Yes, but how do you prove it works?
Mark Earls believes that marketing "communications" is the wrong focus for marketers and that instead, we should be making sure our client/company does things that are worth writing about. He writes:
"Too often communications seek to simulate and fake the interest that companies, products and services are missing. Or distract from the very obvious lack of interest.
No, it's much more about doing things, baking in the interest otherwise faked and then suggesting and encouraging consumers and employees to do stuff together around this."
It makes a lot of sense: people increasingly ignore advertising and PR spin so the effectiveness to sell stuff is reducing. At the same time, if you do something special/interesting/important people can now spread the word for you with a click of their mouse. Even without a PR agency.
But it's not happening very much. Why?
It's hard to demonstrate tangible results quickly. The pressure to deliver results and outcomes NOW is immense for everyone. To do what Mark is talking about requires a significant investment in time and resources.
It involves people across the company to work together in a way that they are not used to. It takes a significant amount of leadership to revolutionise the way you look at marketing.
Anyone who is involved in marketing knows how hard it is to get support for initiatives that are medium to longterm in any case. Especially if you can't provide any proof that it will have a measurable result.
So, to get there, how do we demonstrate that "doing things, baking in the interest" is more effective than doing what we are used to doing? And how much more effective will it be?
I support the idea. I think it's what true marketing is all about. The challenge is to come up with a strategy to introduce this approach that will cut the mustard with the people who are paid to think in revenue and profit. Maybe we should make this a new online project for marketers. It is The Age of Conversation after all.
Update: sincere apologies to the owner of the photo I took off Flickr: I can't find your name anymore so no attribution...
The biggest hole in paid search marketing strategies?
The amount of money being spent on Google adwords and other paid search marketing today is significant, including a lot of small businesses. One of the key success factors is that it's relatively simple to execute. Maybe simple to execute, but not necessarily simple to get results, especially in B2B marketing.
Getting a click through to your site (at the right price) is not necessarily the key challenge: it's getting a result from that click. A lead, and preferably a qualified one.
So what is the biggest hole in most b2b paid search strategies?
I'd argue that it is the landing page (the page the ad clicks through to). Although significant dollars are invested by companies to get their ads on the top of the list, once a potential customer clicks through, they end up on the home page which doesn't do anything for them.
Jon Miller has an interesting business in Marketo, which provides B2B marketing automation software and shares some great tips in a guest post at Online Marketing Blog: Ten tips for lead generation landing pages.
Read the post, but the ten points in short are: (my "bolding")
1. First Impressions Matter
2. Have an Offer
3. Remove The Navigation
4. Use Graphics Wisely
5. Make Your Content Scan-able
6. Only Ask What You Really Need
7. Capture Implicit Information
8. Have Reasons to Give Valid Info
9. Say Thank You
10. Test… But Don’t Over Test
If you are currently investing in paid search and you don't follow these guidelines currently, I bet you'll improve your results by taking this to heart.
(photo courtesy Astrovine)
Does blogging help your search results? You bet.
In case you wondered how effective blogging is for search results, it is very effective.
B2B marketing and branding (or business marketing and branding) is our key area of specialisation. Below you see where my blog ranked for some key search terms relating to my business:
Business branding - 3rd out of 55,300,000
B2B marketing - 5th out of 2,960,000
Business marketing - 7th out of 523,000,000
(Searching www.google.com.au, which is what my market are most likely to use)
In case you forgot what marketing is all about
David Armano from Logic+Emotion gives us something to chew on. I love that man's thinking.
The problem with the latest
Most marketers love the latest idea, strategy or tool. Yes, you too I suspect. There is a good reason for it, we are constantly looking for a competitive edge, either for our company or for our clients. Agencies and consultants are hired for their expertise, their ideas and their ability to execute after all.
The problem is the silver bullet syndrome. Something new comes along (CRM, email marketing, social media marketing; you fill in the rest) and suddenly this is the panacea to all marketing problems. So everyone is an instant expert and the currency of the latest idea quickly devalues to the latest fad.
Spike Jones from Brains On Fire laments the fact that Word of Mouth Marketing is going that way:
I’m over it (the term, not the practice). And I guess I knew it would happen sooner or later: every marketer in the free world is either trying to give advice on word of mouth marketing or says that they are practicing it. From big ad agencies to the guy working out of his garage.
I don’t buy it.
And a bit further down:
The words “word of mouth marketing” are becoming watered-down and sucked into the vast nothingness that is marketing-speak. And while it saddens me, I guess it was to be expected.
Word of Mouth is not new of course. Cavemen used it I'm sure. But talking about Word of Mouth marketing makes you sound as though you are in touch with the latest. Actually making it work for a client is a very different story of course. "Because big ideas are easy doing stuff is hard".
So in time, everyone moves on to the next silver bullet and the people who actually execute something like a word of mouth campaign do what they have always done; make sure their clients talk about the results they have achieved. Sounds like word of mouth.
If “the customer experience” is so important, what’s the plan?
Peter Kim from Forrester's talks about "Turning Customer Experience Into A Competitive Weapon".
New Forrester research with American Banker indicates that 97% of banking executives indicate that focusing on customer experience is important to competitiveness over the next three years.
So they all agreed that it is important to focus on, 97% of them. Here is what I think the trouble is: "the customer experience" is not something that is defined, so it becomes "something we really should do more about". The struggle is that unless you define what it comprises you can't effectively improve it.
It is a struggle because "The Customer Experience" is impacted by every part of the business; it doesn't fit into a neat box like "customer service", "sales" or "delivery". And it is a lot more than "customer satisfaction" which only measures what you are currently doing, not what you should be doing.
For us as customers, "the customer experience" is as much about how easy it is to find, evaluate and buy a product or service as it is about how easy it is to read your bill. "Improving the customer experience" is just as much about innovative ways to enhance that product, provide new payments options, offering more distribution points, and the list goes on.
So the question is, who in the company is both responsible and empowered to look at all aspects of the customer experience? Is it the marketing department? Should it be? Peter Kim has some good suggestions, like hiring a CMO, but I've got a feeling that a lot of companies would hesitate to hire another senior manager without a clear understanding what it is they would be managing. Maybe a simply first step is to have a task force with representation from all parts of the company to determine what it means for your business.
Peter also suggests a "Voice of the Customer" program, which is an excellent idea if it is set up in a practical, manageable way so it is something medium and small businesses can manage as well as large corporate organisations.
In any case, the first step would have to be to actually determine what comprises "the customer experience", because it certainly is a lot more than customer satisfaction.
I am sure there are companies out there who have this sorted, but I'm equally sure they are in the minority. I would love to hear stories of companies that really address this well; maybe your customers, or a company you have worked for. What is your experience?
Jack Trout on CEO’s – via Branding Strategy Insider
Derrick Daye from Branding Strategy Insider met with Jack Trout, the marketer who developed the classic "Positioning" concept with his co-author Al Ries. It's an interesting read, and this is one of the thoughts Jack shared with Derrick:
Not enough CEO’s are intimately involved in the marketing process. They are the ones usually failing.
He has met more CEO's than I have, but could it also be that the CEO's he refers to consider "the marketing process" as a tactical activity? Do they see marketing as advertising, selling and PR rather than building a valuable brand?
I would argue that most CEOs are intimately involved in the marketing process, but they probably wouldn't call it that.
When they make fundamental marketing decisions like going into a new market, acquiring a new company or developing a new product, they involve technical and financial people, but not too often marketers, because marketers only come in when it is time to sell and promote. Yet as the representative of their customers, marketers should be very much involved.
Maybe the issue therefore is not that CEO's are not intimately involved in marketing, but that that they could involve marketers more in marketing.
Market Focus and Position – Accenture report
High Performance Business High-level Overview
Accenture, positioning itself as the experts on "High Performance", have some interesting findings in their research into this subject that every marketer should read. This bit from their exec summary:
Jack Trout never wrote “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind”.
Well, not according to Wikipedia anyway. This is the entry:
A product's position is how potential buyers see the product. Positioning is expressed relative to the position of competitors. The term was coined in 1969 by Gary Sinclair and Marty Reilly in the paper "Positioning" is a game people play in today’s me-too market place" in the publication Industrial Marketing. It was then expanded into their (my bolding - dk) ground-breaking first book, "Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind".
There is a lot of argument about the power of Wikipedia, its accuracy and what it can do to your brand. This is probably someone's prank (as anyone can edit the page) but either way, I don't think Jack and Al will be too impressed with this attribution. Or what it does to their respective brands. People take Wikipedia seriously after all...
PS: Scroll to the bottom of the wikipedia entry and you'll see they are mentioned in the references,
Advertising agencies are not the real problem
I like High Mcleod's thoughts on marketing. He's insightful and by all accounts walks the walk as well as talking the talk with regard to leading edge marketing. In his post "advertising 2.0 doesn't exist" he has (among other things) a good crack at ad agencies, their relevancy and their role.
But is the problem really the ad agency? What is the client's role in this? How close am I if I say that the majority of advertising and selling lacks impact because too little time and effort is invested into differentiating products, services and value proposition?
How much do companies invest in understanding their market? Their competitors? Trying to see what their customers see?
Is that the role of an ad agency? I don't think so. Ad agencies in my mind are good at one thing and one thing only; take a brief and communicate an idea in the most effective way. No more, no less.
Here are a few of Hugh's points:
5. Saatchi & Saatchi: "We're not an ad agency, we're an ideas business." Right. Oh well, I'm sure they're trying to get there one day. Maybe they'll succeed. Who knows.
No they are not an ideas business; that's what the client should be. The ad agency should just be good at ideas to communicate the idea.
6. So a lot of clients have been recently asking their ad agencies, "So what can you do for us in Web 2.0?" And the agencies have been replying, "Lots! Lots and lots and lots and lots!" Bullshit. Ad agencies have so far been hopeless in this space. I don't know of ONE SINGLE piece of work coming out of a traditional ad agency in the last five years that has been even halfway original, thought provoking or effective. Captain Morgan's? Beyond lame. Juicy Fruit? Beyond lame on steroids. Glenfiddich? A missed opportunity.
Ask a silly question and you get a silly answer. What's web 2.0? A new magazine? Instead, what if a client asked "So what can you do for us to get our customers to tell us what they think?" That might be useful.
7. Bartle Bogle Hegarty, the very fine London ad agency, used to pitch their clients, "We makes brands famous". Right. Like movie stars. Like celebs. Like the guys getting out of the limos and walking down the red carpet. Like the ones who get all the money and invites to the fancy parties. While the rest of us stand behind the velvet rope out in the cold, looking in with longing. Great. Super. Lucky us.
What's wrong with that pitch? Nothing that I can see. The ad agency is pitching to a marketing manager/director/vp. The marketing manager wants a famous brand, because a famous brand will make her famous. All this demonstrates is that the agency knows their target market.
So ad agencies are not the problem. They're just not as important in the mix as they believe they are. The problem lies with business that try and take short cuts.The problem lies with businesses that won't invest time and money in the fundamentals of their marketing success.
Syndicate
Subscribe to this site's RSS feed.