Alec Baldwin and Doggy First Aid

It’s never pleasant to spend an hour doing research for a prospect with the express purpose of turning down her business. But that’s what we do regularly at QSearch.

The client provides first aid training for pet owners in Asia. As someone who had a great canine companion, I think that’s a much needed service. However, after researching Google trend and our proprietary Facebook content search engine, all the engagement posts and the search results were in United States (not even Canada.) Despite knowing QSearch’s precision ad placement can help her business (in the future), I had to pull out my Alex Baldwin speech.

In Glengarry, Glen Ross, Alec Baldwin’s character expounded on AIDA.

Awareness (They know they have a problem)

Interest (They are interested in your solution)

Desire (They want your solution to solve their problem)

Action (They want to buy your solution, now.)

Unfortunately for our prospect (and future customer), there isn’t an awareness among asian pet owners on the seriousness of pet first aid. Because there’s no awareness, interest level are low and desires are nonexistent. We would not feel very good taking her money knowing we can’t do much for her sales. We provided her with the market research and then recommended she use content marketing to raise awareness and measure interest before embarking on a QSearch campaign, where we use keywords to identify user with strong awareness and desire and market her service.

Our core value is “making social media useful” and at this point of the client’s business lifecycle, social media is useful only for Awareness and Interest, not for Desire conversion. But the time is not wasted, it’s invested in her future and we gave her solid, actionable tips on PR, community engagement, and content.

Like Alec Baldwin commanded, “Always Be Closing.” And we are. We’re just closing on the future deals when we can accelerate and amplify our client’s growth. The race is not given to the swift or the strong but to those that hold out to the end.

Find out if Social Media is useful for your business at this stage of the growth. Email me at roger@qsearch.cc. I will give you the best marketing advice possible, whether it’s social media or just plain business advice. Make sure to mention Alec Baldwin sent you.

Written by Roger Do

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What Gets Measured Gets Managed

“What gets measured gets managed.”

~Peter Drucker, Management Guru

Every organization uses KPI to measure progress. For sales people, KPI can mean anything from hard numbers such as revenue to soft numbers such as number of customers met in a given time. For marketing, it’s even harder to establish a KPI that measures awareness and response. How do you measure awareness? 

Traditional measurements, like surveys and polls, are ineffective and broken. We either over-valued certain portion of the demographics or underestimated hidden opinions. Even the gold standard such as ACNielsen are not much better. A few years ago, a Taiwanese TV network got a 0.25% market share (ie. 50,000 viewers) in the ratings. This was a very “impressive” KPI, except that the TV network was shut down for half an hour because of its temporary malfunction during the period ACNelsen surveyed the market. Not that it stopped managers from purchasing ACNelsen data to justify their performances.

With the world living out their life on a globe spanning social networks, and content would be digitized, mashed up, and reframed into any format possible, this drives more and more marketing campaigns to come on the Internet, especially on social networks. Along with this trend, we now have more accurate and reliable services to measure awareness, response, and attitude.

However, with the internet producing one DVD worth of data every second, finding the content might be the biggest challenge. QSearch is powerful search and analysis tool focusing on Facebook content. It ranks the issues by the number of like, comment, and reshares each issue received, and display the information in an easily comprehendible way. Even for those without marketing training background can pick up the service immediately.

Don’t believe me? Email me something you’re interested in finding, and I’ll dig it up for you. Keep Calm and QSearch.

Written by: Tien-Yu Lee

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