Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Tag: Marketing

What marketing should learn from the Obama campaign

Barack Obama won the presidency on a combination of many factors, but one often overlooked by marketing is the absolutely essential use of data. Obama’s campaign under manager David Plouffe was a data machine. Consider:

1. Web sites, social media, blogs, etc. – all with Google Analytics, which you could see on page load.

2. The Biden SMS play was brilliant. Get a bunch of people to sign up for your text messaging service by revealing your VP pick on mobile first, and you’ve populated your database.

3. The iPhone app was brilliant. In this Newsweek article, the app’s back end arranged the “call a friend” by states where the campaign wanted to focus. What might have seemed random or casual was in fact well thought out.

4. Email, email, email. Think email marketing is dead? Tell that to the campaign, which sent out more email than I could count, with different voices, topics, subjects, and every combination you could imagine.

5. Word of mouth. The Obama campaign actively encouraged word of mouth at every opportunity, from telling supporters at rallies to call and text friends to encouraging sharing of media by posting to YouTube, broadcasting on UStream, every avenue available to it.

The clear winner in the Obama campaign was marketing. It helped that the product was worth talking about, but without the massive, well-run marketing machine, we’d be talking about a very different president elect today.

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November 7, 2008
The press release I wish I could send out

When I looked at my marketing campaign brief for October, one of the items is the $10,000 scholarship. This press release immediately came to mind:

Student Loan Network $10,000 Scholarship Will Be Awarded on Halloween

Quincy, MA —

The Student Loan Network blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah industry leading blah blah blah blah blah blah leader blah blah blah blah affordable blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah landmark blah blah blah blah historic blah blah blah blah serving families blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah customer service blah blah blah blah blah blah

We’re giving away $10,000 on Halloween to one lucky student. www.StudentLoanNetwork.com/10K.

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah President and CEO said, “blah blah blah blah blah blah leadership blah blah blah we care blah blah blah number one priority”. Blah blah blah savings blah blah blah blah blah blah thought leader blah blah blah blah blah blah competitive blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah full suite blah blah blah blah oh my god are you still reading this blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Internet blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah serving tomorrow’s blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Sadly, this isn’t quite the level of professionalism expected in a press release, even if it’s 100% accurate and gets the point across nicely. Why is it most press releases are full of fluff?

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September 30, 2008
How World of Warcraft can make you a better marketer

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft (WoW) for fun the past couple of weeks or so. It was a fun game in the beginning, but now it’s a useful game, at least in the sense of honing two vitally important skills, arbitrage and information asymmetry. (two skills, I might add, come in handy in today’s economy)

To the right is a screen clip of WarCraft as it appears with a few pricing plugins installed. By itself, the doesn’t look at all like this, only with some plugins. (Auctioneer, if you’re a WoW gamer) Take a look at what’s in there.

Pricing
Median buyout price
Buyout prices at the extremes
3, 7, and 14 day moving averages of prices
Item availability from vendors and pricing
Resale valuation and estimated ROI

Bear in mind, the average player of WoW doesn’t install this add-on software, which means they don’t have access to this information.

What does this have to do with marketing? There are two concepts at work here.

Arbitrage is unequal pricing for equal things. In this example, I can tell what items are good deals and what items aren’t, what items are a bargain, what items are overpriced. Arbitrage extends to marketing and new media as well – concepts that work in proven systems can be adapted to new media, and the result is information arbitrage. I can take a concept like a proven sales letter template and adapt it for a blog.

Information asymmetry is even more important in this case. I have access to information that the average WoW player does not. This allows me to be more effective as a WoW gamer, because I can earn rapid profits from better information, especially competing against players with less information or lower quality information. Marketers in new media have an information asymmetry advantage that marketers outside of new media don’t enjoy. Marketers in new media have access to the Twitter stream, to blogs, RSS, podcasts, and so much more. If you can know what your target market is thinking and saying about your product, service, or industry, you have a massive advantage over marketers who lack that information and either have to compete by spending more or can’t compete as well.

Arbitrage and information asymmetry – all from a fun game.

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September 29, 2008
The market crashes, turns to ashes

“The market crashes, turns to ashes that you’re dancing on while some fat lady cues up for a song.” – Matthew Ebel, Better Off Dead

Well, folks, the great unraveling is picking up pace, with more banks failing, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac taking up hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in a bailout, and companies like Lehman Brothers essentially saying “Everything for sale, cheap! We need cash fast!”

What does this mean for you, the new media professional, the marketing professional?

It means that flash cash for new media is dwindling fast. Companies can’t afford Bubble 2.0 any more.

You’d better have a revenue stream that isn’t dependent on just advertising – MarketingVox recently cited sharp declines in expenditures.

You’d better have a revenue stream that isn’t dependent on discretionary income – that’s going away real fast.

You’d better have a revenue stream that isn’t dependent on corporate largesse – budgets simply aren’t there.

So what should you be looking for?

Look for pay-for-performance revenue streams like affiliate marketing that pay a cut of the sale. Take a look at Shareasale, for example. (Full disclosure: PAID link that supports the Financial Aid Podcast.) As long as you make affiliate publishers money, you make money.

Make premium subscriptions for irreplaceable content. Your content has got to be so valuable, so top-notch, that it’s no longer discretionary spending, but mandatory spending.

Above all else, if you’re not building your database, you’re dead meat.

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September 10, 2008
What happened to the other 98%?

Here’s a vital question I have from a recent discussion with my CEO at the Student Loan Network:

What happened to the other 98%?

We talk a lot, especially in marketing, about click through, conversion, and retention rates. Invariably, these rates are small fractions in all of the discussions I’ve had. 1% click through rate, 10% open rate, etc.

When you turn these metrics around, they’re a little more depressing.

90% did not open rate.
99% did not click through rate.
95% did not buy something rate.
96% did not volunteer rate.
94% did not complete the form rate.

As a marketer, that looks appalling, so we state things in the positive – ooh, that cold calling campaign landed a 2% conversion rate.

What the heck is happening to the other 98%? Didn’t open? Why not? Didn’t click? Why not?

Often we talk in marketing about increasing market share or conversion by a few percentage points.

Why don’t we ever talk about increasing conversion by an order of magnitude?

If you were in charge of a marketing campaign, how would you get the did X/did not X rates to switch places?

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September 9, 2008
SEO more important than ever with Google Chrome

Google’s announcement of Chrome, their new open-source browser, was greeted with a relatively lukewarm reception online today.

Here’s the part that a lot of folks missed, from the Chrome comic book. (yes, a comic book)

Get it?

If your SEO efforts aren’t up to par, Google’s ignoring you in the testing of their browser, too.

If their browser achieves any level of success, Google will test against your site – if you rank.

Now this part is the gem, the part that marketers NEED to pay attention to, or ignore at their peril.

If users think your site is worth remembering, Chrome will do it for them.

If your site ranks for your keywords, Chrome will suggest it – IN the browser itself. No need to be using Google suggest.

Seth Godin is fond of saying that if you make your content remarkable, you win.

Google Chrome now says if you make your content remarkable, they’ll market it for free to their users directly in the OmniBox.

We’ll see how this new browser does, but marketers – pay heed.

Google Chrome debuts September 2.

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September 2, 2008
What martial arts can teach us about marketing

The martial art that I practice places an incredible amount of emphasis on the basics of the art. Basic footwork patterns, basic abilities to hit, grapple, throw, and otherwise put the kibosh on someone trying to hurt you.

One of the things that every senior instructor at my dojo, the Boston Martial Arts Center, constantly emphasizes is the refinement and polishing of our basics. If you punch someone, you want them to stay punched. If you throw someone, you want them to stay thrown. All the fancy moves and movie-like choreography will do you no good whatsoever if the bad guy gets back up and starts griefing you again; conversely, all the fancy moves are completely unnecessary if you get out of harm’s way and deck the guy so hard that his unconceived children feel it.

What does this have to do with marketing? Simple. We forget the basics all too often. In our attention deficit society, in our 90 hour work week system, we’re so easily distracted by flashy toys and tricks that we forget to practice and refine our basics. The ability to send out an effective direct email campaign. The ability to optimize a web page for the basics of search engine optimization. The ability to design a usable interface to our information.

This is a topic I’ll be talking about more at the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer in October. We’ll explore the levels of marketing basics just like a martial art, showing you what “white belt” skills will always pay off no matter how many grades of black belt you have.

In the end, no matter how fancy your marketing or martial arts, chances are in any real encounter on the street or in your vertical, you’re going to get one shot that will decide whether you make it or don’t. There’s no second place prize. The only way to be confident in that one shot is to have solid basics that you can rely on.

Ask yourself this as a marketer: what are your basics? How reliable are they? How confident are you in the results you can generate with them?

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August 27, 2008
If marketing designed stop signs…

More truth than comedy.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVb8EC1Y2xM[/youtube]

Hat tip to Rachel Timmerman for this one.

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August 25, 2008
The Most Effective Marketing A Non-Profit Can Do Is Build The Database

The Most Effective Marketing A Non-Profit Can Do Is Build The Database

I’ve been seeing more and more “brand awareness” campaigns, especially for non-profits and social good organizations lately, and I genuinely have to ask – what’s the value of that? From tweets on Twitter saying “Raise awareness of the plight of…” to advertisements on MySpace like the one to the right, awareness campaigns seem to be everywhere.

What’s the value of awareness?

What’s the return on investment of awareness?

If I were a marketer for a non-profit, a social justice cause, or just about anything like this, I’d have to think long and hard about the value of my limited marketing dollars going towards headshare versus more actionable marketing.

Let’s take this Zimbabwe campaign, for example. Ask the average American to locate Zimbabwe on a map and you’ll have an appallingly low success rate. Heck, ask them to locate the continent Zimbabwe is on and you won’t do much better. Why advertise an awareness campaign on a predominantly US-centric web site to an audience that likely can’t even find the target, and advertise in a way that has no action?

If I were trying to market this campaign, here’s how I’d approach it. If MySpace is the venue where in fact the audience for this campaign exists, fine. I’d put up a simple widget, maybe some scrolling scary pictures of what Mugabe does to his people, and have a “sign the petition” form with slots for name, address, email, etc. right below it, and the requisite opt-in to the mailing list checkbox, pre-checked for your convenience. Maybe make it a Flash widget that scrolled and displayed the last 50 petitioners’ names and locations.

This widget would in turn feed a nice SQL database that would aggregate the petitioners’ data and dump it into a mass mailer like Blue Sky Factory (disclosure: BSF is a sponsor of one of my podcasts, Marketing Over Coffee) and start soliciting donations. Sure, we could print out a list of petitioners and drop it on a politician’s desk, but I’d bet it would be far more effective, once a huge house list was amassed, to offer a politician’s PAC an email to the constituency on their behalf in exchange for their vote/support/introduction of legislation.

Forget spending money on awareness. We live or die on our database. The database is a tangible asset that has real, stored value which we can use for barter, trade, or sale (assuming you have the permission of the audience to do so). If you have scarce marketing dollars, if you have scarce resources, building up a marketing database is one of the fastest ways to add value to your non-profit, stay in touch with your constituency, drive donations and funding campaigns, and make real change in the world.

Yes, you have to use your database wisely, perhaps sparingly, always with the privacy and security of your constituency top of mind, but having an effective database is an incomparable value.

In the information economy, the non-profit with the most information, effectively used, wins.

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June 17, 2008
The Online Marketer's Web Strategy

The Online Marketer’s Web Strategy

I had the privilege of attending and presenting at the MarketingProfs conference over the past two days, and it was a phenomenal conference, full of lots of good ideas. However, one thing stood out among the various discussions that I wanted to make a point about. There is a definite structure and strategy to online marketing that you need to follow to improve your likelihood of success.

During a number of sessions, folks were talking about all the social media stuff available to marketers, about how to choose and how to get started. Social media was the buzzword at the conference.. Social media is sexy. Social media is the hot new thing.

Social media comes LAST, gang.

That’s right, last.

What comes first?

You first must have CONTENT. Something worth talking about. If you want to be in social media, the social part is conversation and discussion. If you have nothing worth talking about – and nothing worth others talking about you – then any effort you put into social media will largely be a waste of time.

Once you’ve got content, USER INTERFACE comes next. Make a web site that’s attractive, easy to navigate, easy to find stuff on. Hire a professional designer or information architect to help you with this if you’re not so good at it, or use a proven templating system. Whatever you do, focus on putting your content into an easily managed format that is a pleasure to use. Make sure you have at least one way of converting a visitor into a database entry somehow, whether it’s a simple mailing list, or a complex lead generation system.

If you’re marketing online, you’re marketing with a web site. Do your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION next. Make sure your web sites validate with W3C standards, at least minimally. Make sure you optimize your sites, build some links, do all the basics. Check out Hubspot’s Web Site Grader for a great starter tool. When you set up profiles on other social networks, make sure you link back to your web site, always. SEO is all about capturing passive traffic, capturing people who are looking for your content.

Only after you’ve completed the steps of great content, user interface, and search engine optimization are you ready to dive into social media. There’s no way you can win the road race if your car is lacking tires and an engine. Content, UI, and SEO are the basics you MUST have in place prior to diving into social media, or else you’ll be wasting time, energy, and the limited slice of attention your audience is giving you – and they won’t give you again.

Photo credit: CC Chapman

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June 11, 2008

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