Posts Tagged ‘branding’
Is Social Media BS?
Wednesday, November 10th, 2010That was the provocative question raised, and answered, by HubSpot VP of Marketing Mike Volpe in a webinar last Friday. Per Mike’s usual style, the webinar was packed with helpful information but too much for one sitting, and to get through it all Mike talks at about twice the speed of those disclaimers at the end of radio ads. HubSpot has apparently found a way to pump oxygen directly into Mike’s lungs, as he didn’t audibly pause to take a breath for the first 40 minutes of this presentation.
Traditionally, big brands used TV and print advertising, while their smaller counterparts employed direct mail and telemarketing, to reach consumers directly through interruption marketing. When marketing moved online, advertisers shifted efforts to banner ads, pop-ups and email marketing. But caller ID, DVRs and ad blocking software have put consumers in control of the marketing messages they see; traditional interruption marketing is becoming progressively less effective. Mike’s answer is to shift to inbound marketing: think like a publisher, produce valuable and interesting content, share it where people are talking about your industry or the types of problems you solve, and let buyers come to you.
Key point #1: Social media is a critical component of inbound marketing. But it’s only one part. Successful marketers can’t rely solely on social media or treat it as a silo, separate from other marketing activities. It has to be part of the fabric of marketing efforts.
Key point #2: To be successful with social media, you need to change the way you do business. Some—in fact, many—types of marketing activities lend themselves to testing. You can run a small AdWords campaign focused on a single asset to determine whether a bigger campaign is justified. You can test banner advertising on an industry publication site for a month or two before deciding to commit to a longer run. You can send a small delegation to a trade show to evaluate the potential for a big booth next year.
Social media is different, however. It isn’t another channel, it’s a new way of engaging your audience. Trial efforts are doomed to failure because it takes time to attract a following and build trust. You can’t dip your toe in the water, and don’t put an intern in charge of your social media efforts! You have to jump in all the way, and involve your best people: the ones who know your products and services inside and out, and understand the issues your customers face.
Success at inbound marketing requires that social media be integrated with other marketing objectives: branding, content, SEO, research, and lead generation. This diagram from HubSpot illustrates the relationship visually.
Key point #3: A blog should be at the center of social media efforts. Blogging makes you and/or you company more interesting online. Content powers social media success. It adds substance to your Facebook status updates and tweets.
Key point #4: In today’s world, a brand is what consumers say it is. In the old days (pre-2003 or so), brands were carefully crafted by agencies, creatively packaged, and presented to the public via one-way broadcast communications (TV, magazines, direct mail). With the rise of social networks, blogs, forums and review sites, markets now define brands. Companies can enhance (or damage) their brand image based on how they respond. For example, poor customer service? Fix it. Then humbly tell the world what you’ve done. Argument, advertising, or avoidance are all losing strategies.
Key point #5: Marketers should spend 100% of their time on social media. This was actually addressed as an answer to a question about the appropriate amount of time to allocate to social media activities. Mike’s answer was brilliant: “I spend 100% of my time on social media. But I also spend 100% of my time on SEO, 100% on developing new content, 100% on lead generation, 100% on branding…it’s all one activity, not disconnected efforts.”
Key point #6: Your buyers are now in control. It’s getting increasingly difficult, expensive and ineffective to buy the attention of your market (see the second paragraph above). You have to earn it. Thinking like a publisher and socializer rather than an advertiser enables you to earn that attention. If you don’t earn your buyers’ attention, they’ll stop following you. If your Twitter following starts decreasing or your Facebook fans begin to disappear, it’s time to take a hard look at what you’re doing and make changes.
Compelling Stats
Combining social media with SEO provides 97% more links, on average, back to a web site.
Websites with blogs attract 55% more visitors on average than traditional static websites.
Twitter users who also have blogs have 79% more followers on average than Twitterers who don’t blog (and that figure is even higher—102%—for small businesses that lack the drawing power of a popular brand).
In a recent HubSpot survey, more than 40% of respondents said they had landed new customers or generated revenue from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and/or a company blog.
Takeaways
So what should you do? The presentation included “Practical Tips” at the end of each section, among them:
- • Start a blog about your industry—not your company. Try to make it the premier publication for buyers in your industry.
- • Post blog content to social media, and put social sharing buttons on your content, making it easy for your readers to share as well.
- • Use social media intelligence on your leads. For example, if you generated a lead through LinkedIn, and that buyer appears to be very active there, communicate with him/her through LinkedIn. Don’t force them into a different channel. And watch what they are posting about, questions they ask, etc. to learn more about their needs.
- • Use social media monitoring tools to track your brand mentions, and also those of competitors. What your competitors are saying on social networks can give you a glimpse into their strategies. And what their customers are saying can tell you a lot about their strengths and shortcomings.
- • Follow your target customers. Listen to what they are saying—really listen—before responding. Ask lots of questions.
Which Brings Us To…
Key point #7: Social media is here to stay. Traditionally, all marketing channels have become less effective over time. For example, the first companies to advertise on TV were highly successful with it, but as more and more companies began running commercials, they became less effective. Today, many viewers record their favorite shows and skip through the commercials. Similarly, direct mail was a highly effective channel at first, before it became saturated and the term “junk mail” was coined. Ditto for telemarketing. And email marketing. So why should social media be any different? Because it is the only channel where the user is in control. If a thousand companies start using Twitter as a broadcast platform for 140-character ads, it doesn’t make Twitter any less valuable and no one has to quit—people will simply not follow those companies.
True, the evolution of marketing will continue, perpetually, and eventually it’s likely some new shiny, sparkly thing will come along that grabs everyone’s attention. But the user-control aspect of social media is likely to continue fueling its popularity and growth for a long time to come. Enterprises and marketers who embrace this and focus on earning attention will prevail over those still trying to buy it.
Book Review: The Perfection of Marketing
Monday, January 18th, 2010Despite it’s ambitious title, The Perfection of Marketing
The book walks through three major steps in the author’s perfection of marketing process: positioning the brand through the sales moment; rolling out the brand consistently; and return on investment marketing. In the author’s parlance, the “sales moment” is that key value proposition that makes a prospect say “yes.” They’ve done their homework. They’ve identified several alternative products or services that will solve their problem. What is the key point that makes them choose to buy from your company above all others? That’s Connors’ key sales moment, and the value proposition around which to build the brand.
The first section walks through the four main elements of branding: a company’s name, logo, tagline, and campaignable image. Nike is used an example. The name Nike comes from the Greek goddess of victory (not a bad association for a company that produces sports apparel for competitive athletes at all levels). The swoosh logo invokes motion and speed. The tagline (which former spokesperson Tiger Woods clearly took a bit too literally), “Just do it,” is both immediately relevant and highly memorable. And the image—an athlete running—reflects the aspirations of the company’s target market. Few companies tie all the elements of branding together that ideally, but its a goal every company can pursue.
The second section, rolling out the brand, properly focuses on building the brand internally first, before taking it to the market. Before a brand image will be believable and accepted by prospects, it must be internalized by employees and partners. Messages must be consistent imbued into the company’s culture. Branding is next extended to the organization’s website and communicated to the media and other key influencers through PR and social media marketing, then to prospects through advertising and promotional activities.
The final section, one sure to be dear to CEOs and CFOs (and the marketers who need to communicate with them in the language of business), explains return on investment marketing. The first key is understanding the lifetime value of a customer; from this, ROI calculations can be performed on any marketing activity to help set budget levels appropriately. Two different strategies are presented: a slow growth strategy focused on conservative and modest marketing investments, and a more aggressive fast growth strategy, “spending ahead of sales” to gain a competitive foothold in the market or launch a disruptive new product.
The book is aimed at a wide audience; C-level executives will gain a greater understanding of the role of marketing and the business justification for various levels of investment. Corporate marketers will come away with clear guidelines for an over-arching strategy, and how and when an outside agency can be most helpful. And marketing agency people will get key insights into how to speak with clients at all levels of management, and position their services within a coherent and unified strategy for marketing success. (Incidentally, The Perfection of Marketing is actually highly aligned with the business practices of the agency I’m part of, KC Associates, though with some helpful enhancements.)
So does the book live up to it’s title? For the most part, yes. My only criticism of the book, albeit a minor one, is that in its brevity, the book does a much better job with the “what” of marketing than with the “how.” This relatively slim volume would have benefited from a bit more detail on specific steps or actions to accomplish some of the objectives presented. Readers will have look elsewhere, or fill in some of the blanks using their own creativity, in order to incorporate the overall strategy presented here.
Still, The Perfection of Marketing
Other reviews of this book:
The Perfection of Marketing, by James Connor – A Book Review
Brad Shorr
My Marketing Book of the Year
Douglas Karr
Best of 2008: Strategy and Branding
Monday, January 4th, 2010Resources for starting a new business, ideas for naming that business, mistakes to avoid, lead generation strategies to embrace, how to apply some of Warren Buffet’s wisdom to online marketing efforts…find all of that and more here in this final collection of the best posts on strategy and branding from the past year.
What’s in A Name? by MediaPost Online Publishing Insider
Kory Kredit explores the inexact science of business naming, from descriptive (AdBuyer.com) to ont-quite-real words (Aquisio) to misspellings (Personifi) to WTF? (Jivox, xy3).
Top 12 Resources for Start-Ups by Duct Tape Marketing
The ever-industrious John Jantsch provides a short but bookmark-worthy “list of resources to help small business owners get started and growing,” such as the SBA’s Small Business Planner, business resources from StartupNation, and guides to starting a business from AllBusiness.com, Inc.com and Entrepreneur magazine.
7 Things Big Dumb Companies Do That You Can’t Afford (Especially Now) by Remarkable Communication
The brilliant Sonia Simone pulls no punches in warning small business owners away from some of the myopic and unproductive practices still sometime seen in their larger competitors, like printing up 10,000 brochures (then throwing away 9,500 of them) and “forgetting that `we’ includes the customer,” as well as recommending effective practices to use instead. Of course it isn’t only big businesses that make mistakes, so to be fair Sonia details in another excellent post dumb things small businesses do, advising entrepreneurs to avoid the number “one,” as in over-reliance on one customer, one vendor or one partner.
Lead generation playbook: 5 steps to a 375% conversion lift by Marketing Experiments Blog
Hunter Boyle and Brian Carroll provide a helpful, educational online clinic on “what happens after prospects hit the ‘submit’ button, and how marketing and sales teams can work together more effectively to expand their customer base and get the most revenue per lead.”
Warren Buffett, Search Marketing Guru? by MediaPost Search Insider
In this well-worth-bookmarking post, Steve Baldwin presents a list of “Buffetisms” he has taped up on the wall of his cubicle (Steve Baldwin sits in a cube?!) and how they relate to search engine marketing. One example: “‘Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.’ All of us run the risk of growing complacent, just because our ROI is somewhere in the black.” An even better one: “‘I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.’ Keep this one in mind when you decide whether to fight a pitched battle for #1 placement on a high-traffic SERP. You might be far better off looking for smaller gains on longer-tail keywords, 2nd-tier engines, or by using day-parting or other segmentation technologies.”
The 6 Untold Reasons Why Businesses Fail by Growthink
Dave Lavinsky elaborates on six common but often unrecognized causes of business failure, such as confusing ego with a business opportunity, trusting “white lie” feedback and failing to make a 100% commitment.
100 Tiny Tips to Create and Maintain Loyal Customers by Bootstrapper
This must-read post for every small business owner and marketing professional provides tips on everything from where to find new customers (not only in the obvious venues like on Facebook and at industry conventions, but at volunteer events and other places) to how to effectively network, communicate and build relationships (e.g., “Send a thank you gift when a customer renews a contract”), to easy-to-use tools and services (such as FreshBooks) to help your business run more smoothly.
The boobs have it, the biggest PR blunder since New Coke by Marketing Edge
The always brilliant Albert Maruggi explains how UPS bungled an unusually powerful branding opportunity with Kentucky Derby-winning horse Big Brown. Due to “short-sightedness combined with a lack decisive management” on the part of UPS, the company had to shell out big bucks to avoid sharing the spotlight with Hooters—not a brand one normally associates with either horse racing or parcel shipping.
SEO: best bang for your buck for generating online leads by E-consultancy
Aliya Zaidi summarizes research from E-consultancy showing that while “natural search, email marketing and paid search are still the most commonly used methods for generating online leads,” “SEO (is) seen as providing the best value for money.” PPC gets a higher percentage of budgets (not surprising, as it has a direct cost per click not applicable to natural search) but natural search clicks provide superior value.
How to run marketing like a profit center by iMedia Connection
Is your marketing department more focused on “firefighting” than executing productive strategies? Is it difficult to measure the ROI of marketing activities and prove the value to the CEO? Having trouble coordinating activities with other functions? David Hutchinson provides a roadmap to success in this excellent article, using marketing operations—process-based management well-established in other disciplines that “enables informed decision making, accountability, sustainability, visibility, teamwork, strategic thinking and best practices execution.” For a longer treatment of this topic, pick up a copy of Value Acceleration: The Secrets to Building an Unbeatable Competitive Advantage
How to Profit From Testimonials…Even With No Testimonials! by Copyblogger
Dean Rieck (is that real hair?) delivers 17 clever ways to get the effect of testimonials for your product or service without actually using testimonials, such as showing pictures of people using your product or service, noting how long you’ve been in business and/or how many products you’ve sold, displaying a seal or approval, or citing favorable reviews.
5 Things Salespeople Really Need From Marketing by Sales and Sales Management Blog
Sales guru-ess Jill Konrath concisely explains what a sales team needs from the marketing department in order to launch a new product successfully, including sales tools, competitive research, and above all a compelling value proposition.
Book Review: Marketing That Matters
Sunday, November 1st, 2009This review originally appeared on the WebMarketCental blog in July 2008.
In writing Marketing That Matters
The book combines guidance on marketing strategy and tactics with a “socially responsible” orientation. The result is best described as an avocado of a book: a solid core of marketing strategy surrounded by a thick layer of politically liberal messaging. As with an avocado, some readers will find this outer layer delightfully tasty, while others will consider it disgusting green mush.
“Socially responsible” has become a charged term. It perhaps shouldn’t be; first off, who would want to run a “socially irresponsible” business? (According to the authors, Wal-Mart executives, of course.) Second, many of the management practices that the authors attribute to social responsibility—minimizing energy use, creating a positive work environment for employees, purchasing from local suppliers when possible—would simply be called good business by most entrepreneurs and managers. Keeping energy costs under control and employees happy is good for the bottom line, regardless of broader societal or political ramifications.
But, social responsibility or irresponsibility aside, the authors do provide an excellent treatise on marketing strategy. Some examples:
- Getting it: “Marketing is about creating relationships…people don’t want to be marketed to—they want to build a relationship with…New-school marketing is based upon satisfying needs. Pushing product doesn’t work anymore, especially in the era of the Internet, when savvy customers can connect with each other and trade stories about your product—and your company—and can easily find alternative choices.” This is precisely the message of The Cluetrain Manifesto
- Strategy starts with customer understanding: “Strategic marketing is acquiring a deep understanding of the needs and desires of your existing and potential customers and designing your business (products, services, delivery mechanisms, customer experience, branding, outreach, etc.) to meet and exceed their needs and desires. When energy bar leader Clif Bar developed the Luna bar, the core idea for creating the product—active women need an energy bar and have different nutritional needs than men—was a demonstration of the pure definition of strategic marketing. The strategic marketing decision to design an energy bar specifically for active women then led to many other strategic and tactical choices, regarding product design, branding and packaging, product distribution, community partnerships, and, ultimately, promotional and sales strategies.”
- Affinity matters: “Consider gathering your leadership team in a room and looking at…a particularly compelling customer experience that can be articulated to the world. Ask each person to talk to two loyal customers about how they describe the company, brand, product, or service to their friends. See what’s consistent in their messaging and start to build a story that you can use in all of your communications with the world: on your Web site, in your brochures, in your press releases, in your company orientation with new employees…In Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands
- Build a community: “Building a community of believers is one of the best pieces of marketing advice we can give to any businessperson…According to consulting giant McKinsey & Company (a company which does virtually no advertising, by the way; the company has an almost 100% referral and reputation-based business), about two-thirds of all economic activity in the U.S. is influenced by people’s shared opinions about a product, brand or service…What if you had to tell your story nine times before your best friend acknowledged what you were saying? For one, you’d probably pick a new best friend. But that’s a good way of looking at the inherent flaws in traditional advertising. Conventional wisdom suggests that it take nine impressions for a potential customer to retain the information in an ad. One good story from a friend far outweighs the potential of nine expensive ads…The Internet is the perfect medium for furthering the conversation between companies and their most enthusiastic customers. Check out any marketing-savvy…company’s eb site and we bet you’ll find many ways to engage with the community that orbits around that company or brand.”
There is much, much more lucid and valuable strategic advice on topics such as branding, customer-centricity, empowering employees to spread your brand message, the role of emotion in decision making, and the importance of capturing and properly utilizing marketing metrics.
Again, however, these morsels of strategic marketing wisdom are drenched here in copious amounts of social responsibility sauce which won’t appeal to all tastes. For example:
- Would you really want to work with people who have no sense of humor (or worse, no sense period)? “We’ve seen SRBs (socially responsible businesses) with poor marketing campaigns that came about as a result of choosing process over impact. What we mean by this is that they were so tied to their do’s (always include all the facts and details, spend your advertising dollars only in publications that support your politics and point of view, only market products and services that are critical to human survival, etc.) and don’ts (never print in full color, never use humor in your marketing, etc.) that they forgot to ask, ‘Does this marketing approach have an impact on our customer?’”
- Strange watercoolers. “In media stories, comments on blogs, and discussions at office watercoolers, it’s not uncommon to read or hear comments like ‘Why wouldn’t you pay twenty-five cents more per pound to know that farmers are making a living, that your food is healthy, and that yhour tomato didn’t contribute to global warming by flying across the world?’ All good questions.” First, such conversations are far less common in most of the country that the authors may realize. And second, many readers are likely to feel that anyone who seriously believes that flying tomatoes cause global warming really needs to be reading Bjorn Lomborg
- Government good, markets bad. Considering that marketing is the subject of the book, the authors are at times bizarrely anti-markets. “In fact, when we think of companies taking a stand, we usually think of industry-funded campaigns or individual company-sponsored ads, in which business voice has been used to fight health-care reform, limit tougher air and water quality standards, fight living wage laws…or limit liability for products such as guns.”
Again, the authors seem to ignore the likelihood that many business people (the audience for this book) legitimately believe that more competition and less regulation is a better path to reducing health care costs and improving quality than a government takeover and exclusion of the private sector would be; that environmental standards should pass reasonable cost/benefits analysis before implementation; that raising costs on small business owners and reducing employment opportunities for entry level and marginally skilled workers isn’t a great idea; and that we’re better off without laws designed to enrich trial lawyers while making self defense more difficult and expensive.
- Confusing community involvement with controversy. The authors advise putting “philanthropy at the center of your value/values proposition,” and highlight companies that support causes such as finding a cure for breast cancer, helping women escape the international sex trade, and keeping kids safe—all worthy and non-controversial causes.
But when the authors praise the work of groups like the Sierra Club, they are going to alienate readers who place affordable food for developing nations, American jobs, and relief for families from record-high gas prices above enriching thugocratic Middle Eastern despots and avoiding any inconvenience to Alaskan caribou. Even the writers’ own local newspaper has picked up on the folly of substituting biofuels for petroleum, noting that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Conley and Friedenwald-Fishman are from San Francisco, and their city’s offbeat, left-of-center leanings are clearly on display here. While this book is likely to sell well in a line from Los Angeles to Seattle, its prospects anywhere to the right of the left coast—geographically or politically—are less clear. Perhaps the authors don’t care. But it does seem incongruous to write a book about marketing (which is the art of persuasion) while being so enamored with government regulation (pure brute force).
It’s unfortunate that the authors have chosen to imply that anyone who believes strongly in supporting philanthropic causes or sensible environmental protection must also be enamored with gun control and socialized healthcare. In placing so much emphasis on controversial political positions, the book needlessly alienates (at least) half of its potential audience. If your political leanings are left of center, you’ll like (most of) this book. But if not, you’ll have decide if getting to the solid core of worthwhile marketing strategy here is worth the effort of mentally scraping away the thick coating of green mush.
