Dan Zarrella - The Science of Marketing: When to Tweet, What to Post, How to Blog, and Other Proven Strategies

Contents

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Copyright 2013 by Dan Zarrella. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Zarrella, Dan.

Science of Marketing: When to Tweet, What to Post, How to Blog, and Other Proven Strategies/Dan Zarrella.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN: 978-1-118-13827-4 (cloth); ISBN: 978-1-118-26349-5(ebk);

ISBN: 978-1-118-23306-1 (ebk); ISBN: 978-1-118-22528-8 (ebk)

1. Internet marketingSocial aspects. 2. Social media. I. Title.

HF5415.1265.Z367 2013

658.872dc23

2013000733

To my fans, friends, and fellow scientists

Acknowledgments

Thank You!

All my fellow HubSpotters, especially Mike Volpe, Kipp Bodnar, and Rebecca Corliss. My lovely and talented wife Alison. My family Mom, Barb, BJ, Joe, Terri, Diana, Jenn, Gramma, and Grampa. All my friends from Wand Fight Team, especially Dave The Pain Train Mazany and Leandro Lorenco.

Introduction

I read a lot of books about marketing. I read a lot of blog posts, attend a lot of conferences, and follow a lot of marketers on Twitter. Im saddened by the overwhelming amount of superstition-based advice I see. I call it unicorns and rainbowssnake oil adages such as Be awesome, Engage in the conversation, and Have a personality. These things sound great. And theyre hard to disagree with; Im not going to tell you to be not-awesome. But theyre not based in anything more substantial than what sounds right.

And when we do get data about social media platforms, user behavior, or digital communications channels, much of it slowly emerges out of the scholastic system, produced by academics isolated from the marketing trenches. Science like this is interesting, sure, but its largely data for datas sake, devoid of applicable lessons. We need more street-smart work conducted by researchers with real-world marketing experience. This kind of work is useful and efficient. It allows you to decide how to apply it so that you can do your job better.

As a social media scientist, I use data, experimentation, and real science to understand how people behave online and how we, as marketers, can leverage that behavior. I want to give you the data you need to get stuff done and to be successful.

But it is important to understand how to apply marketing science to your business. Think about the difference between how research works in fields such as physics and how it works in a field like medicine. In physics, there are mathematical formulas that show how a force like electromagnetism works. That force will always follow that formula.

Medical researchers, on the other hand, test new kinds of treatments on hundreds or thousands of subjects. From those experiments, they produce best practice courses of treatment. In specific cases your doctor will start with the most indicated course of treatment. If it works, great; youre cured. If it doesnt work, your doctor will try the next most indicated course. Best practices generated from large sample sets are tested in specific cases in which the results may differ.

It is this second example that teaches us how to use the marketing data in this book. My work is based on databases of thousands or millions of rows. My data span industries, audiences, time zones, and languages. I work to produce best practice suggestions from these data, but your business may be different. And I try to focus on data that arent highly self-evident; I want to suggest new ways of doing marketing. I want to make you better at what you do, not just reaffirm what youre already doing.

The final chapter of this book isnt meant to be the end-all instruction manual on analytics. Its meant to provide you with a framework for applying the all the data Im presenting, through the scientific method, to your business.

I work for HubSpot, a business-to-business (B2B) company that sells marketing software to a customer base that is largely using the Web to generate leads. My default mind-set when I approach marketing is as a B2B lead wrangler. Even so, often when I talk at conferences, Im asked if the data Im sharing can be applied outside of the business-to-consumer (B2C) world. Too many people think that cool marketing happens only in the consumer world and that B2B marketing has to be boring, stilted, and corporate.

In one survey I conducted, I asked takers if they had separate work and personal inboxes. A full 88 percent told me they did not. More people reported having a separate junk-only inbox. Focus group discussions have confirmed this as well. Youll read more about these stats in the chapter on e-mail marketing (Chapter 8), but the point is simple: business consumers are still consumers.

Boring is bad for B2C, and its bad for B2B. Nobody wants to be put to sleep by marketing messages, regardless of what hat that person is wearing at the momentpersonal or corporate. You need to be more concerned about being labeled spam than getting the right work e-mail address. If youre a B2B company, dont be afraid to make content like a B2C marketer. Be afraid to write white papers full of technical jargon like the rest of your industry.

I did the research presented in this book over a period of nearly five years. Throughout that time, Ive noticed several threads running through the data. Youll hear about these concepts in many of the chapters to come, but I want to introduce you to them first.