Saturday, February 28, 2009

Trusting Me, Trusting You.


So yesterday a buffoon sends out a mass email cc'ing rather than bcc'ing everyone in his mailing list. There were understandable complaints in some quarters, but quickly the tone changed as in-boxes filled with emails from various social media experts offering parodic investment opportunities in Nigeria, deals on pharmaceuticals and announcements that the email list had been sold to spammers.

Perhaps the context of a lazy Friday or the overlapping of the recipients' networks contributed to this interesting example of community forming around a shared sense of implicit (albeit most definitely not explicit or universal) permission. But, the sixty-odd contributions so far have crucially not expanded the distribution beyond the original list and there is a sense of trust that they are all sufficiently web-savvy to limit any damage that has already been done.

If you can engender that trust amongst your potential customers, it seems that people's human-ness shines through even when you screw up.


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Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Measure For Measure.

Measurable results are all the rage as cost-cutting management regimes seek thorough justifications for expenditures.

The subject came up twice yesterday in very different contexts. First I heard James Lovelock of GAIA fame extolling the need for more measurement of climate change but declare that "All things that really matter are intuitive." It's a great point. Projected numbers, in business especially, can usefully be as much about trends and tendencies as about pinpoint accuracy and we know that the great mathematicians all speak of seeing patterns and shapes in numbers rather than calculate them like mere mortals and finance directors do.

Then, in a meeting with an agency, the subject of convincing clients of the ROI on digital initiatives when they were quite happy to pay large sums for traditional advertising. It reminded me of a post that I wrote years ago in which I remarked upon the dubious calculations of financiers and suggested that imputed justifications of marketing expenditures were no less valid. Quite prescient really.

If you measure where you can and combine that with a rigorous inspection of your internal logic, any marketer should be able to generate a solid ROI justification, particularly now that the bean-counters have been shown not to be the master mathemeticians they thought they were.

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Friday, February 20, 2009

Passion Is No Ordinary Word.

Last week, at the Free Agents screening, I heard a producer eulogising about how the show had been a great "job" with which to be involved. This week I heard someone praising an advertising campaign as great "work".

My reaction to both is the same as to those people who spoke of shifting "units" and marketing "product" when I worked in the entertainment industry. If you want customers to care about what you're selling, then think and speak about it in terms of something you care about.

If your language commoditises it, you're half the way to actually commoditising it.

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Thursday, February 19, 2009

Content Squared - Leveraging Content Across Digital Marketing

Working with technology marketers on a daily basis, I hear much about the need to develop more relevant content based upon a solid knowledge of your target customer segments and their needs at different stages of the buying cycle. In fact, in our 2009 Tech Marketing Barometer study (results to be announced in the next week or two) marketers identified "content development" as one of the highest priority areas for improving sales enablement. However, are we as marketers getting the "biggest bang" from our content development investment?. . . . leveraging this content across multiple delivery vehicles and channels? With this in mind, I thought it would be valuable to hear a bit more about how to best leverage content from IDC's VP of Go-to-Market services, Laura Nurzynski. Take it away Laura. . . .

My colleagues from IDC’s CMO Advisory Practice expect digital marketing investment to rapidly outpace investment in much of the more traditional marketing vehicles. (IDC includes the following in digital marketing: display ads, search ads, your company website, SEO, digital events (including virtual events, Webcasts, online forums, etc), email marketing/electronic outreach, and social networks.

How can you optimize your investment in this area and reduce your learning curve? Are there lessons you can learn from you peers about leveraging digital marketing to your advantage –especially in these challenging economic times, when you need to carefully place your marketing investments and efforts for optimal results?

A majority of the programs that I work on with my clients, involve digital marketing. Our clients use written content such as white papers, briefs, Q&A style articles, and newsletters—delivered online as PDF or web content—as offers for direct email campaigns, banner ad placements, and other PR or advertising outreach. They also utilize the same content in more than one communication channel, not only using written content as offers, but giving it to their sales force, posting it in a resource library, and handing out content at events their prospects are attending (very often in a digital format such as a link to a website or on flash drive.) Over the past 2-3 years, I have also been observing more and more use of audio, video, and interactive content on my clients’ websites and as offers for email campaigns. Alternate formats are not only attractive because they are a “flashier” and innovative communications approach, but also because they provide a choice to your audience in how they engage with you. Keep in mind, that individuals consume and comprehend information in different ways: some people are very visual; others need to hear information; and still others need to read lots of details, absorb the information, and then make sense out of it after they’ve had some time to digest and assimilate all the info they’ve gathered. This approach gives you the opportunity to package your message in varied formats to reach and appeal to a wider audience.

Here are a few best practices and innovative approaches I’ve seen in the last few months:

A smaller emerging vendor, launching new products into the marketplace, licensed content from IDC (as market and technology validation from an independent party) then distributed and leveraged this content in multiple formats online:
  • They referenced an IDC analyst Q&A article in their blog
  • They incorporated an independent analyst speaker into a Webcast program, promoted the Webcast via Facebook, on their website, and via media reach programs.
  • They used a multi-touch approach to offer varying levels of detail in the content assets they incorporated into the program, including Q&A style articles with an industry expert, a view of where they fit into the marketplace, as well as a workbook their sales staff could use to engage in a conversation with their prospects, and a Webcast that allowed their prospects to hear from and interact with both their subject matter experts as well as an independent analyst.
  • At last report, they generated 800 leads and 250 attendees to their live webast from these activities over a 3-4 month period.
  • Follow these links to see the use of third-party content in action:
    · Marketo Vendor Spotlight
    · Marketo Blog

A well-know telecommunications company leveraged an analyst video podcast and a white paper based on primary research to generate media awareness and buzz in the marketplace. They broadcast the IDC video podcast live during their launch event and in 7 days generated $500K+ in equivalent media placement from the video, white paper and PR activities.

Several companies are expanding the reach of their face-to-face events by wrapping additional outreach around pre-and post-event promotion activities:

  • A large software company is utilizing an online audio Webcast to generate buzz for new product announcements while also building awareness for an upcoming events series. The online webcasts will expand their potential reach to prospects, given restrictions on travel but will also start to build a pipeline of prospects. During the series of events, audience members will be polled regarding their adoption plans in the technology area. The poll results will be fodder for a follow-up Webcast post event, where the company can share peer information with targets who attended the event, attend a pre-event Webcast or are hearing about the solutions announcements for the first time.

I’m sure you’re incorporating a plethora of digital marketing activities into your current campaigns. As you do so, consider how various content elements can be leveraged in multiple ways and don’t forget to consider your target audience and ensure that you have various messages in different media for consumption by myriad target audiences who learn and consume information in different ways. [Laura Nurzynski, Group VP, IDC's Go-to-Market Services,
lnurzynski@idc.com]

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Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Pattern Recognition.


Changed behaviour gets noticed. It disrupts the status quo. It can be a positive diffentiator. A lot of marketing is based upon claims that we do things differently and this is better for you.

But changed behaviour can also occur for defensive reasons and that also gets noticed (as Facebook have been reminded this week).

It is noticed when a credit card company starts sending monthly bills about two weeks later than before. It is then noticed that this wasn't due to the holiday season postal glut but was apparently a policy change.

The changed behaviour has certainly got the customer's attention, but that customer is now wondering if they're trying to increase the chance of his making a late payment. Customers don't like sneakiness - peceived or actual. They notice it. Don't do it.

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Monday, February 16, 2009

Keep Your Copy Clear.


Snappy way of saying "our showrooms are offering good deals" isn't it? I had to drive past this billboard (yes, a billboard designed for instant impact) quite a few times to work it out.


Add in the looming storm clouds and a racing driver who, for sure, won the world championship but was also beaten in many of the races and you have to wonder what the thinking was. If you haven't got much time to say something, make it simply comprehensible and make it undebateable.

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Sunday, February 15, 2009

The Art Of The Tease.

"Publicity is selling what you have: the film’s stars and sometimes its director. Marketing, very often, is selling what you don’t have; it’s the art of the tease."

No, marketing is the art of making sure that what you have is easy to sell.

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Thursday, February 12, 2009

Let Your Product Do The Talking.


Tonight, because I know a friend who works for the production company, I was invited to a preview screening of a new television series, Free Agents, followed by drinks and canapes. I wasn't going to blog about it here - it takes more than canapes and good company to buy me - but the more I reflected upon it, the more I was impelled to write.

Not because I had the pleasure of watching two episodes of a remarkably tightly scripted show that was uniformly well acted and filmed and which I would recommend unreservedly, but because I had been led to believe I was going to see a comedy. That "branding" made me focus on how often I and the rest of the audience were laughing and the answer was not that often. Don't get me wrong, I laughed outwardly and inwardly on many occasions, so did the rest of the audience, but no-one did so perhaps as often as one would expect of a comedy.

There's a simple reason for that - this is so much more than just a comedy (and I write that as a huge fan of comedy). The point is that categorisation can be bad marketing and by labelling this a comedy rather than just a really intelligent piece of entertainment, a dissonance was created for me and, to a lesser extent, for some other audience members with whom I compared notes over canapes.

The message is not a new one. It's the audience/customer who decides what something means to them. Good marketing is categorically not about telling them what to think. You don't use short-hand to create your product/service, so why sell it short with lowest common denominators when you come to market it? If you believe the world is increasingly media literate, then why not treat it as such?

If you live in the UK, I urge you to watch Free Agents on Channel 4 on Friday at 10 p.m. and while I guarantee you will laugh, I'll be really interested to know if you would describe it as a comedy when you recommend it to your friends.

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Wednesday, February 11, 2009

A Sale Is Not Just The Transaction.


Don't know who is more at fault here. The media owner/train company for daring to sell advertising space that is not a clean slate. Or the media buyer for not assuming to check exactly what they're buying.

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Monday, February 9, 2009

What Customers Really Think (NSFW).


Just count the number of marketing mistakes that The Onion nails in two minutes. But only if you can tolerate Christian Bale-esque language. Headphones advised.

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Saturday, February 7, 2009

Collaboration Costs.

Since technology has made it easier than ever for people to talk about your product/service, it’s important for marketers to consider how best to facilitate this. Not so much in terms of organised incentives or seeding schemes, but in terms of the mechanics of shareability. This was emphasized to me when Angus highlighted this Barclaycard competition derived from their TV advertisement.

Not knowing what it was, I enjoyed it – until the final shot revealed that, as so often online, I’d not been watching remarkable amateurs but professionals with a budget. The idea is good one, but is it something that people would try to imitate and thereby spread?

There’s a trade-off between impact and achievability, between shareability and the participation that leads to shareability. You want to make the impact notable enough to pique people's interest, but not so overwhelming that nobody feels able to match it. If you set the standard too high, will people be dissuaded, challenged or choose to satirise? I'll be intrigued to see what sort of entries they get.

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Friday, February 6, 2009

Is Database Marketing on Your Marketing Operations Radar?

How many times have we heard in the B-to-B marketing press the past several months about the importance of increasing content relevance to our prospects and customers, better engaging them through digital marketing vehicles and improving our ability to generate and qualify marketing leads? Yes, all extremely important priorities for us as marketers, however, if you're a $100M+ company none of this can be accomplished in an efficient and effective manner without the back-office infrastructure to support it. And we all know how difficult an infrastructure conversation is in this economic downturn. For the purposes of this conversation, let's focus on the area of database marketing.

Even the best marketing organizations struggle with consistency in database marketing processes; consolidation of prospect and customer data across the multitude of databases in use across the world; cleansing of data to prevent a "bad data in = bad data out" scenario; and overcoming the complexity of data analysis and list pulls, especially with the increased data flow from digital marketing activities. In a recent best practices study, we spoke with (12) multi-billion $, complex organizations representing in total over $250B in revenue. When asked to indicate their marketing organization's satisfaction with the components of database marketing, some of the most fundamental elements of this area were identified as being the weakest. . . . including data cleansing, digital data integration and contact management.

So enough about the problems out there: that's the easy part to identify. What are a couple concrete things that you can do to help improve marketing's "back-office", especially in these difficult economic times when "throwing money" at the problem is not even a possibility?. . .
  1. Establish a global database marketing council or team to set standards and govern processes and technology. (yes, virtual if need be and it will take more time out of your day . . . but this will pay off in the long-term)
  2. Leverage third party partnerships for external expertise and best practices (e.g., data cleansing). Establish an approved vendor supply list to achieve economies of scale and better govern data standards.
  3. Develop a process to enable the average marketer to obtain a highly targeted list for their activities or campaigns. A 100% self-service model will lead to supplier proliferation, poor leverage of scare marketing resources and an inability to leverage the power of your data. Ideas include: establish a relationship marketing team, deploy a shared services model to get dbse. marketing experts closer to the field (more on shared services to come in future blogs), create an expert analytics team that can do some of the "heavy lifting" for your team's larger projects (e.g., predictive modeling).
  4. Reduce and consolidate disparate data sources. If you're lucky enough to have or pursue a universal data mart or EDW then great. For the rest of us, another option may be deploying an application that serves as the front-end for multiple databases. This option is available through several marketing automation vendors.
  5. Ensure your database marketing and lead management teams are working together if not part of the same group. This is particularly important for establishing a closed-loop lead management process.
  6. And last but certainly not least, establish metrics and targets to measure the performance of your database marketing capabilities. (e.g., data quality indicators, lead generation data to track the success of list pull activities, response times and internal customer satisfaction if you're leveraging a shared services model)

If you're fortunate enough to have a marketing operations individual or team, then turn to these folks for help in deploying the process rigor needed to initiate these actions.

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Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Event Surplus.


Oh look! An advertisement that utilises a busy station as the canvas for an event. How long is it since we saw that? Yes, as regular advertisements are increasingly ignored, there will be a rise in "event" marketing. But one thing is being overlooked.

Event [ i vént ] noun

Definition:

1. important incident: an occurrence, especially one that is particularly significant, interesting, exciting, or unusual


The more "events" marketers create, the less eventful they become. People are already struggling with cognitive surplus. They're going to recognise and zone out "event surplus" very quickly.

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Tuesday, February 3, 2009

The Elevator Pitch 2.0.


Late Tuesday night, about 10.30, Stephen Fry gets stuck in a lift in London. He informs the Twittersphere with a tweet and this photo. In the half hour before engineers release him and his fellow captives, #frylift becomes the top item on Twitter with something like 500 separate comments posted. The two photos he uploads are viewed over 15,000 times in 15 minutes and the national press harvest the feeds for their early editions. A very successful comedy writer even manages to contribute his own spoof.

A trivial event. Yes. A geeky obsession. Yes. Irrelevant to the rest of us. No way. Technology has changed the rules and if any marketer out there thinks they can get away with the slightest distortion of the truth, exaggeration of a claim or defence of the indefensible, they better start looking for a new career. It's not about hiding the truth any more. It never really was. But, these days, there's nowhere left to hide.

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