THINKing

I Feel So Used

Many agency people steer clear of clients who have never before utilized the services of outside creative resources. There often is a steep learning curve on how to properly utilize an agency most efficiently and effectively.  But often even corporations which regularly use outside resources also regularly misuse them. So, let’s review some best practices in getting the most out of your agency, no matter where you are in the marketing spectrum.

Agree On Expectations Upfront. Outline in writing your expectations and your objectives for the ad agency and its work. The larger and more comprehensive the project, the more important this becomes. The old adage is true: unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.

Team Up. You will get the best work if you treat the agency like a partner and not like a vendor. Share business data, sales goals and other crucial information with your agency partner.

You Are The Expert. Don’t expect your agency to know your business better, or even as well, as you do. The agency knows how to develop and communicate messages and may have some knowledge of your industry, but it is up to you to provide agency personnel with the benefit of your market expertise. Provide a background briefing covering such information as market size and key competitors. Additionally, there are certain basic things an agency needs to know whether it is working on collateral material, news releases or full-blown ad campaigns. A good agency will know the right questions to ask, such as those about the demographic, psychographic and geographic make-up of your audience, the benefit of the product or service featured, and the objective of the communication.

Keep An Open Mind. Yes, you are the expert, but you may be too close to the business. Sometimes you know too much for your own good, and it clouds your thinking. Your agency provides an objective opinion, and also acts as an advocate for the consumer who will be receiving your message. So, be open to suggestions from the agency on different approaches to the problem.

Let The Agency Do Its Job. You are a marketer, who may be creative, but you are not a fulltime copywriter or art director. For good reason, agencies hate the “I’ll know it when I see it” school of creative approval. So, for best results, don’t take concept A and try to merge it with concept B. And, please don’t let your spouse make the final decision on the work.

Edits Have Their Time & Place. Agencies don’t expect their work to get through the review process with no changes. But that is the time to make them. Copy should be approved before layout begins. Layout should be approved before the work heads to a printer. Remember, changes cost less at the beginning of the process than at the end.

It’s really all about proper communication between client and agency. Doing this improves the chances of developing effective communications that will achieve your objectives.

Do you have agency/client stories? Do tell.

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Green Content Marketing

Photo Courtesy of Morguefile
Hey, everyone is getting into the green movement. So, why not content marketers? When I was a reporter back in the 20th Century, we had a term for features that had a long shelf life. We called them evergreen. These were the items you could pull out again and again, season after season and re-run with only a bit of editing.

Content marketers need to get back on the green bandwagon by reusing, recycling and repurposing their content. Here are a few ways I do it.

Enewsletter to blog, blog to enewsletter. I do a monthly enewsletter called Think. Feel free to sign up. Typically, the newsletter has two fairly lengthy primary articles plus a series of briefs. All content is aimed at marketing professionals. This newsletter and my blog, THINKing (RSS feed), have discrete audiences. So, I am able to move slightly edited content back and forth between the two to reach these separate audiences.

Blog to blog. THINKing has had a surge in visitors, so I know that not everyone has seen all of the good content we have produced. Occasionally, I’ll run a feature like The Dusty Archives to showcase some of the most popular previous items.

Microblog to blog. Twitter, the microblogging service, offers another unique opportunity to repurpose content. I write short, pithy messages based on some of my recent content and post them on Twitter with a url bringing the interested back to the blog or to my Ezinearticle site for the rest of the story.

Article to white paper. If you develop a lot of content, as I do, and have been doing it for a while, you’ll build a good sized repository. So, I’ll often look through my articles to discover a theme. Once this is done, I can take several articles, string them together and Voila! I have a white paper like this media relations white paper.

White paper to blog. Once you have the white paper completed, you also can break it back down into bite-sized chunks for use on your blog.

Those are just a few Green Content Marketing ideas. How are you recycling content?

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Activate Your Customers With Email

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I love email. It still is the best customer communication tool there is. And email is a great way to bring the online and offline worlds together. Smart businesses use email to drive store traffic. The best brand interactions, IMHO, occur between real live people. So, let’s use our email list to bring customers and our employees together.

MediaPost’s Email Insider has an excellent feature on using email to drive store traffic. According to article author Chad White, there are a few reasons to inject some occasional channel bias into your email marketing,

First, email is good at driving sales to other channels. For instance, 86% of survey respondents made an in-store purchase as a result of receiving an email, according to a recent survey by Epsilon. Second, there’s been plenty of research that has found that multichannel shoppers spend more — and the more channels they interact with, the more they spend. Third, there’s often a business need to drive subscribers to a particular channel. And fourth, different channels are better at some things than others. So if you can break out of siloed thinking and take a holistic approach to sales, there are many opportunities.

Check out Email Insider, if you have an interest in email best practices. Have you used email to drive traffic, or boost sales online? Tell us about it.

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The Dusty Archives

I was strolling through the dusty THINKing archives the other day and realized how much good stuff was in here that you may have missed. So, I’m digging out the top 10 postings of all time. Enjoy.

Top 10 Story Starter Tips for Blocked Bloggers

What Customers Want

Patience? No, Let’s Kill Something

When Billboards Go Bad

Twittering Journalists

RSS 101 Top 16 Links to Get You Started

A Bigger Logo Necessitates A Smaller Idea

Search Me

Marketing By Mistake

Top 17 Media Relations Links

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Social Media News Round-Up

Now that LinkedIn has mastered how to monetize online social networking, it is out to do itself one better.

All about Twello

YCombinator: Twitter for Links

Facebook Becomes FriendFeed

Facebook in Court With Familiar Foe

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Links 6/25/2008

Advertise To Workers At Work To Influence Purchases

The results of a new study, conducted by consumer intelligence firm BIGresearch, into the media and shopping behavior of consumers at work, finds that Americans are spending 60% of their waking hours at work, more than ever before. Marketing chiefs are rethinking their ad budgets and advertisers are preparing to meet a new, highly coveted, yet entirely untapped demographic on their own beige-carpeted turf.

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Are you jiving your customers when you send them promotional materials? Editorial Emergency tells us that if you want a long-lasting customer relationship, you must be authentic in your copywriting.

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Do you have a single place to send the media, as well as prospective clients to find out everything there is to know about you and your business? The social media newsroom is just such a place. A SiteProNews article gets you up to speed on the topic.

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Are you using Flock yet? Flock is the social network browser that is built on Mozilla, the Firefox engine. The company’s website says that “Flock is focused on fundamentally evolving the browser, bringing a refreshing new approach to how people use and participate on the web and simplifying social and web-based applications by bringing them one step closer to the user and integrating them directly into the browser.”

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Help A Brother, Um, A Reporter, Out

I know you’ve often yearned to be part of ProfNet but just couldn’t make yourself pay for the privilege of getting reporters to actually ask you to pitch them.

Well, now there is a free service – yes, I said free – that connects you with reporters who are searching out experts for their stories. It is an email list run by Peter Shankman through his Help A Reporter Out website. It started out as a Facebook group and has now morphed into its own social network that connects thousands of reporters and experts.

You provide your email address and name, agree never to spam the reporters, and then you are emailed a list of queries a few times a day. Also, the service will never spam you either. So, give it a try. If you are a reporter, use this form.

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It’s About Experiences, Not Logos

A lot of marketing experts (self-proclaimed) would have you believe that a logo and corporate identity package is all there is to a brand. I know some businesses which want to change their logo regularly in hopes that it will somehow magically improve their brand and their business. Woe are they.

Smart marketers, however, know that the brand is the sum total of what people think about your organization, and that it is expressed in every contact customers have with you.

Marketing folk often are guilty of trying to make branding look more complex than it is. We come up with all sorts of branding terms: 3D branding, branding triad, brand harmonisation. Go here to see some definitions.

Branding is not complex but it is hard. It requires you to listen to customers and understand what they want from you. Discover what customers think of your brand. If they like your brand, keep delivering the experience consistently. If they don’t like it, fix it. Consistently communicate your brand message. Constantly monitor all of the above. Repeat.

Sometimes you must make a tough decision in order to protect the brand.

Consider Starbucks. It has a simple brand statement: A great coffee experience. It influences everything the company does from its logo, store design and employee selection, and even choice of toilet paper. I’m not making this up.

The story goes that some green-eyeshade-consultant found a way to shave costs significantly by changing over to one-ply TP. Starbucks’ marketers held firm for the two-ply because they knew that something as simple as cheap toilet paper can ruin the goodwill a brand has built.

Now one-ply may not degrade your brand equity, or Wal-Mart’s for that matter. But if Starbuck’s is keeping an eye on the toilet, shouldn’t you be ensuring your most basic “touchpoints” aren’t circling the drain? Your thoughts, please.

UPDATE: Jay Ehret waded into the conversation below. Here is his recent posting on getting a logo that defines your business. Worth the read.

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Hoover At Random

A few links for your dining and dancing pleasure:

Less than one-quarter of US Internet users ages 40 and over use social networking Web sites, according to the JWT BOOM/ThirdAge “Boomers, Healthcare and Interactive Media” study conducted last month.

Big brands are using social media like Twitter to further their aims.

To help you develop copy using appropriate corporate BS, try this jargon generator.

The Dallas Morning News is launching an interesting project this summer: a free, quick read version of the newspaper. Newspapers need to do more of this kind of thing if they are to survive.

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Is The Media’s Liberal Slip Showing?

I ran across an interesting poll from Rasmussen Reports concerning how Americans view media objectivity. According to the poll,

Just 17% of voters nationwide believe that most reporters try to offer unbiased coverage of election campaigns. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that four times as many—68%–believe most reporters try to help the candidate that they want to win.

As you would expect, Republicans have the least favorable view of media objectivity. 82 percent of Republicans believe the media are advocates rather than observers. Even Democrats (56 percent) and independents (69 percent) agreed with that view.

One of the most interesting findings, in my mind was this:

Voters have little doubt as to who is benefitting from the media coverage this year—Barack Obama. Fifty-four percent (54%) say Obama has gotten the best coverage so far. Twenty-two percent (22%) say McCain has received the most favorable coverage while 14% say that Hillary got the best treatment. At the other extreme, 43% say Clinton received the worst treatment from the media. Twenty-seven percent (27%) say the media was roughest on McCain and only 15% thought the media coverage was most unfair to Obama.

I have been looking for more recent figures on how journalists actually vote and with which party they are affiliated, but the latest I can find is from a 2004 study by the Media Research Center. That study found:

• More than half of the journalists surveyed (52%) said they voted for Democrat John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election, while fewer than one-fifth (19%) said they voted for Republican George W. Bush. The public chose Bush, 51 to 48 percent.

• When asked “generally speaking, do you consider yourself a Democrat, Republican, an Independent, or something else?” more than three times as many journalists (33%) said they were Democrats than said they were Republicans (10%).

• While about half of the journalists said they were “moderate,” 28 percent said they thought of themselves as liberals, compared to just 10 percent who said they were conservative.

• One out of eight journalists (13%) said they considered themselves “strongly liberal,” compared to just three percent who reported being “strongly conservative,” a four-to-one disparity.

What do you think? Is this view partially responsible for the loss of circulation by newspapers, and TV News drop in viewership?

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