Marketing

Marketing Resolutions

August 1, 2018

If you’re like most people, you set some New Year’s resolutions back in January. I have no doubt that by now you’ve stopped smoking, swearing, overeating or showing up late to pick up your daughter at daycare.

Since you’ve mastered all of your personal resolutions, what about your professional ones? Maybe you’ve made some headway or even mastered a few of them by now but my guess is that most of them have gone by the wayside in the day to day chaos of marketing.  It’s never too early to start thinking about next year and as such, I’d like to spend the next couple of weeks getting a jumpstart on brainstorming what your resolutions for 2019 might be, by suggesting a handful for you to consider.

Build your email list: Most of us check our email before our feet touch the floor in the morning. Email is such an integral part of our life that we take it for granted. But your email list is one of the most valuable marketing assets you have. People are willing to give you their email because they believe you’ll send them content they find valuable. Do that on a consistent basis and you’ll earn their trust and eventually, some of them will invite you to earn their business.

In 2019 you need a game plan for securing more email addresses and delivering a higher level of content to that list on a regular basis. There are lots of ways you can get someone to happily give you their email address. Think bigger than the “sign up for our newsletter” box.

Work on earning great reviews: When you go to Amazon or Yelp or even when you search for a specific type of business – you notice the ratings and reviews, don’t you? It’s difficult to ignore them and it’s equally difficult not to be swayed by them. Reviews are playing a much bigger role in influencing the search engines as well as potential buyers’.

2019 should be the year that you actively solicit reviews from the customers who love you. Don’t leave it to chance. Create simple ways for them to tell the world that you’re a five-star business.

Produce more videos and build a YouTube channel for your organization: Videos are such a wonderful storytelling tool and you can’t ignore that in 2019. Whether you are teaching your prospects something, trying to influence them or entertain them – it’s hard to beat the multimedia appeal of video. Don’t be afraid to explore behind the scenes content and true brand journalism as you concept your next video series.

2019 is the year to get over your discomfort of the camera. Remember, you don’t have to be in front of the camera to create compelling video. There are many cost-effective ways to produce compelling videos that connect with your audience and give them a real sense of what your company is all about.

Do less but do it better: There are too just too many options out there. Snapchat, Facebook ads, billboards, referral programs, newsletters, print ads, etc. And that just scratches the surface. Even if you have the marketing budget of Coke, you can’t do it all. So rather than trying to dabble in everything, resolve to winnow down your marketing tactics so you can go a mile deep, rather than an inch deep and a mile wide.

Make 2019 the year that you actually eliminate some marketing tactics. Identify the ones that deliver the best ROI and do them more often and better. Explore ideas on how to expand the value you deliver through the tactics you decide to keep and work on elevating your game, rather than expanding your efforts.

Pick one or two of these and weave them into your marketing plan for the upcoming year. Leverage these trends and best practices as you map our your marketing strategy for the coming year. Do that and you’ll crush your 2019 sales and profit goals.

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Could marketing be a revenue source?

July 11, 2018

Previously, I told you about the book, Killing Marketing, by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose. Their premise is that marketing has evolved to the stage where it needs to be completely re-invented, and we need to think of our organization’s marketing departments as media companies, that is to say, as a revenue source.

On the surface, it sounds like quite the stretch.

The book quotes Peter Drucker who said: “the purpose of marketing is to create and keep a customer.” In this case, the authors are emphasizing the word create. They believe that marketing has moved from just persuading someone who is already interested in buying what you sell to literally creating the audience in the first place, via your own generated media.

This is where the book risks losing readers. If you run an architectural firm or serve your clients by moving their goods across the country in your truck, the idea of launching a magazine or creating a YouTube show probably holds very little appeal. But when you start considering the broadest definition of media, it gets a little more interesting and might be better aligned with what you are already doing.

The big shift in thinking here is that rather than marketing to sell a product, you market to create an audience. Once you understand that audience and earn their trust, you can monetize that relationship by knowing exactly what they need/want, offering it to them and build revenue in the process.

Instead of saying, “I want to talk about stuff we sell, and hopefully that will catch the attention of people who might want to buy our stuff” you could say, “I will talk about the topics and issues that matter to the people who typically buy our stuff. After we’ve earned their trust and continued attention, it will be easier to sell our stuff to them.”

The truth is – we’ve all been consumers of this sort of strategy. Walt Disney launched his empire by creating cartoons and movies. He then moved into TV. From there, he started creating products and experiences to serve the audience he created.

It would be easy to dismiss this idea as being reasonable for consumer-focused companies but not for the business-to-business model. But it actually works even better for the B2B organization because your audience is naturally more defined and niched.

By now you’re probably wondering what kind of media are we talking about? Here’s a partial list.

• A content-rich website that provides information and opinion pieces
• A forum or message board/group chat engages your core audience
• A weekly podcast or YouTube video
• Monthly educational webinars
• Regional events to create networking and learning opportunities
• A national event with speakers and CEU courses
• Research (you can sell the report/results) that informs your business decisions and offers insight to your audience

That list is daunting, isn’t it? It looks expensive from both a money and time resources perspective. How does that become a revenue stream rather than an ever-growing drain on your company’s budget?

• Sell sponsorships and advertising spots on many of the items above
• Charge a fee for the events and courses you offer
• Create premium content that you put behind a payment firewall
• Sell subscriptions for access to ongoing research or other media
• Build/rent out your mailing list to other companies who are interested in the same audience

I’m barely scratching the surface of what’s possible. I don’t believe this is an all or nothing strategy. Every business could bake some of this thinking into their marketing, or should we say revenue plan. It’s an interesting premise and just imagine what you could do if your marketing was self-funding!

 

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Is marketing dead?

July 3, 2018

 

I just finished a fascinating book, Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost into Profit, by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose. Joe and Robert are the creators of the mega-conference Content Marketing World, and Joe has written other books like Content Inc, Epic Content Marketing, and Managing Content Marketing.

Catching a theme?

The core message of their book is acknowledging that the marketing world, as we have known it since the dawn of the big three (print, radio, and TV), is our past and that marketing doesn’t have to be just a cost center anymore. When done well – brands can actually create a profit center from their marketing efforts. Instead of your marketing requiring additional financial resources – what if it generated new dollars? We’ve all heard the idea that brands should become media companies. You may not want to take your company quite that far. But wouldn’t you like to make money with your marketing efforts?

Let’s take a step back before we look at the future. Traditional marketing has been primarily advertising – the renting of space on someone else’s channel to earn attention, brand awareness and alter the consumer’s behavior. Even PR falls under that description. Instead of buying an ad, the brand or their agency would pitch their story to the editorial side of the advertising channels. Their goal was to have a story written about them or their offerings that would create the same results as paid advertising would have generated.

Along came the Internet and suddenly consumers found their voice. Until that shift, they’d been our silent audience. But as it became easier to share opinions on message boards, forums, social media channels, websites and review outlets, they got louder and louder.

Initially, as a defensive mechanism, brands began using the Internet too – creating content to fight for search engine position and to balance the consumers’ voice. But the brands discovered what probably seems to you as a very simple marketing truth – that when the brands provided valuable content and helpful information, the consumers would create a connection and magnify the brand’s reach by sharing the content and inviting others in.

On a mega-level, this is what Johnson & Johnson has done with BabyCenter.com. What started as a simple extension of their core website, it now reaches more than 45 million parents a month across the globe and offers their content in nine different languages. Eight of every ten U.S. mothers use BabyCenter.com.

Odds are your goals aren’t quite so lofty. Which is awesome because that means you can replicate your version of the results faster and with a smaller level of investment. The Internet and digital content have leveled the playing field. It’s why small brands like BigPoppaSmokers.com have crushed their competition, stolen the market share of much bigger companies and have created a brand that garners incredible amplification of their value from the consumers who love them.

The book isn’t suggesting that you abandon your core business model and become an organization that generates revenue the way a traditional media company does. Nor is it suggesting that you should abandon your paid and earned media efforts. For most organizations, there will always be a benefit to those channels.

But what the authors are suggesting is that businesses today also need a profit-generating, owned media strategy that will give you an unfair competitive advantage.

Next week, we’ll explore some of the suggestions the book offers that seem reasonable for small to mid-sized organizations to experiment with as they build out a marketing strategy and budget. Based on the book, you just may want to shift some of your dollars to some new avenues.

 

 

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Marketing automation doesn’t mean autopilot

June 27, 2018

Marketing automation is nothing new, but it is enjoying a renewed focus in conversations about how to stay connected to your prospects and customers. As brands get better about creating content and understanding that our potential customers watch and interact with us for a long time before they’re ready to buy – we have to be prepared to stay in touch in a meaningful, useful way for a lot longer than just the active sales cycle.

Just to make sure we’re all talking apples to apples — marketing automation is the tactic of using software to automate repetitive marketing actions like emails, enewsletters, responses to web inquiries, social media, and other website-driven actions.

We’re all the recipient of marketing automation every day. When we download a checklist off of someone’s website and over time, we start receiving emails related to that topic – that’s marketing automation. When we take a quiz and then are directed to a landing page where we can learn more about our results/possible solutions – that’s marketing automation. When we get a shipping update email in real time – that’s marketing automation. When we sign up for an email-based course, you guessed it. That’s marketing automation.

If you’re a B2B company, don’t think this is only a consumer-facing tool. In fact, it’s the B2B marketers that are really leveraging all of the nuances of this tool.

As you’ve heard me preach many times before – it’s about having the right strategy. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that once you pick the right tool, you’re all set.

Marketing automation is most often used as a lead generation tactic, and it’s a very good one. But it can also serve your current customers from a customer service point of view. Your clients often feel silence after the sale. You chased and wooed them before they bought but after the transaction, they sometimes get less attention. Marketing automation is a way to make sure that never happens.

A sizable part of the marketing process can be automated. Yet many companies and marketers tend to focus on specific tools or features they’re missing rather than on how their marketing automation platforms fit within their marketing strategies.

Today, only 10% of marketers are confident in their ability to execute comprehensive marketing automation programs as part of a larger marketing strategy, according to a recent a Forrester study. That’s not because they picked the wrong software; it’s because of the strategy. A sound marketing strategy should be anchored by clear goals. Those could include thought leadership, lead generation, gaining website traffic or something else. Without establishing these goals, you won’t be able to get anywhere — even with the best marketing automation software.

Remember that marketing automation isn’t a tactic in and of itself. It’s a mechanism to help you amplify the effectiveness of your marketing tactics, and you should be clear about what those tactics are. Are you going to be sending out newsletters or an email nurture campaign, or are you going to focus on collecting inbound leads by providing access to gated content? Be clear from the beginning, because all of your subsequent decisions will be based on maximizing these tactics.

Once you sort out all of that, you’re finally ready to find the right tool. But don’t even start looking until you’ve thought through how you want to use it.

If you implement marketing automation correctly, you can expect to see positive results relatively quickly. Don’t rush into it, though, especially if you don’t have any previous marketing automation experience. Take the time to build a sound strategy, and then invest the time and resources to really learn the platform you invest in. The results will follow if you stick with it.

 

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How engaged are you in digital?

June 20, 2018

It’s hard to imagine there is an active business today that doesn’t have some level of digital connection and engagement. But the truth is that how business leaders define engagement and the level in which they invest (time, money, staff, etc.) in that engagement is an incredibly wide range.

Deloitte released a study for Connected Small Business US, which was commissioned by Google to explore the levels of digital engagement among small businesses (250 or fewer employees) and the impact of each level.

The study determined that there were general levels:

• Basic (no website/no social media presence)
• Intermediate (simple website/basic digital marketing)
• High (advanced, mobile-ready website/multiple social channels)
• Advanced (use of data analytics/mobile apps)

As the researchers reviewed the activity level and the outcomes that aligned with each of the four levels of engagement, they came to some very interesting conclusions.

Digital engagement increases revenue. Seventy-seven percent of businesses in the advanced category reported expecting revenue growth over the next year—almost double the percentage of businesses in the most basic engagement level. The reason the advanced level businesses were confident in the potential of growth is because forty-five percent of them had already experienced revenue growth over the past year, compared to only twelve percent of businesses identified as having a basic digital engagement. Thirty-two percent of the organizations in the high category reported revenue growth.

Digital engagement increases employment needs. When a business experiences increased revenue, it only makes sense that they’d need a larger workforce. So no surprise, the category of companies that reported larger percentages of revenue growth (high and advanced) also reported an increase in employment growth. The research also pointed out that people employed by a digitally savvy company “tend to be relatively more productive, with the average revenue per employee at digitally advanced businesses being two times as high as small businesses with a basic level of engagement.”

Digital engagement creates new products and services. Over the past twelve months, businesses at the basic level had less than a ten percent chance of introducing a new product or service. On the flip side, almost seventy percent of the most digitally advanced companies reported did. New channels mean new opportunities, and if you’re not there, you can’t take advantage of them.

So what does this mean for your business? It means that maintaining just the “table stakes” level of digital engagement is costing you opportunity, market share, and money. If you are at that level, which was defined as just having a simple website and not really using effective email marketing, social media or exploring the data that these tools can give you, you need to recognize the consequences. This should not come as a surprise to you but perhaps the outcomes that this study points to can serve as the wake-up call to drive you to explore how your business can step further into the digital realm.

This study emphasizes what common sense has told us for some time. The way we do business has changed. The expectations that the marketplace has for us have changed. We may be the only element that hasn’t yet changed.

For every business, whether you only serve a local audience or an international customer base, embracing digital strategies is a business must. Tools like marketing automation, social media, mobile readiness, and letting the data help you determine what your prospects are interested in and what you can offer to encourage trial and conversion is more business survival than anything else. Today, as the research clearly demonstrates, businesses that ignore that truth are simply behind in revenue, growth, and innovation. But pretty soon, without making some changes, they may just not exist anymore.

 

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Where do AI and marketing collide?

June 13, 2018

AI or artificial intelligence is, at its simplest definition, when a computer is capable of mimicking human intelligence and making decisions/taking action based on that intelligence.

We’ve been slowly evolving to AI being pretty commonplace for years. I’m not talking robot uprising. I’m really talking about tools that help us analyze data and choices to predict best outcomes. Odds are, you are taking advantage of AI today and just didn’t label it as such. The iPhone’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa are simple examples of AI. Both use machine learning technology to get smarter based on our choices and actions so they can serve our needs better with each interaction.

There’s no doubt, given all of the consumer data we have at our disposal today, that AI and marketing will merge in some pretty interesting ways. Granted, we’re talking infancy stages, but the truth is you are probably using it today without recognizing it.

Here’s a quick look at some of the elements of our work where AI is already present and will have an even bigger influence down the road.

Digital media: Given the almost infinite number of advertising options and the advent of programmatic media buying it’s easy to see how computer calculations and propensity modeling would save us time, remove the human bias and deliver projected outcomes. Results can be tracked, modeled, modified and improved upon in nanoseconds, as opposed to how long it would take us to do it manually.

Retargeting and ad targeting are two areas where AI is already playing a pivotal role and is getting better every day.

Content: As a writer, I will admit that I bristle at this idea. How can a computer possibly write as well as a human being? In many cases (at least for now) it can’t. A computer can’t generate copy that connects the emotional dots, but it can generate a report or content around factual dots. Check out Wordsmith.com and watch how they can take information like an earnings report or sporting outcomes and create very human-like copy.

There’s also the area of content creation. Can a computer watch what people view and buy and then use data to know what that consumer should be shown next? Amazon, Netflix, and Pandora are already showing us how effective this is. Why wouldn’t you want the same AI to be working on your website or other digital assets?

Who is your next buyer? This is a fascinating and sophisticated aspect of AI and marketing that many organizations have yet to explore. By using propensity modeling, predictive analysis can give you insight into who is ready to move from consideration to purchase and which of your existing customers is most likely to buy. It will also give you an idea of what kinds of offers (products, discounts, etc.) are most likely going to trigger that purchase decision.

From there, it’s an easy jump to dynamic pricing. AI would help you determine who needs a discounted price to convert and who is ready to buy without you having to give up part of your margin.

Earlier in the sales cycle, AI can help with lead scoring. The idea that a computer can sort through our prospect list and tell us where to concentrate our efforts is very appealing.

There are many industries and professions who are probably right to be a little nervous about AI. But for us marketers – AI is poised to be a huge advantage in how we work. It has the capability to help us measure and deliver ROI in a very efficient way, which allows us to spend even more time on the creativity and innovation sides of our business. Because in those spaces, we are irreplaceable.

 

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CMOS — are you torn between storytelling and driving growth?

May 30, 2018

A new study from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and Deloitte, surveying close to 200 chief marketers worldwide, revealed many CMOs are still focused on the traditional storytelling aspect of their position and are less comfortable with aspects associated with driving growth, including acting as revenue science practitioners and customer experience architects.

According to the report, “CMOs and the Spark to Drive Growth,” 35 percent of respondents identify their role as being the chief storyteller, but only 20 percent view themselves as the market explorer that identifies and maps new routes to revenue. Additionally, just 7 percent say they are the data guru that understands the voice and expectations of the customer.

To download this study, click here.

“Sales and driving incremental revenue growth are the first steps on the path to profitability, but this is not the destination,” noted Liz Miller, Senior Vice President of Marketing for the CMO Council. “What best practice leaders have demonstrated is that ownership of experience strategy and voice of the customer must inform key business decisions, ranging from product specification and identification of market expansion and global market readiness. This will require a new mastery of data and intelligence, along with skills that cross finance and operations boundaries that most marketers feel uncomfortable and unprepared to cross.”

As today’s CMOs remain focused on brand development, customer engagement, lead management and media mix modeling, they are missing the opportunity to focus on business transformation initiatives like mapping global expansion, facilitating mergers and acquisitions, pricing strategy or actively advancing distribution channels.

Of the marketers surveyed, 82 percent believe they are the primary driver of brand development and storytelling, only half believe they own customer experience strategy development. While marketers own the brand and how it melds into engagement and communications, they are also influencers across a vast list of critical business driving functions.

The disconnects between intention to drive growth and capacity to impact the bottom line beyond new customer acquisition continue. Consider that:

68 percent of marketing leaders surveyed expect to drive and optimize growth through new customer acquisition. Only 9 percent expect to impact growth through the introduction of new engagement or distribution channels.
Marketers agree that revenue is the top measure of growth for the organization (95 percent) and for their own personal definition (70 percent). However, while the business also considers gross margin and market share as the second and third indicators of growth, marketers instead look to brand valuation and customer acquisition shifts, highlighting a disconnect in how growth is fundamentally measured.
CMOs are allied with their organizations’ president and head of sales in the development and shaping of new growth strategies, but they do far less to involve supply chain, product and operational partners—key leaders who sit at the front line of customer experience.

“What we hear from our CMO clients is that they are attempting to tackle some of their organizations toughest challenges, sometimes losing sight of keeping the customer at the center of it all,” said Sheryl Jacobson, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP and CMO Customer Transformation Leader. “For the CMO to be effective, they have to keep the customer at the center of every conversation and figure out solutions that will drive growth. But then translate the strategy into the languages of their c-suite peers.”

The importance is for marketers to align their vision of success with both the customer’s vision of need and value and the business’ definition of growth and success. It will demand more than just a deep understanding of storytelling and the brand and will even transcend having an understanding of the business and the touchpoints spread across it. It will demand that marketers become cultural change agents, sparking innovation in how teams, technologies and touchpoints converge.

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About the Study:
Findings of the “CMOs and the Spark to Drive Growth” study are based on a 10-question online audit of 191 global senior marketing leaders. Thirty-seven (37) percent of respondents hold the title of chief marketing officer, senior vice president of marketing or head of marketing, representing companies with revenues in excess of $1 billion USD. The 10-page whitepaper is available for download by visiting https://cmocouncil.org/thought-leadership/reports/cmos-and-the-spark-to-drive-growth.

This study is the first of three investigations into the CMO as the growth driver. Next in the series will be a summary of investigative dialogues with growth-driving CMOs, all hailing from fast-growth, sustained-growth or emerging-growth organizations. The final brief, dubbed the “CMO’s Growth-Driving Playbook,” delves into the steps and strategies that growth drivers have adopted to take a leadership position across sales enablement, customer experience and transformation of people, process and platforms across the organization.

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Tread carefully on tragedy

May 30, 2018

When our country endures a tragedy like the Parkland shooting or a natural disaster like the volcanic eruptions in Hawaii, we get completely wrapped up in the stories, the people, and the emotions. We want to show our concern, to connect with each other to mourn together and, of course, we want to do something to support the victims.

Immediately after the Parkland shooting a few months ago, we saw people changing their social media profile pictures, expressing their support and starting fundraising campaigns. Because of the nature of the tragedy we also saw a flurry of conversation about gun control, mental health and other social issues that played a role in the shooting.

As a country, we were horrified, afraid, angry, sad and struggling with our feelings of helplessness. We expressed all of those reactions for many days following the shooting.

My guess is that if your social media channels are like mine, some people expressed themselves more eloquently than others. And some, it seemed, just talked to talk, as if they didn’t want to be left out.

But the people who really touched my heart and inspired me were the ones who didn’t say very much but they did something. They donated blood or shared a link to a site collecting donations. They found a way to help and quietly did so.

Brands can probably take a lesson from that observation. After all, organizations hurt and feel compassion in the same way we do. They want to express their support as well. After all, they’re just big groups of people.

Much like our friends and family – some companies express their support better than others. There’s a thin line between solidarity and trying to capitalize on a tragedy to position your brand/organization in a good light.

Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s very bad form for any organization to use a crisis or tragedy as a marketing tactic. But you sure don’t want your well-intentioned gesture or words to be labeled as self-serving or an attempt to capitalize on a tragedy.

If your company wants to conduct itself in a way that’s above reproach, follow these guidelines.

Say very little, do something meaningful: JetBlue offered free flights to/from Parkland, FL for the families of the victims while Delta Airlines offered free flights to the Washington, D.C. march that many victims and their families attended. Local restaurants donated food feeding the family and friends of the victims and the injured at hospitals, churches and at their homes. Organizations like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Macy’s, AutoNation and Cigna all donated hundreds of thousands of dollars without any fanfare.

Mourn together: Nickelodeon and MTV – the networks of legions of children and teenagers – went off the air for 17 minutes to honor those killed in the Parkland shooting.

Show your support: Many companies and entities lowered their flags to half-staff and donned ribbons in the colors of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School – maroon and white.

Help others offer a helping hand: Professionals United for Parkland – an all-volunteer group of more than 250 licensed mental health workers provided free counseling via their referral hotline 24/7 for as long as necessary to anyone in South Florida affected by the shooting.

These companies all showed their compassion and humanity. It’s worth noting that none of their gestures required a lot of talk. In times of tragedy and when people are hurting, actions definitely speak louder than words.

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Gated content

May 23, 2018

Whether you recognize the term or not – you’ve all seen and many of you have created gated content. That term refers to putting something on your website or landing page that people want and asking them for information in exchange for that information.

In most cases, you are asking people for their email address and allowing them to pass through the “gate” to a hidden web page where they can download the information that you’re offering. An alternative is that you would email them the information once you have their email address.

The challenge with gated content is that you need to offer something that has great value if you want people to actually trade you information about them in exchange. The question is how many fields should you require. Studies show that the more information fields required, the fewer people you will get to actually complete the transaction. The best practice rule of thumb is no more than three fields if you want a higher conversation rate.

Every field is another barrier you are asking the person to knock down to get to your content. You are asking them to work harder and risk their anonymity with every field. They assume, for example, that if they include a phone number – you’re going to call. They have to decide if what you’re offering is worth that intrusion.

It makes sense that you would want to build a database of people who genuinely have some interest in your company or offerings. And on the surface, it makes sense that you would reduce the number of fields so more people actually finish the task and get the item you are offering in exchange.

But there’s a weird inverse relationship in this kind of marketing. As the number of people who complete the form increases, the amount of information you have on them and the more you can confidently say they are a qualified lead diminishes. Why? More hurdles to leap mean you are in essence, testing the audience to see how badly they want what you’re offering.

Remember, the more you ask them in the form, the fewer completions you will get. But the fewer things you ask, the less you know about your leads.

So when considering whether or not you should create gated content, the first question you need to ask yourself is “why are we doing this?” If you are looking for qualified sales leads then you should actually use more fields. You will get a smaller group of people who actually complete the form and access your information, but you’ll know they really want it. You will also have gathered enough information about them to get a sense of how strong a lead they are.

On the flip side, if you are just trying to build up your database so you can keep marketing to the audience, then reduce the number of fields to increase participation. But you have to accept that many of the people, especially if you just require an email address and nothing more, may not have much actual interest in your product or service.

The length of your form not only reflects the value of what you’re offering but it also reflects the genuine interest of the prospect. A shorter form will get you a larger database that you can market to down the road. But there will be a lot of tire kickers on that list. A longer form that tells you more about the prospect and what they’re interested in. The additional questions will reduce the size of the database but will increase the likelihood of a genuine potential sale being among them.

So as always with marketing – start with why.

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A delicate balance

May 9, 2018

In the Mad Men days of advertising, it was all about mass media, reach and frequency. How many people can you reach and how often can you get your message in front of them? Today’s marketing is a little more complicated than that. The channels have shifted from print, radio, and TV to more than we can count and within each medium, there are more individual channels than our forefathers in the business could have ever imagined.  Today, it is all about balance.

Back in the day, the advertisers controlled not only the message but also the distribution channels. The formula used to be simple – it took 8-12 exposures to a marketing message for the audience to take notice.

Today, as marketers who also serve as publishing organizations, you aren’t bound by those constraints. When you own the enewsletter or Twitter account or control your direct mail schedule – you aren’t beholden to just a budget dictating how often you communicate. It’s still just as important, but now you have other elements (like the fact that your audience is also creating content about your brand) to factor in.

Frequency is a delicate balance. You have to communicate often enough that you stay relevant but not so often that you’re annoying. Here are some best practices for you to consider as you map out your communications.

Enewsletters: If it is packed with breaking news or super current content, then your audience will be okay with a weekly publication. On the flip side, if it’s bite-sized (300 words or less) then once a week is probably okay too. If it’s a mix of helpful information and a smidgeon about you, monthly is plenty. But anything less frequent than that is probably not enough to be something your audience counts on.

Email marketing: These are the emails you send when you are hosting an event, have a sale or are promoting something new. You can send the same (or similar) content out 3-5 times over the course of a couple weeks. But then you need to give your audience a rest. You shouldn’t bombard them with a flight of emails every month or your open rates will plummet.

Social posts (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc): Once or twice a day is good as long as it’s about them and not about you. These are not channels where repeating the same thing over and over again is advised.

Twitter: Twitter is a unique animal. Because the feed moves so quickly, if someone doesn’t see it real time, odds are they are not seeing it at all. So it’s okay to re-tweet the same message multiple times during the day. If you want a global audience, don’t forget to schedule your tweets on a full 24-hour cycle.

Blog posts: If you’re not adding new content aimed at being helpful every week, odds are you are not growing your audience. But for most organizations, blogging is more about influencing the search engines. If you’re blogging more for SEO purposes, every two weeks is a reasonable rhythm.

Traditional media: Odds are, your budget is going to control this one and you’ll have to be choosy about where you appear to get enough frequency. Having a greater presence in one or two channels (a print pub and a radio station for example) is much smarter than being a mile wide and an inch deep. Media mix is very valuable if you can afford it. But if it simply dilutes your exposure, it’s hurting more than it is helping.

Every audience is unique. While these are helpful guidelines, you’re going to want to experiment with your specific audience to see what the optimum frequency balance is for them.

 

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