Worth your time

Advertising as we know it is quickly heading towards extinction. Many would argue that it’s already extinct. This isn’t as gloomy as it might sound however because it is being replaced by more accessible, affordable, and powerful methods of interacting with your customers. The opportunities are so massive that it is difficult to understate them.

The only way to keep up with these changes is to get engaged with the technology and jump in. It also helps to read like it’s going out of style. Here are two fantastic (and free!) resources that are well worth your time if you have an interest in seeing where it’s all going and why.

The Cluetrain Manifesto

This book has been around for a while (published in 2001) but it was definitely ahead of its time and is 100% relevant today. Want to know why your customers are smarter than you? Want to know what to do about it?

FEED: The Razorfish Consumer Experiment

Razorfish is one of the top digital marketing agencies out there. This report reflects their current research into how connected consumers are interacting with social technologies and how it applies to marketers.

Enjoy!

Patience

Looking for a sustainable competitive advantage? Try patience. There are no shortcuts to marketing your business. We live in a marketing culture obsessed with finding the right tactic to boost sales instantly; that one big idea that will immediately define a brand and differentiate it from competitors. Here’s a tip: If you really want a strategy that is unique, one that 90% of your competitors will not be able to duplicate, go with patience.

It’s not surprising that advertisers and agencies continue to search for a quick fix. We live in a world of instant gratification and, to be fair, there was a time when it was possible to get an edge on your competitor using clever offers pushed out to the masses with traditional advertising. So what’s changed? Attention. Today’s consumers are not paying attention to mass market advertising like they used to. There are too many ads in too many places and 99% are irrelevant to the audience that is exposed to them. Yet even with all the news of TV ads getting Tivo-ed, print ads being ignored, and direct mail going straight into to the trash you still see never ending streams of hopeful business owners putting hard earned capital on the line to run a 4 week campaign with full intentions of realizing a 2-to-1 return on that investment. Once they realize it’s not going as planned, they pull the ads and start searching for another magic bullet. It’s the marketing equivalent of yo-yo dieting.

Don’t fall into the trap. Once you have decided what and how you want to communicate with your customers, design a plan that allows you to implement that strategy consistently over a significant period of time. Treat your marketing plan as if it were any other operating expense such as rent, utilities etc. This will enable you to maintain a more consistent presence than your competitors and will allow your messaging to gradually seep into the minds of your customers. Realize that only a tiny fraction of the market is ready to buy your product at any given time. Your goal should be to reach customers well in advance of the transaction so that your brand is the first one they think of when the impulse hits.

Deception

The secret to great online marketing is relevancy. The reason so many advertisers get this wrong is because they try to apply traditional offline strategies to online campaigns. Traditional marketing is based on reach and frequency. The more eyeballs you can aggregate the better because only a small portion of the market is ready to buy at any given point in time. You cannot buy TV commercials that are only shown to people that need to buy a vacuum cleaner within the next 48 hours. This theory is completely reversed online. You can very easily, with a search campaign for example, buy ads that are only shown to people actively shopping for nickel-plated sprinkler heads or authentic decorative tumbleweeds. But with all the powerful targeting that online advertising offers, there is plenty of room for abuse.

When online advertisers start sacrificing relevancy for reach, they often end up with deception. If I know that there are millions of online searches occurring right now for “Halloween Costumes,” why not pay to run my ad for sprinkler heads every time someone searches for Halloween costumes? The reason of course is because no one wants to look at sprinkler heads when they are looking for Halloween costumes. That’s an extreme example but there are plenty of instances where the deception is subtle. Doc Searls has an interesting post about online advertising that demonstrates why deceptive advertising gimmicks not only do not work, but could very well “pop” the online advertising “bubble.”

The message for advertisers that want to get it right is simple – be relevant. The brilliance of online marketing lies in the ability to establish a true dialogue with people that are already interested in your business. It’s a quality, not quantity, based system.

Focus

People that plan advertising campaigns often spend a lot of time focusing on the negotiation and mechanics of purchasing ad space/time. It’s easy to get caught in this trap. Business owners naturally gravitate towards numbers as do the sales reps selling the products. Answering the “how many spots, banners, column inches, clicks etc. can I get for my budget” question seems like a logical way to gauge the kind of deal you are getting. There are two main problems with this philosophy. The first is that it is rarely useful or even possible to make a true value judgment about what you are purchasing using basic calculations such total budget/total units. The second – and most important – reason is that what you do with the advertising you purchase is infinitely more important than how much you actually buy.

Time and time again we have seen business owners or marketing directors spend months negotiating contracts and then scramble once the deal is done to come up with content. The message is almost an afterthought. This is a big mistake because the content of your message is the primary ROI driver. It does not matter how many extra commercials or other freebies you get if the messaging does not initiate a response. On the other hand even a terrible ad buy can often be salvaged if the content is remarkable.

If you are going to spend money marketing your business your focus should be on creating a relevant message that your customers will respond to. Do not make the mistake of spending all your time trying to figure out the nuances of negotiating advertising contracts or, even worse, delegating the task to a lower level employee. Find a professional media planning service that can create an optimal plan for your situation and let them do what they do best – negotiate great deals on your behalf. This frees your time to work on your message to make sure that the money you spend reaching out to your customers comes back to you in the form of increased sales.

Mixing old and new media

A while back I wrote this post about choosing an allocation strategy for online vs. offline media. My point was that it’s not such a good idea to write off anything that might be considered “old media” in favor of “new media” just because it’s fashionable at the moment. One of the main reasons for this is that large sections of the population are still relatively disengaged with the internet compared to the much smaller segment that can be considered fully engaged or “hyperconnected.” Steve Rubel has a great post on this that further illustrates the point.

Drucker’s wisdom

Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.

-Peter Drucker

5 steps to flawless advertising

1. Become comfortable with failure.
2. Test – Anything and everything that feels right. Start small.
3. Measure – Everything.
4. Optimize – Based on the data you collect during step #3.
5. Repeat.

Content factory

The Internet LOVES content. The only thing the Internet loves more than content is relevant and timely content that is updated frequently. Businesses that win in the age of online marketing will embrace that fact that they need to evolve into content factories.

Of course it’s not as if producing content is new for marketing people. We do it all the time. The difference in the online era is that content is now A) free or nearly free to produce in digital form and B) free or nearly free to distribute to the world. This is a significant departure from the days when options were limited to broadcast television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and billboards as the primary means of delivering marketing messages. If you spend thousands (or millions) of dollars to produce an ad and then have to spend 10x that to actually run it there is going to be a very finite limit to the frequency with which you can update your messaging. And once the budget runs out the message, for all practical purposes, goes away.

Marketing on the Internet is different. Producing digital content can be as easy and inexpensive as typing a blog entry. You can do it as often as you want and the incremental cost is essentially free. Sending out 10,000 direct mail pieces costs thousands of dollars. Sending a digital newsletter to 10,000 subscribers via email is nearly free. Same thing with online video. With a video camera that costs less than dinner at a nice steakhouse you can shoot and edit video that can then be uploaded to YouTube for free and distributed worldwide. Blendtec has done a brilliant job of leveraging this concept.

When you feed the content-loving Internet with frequently updated, relevant content about your business the foundation of a powerful online presence is built. Just having a website is not enough. You want to have a presence. The good news is that there are very few barriers to creating all this stuff. The bad news is that many businesses aren’t doing it yet.

If you have been slow to start an ongoing content creation and distribution strategy for the Internet, start one now. Add value to your website on a continuous basis. Your customers want to know more about who you are, what you do, and why you do it. Publish information regularly so that each time your customers come back there is something new to engage them. Give them plenty of ways to join the conversation and then listen to the feedback you get.

Tracking

Asking people where they heard about your business is not a tracking strategy. The data that you get from this kind of informal polling just isn’t that accurate or useful. Decades of mass-media advertising has led to the evolution of powerful defense mechanisms that enable consumers to tune-out most of the ad impressions delivered to them. In other words, they are ignoring your ads. At least they are trying to. It’s a survival instinct. If everyone paid attention to every bit of information flying at them each day, nothing would ever get done. As a result, if you ask a customer “how did you hear about us?” chances are that you will get a random or made-up answer.

Just because the informal polling method doesn’t work does not mean that you cannot effectively track your advertising. One of the easiest ways is to embed campaign-specific offers into your ad content. If you run a special financing deal exclusively on cable TV you can keep track of how many customers ask for it. Online is even easier. By creating a campaign-specific landing page you can measure results by monitoring the traffic to that page. Text messaging is another simple way to track response. It’s now very easy to have your customers send a text message to a specific number to get a coupon or subscribe to a mailing list.

If you do not already, start making embedded tracking mechanisms a part of every campaign you run. The examples above are just a few of the many ways you can do this. It can be a little uncomfortable in the beginning because it will highlight failure as well as it identifies success but the benefits are countless.

Something worth finding

Advertising used to be about finding large groups of people congregating and then interrupting them with a message. Kind of like walking into the mall with a megaphone or the town crier standing on a box on Main Street. Many businesses still approach it that way and wonder why their ROI is dwindling. Things have changed.

From this point forward stop thinking about finding your customers and start thinking about making something worth finding. Your customers are already searching for your products. Make sure that your resources are being adequately allocated towards giving them something they will be thrilled with when they find it. Working this way turns your customers into your sales force. Your job is to be sales support. Give them something great to sell and they will not only find new customers for you, they will also do it in ways that are infinitely more efficient than anything you could accomplish with a ‘traditional’ advertising campaign.

Once you wrap your head around this concept it will become mush easier to figure out how to approach ‘new media’ such as blogs, social networks, and online communities. As an added benefit, you’ll also start to see new ways to incorporate traditional media to amplify your efforts.