Whenever we try new tools for getting our message out to the world, there will be a period of uncertainty where we're not sure if we're wasting dollars. For the past 36 hours my team has been running a test in the Fresno DMA for 30 second television ads. Our goal is to demonstrate the value of mass media in bringing sufficiently large numbers to our site so that we can sell our product.
During the next few hours is when clients, bosses, and we are most likely to panic. Maybe we should alter the run schedule? Change the website landing page? Make some other substantive alteration of the site to encourage customers to spend freely?? My advice is for you to take a deep breath and go do something else for the rest of the day.
Television is indeed a powerful medium. We can reach hundreds of thousands of people every day. The expectations that come with that, though, are dangerous. Seeing isn't deciding. Seeing once isn't learning. It takes time for potential customers to become comfortable with the purchase of new products - especially if they are unfamiliar with your brand or product category. Give your customer permission to take a few days to figure things out in their mind.
Conveying your message effectively is a game of repetition. Generally, we're not selling water to lost travelers in the desert. If your price point is more than $20 or so, you're prospect might just need to do some thinking to get comfortable with the purchase decision.
While my example is TV and it is by far the most expensive media choice in absolute terms, the idea of a little patience is applicable to all the new tools you may be trying - and even some old tools. If you've done a good job in identifying your prospects, you've generated good creative, and are deploying it wisely, then sit back, relax, and keep your eyes open. You might not make a change on day two, but by day four, it might make sense to adjust around the edges.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Monday, February 9, 2009
Advertising Creep
I've recently added Adsense to my blog page. That's it, over there to the left. It is indicative of the larger trend to plaster advertising everywhere it can be shoehorned in. The idea is to create revenue from otherwise unused pixels. As a marketer, I have to say that it's a great idea - in theory. All kinds of questions arise with these models. If you're a marketer, consider these thoughts before you put yourself on either side of the served ad equation.
First, is the inclusion of advertising congruent with the purpose of the site? Including advertising may prove to be a distraction from the page itself. Or, because these ads are so ubiquitous...
Second, will the ads get noticed? People are quite good at filtering out extraneous information. Yet another 200 pixel square ad may very well fall into people's filtration system, receding into the background like whitenoise.
Third, you may have precious little control over the type of product/service offered on your site. Do you want your identity to be linked to erectile dysfunction pharmaceuticals?
Lastly, there's quite a debate about whether or not these text ads are effective. Sure, they get lots of clicks, but do those clicks really translate into conversions? Could the budget dollars you're using for serving ads across a content network be put to more effective use? Can you develop direct contact lists where you can spend a bit more time laying out your product's case?
On the whole, serving text ads across networks is a fine idea - but one that requires that you actively manage your budgets and the creative pretty aggressively to maintain efficacy. Otherwise, you'll end up serving lots of ads to places where there's little hope of snagging a customer. And even if you're paying via cpc models, the time and energy spent managing these campaigns could likely be spent elsewhere with a better return.
First, is the inclusion of advertising congruent with the purpose of the site? Including advertising may prove to be a distraction from the page itself. Or, because these ads are so ubiquitous...
Second, will the ads get noticed? People are quite good at filtering out extraneous information. Yet another 200 pixel square ad may very well fall into people's filtration system, receding into the background like whitenoise.
Third, you may have precious little control over the type of product/service offered on your site. Do you want your identity to be linked to erectile dysfunction pharmaceuticals?
Lastly, there's quite a debate about whether or not these text ads are effective. Sure, they get lots of clicks, but do those clicks really translate into conversions? Could the budget dollars you're using for serving ads across a content network be put to more effective use? Can you develop direct contact lists where you can spend a bit more time laying out your product's case?
On the whole, serving text ads across networks is a fine idea - but one that requires that you actively manage your budgets and the creative pretty aggressively to maintain efficacy. Otherwise, you'll end up serving lots of ads to places where there's little hope of snagging a customer. And even if you're paying via cpc models, the time and energy spent managing these campaigns could likely be spent elsewhere with a better return.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
The First Rule of Marketing
As with doctors, the first rule of marketing is to do no harm. It is tough enough to fight off competitive threats, environmental changes, and all the other enemies at the gate. There's no good reason to make things more difficult for yourself by making gigantic, entirely avoidable blunders. You might wonder if I have some particular blunder in mind. As a matter of fact, I do.
You may have heard about Wells Fargo and their planned junket to Las Vegas. If not, here's a portion of an AP story:
"WASHINGTON - Wells Fargo & Co. abruptly canceled Tuesday a pricey Las Vegas casino junket for employees after a torrent of criticism that it was misusing $25 billion in taxpayer bailout money.
The company initially defended the trip after The Associated Press reported it had booked 12 nights beginning Friday... by saying:
"Recognition events are still part of our culture," spokeswoman Melissa Murray said Tuesday afternoon. "It's really important that our team members are still valued and recognized.""
The branding implications are clear. Wells Fargo is saying, clearly, that "Our customers exist to serve us. We are paramount." The brand for this once venerable, long-standing banking titan is now as tarnished and as utterly valueless as any other. They had an opportunity, especially in light of AIG's epic blunder (doing essentially the exact same thing and receiving withering criticism as a result), to take the initiative, cancel all events, reign in executive pay and bonuses, and say to the American people, "We stand with you. It's an awful mess out there, but we'll get through it together." But no, that would have inconvenienced a whole generation of corporate executives that have come to believe that they actually deserve the perks, the bonuses, the unbelievable salaries.
I really was taken aback by their comment, echoed by Wall Street firms aplenty, that
"Recognition events are still part of our culture," spokeswoman Melissa Murray said Tuesday afternoon. "It's really important that our team members are still valued and recognized."
Recognition? What on earth might the senior management be recognized for? Nobel Prize winning new levels of ineptitude? Mismanagement so severe that they had to ask Uncle Sam for $25 BILLION? The recognition event that needed to happen was to have the board meet and 1) fire the senior management team and 2) resign for failure to oversee the juggernaut before the predictable train wreck.
So back to marketing. Your brand is your most precious asset. Everything you do impacts on your brand. Everything. Big things, and small things. Our collective perception of your brand is developed one person at a time. It's as simple as that. Once you cross a certain line, your brand, so carefully nurtured, becomes an albatross around your neck. Don't Wells Fargo your own brand.
You may have heard about Wells Fargo and their planned junket to Las Vegas. If not, here's a portion of an AP story:
"WASHINGTON - Wells Fargo & Co. abruptly canceled Tuesday a pricey Las Vegas casino junket for employees after a torrent of criticism that it was misusing $25 billion in taxpayer bailout money.
The company initially defended the trip after The Associated Press reported it had booked 12 nights beginning Friday... by saying:
"Recognition events are still part of our culture," spokeswoman Melissa Murray said Tuesday afternoon. "It's really important that our team members are still valued and recognized.""
The branding implications are clear. Wells Fargo is saying, clearly, that "Our customers exist to serve us. We are paramount." The brand for this once venerable, long-standing banking titan is now as tarnished and as utterly valueless as any other. They had an opportunity, especially in light of AIG's epic blunder (doing essentially the exact same thing and receiving withering criticism as a result), to take the initiative, cancel all events, reign in executive pay and bonuses, and say to the American people, "We stand with you. It's an awful mess out there, but we'll get through it together." But no, that would have inconvenienced a whole generation of corporate executives that have come to believe that they actually deserve the perks, the bonuses, the unbelievable salaries.
I really was taken aback by their comment, echoed by Wall Street firms aplenty, that
"Recognition events are still part of our culture," spokeswoman Melissa Murray said Tuesday afternoon. "It's really important that our team members are still valued and recognized."
Recognition? What on earth might the senior management be recognized for? Nobel Prize winning new levels of ineptitude? Mismanagement so severe that they had to ask Uncle Sam for $25 BILLION? The recognition event that needed to happen was to have the board meet and 1) fire the senior management team and 2) resign for failure to oversee the juggernaut before the predictable train wreck.
So back to marketing. Your brand is your most precious asset. Everything you do impacts on your brand. Everything. Big things, and small things. Our collective perception of your brand is developed one person at a time. It's as simple as that. Once you cross a certain line, your brand, so carefully nurtured, becomes an albatross around your neck. Don't Wells Fargo your own brand.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Economics + Behavioral Psychology + Sociology Equals What?
As if touched by God, a few economists have come to a stunning conclusion. People don't always act completely rationally. Yeah, I know. Really amazing. Yet the field of economics has always had at its heart the assumption that people act in their own best economic interest. As an economics student, I or one of my classmates would sometimes ask about cases where a person might be motivated to make a choice not in their own economic self interest. The answer was that, summing up my professor's long winded response, since we can't model that, we don't worry about it. Now we are confronted with the results of economic policy that ignored the behavioral elements and focused solely on the "rational man". And this isn't just a phenomenon of the last eight years. It's always been this way.
So the Nobel Prize and kudos galore are going to economists that are working on integrating the fields of Economics, Behavioral Psychology, and Sociology in the hopes of creating tools and models that better reflect the real world and will lead to more stable economic outcomes.
Okay, so the point of all this in a blog about marketing. Well, isn't the combination of economics, behavioral psych, and sociology basically marketing? The economists have found their field hollow at the core and they've come a'poaching in our territory! Which is actually good news because, frankly, our tools are pretty inadequate to the task. Especially in an era when marketing must now be as accountable as any other part of the organization. The tools that marketers do have, for the most part, are horribly complex, expensive, and generally tough to use.
Marketers are collecting terabytes of customer data each day, but generally fail to explore the meaning of the data to any great depth. But here's an opportunity to leverage emerging thinking from the field of economics to craft tools that better meet our needs, helping us to model behavior in such a way as to finally be able to quantify the underlying drivers of behavior so we can begin to reliably communicate with prospects and customers in a meaningful and impactful way.
So here's the advice, rarely ever heard before by marketers. "Pay attention to the economists." Sounds funny just saying it.
So the Nobel Prize and kudos galore are going to economists that are working on integrating the fields of Economics, Behavioral Psychology, and Sociology in the hopes of creating tools and models that better reflect the real world and will lead to more stable economic outcomes.
Okay, so the point of all this in a blog about marketing. Well, isn't the combination of economics, behavioral psych, and sociology basically marketing? The economists have found their field hollow at the core and they've come a'poaching in our territory! Which is actually good news because, frankly, our tools are pretty inadequate to the task. Especially in an era when marketing must now be as accountable as any other part of the organization. The tools that marketers do have, for the most part, are horribly complex, expensive, and generally tough to use.
Marketers are collecting terabytes of customer data each day, but generally fail to explore the meaning of the data to any great depth. But here's an opportunity to leverage emerging thinking from the field of economics to craft tools that better meet our needs, helping us to model behavior in such a way as to finally be able to quantify the underlying drivers of behavior so we can begin to reliably communicate with prospects and customers in a meaningful and impactful way.
So here's the advice, rarely ever heard before by marketers. "Pay attention to the economists." Sounds funny just saying it.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
The Complexity of Conversion
In a web-centric world, the challenge of converting browsers to buyers is fraught with uncertainty. Today we rely on our sites to do all things - educate, entertain, enlighten, sell, create community, and cement our company's reputation in the marketplace. The number of opportunities we have to capture a prospect and convert them into a customer is very limited. Site bounce rates are generally very high, meaning that most people don't make it past the first page of the site. That goes hand in hand with time-on-site metrics that, by and large, are pretty fleeting. It's as if our buying decisions must be made within moments of arriving on the site.
With that kind of challenge, is it any wonder that retailers are suffering, with many mortally wounded, in this economy? Not only are they maintaining expensive brick and mortar outlets, but their "low cost" web store fronts have perhaps only seconds to convince shoppers to part with their dough. What can you hope to communicate in twenty seconds? Can it be anything more than price alone? It seems increasingly like your site's design can only do things to drive customers away - to help them "de-select" you. It's kind of like your resume - during the initial pass-through the screener is more interested in finding a reason, any reason, to move beyond your resume so they can get down to a more manageable number.
And like job searches, perhaps waiting to make the sale with a resume or your website means that you're missing the point. The more effective method may be to try to make the sale before the customer even arrives - by building an identity that makes your site's design somewhat beside the point, within reason. Having the customer arrive with the intention of buying means that website design need not carry so heavy a load - an impossible load by the looks of things.
With that kind of challenge, is it any wonder that retailers are suffering, with many mortally wounded, in this economy? Not only are they maintaining expensive brick and mortar outlets, but their "low cost" web store fronts have perhaps only seconds to convince shoppers to part with their dough. What can you hope to communicate in twenty seconds? Can it be anything more than price alone? It seems increasingly like your site's design can only do things to drive customers away - to help them "de-select" you. It's kind of like your resume - during the initial pass-through the screener is more interested in finding a reason, any reason, to move beyond your resume so they can get down to a more manageable number.
And like job searches, perhaps waiting to make the sale with a resume or your website means that you're missing the point. The more effective method may be to try to make the sale before the customer even arrives - by building an identity that makes your site's design somewhat beside the point, within reason. Having the customer arrive with the intention of buying means that website design need not carry so heavy a load - an impossible load by the looks of things.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Black Hats Are Better Armed
I suppose this is just part of the natural progression of things, but it seems as if the bad guys of web marketing have way better tools than the good guys. What I mean is that if you have a competitor out there willing to use any available tools to smear your business on the internet there is precious little you can do. Sure, I've read all of the articles that discuss reputation management, successful response strategies, yada yada yada. But the reality is that it is excruciatingly difficult to get negative mentions off of the web regardless of their veracity.
I'm actually a big believer in the power the web gives consumers to speak out about problems. The reality, however, is that you can't believe the negative or positive ratings given by the "public" -- ever. That's because you have absolutely no idea who wrote the review and what their agenda was/is. A competitor, or just someone out to cause trouble, can always be one step ahead, publishing negative (or positive) reviews using a variety of writing styles, in differing lengths, from different ISP addresses. The casual reader will never know something nefarious is happening. They'll just read that your product is junk or that your service is a scam. Next time you're out buying a product, think about the online reviews you see. There are typically so many good buying options that any negativity surrounding one option simply means you'll likely move on to the next one.
So far, I've found only one really good solution to this "black hat" assault. From the beginning, go out of your way to build a vocal, loyal, and energetic legion of customers to defend you in the marketplace. You want the kinds of people who'd shout the good news of your product from the rooftops more than just once, but every single time they get the chance. The only way to fight the spectre of negativity is to have such a positive aura around your product that any new customer is already aware of the shininess of your brand and when they see negative postings they'll likely default to giving you the benefit of the doubt.
It's a very dangerous competitive world out there, with unscrupulous snipers out there just looking for a chance to kill your brand's reputation. They only safe way to travel through the online world is to be surrounded by your friends. Do you have enough friends yet? Has your company made any new ones today?
I'm actually a big believer in the power the web gives consumers to speak out about problems. The reality, however, is that you can't believe the negative or positive ratings given by the "public" -- ever. That's because you have absolutely no idea who wrote the review and what their agenda was/is. A competitor, or just someone out to cause trouble, can always be one step ahead, publishing negative (or positive) reviews using a variety of writing styles, in differing lengths, from different ISP addresses. The casual reader will never know something nefarious is happening. They'll just read that your product is junk or that your service is a scam. Next time you're out buying a product, think about the online reviews you see. There are typically so many good buying options that any negativity surrounding one option simply means you'll likely move on to the next one.
So far, I've found only one really good solution to this "black hat" assault. From the beginning, go out of your way to build a vocal, loyal, and energetic legion of customers to defend you in the marketplace. You want the kinds of people who'd shout the good news of your product from the rooftops more than just once, but every single time they get the chance. The only way to fight the spectre of negativity is to have such a positive aura around your product that any new customer is already aware of the shininess of your brand and when they see negative postings they'll likely default to giving you the benefit of the doubt.
It's a very dangerous competitive world out there, with unscrupulous snipers out there just looking for a chance to kill your brand's reputation. They only safe way to travel through the online world is to be surrounded by your friends. Do you have enough friends yet? Has your company made any new ones today?
Thursday, December 18, 2008
MacWorld 2009 Apple's Last
In what's got to be a surprise move, Apple has announced that this will be the last MacWorld event they attend and that Steve Jobs will forego his usual role as keynote. Apple says that they have many alternate ways of reaching customers and the press and that they don't need the show anymore.
Sure, Apple gets press out the wazoo anytime it wants it. A few cryptic words in an otherwise throwaway press release and the entire world is abuzz. And sure, they must spend millions on each show. But did anyone over there stop to think, even for a moment, that sometimes it's not all about them. Sometimes it's about the galaxy of products that orbit the MacWorld. Sometimes it pays to support the developers of hardware and software that help make the products the hit(s) they've become.
Apple goes out of its way, seemingly, to step on those that seek to enrich the Mac/iPod universe. Heavy-handed actions with the AppStore on iTunes on top of this latest Bronx Cheer to the industry seem to send the signal that since they've become so powerful, they don't need anyone else to succeed and thrive. Their success is 100% attributable to their own genius. Yikes. If that's not the kind of hubris that comes just before the inevitable butt-kicking, I don't know what is.
Show a little humility Apple. Sure, you can reach the customers in other ways, but what about everyone else in the ecosystem when MacWorld goes belly up? How do they reach customers? Through Apple.com? As a Mac owner, iPod owner, iPhone owner, I've got to say I'm not feeling too good about what's on the horizon. The way they're acting, you might almost think that Balmer is in charge of Apple instead of Microsoft.
Sure, Apple gets press out the wazoo anytime it wants it. A few cryptic words in an otherwise throwaway press release and the entire world is abuzz. And sure, they must spend millions on each show. But did anyone over there stop to think, even for a moment, that sometimes it's not all about them. Sometimes it's about the galaxy of products that orbit the MacWorld. Sometimes it pays to support the developers of hardware and software that help make the products the hit(s) they've become.
Apple goes out of its way, seemingly, to step on those that seek to enrich the Mac/iPod universe. Heavy-handed actions with the AppStore on iTunes on top of this latest Bronx Cheer to the industry seem to send the signal that since they've become so powerful, they don't need anyone else to succeed and thrive. Their success is 100% attributable to their own genius. Yikes. If that's not the kind of hubris that comes just before the inevitable butt-kicking, I don't know what is.
Show a little humility Apple. Sure, you can reach the customers in other ways, but what about everyone else in the ecosystem when MacWorld goes belly up? How do they reach customers? Through Apple.com? As a Mac owner, iPod owner, iPhone owner, I've got to say I'm not feeling too good about what's on the horizon. The way they're acting, you might almost think that Balmer is in charge of Apple instead of Microsoft.
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