Inner Architect Partners With Salesforce.com Certified Consultants Red Cote

November 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Over the past few years Inner Architect has continued to build processes and systems for analyzing an organizations’ marketing efforts within the social network channels. During this evolution, we utilized a generic CRM tool that provided value but on a limited basic platform. We realized the next step for our business was to adopt the Salesforce.com  platform for our growing need for greater scalability.

We discovered that Salesforce.com has recognized the needs of it’s clients who have adopted social networks by enabling CRM integration with Twitter and Facebook via the Salesforce for Twitter and Facebook app from Force.com. This powerful app led us to our current partnership launch.

Why the Salesforce Platform for our Business?

We highly recommend the Salesforce platform for managing social marketing. Salesforce’s ability to integrate with Twitter and Facebook enables businesses to:

  • Keep track of engagement with social connections
  • Schedule and manage social networking campaigns
  • Measure and analyze results
  • Hold historical conversational data at the record level
  • Use social data to leverage efforts in social networking
  • Use social data to leverage efforts in other marketing channels

Inner Architect Partners with Red Cote Consulting Inc.

Business partnerships are often the lifeblood of any successful organization. It is with that thought in mind that we are extremely excited to announce our partnership with Red Cote Consulting Inc.. As a certified Salesforce.com partner since 2003, Redcote Consulting Inc. has worked with a broad cross section of businesses from small startups to medium sized organizations successfully completing over 300 Salesforce.com implementations/integrations. Red Cote’s range of services include:

  • QuickStart: This service rapidly has a business up and ready to utilize Salesforce.com.  Red Cote helps customers configure the application with a brief Business Process Review followed by configuration of the application. This can be done online or on site. In conjunction with configuration, Red Cote offers JumpStart Training, online or on site training, to ensure users have the necessary skills to begin using the application effectively.
  • Customized Consulting: This service is for customers who have completed the basic installation of Salesforce.com but need additional ongoing support for more complex functionalities that are more iterative in nature.

Purpose of Inner Architect-Red Cote Consulting Inc. Partnership

There are many advantages to our partnership with Red Cote Consulting that all support the purpose of this collaboration: to provide a unique opportunity for businesses to harness social media networks as powerful new channels that produce quantifiable returns on investment.

Inner Architect’s purpose and role in this partnership is to provide Red Cote Consulting clients and partners with services designed to help them understand, implement, and track successful social network campaigns that create positive results. We accomplish these goals offering the following:

  • Businesses with Marketing Staff: we offer comprehensive consulting and training which enable the business to learn how to develop and manage effective social marketing programs from the Salesforce CRM
  • Businesses without In-House Marketing: we offer full prospecting, customer marketing, and content development services provided by seasoned professionals at the fraction of the cost of hiring your own staff.

 

Filed Under: roi measurement, social media and resources Tagged With: , ,

CNET’S Massive Social Media Rise: It’s All About Organic Growth

August 19, 2011 by Leave a Comment

“It’s not the result of some huge ad campaign or anything we’ve done spending a bunch of money. It’s all about organic growth.” -Nathan Bransford CNET Social Media Manager

You are in-charge of your company’s social media marketing program and you have a difficult decision tree to maneuver.  Should you rely upon a massive ad campaign to drive consumers to your Facebook page and follow your Twitter account? Or should you instead implement a grass roots, multi pronged, organic approach that utilizes fundamental principles with testing as the backbone of your program? The decision was easy for CNET’s new social media manager Nathan Bransford: go organic and don’t throw cash at the challenge.

CNET Social Media Program Results

Since his hire and take over of the CNET social media marketing program in December of 2010, Nathan Bransford has accomplished the following growth by utilizing a grass roots, advertising cost free, organic social media program:

  • Facebook Page: increased likes from 69,000 to 430,440
  • Twitter Followers: increased from 24,000 to 106,222

Organic Social Media Marketing Strategies

The following are some of the strategies implemented by Bransford

  • Facebook and Twitter Buttons: include these buttons in your sites toolbar and make them available on every page
  • Customize: optimize the size and look of the Facebook and Twitter buttons
  • Testing: monitor what works and what does not work aka test and observe
  • Over messaging: post no more than 4 to 6 times per day on Facebook and tweet between 10 to 20 times per day on Twitter (Note: in the case of a media firm posting 4 to 6 times per day on Facebook is permissible but this is a violation of Facebook etiquette for virtually every other business niche)
  • Interact: social media is about interacting with people not simply and repetitively broadcasting of your message
  • Tools: use Hootsuite and Bit.ly to schedule posts and track links
  • Competition: utilize Wildfire to understand how your competition is performing on Facebook and Twitter

Inner Architect Testing Tips

We believe the most important strategy highlighted by Nathan is testing. The following are some tips to keep in mind when testing your messaging on any channel:

  • Subject Lines: do you utilize email as a channel to engage your customers? If so testing copy for the subject line can make the difference between a consumer opening your email or sending it to the trash
  • Time Frame: do you analyze the best times and days to post your Facebook messages, Tweets, blog posts and other communications?
  • Call to Action: do you test your call to action copy to determine the best method to ask for a consumer to perform a specific act?
  • Control Group v Test Group: are you setting up your testing with the correct parameters? You should have your control group, consumers receiving messaging you have utilized, and test the results against a test group of consumers who receive new messaging
  • Keep Your Laboratory Clean: assuming you are utilizing a control and test group to understand the effectiveness of your testing, are you keeping the “laboratory clean” by ensuring each group is the exact same sized population? Are you sending the messages out at the same time on the same exact day?
Filed Under: roi measurement Tagged With: ,

Must Social Marketing Scale?

October 11, 2010 by Leave a Comment
Woman with others wearing headset

I’ve had the opportunity to hang out with some very savvy direct marketers lately. When they begin asking questions about social marketing, ultimately the same questions come up:

  • Doesn’t it take a lot of time?
  • It’s not really scalable, is it?

I have to say that the answer is “yes” for both of these points, but a meaningful ROI investigation needs to go well beyond those two points.

Why is it that telemarketing, which is just as, if not more, time-consuming than social networking is rarely challenged over the time issue? Touching the customer live on a 1:1 basis may take a couple of minutes. The discussion shouldn’t be about how much time it takes, rather how effective that time is.

Why does it matter so much that labor is your greatest expense when printing, paper and  postage costs are non-existent? Isn’t it a good thing that the investment is going towards employing people in a way that is green?

If you are a brand or company that experiences success from the telephone channel, take a look at some of the processes you employ to make phone sales happen. Ask yourself what adjustments might be needed to be appropriate for social marketing and begin to build a strategy.

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How to Measure Social Media Lifetime Sales ROI

June 30, 2010 by 1 Comment

LTV calc

In 1 Simple Ingredient for All Your ROI Needs, I discussed using a key code system to track the performance of individual social media efforts. While this practice is a great step towards tracking the sales performance of the social media channel, it is not enough if you truly want to learn how your social relationships are influencing sales in the long term.

What does it mean to measure impact on long term sales?

Think about it this way. Evaluating long term impact means there is going to be a starting point, a building up of history, and then a point where you measure what has happened since the starting point.

Starting point: Date of first sale

Building of history: Transactions made over a period of time

Measurement point: Recording cumulative sales that have occurred since the date of first sale

How do you apply this analysis to social media?

The goal here is to look at the buying history of the customers you have social relationships with versus those you don’t.  This requires that you:

  1. Identify which customers are Facebook fans and/or Twitter followers.
  2. Append this information to your customer database or marketing database for future reference.
  3. Segment your database into  groups based upon relationship.
  4. Further segment your groups into months or quarters based on first sale date.

In the example above, sales to Twitter followers is 14 points higher than average and 20 points higher than customers where there is no social relationship.  To fully load this analysis to get a total ROI, you would need to load in the costs associated with social media. I’ll save this discussion for a future post. Please leave a comment or email me if you have any questions in the meantime.

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1 Simple Ingredient for All Your ROI Needs

March 19, 2010 by 4 Comments

Susan 1x1Having grown up in the subscription and later the catalog marketing worlds, one basic concept permeated everything we did. Every effort, every offer, every list and every test is assigned a key code, an alpha-numeric code that enable results to be tracked, measured, and attributed to the source from which the customer acquisition or sale came.

This practice of using key codes can and should be used to measure social media marketing efforts.  If it sounds too complicated, it’s really not. It’s more about discipline than it is sophistication, and measuring ROI is all about discipline.

How do you capture key codes?

  1. Create a code to attach to your special coupon or offer.
  2. Publish the codes from Twitter, Facebook or whatever social network where a majority of your customers reside.
  3. Create a field on the input screen that the customer will use to redeem the coupon or offer.
  4. Refine a system for ensuring the codes are added to your customer database.

How do you create key codes?

Depending on how expansive your marketing programs are, you’ll probably want to think about a 5 to 6-digit coding system. Consider this as a possible structure:

Digit 1: Alpha or numeric character to identify source of conversion. A simple example would be T=Twitter, F=Facebook, E=Email.

Digit 2: Year of campaign/effort.

Digit 3: Month or season of campaign/effort.

Digit 4: Type of effort. Examples: coupon, contest, special promo.

Digit 5-6: Specific identifiers for the effort.

If you follow these instructions, you will create for yourself  a vehicle for measuring results and the opportunity to approach your social media marketing as the fascinating science it can be. What’s stopping you?

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