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Category: Content

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.

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.

February 12, 2016
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 . . .
February 9, 2016
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 . . .

January 21, 2016
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 . . .

January 13, 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.
January 2, 2016
Content, Shmontent – Providing Valuable Insights To Prospects Will Convert Them To Customers, No Matter What Form It Takes . . .

The top marketing buzzword for 2015 has got to be “Content,” surpassing “Big Data” from 2014. Everywhere you look online, in magazines or journals, webinars, conferences, you’ll run across tips, tricks, advice, approaches, models, templates, secrets and techniques on how to generate, improve, disseminate and offer content that will effectively convert inquiry to customer. It’s nearly ubiquitous, and clearly some content is better than others, and some is more appropriate than others, and some should never have been produced or disseminated at all.

My feeling is that content marketing is not new, it’s one of those tools in the bag that solid progressive marketers have latched onto because the pathways to delivery have gotten broader and easier. Content is essentially in the same genre as sampling programs, advertorials, forced free trials, and other marketing tools where the creator can put their knowledge of their industry on display, demonstrate quality or level of service, demonstrate their understanding of issues that affect their industry, and provide possible solutions at a lower engagement risk to the recipient than actually purchasing a product or service. It allows the creator or the distributor to shape their brand perception, elevate themselves to expert status, show thought leadership, and hold themselves out there as someone who offers solutions, not just gripes about the challenges facing their industry or line of business. There’s nothing wrong with any of this, it’s a terrific way to accomplish the goal of building credibility and showing forward thought, but it’s not as shiny and new as the most recent generation of marketers would like to believe – the delivery system is new, but the model is not.

Pioneers in content marketing include John Deere corporation, who created a magazine featuring uses for it’s farm equipment in 1898, The Michelin Guide promoting travel and offering insights to travelers in 1900, and Jell-O salesmen offering housewives a recipe book featuring Jell-O as a key ingredient in 1904, and Betty Crocker cookbooks touting uses for their cake mixes in 1912 or so, and so on to the point where recent statistics show that 96% of corporations are using some sort of content marketing in their mix in 2014. The telling statistic in that same report is that, among respondents, only 21% of those using content marketing felt they could accurately track its ROI. I thought marketing was about testing, measuring, data-driven action that creates more efficient and cost-effective drivers of awareness and sales conversion . . .

Hopefully, content won’t be shown to be just the next big, shiny object marketers latch onto, use inappropriately until it loses it’s effectiveness or relevance, or until the next shiny object comes along.

To see how to do Content “right,” pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes“

December 10, 2015
In a World . . . Where There Is No Post Office . . . Direct Mail Professionals Aren’t Doomed

Based on experience, on articles in a huge number of media outlets, on TV and radio, much has been said about the challenges facing the US Post Office. Fiscal reform efforts don’t seem to have stemmed the bleeding, a rate case is in the making that will likely make most mailers sit back and reconsider their mail schedule and creative costs with respect to mailability, machinability and postage costs, and even with offices consolidating and more rural locations closing, deliverability and schedules will have to be accounted for under the current scenario. But picture a world where the Federal Government, Congress, and the American People all agree for a change, and come to an agreement on closing the post office altogether. What might that world look like?

From a business standpoint, a huge bulk of business correspondence has already shifted to e-mail from printed postal mail, as have bill and invoice presentment, financial reporting statements, even annual reports are delivered digitally as PDF files. The remainder of the mail stream includes direct marketing pieces, catalogs, parcels, fulfillments of various types that cannot be delivered digitally, legal documents that must be delivered on paper or signed for by the recipient, and some other odds and ends. In aggregate that still represents a huge swath of companies, and jobs, that will have to shift their thinking, and their marketing efforts and communications strategy, to account for the loss of postal delivery.

Strategically, one of the other common carriers, or possibly both UPS and FedEx, will likely have to ramp up to fill the void, but that would certainly suggest that some changes would have to made in how they operate logistically. Air hubs would have to be expanded, fleet maintenance established and expanded from the current to service fuel and maintain the huge fleet of trucks, cars, planes and other specialty apparatus the USPS currently fields. The care and upkeep of the buildings, street boxes, already a rarity, would likely be curtailed, shifted and more centralized. Delivery would likely be curtailed, made only on select days, much like in EU nations, and only to select stations – residential delivery, especially in rural areas where efficiency is low, would likely cease. Individuals would be forced to visit a substation several days a week to pick up their mail after showing ID. Businesses would receive delivery to their internal mail handling sections, but maybe not daily.

Businesses directly related exclusively to supporting the USPS would certainly be challenged, but what about those who use the mail extensively to market their goods and services, and the businesses who serve them (printers, designers, processing houses, list brokers and aggregators, equipment manufacturers who make printing, folding, inkjet and addressing equipment, inserters, sorters, cutters, stampers, high speed duplication and personalization printing machinery), and a wide swath of other businesses world-wide.

Fortunately, most of those businesses will have the time to adjust to the new circumstances, and if they are nimble and diversified in their customer base and product offering, they will survive in the new post-post office world. Direct marketing professionals need not necessarily fear for their jobs, as nearly all of their skills can be ported over to the digital realm. Copy that sells still works digitally, with some minor adjustments; good design still enhances results, online or off; a good list is still the key to response success, and if my inbox is any indication, there are a good-sized chunk of list purveyors specializing in selects from business e-mail addresses to help companies and non-profits reach out to their target audience.

The toughest cut will be the army of postal employees nationwide, for some of their skills will be made obsolete, marginalized, or undervalued. With no residential delivery, carriers, sorters, and other related jobs will be sidelined out of existence. Hopefully a retraining program of immense proportions will be built into the wind-down plan, and those hardworking individuals will be placed elsewhere as they desire.

As an exercise, close your eyes and imagine that post-post office world and how it will affect you. Let me know if you like the new world . . .

If you liked this and want to read more, subscribe to this blog above. And don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

November 20, 2015
Ten Ways To Make Sponsorship Build Credibility, Visibility For Your Brand

Every business out there has probably been approached about a sponsorship, or included sponsorship in their marketing mix in one form or another, especially those with a consumer sales focus. But how do you make the selection of which one’s might be the most effective long-term?

Careful selection of the events, products, and people you sponsor will allow you to activate that sponsorship to benefit fully from your association. In order to make a beneficial selection, you have to know your brand inside and out, and have a good handle on some of the more “outlying” characteristics that consumers have pinned to it – not just the ones you’re broadcasting about it. Some of those alternative characteristics can make for very solid sponsorships if you pick them carefully and engage fully with all the opportunities they offer.

Many businesses don’t engage fully with the opportunities they do select, and get less-than-optimal returns as a result. This is one situation where you really do get out what you put in. Don’t stop at the logo on the sign, that’s just the beginning. Here’s ten ways to maximize the return on a sponsorship opportunity, planned or impromptu:

For Event Sponsorships:

10) Make sure to provide adequate materials to the event hosts so that all participants receive something from you at the event. Don’t short the count on the collateral, the promotional items or the literature, because that one person who gets left out will carry that impression longer and to more people than all the rest combined.

9) Be sure your brand is represented adequately, accurately and repeatedly. You’ve purchased a certain level of exposure, and most event organizers will bend over backward to help you get it, but if you don’t speak up and remind them, you may not get everything you were promised. Check everything to be sure the brand is represented in the best possible light, and that it’s reproduced at an adequate size, color fidelity and resolution to do you some good – after all, you paid for it.

8) Even if you don’t have something already created, make sure you take advantage of every portion of the sponsorship package. Most sponsorships are multi-faceted, and usually multi-media. If you don’t have elements in use already for each medium, be it flash video, print collateral, sales sheets, logo files in every possible format, bios, soundbites, banner ads, animated gifs, promotional blurbs and items, signage, banners, and other typical elements to take advantage of the whole package of opportunities, create whatever it is you’re missing. You might be the only one of the sponsors who does, in which case, guess who’s going to be the most memorable?

7) Make sure the audience matches your efforts. Most brands have a broad range of demographic, psycho-graphic and geographic audiences it serves. Be sure the sponsorship you pick reaches at least a viable, sizable niche slice of your total target market. If not, it doesn’t make sense to participate.

6) Make your selection based on LIFETIME CUSTOMER VALUE, and not just acquisition cost. It may cost you $25 to reach, influence and close a new customer to buy your product once. But if the event sponsorship is a valid one, you not only close one sale, but in most cases (if you’re doing your retention efforts correctly), you’ve gained a long-term customer who will enact or refer multiple sales over the next few years. Once you factor that in, the numbers on ROI work much better.

5) Do your part of participate in the success of the event. Your name and your brand is now attached to this event. Do you part to promote it, get some mileage of your own out of your participation, fill the stands and pack the seats – it‘s to your benefit, it drives that many more people to view your participation, and bring you more customers.

4) If the package doesn’t fit, ask for what you want. Most event organizers want the sponsorship to benefit you, so that you’ll repeat or extend your participation and become an evangelist for their event. They want to make you happy, and will negotiate in good faith if you have an alternative proposal to present. If you don’t ask, they won’t likely offer what you want. The tough part is accepting and using the valuations attached to each element. Most often it pays to just make the best overall deal you can, and work it to the fullest.

3) Pick events that make interaction logical. A mountain bike company sponsoring a swimming event doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that same company sponsoring an off-road bike race makes perfect sense. That’s not to say that you can’t sponsor an event outside your industry, you just have to be selective so that the audience can easily make the connection between your brand and the activity they‘re engaged in at the moment.

2) Make the sponsorship an integral part of your strategy, even if it isn’t. Plan your sponsorships to work with your product’s sales curve, either to boost the top or fill in the troughs, seasonally or geographically. If you’re expanding your service or delivery area, work events on the fringes of your current area to make the expansion more organic. If you sell primarily in the summer, work the earlier and earlier events, or later into the fall to extend your season and broaden your exposure.

l) Don’t select more sponsorships or pick more events than you can fully support. The up-front cost is just the tip of the iceberg, and once you add manpower hours, staff training, brand monitoring time, collateral and participation costs, and follow-up and activation costs, it’s easy to get overextended, and not give a full effort to anything, a recipe for failure. Make an honest commitment to the right mix of events and participate fully for the greatest benefit.

Making smart selections when choosing a sponsorship is a combination of art and science, and the basis is really knowing your market, knowing your brand intimately, and using some common sense with an audience perspective. Sponsorship can be a strong part of your marketing mix, if you make the right choices and work them to the fullest.

If you found these tips helpful and would like to read more, pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

November 13, 2015
Reach Your Audience The Way THEY Want You To, and Success Will Follow . . .

It has been said that on occasion at least, the medium is the message, and that’s a good thing to keep in mind when setting up your next marketing program. However, the choice of media is not really up to you anymore – and no, despite all the rumors, it’s not up to your ad agency, either – it’s really up to your customers. Sometimes, it’s via newspaper or magazine, sometimes it’s television or radio, often it involves a digital component, e-mail or a website, blog or social media platform. Regardless of which one, you have to let the customer decide which they prefer to interact with your brand, which one has credibility for them, which one will carry the message most effectively, or which combination will move the emotional needle and spur a buying decision or action of some sort. That’s really the goal, isn’t it?

I want to thank John Garcia, a writer for The Business Journal chain of media (print and online both) for coining the term “Tradigital” to describe the proper mixture of traditional and digital media used to reach a given audience. In a world full of cutesy contractions of celebrities’ names, this stands out as a brilliant single word explanation of the best approach to finding the audience in the right way.

As always, the key to making the best balance of Tradigital media selection, good, solid customer research is the best place to start the planning process. Dip into your customer base, review your prior media mix, see what’s working and what’s not, and for whom, then vet it with some in-depth, interrogatory interviews with actual customers, asking them specific, actionable, emotionally-driven questions regarding how they feel about interacting with your brand both traditionally and digitally, see if you can divine their decision-making process and where they like to start versus where they enter your actual sales process.

Data in hand, now it’s time to make some decisions. Do you need to reinvent the wheel, recreate the existing sales funnel to match your customer’s preferences more closely, or are just a few reorganizational tweaks all that is needed? Only your data can tell you for sure. Certainly, the more closely your sales process aligns with their decision-making process, the more comfortable your customers will be interacting with you, and the more often they will return to buy again – you win!

Getting the mix right can be tricky, but with two types of data to work from, transactional and anecdotal, you should be able to connect the dots mixed in with some experiencial knowledge and common sense and get pretty close.

If you don’t feel comfortable doing this type of baseline research with your own customers yourself, hire a professional to work with you and get you going in the right direction – they do this all the time and are objective and understanding at once, able to empathize with customers while keeping their emotional distance so that it doesn’t influence their analysis. That what professionals are for.

Did you get it right? Time will tell, as will your sales dashboard. Unfortunately, the job is never done, as the customer parameters and demographics shift and change over time, so even if you got it right for now, you’ll need to keep a close eye on it and be prepared to shift over time as customers evolve and change.

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October 30, 2015
Innovation: Bravery + Curiosity + Support = Advancement

As we effect change at various client organizations, mostly through redirecting the current marketing efforts, we often encounter some underlying resistance from some of the down-line managers. Most of this has very little to do with our efforts specifically, and has much to do with aversion or resistance to change in general. We are change agents by nature, indeed that’s the reason we are engaged is to effect change. If change wasn’t needed, we wouldn’t be there . . .

The question often arises, “How do we mitigate this resistance and achieve full consensus throughout the company to drive the program forward successfully?”

The answer often lies in two areas:

1) We realize that you can’t please all the people all the time (to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln), and there will always be dissenters and those who don’t completely buy in to the new programs or processes. The way we’ve found success in handling those is to isolate, educate, reformulate, and redirect those individuals. This keeps them from spreading negative messaging throughout the firm, poisoning the well.

2) We understand that much of the atmosphere of innovation we are trying to create comes from the roots of corporate culture, and so that’s where you start to effect the necessary changes.

That all sounds good on paper, but what does it really mean to client companies?

Like many such changes in corporate behavior, it all starts at the top. We work closely with CEOs so that they understand the impact of their downstream messages, and help them position the new elements in the proper light, so they can lead by example, both in action and words. Once the messaging of innovation is firmly established, it should be supported by new programs run by Human Resources, so that innovation carries an incentive and is rewarded. This clearly establishes the goals and guidelines for those individuals responsible for activating those new elements.

Once that infrastructure is in place, mid- and lower-level managers can be directed both by specific goal and by example, to help create the atmosphere that supports innovation, building competitive teams, setting an agenda that drives innovation and rewards initiative, and stresses accountability.

This trickle down effect needs to be championed all the way through the rank and file and out to customers, suppliers, vendors and support groups, so that it rings true no matter what angle the company is viewed from.

More on this issue in a later entry, but for now, effect change, champion the positive effects, and guide the culture and the results will follow!

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October 16, 2015