6June2009
Posted by robgraham under: Media Musings; Targeting.
I make mistakes.
It’s a human thing. I’m not thrilled about it but there’s not a lot I can do to change this.
You see, as hard as I try to do everything perfectly the first time it rarely happens. That’s not to say I can’t get close or be effective in my efforts, but I’ve learned that the reality of almost any development process is that it can be rejiggered and refined to be even better and more effective.
I bring this up because in marketing and advertising there’s a certain assumption that by the time the campaign has been created and distributed, it is 100% spot in reaching its target audience and campaign goals. As much as I’d like to believe that the campaigns are created in the past hit all set marketing goals square on the head, I’m dubious that, as brilliant as I am, I’ve been able to bat .1000 consistently.
Like anything else, marketing is about achieving success by small degrees. Certainly, there are best practices that will get you well within range of your marketing goals. But marketing online (and off-line for that matter) is not a ‘set it and forget it’ proposition. It is a dynamic process that should be designed (and be allowed to) to evolve slowly over time. This also holds true for just about any type of marketing or advertising content designed for consumption including webpages, printed brochures, display ads, point of purchase displays, and just about anything that you can think of.
The reality of all of these forms of communication is that you won’t be able to know how effective they are in reaching the right consumers with the right message until you do two things:
1. Clearly identifying how success for the campaign or project is being determined
2. Identifying the areas of contact between net media and consumers that directly impact
reaching those goals
The bottom line is that you can’t measure success until you know what it is. Furthermore, you need to define what to measure in order to determine if those success points are being reached.
For example, if we were training to be archers, we could both easily agree that the goal for this activity would be to consistently fire the arrow and hit the bull’s-eye. As we take our shots, it’s going to be clear to both of us whether or not we are successful. However, every shot taken provides us with feedback which helps to determine what was wrong with the previous shot and how we might use that understanding to improve the success of the next shot. In this way, over time we should be able to refine our approaches until we are able to hit the bull’s-eye just about every time.
This optimization phase is a natural part of any development process. In online advertising the opportunity to access instant feedback and use that information to determine future success is a powerful, powerful tool. However, in order to take advantage of this secret weapon, you first need to be willing to admit that you’re probably not doing it 100% right the first time and build in the feedback loop to tell you what you’re doing wrong and how you can improve those results.
Bottom line is that it’s okay to make mistakes. Mistakes can also provide us with feedback which we can use to minimize future mistakes. Marketers who don’t have an optimization phase built in their advertising cycle are ignoring this reality.
And that is a mistake.
Rob Graham
28May2009
Posted by robgraham under: Media Musings; Targeting.
A few weeks ago I was visiting an office building in while waiting for a meeting, I picked up a brochure that was sitting in a small Lucite stands in the corner of the waiting area. It was one of those tri-fold brochures popular during the 90s in which a marketer could run preprinted and pre-scored paper through the laser printer and voilà suddenly you had marketing collateral.
Now, I’m not going to pick on the media (since I too used it at one point in my career as a way to create very affordable marketing materials) but I did notice in reading this brochure that they totally missed the point of what they were trying to accomplish in the first place.
The brochure was for a company that provided professional services. The content talked about the services, about the history of the company, about the people running the company, and about where they did their business. However, in carefully scanning the contents, I noted that not once did they explain to me (the reader of their marketing materials) how any of this information applied to me.
Effective marketing is about creating a relationship with the consumer. In order to do this, marketers need to provide consumers with something that personally resonates with them by meeting their current needs and desires. While in this case all of the information in the brochure was factual and accurate, it was also highly irrelevant in telling me why I should care. In truth, it appears that the brochure was written for the benefit of the marketer. I can just imagine them looking over the copy and commenting to each other about how professional this makes them appear and that the shot of the outside of their office really pulls it all together. Unfortunately, by the time that I, the consumer, look at it, it appears to be a self-serving printout which was designed to impress but not necessarily to inform.
For marketing to be effective consumers need to be able to “try on” the content being provided. If I were walking by a store window and saw a new suit sitting on a mannequin, I would automatically picture myself wearing that suit and judge in my mind’s eye whether I thought it would look good on me or not. Likewise, with just about anything that we can purchase, consumers need to try on the idea first before they can make a decision to buy. Anybody who’s gone house hunting knows that there are occasions when you walk into a house and you say, “this is nice but it just isn’t me”. It doesn’t matter what criteria you used to arrive at that conclusion. The truth is the decision that you make is based on personal revelations and how well something meets your comfort levels.
The other thing that is important for marketers to remember is that consumers have limited bandwidth. We are bombarded daily with marketing messages and as a result we are in scan mode. This scan allows us to quickly eliminate anything in our environment which is a relevant to our immediate needs while also keeping an eye for those things that match our set of current needs and desires. For marketing to work in this environment it needs to provide hooks that will allow us as consumers to include it and its content in our current list of needs. It’s quite possible that there are marketing messages that are very relevant to us as individuals they get passed over because that information is not obvious to us when we come in contact with the message.
‘What’s in it for me? ‘Is the rallying cry of the consumer. To be an effective marketer you need to focus on the answer to that question at every turn. If you can’t effectively explain to consumers why they should care about your offer than the deal is done — in most cases the consumer won’t even notice that you exist and they will happily move on scanning for content that matters to them personally.
Rob Graham
22May2009
Posted by robgraham under: Marketing Methodologies; Media Musings.
In case you hadn’t noticed it the world is changed. In this column I often focus on how these changes affect our efforts as marketers and advertisers. However, I think it’s important that we knowledge the elephant in the room and discuss what the future of our part of the world will look like in just a few years.
Online media is here to stay. For those of us who work in this area this is a blessed event. For those who work in more traditional media these are often very frightening times.
You need only look at the rapidly failing newspaper industry to gain a sense that something that once was the dominant way of distributing news and information is no longer can of that domain. In the case of the decline of newspapers, advertisers found it easier, cheaper, more effective, and overall faster to reach customers using different new and emerging online technologies. From free classified ads to news as it happens, most newspapers can no longer compete against those technologies and methodologies which have become dominant instead.
The result is that for a newspaper to survive it needs to first gain a better understanding of what its new identity is. For many newspapers, the concept of printing presses and home delivery are still at the core of their fundamental business models. After all, they are in the newspaper business. But in the future, will this be the dominant form of news distribution? I think we can safely say that the answer is “probably not”. However, all is not lost. Newspapers also have a great social infrastructure which allows them to serve as the voice of the community. Yes, the market for yesterday’s news being delivered today is quickly dying. However for newspapers to remain a central pillar of the community and to allow readers to exchange ideas with one another has a strong future possibility. Newspapers as media companies, are also well positioned to allow advertisers to reach target consumers and to provide connectivity between people.
I’m not saying that this revelation alone is going to save the newspaper industry. But positive change starts with accepting that you are no longer in control of what is happening in the world around you and finding new ways to reestablish your worth to the economy.
Several years ago I was in a meeting with a publishing client of mine. We were discussing ways in which they could take aspects of their educational materials and place them into digital media format for easier access and use by students. During this meeting, one of the senior executives slammed her hand down on the desk and stated “We are a textbook manufacturing company. We have always been a textbook manufacturing company. And we will always be a textbook manufacturing company!”
My initial thought at the time was “it really doesn’t matter what you want reality to be, the market is going to change based upon the needs and desires of your clients. To think otherwise puts you in a very precarious position.”
It has been said that the only people who like change are wet babies. Change is uncertain, change can be difficult and often painful. But avoiding change and pretending that it isn’t happening can end up destroying even the most ardent believer. Effective marketing, and so many other things, starts with setting affective goals. If those goals take into account a changing world and offers new solutions to old problems then you’re in pretty good shape. However, on the other hand, if the goal is to always maintain the status quo and keep doing things the way you’ve been doing them for years, then those years may be numbered.
19May2009
Posted by robgraham under: Marketing Methodologies; Targeting; Uncategorized.
When we talk about finding solutions to problems, part of the natural progression is to look for what works and stick with it. Unfortunately, this often means that we stay with the first solution we find and neglect looking for additional solutions.
I bring this up because I’m often surprised by the lack of efficiencies that many of the current manufacturing and economic systems offer. As an example, I was shocked to learn several years ago (horrified actually) that the standard combustion engine used in almost all auto manufacturing today uses only about 1% of the energy being generated by the burning of gas to move the vehicle forward.
While I won’t belittle the usefulness of cars and other vehicles it does seem to me that an acceptance of the pure waste of 99% of the potential energy is a shame. However, if you peek back at what life was like during Henry Ford’s rise to automotive dominance, the plain truth is that gasoline was cheap and plentiful. As a result, the need to push the envelope and to create more efficient car engines was offset by a real lack of need to do so. Today, things have changed and technologists around the world are working hard to increase efficiencies of the standard combustion engine.
As we continue to fumble our way through new and often very different advertising and marketing paradigms for the 21st century, it occurs to me that the way we’ve been doing “our thing” for the last 100+ years means that we too never stopped to figure out ways to make the process more efficient but instead settled for the results we got because they were so far better than anything we’ve had before.
For these reasons, traditional direct marketers were content (overjoyed, actually) if they received a 2% response on their direct mail campaigns. Using a business model that builds a 98% waste factor into it strikes me as a prime example of not setting realistic goals.
That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of challenges in reaching consumers because we all know that’s not the case. However, as we begin to develop new models for targeting and reaching consumers what can we do to increase the efficiencies of the programs that we create so we can allow the greatest potential to move our messages with the least amount of waste?
I would propose that we can start this process by first moving away from the mindset that reach and frequency is the end all. True, in some campaigns, such as branding, getting your message in for the greatest number of eyeballs accomplishes this set task. However, even with branding there are ways to increase efficiencies so that the brands are seen by those consumers to which the brand is significant and may fill a future need. Offering a brand of surfboard to the entire population of an economy may meet branding goals of “getting the message out there” but, as I’m sure you will agree, still falls very short of getting the message to those consumers would be most interested in purchasing a surfboard now or in the future.
I would also propose that in the future accurate consumer targeting is paramount to the success of any campaign. As pointed out above, reaching everybody with the same message is not only incredibly wasteful but often meaningless to huge percentages of consumers. By first identifying who the target consumers for product or brand are and then breaking that group into smaller sub targets will allow advertisers to create multiple marketing problems that are specifically designed to reach specific segments of the target audience. As a result, more consumers receive a message that meets their personal wants and needs and also speaks to them directly.
Finally, I would propose that start to accurately measure online and offline campaign results. There are too many horror stories of companies that have spent millions upon millions of dollars on advertising without ever stopping to measure what the results of the campaigns were. True, not every campaign yields a clean number that determines whether or not ROI was met or not. However, to have no understanding of what the money you’re spending is actually doing for future profits is almost criminally negligible. To be an effective marketer in the 21st century means finding meaningful and accurate ways of collecting data and then analyzing that data to come up with clear and meaningful answers that help identify if marketing goals are being reached.
The bottom line, as I see it, is not one of waiting for the right tools and technologies to find their way into the marketplace. We have arrived already. The challenge now is to learn how to use these tools effectively and to move away from older and less efficient methodologies and exchange them for proactive and meaningful ways of measuring campaign success. This will not only allow us to be more efficient with every dollar spent by two also do a far better job at communicating the benefits our brands and services provide consumers.
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Rob Graham
18May2009
Posted by robgraham under: Engagement marketing; Media Musings.
I received a call a few days ago from a sales rep telling me that he was in charge of global sales for a company that provided training services. Being that I too provide training services I wasn’t quite sure what kind of synchronicity we might have and would’ve mentioned this except that right after introducing himself he went into his patter to tell me about all of the different services-based company offered. It was quite an impressive list. The only problem was is that I didn’t know how any of these services could be applied to my business models because he never bothered to clarify any of my business goals.
Eventually I was able to shake him free with a polite “sorry, but we’re not interested at this time”. I hung up the phone and started thinking about his approach and pondering how ineffective it was at reaching me and my needs.
We’ve all been subject to ineffective and just plain bad sales pitches. In this case the information he was providing me was all legit, and in his mind, no doubt, very topical. The problem was that he had no idea what my needs were and never even bothered to find out. The result was a mishmash of options presented to me at such a rapid pace that I couldn’t try any of them on to see if they fit.
Selling is hard. Selling to people who don’t know what you offer is very hard. Selling to people who have no interest in learning what you offer is harder still. However, there are ways of starting a dialogue with prospects that allow salespeople to move away from their carefully crafted scripts and to start a real conversation with a real people. In this example, all the sales rep really needed to do to start things off was to ask me about my business. What is it that I do day-to-day? What is it that I was hoping to accomplish in the future? By gaining an understanding of what my needs were and what my future goals are, he would have been well-positioned to respond to me I saying something like: “Well, based on what you’ve told me, I have a great solution for you!” Instead, I received a laundry list of generic information that was fairly meaningless and more indicative of someone merely fishing.
As marketers, we all need to move away from any type of communications model that sounds more like a monologue than a dialogue. Consumers can very easily tune out and ignore these one-size-fits-all pitches. After all, they don’t know what’s in it for them unless they can establish where the connection is. By approaching the sales pitch as a dialogue, the goal is to share information back-and-forth. I ask you a question and your answer gives me insight into our potential relationship. With this insight, I can establish points of commonality, assess your needs, and use any information you provide me to customize a response that best fits your personal needs. Without this input, I can only guess what you want or need and in most cases I’m going to get it wrong.
Simply asking a few questions during the sales process not only humanizes the conversation but provides solid insight into how the relationship between the sales rep in the consumer can move forward.
13May2009
Posted by robgraham under: Engagement marketing; Media Musings.
The headlines are buzzing this morning because U.S. retail sales for the month of April fell unexpectedly for the second month in a row. In short, people aren’t returning to their former pre-bust buying habits as the economy is proposing to improve.
I can’t speak for most Americans, but I know that I am much more cautious today with how I spend my money because of concerns I have that in the future I may need whatever cash I have on hand to cover my basic living expenses and would rather not have it tied up in a new sofa or flat-screen TV. But is it my thriftiness, and that of most Americans, that is causing this decrease in retail sales?
I think the problem goes deeper than that. As a guy in his middle fortysomethings, my need to go out and acquire new “stuff” is diminishing rapidly. During the last four decades I’ve acquired pretty much everything that I want to acquire. Certainly from time to time the need for a new pair of jeans, a best-selling novel, and perhaps a new car will appear on my ‘needs radar’. But we’re talking maintenance here and not consumption. I don’t personally need a new device that will allow me to play music. I don’t need a computer. I don’t need new bedroom furniture, an outdoor grill or a white picket fence in front of my home. I already have all these things and the need to acquire new ones is very limited.
As the population continues to age, there are more people over the age of 50 with discretionary income than there are under 50. If, like me, most of these people are in a post-consumer mode of behavior, then that leaves a fairly limited portion of the population to cover the entire range of product consumption in order to keep all of these retail channels up and running. The bottom line is that there are too many stores that want to sell their stuff to too few customers who want to buy it.
It doesn’t make any sense to believe that any economy can sustain perpetual growth when it comes to the sale of things. What does make sense is that as consumers our habits are changing to better meet our desires. In the past decade consumers have gotten away from the desire for things and have had moved closer to products and services that offer us opportunities for experience and engagement. This opens a new door to companies who can provide interesting and meaningful experiences for consumers and it also means that these companies aren’t beholden to manufacturing products for sale.
I don’t have all the answers here. I only know that if I were to plan for the future as a business, I would focus on providing information products that would allow people to live a more fulfilling and interesting life and focus on those things that don’t necessarily need to be carried home in a shopping bag.
12May2009
Posted by robgraham under: Bad Marketing Practices.
The bartering of information is perhaps at the core of anything that marketers do online. In a nutshell, marketers create opportunities for trade with prospects by offering them something of value in exchange for personal information. In most cases this works quite well. If a marketer can offer something of value to consumers are generally willing to exchange personal information for that value.
Unfortunately, not everybody gets this concept.
Yesterday, while doing some research, I decided to check out a new service being offered by Omniture called Omniture Genesis. Just for the record, Omniture is a great company with plenty of great products and services. However, in this instance they totally missed the ball.
In my attempt to learn more about Omniture Genesis I clicked on a link to see a product demo and was immediately taken to a registration page. I didn’t want to register — I wanted to see a demo. However, until I gave them my personal information (including my phone number) I wasn’t going to have an opportunity to learn more about the product and what it could do for me. In the end, I followed the registration process so I can watch the short demo.
The problem with this approach is that it forced me to make a commitment way too early in the process. It also is creating a marketing firewall of sorts. Furthermore, I’m not interested in buying Omniture Genesis. I was simply doing research so that I would have a better understanding of the service should it ever come up in conversations with my clients. But now I exist in their database as being someone who is interested in perhaps purchasing Omniture Genesis in the future. Not the case.
This information gathering approach is kind of like forcing somebody to sign a lease agreement before they test drive a car. It doesn’t make any sense in that context and it doesn’t make any sense in this. If you want to get information from a site visitor make sure the trade is a fair one and that you are offering something of value (a white paper, a widget, a screensaver, etc.) in exchange for that consumer’s personal information.
On the other hand, if the only thing you have to trade is it your marketing materials then it’s a pretty bad deal and will probably drive away at least half of your prospects before they’ve even had a chance to be engaged by what you offer. Try giving the marketing materials away for free and then create ways to channel interested consumers toward providing personal information for future follow-up.
11May2009
Posted by robgraham under: Engagement marketing.
How well does your marketing tell the story of why consumers should do business with you? It’s not a trick question but it’s often one that seems to be secondary to many marketers (after informing you how great they are) and it shouldn’t be.
I bring this up because I’m often impressed with unassuming marketing campaigns that do a terrific job of pulling all the pieces together in a meaningful way. In this case, I’m talking about a company called Penzeys Spices (http://www.penzeys.com). Headquartered 
in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, Penzeys Spices offers a wide variety of seasonings through their seasonal catalog that not only inspire readers to add more flavor to their cooking but also educate readers on the differences between spices and how they are used, presents recipes submitted by other readers, offer great descriptions and photographs of the products and is peppered (pun intended) with drawings of spices provided by children.
Selling spices is not new but that doesn’t mean it can’t be interesting. As a product category, spices have lost a little luster since the days of Columbus, but the folks at Penzeys have created an engaging experience for anyone who picks up their catalog. They inherently understand that the people they’re reaching are foodies who are often responsible for cooking for other people and generally love the process of preparing meals and try new things. Apart from allowing readers to constantly fantasize about ways to improve their own dishes, Penzeys offers social marketing, community and sharing aspects to their marketing that could serve as a guide to any company wanting to get a better sense of how to do it right.
8May2009
Posted by robgraham under: Engagement marketing.
When I first started in the online ad business (late 1990s) online advertising was a pretty straightforward environment to navigate. You created a picture of a particular size, you called it an ad, and he gave it to a publisher or to an ad network to give a publisher and you were in the online advertising business.
Early ads were nothing more than sophisticated than large buttons that were designed to take consumers from where they were to where the advertiser wanted them to be. While early pioneers managed drive a lot of traffic to their websites, the novelty of the model quickly wore off in for the last 10 years or so has been a lukewarm mainstay of the online advertising business.
Today, online ads are going into a rapid decline with regard to their marketing and advertising effectiveness. As traffic driving tools, they’ve never been very effective. The truth of the matter is that most consumers aren’t comfortable with clicking on ads that takes them away from what they are already doing. On the other side of things, publishers who placed these ads on their pages are also in a pickle. While they want their advertisers to find success on their pages, every click on an ad in essence drives traffic away from those pages. That being said, click through rates across the board are dismally low today.
Furthermore, click through rates are largely indicative of absolutely nothing. While most marketers strive to drive traffic to their landing pages, what’s really important here is not to measure how many people clicked on the ad but to measure how many people accomplished what was the advertiser wanted them to accomplish once they arrived on the landing page.
All that aside, the real issue with display advertising today is that it’s no longer the only game in town. Apart from a general lack of engagement, most display advertising has become page clutter-almost invisible to the consumers who visit.
The world of online advertising alternatives runs the gamut from interactive rich media ads, to highly targeted search ads, to engaging video ads, to social networks and instant communications models. In short, there are plenty of ways of communicating with consumers in interesting and engaging ways that don’t require them to click on an ad and go someplace else.
Historically, display ads may turn out to have been a bridge technology that got the market from point to point. They have served their purpose but the alternatives we have today make them the ‘horse-drawn carriage’ of online marketing. I think it’s time we started looking for the online advertising trains, planes and automobiles of the future.
6May2009
Posted by robgraham under: Email marketing.
As I was checking my e-mail this morning I noticed that I had over 2500 unread messages waiting for me. Now, these weren’t all in the last 24 hours. In truth some of these stretch back as far as January and had been spared deletion based on some sort of reasoning at the time. However, after a few months of sitting in my inbox I figured that the timeliness if not the relevancy of most of these messages would be lacking.
As I was cleaning up, I noticed that I was getting plenty of repeat e-mails for several offers in which I had absolutely no interest decided to take a few minutes and unsubscribe from some of these lists to reduce the daily onslaught. One of the advertisers, a nightclub in the Los Angeles area, pitched me at least weekly on upcoming events, special musicians, and invitations to all the fun I can stand if I’m willing to spend the night out dancing. Now this sounds like fun at all but because I live in the Boston area it’s a heckuva commute.
After clicking the unsubscribe link, I was taken to a landing page telling me how sorry they were that I was leaving them (which seems to be fairly standard practice in the hope to retrieve those subscribers who are sitting on the emotional fence, I guess) but in this case they also gave me a small dialog box and asked me to tell them ‘why’ I was unsubscribing.
I think this is incredibly valuable marketing tool. All too often marketers lose customers and never know why. In the past few years I have changed cable providers, ISPs and gas companies. In none of these cases was I contacted by the company I was abandoning and asked ‘why’. In all three cases I had a pretty good story to share but probably not one that they really wanted to hear. On the other hand, had any of these companies actually taken the time to find out why I was unhappy with their services they may have actually saved me from moving on and retained me as a customer.
‘We are sorry to see you go…’ doesn’t mean anything to me as a consumer. For a company to express regrets that I’m leaving seems very self-serving and frankly has little to do with me. But, for a company willing to make an effort and to ask me why I’m leaving , then that’s all about me and I may just be willing to share my reasons and help them avoid making similar mistakes with other customers.
I opted out of the mailing list with the nightclub in Los Angeles and I told them why. Unfortunately, what they offer is still largely irrelevant for me no matter how good the offer. But, whoever is in charge of their e-mail marketing is pretty savvy and is gathering some of the best data possible to help their future marketing efforts. I hope the feedback they receive helps them hone their craft.
