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Posted on by Louis Gudema

The world of marketing is changing very rapidly. New tools and channels are introduced every year, and others become exhausted and inefficient, if not useless.

As I wrote in October for OpenView, it’s very expensive and time consuming to generate leads from inbound marketing unless you already have industry-leading domain authority. I strongly agree with Avinash Kaushik that organic social media is not worthwhile for most companies; that channel peaked around 2013. And online display ads have a click-through rate of about .05% — they are basically impressions, but don’t drive engagement.

On the other hand, in my Bullseye Marketing approach (and book) I outline an approach that will work in 2019:

  • Fully exploit your existing marketing assets (few companies do this)
  • Sell to people who want to buy now
  • Cast a wider net with long-term awareness and brand building programs

Highly experienced marketers and companies with robust, omni-channel marketing programs don’t need Bullseye Marketing. But for the other 80-plus percent of companies, it can be transformational.

Maybe five years from now Bullseye Marketing will be passé, but in 2019 it is what’s working.

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

A month ago, on November 13, Coca Cola completely revamped on its social media presence for World Kindness Day. It removed all previous posts and posted many positive, inspirational items. This is the gallery of Instagram images, and the posts on Twitter and Facebook were similar.

Coca Cola's new Instagram feed

“This is a really great moment in time for us to reset, holistically, our social strategy on the Coke brand handles,” Sarah Traverso, group director, Social Center at Coca-Cola, said. “World Kindness Day feels like such an appropriate day and moment to kick off messages of positivity, but also when you look at Coke and what Coke stands for, Coke really is a brand about optimism, uplift and wants to bring people together in moments of connection.”

Engagement with the posts was the usual very low level that you see on social media – well under 1% of their followers.

This is a pure brand play, of course. Coke wants consumers to identify those qualities of optimism and kindness with the brand. Like many consumer products, people aren’t buying Coke based on its features and benefits. Aside from the taste, they have an emotional connection to the brand that Coke wants to shape and reinforce.

Coke TV ads have promoted such values as sharing (a Coke) and, a commercial I especially like, their game day tailgating ad. They’ve been doing this since at least their 1971 “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” TV commercial .

Coca Cola has the budget to repeat these messages enough that they become associated with those values and emotions. Smaller companies, though, may need different strategies.

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

Yesterday the New York Times had a very interesting feature on how marketing companies use very precise location data from smartphone apps to identify and target people.

The Times talked with various location data companies. Once people had given the app permission to use their location (for weather information, tracking running, etc.) they would find out where that person was within a few yards many times a day. The fact that, for many of the apps, the person’s location data would also be used for marketing purposes was buried in the app’s terms.

The anonymous data can be useful for understanding customer behavior when aggregated. Where do that business’s customers live? Where else do they shop?

But – when combined with publicly available data — just by looking at where the person spends several hours every night it’s easy in most cases to identify who they are. (One of the article’s authors, Natasha Singer, wrote four years ago that data scientists, using just four pieces of non-location data, in 90% of cases can figure out who a person is.)

The OMG moment in the article for me was when one marketing company said that they targeted anonymous people in emergency rooms with ads for personal injury lawyers.

Of course, if you use a smartphone GPS service, like Google Maps or Waze (which is also owned by Google), you know that you’re giving up this data. And of course Google uses that for targeting ads. Facebook uses its app data for the same purpose. This is the Grand Bargain that we’re making with technology: give us lots of useful free stuff in exchange for some/much of our personal information.

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

While some companies rely solely on direct sales, many gain a significant amount of revenue through other channels – in some cases, such as producers of consumer goods, close to 100% of revenue may come through their retail channels.

For those consumer companies it’s common for them to do joint marketing with their retail partners. P&G, for example, may contribute co-op dollars to support a supermarket chain’s advertising of P&G’s products.

In the case of the supermarket, that’s a fairly straight forward arrangement. After all, the chain is marketing all the time and P&G can piggyback on it.

But what if your channel partners aren’t marketing?

That is the case for many B2B companies. They may be selling their equipment through distributors and dealers who are doing little marketing.

Many software companies have channel partners who resell, install (if the software is on premise), integrate, configure, and do training on their software. But while software companies are especially adept at today’s increasingly-digital marketing programs, many of their partners (who may be professional services firms at heart) often are not.

And when the channel partners aren’t marketing they’re both being hurt because the software vendor is losing out on sales, too.

In those cases, software vendors (and other B2B companies) need to go beyond just contributing dollars to their partners. They need to show them the way.

They need to educate their partners on what marketing even is (many people think it’s just advertising and promotions, or social media), why it’s important, and the impact that it can have on their rate of growth. They can explain the impact that their marketing programs are having on their revenue. And they also need to educate them on the most effective marketing programs, and how to successfully execute them.

But knowing what to do and actually doing it are two different things. Marketing programs live or die with consistent, excellent execution. If the partner doesn’t have staff experienced in managing modern marketing programs, they may also need consultants, freelancers, and agencies to help them.

At revenue & associates, we’re helping companies empower their channel partners. Please let us know if that’s something that you need help with. 

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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:

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

If you’ve been watching the World Series (Go Red Sox!) you cannot have missed the annual Taco Bell “Steal a Base, Steal a Taco” promotion. If any player on either team steals a base during the World Series, people can go into a Taco Bell for a free Taco on November 1. Although base stealing is far less popular than 20 or 30 years ago, fans didn’t have to wait long as Boston Red Sox player Mookie Betts stole a base in the first inning of the first game. Tacos on!

The promotion includes frequent mentions during all of the Series games, ads, social media posts to Taco Bell’s 1.9 million Twitter followers and followers on other social networks, and so on. Beyond the tacos, the promotional elements for sale include Steal a Taco baseball caps, and Topps baseball cards of all past players who stole the World Series base that triggered the free taco.

The results from the promotion last year were down from the highly rated 2016 seven-game World Series, when the Chicago Cubs ended a 108-year drought of World Series championships against the Cleveland Indians, who have not won since 1948. While more people definitely were coming into the Taco Bell stores during the promotion, in 2017 it was 17% less of a bump than 2016.

Results may be even worse this year because TV ratings for the five-game World Series were down 23% from last year. Ho hum, another Boston team winning a championship. Haven’t we seen this show before?

 

Taco Bell also runs a similar “Steal a Game, Steal a Taco” promotion during the NBA championship series in which the free tacos are triggered if either team wins a game on its opponent’s home court. 

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Posted on by Louis Gudema

Last week I mentioned my guest blog post for OpenView in which I say that inbound marketing has passed its expiration date and Bullseye Marketing is a more useful successor.

I got a lot of positive feedback to that piece. But a few people contacted me to say “no, no, no!” They all had the same story: they had created one or two pieces of content that had been very effective in attracting new, qualified leads.

This is a great strategy: rather than attempting the traditional inbound approach of (in basketball parlance) flooding the zone with hundreds of pieces of content – HubSpot has a chart that shows that results usually start to improve when you have posted over 100 blog posts — focus on creating just one or two outstanding pieces that really answer the questions of your prospects and promote the hell out of that.

Similarly, instead of tweeting and posting broadly to social media to try to get attention, do what Evan Kirstel describes in my interview with him (on this website and in my book): use social media to gain the attention of the influencers in your industry, and narrowcast with the hashtags of specific events.

 

Unless you have a massive budget and can afford to go big, hyper-focusing with fewer, higher quality interactions may be how to break through to the people that really matter to you.