Posts Tagged ‘Dialog Marketing’

Life Is Funny, Sometimes

July 13 2009

It may be appropriate to tackle the subject of hangovers. We don’t mean too-many-beers hangovers, but the marketing hangovers.

In a recent brainstorming session we came to the realization that this recession has been like one long hangover. Some might say it’s been a nightmare. No matter how much Red Bull you drink or how much Advil you pop the ringing and pounding won’t stop. (BTW-We don’t endorse either. Read more…) We do have advice, if not the cure.

Think don’t fight your way out of a slump. On the marketing front it is tempting to take what little budget you may have and either hoard it, or start throwing it at products, channels, or consumers. We saw people hoard budgets in the first quarter and much of the second. Next we saw people throw money at the problem hoping for a solution.

Finally, it’s go time! We’re getting strategic with our clients, thinking up new programs that get both internal and external audiences jazzed. Life’s funny. It has taken a rough economy to bring out the best in ourselves and in our clients. We’re all a little more focused and a lot more creative. There’s no turning back.

Remember, if you must do direct marketing, direct responsibly.

We take 20% to web, 60% click-through, and get huge time-on-site numbers. That’s good direct marketing. So good, in fact, that we call it Dialog Marketing. We about to launch our “Hangover” campaign. You need a pair of red decoder glasses to view it, give us a ring. Call us at 214-299-8688 ext. 11 and ask for Liz.

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Raise Your Hands

July 9 2009

Some lessons we learn the hard way. Education starts by raising your hand. You may start learning at an early age, but not until you participate does your education truly begin.

We’ve all been there. You’re sitting in class, the teacher asks questions and a few people raise their hands. These students may know the answers or they may not, but they are willing to jump into the fray. The rest of us sit quietly hoping the teacher doesn’t bypass the others. “No eye contact,” I’d say to myself. “Look away.”

In our business, raising your hand is a big deal. Our goal is to get our clients’ prospects to raise their hands hungry for more knowledge and a better education. Not everyone hungers for more and that’s okay. Like any good teacher, we help our clients find a way to engage those students.

Get 'em up!!

Your organization needs to find new ways to engage prospects and sometimes drag them kicking and screaming into a conversation with you. Prospects look away. They don’t make eye contact. They evaluate. They analyze.

We’ve always believed that to truly engage your target audience the marketing solution must be as personal and relevant as possible. Nothing’s changed. If you can make eye contact and catch a prospect before they look away, you find more willing buyers than you imagined.

The Internet is the second best place to make eye contact. Face-to-face is first.

You’re sitting in front of a computer what, 8, 9, 12 hours a day? That’s lots of eyeball time. Once you make eye contact with your prospect, once you get them to the web, you need to keep them from looking away.

Like millions of marketers you don’t have the brand and money of a Coke, AT&T, or McDonald’s. The nice thing about digital space is that you don’t have to be a Rockefeller to build a whiz-bang web asset.

Your budget is a little thin. On top of that your product is not soda or a phone, but a gas chromatography flow meter. It doesn’t get more exciting than that.

There are people out there passionate about chemical chromatography. If you sell flow meters, we need to help you find those people, make eye contact, and keep them focused on your solution. It’s not as hard as it might sound.

We build microsites everyday that encourage people to raise their hands. We track our microsites so we can connect with all the people that didn’t raise their hands.

Finding a group of willing buyers is always a challenge, but blending traditional media with web media garners 10x better than old-school marketing.

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Our Goal: 100 Fans

June 30 2009

Scratching your head to figure out how to measure social media’s revenue impact? You’re not alone. High-level stats may look like this:

Twitter: Following 46/Followers 153
Facebook Group: Fans 80**
LinkedIn Group: Members 68
SMS Subscribers: 24
Newsletter Subscribers: 623

Social Media Life Cycle

What do they really mean? Our numbers (above) compare favorable to others our size, I think. Actually, I don’t really know what the competition is doing, or if that’s the right measuring stick for our efforts. We don’t approach this in a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses way. Our measure so far is on quality. People that follow us, are fans, are members or subscribers appear to be really, really smart.

As a small organization we can follow a prospect through our social media pipeline through to sale, but we have a harder time quantifying the sunk costs of getting them there. We can only imagine the complexity of a larger organization’s social media efforts. It seems obvious to us that social media is about small, highly interactive groups. So maybe corporate marketing shouldn’t only the social media face of the company. Maybe it’s the local franchisee, the product manager, or the field marketer. I don’t think anyone has all the answers yet. If you come across someone that does, be suspicious, very suspicious.

We’ve taken a goal-based approach that walks the line between strategy and necessity. Much of our social media experience/experiment seeks to prove out different strategies before we suggest solutions to our clients. We practice what we preach. We also need to be in the space out of necessity. Each day social media encroaches on marketing budgets and spend, taking time and attention away from quantifiable marketing efforts.

You can do both and should. Pull together a strategy that closes the loop from direct outbound to social media inbound to quantifiable results. Pull together small teams and micro-campaigns to leverage social media, because the life-cycle of a advertising campaign is shrinking.

(We’ll take a closer look at the public’s attention span next week after the holiday, because people have shorter attention spans going into a three-day holiday.)

**Finally, we need 20 more fans to reach a 100 in Facebook. Why is this important? It takes one hundred fans to earn your way into a vanity URL for your group. Vanity URLs, custom tabs and fb applications are another reason we should be excitedly cautious about the evolved Internet today. Thanks for that little bit of advice @alexrudloff.

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Right Place, Right Time

June 23 2009

We want to be in the right place at the right time. All marketers, business developers, people that play bingo or the lottery want to be there when good things happen.

If you’re top-of-mind you’re already there. If you’re not, how do you get there? Some argue brand awareness. We think differently.

The costs of raw data, including demographics and contact information, continues to drop. With volume comes noise. More data means we need better filters and the ability to cut that information into smaller, relatable buckets. With better defined buckets of consumers your message can be made more relevant and more effective by extension.

Brand Communities Built Around Relevance

Being in the right place at the right time requires brand participation, not brand recognition. It’s the relevance of the brand community that drives consumer behavior, not a mark or logo. The brand has always been holistic. Brand equity as a measure of brand value could be misleading in today’s environment.

This idea of a brand community is difficult to wrap your arms around, but it sure sounds good. Social media is one option and loyalty programs another. Self-identification with a brand, yet another.

At the end of the day, we want people to buy. We want revenue. We want to be there when they are ready to make that buy-decision.

The marketing funnel becomes the engine that drives not just brand awareness, but more importantly self-identification and the construction of a brand community. If you can organize specific brand communities (and there will be lots of them) and deliver a relevant messaging, you will find yourself in the right place at the right time.

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