THINKing

5 Best Posts - January 2010

We had some very popular posts in January - some old and some new. I thought I’d share them with you.

1. 8 Ways To Use Twitter Lists
2. Twittering Journalists
3. Be Relevant
4. When Billboards Go Bad
5. 7 Ways To Kickstart Your 2010 Marketing 

What’s your favorite?

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#1 With A Bullet

Old radio guys like me remember the phrase “#1 With A Bullet.” This was what you said about a hit record (wow, does anyone else remember records?) that was #1 on the chart and continuing to sell well.

Well, I want to know what marketing tactic is #1 with a bullet on your 2010 list.  eMarketer seems to think that email may be at the top of many marketers’ lists, followed by social media, search and advertising.

The real news out of eMarketer is this,

Combining social media and e-mail marketing is a growing trend. More than four in 10 business executives said integrating the two tactics was one of their most important e-mail marketing initiatives for 2010, just after improving performance and targeting and growing opt-in lists.

Now, integrating email and social media is not just including links in your emails to your social media profiles. It could include cross-promoting newsletter content on your blog or even polling your followers on Twitter and using the results in your blog and enewsletter.

Are you integrating your email and social media programs? What else tops your list? Tell us about it, won’t you?

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Marketing’s Magic Bullet

Do you believe there is a marketing magic bullet? A lot of people do.

Hundreds of “consultants” make millions of dollars each year teaching seminars and boot camps, and selling newsletters about marketing’s magic bullet - that one simple thing you can do to fill up your register with virtually no effort on your part.

People buy this tripe because they want “simple” and “no effort” ways to move their business forward.

All those magic bullet consultants are wrong. I have the secret and I am going to share it, but you won’t be happy about it.

My marketing magic bullet: focus, discipline and consistency. Yes, my magic bullet involves some work on your part.

Focus requires you to define your audiences, learn about their behavior, and then provide relevant and believable information, communicated in an original, impactful fashion.

Discipline necessitates developing a marketing plan and implementing it aggressively. Your plan must also include a sales element. I know businesses that market and then just expect clients to flock to them with wallets in hand. Unfortunately for these businesses, it requires some effort on their part. Sorry, no passive income.

Finally, we come to consistency. This means implementing your program even after you are tired of it. And don’t change your message and marketing tactics on a whim. The race goes to the marathon man, not the sprinter.

Some other smart people agree with me. Business Coach Brent Dees says, “You can do anything, but you can’t do everything. If you focus, you can accomplish your goals.” Friend Bill Loeffler used to tell clients, “We can’t do everything. Let’s pick three marketing tactics and do them right.”

Remember: focus, discipline and consistency. Unlike those other consultants, I won’t bill you for that magic bullet. Lock and load.

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7 Ways To Kickstart Your 2010 Marketing

It’s 2010, now what? Have you completed your marketing planning or did you leave it to the last minute? No matter. We have 7 ideas of things you can do to kickstart your marketing.

Define Your Customers.  I had a client one time who told me that “all carbon-based lifeforms” were the targets of his advertising. Needless to say, I quickly disabused him of that notion. If you want to spend your money wisely, this is the#1 thing you can do right now for your marketing effort.

Focus On Current Customers. I know that you want to go out and take down that new business buffalo, but you’ll get a greater return by getting more business from current customers.

Get Referrals. If you have done a good job for existing customers, they will tell their friends about you. But you need a strategy to make this happen.

Activate Your Customers.  It is no secret that I believe email is still one of the best ways to generate goodwill, referrals and business.  Plan your email attack to activate customers now.

Open Your Wallet. I’ve been accused of being against paid advertising. I am not. I’m just against unplanned, poorly focused advertising. Some of your competitors are still weak from the recent economic strife. You still have an opportunity to kill the weak, if you’ll spend some money smartly to take market share.

Be Sociable.  Humans - being human - love social interaction, particularly of the face-to-face variety. Always have, always will. So, look for ways to add human interaction to your marketing. Also, reexamine your approach to social media.  

Be Tactical. First off, let me say that I’m a strategy kind of guy. But sometimes you just need to do something to get your marketing off dead center.

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Of Spokesmen & Sluts

I would never recommend that a client select a celebrity to be a spokesman for its products. Period. End of story. I know the potential benefits of using the right celebrity to draw attention to your company, product or service. I just don’t think it is worth the possible problems.

Celebrities often seem to have more than their share of moral failings. So, when they fall off the straight and narrow path, the accompanying crash is louder than it would be for you or I.

Whether it’s a pro golfer running around with porn stars and sluts, an angelic faced Ivory Snow pitchwoman who turns out to be a porn star or the world’s best swimmer taking hits off a bong,  if you align your brand too closely with a celebrity, you are asking for trouble. You are ceding the brand to someone over whom you have no control.

I’d rather tie my brand to a brand promise  - the statement I make to customers that spells out what they should expect in interactions with me, my people, as well as my products and services. Here, I have some control.

Then, there’s the whole question of whether the celebrity overshadows the brand. Can you name a celebrity and correctly identify the companies for which he or she speaks? It’s like beer commercials that rely on humor to get your attention but once they are over, you can’t name the brand because the commercial didn’t tether the humor to the brand promise.

What do you think about the value of celebrity spokesmen?

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Time To Plan

There’s usually some downtime at work around the holidays. What are you doing with your break? I’m using mine to meet with clients and prospects and to complete my planning for 2010. Do you have a marketing plan for the year? What new items are you incorporating into your plan?

Here are a few things I’m thinking about for 2010.

How much should I budget - both in terms of my time and money - toward marketing and PR? Does it make sense to spend it in traditional marketing, in PR, in direct marketing, in social media or in some combination?

Have the media habits of my clients and prospects - marketers and HR executives in Fortune 1000 companies - changed? With which media are they spending more time and which ones have they abandoned? Where is their pain in 2010? Are they still short-staffed and looking for outside resources to round out their teams?

Based on some of the research I’m seeing, it looks like marketing budgets will be up a bit this year.  According to eMarketer,

Next year, while broadcast television, radio, newspaper and magazine spending continue to downsize, though more slowly than in 2009, online ad spending will enjoy a nice bump-up: eMarketer currently forecasts 5.5% growth. And the increase won’t all come from search—banner ads will grow 3.3%, and online video will jump by 40%.

This is shaping up perfectly for My Creative Team, since we have a great deal of expertise in the online environment and in developing flash animation and corporate video for online use.

LinkedIn now connects me to 52 million professionals. Is there a better way to utilize my nearly 600 connections on this social platform? How can I use LinkedIn’s advertising capabilities to reach my target audience, specifically the HR audience? We develop a great deal of employee communication and training materials for Nucor, and would like to expand into HR with other Fortune 1000 firms.

Does a My Creative Team presence on Facebook still make sense since we are focused on Fortune 1000 contacts?

Tell us what you are thinking about. We’d love to hear your thoughts on how you plan to market in 2010.

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Be Relevant

It comes as no surprise to me that Americans are trying harder than ever to avoid advertising. According to a new study by Synovate,

More than four in 10 US consumers said they were skipping ads on TV and the radio as well as avoiding Websites with intrusive ads more in 2009 than they were the year before.

Why, you ask? Because advertising is increasingly less relevant. We’ve discussed this before: advertising needs to be relevant, original and impactful or consumers will avoid it like the plague. And they certainly won’t share the ad with their friends.

When asked about positive ad-related activities, such as searching for advertisements online, sharing and discussing ads with friends, or following brands on Facebook and Twitter, responses were in the single digits. Most consumers reported never doing any such activities.

Relevant ads get shared. But most ads aren’t relevant because the advertiser hasn’t done the hard part: determining who his target audience is from a demographic and psychographic perspective. The more you know about the customer, the easier it is for your creatives to develop relevant, original and impactful messages, and to determine the best ways and vehicles through which to disseminate your messages.

But I’m not letting the agencies off the hook here either. Too often, the agency goes for the easy, humorous approach because they know that using humor increases likeability of the brand. Here’s the problem with that: they inject the humor but leave the brand message out of the equation. How many times have you laughed at a beer commercial only to say after it was over, “whose ad was that?”

Remember, understand your customer and ensure your agency is developing relevant, original and impactful ads for you, or save your money for something besides advertising.

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Marketing Spending Pays Off

Well, here’s a big surprise: small businesses which spend more during a downturn actually do better financially. Marketing professionals have been giving this advice to businesses of all sizes since the first recession. But too many business leaders make marketing their first, instead of their last, cut. It’s nice to have some empirical data to prove our assertion.

According to the “Small Business Marketing Health Check” report from Hurwitz & Associates, there is a correlation between small businesses that are doing well and greater marketing spending. Almost two-thirds of small businesses that expected increased revenues had raised or planned to raise marketing spending, compared with just 32% to 36% of businesses with flat or declining revenues.

During previous recessions, American Business Press has sponsored two studies on marketing expenditures, and the group found that:

- cutting spending on marketing and advertising during a recession produces negative short and long-term results in relation to sales and profits

-  additionally, during the 1974 - 75 recession years, the study found that companies not cutting marketing had higher sales and net income during those years and the two following years compared to companies which cut in either or both recession years.

But you have to be smart. A recession is not a time for profligate spending. You need to determine what is working best in terms of immediate lead generation and sales. Luckily, this time we have access to lower cost, easier to track digital media.

The previously mentioned “Small Business Marketing Health Check” indicates that smaller businesses were shifting away from traditional media and toward social media, email newsletters and search.

“The survey clearly reveals that the use of low-cost Web-based marketing tools is playing a strategic role in helping businesses succeed,” said Laurie McCabe, partner, Hurwitz & Associates, in a statement. “Making a few changes to incorporate more online tools into the marketing mix seems to be a key ingredient to small business success.”

What are you doing to tweak your marketing during this recession? Let us know.

Related articles:

Retailers Boost Spending on Holiday Advertising

How To Thrive In A Recession

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Smart Customers

Your customers are smart, but as marketers, we often misconstrue what they are telling us. We’ve written about this before but thought about it again today when I read a piece by Valeria Maltoni entitled “Your Customers Don’t Know What They Want.” Maltoni says,

Whenever you design a survey, a feedback form, write a phone script - throw away everything you know about your product and service. Your customers and prospective customers are not in your head - they don’t have your same history and assumptions about what you ask. Instead, look to capture the outcome they’re seeking. What job are they trying to do?

 It’s not that customers don’t know what they want, it is that they don’t know the possibilities.

Krispy Kreme gives us a prime example of asking the right questions and actually listening to their smart customers. They didn’t ask the customers what they wanted in a donut. They asked questions that got to the heart of the Krispy Kreme brand experience. Consumer input brought about the “Hot, Now” signs and the drive-through window.

Maltoni suggests that marketers ask questions and listen to customers for,

• indications as to how they’re solving a problem now or thinking through it
• hints that the second answer is where you should focus
• clues as to what gets their hearts racing in addition to their minds going

Listening to your customers is always good, particularly in a reccessionary period.

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Social Media: A Tactic Seeking A Strategy

Every time some new tool comes on the scene that possibly could be used in marketing or advertising, organizations jump on it with no forethought. The tactic du jour is social media.  A recent survey indicates that a majority of media buyers are adding social media to their 2010 budgets.  According to the 2010 Media Planning Intelligence Study from the Center for Media Research,

57.7% of respondents “ideally” plan, and 56.3% “realistically” plan to include social media in their media plans next year. That finding is significant, because it shows the rapid speed with which social media, including social networks like Facebook, micro-blogging services such as Twitter, and other new and emerging formats connecting people to each other online have taken a precedent with both consumers and marketing and advertising industry professionals.

Now, if you ask these buyers why they want to add social media to the advertising mix, you won’t get much in the way of solid, credible support for getting on the social media bandwagon. They want to be there because it is all the rage. Hello, people! What happened to hard-nosed number-driven media planning?

I ran across this piece from ClickZ Columnist Sean Carton, who agrees with me that this trend is worrisome.  Says Carton,

Sure, plenty of clients (and prospects) I’ve spoken to in the past year or so made vague noises about viral video or being on Facebook or tweeting, but when I’ve pressed them for why they want those things, few can give me an answer.

They have been hypnotized by the steady media drumbeat extolling the virtues of social media. They, too, are probably being pressured by clients and organizational higher ups to add social media to the plan, strategy or not.  It is up to us to help determine whether social media makes sense for our organizations.  And if it does make sense, what should our approach be? Like every other media decision since time immemorial, your target audiences will direct you to the appropriate decision.

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