Apr 5, 2011 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Social Media
Following on from yesterdays somewhat cynical observations about the supposed ease of using viral marketing as an advertising “strategy”, driven often by cost considerations and dills who do not understand, it seems sensible to take a closer look at e-advertising, and the ways to target advertising to where it may deliver a marketing return, and hopefully eventually, a financial one.
Ads on the net have proliferated, from targeted ads that look like the stuff on TV or in magazines, to stuff, sometimes highly creative, posted by individuals, and that would never cut it in the advertising old days, but that leveraged the dynamics and connectedness of the net and have worked a treat. Predictably, the tools to manage placement have evolved pretty quickly as service providers seek an alternative to the disappearing revenue from traditional media.
The social media phenomenon of the web 2.0 has opened up another way to slice and dice potential audiences to target communication at those more receptive for some reason, but when you have a starting point of 600 million facebook, and hundreds of millions of other “opportunities”, Foursquare, Flikr, U-Tube, et al, the problem becomes one of analytics. Predictably there are a host of start-ups addressing the challenge of organising the data into a useable form, but the numbers are huge, and the organic unpredictability of an individuals capacity to respond to messages of all sorts makes this a real challenge.
I still fall back on the old fashioned formula of identifying a need, then over-delivering to customers, one by one, as the starting point. The difference is we can now conduct hundreds of small scale “experiments” using all the digital tools and low cost communication, the “experiments” themselves becoming the medium of communication exchange with highly fragmented potential and existing customers.
Apr 4, 2011 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media
Bosses, often with no idea of marketing, and the social networks and how to engage them seem to be increasingly thinking forget the TV, (good idea that in most cases) “just make a silly/funny/outrageous video, and it will go viral”.
Voila, marketing success at little cost, up go the profits.
Wish it was that easy, if it was, everyone’s’ creative baby would get a million views on U-tube, but it only happens to a few.
The basic rules of marketing and communication still need to be respected. Identify a problem for a group that your product solves better than any other, demonstrate the solution, praise the value, and build a relationship between the user and the product.
Making a video of cats that look like Hitler and dancing babies only work very occasionally, then usually only once, so be relevant. Take a look at the “virals” in Tom’s narrative of his cartoon in the link, they work!
Apr 3, 2011 | Communication, Customers, Sales, Small business
I’ve seen lots of customer service initiatives that promise “delivery by ……..” and no matter how quick that may be, there is still uncertainty about when it will be delivered, and customers will be anxious.
By contrast, “we will deliver at 3pm on the 25th” is very specific, and so long as you do deliver at the nominated time, every time, even if it is a few days longer than then quickest possible, customers just love the certainty.
Mar 31, 2011 | Collaboration, Social Media
Social media can be seductive, the chase for the raw numbers, without considering the quality of the numbers.
I am little different, I like to see the numbers, which whilst relatively low, are steadily building on this blog, as the scattered individuals who find value in what I write slowly find me, and offer the opportunity to engage. However, amongst those who find me are those who will never take any value, or add any value to the content and debate I try to encourage, or who just want to sell me something. No use to me, or readers of this blog, so they must be filtered out, or they dilute the value.
Analysing the numbers becomes increasingly important as they grow, because in order to engage effectively, you must filter the electronic wheat from the chaff.
There are many tools to do this, Google analytics being the best known and widely used, but for a 60 year old non techo to install it on this WordPress hosted blog proved to be difficult, until this suggestion came along.
Thanks Paul.
Hopefully I can add some value by posting the link that will assist others as it helped me.
Mar 30, 2011 | Lean, Management, Operations
The clarion call for improvement, in everything from the minor shop floor activities to big picture strategic implementation is clear. We all need to do more with less, and this requires that we identify which bits of our current activities should be changed, redirected, or trashed.
In effect, there are three questions that should be answered:
- What are the underlying drivers or causes of problems?
- How can we build predictability of outcomes from any particular activity, and group of activities?
- How can we ensure the mistakes of yesterday are not repeated today?
These seemingly simple questions lie at the core of all improvement I initiatives.
