Oct 2, 2012 | Communication, Social Media
SME’s cannot afford to spend money on traditional media, and after all, it is now far from the only option, so why would they?
Facebook is the first stop of most, predictable I guess with almost a billion users, but the environment is all wrong for many, as it enables a social digi-conversation not a commercial one.
If you need a commercial conversation, Linkedin is way better, with 150 million users, 50% of whom are businesses. So, if you have a B2B service, Linkedin is a real option, often overlooked.
In this terrific post, Shelley Kramer gives some very useful “how to” tips.
Oct 1, 2012 | Management, Marketing, Social Media
Just because two things correlate, does not necessarily mean that there is cause and effect at work.
Imagine you have just launched a new product backed by a great TV ad, and sales exceed forecast by a factor of 5. Obviously the ad agency is going to be delirious, putting your ad on all their show reels, but did the advertising cause the sales, or were there other success factors working for you?
Emergence of digital media has complicated the lives of communication agencies and marketers enormously. By offering real ROI measurement opportunities, web-tools have made marketers accountable for results as never before. This does not mean it is easy, just possible.
Google analytics offers a range of tools by which to generate a host of metrics, but two challenges remain:
- Which are the few metrics that really get to the heart of marketing ROI
- What is the cause of something, and what is the effect.
Avinash Kaushik’s great blog addresses these issues, in this one, examining the complications of the ROI of Facebook advertising, something that has stumped lesser minds for a while now, and cost early facebook investors a heap in the IPO.
Reading the post, I was reminded of Seth Godins musing about the relationship between rain and umbrellas. Every time it rained, he saw umbrellas everywhere, so did the presence of umbrellas cause rain, or did rain cause the presence of umbrellas?
Sep 28, 2012 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales
Working with a client recently, I realised my language had changed. The word “Pitch” had been substituted for the more usual “Present” as I encouraged them to get out and engage with their markets in a very focused way to build sales, rather than taking a more passive approach, and presenting their credentials, hoping to strike a nerve.
Any presentation, as I have argued before is an opportunity to sell something, a product, an idea, a course of action, but it seems to offer three alternatives to an audience, buy in, leave it alone, or remain on the fence. By contrast, a Pitch seems to offer less options, you either buy in, or not. No middle course, no fence, yes or no.
Before he was famous outside advertising, Bryce Courtney used to write a weekly column for one of the Australian newspapers called “The Pitch.” Looking back at a dog-eared copy of a compilation of columns published afterwards, and decoding the great stories for the message, it is unashamedly, “Pitch” as a call to action, leave no middle ground, and manage a conversation for a “Yes or No” outcome.
A more recent publication is Oren Klaff’s great little book, “Pitch Anything” which offers a framework for making a pitch successful, and whilst the focus is on capital raising, the lessons are applicable everywhere.
So stop presenting, and start pitching when you want a clear outcome.
Sep 25, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Big Brother is watching where you are, if you have a smartphone. The GPS capabilities of the newer smartphones opens up an extraordinary Pandora’s box of opportunities to market to those in immediate reach, alternatively to deluge them with SPAM, as illustrated by Tom Fishburnes cartoon . (make sure you click through to his Google keynote)
You are a smart young thing, with a purchase history in a chain of fashion stores. As you walk into the orbit of a store, your phone tells them who you are, and that you are close, which offers the chance to mine your database, and come up with tailored specials, available for the next 20 minutes, just for you. Or perhaps as you move towards the cinema complex in George Street, the movie about to start that sits in your preferred genre, offers you a preferred location, and a coffee. The opportunities are endless, the potential to annoy by filling your phone with Spam almost as endless.
This evolution will require a rethink of the customer acquisition process. Aiming messages at consumers with the laser-like accuracy to avoid being a Spammer will require a sophisticated data mining capability, as well as a sensitivity to consumer preferences that will be hard to translate into an algorithm.
The downside for those who do it poorly is that potentially loyal consumers will move elsewhere, and block your messages, the emerging equivalent of retail purgatory.
Sep 24, 2012 | Branding, Change, Marketing, Social Media
So, the Gruen team is down a member as Russell Howcroft moves on to take over running the ailing Channel 10. There must be a sense of irony here, he moves from career as a “Madman” moonlighting in a successful public subscription TV channel where he has pontificated on the merits and foibles of various advertising, to a struggling channel with an eroding advertising revenue base at a time when TV’s are turning off (my assumption) in favor of alternatives.
There are still plenty of TV’s out there, but are they being used as TV’s the way they were a decade ago? Probably not, they are playing recorded shows, either downloaded, bought via a subscription service or in a boxed set, and played when, and where it suits the viewer, on a whole range of devices, not when the “prime time” usage model of a fixed set and time table dictates.
How will an old school advertising guru perform in this environment of rapid and disruptive change? Even the disrupter, Google, who made a fortune out of placing ads in the way of what you are searching for has recognised that where you are is as important, and so are investing in Maps as a representation of the interface between the real world and the virtual one, seeing the next wave of innovation coming.
Good luck Russell, but my instinct is that a 30 year old social media whiz Kid may have been a better choice.
