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Posted on by Louis Gudema

I sometimes hear marketers or agencies say that they do digital marketing, or people will ask if I do digital marketing.

I’m not totally sure what they mean by it or what they’re looking for. Do they mean email, social media, search ads, and blogging? Do they mean expertise in the 40+ categories of marketing technology including marketing automation, virtual reality, and programmatic advertising?

My attitude towards “digital marketing” is that of Marc Pritchard, P&G’s Chief Brand Officer, who said a few years ago, “We don’t do digital marketing. We market in a digital world.”

Of course companies need to be wherever their customers are and increasingly that’s online. That’s why digital advertising now surpasses even TV ads. And getting your website right is critical.

But there is far more to marketing than just executing campaigns in digital channels. It all starts with understanding your customers, what they really want, and the emotions that drive their decisions. That kind of research is often best done face to face, or at least by phone or web conference.

Your revenue generation efforts may involve direct outreach to key accounts by sales with the support of marketing in the form of new content. This cadence of sales contacts may begin with the sending of a physical piece through the mail. I’ve found this approach to direct sales or account based marketing can be very effective.

Google and Amazon use TV ads, and ads in other media. 

And physical events are still one of the most effective forms of customer acquisition and retention for many companies.

So definitely do digital marketing – whatever that is – and incorporate it with strategic research and insights and traditional channels when they’ll work best.

Right message in the right place at the right time.

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

A week ago my father-in-law passed away in Indianapolis. He had been a lifer at Eli Lilly and received a nice letter from the company president on his 25th anniversary there. The letter was proudly displayed at his funeral and I posted a photo of it on LinkedIn.

That post has now reached what I call “social media escape velocity”: that rare, rare phenomenon when a post is so popular that it does go viral. By midday Sunday, three days after I posted it, the post had been seen by an impressive 5,000 people and engaged with (liked, shared, or commented on) by over one percent of them. Apparently that was the tipping point for the LinkedIn algorithm. In the next 24 hours LinkedIn showed it to more than five times as many people — over 25,000 with a still high engagement rate.

Once people at Eli Lilly discovered it it went through that world, of course, but still they were less than three percent of the people who saw it.

Positive and even inspirational posts tend to be the most popular on social media (outside of politics and sports). It’s not uncommon to see personal posts on LinkedIn get thousands of likes and comments. A marketing or other business tip is not likely to achieve that level of enthusiasm. Sometimes these personal posts elicit “LinkedIn is not Facebook” admonishments, but given the posts’ popularity these tend to fall on deaf ears.

What I posted wasn’t purely personal. It has to do with how a company acknowledged a long-serving employee: what the president rightfully described in the letter as “a mutual compliment”. But in any case, in social media you don’t need to be all business. You can and should let your personal side come through.

 

BTW, I also posted this in Twitter where I supposedly have more than 3X as many followers, but it got no action there at all. I find in general that LinkedIn is a far better platform for business engagement. 

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

Since the reach of organic (unpaid) social media is now so low – less than 1 in 50 of your followers typically even sees a company’s post – using paid social can be far more effective. And with the data that platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn have you can target your ads really well. (You can also target just to people on an email list that you upload.)

As with any digital marketing, you can significantly improve how many results you get by using built-in on-site forms rather than having people click a link to go to a form on your site. These forms will auto-complete information that the site has about the user (with their permission) making it super easy for them to respond – which is even more important on mobile. Facebook claims that these forms increase leads by 2.8 times over sending them to your site.

·         Linked lead gen forms are available on Sponsored InMail and Sponsored Content

·         Facebook provides Lead Ads

Twitter had these lead generation “cards” for four years but discontinued them in 2017 (why?). Here is a blog post from the always-insightful Larry Kim on how to run a successful Twitter lead gen campaign.

The three most important elements of direct marketing success in order are:

1.       List/audience

2.       Offer

3.       Creative

 

These forms fall into the creative category and, as I said, can more than double your results. But don’t forget you also need a compelling offer and, most importantly, need to target your campaign well. 

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

It used to be said that politics is the art of addition: how to bring together a large enough coalition of voters to win.

But increasingly politicians have been practicing subtraction, clearly defining themselves and aiming to attract the most highly partisan members of their parties. Very little effort is put into changing minds; it’s all about getting your voters to the polls.

A major reason for this is the increasingly polarized nature of the electorate. As you can see from these charts, 24 years ago the electorate was bunched towards the middle with something like a classic bell curve. Now we have a double-hump electorate and that polarization is especially prominent among the most engaged voters. 

When your market is focused around the middle, imitation is encouraged. Competitors tend to offer similar features. For politicians, compromise is possible.

When your market has two – or more – centers, then you need to differentiate. For politicians that means that more extreme positions are encouraged and compromise is undesirable.

An industry like food has many micro-markets which are the result of the personal preferences of hundreds of millions of consumers. Organic food is the fastest growing food category, but others include “health” foods (organic doesn’t have to be healthy), lower-cost processed food from large companies like General Mills, ethnic foods, and – in restaurants – distinctions as subtle as fast food versus fast casual. Differentiation is not only encouraged but required.

 

Will U.S. politics ever return to a more centered model? Maybe if people get tired of all the yelling. But this 1894 quote from Tolstoy is not encouraging: