Tag Archives: Advertising and Marketing

May 12, 2015 · 10:47 am

Mowers And Marketing

I bought an electric lawn mower this morning.  It runs on a rechargeable battery and it is both incredibly light and much quieter than the old gas-powered thing we’ve had for decades.  That it’s more environmentally friendly goes without saying – no fumes means no pollutants.  Yes it was a higher investment cost initially but over time it will just as cost-effective to cut the grass as with the old thing.

Obviously I didn’t just grab the first mower of this type I spied.  I went to the internet to do research and there was lots of information about battery-powered mowers generally and every model specifically.  That’s not news to you but it reminded me of a few points that might be applicable to your sales efforts so let’s review.

First, the single most important information upon which I relied was user reviews.  Putting together a list of the purchase candidates was relatively easy – I just searched for “battery-powered lawnmower reviews” and found a few professional sites that had side by side comparisons of features.  As an aside, most of these contained affiliate links to purchase the mowers which reminds us that having an active affiliate program is something every online seller needs.  Once I had sorted out my choices down to my three top candidates I went to Amazon to read reviews.  Any mower without at least a dozen recent reviews became a questionable choice in my mind.  Why rely on real people rather than the professionals?  Both because of much higher volume and due to the fact that I have no way of knowing who is being paid to say nice things (thanks, content marketing…).

That activity is typical.  A Bazzarvoice study looked at how reviews can impact sales and return on social media investment.  You can read it here.  The big takeaway is you must get users to write reviews.  They help with search results (SEO benefits) as well as with conversion:

As the number of reviews ticks higher, businesses start to see increases in the conversion rate. Just one review can increase the conversion rate by 10 percent. At 100 reviews the conversion rate can be boosted by up to 37 percent, and by the time there are 200 reviews, the rate can be boosted as much as 44 percent.

The fact that these reviews exist is just as important as what they say, as it turns out.  They add authenticity, and in addition to the types of ROI already discussed, authentic content also positively impacts overall consumer trust in a brand. Even negative reviews (which you MUST NOT edit or delete) can help.  I found many of the one or two star reviews were based on some nit or an unrealistic expectation (no, the battery doesn’t last for three hours before it needs recharging).

The only thing the folks at Home Depot won’t understand is how I came to choose their store and that model.  They have no clue how I did my research and the folks at Amazon won’t understand why I did all this research and never bought (their prices were hundreds of dollars too high).  That cross-channel measurement is a much longer topic but it’s a critical missing link in much of our marketing.

Think about your last major purchase.  Did it flow something like mine?  How are you serving all the folks who are doing their research right now?  How are you encouraging  reviews and getting them front and center?  Make sense?

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May 5, 2015 · 11:26 am

Asking For Trouble

You might have read yesterday’s screed about how AT&T was selling “unlimited” data plans that really had limits and shaken your head. I mean, doing something as deceptive as that would never cross your mind, right? Well, let’s put that deception into another, more prevalent context and find out.

The Association of National Advertisers did a survey about native advertising. You know what that is – content created by or for a sponsor which looks very much like the environment in which it runs. Maybe it’s completely straightforward or maybe it contains subtile messaging about the sponsor’s product or service. As the ANA puts it:

Native advertising is an advertising method in which the advertiser attempts to gain attention by providing messaging in the context of the user’s experience. Native ad formats match both the form and function of the user experience in which they are placed. The advertiser’s intent is to make the paid advertising feel less intrusive and increase the likelihood users will engage with it.

Many marketers (58%) are already engaged in this and many more intend to do so in the next year. I’m not going to go off (again) on publishers who do their damnedest to blur the line between ad and editorial. Instead, let’s just look at what the ANA found:

  • Two-thirds of respondents agree that native advertising needs clear disclosure that it is indeed advertising. Only 13 percent feel that such disclosure is not needed.
  • Both the publisher and the advertiser have a responsibility to ensure disclosure.
  • Three-fourths of respondents feel that there is an ethical boundary for the advertising industry when it comes to native advertising.

That’s all well and good except that when it comes to how that disclosure is made, we might just have an issue (and what the hell are the 13% thinking?). A company called TripleLift surveyed 209 U.S. consumers for their thoughts on how native ads are presented. They were shown a native ad on a website and different respondents saw the ad with different labels.  Seventy-one percent said they noticed the content in the ad, but fully 62 percent didn’t realize they were looking at an ad.  When asked which labels were the most clear, “advertisement” and “sponsored by” were the best in terms of letting consumers know they were looking at an ad.  The problem is that readers do NOT like feeling as if they’ve been deceived, as a study by Contently found:

  • Two-thirds of readers have felt deceived upon realizing that an article or video was sponsored by a brand.
  • 54 percent of readers don’t trust sponsored content.
  • 59 percent of readers believe a news site loses credibility if it runs articles sponsored by a brand.

So let’s go back to the AT&T question.  Would you knowingly try to deceive a consumer?  Before you answer, are you running native ads that just might be doing exactly that?  Are we – marketers and publishers – just asking for trouble in our quest for better engagement?  Let me know your thoughts.

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May 4, 2015 · 11:35 am

Misleading Marketing

Sometimes it’s just too easy to point out corporate stupidity and today I’m taking that easy road. You might be aware that the FTC is suing AT&T for allegedly misleading consumers by offering them “unlimited” data plans, and cutting back their data speed when they exceeded a maximum monthly allotment of data usage. AT&T doesn’t deny doing it, which is smart since there is ample evidence to support the accusation. Nope. Instead, they’ve told the FTC that their hands are clean since customers should have known they were going to be throttled if they used too much data.

I’m not all that knowledgable about network congestion management.  I do know that all ISPs (and a wireless carrier is one of those although you might not think of them that way) use “traffic shaping” to manage the load on their system.  Generally that’s something that’s imposed on a short-term basis to manage load.  So while there may be a heavy demand for bandwidth during primetime evening hours, traffic is much lighter in the middle of the night, for example.  Wireless carriers (except for Sprint) all impose limits on the bandwidth a user can have.  In my mind it’s a false scarcity since most people don’t come close to using all the bandwidth in their plans.  Even with the explosion of mobile video usage, no one is claiming that our wireless infrastructure is near its limit.  But let’s put aside the alleged technical issue and focus on the real point.

You can’t sell something as “unlimited” and then place limits on it.  Selling someone an unlimited high-speed data plan which becomes very low-speed after a certain, unstated point is misleading at best and fraudulent at worst.  The  fact that customers continue to renew their contracts isn’t an indicator that they don’t mind being deceived; it’s more of an indication about how little choice we all have.

This quote, taken from a MediaPost article on the subject is what I find particularly galling:

AT&T adds that consumers with unlimited data plans signed up for those contracts even though they “had reason to anticipate the possibility” that they would be throttled.

I don’t know how someone at AT&T wrote that with a straight face.  Really?  When you said “unlimited” a customer with zero technical training about network management should have anticipated that once they crossed some boundary known only to you they would suffer a service degradation?

Any of us in business need to run our businesses in accordance with the business model we develop to maintain profitability. If AT&T’s engineers tell them that throttling is necessary, so be it.  The point is that we need to let our customers know what they’re buying – honestly, transparently, and actively.  Lying isn’t a marketing plan – it’s just stupid.  Right?

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