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Word of mouth, without the mouths.
Every marketer knows the power of “word of mouth.” As advertisers, we strive to generate positive conversations, or word of mouth, at every opportunity. There is nothing more powerful and more rewarding than to have your target, your customers and people in general talking about your brand because you’ve created something that rings true and has meaning. Enter social media, which is essentially a new set of tactics providing your brand the opportunity to enter into people’s conversations, sometimes quite literally. But, make no mistake; the tactics have changed, but the ideas and message are what actually creates the conversation, not the tactic.
One hundred years ago, when someone received a letter from a friend, that letter was social media. Fifty years ago, when they called a friend to talk about a new product they saw in a commercial, that phone was social media. “Social media” as we define it today generally applies to Internet and mobile, but it is simply another form of interpersonal communication.
The key to incorporating social media into your marketing is to simply create something (an idea) and introduce it to people so they share it with people they know – no different than running a great ad in the 1960s and having people talk about it around the water cooler the next day.
And of course, the great benefit to these new channels is that you can bring these people right to you, instantly.
How you introduce your idea to many people has changed, but at its core, it’s still just advertising.
Posted by 3 at 12:36 PM | Post a comment
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Mom, can I have five bucks for lunch?
Imagine that you want to get $5 from your mom so you can run down to the nearest joint and grab a burger. How would you go about it? What would you say to her? Pretty simple proposition, you know your mom really well. You know what makes her laugh, her favorite movies, where she stands on taxes and you’ve argued with her, eaten a few meals together, garnished untold fortunes from her, made her furious with your sister, gotten her to do you laundry for 20 years, and she loves you. You know what to say and do – you’ll have that $5 inside of a minute, it just depends on how far she has to go to grab her purse.
Now imagine that you want 20,000 women aged 35-54 to give you $4.95 to buy their kids a value meal at your chain of fast-food establishments. Is this a tougher proposition? Absolutely. Should you go about it differently? Absolutely not. The only reason it’s a harder proposition is that you don’t know what to say and do to make it happen. And more often than not it’s because you are thinking of how to get 20,000 women aged 35-54 to give you $4.95 to buy their kid a value meal at your chain of fast-food establishments. But, what if you knew that these 20,000 women shared a lot in common with your mom, and you thought of “them” as “her.” Now everything changes because you know what makes your mom laugh, feel good, spend money and you know what she wants from a meal, why she would buy you a burger and where and when is the best time to talk to her.
Effective campaigns simply come from thinking of a single, ideal person within your target audience(s), regardless of who the group is or if you know someone in that group. Plan and work hard to know your audience as a collection of real individuals, and you’ll quickly see how new and authentic ideas, tactics and messages spring forth from this personalized understanding.
(And by the way, thanks for everything, mom.)
Posted by 3 at 05:44 PM | Post a comment
Monday, August 23, 2010
Success can be measured. And it can’t.
There are a lot of bad ideas masquerading as breakthrough marketing concepts in these days of obsessively measuring clicks, traffic counts and phone calls. One of the ugliest imposters: “If you can’t measure it or track it to sales, you shouldn’t do it.”
Why are we calling this out? Because it’s insulting to the most important people to your business: Your target, your customers, your lifeblood. It says that these people and their thought processes are no more complex than a Pavlovian dog. And that marketing, advertising and communications is no harder than ringing a bell. It also neglects the idea that your objectives might be more thoughtful and long-term than today’s sales.
To be clear, every communication should elicit a form of action. Whether it is a change in perception, an understanding of a benefit or an actual purchase, each communication needs to affect your target in some manner. Measure where you can, but know that some of these actions are difficult to measure. You must understand that most sales processes are based on a long series of multiple communications. Where you don’t want to limit yourself when considering tactics is in requiring a physical, measurable result. There is a place for this,
but requiring sales metrics for every message eliminates any long-term strategies and tactics, which are often much more effective over time. The truth is that there are valuable communications that do a great deal of work toward your final goals, and move your target toward the ultimate objective, but cannot be measured because the action takes place in a person’s mind, not at a
cash register.
You should always define your objectives and have the ways and means of measuring the indicators of your success. (We often measure “indicators” of success such as changes in perception or understanding when we cannot measure a physical action such as a purchase.) But requiring transaction metrics for each message can lead to the circle of “next week” marketing that some businesses find themselves trapped within – endlessly dropping prices, loading up promotions with non-benefit “benefits,” or racing to the meaningless middle of their categories with “me, too” marketing messages.
So, if a Pavlov disciple tells you that every message must elicit a measurable action, for any business, and always... ring the bell and walk away. They probably don’t understand how to accomplish your objectives, are fuzzy on the fundamentals of the sales process and they certainly don’t understand people.
Posted by 3 at 01:24 PM | Post a comment
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