A friend was at a recent business meeting where product marketers were going over color palettes, organization of their stores, and a bunch of other details, all important. What was critically missing, however, was their marketing. When asked, they said that they were doing marketing, that all of the operational details they were discussing was marketing.
Wrong.
They’re staring at a pizza. See, a pizza can be good. It can be tasty, with crispy crust and sweet but salty tomato sauce, hot cheese, in exactly the right proportions, made just the right way to be delicious and awesome.
That pizza will never, ever sell itself. At a minimum, the pizza has to be delivered or received somehow. That’s service. Given how much competition there is for pizza joints, even if it’s the best pizza in the world, the parlor will at least initially need to let people know about it, invite them to try it, tell them of its existence. That’s marketing.
Where my friend’s colleagues went wrong was in mistaking the product for the marketing and service. They thought that making a quality product was marketing and wondered why their stores were empty day after day after day. “But we have an awesome product!” “Maybe we need a new color palette for the inside of the store!” “Maybe we should move the register closer to the door!”
They’re rearranging toppings on the pizza instead of figuring out how to get people in front of the pizza to at least take a bite. They’re staring at the pizza, wondering why no one is buying it and eating it.
Are you mistaking product for service and marketing? Are you staring at the pizza instead of sharing it? Ask yourself these questions in the next marketing meeting you sit in, and if you’re in that situation, get people in your company to stop staring and start sharing your pizza.
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I’ve read and heard a lot of buzz about Amazon’s Kindle and Kindle 2 lately. Of the folks who are not wild about the device, the main criticism is that it’s not a book. It lacks the real world charm of books – the feel of the paper, the smell of the book, etc. You’re right – the Kindle is not a book, and that’s the whole point.
A quick story. Last year, I was flying back from Tampa on a business trip and sat next to Grandma Rosenblum, a wonderful 80 year old great-grandmother. I was surprised, amidst the usual contents that an 80 year old carries, to see an Amazon Kindle in her purse, and asked her about it, since my stereotype of 80 year olds generally doesn’t include cutting edge technology. Her response? “I love my Kindle. Everyone I know at my senior center has one. We all love that you can make the letters as big as you want. One of my friends has really bad eyes but she can read again now!”
I asked her about the other features of the Kindle – blog subscriptions, newspapers, etc. and she said she didn’t read anything like that, just books and the occasional article. Except she was wrong. She did read a couple of blogs – Huffington Post was in there, as well as mainstream news sources like the New York Times. She just didn’t call the Huffington Post a blog. It was merely, to her, a series of articles.
The Kindle 2 has even more stuff. Based on initial product description, it’ll have the 3G wireless component, but it will also have document conversion and a basic web browser. Guess what, gang? That’s not an eBook reader any more. That’s a tablet computer. Granted, you may not be working in Excel or playing Warcraft on it, but with the addition of a browser and document conversion, the Kindle is now a computer that can be used for productivity above and beyond reading stuff.
What’s the takeaway here? The Kindle 2 seems to be a workable tablet computer disguised as a book reader, rather like the iPod Touch is a workable PDA disguised as a music player. If you’re a business type, I would bet you’ll get some enhanced productivity out of the new Kindle.
If you’re a marketer, all I have to say is this: you had better be cranking out eBooks, you had better be cranking them out in Kindle-supported formats, and as a bonus, if you have the absolute trust and love of your readers, you might even get them to register their Kindle document conversion email addresses to get new eBooks from you when you have them. (did you know you can email documents to Kindle for conversion?)
Full disclosure: links to the Kindle are paid links for my employer, using Amazon’s affiliate program. Purchasing a Kindle through these links earns my employer the standard Amazon commission.
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All of these are premium brands, yes? They conjure up certain images, certain feelings, certain associations, all of which their respective marketing departments have worked hard to establish over the years. Premium denotes quality of product or service above average, a product you can aspire to as a consumer…
… unless you’re in the middle of a brutal recession. Suddenly, premium becomes a boat anchor around your leg as consumers seek out thrift, value, cost-conscious… cheap.
Sometimes premium can override cost concerns – the old “quality costs less in the long run” hack – but sometimes, it will just kill you.
As a marketer, think carefully about how your brand will be perceived in good times and in bad. Is there a brand association durable enough that it’s appropriate no matter what the economic climate is? Can you play the trend of the day in your communications while staying true to your core value proposition?
Here’s a tip: invest, invest, invest in your customer service, and by that I don’t just mean your call center, I mean every employee in your company. Service costs money, absolutely, but great service endures good times and bad.
When times are good, people love the personal touch and are willing to spend more for great service. When times are bad, people want to stretch the dollar as far as it can go, and if your product or service has value and can be backed up with great service (think a warranty w/a toll free number that humans answer on the second ring), you will endure when everyone else goes out of business.
Great customer service pays huge dividends. You can get more return out of great service than all the PR in the world, because in the uber-connected 2.0 world where everything is online and simultaneously service nearly everywhere borders on abusive, your great service will be worth talking about.
Great service, in other words, is a premium, a premium that will lend a shine to your brand no matter what’s happening in the world – and that’s worth paying for.
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A while back, Mitch Joel posted his Pixelated conference series, a collection of seminars and sessions from conferences that contain the “best of the best” for any set of topics. I’ve been so busy doing stuff that I never got around to putting mine together until now. This version of Pixelated is focused on Business Marketing – ideas from sales, marketing, branding, and new media that should help any business do things a little better.
If this were a conference, a real life conference, I have no doubt that attending it would cost you thousands of dollars, at least for the first sessions. Thanks to the exceptional generosity of conferences and events who post their sessions, you can enjoy some of the best content on earth without leaving your chair.
Treat this as an actual conference. Take a day or half a day to watch the videos and give them your undivided attention. Have a bottle of water, a notepad, and an open mind as you watch the sessions, as if you were actually there.
Rather than just a pile of videos, I’ve also added brief annotations about why I think each session is important.
Updated: refreshed for July 2010, with some new sessions from TED and other shows.
Pixelated Business Marketing starts… now.
Seth Godin @ TED: This is Seth’s newest set of perspectives, based on his book Tribes. The evolution of marketing from mass media to hero culture of sorts.
Rory Sutherland @ TED: An amazingly funny and insightful talk about the creation of non-tangible value.
Malcolm Gladwell @ TED: This session ranks super high on my list because Malcolm gets you to think outside the box. What product or service do your customers deeply want but don’t know it?
Joseph Pine @ TED: If nothing else, this talk should make you think about what experiences are and how to give them to customers, rather than products or services.
Dan Ariely @ TED: Dan’s book, Predictably Irrational, is the basis for this talk about how our decision processes are flawed, including why consumers buy things they really shouldn’t.
Garr Reynolds at Google Talks: Garr is the author of Presentation Zen, a phenomenal book that asks you to look at how you present information and how you can make your presentations better, more impactful, and less boring.
Avinash Kaushik at Google Talks: Avinash is pretty much THE bottom line when it comes to web analytics. In this talk he goes over a good chunk of his book and also talks about data-drive corporate culture and its importance.
David Meerman Scott from Inbound Marketing Summit: David’s book, the New Rules of Marketing and PR, power part of this talk as he goes over how the ground is changing underneath traditional business outreach.
NEDMA: I talk about email marketing and social media integration.
Optimization Summit: I talk about the best practices of email marketing.
In reading the latest “controversy” in social media about Burger King’s ad agency tweeting on behalf of the client and the furor over authenticity and transparency, I came to this conclusion:
Burger King needs a new agency.
If you haven’t been following along, here’s the very short summary. CP+B is the agency in question tweeting as the fictional King character for Burger King on Twitter. Some social media folks object to a lack of disclosure by the agency, a lack of authenticity.
Here’s a different perspective on the issue: ROI. What in the world was CP+B thinking? I’d love to see even a back of the envelope ROI argument for creating a Twitter account for a fictional character to sell sandwiches, which is the whole point of Burger King.
Forget about transparency, authenticity, and whether or not an agency should tweet as a client. What in the world is the ROI or even apparent value of this initiative?
Here’s how I would have handled a client’s request to be engaged on Twitter: create a Twitter bot that you can message with your current location. It returns the three nearest Burger Kings so that you can get something to EAT, since the whole point of Burger King is to provide something for me to eat. I’d use it in a heartbeat when I travel. If Burger King and CP+B approached Twitter or social media in general from the perspective of being USEFUL, they’d get more sales and a measurable ROI.
It’s absolutely true that you can’t get precise ROI on social media. My work for the Student Loan Network means that ROI gets fuzzy, but the business connections, enhanced distribution of things like eBooks, inbound links, and other measurable activities are all improved by Twitter and social media. Can I put an exact dollar amount on it? No. Can I say that Twitter has improved the bottom line? Yes. Have I helped folks on Twitter get financial aid questions answered? Yes.
Be useful in your social media experiments. Don’t just do something in social media because it’s what the cool kids are doing. Do something that is useful, that serves a need, and your social media experiment will be a success.
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In a period of growth, your brand is your sword, helping you open up new markets, boldly making an impression on consumers, reinforcing the emotional aftertaste of doing business with you for good or ill. Your brand is what you brandish against competitors, demonstrating with swiftness your strengths and the reasons others should do business with you. Obstacles like barriers to entry are slashed aside as word of mouth of your brand paves the way for progress.
In a period of recession, your brand is your shield, defending you against the onslaught of market forces. Your brand reminds consumers why they did business with you in the first place, the value of business with you versus a lower priced, potentially lower quality competitor. Your brand as shield provides some cover for you to reposition, to adjust, to realign on new terrain, to bide your time until opportunity becomes apparent and it’s time to wield the sword.
If you are skilled only with branding as a sword, then the forces of recession will toast you as surely as a dragon’s breath the moment the market turns.
If you are skilled only with branding as a shield, you’ll be left behind when others charge forward to opportunity and prosperity.
How do you put this to use?
Wield your brand as a sword by creating something worth talking about, giving customers experiences that amaze them. Solve their problems. Cut away obstacles to their success. Deliver what you promise plus a little bit more. Serve them in the truest sense of the phrase.
Wield your brand as a shield by never failing to deliver what you promise, by providing great service as a defensive play, by reminding customers in as many ways as possible why they’ve done business with you and why they should continue to do so. In marketing copy and sales talks, ask customers to recount their experiences to you as a way of self-reinforcing the good. (assuming you delivered on your promises)
This above all else, though: know when it is time to advance with sword in hand or hold your ground behind your shield.
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Social media for business is unquestionably a hot topic in the current environment. Lots of folks want to know how it can help their business, make them some money, or reduce costs, and to a degree, social media can do all that. That said, a real stealth play for social media is using its shiny object status to effect change in an organization.
Consider Fizzcrank Corporation. It’s been doing okay for the past few years with traditional marketing, from brochures to trade shows, but it’s feeling a little stagnant. Products aren’t revving quite as quickly, and buyers aren’t buying Fizzcranks at the same levels they did two years ago. Bob the marketing manager has been wanting to do more field work to see what customers want, but management isn’t willing to step outside its comfort zone. What does Bob do?
Leverage the power of the shiny object! Bob brings shiny objects like Twitter, Google Reader, and Facebook to the table and says that for no money and just some time and effort, Fizzcrank Corporation can become a leader in the Fizzcrank industry. Management is bedazzled by the shiny objects and says that as long as the no money part is true, Bob can do whatever he wants with social media. The CMO gets all excited and has a press release written (that is ignored) to announce Fizzcrank Corporation’s thought leadership in the Fizzcrank vertical.
Now the real work begins – Bob sets up his listening post tools, tying Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a bunch of other networks together. (see my Twitter eBook for more details on how) He sets up monitoring for keywords, starts listening for Fizzcrank in global searches, and before long finds out that customers would really like to be able to use a Overcharged Capacitor with their Fizzcrank. Bob takes the idea back to the engineering gnomes who inform him that matching up an Overcharged Capacitor with a Fizzcrank is not only simple, but a really good idea, and Fizzcrank OC is born.
Fast forward three months. Fizzcrank Corporation now dominates the Fizzcrank industry with Fizzcrank OC. Products are selling better than ever, and Bob now talks to customers regularly. Management is happy with profits. Bob is happy to be talking to real people instead of writing press releases and billboards. Customers are happy because Fizzcrank is creating products they actually need and want.
The lesson in this fictional account is that social media can be a way to introduce a cultural change in your company, away from broadcast marketing and toward listening to what your customers are saying. If you work at a company that has not developed a culture of listening, see if you can use social media as a stealth play to begin the practice – after all, your customers likely know better than you do exactly what they want out of your products or services.
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Much has been made of 2009 being a year of frugality for marketing departments and social media becoming the new darling for budget constrained companies. That said, I want to throw a contrary viewpoint out there: social media marketing is not necessarily cheaper than other forms of marketing.
What social media marketing achieves is a trade of time for cash. If you’re capital constrained, you’re going to be trading big cash spend for big time spend. If you’re okay with that, if you have the personnel resources to spare, then social media marketing is going to work well for you.
Social media requires a hefty investment of time, and even in the best of times has a squishy ROI. You can’t load up a social media marketing plan like you can an email marketing plan and say that if we post this item to Facebook or we Twitter this web page, it will result in 354 clicks to our product page and 14 purchases. You can do that with reasonable confidence with email marketing – you know what your open rates are, you know what your clicks are, and you know the revenue behind a click. There is no such formula or set of statistics for social media.
One of the catches in tough economic times is a stronger demand for ROI – making sure scarce resources are well-allocated. How do you calculate social media’s ROI?
We do know the market value of some items in social media; an inbound link from a certain class of web site carries a market value (in terms of what it’d cost to buy that link) so if you can get one for free, then that inbound link’s value can be directly attributed to social media’s ROI if the link couldn’t be obtained any other way. I know that if Chris Brogantwitters this blog post, there’s an audience of 26,566 that will briefly see it in their Twitterstream; on a CPM basis, I know that I would have to pay a certain amount for access to the same size audience. If he went a step further and asked you to link to it from your web site, then I’d have additional hard ROI I could build into my numbers.
Even with that, the ROI is tough to crunch. I wouldn’t necessarily make a business decision for social media based on those numbers, would you?
If you’re looking to get impact out of social media marketing, take a hard look at what you’re doing right now inside your company using more expensive channels and see where social media marketing might make a difference. For example, in my own work at the Student Loan Network, we’re always looking for great partners to work with; having a prominent LinkedIn network (cspenn at gmail dot com, all requests accepted!) is a great, low-cost way to find new partners to work with. Twitter has transformed from a big chat room to an honest-to-goodness source of lead generation and link building. Blogging is pure SEO food, podcasting has built the name of the company in the industry far beyond what should rationally be possible without massive ad spend, and the connections made through events like PodCamp, Podcasters Across Borders, and other conferences have driven incredible business connections.
I would argue that social media marketing isn’t cheaper per se. What I would argue is that it opens new, different doors and gives you opportunities you might not otherwise be able to generate without far more cash resources than you have access to, and therein lies its true value.
If you’re in marketing, how are you presenting why social media marketing is right for your company? Comment below! (comments are moderated but will be approved pretty fast)
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So here we are. The economy’s down, business everywhere is in trouble, prospects for the future look dim at best. What’s a marketer to do?
The thing to do is to take a moment and strip away everything in marketing that doesn’t matter. Put down for a moment ROI, analytics, metrics, conversation, social media, direct mail, campaigns, all the buzzwords that we insist upon. Put all that away because it clouds our vision.
The soul of marketing transcends all of this, all the technology, all the distractions. The soul of marketing can be boiled down into a simple three part creed. If you work for a great company, this is a formalization of what you already know.
I believe in myself.
I believe in my community and our ability to mutually succeed.
I believe in what I have to share.
I believe in myself. This is where you start. I believe in myself, I believe that I am larger, stronger, more powerful, more capable than any downturn, than any financial crisis or sagging economy, because I believe that I can make things happen in any environment, but especially in a challenging one. I believe that worry, doubt, and anxiety are largely mental limitations and I believe in my ability to go beyond my limitations.
I believe in my community and our ability to mutually succeed. I believe in my coworkers, that we share a common purpose to be successful, to do good, to help each other succeed. I believe that the more I share with my community inside and outside of my company, the more I receive in return unasked. I believe that giving is the greatest pathway to gain, and what I have, I have to share in order for everyone to prosper.
I believe in what I have to share. I believe in the company I work for and the products and services we have to offer. I believe that our goods and services legitimately improve the lives of the people who use them responsibly, and I believe that the company I work for stands behind our shared ideals. I believe that at the end of the day, our community, our customers, and our world is better for us having done business in it, and prosperity will be the natural by-product of the true value we create.
If you can wake up every day and affirm this creed truthfully to yourself, if you can look a coworker, colleague, or supervisor in the eye and feel these truths in action, then no amount of economic hardship will be able to slow you down.
If you wake up one day and you can’t affirm this creed, then you have to either change how your company does business or you have to change companies to one that does business in alignment with your ideals.
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I got yet another cold call at the office today. The sales drone on the other end, as soon as they confirmed they got a live human being, immediately launched into their pitch.
“Mr. Penn, I’d like just 15 minutes of your time to go over your telecom needs and introduce you to SomeRandomCompany, a leading national provider of…”
I lost him after the leading national provider. I think he went on for about 2 more minutes before pausing to ask when he could schedule an appointment to waste even more of my time, after which he got a polite and very brief “thanks for calling, please remove me from your call list, happy holidays, good day sir”.
Another mutual waste of time. Even if I had telecom needs, I wouldn’t use his services. Why? I despise being interrupted at work (we’re busier than ever at the Student Loan Network!), and nothing is worse than cold calling, whether on the phone or in person. (office supplies sales drones, I’m looking at you)
These folks are trying old school interruption marketing and it just doesn’t work any more. Why? If I don’t have telecom needs, then you’re just wasting everyone’s time. If I have telecom needs, I’m not going to wait for someone to interrupt me. I’m going to go to Google, type in telecom companies near 02169, and see what comes up. Simultaneously, I’m going to use Twitter or LinkedIn to ask trusted business associates who they use for their telecom and if they’re happy with them.
Are you still using interruption marketing techniques? You shouldn’t be – partly because I’m sure you’ve seen their effectiveness decline, but also because there are better ways to market. I had another guy leave a spam comment on my blog advertising his expert SEO services. I guarantee if I Google SEO expert, he won’t be in the top 3 results.
The very best thing you can do as a business looking to make a marketing move is to have something worth talking about that’s amazing. Do something amazing. Do something useful. If you’re a telecom who wants my company’s business, fine. Do something so incredible that I won’t ever look anywhere else.
Look at a company like Hubspot and their Web Site Grader. It’s a great, free tool that is amazingly good at what it does, and if I ever needed inbound marketing services, I wouldn’t even bother calling anyone else. If their free product is this awesome, their paid products must really rock the house.
I love the service I get from Blue Sky Factory for email. (full disclosure, they sponsor Marketing Over Coffee and PodCamp, and the Student Loan Network is a client) Name another email service provider that lets me IM tech support AND the CEO whenever I need help, and has a Twitter outpost that lets me hit them up for non-urgent stuff. When I was doing due diligence pricing research recently, one email provider’s live chat was with a customer rep who had no interest in answering my question about price. They stuck to script despite the fact that their answers had nothing to do with the questions I was asking that they didn’t even make it onto the short list. As my friend Chris Brogan said, customer service is the new PR – and your customer service has to be amazing.
Part of my work at the Student Loan Network is to bring a little of that magic to the student loan industry. We crank out eBooks like candy, like the new FAFSA line by line eBook and the Scholarship Search Secrets eBook, plus participate on all the major social networks so that we can be found. If you’re not interested or looking for student loans, that’s fine. I don’t want to interrupt you. If you are looking for student loans, then it’s my aim to have built presence of mind with our free goodies that will put us at the top of your short list.
The takeaway for you is simple: what can you do that’s amazing? What can you do that will absolutely dominate mindshare in your vertical and make you the painfully obvious choice for anyone who needs your products or services?
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They’re staring at a pizza. See, a pizza can be good. It can be tasty, with crispy crust and sweet but salty tomato sauce, hot cheese, in exactly the right proportions, made just the right way to be delicious and awesome.
