and goals.

Overall, it was a very simple project, but nonetheless the Monkey Joe’s landing page was effective in providing coupon-cutter moms with yet another way to save pennies.

There’s some new faces at Digital Scientists (perhaps you’ve noticed the gentleman with the big smile on our scientists page).

Hemanth Pai is the latest addition to the team, bringing his knowledge and expertise of emerging web and mobile technologies to our development department. This Georgia Tech graduate (Masters in Computer Science) possesses skills in HTML, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, and Objective C (to name a few). He is currently working on the Blackberry version of the Mission Zero app, as well as various iPhone applications for our clients.

Of course, that’s all shop talk. We asked Hemanth to tell us a little more about himself. Who knew we had a budding entrepreneur on our hands!

Where do you originally hail from?
I was born in Udupi, a coastal city in South India and brought up in Bangalore, a major metropolis in South India.

Where did your work prior to Digital Scientists?
I worked for Intuit (makers of QuickBooks and TurboTax) as an intern over the last 2 summers – summer of 2007 in India and summer of 2008 in California.

What’s something we don’t know about you (and would never guess)?
My friends and I could have been the inventors of electronic cigarettes. About four years back (right around the same time when some Chinese guy applied for a patent), we participated in an Innovative Business Ideas competition. We were all electronics & electrical engineers (with quite a bit of entrepreneurial skills), so we came up with the idea of electronic cigarettes.

We designed a heating element that was cylindrical in shape and would vaporize nicotine (in liquid format). We also came up with a rudimentary, yet solid business plan. And all of this happened in less than 10 hours, and our sole aim was to win. We did win the competition hands down, but the irony is we never thought of taking it forward and actually implementing it. We did use the same idea to win a couple other contests.

What’s on your iPod playlist?
Mainly Metallica, Iron Maiden, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana and some Hip Hop & Pop.

What is your favorite blog?
My favorite blog is Zen Habits.

What blog do you wish your wrote?
I wish I wrote Engadget (getting your hands on the coolest, newest gadgets + bragging about it = nirvana).

Whose quotes are at the end of your email or what comic is on your fridge?
XKCD

If you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?
Alizee Jacotey

As a digital marketer now, tell us what you love most about the industry:
Marketing involves anticipating and understanding the needs of the consumer/end users and satisfying those needs in a better way than the competitors. How one uniquely addresses the needs of the end user is a challenging task. There is a lot of scope for innovation and creativity. That’s what I love most about marketing.

When the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center asked Digital Scientists to design their new website to help promote their cutting-edge exhibitions and drive membership, we were thrilled to donate our services.   After all, the Contemporary has been at the forefront of the Atlanta art scene for over 25 years.

Our marketing team immediately framed the project around an Art Meets Commerce point of view.  Our design team relished the chance to show off their creative skills.  The development team couldn’t wait to introduce the Contemporary to the world of Web 2.0.

We chose to let the art speak for itself on the bold new homepage.  Then we gave the rest of the site a minimal design treatment and layout.  Pages were created to be both visually stimulating and user-friendly. Content was kept to a minimum and folded into interactive elements.   This kept the look and feel of the pages clean, while putting important details within a user’s reach.   Exhibitions, Programs, and Support are now prominently featured and more accessible.   The addition of commenting and social tools, as well as a calendar, allows users to interact with site and share art, events and dates with their friends.  Users can now follow the Contemporary on Twitter and Facebook straight from the site.

We built the site around a robust content management system (CMS) that allows the Contemporary to quickly and easily update their site as programs and exhibitions change.  To save on editing time, we added PaperClip, a plugin, that automatically resizes uploaded images to fit the different pages.   The “Add to calendar” feature found on the Exhibitions and Programming pages is an example of the custom functionality we developed.   Additionally, jQuery makes the user experience a bit more enjoyable by providing image viewers, tooltips, hover effects, accordion sliders, and ajax functionality.

Whether it’s the sleek and modern look that makes the new site engaging for users or the easy-to-use management tools that lets the Contemporary focus on what matters most – art, of course! – the new site aims to please.

Visit the new Atlanta Contemporary Art Center website today.   Check out the current exhibitions or just browse the new scenery.

Today, we are celebrating the launch of Ray Anderson’s new book, Confessions of a Radical Industrialist. Anderson is the founder and chairman of Interface, Inc., a company we have proudly partnered with on several projects in support of their Mission to Zero. It’s also the unveiling of RayAnderson.com, which Digital Scientists designed to promote the Confessions of a Radical Industrialist book tour.

Given that the author is a noted figure in the sustainability movement, it was important for the book to have its own online presence. Therefore, we developed a microsite (just a little site, but filled with lots of great content).

In lieu of a traditional navigation and search bar, visitors on RayAnderson.com are directed to take three distinct actions: Meet Ray, Read Ray or Follow Ray.

Meet Ray - This page provides an introduction to Ray Anderson, multimedia materials, and a calendar of Ray’s speaking engagements, including venue information and the ability to RSVP.

Read Ray – From here, readers can purchase Confessions of a Radical Industrialist, as well as Ray’s first book, Mid-Course Correction. They can also read selected press articles and browse Ray’s personal reading list.

Follow Ray – This is a dossier of Ray’s social media activities. Readers can choose to follow Confessions of a Radical Industrialist on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and of course, MissionZero.org.

To finish it all off, we applied a bold, modern black-and-white design treatment.

If you want to learn more, or maybe just see what the excitement is all about, check it out at RayAnderson.com.