The Neverending Debate for Marketers

The Power of a Story

There is no better way to talk about the power of a story…than with a story.  I’m a firm believer in this type of marketing.  The research presented here backs it up and is quite convincing.  Turning a message into a story is a creative challenge but the effort is well worth it.

Additionally, I’ve added another resource from Harvard Business Review that talks about how to use data in your story.

The Customer Journey

The Chinese philosopher credited with founding the philosophical system of Taoism said, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”

So much of the customer journey has changed with the adoption of smartphones and mobile computing over the last five years.  22% of the global population owns a smartphone or connected device and this growing trend has shifted the balance of power from brands to consumers.

68% of connected consumers tend to trust the opinions and reviews that others post online, according to research from Nielson.  This has an immediate impact for every industry.  As evidence of this, a Harvard Business study that covers seven years of Yelp reviews concludes that a one star bump in a restaurant’s overall rating (based on five stars) impacts revenue 5%-9%.

You can’t ignore a prospect without risking a blow to your reputation and business.  Consumers have a loud voice and they’re willing to flex their muscles to make sure that they are heard.

The paths that your customers take are not linear and what they expect on their journey is a personalized experience.  They’re willing to provide personal data to brands, but brands need to be able to aggregate, synthesize and convert that data into meaningful experiences that deepen the relationship.

Understand that first step in the journey you want your customers to take and start thinking about how you’re going to build lasting, meaningful relationships.

Connections 2013 – Indianapolis

September 17-19, 2013 in Indianapolis, IN, ExactTarget, now a Salesforce.com company, held their annual interactive marketing conference.

This was the fifth year I’ve attended the conference and I have always been impressed with the production CEO Scott Dorsey and team put on.

I went there looking for more information on device responsive communications, or simply put, the ability to create content that responds to the device you’re viewing the message on. There was a lot of talk about this topic and ExactTarget has a lot of resources on their website for those interested.

Overall, it was a solid message to marketers. ExactTarget, as part of Salesforce.com, has tighter product integration and a more developed offering that goes beyond just e-mail. Marketers should be excited about the “1:1 future.”

ExactTarget talked about making your brand into a “customer company” and getting out in front of trends and being more agile.

Dorsey said, “Customers have expectations and when those expectations aren’t met they have choices.” The focus was then on ways of meeting and exceeding those expectations during the conference.

The essence of the ExactTarget product portfolio is to engage customers and prospects in real time across many different types of media and technologies in a way that grows the relationship in a meaningful way.

The big product reveal was the Marketing Cloud–which helps organizations see a single view of the customer. It handles any “spectrum of knowledge you have on a contact.”

This was demonstrated by COO, Scott McCorkle.

Scott meticulously took 5,000 marketers through all the features using Red Box’s marketing playbook, a brand most people are familiar with. It was impressive. Once all your data systems are connected in the marketing cloud you have unlimited ability to engage customers in real-time. It’s the promise land for all marketers.

Don’t be surprised if you’re walking by a Red Box and they send you a text message that a movie you may be interested in is available 200 feet in front of you.

Building the marketing cloud for your organization using ExactTarget products looked like a very complicated integration process, but that wasn’t discussed much.

Speaker and author Jim Collins was there. He urged people to create a “stop doing list.” After a couple minutes of thought I added “create a stop doing list” to my stop doing list.

One of the statistics that I heard several times was that 70% of a sale is complete before the sales rep ever gets involved. That’s evolved pretty quickly over the last five or six years for B2Bs. Because consumers are doing more research online and brands are publishing more content to help them, It puts more pressure on marketing to communicate to customers farther along in the decision process and provide customers what they need to make their decision.

As for content marketing, the message was to stop focusing on thought leadership and more on delivering the right piece of content for the right person at the right time. If 70% of the B2B sale is going to happen through marketing, this seems logical.

It will be interesting to see how Salesforce.com and ExactTarget work together going forward and especially how the DreamForce and Connections conferences evolve.

Bruce Lee, Blue Label and Branding

Bruce Lee was recreated using CGI Technology. This video was sponsored by Johnnie Walker and targeted at the Chinese market; but here’s the catch, Bruce Lee didn’t drink.

There is some healthy debate about whether this is a good fit for Johnnie Walker. The technology to recreate Bruce Lee is amazing and it’s a great way to promote Bruce Lee’s philosophy to a generation unfamiliar with this legend.

What do you think about Johnny Walker’s content piece—good brand move?

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)

Social Drip and Big Data Working Together

Targeted sharing is a “peer-to-peer digital persuasion tool” which was deployed during the final weeks of the presidential campaign to help get out the vote and reach 18-29 year-old voters. The Obama campaign used the technique to target a user’s friends and to encourage them to get to the polls and vote.

The key with this specific example of social marketing is that many folks who registered for the Obama campaign Facebook App allowed the campaign access to their list of friends and the campaign was able to cross-reference that data with their own data on those users’ friends. Connecting the two pieces of data allowed the campaign to figure out which content to share with a user and which of their friends that user should share the content with. The campaign mentioned that 85% of people 18-29 were a friend of a friend of Barack Obama.

This is a great example of the raw power that social media has for marketers.

Persuading someone to perform their civic duty is much easier to do than convincing them to buy a product.

Targeting users based on certain characteristics has always been a fundamental technique that marketers employ to relate with customers more intimately and increase the chances that a message connects. With social media, this has been difficult to do but the payoffs are now materializing for marketers.

For brands, this example would be quite sophisticated, as you’d need to have data on quite a lot of people and also have access to a customer’s data on Facebook for the technique to work at scale—not to mention a call to action to make it payoff. The campaign had 1 million fans on their FB app and the average person has 190 friends.

Custom Audiences, which is a feature on a much smaller scale, just launched on Facebook. It allows brands to target a specific group of users with whom they already have a relationship with, on or off Facebook. This feature lets brands target customers by email, phone, or Facebook ID number. A brand can upload their list of users and select those that they’d like to target. This provides marketers more flexibility to segment and target audiences with dynamic content specific to their wants and needs—and even their purchasing habits.

This creates options for brands that have detailed records of their customers and want to be able to communicate with them through Facebook.

The added benefit to this type of marketing is that individuals that already know your brand are going to be more receptive to your messages and that increases the likelihood that there will be spillover into their friends’ newsfeed.

Many brands that were slow to the game on Facebook will now have an easier time catching up on the social platform.

In the end, brands won’t increase their marketing budgets to accommodate these new channel features, they’ll siphon money away from existing channels. The real question is which channels will suffer?

My opinion, new technology only has a solid payoff until everyone saturates the channel.

Changing the Game: Social Influence & Engagement

In a recent Forrester report, How Social Media is Changing Brand Building, they report that 93% of marketers polled agree that they need to “reinvent their brand building strategies as a result of digital innovations like social and mobile.”

If you look at your social strategy as something that has to be measured you may be missing the bigger picture.  Social is about what it forces you to do on a daily basis—evolve the conversation that surrounds your brand.

To position your brand in traditional channels requires a well thought out message and some creative combined with good placement of the message.  If you approach social marketing that way, you’ll be missing the biggest part of the process. The context of the conversation has to have a comfortable flow and “content, in the right context is ultimately king,” says Deanna Brown, CEO of Federated Media Publishing.

You have to put more time into building the content that will fuel your conversation because a social effort requires you to continuously engage your customers or audience. The conversation needs to be anchored down with substance then expanded with conversation.

To give you an idea how important content is, in a WSJ article about GM, it’s noted that GM spends $3 producing content for every $1 they spend promoting that content on Facebook.

Once you get into a rhythm of producing content that your audience consumes and you understand how they engage with your brand based on that content, those insights can conveniently be incorporated into other marketing channels such as e-mail, website, SEO or banner ads.

What we’re now learning is that social media isn’t a channel that is going to drive transactional sales, as noted by an IBM report discussing referral business on Black Friday.

When evaluating social media, stick to the idea that it’s primarily a channel that will help you reinvent your brand and not a channel that will help you drive transactional sales. If you focus on the brand, the sales will come.

Marketing in a Recession

If it’s such a great idea to increase your marketing and advertising budget during a recession then why does the demand for advertising space always decline as the economy slows down?  Why does everyone tend to increase their marketing budgets only when the economy starts to improve?

In a Forbes 2008 article Marc Babej and Tim Pollak opine that “there are no rules of thumb for advertising in a recession—except one: Don’t gamble.”  Mark and Tim go on to say “that’s exactly what you’d be doing if you buy into the idea that the reason to spend during a downturn is because others aren’t.”

During economic contractions, competition for customers’ attention is reduced and the cost to broadcast your message is also reduced—two variables that you can never control—working in your favor.

Harvard Business School professor John Quelch says that “brands that increase advertising during a recession when competitors are cutting back, can improve market share and return on investment at lower cost than during good economic times.”   Quelch also says, “Instead of cutting the market research budget, you need to know more than ever how consumers are redefining value and responding to the recession.”

In a research report produced by Cahners and Strategic Planning Institute (SPI) they conclude, “During a recessionary period, average businesses do experience a slightly lower rate of return relative to normal times.  However, expansion times do not generate a higher level of profits than normal periods as might be expected”.  They go on to say that the reason behind this is that smaller competitors are “less willing or able to defend against the aggressive firms”.

Every recession is different but consumers are usually handed all the leverage when money is tight; they exercise greater control and put more time into their purchasing decisions.  Getting to the heart of what your customers value and delivering that value is center to the idea that you can improve your market share.  Even if you figure that out and are able to broadcast a message that improves awareness, you still need to monetize that increased level of awareness—that’s the hardest part and the part no one wants to talk about.

One thing is clear, as a market leader, you should be positioned to invest when others can’t.  You need to be in good shape when the recession starts or you won’t be able to sustain the strategy.  Warren Buffet likes to say, “when others are greedy you need to be fearful and when other are fearful you need to be greedy.”  Business runs in cycles so look for the next cycle and be prepared when you need to change direction.

Art & Science Fueling Innovation

The creative, analytical and technical pieces of your decision making process need to work in harmony for businesses to move forward in today’s maketplace.

Balancing right and left-brain thinking forces good decision making without restricting expression.

Creativity is a right brain activity and right-brain thinking is concerned most with the whole of an idea.  Creativity depends on intuition as opposed to logical and linear thought of left-brain thinking.

In an IBM study where 1500 executives were interviewed, they report that “successfully navigating an increasing complex world will require creativity”.  In the same study, Frank Kern, senior vice president of IBM Global Business Services says, “The biggest challenge facing enterprises from here on will be the accelerating complexity and the velocity of a world that is operating as a massively interconnected system.”

Creativity is the center of innovation.  But, too often people tend to rely on their gut feeling—a trait of right brain thinkers—and that can be a problem.

In the book Good to Great researcher Jim Collins writes that “breakthrough results come about by a series of good decisions, diligently executed and accumulated on top of another.”  He goes on to say “you absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts.”

“To have significant impact on business performance, analytical competitors must continually strive to quantify and improve their sights into their performance drivers—the causal factors that drive costs, profitability, growth, and shareholder value in their industry.”  Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris write in their book Competing on Analytics.

It’s about finding the right place to apply creativity that will make the differences.