Oriol Gifra

When you read reputed authors like Dan Ariely with his Predictably Irrational or Philip Kotler with his latest book Marketing 3.0 talking about values and sentiments I wonder if we should start working in a new type of marketing, that one that work the irrational and emotional part of the human beigns.

Advertisers from all the world already did know that, in fact since a long time ads try to reach that emotional point of no return to send people to buy the product shown asap while that emotional flame is alive.

Here the key question is how to keep emotional flame alive as long as possible, what also is somehow called “engagement”, a difficult word to measure with clear KPIs (since when and until when someone is engaged and why?).

What seems clear is that today’s marketing needs to focus on that part, on the irrational and emotional part of the human decision-making process that leads to specific behaviours.

The understanding of emotions (feelings) and their effect on reasons (thoughts) will reveal tone but more importantly they reveal what will drive behavior and how behavioral change can be facilitated.

With that in mind, and mixing some Ariely’s behaviour irrationality and some Kotler’s spirit and values seems that we have a new marketing in front of us, more human based in terms of understanding the (ancient and basic) human principles. Furthermore, if we add to this the Social Media framework as a new relationship channel, we really have in front of us a new marketing compared with the classical one.

To me that are very good news. On one hand because seems that corporations will need to adapt soon or later to a new way to understand their relation with customer’s, treating them not as numbers but again as persons, people with feelings.

On other hand, because it will (I hope) remove bad marketing practices and price will not (always) will be the king in the marketing offers and messages.

Let’s then work a more emotional marketing (and may be irrational) but more customer centric and friendly, based not in the short term but a long term relationship.  Let’s try to go from customers to friends and believers.

After all life is more easy than the tools we build to live it. We, the humans, build complex algorithms to try understand ourselves, our behaviour…. but sometimes it worthy to stop for a while and take and old book, a very old one, as the Bible or any other thousands of years old.

From ancient times up to now is amazing how the essential, the very essential of human behaviour, that part that probably belongs to genetics, that not change from years very much.

One of those things are beliefs. Our mind structure is as interesting as unknown. Why we think something is better than other very similar is very courious. Leaving aside the irrational part of ourselves already long demonstrated by professor Dan Ariely the true is that statistically in frinds we trust.

 In other words, what our friends recommend us we trust.

In my past experience I have seen different marketing campaigns were I was able to compare the conversion rate from different promotion sources: current customers offline recommendation, e-mail marketing, online advertising…. always the first conversion source was existing customers and their recommendations (75% conversion rate), much higher than e-mail marketing and advertising.

Recommendation comes from believers, people who belief in what your are selling or saying. Religion is one of the best examples of how believers make an idea expand and be alive from more than 2,000 years.

When working in a product or project I suggest you to think who are your early believers and how those early believers can help you in seeding your product or ideas vision. I think that’s the KEY to success offline and online.

Social Networks can help us in doing that but first we need to think about believers and what make them be our believers.

Let me in this post write a short comment on how is impacting Internet on health decisions.

Health industry is beign affected by consumer and patients behaviours. Searching disease, doctor’s ratings or drug information through Internet  is an extended practice:

Source: Google Think Insights

1. 75% of patients research symptoms online before talking to a doctor
2. Internet is the top resource for health questions & concerns
3. 70% of the patients research again online before starting with a medication prescribed by a doctor
4. 87% go online to gather information: 57% of them read an article/newsletter or report
5. 48% of them search for treatment options
6. 43% of patients do an action on info as registering for a newsletter (21%), 12
7. 53% do more than 3 searches to answer a health question
8. 20% of patients do mobile search (smartphones)
9. 52% did a self-diagnosis
10. 49% started an-over-the counter treatment
11. 55% changed behaviours/lifestyle

All these data provided by Google Think Insights demonstrates how deep is the impact on health behaviours when information is available and free accessible. From this point, I think health related industry will need to adapt their information and behaviour to make it patient-centric.

Want more data?. Here it is:

From the leading US patients social network PatientsLikeMe, nearly 7,000 members from six of the site’s communities (ALS, Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s Disease, HIV, fibromyalgia and mood disorders) were sent a survey invitation. Of the 1,323 respondents to the invitation, 72 percent said that the site was “very” or “moderately” helpful in informing them about a symptom they were experiencing, and 57 percent found it helpful for understanding the side effects of their treatments. 

Other interesting resources:

Healthcare Performance Management in the Era of “Twitter”

Health 2.0 News

61% of American adults look online for health information in 2009 (Pew Internet Research)

Today I attended invited by Google Engage team from Dublin & Madrid to the meeting they held for online marketing professionals and agencies.

I want to give thanks from here to the Google Team for such opportunity, I really updated my AdWords knowoledge besides to know some other interesting data about ROI and online and mobile ad effectiveness.

Although it has been all day long, I just will note below some interesting points I want to highlight:

1. Today Google launched globally the new Google Display Adwords tool, which improve ROI and effectiveness from the Display Network.

– It is now more easy to use

– Its algorithm has been improved

– It provides keyword performance data (same as Search)

– Google says it reduce up to 50% impressions improving CTR

2. Google announced also today they are launching a new option within Adwords, which are the Dynamic Search Ads. You only will create the copy of the Ad, and Google will create dynamically the title by creating the best title for it and the best keywords. Almost Plug & Play Ads.

3.  And now, some interesting data and tricks

– Shhhh (do not say it to many people :-), but use irregular pricing for your keyword bidding. Most of the people are using prices ended in 0 and 5… so in that biding price offers there are many competitors.. they suggest to change it some cent above or below, Ex. 0,36$

– Adding Ad sitelinks extension feature improve your Adwords Ad CTR by 30%

– Create different campaigns for Search, Display and Mobile … the perform different and for instance, for Mobile even you need to adapt your Call to Action copy, as the Ad is seeing from a mobile device.

– Do not use CPA bidding unless you have had more than 10 conversions/day in the last 30 days (it seems they may reduce that minimum in short).

–  When using remarketing feature, please do not spam your customers, activate the maximum exposure Ad rate to 7 impressions per day and campaign. Remember to include you remarketing tracking code in all your site pages.

– Now is time to use mobile Ads, as there are very few competitors (at least in Spain), low CPC cost and it increase conversions rate:

Some interesting data about Mobile Adwords:

–  Up to 43% conversion increase comparing with Search Ads.

– Up to +80% CTR

– Up to -15% CPC ($)

– Up to -15% CPA

Mobile usage have its own moments.  We use it mostly when we have “nothing to do” as for example going from one place to another or wait for someone or something. We use it mostly from 8pm up to 11pm.

Some useful videos:

Google Remarketing

Google Mobile Marketing Stats

For more information about the New Google Display features you can visit also the official blog post.

We hear frequently in Online Marketing discussions on how important is content, or “content is king”. Well, I think content is important, but it is worthless if it does not suggest you any emotion. At the end, as a human beings, we are build-in and act in response to some type of emotion.

In this post I just wanted to emphasize that within marketing tactics not all is about audience volume or conversion improvements, but it is also about your ability to wake up people emotions. Think about it.

What do you need to generate emotion?. I think you need minimum the following elements:

– Dream: it can be a dream for people what are you saying/offering?

– Expectation: client can realistically experiment that story/offer?

–Immediacy: it is possible to experiment that in short time?

–Unique: how exclusive is it?

–Sharing: can be shared with others?

Disney is probably the best example of a company that sells dreams, that can be realistically experimented (at the Cinema. At least kids enjoy Disney movies as it were real to them), it is immediate consuming, Disney movies are very unique and can be shared with others (family, friends who come with you to watch the movie).

Disney for me is a good example of Emotional Media company.

I think we all need to go to Disney model. I think Social Media is a great tool to help generate and spread those emotions. Marketing need to be emotional, as people are. Let’s create/convert content to Emotional Media version to sell more (attract more people, be more interesting, generate desire, improve conversions and build brand loyalty).

Emotional Media can be defined as the content that can raise emotions and those emotions spread trhough Social Media. Content can be defined here as a message, offer, story…. and can be displayed though different devices and formats (transmedia), web, mobile, video, TV…

From last 1th January 2012 Google Health has been discontinued.  This is another failed experiment from Google. Here is the message you can read now.

I think from this one we can learn a lot and from here I thanks Google for that. The official reason why the service has been discontinued was explained in their official blog as follow:

 “Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would. There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts. But we haven’t found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people.”

After running about 4 years only “tech-savvy patients and their caregivers” mostly used it.

For me the most important reasons why the service failed are pointed below:

– Privacy matters, and even more when that information is related to personal health information. It seems Google did not succed in getting enough confidence for many users in relation to the issue of data privacy.

– Early users have found the service difficult to use.

– The service could not overcome the obstacle of requiring people to laboriously put in their own data continuously.

 Beside all those points, for me probably one of the main reasons is that Google did not meet what people probably want to check online regarding health issues.

In my opinion health is and will be a very social topic, in terms of sharing opinions and experiences online. Beside, health information needs to be covered different from any other type of data or information. Health can not be treated as if we were working with sports news or webs. It needs to express confidence, trust, reputation, authority behind the source of that information. Google probably did not have neither those atributes, or at least not enough from my point of view, although its partnering with hospitals and physicians.

Meanwhile, Google has recently announced  another approach to health information through some improvements in its search engine allowing users search for  symptoms and providing information about it causes and treatments.

I think (and it is my personal opinion) patients will appreciate more a P2P relation, which can be Physician to Patient or Patient to Patient as it’s been demonstrated by projects like Patients Like Me or the UK base project Doctors Net

I like Mari Smith and her common sense when talking about here new book The New Rules of Relationship Marketing and the concept People to People that is behind.

Although a lot of people has written about Social Networks and the Community concept, I personally think that for marketers is more appropiate the approch from the relationship marketing  as a way to understand better our customers, learn from them and work their loyalty and satisfaction.

Here is an interesting interview.

I think the concept People to People is better than the famous B2C (Business to Consumer). P2P is much better in terms of proximity and customer care. Who is behind the counter or attending us is a person, so the relation should be as personal and personalized as possible. I think the future for many companies and their reputation will come from this new relationship marketing that Mari is talking about.

I was last week at the University of VIC explaning to students something I wanted to share here with you.

We were preparing a case for a Transmedia project… and conversation finally went to a very interesting point. In reality, what online marketing shoud pay more attention is not how you promote or analize, instead I think marketers today should be obessed in providing an excellent digital experience to the users and clients.

At the end, if you think about it, all is about you digital experience and nothing else.

The experience starts from the first moment people think about looking for your product and service and search for it. What the people of Google called The Zero Moment of Tuth

From that point in less than 10 seconds user or potential client should be already reading you (blog, newspaper…) or your product or services. It means, you should be findable (SEO) and easy accessible (speed and usability).

The digital experience continues when you “enjoy” with what you are offering, doesn’t matter if it is a blog or and e-commerce. We all should make people to enjoy staying with us by explaining interesting things to them or selling interesting product or services.

In the case of e-commerce, all the factors related with that type of business have an important impact on the digital experience of the user or client. Factors such product availability, price, service and Customer Care, or better say Customer Satisfaction Department.

Digital experience continues after users have left the page, because you can send them an e-mail, a product, an alert or whatever engagement strategy you may have. Probably (depending on the type of your service or website) users may continue visiting you through their mobile phones or tablets… 

Today, online marketing is a digital experience storytelling. Do not think only in service or product terms, but start thinking on which “story” of digital experience are you going to tell to your users or clients.

Steve Jobs did not create a mobile called iPhone or a tablet called iPad… he went much farther, he created a huge digital mobile experience behind those devices. We need to create as a marketers also that experiences.

Online Marketer = Digital Experience Director 

We need to create as a marketers our own digital experience for our followers, fans, clients…

Recently Search Engine Land posted an interesting article about the correlation between searches and phone conversions. The data provided is surprising to me (I never thought it was so high) as it is estimated 43% of the Search Engine conversions happen over the phone.

Ads that contain phone numbers are also said to have a 10% increase in clickthrough rate.

Probably this data make us to rethink about placing more visible phone numbers not only in Ads but also in pages and even in some meta data. This is an interesting ROI data to take in mind when planning our SEO and SEM strategy.

This data is provided by the phone tracking service IfByPhone:

Recently Google announced that they released a new update that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and can better determine when to give you more up-to-date relevant results.

The below video Rand Fishkin and Mike King describe how works the Freshness Factor.

a) The inception date of the document (crawled,indexed, etc.)

b) The inception date of the document first appearing in search results