Don't blast your customers!

Here's an interesting blog entry on MediaPost about softening the language we use as marketers.

"Maybe we need to stop calling them consumers, target audience and viewers … and just think about them as people."

An interesting concept, and one I largely agree with. What we call a product/service can often affect the way it's used.

A few years ago I stopped saying the words "email blast" to customers, and instead I'll use "direct email invitation" or something of the like. A subtle difference? Perhaps. But "blast" sounds so...violent and uncontrolled. Do we really want to blast our customers? I hope not...

Lead-obsessed marketers and the same-day wedding

I just saw this white paper entitled "Blind Date to White Wedding: Best Practices for Lead Nurturing that creates B2B relationships, builds trust and increases sales," (hat tip to Tom Pick) and it made me think about a play I saw a few weeks ago. Yes, I'm going somewhere with this...

For the first time in more than 10 years, I went back to my high school alma mater. My wife and I went to see a series of one-act plays (we knew one of the performers: great job, Brielle!). One of the plays was called "Wanted: One Groom," and the basic premise was that the main character, a young woman named Kayla, wanted to get married -- so she placed an ad for a groom in the New York Times. The ad included her address, the date and time of the wedding (later that day!), and asked prospective grooms to apply in person immediately.

When Kayla's best friend heard about the ad, she thought the idea was completely absurd, and spent the entire play trying to persuade Kayla and her parents how crazy it was to get married the same day, to a total stranger who was found through a newspaper ad. But the friend's complaints fell on deaf ears, because Kayla and her parents thought it made perfect sense.

It amazes me how many marketers spend their budgets entirely on lead-generation campaigns. I talk with more and more advertisers whose sole purpose is driving leads. If the marketing effort doesn't have some sort of lead-gen component that identifies prospects who are ready to buy, their boss or their management won't let them do it. So let's go back to the "Blind Date to White Wedding" white paper, and think about the purchase process as a courtship between marketers and their prospects...

These short-sighted marketers see lead-generation as a way to cut to the chase. They think, "Why should we bother with identifying someone who isn't ready to buy immediately, and take the time to nurture these people...when we can just go after people who are ready to buy right now?" The lead-obsessed marketer is just like Kayla in the play who wanted to find a groom without going through the process of dating, steady relationship, and engagement. They want to skip the "courtship process" and just place an ad for someone who's ready to buy their product.

Just like the best friend in the play who thought an ad for a groom was absurd, I'm saying that marketers who are solely dependent on generating ready-to-buy leads are equally absurd! (But just like in the play, I have a feeling my complaints will fall on deaf ears as well.)

That's not how marketing is supposed to work. Of course you want to identify people who are close to purchasing your product or service, but that shouldn't be the only group you're after. Marketers should be developing a pipeline of potential customers through many different sources, in all stages of the buying process. The ones who aren't ready yet should be "courted" or "wooed" until they're ready...and only then is it time for a wedding!

When someone else messes up your perfectly-crafted work

In this post by Dianna Huff, she discusses the difficult situation marketers face when they have a boss rewriting their copy, often making it worse.

While I try not to press myself too closely into the inner workings of our clients' communications, I can usually tell when an ad was created by a boss or a committee of managers -- rather than by an intelligent copywriter who has an eye on results.

It's always wonderful to see the great performance a campaign that's well-crafted and "unfooled-around-with" (to steal the slogan of Simply Orange brand orange juice) can yield. But when someone in the process feels like they need to include "this is why our company is so great" wording, or they lose sight of the customer's desires and objectives, the results can be disastrous. I've seen click-through rates that have differed by a factor of 25 (yes, 25 times better!) when one well-written ad runs in the same medium as a poorly-written ad.

Aside from Dianna's suggestion of printing out that article and leaving it on your boss's chair, I'd simply recommend pushing back (delicately, of course). If you're dealing with a medium that's measurable, like most online ad campaigns, suggest some testing to see which ads perform best. Remind your boss to put themself in the prospective buyer's place (maybe using the personas you've developed). Sometimes it just takes a small nudge to make them remember the basics and snap out of their short-sightedness.

Banners are good for more than just clicks

"If you’re only doing banners and buttons and only tracking clicks, you’re missing a huge opportunity."
-- Shawn Riegsecker of Centro, on the integration of online and offline campaigns. During his presentation at the recent Web Association event, Riegsecker talked about advertisers who saw their ROI on pay-per-click ads drop 30-40% when they discontinued their online branding campaigns that included banner ads. His point: Generating clicks isn't the only way a banner can be successful.

Social media versus advertising in an economic downturn

This post by Josh Bernoff predicts that social media will be the choice of marketers during the economic downturn. He advocates cutting traditional advertising when budgets get tight, and moving your money to social media because it’s in a different part of the purchase process — consideration (versus awareness with traditional ads).

I agree that social media should be an increasingly important tool in a marketer’s toolbox. But social media’s use really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. Social media, search ads, and email marketing can be great and relatively inexpensive tools for your marketing, but there are many situations where there’s no substitute for awareness.

For example, I’ve been working with a client who is an innovator in a brand new product category. This client is a large established company, but the particular breed of technology they’re talking about is relatively new to the market. Manufacturers simply don’t know about it yet.

Would social media be a good choice for this company? Not at this stage. They’re still in their infancy — where potential customers don’t know anything about the solution…and the customers don’t even know they HAVE a problem! With social media, they’d end up preaching to the choir — a tiny group of people who already know about this new solution and think it’s great. But without a loud voice (read: advertising) to educate the market about the problem, this company would be missing the critical mass they desperately need. Social media can’t do that on a large scale nearly as effectively and reliably as advertising can.

Awareness is critical to many marketing campaigns. Social media can be very useful, but don’t make the mistake of throwing away your advertising campaigns for applications where social media isn’t warranted.

Google's new Social Graph API

Just launched by Google, this new tool could add a whole new dimension to social networks. It looks for connections between people on a variety of social networks, and helps to build links based on the people who already have a public connection. Pretty cool idea.

(Hat tip to Gary Stein at ClickZ)

Developing personas for your web audience

Here's a link to a good video about developing personas for your web audience. How can you design a site, or add new features or content without knowing who you're targeting? Granted, personas are more art than science, and well-designed surveys and usability tests are other things you should be doing to learn more about your audience. But they can still be helpful.

Last summer, one of my colleagues and I put together a set of personas for the IndustryWeek.com audience. Unfortunately we didn't have the benefit of watching this video first, so it was a little more painful since we had never done it before and didn't know some of the helpful pointers covered here. But it was still a good exercise that helped our sales team (and even us) internalize some of the key attributes of our audience.

Getting Generation Y's attention

"We came up with Safety Stuffers that convey safety messages in exciting, compelling (and brief!) ways geared toward younger workers. Folks interested in that concept can read about it at this page of the Quad-City Times website."

-- Mark McLaughlin of Nehlsen Communications, on how his firm altered its communications medium to get the attention of Generation Y. (Original post on the IndustryWeek Forums)

Media industry similar to music industry

I'm beginning to think the media industry is a lot like the music business. The music biz's main product (the CD) saw double-digit sales decreases in 2007. Music downloads are increasing, but they're increasing at a decreasing rate -- and they're not making up for the revenue loss the record companies are seeing with CD sales decreases.

This sounds like a similar story to what many B2B media companies are feeling. Marketers are spending more money on eMedia, but less money on print advertising, causing many magazines to struggle or shut down. Even with double-digit increases in eMedia spending, in many industries marketers' total spend with media companies is still decreasing overall.

To combat the problem, the music industry is trying to create a new business model by filing lawsuits against their customers. Maybe media should try that? :-)