EqSim

I’m a bit late to read this post, but author Alan Moore of “Communities Dominate Brands” makes an observation in early 2007 in his post entitled “Gaming the New Marketing?“.

His point is that games represent a new way to communicate with an audience, in an immersive, engaging way.  He dismisses “branded entertainment” and “product placement”, which I agree, are indirect at best.  Then he states “where the content is the advertising and the advertising is the content”.

This is exactly the point of product simulation advertising or marketing, namely making the advertisement the content and the content the advertising (or vice versa).  I agree with his point that games are an important new form of marketing to the gaming demographic, but I would argue that a more direct interactive simulation, focused on competitive features of the product solving real-world problems, is a more compelling incentive — after all, the advertiser wants the viewer to see how the product solves the viewer’s problems, not just walk away with a good feeling about the product (a nice side effect, of course).

In other words, games are a good manifestation of interesting interaction (to the viewer), but not the most direct.  The most direct would be interaction with the product itself.  So have I just invented a “degree of closeness” measure, namely, that games are typically second or higher degrees of closeness compared with direct product experience (being 0 degrees, and 1 degree being some type of product simulation)?  Of course games can have direct product experiences, or authentic product experiences, but games that don’t wholly focus on the product experience would earn farther degrees of separation.

I would say that Alan’s use of the word “game” may be fairly general, judging from his other comments in the post, but I think adding the word “gaming” unnecessarily shifts the perspective away from the core that the content is the advertising and the advertising is the content.

I finally got a chance on an airplane ride to take a look at Paul Mosenson’s e-book “Digital Marketing The Right Way: an Introductory Primer for B2B” (NuSpark Marketing). It is a nice introduction to essential elements of digital marketing (web site purpose/presentation, SEO, social media, content, lead management), helping the B2B vendor reader understand important elements of a vendor’s online presence (web site, blogs, interaction in the online world) and how customers and potential customers can be reached, drawn in, and held. continue reading…

In “Study finds customer engagement hard to measure,” B-to-B Magazine’s Kate Maddox posts some high-level findings from a recent study from Forbes Insights about measuring customer engagement.

“Customer engagement is a top priority for CMOs, but many companies are struggling to implement strategies and measure customer engagement, according to a new study from Forbes Insights and George P. Johnson.”

A majority (67%) of marketers polled view customer engagement as very important, but a good percentage feel their companies do a fair or poor job engaging their audiences. They view retention, sales, and revenue per customer as key metrics for customer engagement.

I hypothesize that “product engagement”  — using tools and methods to present products in a more interactive and engaging way, such as via product simulation marketing — would be a big contributing factor to overall customer engagement.  Furthermore, it may be easier to measure product engagement because of the direct relationship between what is presented and how the viewer/customer interacts with it.

This post isn’t quite about any “rules of engagement,” though I’m surprised I haven’t seen that title used to describe an articles about engagement marketing, since it is becoming a popular topic, especially in social media circles.  Maybe a famous blogger or company will use it and (hopefully) credit me with thinking it up.

Anyway, I was reading a post by Amber Naslund today, entitled “10 Key Engagement Metrics.”  She brings up several good indicators about engaging content, and here they are:

1. Comments
2. Unique commenters
3. Thread size
4. Time with content
5. Content downloads
6. Subscriptions
7. Content sharing
8. Suggestions/Feedback/Comments (does that count, wasn’t that #1?)
9. Spinoff content
10. Recommendations.

Pretty solid.  In the opening of the post, she writes “[w]hile no single metric alone is going to be a solid indicator of how engaged your community or customers are….”  I agree, but I think there is a big picture element that is worth emphasizing from the discussion (she did mention, but I felt could be more emphasized): virtually all of the metrics she articulates revolve around some form of interaction with the content (except maybe #4, but I think precisely’time with content’ is exactly where product simulations would fit as a means to deliver useful engagement metrics). 

By having a big picture concept, it can not only help to tie seemingly disparate items together, but also help us evaluate a range of additional interactive activities that should lend themselves to being metrics of engagement (like the use of product simulations, but isn’t that an obvious comment coming from me?).

I just saw this interesting post that excerpts “Stories that Sell”, but Casey Hibbard, or “The Power of Success Story Marketing.”  The gist of this excerpt is that “[w]e [customers] trust what others say much more than what a business itself says,” and that presenting customer experiences as case studies is a more effective marketing tool than almost anything the company writes about itself.  While “most of us don’t truly believe the benefits espoused by companies–unless they are verified by other trusted sources,” the author continues with the zippy line “[j]ust about everyone else is more credible than the business itself.”

I would agree that good customer stories provide compelling evidence that the the product or service has been delivered successfully to meet the needs of similar buyers.  However, it can be difficult to get good customer stories that align completely with what the company presents.  Buyers buy products and services to solve their own need–the buyer may accept a vendor’s argument about solving a peripheral issue for the buyer, but they buyer may not be willing in terms of cost or time to help the vendor prove it.

I believe that context-appropriate simulations can be similar to a case study when it shows how a mock customer, in this case, the viewer, can solve a problem that we hope is relevant to the customer.  If we can align our presented problems (contexts) with the problems that viewers face, we in effect put viewers into their own case studies.

“Products don’t function on their own”
I love this quotation because it zeroes in on the problem I have with most types of advertising on the web — show a picture, write some specs, maybe even a short video.  While the latter is getting to the idea that demonstrating function is important, I think that simulations presented in real-world contexts show the interaction between the operator and the product.  Allowing the viewer to drive the operation further puts the product ‘in the prospect’s hands’, which all good salespeople know is the ultimate sales pitch.  Directly following this quote is another gem: “People encounter challenges to overcome, become heroes, find solutions, and ultimately triumph.”  What better way than to show how the prospects themselves can solve that burning issue.

In a section entitled “Education: Show, Don’t Tell”, the author identifies that “as much as [marketers and business owners] detail how their products and services work for users, there’s often a gap between those descriptions and readers’ understanding of how they will actually work in their environments–all the more so when the products or services are complex.”  The conclusion?  Another point for the right kind of simulation: “you have to show readers what you’re talking about, descriptively and in context, rather than just telling them that your product or service accomplishes this or that.”

Then the author turns to some important numbers:

A survey by KnowledgeStorm (www.knowledgestorm.com) and MarketingSherpa (www.marketingsherpa.com) shed light on the role of case studies, particularly in IT purchase decisions. The survey, with results published in How Technology Marketers Meet Buyers’ Appetite for Content, asked nearly 4,000 B2B marketers, and technology and business professionals, what buyers want and what marketers deliver. The survey revealed that buyers expect you to educate them. In fact, 84 percent said they want content that educates them and expect vendors to provide it.

Awesome.  Now I have to talk with my clients to help me prove my hypothesis completely (won’t that make a great customer case study? ).

I came across the term “engagement marketing” recently through Twitter  (hey, it even has a Wikpedia page, maybe something I can create for product sim marketing once I figure out what to say!).  Through Wikipedia, then I saw an entry for “experiential marketing“.

Of course anyone could have made up those pages, but the materials seem somewhat credible and they gave me some interesting directions to consider in the proper placement of product simulation marketing.  The ‘experiential marketing’ term came closest, with the opening phrase/definition “Experiential Marketing is the art of creating an experience where the hoped-for result is an emotional connection to a person, brand, product or idea.”  Sounds like a winner.

A thought struck me while reading the engagement marketing entry.  It talked about a two-way conversation, but when I think about simulation, it sounds awfully one-way–the prospect uses the simulation to explore the product and its uses.  Since simulation would be great for aligning a context and desired feature set between the prospect and the product (something I indirectly referred to in an earlier post about using context to create a compelling call-for-action), it occurred to me that the advertisement or presentation ought to do a bit of ‘push’ marketing by offering the prospect I way to find out when new things happen related to what the prospect is interested in.  There’s nothing earth-shattering here, this is done all the time — the checkbox that says “send me more news and info about related stuff”.  However, having the prospect engaged in simulated product use contexts may be able to help the prospect get information he or she really wants, not just the email blast about any new product from that manufacturer.  If the ad/presentation can identify features of the prospect’s context, for example, what stage they are at in the buying cycle, what elements of the products are most relevant to the prospect, and other stuff, the manufacturer can send the prospect very relevant information on new products, or changes to existing products.

For example, if I am looking at new cars and honing in certain features, it behooves the manufacturer to send me information (opt-in, of course) about new cars that share those features.  Something to help the shopper make sense of all the specs.

Again, nothing hugely new in concept, but simulation could let us be more precise about the information we send back (the other way in the conversation, from manufacturer to prospect), and could even identify why the new information is relevant.  A true personal shopper that is learning what is important to the prospect.  Hence the prospect would feel that the manufacturer is being more helpful rather than simply trying to sell more of its stuff.

Coming up with the correct wording is essential for any task.  I have been uncomfortable with the terms “simulation-based marketing” and “simulation-based advertising”, because they sound like one is simulating the marketing or simulating the advertising.  However, I have liked those terms because they can get meaning from analogy to “simulation-based training.”

I have come to a new term which I believe is descriptive yet distinctive: product simulation marketing.  Now all that is left to do is fill out what this means!

Thanks to the folks at Unisfair via Twitter, I just saw a very nice blog post about developing metrics for engagement of social media: http://econsultancy.com/blog/4887-35-social-media-kpis-to-help-measure-engagement.  As my focus is on ‘product engagement’, I have been thinking about how that fits into other activities that express a viewer’s/user’s interest level.

Joerg from Unisfair mentions the Unisfair Engagement Index, an attempt to measure engagement in virtual events–another  interesting concept.  It seems like a useful endeavor to focus on a grouping of interaction opportunities — like a virtual trade show — and then distill the engaging elements.