davidpoulos.com

Category: Communications

  • Attendee Acquisition Is A Long-Term Investment That Pays Off

    Attendee Acquisition Is A Long-Term Investment That Pays Off

    With the recent rise in attention among marketers to customer engagement, and customer experience, customer journey, call it what you like, event marketing has risen on the marketing totem pole to a higher priority than ever. But with that new status comes a new sense of accountability as well – “If we’re going to host all these people and feed them, educate them, allow them into our world to meet us and each other, I want to see that the expense associated with that activity pays off . . .”

     

    Finding out what that expense is would be a logical first step, and then bench-marking that expense against what competitors are paying might be another. We’re marketers, after all, competitive and curious, and we test and measure everything!

     

    The finding out part is pretty simple. The 2016 Benchmark & Trends in Attendee Acquisition study was released by Lippman Connects, Exhibit Surveys, Inc. and Tradeshow Executive magazine as a joint study. That study shows that the average cost of attendee acquisition marketing is over $300,000 per event, and when you get more granular, the average show with flat or inflating growth spends roughly $32.66 for each attendee they attract. If you’re spending less than that, and your show is still growing year over year, then you have reached a level of marketing efficiency that bests roughly half the shows out there – congratulations. If you’re spending less than that, and your shows are declining, you have a decision to make: Invest more in your marketing efforts, across all channels, unless you have clear evidence of an inefficient or low-performing channel, or continue to contract until you level back out and your attendance flattens, and then re-examine the relevance of your event to the current audience.

     

    Now the value-tracking portion, which is a little tougher. Start with how many visitors you’re attracting for each paid exhibitor. This is a good number to know for marketing purposes, because exhibitors use this to calculate their expense of acquisition for new customers from your show, and use it as a benchmark when making the decision to exhibit in your show. According to the same study, shows studied had 22 attendees per exhibitor and scheduled the floor time for a total of 21 hours or more.

     

    But attendees don’t just sign up for the exhibitors. Some 50+% of show attendees are there as conference enrollees, and the show portion is just gravy. 42% indicated that they were interested in the exhibits. Smart show organizers recognize this, and are attempting to make this portion even larger by enlisting the help of the exhibitors themselves. Pre-show marketing by exhibitors is a staple of attendee attraction, and the more you encourage and enable your exhibitors to market their presence at your show, the more attendees you end up with, at no additional expense. That’s a win for everyone!

     

    One of the key challenges in event marketing is justifying that $32 per head acquisition cost, and more importantly, tying it back to a specific marketing activity. Given that most event marketers use a broad variety of channels to market events, including direct mail, traditional print advertising, where appropriate radio and TV advertising, social media promotions, outdoor, e-mail, and other channels, linking any single activity to an uptick or drop in attendance is difficult at best. Your post-show survey work should shed some light on what the most likely driving force behind registration might have been, but it’s really the integrated effort that drives the boat on this one – each channel supports the others to drive overall awareness and memorability for you events, and what you’re testing in your survey is simply the one channel that most closely came to triggering the registration process.

     

    If you do a lot of digital marketing, and have links sprinkles all over everything that drives traffic to your registration page or an online form, it is very likely that this will appear to be what is driving attendance – but is it? If you put up billboards surrounding the venue at a consumer show, and get a lot of walk-in traffic (non-pre-registered), is the billboard driving attendance, or is it just a reminder of the date? If you ask attendees point blank why they registered, chances are excellent the answer won’t be “I got an e-mail and filled out the registration form.” It will more likely take the form of “I saw that my colleagues were going and wanted to go with them,” or “we go every year to see the new technology, and to reconnect with colleagues in the industry.” Those results are harder to directly link to a single marketing activity, but go directly to awareness of your event, which is driven by all of your integrated efforts combined.

     

    Strong, consistent research can help pin down what efforts are working the hardest, and you can use the data to reallocate resources in your budget to take advantage of certain triggers, and drive incremental growth in the short term. But real, sustainable growth is a long-term commitment of time, effort, and resources to contain and drive momentum year over year, and requires constant testing and reinvestment to show results.

  • Can A Computer Know Your Customers Better Than You Do?

    Can A Computer Know Your Customers Better Than You Do?

    The rise of the machines, and the fear associated with it among humankind has increasingly crept into popular culture, in some subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Whether smart machinery or artificial intelligence (AI) is a good thing or a bad thing, especially as portrayed in film and fiction, often depends more upon the intent of the creator and the law of unforeseen consequences than the nature of the intelligence itself.

    On a daily basis, the average retailer gathers enough transactional and personal data to feed a growing intelligence network that could be smart enough to function on its own in less than a year of constant-cycle learning. That’s a tremendous amount of data! It takes humans 15 years to amass that level of cognition and ability, on average. Sometimes this “knowledge” is used for good, and because there are limits placed on its use, either by the technology itself or by the circumstances of its use, all is well. The nightmare starts when those strictures and parameters are eliminated, and the machine can “learn” from all sources continually and can act and react accordingly.

    The most widely used and easily recognized execution of this is the modern shopping algorithm. An algorithm is simply a comparative database that allows information to have tags attached to it, and when there are several tags in common between two items, one is deemed “related” to the other. This is a simple but very powerful idea. Humans are designed and hardwired to seek out patterns, both visually and in context, but computers are much better suited for this task as they have perfect recall, and aren’t influenced by loss of memory or emotion.

    Smart machines that use an algorithm can appear very “smart” to their human users. Amazon.com was one of the first, and most famous, users of a comparative algorithm, when applied to book titles on their bookseller website. Customers would make purchases, the computer would keep track of these purchases, and build a data profile from the tags attached to each item purchased. The tags would then be used to compare these purchases to other books also available on the site, and “recommendations” would be made by the algorithm, based on the number of tags in common. Pretty slick, and with the right verbiage attached to the recommendations, it looks almost like there is a human making the picks and the recommendations.

    TIVO television DVRs use this technology to make decisions about what TV programs you like and make recommendations and create recording timers accordingly. Not an infallible system, but it can be remarkably accurate, and it gets better the more decisions it makes and the more data it amasses. Now, extend that capability to association or non-profit membership groups, and as a marketer, think about your annual conference, seminar, or continuing education program. Where does that extension take you?

    Why not use an algorithm to help attendees pick conference sessions? Will it improve member engagement? Will it increase overall enrollment? Will it help balance out room set up and class sizes? Can it be used to build tracks or new program offerings in the future that are successful? My research tells me that this type of personalized approach would be well-received by the vast majority of individual association members in a wide variety of industries. The commercial marketplace has gotten them comfortable with the technology, and they understand that the ”Machine” isn’t making life-or-death decisions, merely suggestions based on history, commonality and goals already stated. Generally if it saves attendees time, allows them to navigate a wide spread of data quickly, make some choices effectively and the results are reasonable, I think most event attendees would welcome such a system with open arms.

    This type of innovation offers benefits for the organizer as well. Instantaneous feedback of popularity of each session based on purchases, the ability to add additional sessions in the same vein, or to cancel sessions that don’t attract an audience, means your conference department appears to have a solid handle on the needs of the members and can react to them quickly and effectively, with less waste. In short, the data embedded in the algorithm, and the resulting choices it returns, allows for smarter, faster, more efficient product and program development, with less risk, and greater reward.

    One or two membership groups have put the power of the algorithm to use with good result. I hope the industry as a whole embraces this use of technology to improve their educational offerings, and for those organizations with more of an a la carte benefit offering, that this same technology can be applied to member benefits as well, providing a highly personalized experience for each member, quickly easily and intelligently. I say, “Let The Machines Rise!”

  • Center On Customer Experience To Sell Out Events

    Center On Customer Experience To Sell Out Events

    We’ve long advised companies who want to be market leaders to adopt a customer-centric stance in their internal and marketing attitude. That advice has been well received, but often reluctantly implemented, due to the complexity and length of time involved in properly instituting a sea change in their organizations. While we admit, thoughtful and well-considered moves of this magnitude do not happen overnight, they can be implemented incrementally, and start showing results sooner than a cold start.

    The place to start is by working backwards. Think about your customer or client, at the moment they are just finished interacting with you – they’ve received their product, paid the invoice, shaken hands after the exit interview, whatever trigger ends an interaction cycle with your firm. Now, ponder for a second what happened, how was that customer feeling at that last few minutes of interaction? Were they thrilled to receive their product and can’t wait to use it, were they a little disappointed because it took longer than expected to arrive, or didn’t live up to the expectations you set for them, did they care at all, or did they just put it aside until a more convenient time?

    If you’re a service provider, what feeling or sentiment preceded that last handshake or interaction (not counting the invoice, we’ll get to that in a moment)? Was it buoyant that they got what they needed from you, were they excited about the next time they worked with you, relieved they had gotten a good outcome without getting scalped, happy to be out of your clutches? Behind that smile and that handshake is a wide range of emotions and feelings that those clients or customers will carry with them for quite a while, and the next contact they have with you, including any further marketing or follow-up efforts, will trigger a somewhat milder version of that emotion, guiding their next response to you.

    The place to start is by working backwards. Think about your customer or client, at the moment they are just finished interacting with you

    First impressions are critical, but last impressions are often lasting and difficult to change. Now that you have some idea of where to start in examining your customer experience, backtrack through your engagement with that customer in your mind, go through the steps that lead up to that final feeling. Work it over logistically, reverse-chronologically, and see if there are any snags, bumps in the road, places where communication status dipped, where the customer might have felt anything negative, like abandonment, uncertainty, fear of the unknown, or experienced something negatively unexpected. Those are your trouble spots, and in the journey of customer experience, those are the places where you can negatively affect your customer relationship and their likelihood to return to you the next time they need something you offer.

    First impressions are critical, but last impressions are often lasting and difficult to change.

    Even marketing can REALLY benefit from this process. Work through the attendee experience minute by minute. Review your program from the time the attendee hears about the event, what triggers them to register, what do they experience once they’ve registered, how often do they hear from you, what kinds of information do they receive from you, or what do they go searching for in your materials or online? How do they go about booking travel if any is required, do they look for a deal or the flight and hotel that most readily meets their limited schedule, or a combination of both? Do they stay in the host hotel to be “close to the action” or somewhere off-site to maintain privacy and corporate security?

    What do they encounter upon arrival? How did they get there? What do they see first? Are they run down endless hallways before they encounter anyone officially connected with the event, or are they greeted by someone clearly in-the-know that they can ask questions of right away? Is there a place to “unburden” themselves, divesting their arms of coats, bags, luggage, umbrellas, etc, before they get a badge? Is everything conveniently located, and labeled in large, unambiguous letters with pictograms for international attendees?

    Admittedly, some of these areas may be beyond your control – you can’t guarantee a positive experience from the airlines, or that the hotel concierge will treat them politely, or that their favorite shampoo will be in the hotel bathroom . . .

    Work through the whole meeting, trying to empathize with the attendee from the time they see your first e-mail announcement until the time they get back to their place of origin, and include your post event survey if that goes out beyond the 24-hour post event mark. Now you have a basis for evaluating your customer experience from an attendee-centric point of view. Using that as a baseline, try and separate the logistical, intellectual experience from the emotional one. Tease out those feelings as the flow from one to another and try to envision an overall emotional response to the event, and connect the emotional changes to each major logistical challenge they face. You now have a roadmap to isolating the negative emotional contexts in your meeting and either mitigating them or eliminating them, to provide your attendee a positive customer experience end to end.

    Now that you’ve done the ground work, how do you use that knowledge in your marketing efforts to attract more attendees the next time? Pull out the outreach materials you used to promote and raise awareness of that meeting, the elements that drove attendance. Do they highlight all the customer experiences and benefits you experienced mentally? Do they convey the emotional punch, the triggers to emotions you felt when you entered the meeting? Do they walk the attendee through what they will experience, show the benefits of those experiences, make it easy, painless and simple for them to experience them? Do they set accurate expectations for the attendee that you can always live up to in real life? If the answer to any of these is “no,” then those are the areas that need some work in your programming, planning and marketing efforts, to align the real experience with the “paper” version your espousing in your marketing efforts.

    Admittedly, some of these areas may be beyond your control – you can’t guarantee a positive experience from the airlines, or that the hotel concierge will treat them politely, or that their favorite shampoo will be in the hotel bathroom – but once they enter your meeting venue, they are your responsibility, and taking that seriously can mean the difference between a one-time attendee and a lifetime cheerleader for your events. Pay special attention to the way they feel when they leave. Did they learn something valuable, did they meet someone important to their professional growth, did they learn something about a new subject or a different culture? What feeling are you leaving them with, what will they remember when they complete that online “satisfaction” survey? Hopefully the emotion won’t just be satisfaction, but something stronger and more positive – the one you planned to leave.

  • Patience Is A Declining Virtue

    Patience Is A Declining Virtue

    In marketing practice, we are called upon to determine customer insights so that our message can be directed toward the “right” audience, that it might resonate with that audience and persuade them to take action. Demographics play a large part in shaping that research, in tilting the questions in a way that will be easily digestible for the audience and give us the most insightful answers. Age is now the number one determinant of both duration and language skew for customer research we do for clients.

    Millennials are the largest single generation in history, and are now of an age where they make up a significant percentage of all sorts of list factors – they’re now parents, breadwinners, purchasers with discretionary income, investors, and drivers of cars, purchasers of houses, and all the other things that the Baby Boomers used to dominate. But they are decidedly different in aggregate, and we have no choice but to acknowledge this in our work if we are to serve our corporate clients and provide them guidance.

    One of the biggest general shifts the millennials have undertaken is their level of patience. Busy is the new normal, they’ve been over-scheduled by their parents for most of their lives, and they know no other way. As a result, time is more precious to them, and they are constantly pushing the envelope to find ways to do things faster, simpler, easier, more technologically assisted, more conveniently, to find some additional time to do what they want to do.

    How does that impact marketing? In lots of ways. as it turns out. In their attention span, absorption of ad messages has to be even quicker than ever. The new calculation seems to be about 4 seconds, based on banner ad engagement times by Amazon.com and e-bay.com. That means messaging must be as straightforward, as direct, as obvious as can be, to transmit the full meaning and all its implications in the time it takes to glance at your Smartwatch.

    In our daily work for clients, it impacts how many questions and what kind of questions we can include in any given research vehicle. Surveys have to be even more direct and shorter then ever before. According to research undertaken by Quirk’s Marketing Research Media,

    “Perhaps the level of patience for answering our surveys among the Millennial audience is deteriorating in the same manner as other mundane or routine tasks that we identified within our trend forecasting are being shunned. By isolating the past two years of research (Figure 2), a slightly different picture emerges.

    20160210-2

    Reviewing our most recent syndicated surveys shows that recent participation has been drop-ping off closer to the 13-minute mark, negatively impacting, on average, one out of every seven survey starts. By the time survey duration has reached the 20-minute mark, we’re looking at one in three participants deciding that we’ve overstayed our welcome and becoming intolerant of any more questions.

    When faced with the reality that our survey participants are growing more impatient, we’ve resolved ourselves to advise our clients to aim for the 12-minute mark, anticipating that youth participants will surely become less patient over the coming year.”

    Apparently, if you want to gather insights from this newly dominating demographic, the KISS rule applies in spades – simple, direct, accessible queries with no time wasted on niceties or the ever popular “rephrase to check for variance” is what’s going to get you there. And you banner ad creative types, take note – if you have to get your message across in 4 seconds, better sharpen your digital table stylus’ and buff up your copy editing skills – not so much for accuracy or grammar, which are also on the decline, but for brevity.

    Clearly, knowing your target audiences’ demographics is even more important now than ever, and the lines between groups blurs and the number of subsets and subsectors of each group grows daily. Data is only as useful as the context in which it is interpreted, so keep in mind to whom you’re speaking when devising communications strategies aimed at this growing and powerful group of purchasers.

  • Why Do So Many Super Bowl Ads Fail?

    Why Do So Many Super Bowl Ads Fail?

     

    While they are still fresh in my mind, I wanted to work through my dismay at the quality and effectiveness of many of the ads run during the recent Super Bowl telecast. There’s a lot of chatter critiquing individual ads the day or two after they run, but I don’t see a lot of analysis about the craft in general and what it means for broadspectrum media marketing in general. I won’t speak directly to any single effort, or run down the list and comment, that’s been done to death. Here’s my take:

     

    • Pressure – with :30 spots topping $1.5 million at the bottom end for TV time during the telecast, there is tremendous pressure to use that expensive time to best advantage, and to be memorable so people will talk about it the next day and beyond. However, being “memorable” for memory’s sake is a flawed tactic if the brand doesn’t already resonate, or the ad attempts to shift brand perception too far outside the limits of credibility.
    • Dilution – the audience touted by the Super Bowl telecast is not only huge but is much more diverse than it used to be – that male 25-34 demo has been diluted significantly as parties, gatherings, and the halftime shows have broadened the audience to take in women, older men who remember the good old days, and twenty-somethings watching for the halftime shows. Whenever you have to play to that broad an audience, the tendency to pitch to the lowest common denominator is terribly great. By appealing to everyone, they don’t really appeal to anyone.
    • Shock Value – in the past, the most unusual, the most shocking ads have been the ones that garnered the most attention, got the most buzz in days after their airing. Now, it’s a contest to see who is going to be the most shocking, the most outrageous, regardless of whether it actually moves the needle for recognition, or god forbid, sales. Shock for shock’s sake is great for slasher movies, not so great for advertising.
    • Lack of Taste – as societies’ level of etiquette and civility toward its own members has declined, so has it’s need and desire to be tasteful. Who needs to be tasteful if it’s not going to be appreciated, right? So some of the more crass, tasteless ads often resonate with the younger, newer audience who are the next generation of both creatives and pundits, who have a different set of taste values than the older generation before them.
    • Lack of Fundamentals – some of the ads are just bad because they don’t do the job we expect them to do. They may not have been intended to do the job traditional ads are crafted to do – sell product, or reinforce brand. Some of them are just there to make an impression for a short time – see number three – rather than reinforcing the brands behind them, the ads have become a product within themselves. Some are so bad at the traditional function, they functionally fail, as day-after polling repeatedly shows – you remember the ad but not the product or the company for whom they were made – kinda defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

     

    Those are just a few of the reasons that for most of the core Super Bowl audience, many of the ads run during the game seem strange, bizarre, poor or just plain awful. The goal has become, “Hey, we need a Super Bowl ad” instead of “Hey, we need a new campaign, and by the way, the Super Bowl has a great audience that matches the demo we need to hit,” which has lead to the current crop of high-visibility, low-memorability, poorly identified spots that miss the mark on any other day, but on Super Sunday, they become darlings – for about 48 hours. Pretty expensive two days, if you ask me . . .

  • Engagement Is Good, Revenue Is Better

    Engagement Is Good, Revenue Is Better

    There is a lot of buzz among marketers about fostering customer engagement, building engagement with apps and websites, creating communities with blogs and social selling. It all sounds great on paper, we should all work together, share your purchases socially, everybody knows everything you do, everyone’s on your side, we’re all a village, cumbaya . . . But when you’re standing in the aisle at Wal-Mart deciding what frozen dinner brand or dog food to buy, I don’t feel that my level of engagement with Purina’s website is the deciding factor. Marketing is about raising awareness in a positive way to influence and drive SALES. I can be as engaged as can be with a brand, but if a similar product is in front of me, and they are largely the same, engagement doesn’t trump quality, availability and price, and the sale will go to the one who fits those three criteria the closest. Even with B2B sales, I’ve been “engaged” with a number of websites and businesses prospecting my business via e-mail and other devices, but haven’t actually bought anything from any of them – I’d score really high on their “engagement scale” algorithm, but they haven’t made a dime off of me, and may never do so.

     

    Brand engagement is a long-term play. It needs to be tied to other awareness vehicles, timed promotions, backup media, and ongoing evolution of product benefit awareness in order to really be effective at driving sales. This is not a new idea, but it’s one which has risen to prominence recently along with the ubiquity of social media platforms, which provide the ability for person-to-person communication in a way heretofore not possible on the current scale. I can now tell thousands of people what I’m doing, what I’m interested in, what I’m buying, what I’m eating, cooking, enjoying, drinking, and more on a moment’s notice in real time. That means that if I’m sharing it with others, it’s boosting their awareness as well as my own for a particular product, service or item. That kind of organic, exponential awareness spread at that speed was unheard of just 15 years ago. Epidemiologists are familiar with the concept, but marketers only recently began to apply it to their efforts – indeed the term “going viral” is borrowed from the disease spread specialists, as information, or awareness, can spread a lightning speed unseen from the outside, like a virus.

     

    Just because I’m aware of a product or service that I’ve engaged with it on the Internet, does not mean that when the time comes I’m actually going to make a purchase. It may increase the odds some, but as we learned with the recent Powerball drawing, odds need to be changed significantly with a supreme effort in order to really affect the outcome. Social media engagement or website engagement is like buying 100 lottery tickets instead of one. It seems like you’ve boosted your chances of winning by 100 fold, but in reality, those other 99 tickets didn’t even move the needle.

     

    By all means, do A/B testing, make adjustments, formulate campaigns that include a mechanism for increasing engagement, but depending upon it to drive significant revenue could be a mistake. The basics of building ongoing awareness through media your audience utilizes, timing your efforts to coincide with that target’s needs or life-stage position, matching your demographics and psychographics and messaging to that of the prospective customer, are still the linchpins of successful marketing efforts, and enhancements and refinements to these, along with some boosts in awareness through effective promotion of specialty offers, benefit driven messaging, and creative imagery, will drive revenue upward on a consistent basis as the brand evolves and the audience grows. If you’ve got all those bases covered effectively, engagement is a nice to have, the icing on the cake, and a good set up for the upsell and cross sell to that customer base, due to the added time allowed for an opportunity to develop.

     

    Unless I miss my guess, the folks dwelling on engagement (which is notoriously hard to measure with any accuracy) don’t have all the basics in place and need a buzz word and a crutch to help them explain why things on the sales side aren’t moving as far or as fast as expected.

     

    Dwell on the basics of marketing, make sure all the right pieces are in place and working together efficiently, and keeping the pipeline full, then worry about engagement.

  • Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics

    Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics

    The world of marketing is fraught with data, we’re drowning in it, awash in a sea of numbers, statistics, charts, graphs, analytic dashboards keeping track of minutia that has little bearing on the bigger picture of framing and positioning the thing we’re marketing in it’s best possible light to the best possible audience. What was once about words, pictures, images, headlines, ideas, insights and engagement has been reduced to a series of tactical, digital zig zags, trying to maximize return on a micro level, and hope it scales up and moves the corporate revenue needle.

    Why?

    Do It Yourself

    One of the reasons that data has become so powerful (it always was, we just didn’t think it was cool to talk about it) is that not only is there a lot of it, but it’s easier to obtain and derive, and the costs are much lower, thanks to the Internet. In the bad old days, if you wanted to measure engagement or response, you had sales numbers (conversion), inbound phone call numbers (inquiry, “likes”), or account rep activity (lead gen inbound). Other than those in-house numbers, if you wanted to know more, you needed to dig much deeper, create a research study, engage a firm and have them do what they do and report back.

    Today, all the activity data, engagement activity, views, likes, dwell time, clicks, shares, conversions, and other forms of engagement signal are logged, categorized, organized and reported to you digitally on a minute-by-minute basis in real time, using inexpensive or free software. And it can all be accessed by anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection, anywhere in the world.

    Prove It . . .

    One other reason all this craziness over data is occurring is more corporate and has to do with economics. The marketing department has long been viewed as an expense, occasionally by the more enlightened as an investment, but only recently as having the potential to be a profit center. Marketers have always had the need to justify their existence pressed upon them, and we spend hours writing reports, dissecting response numbers and finding ways to make it look like the things we’re doing contribute directly to the company’s revenue and well-being. On some level, the more data we can present, the more attractive a case we can make for being provided, and spending, more money to do the things we know we need to do, but have to prove it to everyone else.

    In the real world, using data to gauge performance, learning and improving returns, and making decisions based on data is really the main idea – but we’ve been doing that for years. The real trick is to properly select and vet the data you’re looking at and using to make those decisions. Just because a number represents a count of a certain behavior or response doesn’t make it a viable or useful piece of data – it may not scale, it may not apply across platforms or audiences, it may not be sustainable, it may be badly skewed by events you have no control over. But it is data, and therefore useful, right?

    The other pitfall to all this data is that even if it is accurate, correct, vetted and sustainable, you need to find a way to convert that data to insight, and that insight into an action plan. You have to use the data to further the cause. Most data will tell you something on it’s own, but its not enough to go the distance. You need to step back, see the larger picture, put the data in context with other inputs you have proven already, and see if it flies.

    Lies, Lies, All Lies!

    Now we come to the lies part. Numbers and statistics can be manipulated to indicate almost any point of view, the insight comes in the interpretation. Averages tend to dilute or blunt insight, rather than amplify it. Statisticians have all sorts of tricks and formulas to manipulate data so that it can tell virtually any story you want – it’s all in the spin, how it’s presented. Even something as simple as college rankings, a long standing measure of the potential for success in leveraging education and brand to elevate one’s position in life in the long term, can be easily manipulated by marketers to tell a story that promotes the cause. If a college has slipped in the rankings from number three to number seven, is that slide an anomaly, is it due to something short term or environment that will reverse it self when conditions change? Even though that could be seen to represent a significant slide, it’s a virtual certainty that recruiters will be touting it as a “Top 10” college for years to come following the slide, hoping that nobody looks too closely at where within that top ten it falls.

    Use It Right

    The best use of all this data is to gain a clear understanding of the current position and level of success of your marketing efforts, establish a base line, relate it to growth, profitability, revenue growth, reach, market share or other commonly regarded metric, in order to use that baseline as a starting point for improvement going forward. If that happens, justification of added spending will be easily achieved, as activity can now be tied directly to results that impact everyone. Clicks and likes don’t pay the light bill or match the retirement funds, but if you can use data to show how you’re moving the needle, use it to improve performance by looking at the “right” metric, and make good decisions based on a few key data points, then that’s all the data you really need . . .

  • Could Your Business Survive Ten Days With No Internet?

    Could Your Business Survive Ten Days With No Internet?

    As fears go, loss of Internet access is climbing the ladder, and will soon join spiders, tornadoes, public speaking and cancer at the top of the national list. With all the threats presented by the modern world both international and domestic, the loss of the currently ubiquitous Internet is a very real possibility. Cyber Security has gone in just 15 years from a futurist topic on the seminar schedule at small, obscure IT conferences, to a huge industry and a Federal government priority,in an effort to preserve the integrity and functionality of this newly precious resource. Could your business survive the Internet-less apocalypse?

    So many businesses depend so heavily on the Internet for their marketing, either through organic search and SEO of their site, e-mail marketing and customer service, banner advertising, Adwords programs, re-marketing programs, to order-taking and fulfillment operations, that they could not function with no internet capability – web-only based businesses are out of luck from day one! Brick-and-mortar businesses have an advantage here, in that they may still have foot traffic, use traditional media like TV and radio ads, billboards, building signs, direct mail and print ads, to drive shoppers to the store – they would have to use cash to purchase anything if the Internet were “down” or didn’t exist, but they could function moderately well in the local geographic area. What would be most missed is the additional global outlet and customer base that the ‘net allows for.

    Professional services businesses would also function in a remedial way – law firms, accounting firms, consultants, and engineering firms still do much of their marketing and lead generation through traditional means – but would be hampered in providing some of those services in as quick or timely fashion as we’ve become used to – “e-mail me that spreadsheet,” and “give me everything Lexus-Nexus has on . . .” would be things of the past, but those laws are still “on the books” and in the books at most firms, and the search, while laborious and time consuming, could still be performed manually, and those ledgers still record debits and credits just fine, no batteries required.

    The US Postal Service would likely see a huge uptick in business, as e-mail ceases and businesses have to return to writing memos and mailing them, either internally or externally to clients, customers and far flung colleagues. It might make some of those long-winded and knee-jerk missives that show up in your inbox on a daily basis a bit more scarce as well, as business people are forced to craft more thoughtful communication to commit to paper and mail. It would certainly allow for more time to proofread and edit, something most e-mail desperately needs, so not all of this non-Internet fantasy is bad . . .

    Certainly the lack of social media communications platforms would free up more time to be productive, although those businesses that exist or thrive using social media marketing as a reason to live would disappear, they would likely be supplanted by higher attendance at conferences, tradeshows, meetings, seminars, more client contact, which would help out the hotels, airlines, conference venues, as face to face returns to fill the vacuum. Talented writers would have to work for a publication, magazine, newspaper, ad agency, or radio or TV outlet, as blogs would be impossible. Maybe they’d remember how to grow and hold a following, build an audience, and even get paid to write . . .! Editors would suddenly be back in fashion, curating the news and crafting public perception of current events, rather then the gang input, do it yourself, Wikipedia approach to learning about the world around us.

    Take five minutes, and mentally catalog all the things in your business, either marketing or operations, that depend upon the Internet to exist or function. Were a global calamity to occur, could you continue to function as a business without it? Is there a written (and printed out) plan for this eventuality? Keep in mind that we’re not talking about the stone age, electricity still works, computers still function as free standing machines, connect to printers and other computers over local network wires, the phones still work (unless you have VOIP service only), its the global connected-ness, the openness, the instantaneous access to global information that’s gone. If nefarious evil-doers were to knock out large sections of the global ‘net, would your business survive? If your fleet of trucks uses credit cards at the gas pump, your transactions are credit card only (the return of the chick-chuck slider machines would be rapid and expensive), your equipment needs GPS reports to function, your outreach is web-only, your pipeline driven solely by Google Adwords, you might be out of luck quicker than you think . . .

    Should we continue to base our businesses heavily around the Internet’s availability and ubiquity? Probably. Should it be our only way to continue to further drive commerce? Likely not, as you just never know . . .

  • Is Your Business Card Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool?

    Is Your Business Card Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool?

    Think about it: Every meeting you attend outside your company, every business function you attend, every group you join, even casual encounters at sporting events, concerts, classes and athletic competitions like races and charity bike-a-thons, the one thing you can use to conveniently provide your contact info and your business “story”  to a new acquaintance is your business card. It carries your company brand, it carries your professional reputation, your phone number, e-mail address, website URL, physical address, even a level of achievement and professional status – that’s a lot of heavy lifting for a piece of card stock 2″ x 3.5″!

    For small businesses, the many choices made in creating a business card are each vitally important to be sure it can carry all that weight effectively. Nice layout but thin, flimsy stock says I’m just starting but don’t have the resources to spring for the good stuff (sending a subliminal message that maybe I’m not concerned with other details of my company’s image, either). Standard white with black type might send the message that basic is good enough, I don’t care enough about appearances to even pay attention to subtle design cues and engagement that some color can create. Way colorful and “cartoony” might make it difficult for the recipient to grant your firm the importance and weight of consideration it deserves. Lots of type and images of you might come off as narcissistic if over done. Too “designy” might reduce the impression of seriousness and business acumen that goes behind your creative decisions. Type too small to read, too much information packed in illogical order, funny, multiple or odd type faces that make it difficult to read or absorb quickly, are all poor choices, and we’ve seen them all at one time or another. All these choices are critical to convey the message in just the right way that really makes you memorable, carries your brand effectively, and connects that person who receives it with the way you can somehow help them achieve their goals, no matter what they are. Like I said, a lot of pressure for a small scrap of paper . . .

    With all that going on, it’s usually best to leave the design, layout, and production choices to a design professional who has a reasonable portfolio of business identity work. That doesn’t mean your new sister-in-law who just graduated from art school can’t take a crack at it, depending on what type of business you’re starting or promoting, but her input should be able to stand on it’s merits, not on her attendance at Thanksgiving dinner. There are basic design tenets that should be adhered to when crafting an effective business card (and other identity materials), but those tenets leave a huge margin open for creativity and ingenuity! Don’t feel boxed in by convention, just give due weight to the experience of those who are successful at creating these little buggers.

    For the money, business cards can be your most effective weapon in the battle for recognition, growth, brand awareness, new customer acquisition, and professional networking success. Its certainly the oldest, and most valuable dollar for dollar. Sure, digital elements are global, changeable, adaptable, mobile and modern, but the lowly business card travels further, gets kept longer, is more portable and shareable, carries more information and meta-information, more memorable tactility, and more engagement than a web banner ad URL could hope for on its best day!

    Next time someone hands you their business card (hopefully you asked for it first), take a moment and study it, feel it, read both sides, absorb it for a moment, then look up and connect all that information with the person in front of you. Does it all hang together, is it “as expected”, or is it in jarring contrast to the person, company or position you’ve encountered in the person you’ve been speaking with? That jarring disconnect is to be avoided at all cost, as it reduces that attachment, that engagement, that connection and memorability that are the card’s main job. If the card looks and feels just like you’d expect after speaking with the person for a few minutes, observing and listening to them, then its a winner, and carries that person’s brand, their status, their stature, their ethos and of course, the way to continue the conversation later, perfectly packaged in one small fragment of wood pulp. Not bad for a few bucks and some thought . . .

  • 5 Things To Watch For In 2016

    5 Things To Watch For In 2016

    I don’t normally do predictions and prognostications about the future, because even the most informed and engaged “futurists” are at least half wrong on a terrific day. If you go back and review their predictions with 10 years of hindsight, usually they were either dead wrong – not good for career development as a futurist – or the predictions now, in hindsight, seem rather vague or are broad enough to be interpreted in a number of ways, one of which might be construed as having some to fruition. Either way, such prognostication is best left to carny acts at the State Fair rather than being used as a business decision-making tool. However, as the new year looms, I feel compelled to at least point out some observances that seem to be gaining positive momentum and seem fairly sensible in the broader context of marketing. So, here’s five things to keep an eye on:

     

    1. Data Gathering V.S. Privacy – Eventually privacy will win, but not next year. There is so much data out there available now on everyone, from a huge variety of sources, all self-proclaimed, that marketers can access it without having to invade anything more sophisticated than a social media page. That level of data availability will continue to increase, and the volume and type of data available will ramp up next year, as more software is launched, more apps are developed, and the digital sharing movement continues to grow in the new connected environment. Marketers will have to continue to run to try and reach the top of the curve and not get too far behind in the actual viable use of that data to produce results.

    2. The Clouds Gather – Storage on site at corporate buildings will continue to drop weight like Jenny Craig moved in next door, as storage needs are more easily accommodated in the Cloud. Data centers and other aggregating technologies will continue to supplant hard on-site storage for firms under a billion in annual sales. Now cyber security exercises will have to beef up accordingly to provide the security and trust the could requires to continue acceptance and growth.

    3. Old Will Become New Again – In a sense, marketing is like fashion, if something sticks around long enough it will circle back around and become popular again. Like hemlines or trouser cuffs, marketing tactics can be reborn as if it was discovered anew by the next generation of marketers. The speed of growth of content marketing will accelerate – at least until the end of this decade – but content marketing has been used since before the turn of the century – the last century! Ask John Deere, Betty Crocker, Jell-O and P&G, who used content marketing to sell products and stay top of mind, establish market dominance and cement their brands in the minds of buyers in a certain context, with great success. The biggest change is the speed of the distribution of that content. Modern digital marketers can get a “read” on the popularity and engagement level of their content before it converts to a sale, which allows for some adjustment and fine tuning that the old-school folks didn’t have available to them.

    4. The Message Becomes The Medium – FREE!  Big agencies will put in a greater level of effort on earned media and on visibility message marketing, as opposed to just paid advertising. The success of Donald Trumps nascent presidential campaign, driving him from neutral name recognition to leading the GOP field by a significant margin in under a year, after spending a paltry $1.8 million, shows how effective this approach can be. While agencies’ bread and butter will continue to be paid media, both traditional and digital, the earned and PR practices will take a larger role in the messaging scheme, will gain power and recognition for top brands that “get it” about how information travels in today’s connected world.

    5. Rollin’, Rollin’, Rollin’ – Going Mobile Becomes “Normal” – As the number of mobile searches continues to climb, and broadband becomes even more ubiquitous, and the number of smart devices proliferates, having a strong mobile component to your corporate web presence will become not just essential but standard. If your site doesn’t perform on a 5″ touch screen, you’ll be relegated to the digital dustbin quicker than your girlfriend’s MySpace account.

    2016 will be dubbed the year Content peaked, as the field gets crowded, the hackers learn to generate more targeted content in a mass contact way without human intervention. Computer as author is everyone’s fear, there’s enough published by humans already to circle the globe multiple times a day. We don’t need more, we need better – better engagement, better targeting, better relevance, better quality.