Build Business Smart.

Using The “Linest” Function in Excel For Faster Twitter Potential Reach Analysis

December 7, 2009 –

Last time we looked at a way to put together an analysis for the potential reach of a tweet; today we’ll look at a method of using the ‘linest’ function in excel to make the analysis faster. When you go to Twellow to look up the users that would be interested in your business, it will give you a long list of profiles. The only way to get the data into Excel is to type it in manually, so if we want the entire list of sometimes thousands of users, we need a way to cut back on the amount of time it takes. Here’s the method in a few steps:

1. List manually the first 10 to 20 names; you want to be exact with the users that have a substantial amount of followers.

2. After the really large users are entered in, you’ll notice that the number of users doesn’t change drastically from, say, user 25 to user 40. So, we’ll just enter in the two users and use a regression to fill in the rest. This makes our work faster, and we’re still close enough on the numbers for our analysis. How to do this is shown below.

Set up for the regression

Set up for the regression

 

Setting up the linest function

Setting up the linest function

Remember to important things when setting up the ‘linest’ function:
1. Make sure an highlight two adjacent cells before typing it in.
2. After entering the formula, hit ctrl+shift+enter

 

Filling in the data

Filling in the data

Repeat this as many times as necessary to get the complete data set. As you keep going, you can increase the intervals from 15 to 50 to 100, etc.

By Curtis Seare | Posted in Excel | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Potential Reach of a Tweet

December 5, 2009 –

How do you show the online marketing opportunity for a new business venture? One piece of the online space that you will want to show is Twitter. Here’s an attempt at gauging how much reach your tweets would have.

To start the analysis, head over to Twellow and search for users that would be interested in the new business. Twellow gives you a long list of people that could be interested, and from that list we can start creating a spreadsheet with the user name and the number of followers they have.

The rest of this analysis assumes we get each user to tweet once about our new business. The question is, how many people will be aware of us as a result? The completed sheet below answers that question.

Tweet Reach

 

The % Views is our best estimate of how many of the user’s followers will actually read the tweet.

The Awareness is the number of followers the user has multiplied by the % views, giving us how many people actually read the tweet.

Then we get into the retweets. The % that Retweet is the percentage of aware people that we think will be interested enough to retweet.

The # of retweets is the % that retweet multiplied by the awareness

The average # of followers is the average of each of the users followers on the list, to give us the number of followers the average user has.

Multiply the number of retweets and the average # of followers, and you get the potential number of people that can be reached from the retweeting, or Potential Reach.

Multiply this by the % views, and you get the Awareness reached by the retweeting.

Finally, add up both awareness columns to get the Total Awareness. This number is an estimate of the number of people that will be aware of your business as a result of that user tweeting about it once.

Obviously there are many assumptions made here, but it gives you a good idea at just how powerful a tweet could be to increase awareness of your product or service.

By Curtis Seare | Posted in Twitter Analytics | Tagged | Comments (0)

Confused People Don’t Act

December 4, 2009 –

Let’s illustrate further the principles discussed in yesterday’s post. Sometimes it’s best to learn by example, so I’ve embedded two ads below. Take a look.

 

Although both of these commercials can be considered entertaining, one of them was effective and the other a failure. It’s easy to see why when you consider which one of them makes it easier for the viewer to incorporate the message into their lives.

In the first ad the viewer hears the name ‘Outpost.com’, and then see a pack of wolves attack a high school band. What is the viewer supposed to do with that? Apparently they weren’t sure, because Outpost.com is no longer in business.

The second ad gives the viewer a natural scenario (making a sandwich with peanut butter, and wanting milk with it) and then ends with the interrogative: got milk? Well, if the viewer doesn’t have milk, he or she needs to go get some. Easy and simple. And incidentally, the ‘Got Milk’ advertising campaign was one of the most successful in history.

By Curtis Seare | Posted in Content Creation | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Build Content That Helps People Act

December 3, 2009 –

We market to people because we hope that our messages will spur them to take action. Can your audience easily see how your message fits into their lives? If not, there’s a good chance they won’t take any action on it.

In Malcolm Gladwells’ book, The Tipping Point(affiliate link), he cites an interesting case study. An experiment took place at Yale University trying to convince students to get a tetanus shot; two different packets of information were prepared with information about the benefits of getting the shot. One was purely informational, and one was aimed at instilling fear in the students by describing potential consequences if they didn’t get the shot. After the students were split up and each group was allowed to read one of the packets, they took a survey which would indicate which group was more motivated to get the shot. Predictably, it was the ones that received the packet aimed at instilling fear.

Only a very small percentage of students, however, went to get the shot. And totally unexpectedly, there was no difference in between the two different groups. The fact that one of the packets instilled fear, and that the students who read it seemed more motivated to get the shot, made no difference in their actual behavior.

The experiment was done again, and this time there was a small change made – in the packet was included a map of the university campus with the health center giving the shots circled, and a list of the times the center was open. This one small change resulted in a 28% increase in students getting tetanus shots.

Why did the percentage raise so dramatically? Because the map made the message fit into the students lives. It took the information from an abstraction to something practical and actionable. And that made all the difference.

Help your audience see how to apply your message. If they can picture themselves taking action, there are higher chances that they actually will.

By Curtis Seare | Posted in Content Creation | Tagged | Comments (1)

Web Analytics and Online Revenue

December 2, 2009 –

A little while back we did some work with a company’s web analytics data. Their online revenue had doubled, and they wanted to know why. The answer to the question was not obvious, and only after extensive analysis did it present itself. It’s useful to see the process of how to use web analytics to come to a conclusion. The analysis was written up on the Tableau Software blog; you can read the entire story here.

By Curtis Seare | Posted in Google Analytics | Tagged , | Comments (0)

The Marketing Strategy of Doing

December 1, 2009 –

Today’s market is transparent. With the advent and popularity of web 2.0, everything your company does can be tracked, recorded, discussed, and reviewed. And all of that information is freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

Because the market is going to get more and more transparent as the tools of web 2.0 continue to grow in popularity, increasingly marketing is not going to be about the message you engineer and send out through advertisements. Increasingly, marketing is going to be about who you are (or perhaps better said, who your company is). You will be defined by how you do business, how you treat your customers, and the quality of your products and services.

It’s not going to be about what you think your company is, or how you seek to portray it through advertisements. Batman got it right; it’s what you do that will define you.

How are you defining yourself?

By Curtis Seare | Posted in Marketing Strategy | Comments (0)

Focusing On The Few, to Reach The Many

November 30, 2009 –

Seth Godin recently explained a principle he calls “First, Ten.” An interesting idea of this principle is that spending time with the few in order to reach the many is, in fact, more effective than spending time with the many to reach the many.

The Magical Penny

We all remember the trick we were taught in elementary school. Go home and ask your parents if they will give you a penny on the first day of the month, and then double it every day for just that month. Day two is 2 cents, day three is 4 cents, and so on. In return you would promise never to ask for any more money, as long as you lived.

A penny doubling for a month, at first consideration, seems harmless. Until we do the math. As it turns out, under this system of payment you end up receiving over $10 million on the final day of the month. What began as a lowly penny has turned into a fortune.

The “First, Ten” Principle

Let’s get back to Seth’s advice. He says the following:

“Find ten people. Ten people who trust you/respect you/need you/listen to you…

Those ten people need what you have to sell, or want it. And if they love it, you win. If they love it, they’ll each find you ten more people (or a hundred or a thousand or, perhaps, just three).”

Now we’ll make some assumptions and do some analysis on this idea. First, you spend a week finding 10 people. Now, let’s say in the next week, each of those 10 people brings you just one more person each. Now you’re at 20. Let’s say the same thing happens the next week, bringing you to 40. Continuing on, we will have over 5,000 people in 10 weeks, over 150,000 in 15 weeks, and over 5 million in 20 weeks.

Now consider the quality of these potential customers – they didn’t hear the message from an advertisement or from you (except the original 10); they heard it from a third party source that they knew. And that makes them that much more likely to trust you and become a customer.

Focusing On The Few

Our quick analysis shows that this can be an extremely effective, albeit somewhat unconventional, way to market. Have you ever considered taking an entire week, and focusing on finding and marketing to just 10 people? Take all the work and time you would have spent designing advertisements, sending copy through various marketing channels, optimizing online ad campaigns, and all other marketing activites, and spend that time instead focusing on just 10 people.

Spend time finding the right ten. Spend time explaining your product and service, showing it to them, letting them test it, and answering all their questions. Spend time getting their feedback, allowing them to become more invested. Spend the time necessary to gain their trust and respect. Forget about all other marketing efforts for the week. Your only goal, by the end of the week, is to have 10 evangelists for your company.

Assuming your product or service is worth something and really does provide value to these people, you are about to have a lot of business on its way.

By Curtis Seare | Posted in Marketing Strategy | Tagged | Comments (0)

The Use of Collective Buying for Market Research

November 28, 2009 –

For any business that has not yet heard of groupon.com, it’s definitely worth your consideration. They use the power of collective buying to deliver a great value proposition to both consumers and businesses. Businesses get risk free advertising, new customers, and increased revenue; consumers get great deals and find out about new products and services that interest them. The groupon site does a great job of describing the process; check it out their video here.

Not only is using groupon a great business tool in and of itself, but it’s also interesting from a market research standpoint. Want to gauge the demand for a new product or service? Want to see if your product will sell to a new demographic? Want to see if an expansion of services will help or hinder your value proposition? You can do this all risk-free using groupon’s services.

You can set up any promotional, targeted at any audience, for free. If there’s no demand, then you don’t pay anything. If there is demand, then groupon just gets a cut of the revenues you earn from the promotional. What’s more, you can track how many new customers come from the groupon promotional and who they are. This will give you data on the amount of demand and the customer base so you can successfully implement further marketing efforts.

By Curtis Seare | Posted in Market Research | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Stop Wasting My Time

November 27, 2009 –

The average person reads between 200-250 words per minute. If you’re trying to do marketing with any kind of written message, you need to be aware of this.

How much time do people have to give you? How long is your message in relation to that time? If it’s too long, work it down and use clearer, more precise language. Forget the fluff, and get to the point.

(If you’re average, this post took you about 20 seconds to read. Reasonable?)

By Curtis Seare | Posted in Content Creation | Tagged | Comments (0)

Thanksgiving Metrics

November 26, 2009 –

Being human is an important part of being a marketer. And generally, the people that are best at being human are the ones that are good at being grateful. So how good are you when it comes to gratitude for others? Take a look at this metric:

Number of times you’ve said thank you / Number of times you’ve been helped = Your level of gratitude

According to this math, if the ratio equals “1”, you are perfectly grateful. Except you’re not. Saying thank you is nice, but real gratitude involves more than just talking. Let’s improve our equation:

Number of times you’ve helped / Number of times you’ve been helped = Your level of gratitude

Now, a score of “1” would indicate perfect gratitude. Except it still doesn’t. Are we really able to calculate this metric with exactness? Let’s look at this equation:

Number of times you have been helped that you know of / Total number of times you have been helped = Your level of awareness

No one will ever earn a score of “1” on this metric. We are forgetful, we lose track, we tend to focus on the negative more than the positive, and we just aren’t aware of everything that happens or has happened. Can you calculate the number of things your parents have done for you? Not likely; a numerous amount of them happened when you were a baby. How about calculating how much sacrifice has gone into making your country free? Again, it’s impossible. And these two examples say nothing about the things that are done for us day by day that we simply don’t know about.

The point is, we are all in a great deal of gratitude debt. So much so, that even if we spent our whole lives being grateful in every way we knew how, we’d never get it paid off. So why bother calculating it?

Well, we shouldn’t. We have learned our lesson from trying to calculate it. And that lesson is that we need to be more grateful than we think we should be. Because in the final analysis, even that will end up being less than we really should be.

Showing gratitude, being helpful, and adding value are good marketing practices. More importantly, they’re good human practices.

By Curtis Seare | Posted in Marketing Analytics | Tagged | Comments (1)