davidpoulos.com

Category: Leadership

  • You CAN Teach An Old Dog New Tricks . . . Sometimes You Don’t Have To

    You CAN Teach An Old Dog New Tricks . . . Sometimes You Don’t Have To

    In the world of marketing, there are new things to learn, new innovations introduced, new techniques that surface, every day. It’s a fast-moving, wide-open world where marketers chase the next big thing, the new, shiny object that promises more information, faster feedback, better data or segmentation, easier tracking, more operations under one platform, and other enticing offers to help marketers make sense of this huge, complex puzzle called marketing.

    But sometimes, that new shiny object turns out to be a tarnished, older, less spiffy tactic in a new package, or a reboot of a more traditional tactic, dressed in digital clothing. Old or new, the object of the game is to connect with, to engage, to persuade, and to change opinion and the subsequent behavior to a purchase.

    Sometimes marketing skills and practices can be applied to new tactics as well. E-mail is a strong, successful tactic when used under the right circumstances with the right audience. The same characteristics that make an effective e-mail campaign, the same skills that e-mail uses to reach the audience effectively –

    • strong, persuasive copy;
    • a solid, clear, concise and compelling offer
    • eye-catching headlines and carrier tagline (read “Subject Line”);
    • the right list, one that is accepting, responsive and relevant and clean of undeliverable addresses;
    • attractive imagery that resonates with the audience and conveys the message and reinforces the brand;

    are those used in direct mail. Yet direct mail, and it’s practitioners, are increasingly marginalized by clients, agency leaders, and pundits as a dying art, an antiquated technique, an anachronism. However, those same experts agree that those elements are what makes e-mail campaigns successful – so why are those skills declining?

    One reason might be the ease of using e-mail versus crafting a direct mail campaign. There are lots of moving parts to doing direct mail well – there are formats, sizes, stock selections, printing techniques, postal regulations, list prep, personalization issues, pre-sort and data processing, on top of the writing, imagery, offer, list and subject line to consider. The time required to put together and manage a direct mail campaign is almost always longer than an e-mail campaign – production time, mailing time, list data management, merge-purge, and other operations to allow for postal delivery, and the physical transport from one production process to another takes much more time than writing, designing, loading, and sending an e-mail. That additional time comes in handy, it allows for lots of thought, editing, revision and review by lots of different sets of eyes along the way, with lots of opportunity to spot errors, typos, color and size problems, regulatory and weight issues, and a host of other potential errors that can sink your program and tank the results. E-mail, thanks to a variety of competent and inexpensive software programs, can be executed solo, with no oversight as to what goes out, how it’s designed, and no restraint as to the content, the biggest constraint being the list has to be deemed an “opt-in” originated, so that SPAM regulations don’t apply.

    [pullquote align=”left or right”]Old or new, the object of the game is to connect with, to engage, to persuade, and to change opinion and the subsequent behavior to a purchase.[/pullquote]

    Yet, all the simplicity and speed of e-mail should free up time to write tremendous copy, to craft a very persuasive offer, to tell a story with endless insight and as much real estate on the page as you need to tell the full compelling tale. But with all that extra time, how many top-quality, really creative and persuasive e-mails have you read recently? Based on the total received on a given day, not many arrive in my inbox that compel me to do anything but hit “delete” . . .

    . . . and the ones that do, I’ve found, were usually crafted and written by those with direct mail experience in their past. DM pros make great e-mailers, but the reverse is not usually true.

    Turns out, the craft of copywriting, the ability to relate directly to an audience in writing, the skill required to turn features into benefits, to make offers that are easily interpreted and unambiguous, to build rapport with the audience, to engage and entice that audience with something as mundane as a plastic widget or a monthly meeting, is still just as valuable in the new digital frontier as it was in the bad old days of catalogs and direct marketing. Kudos go to those who’ve taken the time and energy to learn their craft, to perfect their art, to become true 10,000-hour experts at the art and science of communicating to an audience of individuals. Next time you think you’ll dash off an e-mail to your hot list and it takes you twenty minutes or less to get it out the door, take a few minutes before you hit the “send” button, and see if that’s really the best, the strongest, the most interesting and compelling message you could possibly send . . . if not, maybe wait until someone else gets to read it before you launch it out into the ether . . . the job you save may be your own!

  • Persistence More Important Than Ever To Close The Sale

    Persistence More Important Than Ever To Close The Sale

    In the modern world, the practice of sales, whether it be called “Account-based Marketing” or Business Development, or some other euphemism, is as tough as it’s ever been to be effective. With over a thousand marketing messages or more hitting the average citizen every single day, it’s harder than ever to cut through the clutter, to get people’s attention, to gain their engagement and their focus for even a few moments, let alone tell a compelling story and persuade them to take whatever action that moves the needle for your firm. One of the most effective tactics is one of the oldest, and it still works in today’s environment – persistence.

    We’ve all seen the memes online for success in sales, indicating that most B2B sales are made after the 12th or 14th contact with a prospect, less than 5% get made after the initial contact, etc. A key ingredient seems to be “keeping after the prospect until they cave in and buy.” I don’t frame it that way to sales-based clients, but that’s essentially what you’re trying to do. Entire systems and software platforms have been created and sold based on this endless tracking and following strategy, scheduling the next contact, ranking the viability and likelihood of a sale, gauging their ability to buy, and when. The systematization, the automation of the sales process has been driven to new levels in an attempt to counter this profusion of messages and the shortening attention span of the prospect audience.

    Technology has made this not only possible, but extremely easy, and as a result, sales management of all stripes have latched onto this approach as a way of integrating sales into their other business processes. You can now track and call a “Lead” anyone who clicks on a link in a search results report. And beyond that, you can have your messaging and tracking follow them on their entire journey through the ether that is the Internet, popping up whenever and wherever they travel.

    This is sales?

    True sales professionals know that these are simply tools, not replacements for a solid set of skills, like active listening, seeking out pain points, probing for possible objections, collaboratively crafting solutions, over-delivering and under-promising. The essence of all of these things is that you have to actually get in front of and speak directly with people who make the buying decision. Conducting sales activities “remotely” will only take you so far, at some point you have to interface with the customer. Usually more than one such engagement is required, because the basis of a sale is trust n the sales person, and trust in the company behind them to back up their promises and claims, and that trust takes several encounters to achieve. Hence the need for persistence, to keep coming up with a new, compelling reason to get in front of that prospect and convincing them to see things your way.

    The skill in all this occasionally takes the form of sensitivity – the gauge of how tolerant the prospect will be in receiving follow-up messages, calls, e-mails, communications from the sales person, before they start to work against them and annoy the prospect. Persistence is not just being relentless. It’s being in contact on a regular, ongoing basis, and offering something of value to the client with each interaction, building trust progressively, offering to work the prospect through whatever challenge you’ve agreed they face together, showing them how you’ll achieve the desired result. For professional services or big-ticket items, the consultative approach is by far the most effective.

    And that takes persistence.

    If you’re on the fifth or sixth contact with a well-qualified prospect, it may seem like overkill, but if you hang in there, the seventh touch may be the charm. For efficiency’s sake, the game is to try and reduce that number of touches to the most effective use of your time and resources without negatively affecting the outcome. But if you plan on investing significant time with each prospect, and have a constantly full pipeline of incoming prospects, eventually a rhythm develops and you can gauge how many touches are required for each one, and can start to predict and plan your time investment accordingly.

    As each one moves through the pipeline toward the close, a new one starts with an initial interview, and proceeds through the consultative system toward a close and into the delivery or service phase. By being systematically persistent, you’ve remained top-of-mind without being annoying and driving interest downward, provided the prospect with value before the sale, and shown your ability to deliver, to keep to a schedule, to bring something to the table, and have developed trust.

    Now that’s sales!

    Mechanizing, automating, scoring, tracking, weighting, prioritizing, and all the other functions are merely supports for the basic activity of communicating effectively and persistently with the customer to achieve a result. Of course all this communication has lots of other benefits as well, since the more you know and can learn about the customer, the more effective you can make the solution you’re delivering, and the more opportunity you can uncover for additional sales interaction with them – they’ve told you what they want, you just have to deliver it at the right time in the relationship.

    Message clutter, short attention spans, over-scheduling, software profusion, excessive meaningless contacts and content in the inbox, are all enemies of the practice of effective sales, which requires honest, direct, persistent communication with actual people. Everything else is distraction, which won’t put food on the salesperson’s table, or fill the company coffers with anything but empty promises. Avoid distraction, dig in, and connect with prospects – they’ll appreciate your honesty, and enjoy the attention.

  • Customer Engagement: Make Your Sponsorship Count

    Customer Engagement: Make Your Sponsorship Count

    There are many forms of sponsorship businesses can use to their advantage: from the check written to the local Little League baseball team to help offset the cost of uniforms (with your name on the back), to local sponsorship of a national charity event, to owning a major golf tournament or NASCAR race. Each has its own audience, it’s own impact, and it’s own way of engaging the audience. The trick with all of them is to create a positive, lasting and active emotional connection between your brand and the event.

     

    Brand activation for a sponsorship is one of the toughest marketing challenges most businesses face in their effort to raise awareness and drive recognition that can boost sales over time. The magic is in the matchup of the brand and the sponsored entity. The audience has to intuitively “get it” when they see the sponsor’s name in connection with the event, which means that there needs to be at least some rudimentary logic to the pairing of the two. There are some pairings that appear to be, well, natural in how they are executed, but I’m a firm believer in the tenet that there are no coincidences, and that most simple, natural occurrences are engineered by someone or something, although not necessarily for their own purposes. Auto racing promotions by oil companies, tire companies, engine builders and the like seem like natural extensions. Beer, cigarettes, soft drinks, and other consumer consumables, seem like a bigger stretch, until you consider that the audience for the race is the tightest demographic match to their product buyer possible, based on their own internal research. A huge chunk of race fans enjoy a Coke regularly, and in earlier times, the vast majority of race fans enjoyed a Winston or Marlboro on a very regular basis.

     

    Even those famous pairings required some time and effort to appear natural, and be linked in people’s minds permanently. Not only were there competitors in each category to wrench the spotlight from, but they had to find a way to activate the sponsorship so that all the dollars they spent paid off, by moving the product sales needle in some predictable way. Pennzoil, Valvoline, Quaker State, MobileONE, and a host of other petroleum brands vied for NASCAR sponsorships, but only one would eventually rise to the top of the recognition heap in that particular type of racing. The winning brand crafted a long-term series of ads, promotions and other outreach content that pinpointed and brought to light their involvement with high performance activities. You could put it in your Chevy, but you knew that it was developed for and was used in a race car, making your grocery-getter a little more like the race car you couldn’t have. Aspirational activation is a strong driver of success in sponsorships, and has been used to promote luxury brands and commodity consumables alike for many years with great success.

     

    Athletic endeavor has been fertile ground for this type of approach, because athletes have long been role models of persistence, hard work, grit and perseverance against the odds. Aspirational stories abound about athletes, and since they enjoy extensive media coverage, athletes and their stories are readily available to the public. If consumers aspire to be like the great athletes they watch and read about, then emulating them is a logical step toward making that aspiration a reality. If Tiger Woods wears a Tag Heuer watch, maybe if I buy one I’ll be a little more like him, run in the same company as he does. The athletes’ brand transfers to the product, and in some cases the reverse as well, creating that “natural” pairing. You’d expect the winner of a slew of majors in half that many years, with lifetime earnings in the multi-millions, to wear a pretty high-end watch. If Tiger had a Timex endorsement, it would have created a bit of a disconnect for the audience(s), and that natural feeling would not exist, diminishing the positive effect of both brands, diluting the aspiration, and reducing the effect on sales to the point of being nonexistent.

     

    On a smaller scale, middle market businesses can make sponsorships pay off quite well if they create or find a way to activate that sponsorship emotionally with the audience. The key is still to make it aspirational and activational. The aspiration can often come from the sponsor’s own position in the market. The largest commercial bank in the state sponsoring a business organization designed to build wealth and commercial connections makes perfect sense. Offering unique access or benefits to the members of that group makes it activated and effective. Market awareness, brand recognition don’t do all that much unless the target audience frequently finds itself in a quandary between two entities – the one with the higher recognition has been shown to win more frequently and more consistently, however irrational that choice may be for the consumer.

     

    Being in front of the right target audience for extended periods of time offers the recognition, but with no activation or aspiration, the sponsorship will be less than ideally effective. A male country music artist’s tour sponsored by Prius doesn’t have the same level of activation and almost no aspiration, when compared to Ford trucks. It’s a matter of cultural understanding, and matching the market leader to the aspirations of the audience. Country music fans clearly care about their environment as much as the next fan, but their concern takes a different form than saving gas or reducing pollution.

     

    Big brands should select their sponsorship opportunities carefully, to be sure that the target audience’s aspirations and activations align with their values and cultural norms. Done correctly, your sponsorship can be one of those “natural” pairings that lives in consumer’s minds for a lifetime.

  • 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.

  • Big Data VS Privacy – Who Wins, Marketers or Consumers?

    Big Data VS Privacy – Who Wins, Marketers or Consumers?

    In daily practice, good marketing, at it’s heart, is an attempt to get inside the head of as many people of a certain type as possible, and suggest that they take an action – buy something, become aware of something, donate to something, tell a friend about something. Maybe not the cleanest definition, but its functionally accurate.

    To do the best job we can, we use primary research on behalf of our clients, to learn the thoughts, feelings, emotional triggers and preferences of their customers, so that we can showcase their products, services of ideas in the best possible light, at the best possible time, using the most effective media to deliver that message.

    That research involves asking a lot of direct, probing, emotionally-driven questions of hundreds of people per client, and if you include surveys, that number soars into the hundreds of thousands over the years. Most people enjoy taking our surveys or talking to our staff on the phone, for a couple of reasons. We explain that their individual responses will not be used to sell them anything, ever. We explain that, together with hundreds of other people’s opinion, their opinion will help shape new products and services, and tailor them to their needs and preferences, making them better suited for them. We explain that they have a right to privacy, and that their individual responses will not be connected with their name directly, that their name or other information will not be sold to anyone, ever. With those assurances in place, people feel secure enough to share good, solid accurate insights with us and they help us do a better job. Everybody wins!

    Big Data gathering apparatus, on the other hand, offer no such assurances. Has the clerk at the grocery store register ever asked if you’re OK with them collecting your shopping data? Has the clerk at Target ever asked if you’re comfortable with them collecting data on what you buy, how often and when? Even though it might be buried in their user agreement, the folks at facebook or Snapchat have never made a point to call and ask you if they can share your data with Macy’s, nor has a representative from Google ever called you to ask if they can shadow your search patterns with that ad for that great bag or cool phone cover you found while shopping, and that seems to mysteriously follow you around the Internet for the next few days. You gave them the information freely, but you didn’t think it would affect you directly and immediately.

    There’s nothing inherently wrong with using data that is given voluntarily. The difference between gaining insight from research and using data to help capture the consumer directly is that feeling of invasion of privacy. Its hard to quantify a feeling of invasion, its even hard to describe accurately and reliably, as it differs from person to person. Its sort of like the supreme court’s definition of pornography – you just know it when you see it.

    So where does it cross the line between legitimate research to gain insight, and data manipulation to gain data on an individual basis? In our practice it starts with respondent awareness – we make sure our intentions are well known and easily understood by each respondent, and we record the conversations as a reference, asking them on tape if its OK to ask them questions, understanding that their responses will be used only in aggregate, will be anonymized, and won’t be sold to anyone. That assurance provides them some transparency to the process, and the recording helps us validate that we’ll keep our word.

    Data privacy is a growing issue, and as the data gathering apparatus represented by social media, retailers, payment processors, and marketers grows in size and sophistication, it will be an even larger issue going forward. Add increased use of mobile devices, increased web mobility and app utility, the growing capabilities of nefarious hackers and data thieves, and its easy to see these two elements, privacy and data research, colliding in a cataclysmic revolt every bit as transformative as the French Revolution.

    As marketers, we’re often accused of leading the data parade, and our Orwellian need to keep tabs on what people buy, what they register for, what they watch and what they say to each other is what drives all this privacy invasion and leads to breaches and leaks of personal ID information. This is largely an emotional reaction, unfocused and poorly reasoned. I need only point to the conundrum that when purchasers were asked to fill out an order form and include a credit card number, drop it in an envelope and mail it off to an unknown person, they have no trouble, but when asked to provide that same information over the telephone, have great trepidation about revealing those same 16 digits, and an even higher level of distrust about completing a form with that same information online. Much easier to snag that envelope out of your mailbox than it is to set up the apparatus to capture that info, decode it and decrypt it from a phone call or online.

    Marketers are facing a crisis if faith, of trust, because a few of us have abused consumer trust in the legitimate use of their information to gain market insight. Good marketing is based on research, and good research is based on trust. That pyramid is likely to collapse if data ethics and security are not rigidly observed, safeguards put in place, rules and guidelines observed religiously, and procedures followed closely in our handling of consumer data, no matter how it is obtained – if not, it won’t be much good anymore.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 . . .