Jul 13, 2020 | Communication, Customers, Strategy
Writing an email sequence is not as easy, or effective, as the videoed on-line courses (special deal $695, ends at midnight) would have you believe.
The templates and advice is all pretty vanilla although useful, but does not get to the heart of why people buy from you, and how, amidst the tsunami of stuff coming at them, they pick out yours.
Many seem to think digital is different from the old fashioned advertising I grew up with, and it is, tactically, but strategically, it is the same.
A potential customer goes through some sort of journey that differs in every case, but generally follows a process:
- recognition that there is something of interest out there for them
- Awareness that the stuff out there has relevance to them as a solution to some sort of a problem they have, or have recognised as a result of the discovery process.
- The problem now seen becomes something that has a value in its solution
- There is activity seeking that solution
- Choosing a supplier, and installation of the solution
- The after sales process, where they can be persuaded, assuming you did a good job, to be an advocate for the problem you solved for them, and more specifically for you as the solution provider.
The process by which this all happens is not a nice logical ‘Sales funnel’ where progress is made in an orderly manner. In reality is looks more like a huge ball of tangled fishing line, a real mess. Seeking to put order to the mess makes sense so long as you do not lose sight of the simple fact that the whole thing will resist the orderly, sequential nature of software, and revert to the mess at any and every opportunity.
The targets of your ‘content’ at each stage also has wrinkles.
You have current customers, the easiest to reach, potential customers, those you really want to reach who may have the problem unrecognised, some who may have recognised their problem, and you have advocates, those who might amplify your content.
The further audience is the wider community, out of whom all the other three groups emerge in one way or another.
Therefore, you need to mix and match between the mediums and the message to maximise the outcomes of the investment in content. You do this by the combination of focus on specific market personas. This includes personalised messaging of current and past customers, as well as more general communication of the problem/value proposition equation to gain reach into the varying audiences, to generate marketing leverage.
How deeply have your considered your mix of content and medium to reach your preferred audience?
Header credit: Maksym Kopylov via Flikr
Jul 6, 2020 | Analytics, Communication, Marketing
Marketing has moved significantly into the digital domain, online. It appears to make sense, as it appears ‘SMART’ (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time driven).
The engineers and accountants amongst us warm to this sort of seemingly measurable expenditure, they can look at a dashboard of quantitative outcomes, and feel good that they are not wasting money.
However, a closer look might give them pause.
Specific.
Yes, you can have a specific, focused activity that either happened, or did not, and people can be held accountable for them.
Measurable.
Yes, you can measure an activity done on line, so long as you are prepared to discount the bots and fakery hiding in the digital supply chain. The ad did appear, we got X 000 likes, Y 00 email addresses when they downloaded the clickbait, and sales reps are now chasing them as qualified leads. Hopefully a few of them actually are, but we may never really know.
Achievable.
Yes, the goal of getting likes and qualified leads has been achieved
Accountable.
Again, you know the intern in the marketing department was accountable for ensuring that there were X entries in the twitter feed, Y postings on Facebook and Instagram, and that the agency supplied a white paper a week as clickbait.
Timely.
Again, yes, the boss wanted this all done by the end of the month, as it was, Hooray!!
Problem with all of this is that we are measuring the wrong things. They are all about activity, nothing about outcomes. When we understand and can quantify the cause and effect links between activity and outcomes, a really tough problem, SMART goals may become useful.
‘Digital marketing’ has replaced using ‘digital’ as a tool of marketing. Those amongst us who do not understand the wide impact of ‘marketing’ have got it all the wrong way around. They have been seduced by the new shiny thing that appears to be useful, and sometimes it is, but not often as a standalone strategy, it is by its nature a short term tactic only.
Jul 1, 2020 | Branding, Marketing
My go to marketing guru, Albert Einstein said: ‘Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another, and relocated’. This has become known as the first rule of thermodynamics.
Perhaps ‘Value’ has a similar characteristic?
Recently I needed to buy a pair of sunglasses. I wanted polarised ones, that sat on my nose easily, and did not look ‘dorky,’ whatever dorky is. I went to a specialist sunglasses retailer in a shopping centre near where I live. The cheapest that met my very broad specifications was over $150. Too much, so I went into a pharmacy a few doors away that had sunglasses, and bought a perfectly good pair of polarised, non dorky glasses for $30.
My instinctive reaction was that the specialist retailer was a rip off merchant, but on reflection, he was not catering to mean old buggars like me, he was catering to the young hip crowd, who saw value in the brand name, and fancy curving design. There was value for them in the extra $120, the value of being seen in an expensive pair of sunnies, the feeling it gave them of being able to pay that much for something to sit on next week,
The value was not counted in the dollars, it was in another set of forms, ones I did not value in this instance.
There is some sort of scale in our heads that measures ‘value’ to us, which will differ for each individual, and set of circumstances. The scale goes from the pure utility derived from the product, to an entirely emotive response.
The specialist retailer was not selling just sunnies, they were selling a feeling, and a sales experience, the street cred that comes from an expensive brand. The sense of ‘value’, whatever it may be made up of, makes the extra $120 for some, a good investment. That feeling comes from the context of the sale in the specialist retailer, combined with the investment made by the brand owners in building their own ‘brand story’.
In every purchase there is a trade-off between pure utility, and the price paid. The point of intersection is the value a buyer sees in that purchase at that time. A brand is the carrier of that value.
The pharmacist who got my money was just supplying me with the utility of sunnies. I wanted only to keep the glare of the sun out of my eyes, branding added no emotional value at that time, the value to me was entirely in the utility.
Jun 25, 2020 | Branding, Communication, Customers
Kids understand stories, it is the way they learn, the way they absorb the lessons of the past for later use.
Why don’t we use this instinctive capability more often in our marketing?
Take your kids to the pantomime, they love it.
They get excited every time the villain comes on stage. They boo, yell warnings to the hero, and hop up and down in frustration when the hero looks around as the villain hides.
Why does this matter?
When building a brand, you have to make choices. Who is your brand for, and just as importantly, who is it not for?
If you can explicitly state who your brand is not for, then those for whom it is for, will rally around and support it against the villain.
Simple stuff, hidden in the instinctive responses in our brains.
Watch your kids at the panto, and learn how to build a brand.
Define the villain, and the kids will cheer for you.
Jun 22, 2020 | Analytics, Customers, Marketing
One of the questions occupying my newly monastic mind over the past few weeks has been: ‘what changes can we expect in the revenue generation processes as a result of the ‘Bug?’.
In the lead up to this crisis, I have been considering how automated everything was becoming, at the expense of humanity.
There is an inherent conflict between the centralising force that is the ‘Martech’ (marketing technology) automated decision making processes, and the front line sales function. Martech investment requires that a range of decisions to buy and install various combinations of software be made that automates a selling relationship. The decentralised nature of the sales front line does not benefit from such automation, as people still prefer to buy from people, particularly in cases where the investment is large, or there is an emotional element to the purchase.
To my mind, it has become too clinical and automated in most large businesses. This creates opportunities for smaller businesses whose niche is perhaps more clearly defined, and who lack the resources and capability to leverage an integrated ‘Martech stack’.
The Bug has brought the question to the fore.
On one hand, we are now compelled by circumstances to interact using the digital tools, but there is a steep learning curve for many, and SME’s are rapidly discovering their capability shortcomings. On the other, human contact will become more valuable than ever, and those same SME’s may be in a better position than most large companies to be ‘Human’.
Where on the scale does your business fit?
Jun 19, 2020 | Marketing, Strategy
‘The bug’ has given us a once in a generation opportunity to make change. Things that may not have been possible, have suddenly become not just possible, but necessary.
While most of the focus is automatically on cutting costs, the greater long term benefit is in the optimising of current expenditure. Arbitrarily cutting costs, as often happens in extreme circumstances, always results in throwing out a few babies with the bathwater.
Revenue generation, the combination of sales and marketing budgets, is usually the first to feel the knife when times get tough.
However rather than just ‘cutting’ across the board, or making the obvious decisions by cutting the biggest items first, consider the opportunity to optimise, and how this will deliver cost savings. More importantly, such an exercise can increase the productivity and long term impact of the investments you make, as well as reducing costs.
Classifying all expenditure into ‘buckets’ so that you can then allocate a weight to their relative value, and concentrate on those from which you can extract productivity increases, is a sensible first step.
All expenses can be classified in two major axes:
- Fixed to variable or discretionary expenses. Those that are not able to be reduced or improved, to the extreme of expenses which are entirely discretionary, such as media spend.
- The second axis is tactical to strategic. The short term expenditure which can reasonably be expected to deliver a return in a very short term, to the other end of the scale, the strategic expenditures which are normally those that appear to be in the ‘important but not urgent’ pile.
The manner in which you go about optimising your expenditure will be a function of your competitive context, the financial and strategic position you are in, and the strategic priorities in place. It will also reflect the attitude of the person delivering the instructions. Therefore, it is also a measure of your effectiveness at arguing the role that investment in marketing has to the health of the enterprise.
Your fixed marketing costs are items like employee costs, marketing software licences, retainers paid to service providers, and are often overlooked, or just cut arbitrarily. In the absence of a critical review, mistakes will be made.
Discretionary costs are often heavily weighted towards media, and they are very easy to cut. This will deliver a short term cost saving while often compromising the commercial sustainability of the enterprise.
History shows us that those who continue investing thoughtfully in the tough times, benefit hugely as the better times return.
When instructed to cut costs, do so with an intensive focus on the relative revenue and margin generating productivity of the cost you are about to cut, and to the long term impact that will have on the enterprise.
