Every form of marketing is about gaining attention, from sandwich boards to social networking and virtual communities. We’re going to change pace here a little bit before we dive back into web toys and talk about old school marketing–print, radio, TV, direct mail, etc.. We’ll also explore how marketing connects to selling and the sales force, all as a prelude to showing how all marketing can now be integrated, amplified and measured.
Why don’t we just switch completely over to digital marketing–go all out with search, and social marketing, and all the other new, new things? Some organizations have, but for most it’s a big mistake. Approaches like search have a very important benefit, which is also a limitation–you only get to talk to people who are looking. Essentially, relying solely on search is like a car dealer relying solely on location. Some companies look at venues such as social marketing or advertising on popular sites as having the same characteristics as traditional marketing and therefore being a more measurable replacement. Also a mistake. There’s an online world and an offline world, and the intentions of the users are the most important separator. That’s why general site banner ads have fallen somewhat out of fashion–they interrupt in a place where interruptions are not well tolerated. Confining your marketing to either one limits your reach and reduces the overall power of your marketing. You give up too much flexibility by choosing one world over another. The optimal approach is to gain the best of both, and use the characteristics of each approach to increase the value of the other.
Don’t misunderstand my position–I don’t think all forms of old school marketing will be with us forever. The value of printing something on paper declines daily. Broadcast television is being marginalized. Radio is something you listen to when you forget your iPod. But there’s a huge audience currently extant, and even more important, a huge body of knowledge about how to influence them. Web marketing is tactic-heavy. People implement and execute with a strategy so shabby it would get them fired immediately if they applied it to traditional marketing. Strategies are hard, tactics are easy. Strategies are dangerous–you are predicting the outcome of an action. Tactics are safe–you’re just working hard at your job. But if you apply old school marketing discipline to build your overall marketing strategy, you’ll have a platform you can be successful from again and again.
There’s a bigger issue too. Online marketing is mechanistic, which suits geeky people like me, but severely limits it’s affect. No, I didn’t mean effect, I’m referring to how it influences, not how it works. In the heyday of advertising large amounts of time and money were spent on understanding how to motivate people. How to connect to the trends of the time and propel a product from it’s utilitarian purpose to a sort of social icon. The underlying psychology, the human desires and behavior elements were analyzed and the right strings were pulled. Spokesmodels selected by how a product was to be positioned, words and images chosen for how they connected to ambitions, or desires, or social trends.
I constantly make fun of focus groups, but really it’s shorthand–I’m making fun of the hollow way that marketers conduct them. When they were invented they were staffed by trained interviewers, overseen by psychologists, and carefully analyzed to separate motive from expressed preferences. No one does that now. Instead they ape the format of the focus group and think that asking consumers what they prefer is going to get straight answers.
Assuming you have the budget for it, the way to really propel a product forward is to combine the influencing aspects of traditional advertising and it’s great reach, with the conversational aspects of online marketing and its great ability to measure and refine. Do it all in a disciplined way and you have the platform we have been talking about.
Consider Apple vs. Amazon. I don’t know the degree of integration that Apple achieves between their television, print and online advertising, but I’d assume it’s substantial. Clearly their mix of TV, print and online works very well for them, they just completed their most profitable quarter ever, growing virtually unabated through the recession. Obviously there is more than just good marketing at work here, but the marketing is superb. It delivers a consistent message and leaves the entire audience convinced that Apple builds superior products in every category. They get away with an archly negative TV campaign by making us fond of BOTH characters, but we’re fond of “PC” as a hapless geek, while Mac is cool and makes everything look easy. The advertisements are actually about “PC” and his tribulations. They are never about Mac. They strongly reinforce the notion that PC’s are hopeless. Could Apple accomplish what they have with a purely online campaign? Of course not.
This is a powerful example of traditional media’s ability to connect a product to social trends and personal desires. We don’t just find the advertisements funny and entertaining. We connect to them personally, and relate the essence of those personalities to the companies they represent. PC doesn’t even represent a single company, it represents Microsoft, Dell, HP, and every company that serves the overall PC market, meaning those products that descend from the original IBM PC and the MS-DOS operating system. It’s an interesting aside that the DNA of these two entities is so very different. Mac did not descend from the IBM PC and MS DOS. It did not even descend from PC’s prehistoric (1977) ancestor, the Intel 8080 chip and CPM. It used a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor and a completely different operating system.
Now let’s look at the Amazon Kindle. Another very successful product. If you have one, you probably like it a lot. I do, and I do. If you don’t have one you probably are not sure you want one. The idea seems useful, but it also seems a little clumsy. You don’t know that much about how it works. It seems less handy than a book. Objections form in your mind easily. Until you somehow become convinced you want one, you won’t go looking for one.
In other words, you haven’t been influenced to believe Kindles are cool.
Amazon’s campaigns for the Kindle are almost purely online. They only grab the people who are looking for one. They don’t form the concepts that would convince prospects to be interested. They cater to existing interest. They are a store in a good location.
While the Kindle is very successful, it’s obvious that it could be far more successful with a marketing strategy more like Apple. I’m not sure why Amazon chooses to limit their marketing as they have, they may have an excellent reason to be foot-dragging, but they clearly are not driving adoption with their marketing as Apple’s does. They can market the kindle as aggressively as they choose online, but until they move to traditional venues it is clear to both you and I that they will not optimize their sales.
While your company may have little in common with these examples, they serve to make it very clear that traditional venues provide advantages and capabilities that online media does not, and it makes sense for you to consider them carefully before you reject them out of hand. If I were looking for a thumb rule for when traditional media makes sense it would be: Who benefits most from driving adoption? If my client would gain the most from driving adoption and interest for a particular product or niche then I would strongly advocate traditional marketing. If you have a minor market share your competition may gain more from your effort at driving adoption than you will. In that case you would benefit more from increasing your win rate for people looking to buy.
Adoption is not the only reason for choosing a traditional approach. If you want to gain market share or take over a niche left unguarded in an existing market, you will have to do better than just have a good location. You’ll have to drive people to it.
Let’s talk a little about integration of new technologies to old, because the traditional venues and methods have such great value to lend to the new–especially direct marketing. In fact most failed web initiatives would be improved if traditional DM (Direct Marketing) best practices were applied.
DM generally has a solid goal for interpreting results of a marketing campaign, and it’s usually to either sell something immediately or generate leads. Simply firming up web initiatives to that standard, and connecting them on a clear path to money would improve their performance in many cases. But there’s a lot more to learn.
Over the last 20 years DM improved how useful leads were by enhancing them with a lot of additional information. Early on, lead generation gathered enough information about the prospect to score the lead and place each one on the timeline of the sales cycle, enabling the sales force to cherry-pick leads that were more likely to be useful. As the data management processes improved, and companies like B&J started adding web interfaces to DM campaigns, lead scoring evolved into richer information that enabled delivery of highly relevant information. This enabled companies to do effective lead maturation–staying in touch with prospects over the span of time that it took for them to move through the sales cycle, and beyond the traditional sales cycle into high value processes that increase the value of the customer.
Applying these techniques to all your marketing, including everything web-focused, provides a clear, clean, logical, customer-focused organizing principle. I’m going to show you how to establish the core. What tools you use to manage the data that results is your business. B&J generally favors a stand-alone database that can accept any kind of feed since it offers the greatest flexibility, but some people have success with either a marketing automation system or a CRM system. Both are far less flexible and ultimately may limit your capabilities, but you can deal with that later when you are rich and famous. Of course it will be incredibly painful and difficult to rip and replace, but it’s not a foolish choice. Building a central stand-alone database is expensive and difficult any time you choose to do it.