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Archives for March 2013

Keeping Things Clear: Developing Dependable Interns

Whatever we’d like to believe, interns often don’t know quite what to expect from the internships they apply for. However good the copy on your recruitment pages or the open days you run, interns often just don’t know what to make of a potential job opportunity and what role they are expect to take on. This is especially common nowadays as creative firms are taking on interns and graduates remotely or part-time and often giving them support through university. The only way to ensure the interns you’re taking fit the role you want to give them is to keep things clear…

Clarity in Contract
Once you’ve interviewed your interns, the first point of contact they’re likely to have with you will be a contract. This, of course, needs to set out all the proper legal provisions, but it is your one opportunity to set straight exactly what your expectations of your interns are. Make sure the hours required are clear, especially important if your interns are casual.

Go and Get Coffee
Talk outside of a formal setting can really be beneficial to an intern and, though it’s still a professional environment, a casual natter over a cup of something warm will gives you a chance to talk about etiquette as well as requirements. Make clear their role but also ensure that they can make their intentions clear to you.

Talk about the Difficult Things
Whether it’s money, time or even personal relationships, you can imagine that your intern will feel pretty concerned about asking the wrong question so don’t make them: ensure that you discuss everything clearly and upfront from the start. If you want, for example, your intern to continue working remotely after they finish then ask well in advance: don’t wait for them to guess!

Keep in Touch
So many internships end on the last day with a quiet drink and a farewell and, until the candidate reapplies through the graduate mill they are not contacted again. This is extremely bad practice and regular email contact is the easiest way by far to ensure your intern thinks positively of their experience and, possibly, applies to work for you at the end of the day.

It can be easy to get sucked into the day-to-day at work, but your intern won’t have that same experience. Think back, remember what was troubling you on your first day and make sure it’s addressed professionally and start of on the right foot.

Trust and Transparency

RioTinto have a Taxes Paid page, which highlights the amount of taxes RioTinto has paid, as well as offering a wealth of related information. The page is easily accessible from the main navigation in the Our Approach area.  This is a particularly timely website addition given the current furore over tax inequalities associated with large corporations.

The addition of a Taxes Paid page offers three main benefits to RioTinto:

  1. Establishes trust
  2. Highlights commitment to transparency
  3. Indicates pride in their dedication to ethical business practices

These three benefits garner audience connection and appreciation, which subsequently encourages the reader to continue to explore the website to learn more about the company.

Consumer Perceptions of Online Privacy Practices Affect 9 out of 10 Brand Purchase Decisions

online purchaseJust how important is it for brands to ensure consumers have positive perceptions of a company’s efforts to keep their private data secure? For 91% of internet users in the United Kingdom, online privacy policies directly affect their decisions to do business with a company. That statistic comes from a study by Accenture from August of 2012, and it tells just a small part of the story.

On Monday, eMarketer reported that 46% of respondents to a 2013 survey by Ipsos MORI and TRUSTe said that they “strongly avoided” doing business with companies that they thought didn’t do a good enough job of protecting their privacy and personal information online. Add an additional 45% who “had a tendency to avoid” doing business with these companies, and you end up with a meager 9% of the sample U.K. internet user audience who claim that online privacy concerns do not affect their online purchasing decisions or behaviors.

This data reinforces the idea that marketers must prioritize building brand trust with consumers. As I wrote in one of my articles for Corporate Eye last week, building brand trust is the number one factor that can motivate consumers to share personal information with your company, which can then be used in future brand marketing campaigns. This finding comes from the 2012 Data Tracking Study from DMA (follow the preceding link to read the details and see the infographic), which reported that consumers are more willing to share private information when they trust the company (47%), the company has a clear privacy policy (43%), or the company provides an essential service (31%).

Bottom-line, now is the time to revamp your online privacy policy and consumer-facing communications related to your company privacy practices. Don’t assume that consumers know your brand, and therefore, trust your company to protect their private information. They expect companies to protect their information, but they don’t typically perceive that companies do enough to keep their personal information safe.

The Ipsos MORI and TRUSTe study found that nearly half of internet users in Great Britain do not trust most companies with their personal information online. When asked if “most companies can be trusted with personal data online,” internet users responded as follows:

  • Strongly agree = 6%
  • Tend to agree = 51%
  • Tend to disagree = 33%
  • Strongly disagree = 10%

These numbers are quite terrible from a brand perspective considering that one of the most important aspects of brand building is developing brand trust. Brand marketers need to aggressively work to change the consumer perception that company online privacy practices are not adequate. This requires both education and proof. In other words, companies need to live up to the privacy expectations that consumers have.

Can your company prove that its online privacy practices sufficiently protect consumers’ personal information?

Image: Pierre Amerlynck

The Recipe for Engagement: How To Hook and Engage Your Online Readers

Why are you reading this sentence? And what makes you continue on to the next?

Is it the title that hooked you?

Or is it the cascade of words upon phrases, forming sentences – one leading into the other, dragging your eyes across the screen and hooking your interest with every passing line?

Research indicates that content must engage the reader within 8 seconds before they abandon the page on their way to another site.

Online readers are impatient, to say the least. So how can corporations use content to keep their website readers engaged?

Content-savvy corporations follow an advertisement technique termed AIDA.

A – Attention: Content must first attract the attention of the customer.

I – Interest: Content must then raise customer interest by presenting the benefits (as opposed to just the features) of the product/service.

D – Desire: After attracting attention and piquing the customer’s interest, content must convince customers that they desire the product/service – that it will satisfy their needs.

A – Action: Finally, content must lead the customer to take action. This step is often forgotten.

AIDA is an acronym representing a timeless recipe for the creation of engaging and, not to mention, persuasive content.

The AIDA technique is technically attributed to American advertising pioneer, E. St. Elmo Lewis circa 1903. Its roots, however, extend much deeper into the 19th century when Joseph Addison Richards unknowingly used the model in an 1893 business advertisement. C.P. Russel then formally published the concept of AIDA in an article in 1921.

The fact that the technique came so naturally to several of history’s finest marketing forerunners is proof of its innate persuasive style and natural ability to engage readers.

Currently, corporations battle Google’s ever-changing algorithms, which are graciously designed to keep quality content at the forefront of online marketing. Despite the confusing and constant flux of keywords, meta descriptions, and links, two things remain constant – ‘content is king’ and AIDA works. It engages, it persuades, and it sells.

With the rise in demand for quality content came rededicated interest in the creation of persuasive, selling content that people actually want to read. After all, content must entertain readers who, on average, only give you 8 seconds to catch, maintain, and satisfy their interest.

Below are several techniques that adhere to the AIDA concept.  Use them to engage readers, persuade readers, and ultimately sell your products and services.

ATTENTION

  • There are three ways to catch a reader’s attention. The first is by expressing opportunity. Raise intrigue by hinting at the possible gains your products can provide. Conversely, the second technique is to highlight how failure to purchase your product/service threatens their needs, values, and goals. Note that these threats must be genuine, and must be organically generated – they must come from an impartial source. Finally, contrast, such as intermittent short sentences and sudden changes in the tempo of the content will also gain attention.

INTEREST

  • Much to our dismay, humans are inherently selfish. Therefore readers are more interested in content that adheres to their interests. This highlights the importance of knowing your target audience. If you can address the interests that lie behind their attitudes, positioning and goals, then you are sure to engage their interest.

DESIRE

  • A seemingly endless amount of research indicates that the Scarcity Principle is a sure way to generate desire in a reader. After all, desire is defined as the feeling one gets when they want something they don’t have. So, if you make something they want seem difficult to obtain (i.e. ‘limited time only’ sales and ‘limited editions’) they will want the product more. Thus, make your product scarce, and your paying customers will become abundant.

ACTION

  • Make the reader take action – this is obvious. But how? A simple way to do this is to use action verbs in your content. Action verbs generate more interest than passive verbs.

Creating engaging web content is just as much an art as it is a science. By applying the above technique, corporations can align their content with the attention, interests, and desires of their target audience, subsequently leading them to take action.

 

Recommended Reading:

Ferrell, OC and Hartline, M (2005). Marketing Strategy. Thomson South-Western. ISBN 0-324-20140-0.
Handley, A & Chapman, CC (2011). Content Rules. John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey. ISBN 978-0-470-64828-5
Scott, DM (2011). The New Rules of Marketing & PR. John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey. ISBN 978-1-118-02698-4
Bly, RW. (2005). The Copywriter’s Handbook. St. Martin’s Griffin, New York. ISBN 978-0-8050-7804-6

How Consumers Use Social Media in Purchase Decisions

online searchMost brand marketers still invest more of their marketing budgets in traditional marketing activities than they do on social media marketing activities. Even digital marketing budgets are skewed more heavily towards traditional online marketing activities than they are towards social media marketing activities. According to new research from Radius Global Market Research, this is a good strategy.

The study found that consumers are much more likely to get information and share information via traditional online channels than social media channels. In fact, traditional online channels were used 50% of the time or more depending on the category of the product or service being researched for possible purchase.

Don’t count social media out though. The study found that social media influences anywhere from 9% to 39% of purchase decisions depending on the category of the product or service being researched.

As you might expect, big ticket purchases and emotional purchases are the ones that drive consumers to seek out online information before they make their purchase decisions. Consumers seek out online information most frequently for:

  1. Travel purchases = 76%
  2. Electronics purchases = 73%
  3. Automobile purchases = 67%
  4. Baby care equipment purchases = 66%
  5. Household appliances purchases = 64%

Social networking sites were consulted most often for:

  1. Baby care equipment purchases (39%)
  2. Electronics purchases = 35%
  3. Automobile purchases = 28%
  4. Toys and games purchases = 25%
  5. Household appliances purchases = 23%

Also as you might expect, the survey found that consumers of all products and services across all categories are more likely to search for information online before they make a purchase than they are to share information about their purchase or their experience with the product or service after they’ve purchased it.

However, Radius Global Market Research found two categories where consumers are more likely to seek out information and share information after they’ve made a purchase than they are to gather information before they make the purchase — personal care and makeup products. Also, people who purchase smartphones are nearly as likely to share and search for information after they make their purchase as they are to seek information online before or during the purchase process.

The Radius Global Market Research study results are based on a survey of a sample of its internet panel of consumers from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Scandinavia.

What do you think? Any surprises in this data that will affect your brand marketing spending?

Image: Carl Dwyer

Governance Lags Innovation

Innovation is one of the top issues for Boards and senior managers.

Three recent surveys indicate:

Survey

Finding

IBM’s 2010 Global Survey of CEOs (IBM, 2010)CEOs cited creativity as the most important leadership quality over the next five years.
Ernst & Young, 2010, Connecting innovation to profitThey [top entrepreneurs] understand that innovation is the primary force that can catapult a company to market leadership and keep it ahead of its rivals. They know from experience that the passion for innovation that started them on their journey has to be protected and nurtured.
GE Global Innovation Barometer91% of senior executives surveyed report that innovation is a strategic priority for their company

 

Senior managers from start-ups to big corporates realize that innovation is important but what about innovation governance?

It seems that innovation governance lags well behind the focus on business innovation. Authors of the article Corporate Governance and Innovation: Theory and Evidence write,

… our knowledge of how laws and institutions shape the innovation choices of firms at the micro-level through the channel of corporate governance is still relatively nascent.

I can attest to this since my search for the phrase innovation governance yielded far fewer results than for business innovation.

I used Google Trends and searched on the two phrases shown in the above chart. A few observations:

  • Business innovation is a subject of continuing interest, though it declined up to the World Economic crisis in 2008-9;
  • Innovation governance did not appear until 2007;
  • There is a wide gap between the two phrases.

The conclusion is that Innovation Governance needs far more attention. Boards, C-Level managers and researchers need to evaluate the risks and the opportunities  associated with innovation. More on this in future posts.