davidpoulos.com

Category: Marketing Cures

  • Make Your Marketing Dollars Work As Hard As You Do

    Make Your Marketing Dollars Work As Hard As You Do

    Marketers are typically asked to justify their expenditures, to craft a nearly inviolate budget often as much as two years ahead of time, and to stick to it to control spending. Rarely are they asked if those expenditures are the most cost-efficient solutions, or if allocating more resources to a particular item might improve its resulting gains over above the spend, by scale or efficiency. Corporations with a culture of control focus more on the outflow than the value of the resulting inflow when discussing marketing expenditure. Based on years of experience with both winners and losers in the corporate and non-profit world, I can honestly say that this might be a losing approach to marketing.

    Corporate leaders often assume that marketing is ALWAYS doing the most cost-effective thing to achieve results, based on a cost-conscious culture and the nature of marketing as an accountable function. Spend “X”, and you can usually count on “Y” coming back. But what if you doubled “X” and “Y” quadrupled or quintupled? Would they have approved the additional expense at the beginning of the year, prior to the effort? Probably not. In some cases, more time is spent trying to justify expenditure than on creating the method and message of the expense. To me, that’s crazy!

    Fortunately, in today’s expanded culture of innovation, a business climate rife with entrepreneur-ism and start-up fever, fast-cycle test-fail-repeat operations are becoming more prominent, and with that comes an easing of the penny-pinching, along with a realization that “if we try ten things and six work, we’re ahead of the game” for marketing departments lead by enlightened senior executives.

    Finding such an enlightened marketing leader requires some work, but the effort is almost universally worth it based upon the game-changing results that can be had as a result of their efforts when supported by senior leadership. They are often cloaked in other experiences, other disciplines, and usually don’t fit the linear career paths that the HR Department is trained to look for. Such outliers can really move the needle, and are worth the effort to find. But that’s not the whole story.

    A quick analysis of your marketing expenditure will show you where the money is going, and each item should provide some indication as to what it’s returning for that spend, either in dollars, or results of some kind. If it doesn’t, some sort of metric needs to be “baked in” to that activity so that you can make it accountable. Once that’s in place in the budget, sort and rank the items by results, not by cost, and see if the order changes from the cost-based ranking. Comparing those two lists seems simple, but it can be an eye-opener when seeking an edge, by finding inefficiencies and reallocating resources to drive growth and revenue generation. Like the stock market or Las Vegas, you double down on the winners and bag the losers quickly, to mitigate risk and drive growth of return.

    The other advantage to this type of approach is that you avoid the “cheap trap” of not thinking large enough, based on a lack of faith in the results. Thinking bigger has a really strong track record of success, doing everything as cheap as possible doesn’t, because many great ideas, initiatives, campaigns and other activities die from capitol starvation before they ever get a chance to come to fruition. If the initial tests are even reasonably favorable, feeding that idea has a 2000% chance of succeeding over the one that breaks even and stays small. Good testing programs and solid research mitigate that risk even further, and will highlight even greater opportunities as results come in and new ideas surface based on their successes. It’s a good day when the winners spawn more winners.

    Good ideas, good research, patience and faith combine to drive success in marketing. As a famous marketer for a large consumer products company once was rumored to utter, “every dime I spend on events and marketing comes back to our company dressed up like a quarter.” When you scale up, double-down on winners, and feed the best ideas, that quarter quickly becomes a dollar.

  • 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!

  • Insight Versus Data – Don’t Mistake The Two

    Insight Versus Data – Don’t Mistake The Two

    Contrary to popular belief, not only can’t “everyone do marketing”, but the myth that “the Marketing department dreams this stuff up every day . . .” still persists in modern corporate America. I’d like to dispel that last myth, and cover one other as well, that “We have lots of customer data, we can use that to guide our copy and creative platforms with greater success,” that has arisen again and again in discussions of big data with regard to marketing.

    Myth 1 – Marketing comes up with offers, images, copy, color palette, tag lines, slogans, ads and social media posts on their own, every day, just any old idea that surfaces can be put into play and used.

    Nothing could be further from the truth. This myth originated with and has been propagated by those who DON’T work regularly in marketing. Those who are on the outside looking in, so to speak, see a hive of analytical and creative activity going on, with seemingly little input from them or anyone else on the premises. This makes sense on it’s surface, because aside from the initial vetting of a campaign internally, people in the building have little to do with outreach marketing of the firm, unless by some chance they fit the target customer profile as well. We’re not marketing to staff, folks, we’re raising awareness among some very specific individuals outside of here, and their input is used heavily by our marketing pros to shape, craft and refine messages, offers, imagery, brand resonance, media choices and a host of other elements to make sure that those outreach efforts are as successful and cost p-effective as humanly possible. We work in a vacuum at our own peril, and avoid it like the plague as a result.

    Just because we create multi-page printed pieces, video and radio copy, social media posts and potentially entertaining memes and vines, doesn’t mean we’re all having “fun” in the marketing department, “making creative stuff up” all day.

    Myth 2 – “We have lots and lots of data points from our customers, we can use that in our marketing efforts, we don’t need customer insight research,” is the refrain we’ve heard.

    Not true. Customer insights are gleaned through a variety of methods, using all kinds of data. No single source is likely to yield enough information to form a truly overarching customer insight that will effectively cover the segment and guide creative and media elements accurately. Most customer data gathered today is transactionally-based data, either that they purchased something or attended something, (to become a customer), or relational data, (like logging into a website or social media outlet to view a product, referred or recommended our product to someone, or as part of a search). These are very tiny snapshots of singular incidents in the past, and we have no way of knowing what may have lead to or motivated those actions, or if they will ever take place again. Taken in aggregate, they can give you an inkling of preferences or trends, or show patterns with regard to seasonality, economic cycles, or changing needs, but they do not fully and accurately reflect any real human truth with regard to your product or company.

    In short, customer insights should be derived from an amalgam of different inputs, including former customers, potential prospects who fit the audience, staff, industry stakeholders and a host of others to provide a fully rounded, robust portrait of a single verifiable insight that can be extrapolated across the full sector, and applied to actionable efforts to drive emotional resonance and push to purchase. Short of that, true customer insight derived from a single set of data will likely be flawed and less than fully successful in driving marketing results forward.

    Gaining, analyzing and actualizing customer insights involves a specific process, involves a significant number of people, and still needs to have the resulting insight tested in the real world before being applied across the board in outreach marketing efforts. Anything less, and the insights you should be seeking are about your own marketing chops . . .

  • When To Give The Customer A Quick In-And-Out

    When To Give The Customer A Quick In-And-Out

    For those of you with less than pure thoughts, got ya! I don’t write on customer service issues very often, once or twice a year, and it usually has to do with how to treat them with respect, how to enhance their experience, or how to engage them more thoroughly and for longer. But sometimes, you just want to get in, get yer stuff and get out, and that’s not always a bad thing.

    The thought of speed in a transaction is a foundation in certain sectors of brick and mortar retail – groceries, convenience, gasoline, and the like for instance. They aren’t large footprint locations, don’t have much room for folks to be roaming around, and studies have shown that they often are in a hurry or have a set list of things they need, and that total receipt won’t change much due to them lingering. They make up for this by providing a lot of opportunities for impulse buying while they have you the most captive – at the cash register. Some of these locations are so ardent about this, that they have arranged the items packed so closely together you can hardly see the cashier for the racks of stuff! But you can still get in, pick up your choices off of easily selectable shelves and quick-grab racks, get in a line (if there even is one) and pay inside of a couple of minutes, seemingly regardless of the number of items.

    In that instance, that’s good customer service – you gave the customer exactly what they wanted – speed. Their expectations were met and you’ve given them exactly what they needed, a no-frills transactional approach to commerce without a lot of fuss or conversation. Some of this is possible due to technology – they have the fastest register software available and the simplest, most common-denominator pricing and indexing for inventory of anyone in the business of retail. But some of it has to do with design, layout, and most importantly, human behavior.

    The reason people shop at convenience stores is exactly that – convenience. They don’t go bargain hunting, they don’t argue over the $3 mini bag of Cheeze Curlz, they don’t bring coupons (there aren’t any), and they often aren’t terribly loyal when it comes to brand. They’ll pay a premium for the speed and won’t argue about it with the cashier, who says as little as possible during the transaction. They’re not folksy, they’re not chatty, they don’t know you most of the time, and don’t plan on seeing you again, ever. No need to form a relationship, just bag the chips and the soft drink and move on.

    That’s not to say that you feel rushed, or hurried, or that the service is brusk or rude, because its not. It’s just devoid of emotion, good, bad, or indifferent. They serve a function, do it well, and please the customer – job done. For the cashier, this is a relatively simple, boring to the point of inanity, potentially dangerous job, often on an odd shift, done for the short-term based on a dearth of marketable skills and a need for capital – it’s not a career position. For the customer, it’s a quick pit stop with a specific purpose, no browsing or emotion required, and if they happen to find something whimsical or amusing at the register, or something there reminds them of another item they need, so much the better for everyone – what the heck, it’s only two bucks, right?

    Other types of retailers can benefit from this approach as well, specifically online. Everyone’s focus in the early days of web commerce was to extend “dwell time” – how long are they lingering on the site, what are they looking at, what page and what item draws their attention, were key metrics. Consumers were still getting used to shopping online, and there had yet to be developed standards of usability or code norms for websites, so the customer had to not only learn how to find the items they were looking for, but how to work the website in order to get them, from the shopping presentation matrix to the sizing and customizing of the item, to calculating the shipping time and cost, to the payments page(s), it was a learning experience, not so much a shopping experience.

    More recently, shoppers have gotten vary familiar with all the bells and whistles of online commerce, web designers have figured out how to present non-static digital items for greatest effect, and how to lay out pages intuitively so that your eye and cursor travels to what you want almost effortlessly. It’s a strong advantage, and only recently have online shoppers been allowed the freedom to use their own data to speed the process along. For commerce sites you frequent, there is significant data from your prior transactions that allows both you and the retailer to benefit.

    I frequent a couple of gift sites for things I send to clients for the holidays, and after a few years, I can visit them, select, buy, address and ship about 20 items in less than 30 minutes – blazing speed compared to a trip to a crowded mall, let alone the gift wrapping, boxing, shipping, and distribution time and cost. All the addresses are already there, my selections from last year and prior are logged, and it reminds me if, in my shopping haze, I duplicate a previous gift – nice feature for us oldsters. The shipping is often either included or free based on frequency and volume, and I know the quality and presentation are top notch with out having to investigate further – a quick in and out transaction that by no means diminishes the thoughtfulness of sending a gift to a loyal client.

    Sometimes providing a great customer experience really means delivering on your brand promise, as long as it’s been accurately telegraphed ahead of time. I know the convenience store doesn’t have premium brands, I know their selection is rather limited to a certain type of merchandise, and I know that I’m not going to get a bargain, or be met at the door and asked if I’d like a sample of Chai latte while I shop, or that the cashier is going to gushingly ask if there’s “anything else she can do for me.” But I also know they’ll have what I need to get by, right now, and get me back out and on the road without having to do anything special, or even say a word. Sometimes, that’s a great experience!

  • 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.

  • Deep Branding Is The Real Thing . . . How To Achieve It And Keep It Thriving

    Deep Branding Is The Real Thing . . . How To Achieve It And Keep It Thriving

    There are an awful lot of misconceptions about what branding is, how branding works, what purpose it serves, how much time, money, and energy should be devoted toward brand and branding activities. We see it in our practice, usually from business owners whose job it is not to ponder such things at any depth, but to have enough grasp to understand when someone more informed uses the term in a meeting.

    This isn’t new.

    Ad agencies and their clients have been hosting a debate about branding activity for decades, usually to persuade their clients to increase their spend on TV and radio branding ads for their products, if for no other reason than the products brand was a multi-faceted one, which required a lot more work to encapsulate in a :30 spot, and it was easier to do several ads with different focus or messaging and run them all in series to get the job done.

    Most purveyors of products or services have a sense of what brand is, from a rather shallow perspective – in their minds it involves logos, online buzz, color palette, some minor but repetitive messaging points, and that’s where their story ends. I contend, along with some other professionals, that the surface stuff that gets readily recognized as branding is just the tip of the iceberg.

    Branding in our experience involves a showcase of authenticity, consistency, values, reliability of delivery, and transparency of presentation that transcends all the hype, the spin, the gloss, and is a set of characteristics at the root of why the company and its products work and perform as they do. The more the members of a given company live, breathe, work and display the characteristics of the firm as a whole, the more effective those branding efforts become. That level of authenticity can be achieved, but it requires a company-wide commitment to those same values, and a mind-set that allows each and every employee to deliver on that promise, no matter what it is, each and every day for each and every interaction with customers, vendors and others. That’s a pretty tall order for most companies, but look how successful those who achieve it can become.

    Some great examples in a number of sectors include: L.L. Bean (who doesn’t know that their stuff is rugged and practical, but also can be returned over it’s life, no questions asked, no fuss, free), BMW (widely through of as at the peak of commercial automotive performance engineering for the masses) Harley-Davidson (tough, patriotic, ruggedly individual customers who have a passion for things mechanical and cool), Campbells (feel-good, inexpensive, but consistently healthy and sensible simple meals in a can), Clorox (when you want something white, clean, back to it’s basic elements, synonymous with bleach) and so on. It’s all about delivering something people desire consistently over years and holding that trust with the customer to deliver in a way that’s familiar.

    For those in the know, branding isn’t a fad or a new buzzword – it’s a way of being. It’s not just the packaging, it’s what and how that package is delivered, time after time, to those who know and love it. To those with a slighter understanding of the idea, the buzz talk may be overwhelming, even tiresome, because their definition is so limited and they don’t see what all the fuss is about.

    There are quite a few business tomes penned by quite informed and well-educated authors on the subject, but I won’t make any recommendations here as I would certainly run afoul of those I omitted. Suffice it to say that if you select a few of these to read in your spare time, you’ll come away with the clear idea that few have a clear idea of what it is, and how to maximize it’s value – the top practitioners of the art are the ones that really get it, and they’re too busy working to maintain and burnish their company’s brands to write books. Branding is still as much art as science, and those with an intuitive understanding of the art, with a gut sense of what their company’s brand represents will be the victor in the war for consumer mindshare.

  • 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.