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I recently came across research that’s been done over the past decade in the UK on the effectiveness of branding versus direct response ad campaigns. The researchers at the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising looked at about 1,000 award-winning campaigns. Some of what they concluded:

  • Direct response (DR) campaigns (like email, direct mail, search advertising, etc.) drive the best short-term results, but branding campaigns are more effective in the long run
  • The accumulation of multiple DR campaigns do not equal the impact of branding campaigns
  • Creative/award-winning branding campaigns have greater impact, not surprisingly, than less memorable ones
  • DR campaigns tend to increase volume of sales in the short run, but branding campaigns can impact the willingness of customers to pay more (higher profits)
  • DR campaigns that use price (10% off!) as their offer hurt the price elasticity of customers
  • The most effective DR campaigns are reason-based; the best branding campaigns are emotion-based.
  • Branding campaigns typically take more than 6-12 months to have their greatest impact. They can still be increasing their effectiveness after 2-3 years. (Progressive’s “Flo” campaign has been going since 2008. The Marlboro Man was launched in the 1950s and ran for decades.)
  • Optimal campaigns are branding with DR elements.

The recommendation of writers Les Binet and Peter Field is that in the long-run marketers should allocate roughly 60% of their budget to branding and 40% to DR efforts.

They did also say that it would be controversial that they found that advertising campaigns are far more effective, and cost effective, for new customer acquisition than getting more business from existing customers. That doesn’t entirely surprise me, though. It’s not the role of advertising to grow and build current accounts; customer experience is more important for that, and other tools like email updates and inside sales.

This graphic nicely illustrates their conclusion that the impact of branding efforts are cumulative and, ultimately, more effective.

Graphic illustrating the impact of branding versus direct response campaigns

Their balance of short- and long-term recommendations aligns very well with my Bullseye Marketing approach. This chart of theirs could have been a summary of my book.

targeting in each ad stage

By focusing on the Phase 1 and 2 programs of my Bullseye approach you’ll not only have quick wins that build buy-in, but you’ll also set the foundation for success with your long-term, Phase 3 branding efforts.

But if you started with just the branding programs, the likelihood is that you wouldn’t have many measurable results in the first 6-12 months, your leadership would lose confidence in marketing, and you wouldn’t have the budget or support for long-term success.

BTW, this work is based on B2C campaigns, which may be why they said that TV is especially impactful for emotion-driven branding campaigns. They are working on new research now that is specific to B2B.

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Last week I attended a panel on “The Future of Small, Private Colleges” at McLane Middleton, a New England law firm. One of the panelists was the current president of Montserrat College of Art, a 400-student school north of Boston, Dr. Kurt Steinberg. He had a lot of great insights into the crisis in higher ed which, to a significant degree, is a failure of marketing.

He divided small, private colleges into two major categories: specialty schools and general, liberal arts schools. Specialty schools, such as those focusing on art, engineering, or business, are actually growing. It’s the small liberal arts colleges that are shrinking and dying.

Dr. Steinberg understands that they need to market Montserrat as a small, non-urban arts college. Students who want to go there wouldn’t like Pratt with 4,500 students in New York City, and vice versa.

In general specialization is a good business strategy. Saying that you’re good at everything is rarely a convincing or compelling proposition, but saying that you’re an expert at one thing can be. Who wants to hire the proverbial “jack of all trades, and master of none”?

Jay McBain, from Forrester, made a similar point in my interview with him on my podcast, “Ten years ago we used to build these partner programs that try to get you to go after one of the 27 verticals. ‘Go read healthcare, high tech, HIPAA, and become a health care expert.’ Today it’s a sub-industry play. There’s 297 sub-industries below those 27 majors. And instead of just being a health care expert, be a midsize clinic with 50 doctors specialist.”

I think that this was one of the reasons that Newbury College in Brookline, MA, closed last month. They had both a strong culinary arts program and a liberal arts division. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says, “Employment of chefs and head cooks is projected to grow 10 percent from 2016 to 2026, faster than the average for all occupations.” Newbury could have doubled down on being a culinary arts school, but instead they presented a vague message (their website is still online): “Newbury College provides a meaningful education inside and outside of the classroom. Founded in 1962, Newbury has always sought to provide students with a career-oriented, experiential education. Beyond academics, Newbury’s mission is to encourage lifelong-learning and engaged, socially-responsible citizenship.” It didn’t work.

bar chart of higher ed inflation

Another problem for liberal arts colleges, which Dr. Steinberg didn’t touch on, is that for many families these liberal arts colleges have priced themselves out of the market. College tuition has risen twice as fast as inflation in general. Many parents and students want to now know that there’s a paying job at the other side of that quarter million dollar investment.

And the customer is changing. A growing proportion of students are first generation in their family to attend, or black or Hispanic; many may be looking for a different experience, or different services, than fourth generation white students.

And the competition is changing. Dr. Steinberg also noted that larger universities are getting better at creating and promoting specializations within their large and diverse offerings. With honors colleges and special dorms, they can cater to the needs of students looking for more focus. I still remember touring the University of Maryland (40,500 students) with my daughter; the excellent student guide at one point said, “You’ll find your small college in a large university, but you won’t find a large university at small college.” Some students are attending online programs, too, although that’s still a small number at the undergraduate level.

In my opinion, all of these are marketing issues. The colleges that understand their rapidly changing market, adjust their product, and promote it well, can survive and even thrive.

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When you boil it down, (I am not the first to say that) marketing consists of getting the right message to the right person at the right time. And that message has to prompt them to change their behavior. (If you think it’s easy to change someone else’s behavior, just think of how hard it can be to change your own…)

If you’re selling professional services, or software, or clothing, or anything else, that simple task can be complex enough. But it’s even more complex if you’re trying to change the behavior of an addict, or the attitudes towards addicts.

“The Power of Marketing in Public Health Crises” is going to be the subject of the Boston Sales and Marketing Innovators (SAMI) meeting on June 20th. Judi Haber, whose agency has been working on issues related to public health, including opioids and vaping, will be leading the session.

So if you work outside of public health, and you think this doesn’t relate to you, you couldn’t be more wrong. People attending are going to hear about such matters as:

– The role of social media in reaching hyper-targeted audiences.
– How message testing can get to the “truth of the matter.”
– Tips for changing negative or harmful human behavior and attitudes

Those first two at least should be useful for any marketer.

Marketers sometimes narrow their thinking too much, feeling that if you haven’t worked in their industry then you have nothing to offer. Personally some of my best work has been the first time that I worked in an industry because I didn’t come in with any pre-conceptions.

So I hope that Boston-area people will join us on the 20th, and that people reading these tips everywhere will broaden their thinking and be open to new ideas on how to get the right message to the right person at the right time.

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This recent photo from the summit of Mount Everest is tragic: The New York Times reports that at least 10 people have died attempting to climb the world’s highest mountain this year, with a significant contributor being how much longer it takes with the unbelievably long line at the top, and the inability to get off if conditions change.

Human Traffic Jam on Mount Everest

In another sense, though, it’s an illustration of the problem with tourism globally: the seemingly infinite demand is increasingly outstripping the relatively fixed supply. There is only one Mona Lisa, Grand Canyon, Great Pyramids, or Great Wall of China, but more and more people can afford to see them. When my wife and I visited Croatia (a very popular vacation spot in Europe, and for good reason) in September a couple years ago – the supposed off-season – most places were overrun with tourists once the buses and cruise ships arrived around 10 AM. We’d get up at 7 and walk around for 2 or 3 hours before getting breakfast just to have some sense of what a place was like without people like us. You don’t want to be in St. Mark’s Square in Venice at noon.

This is not a marketing problem: marketing only makes it worse. And the market can’t solve it by raising prices without limiting these experiences to the 1%.

Yogi Berra once said about a restaurant, “Nobody goes there anymore since it got so popular.” That does not seem to be happening with global tourism, though.

As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

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Last week on the Software Channel Partner Podcast, Forrester principal analyst Jay McBain was my guest. He had lots of surprising and useful insights about how to succeed in the rapidly-changing channel (such as that it’s changed more in the past 18 months than the previous 35-40 years). You can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, and all major podcast apps, and here.

The biggest marketing opportunity for your company?

I recently did a three-hour marketing workshop for a group of CEOs. After an hour and a half or so I summarized the first phase of my Bullseye Marketing approach and asked them which program they thought could be most useful for their company:

  • Understanding their customers better
  • Improving their customer experience
  • Selling more to current customers
  • Improving their website messaging and experience
  • Improved conversion optimization
  • Email marketing
  • Remarketing
  • Better alignment of marketing and sales

Overwhelmingly, for this group, they thought that improving their customer experience could have the biggest, quickest impact.

And it certainly can. More than any logo, colors, or catch phrase, your customer experience is your brand.

A common framework for understanding the customer experience is the 5Es (see page 39 of my Bullseye Marketing book):

  • Entice: How do customers first hear of us? How are they lured into doing business with us?
  • Enter: What’s their initial experience with us?
  • Engage: How do we interact with them as they do business with us?
  • Exit: What is the end of their experience like?
  • Extend: How do we encourage repeat business?

Improving the customer experience is not a top-down activity. You must involve the customer and front-line employees deeply. You may want to start with a few quick-fix items: parts of your customer experience that you know are inferior and which customers would really appreciate improving. A more in-depth approach can go on for weeks or months, and ultimately you want to put the creation and maintenance of a superior customer experience at the center of everything that you do.

Surprisingly, most customers think that the customer experience that they’re getting is not improving. And they think that it’s very important. So if you put a priority on customer experience, it can become a true competitive advantage.

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Last week I saw a post (from 2012) with a marketing term that I hadn’t encountered before: profit horizon.

The idea (or question) is, What’s your timeframe for getting a profit from this marketing program?

A big brand like Coke or P&G may have profit horizons for some of their branding campaigns of two years or more.

Companies running search ads and other direct response programs may have profit horizons of a few weeks.

The strategies and tactics available to you differ depending on your profit horizon. You wouldn’t use national TV branding commercials if your profit horizon is very near, but you might run 2 AM direct response TV ads.

Although I’d never heard the term, the profit horizon was on my mind when I developed my Bullseye Marketing approach.

In the center of the Bullseye you’re implementing programs that are likely to produce results in just a few weeks or months – and they lay the foundation for success of second and third phase programs.

The second ring has a similarly near profit horizon because it’s based on using intent data to find out which customers are in market now, so you can get your advertising in front of them.

Then in the third ring are the long-term branding and awareness programs that can generate great results in the long-run, but are unlikely to generate hardly any new sales for a year or two.

A critical mistake that many companies that don’t have robust marketing programs make when first launching and ramping up ones is to start with third phrase programs that get a lot of buzz – like social media and content – without realizing how long they take to produce results. When they don’t see any impact after six months or so they are likely to say, “We knew it: marketing doesn’t work for us.”

But it can work if you understand your profit horizon, the Bullseye Marketing approach, and which programs can produce results in the timeframe that you’re targeting.

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What do these have in common?

  • A supermarket
  • A car dealership
  • An insurance agency
  • A movie theater
  • Upwork, Catalant and other sites for hiring professionals
  • A firm that provides outsourced IT services to companies

These are all examples of companies that act as a channel for another company, connecting them to customers and selling their products and services. P&G doesn’t sell Crest and Bounty directly to consumers, it sells through supermarkets. Most cars (except for Teslas) are sold through dealerships that aren’t owned by the manufacturer. Insurance is sold through agents. Movies are distributed through independently-owned theaters. Professionals worldwide get work through hiring sites. And managed service providers that provide IT services usually re-sell software, too.

The World Trade Organization estimates that 75% of global commerce is done through these indirect channels, rather than through direct sales. (Many companies use a combination of direct and indirect sales; Microsoft sells 95% of its software through partners but does have a salesforce to handle larger enterprise deals. Many insurance companies sell both direct and through agents.)

The software channel is the topic of my new Software Channel Partner Podcast available on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, and wherever fine podcasts are sold. (Yes, the first four episodes all feature interviews with men, but in three of the next four I interview women software channel leaders, so that lineup of guests will look very different when you look at it a month from now.)

A channel strategy can be a great force multiplier for a business. Who could sell the products or services for your company?

Although indirect, channel sales are often less expensive than direct sales, people new to the channel often under-estimate the amount of effort that a successful channel strategy requires. More than once I’ve heard the leader of a small software company say, “Oh, let’s just get some partners to sell it for us.  That’ll make our work a lot easier.”

Aside from arranging for these partner deals, though, and making them lucrative enough to be worth the effort of both the partner company and – critically – their sales people, the vendor has to work hard to stay top of mind, train channel sales reps, arrange for timely compensation, and so on.

In fact, Forrester channel analyst Jay McBain (a guest on my podcast in May) lists 90 different competencies in six categories that a full channel program requires.

So if you don’t have a channel strategy, it may well be worth it to create one. If you do have a channel program, even if you’re not in the software industry you’ll find lots of ideas in my podcast for how to bring best practices to your program.

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Next Thursday, April 25, the Boston Sales and Marketing Innovators (SAMI) meeting (sorry, it’s sold out)  will host Dave Gerhardt, VP of Marketing at Drift. Drift provides the most sophisticated website chat tool, which has AI capabilities to initially manage conversations at scale and figure out if the person wants to talk to sales, customer support, or has some other issue. In just five years over 150,000 companies have adopted Drift and many have reported significant increases (10-25%) in website leads and sales.

I’ve read the Conversational Marketing book that Dave co-authored with David Cancel, Drift co-founder and CEO. My take is that chat is not really marketing (unless you consider sales part of marketing). What makes chat so successful from a revenue point of view is that it re-inserts sales early in the decision making process, as it used to be. Because of the ability of people to do research on the Internet without interacting with a company, they now often wait far longer to talk to sales. Some estimates say that people are perhaps two-thirds of the way through the buying process before talking to sales. Now chat is enabling sales to get involved with buyers much earlier, while they’re doing their research, as they did in the good old days. But in a different way.

The title of Dave’s talk to SAMI is “15 Conversational Marketing Secrets that Will Give Your Business an Unfair Advantage” (because of the Meetup meeting title character limit we had to change “advantage” to “edge”). Dave and Drift CEO Dave Cancel are really into the brain science of effective copywriting. In that title I could four devices:

  • Starting with a number (or the word “How”) usually produces a better response to an email Subject line, blog post, talk topic, etc.
  • “secrets” suggests exclusivity
  • “your business” makes it about the reader, as opposed to a more generic “a business”
  • “unfair advantage” suggests an exclusive benefit

You can sign up for free Drift Inside tips and watch a half hour video of Dave explaining some copywriting tips here. Nancy Harhut is another terrific speaker on this topic. Here’s a 50-minute talk in which she describes 26 persuasive copywriting tips (no sign up required).

Tiger Woods won The Masters golf tournament, and it’s estimated that the Nike swoosh brand impressions from his clothes alone were worth about $22 million. Nike quickly put out this terrific ad on their current “chasing your crazy dream” theme.

Nike tweet with ad

According to Twitter, almost 20 million people had seen it in within 17 hours.

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Companies that market more and better grow faster. Deloitte estimates that enterprises dedicate about 11% of their expenses to marketing. That’s how they got big; it’s not like they got big, had all this extra cash lying around, and said, “Let’s waste it on marketing.”

With B2B small- and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), though, the situation is quite different. Most B2B SMBs greatly under-invest in marketing, to their own detriment.

I studied the marketing programs of 351 SMBs with about 50-1000 employees. Using my nine-point digital marketing scorecard, I could tell how many programs such as social media, search engine optimization, content marketing, and marketing automation companies were using.

The results were somewhere between sobering and shocking. I uncovered a major divide between the 85 software companies in the study, which were using a median of 7 of the 9 programs, and the 266 non-software companies (in industries such as professional services, medical devices, and manufacturing) which were using a median of just 2 of the 9 programs. Since digital marketing is central to any modern marketing program, and companies got one point just for having Google Analytics on their website, essentially most of these non-software firms were not marketing.

These are not solopreneurs or very small companies; many of these companies have been around for decades. These companies are the heart of the U.S. economy; the Census Bureau reports that companies with 50-1000 employees employ more than three times as many people as enterprises with 1000+ employees.

And it matters. As I said, companies that market more grow faster. Among those software companies, the ones that were using 8 or 9 of the programs were growing about five times faster than those using 0-3 of the programs. 

Chart showing the faster growth rates of companies using more martech

Other studies in other industries have found similar results. For example, a 2016 study by Velocify of over 1,000 insurance agencies showed that the agencies that spent the most on marketing grew much faster than those that spent little. They all got leads from recommendations, but those companies with robust marketing programs got leads and sales through other channels, too.

My original research was done in 2014. (You can download it here and learn more about the methodology.) Recently I redid my survey with the same 351 companies to see if anything had changed with those non-software companies. . Little had. The median of the non-software companies only rose from 2 to 3. That rise is due almost totally to one thing: new, mobile-friendly (responsive) websites. Most companies redo their websites about every four years or so. In the redesigns since 2014, the web developers made the new sites responsive, whether clients asked for that or not. While in 2014 only one in five of the non-software companies had mobile-friendly websites, today four out of five do. But the use of most of the other marketing programs has changed little; a few actually declined.

Chart showing the difference in the use of nine martech programs from 2014 to 2018

These results also make intuitive sense to me, for what that’s worth. Of course the number of responsive websites would have increased significantly. And social media gets so much buzz that if companies are going to try one thing, they’re going to post for free at least daily (or weekly on LinkedIn, my very low standard). This social media activity, though, isn’t going to do much since not part of an integrated marketing program.

And the least-popular programs in 2014 are even less popular now. After all, PPC clicks are more expensive so if your program was marginal before then it might be unprofitable with higher CPCs. And most content programs don’t produce results: 9 out of 10 pieces of content get no organic search traffic (as in zero), and companies need to optimally post a new blog piece at least 11 times a month to produce significantly more leads. That’s twice the frequency that I required in my study and very few companies were doing even that. Even HubSpot’s CEO now has turned to saying that inbound marketing works “at scale”; for them the scale was the spending of tens of millions of VC dollars.

Why are so few non-software companies marketing?

There are three major reasons why non-software companies market so little:

  1. Marketing is not in their DNA. Most company founders are experienced and skilled in their industry, and they had to become at least competent at sales or their company would not have survived, but they had little or no exposure to marketing along the way. They may see marketing as an expense rather than an investment in growth.
  2. Marketing has become so complex. While thirty years ago there were only a few ways for companies to reach their customers — such as direct mail, print, radio, TV, and events — today there are dozens of marketing channels; some people have put the number of channels at over 100. With thousands of companies selling marketing software in dozens of categories, and thousands of additional vendors and consultants all making competing claims, even experienced marketers can be overwhelmed. Executives with little marketing experience are even less prepared to figure out what to do, or how to manage employees and vendors in marketing.
  3. What works in marketing changes rapidly. What worked in digital marketing 10 years ago, or even five years ago may not work well today. What works today may not work in five years. Companies need to be constantly experimenting, testing, and adjusting their marketing programs based on actual results, not theory. As Jay Acunzo says, it’s all about finding the best approach for you.

The people at software companies are more comfortable with the technology and data and testing that are central to marketing today.

But most non-software SMBs do little or nothing. And they lose out as a result.

Bullseye Marketing: The way forward

In working with companies of all sizes and in many industries, I’ve developed a low-risk approach for them to launch and scale marketing programs. They can use this approach to achieve quick wins and build the internal buy-in needed to scale marketing programs that can drive business results. I call it Bullseye Marketing, and described it in detail in my book of the same name.

Bullseye with three rings

Bullseye Marketing involves three phases, as illustrated in this graphic.

Phase 1: Fully Exploit Your Existing Marketing Assets

Companies that have been around for even just a few years have typically developed considerable marketing assets, but most don’t realize their value and they fail to fully exploit them. Some of these assets include:

  • Their customers and customer knowledge
  • Traffic to their Website
  • Email lists
  • How sales and marketing teams collaborate

By taking better advantage of these and other marketing assets, companies can often improve their results quickly and inexpensively. It costs nothing besides staff times to listen to your customers, or for sales and marketing to work together better, and little to undertake an email marketing program, implement compelling calls to actions or chat on your website, or setup remarketing. Just improving the calls to action and conversion devices on your website can quickly double or triple website leads in a few weeks. Selling more to current accounts is typically 5-25 times less expensive than closing a new account, but many companies focus too much on new customers.

And these center-of-the-Bullseye programs establish a foundation for success in Phases 2 and 3.

Phase 2: Sell to People Who Want to Buy Now

B2B markets are typically much smaller than we think, because – unlike a company that’s selling something that’s used frequently, like food — most companies aren’t in-market for most products and services. Vendors that hyper-focus their new customer efforts on those that are will achieve much greater success at a much lower cost.

  • Search ads tied to certain keyword phrases are likely to target people and companies who are in-market and plan to buy soon.
  • Companies can monitor surges in interest in their content by people and companies – such as visits to their website, downloads, attendance at webinars, and opens and shares of their emails – that can indicate deeper interest and buying intent.
  • Third-party vendors aggregate search data across many industry sites and use it to identify companies that are in-market now, and then sell those names to vendors.

All of these are ways that companies can target customers that intend to buy soon, which is the second ring of the Bullseye.

Phase Three: Cast a Wider Net

In the third phase, companies use programs like social media, content, display ads, and events to build their brand and awareness of their offerings. These programs can take two or three years to produce meaningful results, unless done at a massive and expensive scale, but in the long run the inbound leads that they develop often close at a higher rate than any except for those from current customers.

Unfortunately, programs like social media and content marketing are so identified with marketing that when many companies try to ramp up their marketing they start with them. These programs are unlikely to drive rapid results, though. McKinsey estimates that center-of-the-Bullseye email marketing is 40 times more effective for customer acquisition than Facebook or Twitter. Based on my experience, I agree.

Companies that start with these outer-ring programs are unlikely to see a fast return. After six months or so they may say, “We knew marketing doesn’t work for us” and pull the plug on marketing altogether.

But by utilizing the Bullseye Marketing approach, companies that until now have under-invested in marketing can transform themselves and achieve much faster growth.

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I’ve launched a new podcast, the Software Channel Partner Podcast. (You can download it on Apple, Google, Spotify, and other podcast apps.)

It’s in support of work that I do with software vendors to enable their channel partners (resellers, implementers, etc.). Some companies, like the subject of my first episode, get 100% of their revenue from “the channel”, and are doing no direct sales. 

And, as a former video producer, it’s really easy to produce a podcast. Even if you’re not a former video producer, it’s easy:

  1. Get a good microphone. Marketing Book Podcast host Douglas Burdett recommends the Logitech H390 USB headset which only costs about $20-25.
  2. Get Calendly. It makes all the scheduling MUCH easier.
  3. Invite guests. 
  4. Craft your own questions or, if they approached you to be a guest, ask them what they’d like to be asked about.
  5. Record it using a web conferencing platform like Zoom, Uberconference (what I’m using, for free), GoToMeeting, Skype (not ideal; creates a video file that you need to convert to an audio file).
  6. Produce an intro with music. You can do this on Upwork or a similar platform for around $100.
  7. Edit out the retakes, long pauses, unnecessary Ums, etc. of each episode using free audio editing software. I use Audacity.
  8. Host your podcast on Buzzsprout, Podbean (what I use), or another service for around $100/year. Through them, it will be distributed to Apple and Google podcasts, and that will get it on many more apps. You’ll need to make a slight bit more effort to link it to Spotify.
  9. Amplify it by mentioning it in your email/newsletter, posting to social media, possibly running paid, highly-targeted LinkedIn ads for a few weeks, etc.

And regularly post new episodes.

You’ll also want a section of your website for the podcast, including a page for each new episode. There you can post the podcast player from your hosting service, as well as show notes for sites, books, etc., that your subject mentions during the interview. And I’m also posting a complete transcript of each interview which is good for accessibility and great for SEO. There are very inexpensive services ($.10/minute) that can produce a transcript from an audio file, but they aren’t perfect and you may need to spend more time checking over that than everything else that I’ve mentioned combined. That’s a good job for an assistant or an intern. Or on Upwork you can hire a person to do it very accurately for $1/minute. 

I am using a regularly plain vanilla name for my podcast, the Software Channel Partner Podcast, for search results reasons, too.

And that’s about it. All of that combined is maybe 2-3 hours/episode, including the background reading you need to do to prepare for the interview.