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“Social media is cool!” proclaims Chris Brogan in a premium article at MarketingProfs. “Blogging and podcasts are cool! We’re so cutting edge! Twitter is like the future here today, and no one knows about it!” If you’ve noticed a certain facetious quality to his enthusiasm, his next line makes clear his disdain for the gee-whiz attitude many people take: “Yeah, whatever.”
According to Brogan, achieving success with social-media tools requires a sober analysis of their usefulness, and the smart implementation of well-reasoned strategies that complement traditional marketing efforts. Let’s say you’ve joined Twitter in a professional capacity and now have 3,000 followers. That’s great, but now what?
Reaching your business goals means leveraging that network with a solid plan—not just preening over your popularity. If you want sales, for instance, you should start by differentiating between your real-life friends and your customers. “I don’t sell to my friends,” says Brogan. “My friends sometimes bring me sales. Two totally different things.” With customers, meanwhile, you’ll want to move them gently to places like email lists where they’re more likely to convert. “Don’t let them just reside in Twitter,” he notes. “Twitter isn’t a database.”
Your Marketing Inspiration is to keep Web 2.0 in perspective. “Blogging and social media and all these whiz-bang tools don’t sell things,” says Brogan. “People sell things. People who know how to sell things sell things. This social media stuff [sic] is great, but it’s a set of tools, so you’ve gotta pull out of the ‘yippee! hooray!’ cloud for a bit and look at basic selling mechanisms.
source: Marketingprofs enewsletter
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These days, everybody’s touting the importance of engaging clients through social media. Form communities! Get talking! Create buzz! It’s all good! But is it? Can B2B companies go overboard in their quest to attain a vibrant community online? In other words, is it possible to party too much?
Well, Francois Gossieaux thinks so. His recent post at the Emergence Marketing blog presented the scary thought that, “Even with a vibrant community, you may still fail.” Uh-oh.
Gossieaux presented two main reasons why vibrant online communities might not achieve the goals they were set up to deliver:
1. You are getting the wrong ideas from your community. One trap Gossieaux identifies: the use of incentives to get client feedback. Yes, some clients who are attracted by an incentive will certainly reply, but are their responses “really the ideas that will make a difference in your new product innovation?”
2. You are getting too close to your community members. “There is such a thing as listening too closely to your customers,” he says. “In new product innovation,” he notes as an example, “there is a huge difference between what is being said and what is being meant.” He reminds us that “it is a known fact that [changes] based on direct customer feedback lead to incremental innovations at best.”
Party in moderation. While participating in social media is a great way to engage clients, remember that it’s only one part of a vital marketing mix.
Source: Emergence Marketing
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Even a small company can benefit from email messages tailored to a recipient’s specific wants and needs. “Using segmentation,” says Michael Clark in an article at MarketingProfs, “customers only get notified of new products, specials, and offers based on past buying patterns, knowledge of the customer and what they’ve clicked on in previous e-newsletters.” Examples include:
- A liquor merchant that invites wine drinkers to tastings, while promoting 12-pack specials to beer lovers during football season.
- A sporting goods store that sends email offers based on a knowledge of which customers ski and which play tennis.
There are a number of ways to slice and dice tasty segments to better serve your customers:
- Collect information at the first touch point. When a prospect or customer subscribes to your email list, offer a menu of special interests and ask them to check any that apply.
- Use online surveys to request additional non-critical data. Says Clark, “[Y]ou can create new lists or add to existing ones based on how respondents answered your questions.”
- Make good use of tracking reports. Paying attention to which recipients click on which links can help fine-tune your segments.
Cater to their range of tastes. “Creating different email messages for different groups is a bit more work on your part,” says Clark, “but it’s worth the extra effort when an email message hits your customer’s sweet spot.”
Source: MarketingProfs.
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As we continue to feel the adverse effects of a global recession, it’s only natural to feel a sense of defeat. “Giving up the ghost is a real option,” says John Baldoni at Harvard Business Online, “but if you are a manager in a declining business or even a flat lining [sic] one, defeatism can be used as a precursor to regeneration.”
To reach the best outcome, Baldoni prescribes this process:
Face the truth. Maybe your customers can no longer afford your product or service, or they’ve discovered it isn’t essential. It’s possible your business won’t regain its former glory, even when the recovery comes. Whatever your circumstances, acknowledge the facts and make a realistic assessment of the situation. “Remember the good things, as well as the good contributors,” says Baldoni. “Mourn what you have lost.”
Resolve to move forward. If you choose to stick it out, and your top leadership fails to provide specific direction, he advises, “[m]ake things happen that are consistent with organizational vision and mission.”
Think anew. Analyze your day-to-day operations and identify ways to become more efficient and effective. Says Baldoni, “Cost-cutting is not the answer; re-engineering value is.”
Don’t let defeatism get the best of you. “Rather than thinking that all is lost,” he says, “add the caveat, ‘if we keep doing what we are doing.’ That sets the stage for those who want to move forward.”
Source: Harvard Business Online.
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When you read about spam in email marketing blog posts and articles, you probably notice writers rarely pause to define industry-specific lingo. While you undoubtedly know what block, bounce and tag mean, less common words and phrases might leave you scratching your head. Fortunately, Spamhaus fills in the blanks with a glossary that includes terms like these:
Listwashing. Simply put, spammers clean their list not by implementing a correct opt-in process, but by removing the address of anyone who complains. “Listwashing removes spam symptoms without curing the underlying problem,” explains Spamhaus.
Snowshoe spamming. This is a technique in which spammers use multiple IP addresses and domains to spread the load of their activities across a wide area, much like a snowshoe distributes a hiker’s weight. “Snowshoers have learned an important lesson from botnet spammers,” notes Spamhaus. “[T]he IP that delivers the spam does not need to be the same IP that runs the actual spam-cannon server.”
Cartooney. A conflation of the phrase “cartoon attorney,” a cartooney is a baseless legal threat that intimidates recipients by citing irrelevant or nonexistent laws. According to Spamhaus, “Many promise to sue under invented laws such as the ‘Freedom Of Speech Law’ or ‘International Email Law’ and are usually written by spammers reacting to what they consider undeserved censure, being publicly identified or added to spam filter blocklists.”
Brush up on that spam talk. With a little help from the Spamhaus glossary, you’ll get the most out of the email marketing conversation—and sound like a pro.
Source: Spamhaus.
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As marketers continue to see good ROI from finely tuned mobile strategies, the humble text message has acquired newfound cachet. And in a recent video posted at the CenterNetworks blog, Allen Stern interviews Tatango CEO Derek Johnson, whose one-to-many SMS service enables instant mobile communication with an entire list of subscribers via text message and voice call. It’s worth checking out; here are some of Tatango’s finer points to consider:
The service is free, supported by advertising inserted at the bottom of a message. This leaves you with around 120 characters at your disposal.
You can easily build an opt-in group by inviting customers or colleagues to join.
Johnson claims that there are no limitations on the size of your group: the service can be scaled for small teams or large customer segments.
Sending a message is easy, too. “You can go to the website or you can do it directly from your mobile phone,” says Johnson. “You simply text … your message to 68398, and if you’re a group administrator, we know that it’s going out to your entire group.”
Text that next ad message! According to Stern, services like Tatango’s—including that offered by tXt_blaster—have some serious marketing potential. “This method could be more effective than email marketing,” he says.
Source: CenterNetworks.
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Shrinking economy? Time to shrink that ad budget.
That’s the knee-jerk reaction being witnessed at quite a few B2B companies these days. And it may be the exact wrong thing to be doing. In a recent blog post, Justin Hitt makes a compelling case for not only maintaining your ad budget in tough times, but for doubling it.
Here are a handful of Hitt’s Six Reasons to Double Up On Advertising During a Recession:
- Customers still have problems to solve. “Just because the economy is poor doesn’t mean customers aren’t facing problems you can solve,” insists Justin Hitt.
- There’s more ad space available at lower rates. You’ll never find a better environment for getting a big bang for your ad bucks than in a tight economy. “[M]ore publications are more willing to work with those who have money to spend,” he notes.
- Fewer customers are willing to spend. Go after them! “In every market, someone is buying something; they are just a little harder to reach. That means, testing new outlets may pull up someone who you may not have previously reached,” Hitt explains.
“Recessionary times … are great for getting more from business advertising, if you know how,” Justin Hitt suggests, adding: “The key is to be more focused on buyers, better measure advertising metrics, and test your marketing for results.”
Get out there! Post positive ad messages in front of prospects and clients. “[Times like these] make people more discerning to only work with those who understand and can benefit them,” Hitt concludes.
Source: Ask Justin Hitt.
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Merchants are hard at work these days trying to influence customer choice. Here’s some new research that might help. Specifically, these researchers looked at how assortment size influences whether shoppers choose indulgent or practical products.
In one experiment, two groups of participants were shown pictures of ice cream, and were asked to select their preferred flavor. For each flavor, there was both a regular version (e.g., vanilla) and a reduced-fat version (e.g., reduced fat vanilla). The difference between the groups was this: in the “low-variety condition,” there were just two options available: one regular and one reduced fat. In the “high-variety condition,” there were 10 options available: five in each category.
Yummy! Ten varieties of ice cream! That group chose the most sinful options available, right? Well, of course not.
Surprisingly (at least for ice cream lovers), the participants who chose from the larger assortment were more likely to select a reduced-fat flavor—the virtuous option. A subsequent experiment offering cookies or fruit got the same result.
Why? These researchers concluded that “because choosing from larger assortments is often more difficult, it leads people to select options that are easier to justify. Virtues … are generally easier to justify than indulgences.”
Advice for marketers? The researchers suggest that manufacturers of healthy snacks or other more virtuous products may be better off “pursuing venues with larger selections.”
Match size to substance. Before you decide on an assortment size, figure out if your product is a vice or a virtue.
Source: “Variety, Vice, and Virtue: How Assortment Size Influences Option Choice,” by Aner Sela, Jonah Berger and Wendy Liu, Journal of Consumer Research
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“It’s hard to get analysis right,” says Gary Angel in a post at the SemAngel blog. “[And] even when you do, it’s hard to get it consistently right.” You increase your chances, he argues, with a good process that prevents common pitfalls like these:
Failing to establish measurements of success before deployment. “[I]t’s always possible to find some evidence of success when you are allowed to choose the measure of success after the fact,” he notes.
Allowing vendors to measure their own performance. It isn’t an issue of questioning a vendor’s honesty; rather, says Angel, any self-interested party is naturally inclined to read data in the most positive—and, likely, least helpful—light.
Conducting analysis without the aid of a professional statistician. According to Angel, this doesn’t mean you need an entire team. “But if you have a team generating reporting and analysis on a regular basis,” he says, “you need at least one gate-keeper reviewing it and quashing the most abusive practices.”
Neglecting to tell an analyst that something has changed. If your technology and marketing managers don’t coordinate with those who study your data, critical insights might be lost.
“Good process is very much about protecting ourselves from the things that cause mistakes so that we have a chance to be consistently correct,” says Angel.
Source: SemAngel.
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In a post at his blog, David Reich recounts the story of a PR executive who wasn’t exactly thrilled about traveling to Memphis for a meeting with clients. Unfortunately, the exec decided to announce his disdain in a very public forum known as Twitter: “True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I’d scratch my head and say ‘I’d rather die than live here.'” Ouch.
His clients took understandable umbrage at the slight on their fair city, and made public an email expressing their disappointment with the comment. After referencing their multimillion-dollar account with his agency, they noted, “[I]t is enough to expect a greater level of respect and awareness from someone in your position as a vice president at a major global player in your industry.” Again, ouch.
“It’s easy to get caught in a situation like this, since Twitter is about friendly dialogue,” says the sensible David Reich. “But what you write is going out there in public, and Mr. Big Agency Guy should have had a bit more sense and sensitivity.”
In other words, as social networks continue to blur the lines between personal and professional lives, remember that an off-the-cuff comment meant for college buddies are just as likely to be seen by customers.
David Reich’s Marketing Inspiration can save you unnecessary pain: “If you don’t want your comments made public, even by accident, don’t write them down anywhere online.”
Source: My 2 Cents.
“Social media is cool!” proclaims Chris Brogan in a premium article at MarketingProfs. “Blogging and podcasts are cool! We’re so cutting edge! Twitter is like the future here today, and no one knows about it!” If you’ve noticed a certain facetious quality to his enthusiasm, his next line makes clear his disdain for the gee-whiz attitude many people take: “Yeah, whatever.”
