Tag Archives: Digital marketing

February 27, 2017 · 4:39 pm

Learn To Shut Up

I don’t suppose it will be a great shock to any of you that there is new research out that shows marketers can be their own worst enemies. The study comes from Bridge Ratings and is entitled The Facebook Fatigue Dilemma. There is quite a bit in the study but the section I found of relevance to us today concerns why users unfriend or unlike a brand. Not surprisingly, it’s because they are being inundated with marketing messages, and while they can’t really control which ads they’re seeing (more about that in a second), they can control what pops up in their news feed by telling the brand to go away via unfriending.download

What they study shows, as reported by eMarketer, is “44% of respondents “unliked” a brand on the social media platform when the company posted too frequently. Likewise, 43% of those polled said they “unliked” brands because their Facebook walls became too crowded with marketing posts, forcing them to cut down on the number of brands that they follow.”

As marketers, we forget sometimes that our brilliant messages are not the only messages the consumer is seeing. While what we have to say is important both to us and the consumer (hopefully), we are just one of a thousand messages the consumer is seeing that day. We need to learn to shut up unless and until we have fresh content that’s relevant to the consumer.

Of course, we can also do a little educating. Going off on a tangent here, I’m convinced, based on my discussions with many Facebook users, that most people have no clue how to tune their Facebook feeds to serve them. I’ve yet to see any marketer run a campaign within Facebook helping users to use the platform (and to presumably keep your incredibly helpful posts front and center). Do you use the little drop-down tab in each and every news feed post to tune the stream? How about using lists to segment various things? Do you actively report your feelings about various ads to the Facebook algorithm to help make what you see more relevant?

Media isn’t a megaphone. Marketing isn’t a monologue. We need to learn to shut up until we really have something to say, don’t we?

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February 1, 2017 · 11:58 am

Smoke And Mirrors

I wrote last week about magic and distractions. Another magically-themed post today about the smoke and mirrors magicians use in their acts. That expression has come to mean something that’s deceptive or fraudulent, and a couple of pieces about the marketing business got me thinking about that term today. Even if you’re not a marketer (but who isn’t!), there’s something to take away.

One piece on Digiday dealt with ad-buying technology. You’re probably aware that the majority of digital ad buying (which will soon cover TV as well!) is done programmatically. No humans are involved other than to create the platforms on the vending end and choosing the ones to use on the buying end. The Digiday piece contains the following statements from an ad tech software developer:

I can say from first-hand experience that a lot of it is taped together stuff and nowhere near the sophistication that’s talked about…It is really easy to put up a website and mention “algorithms,” “machine learning” and a bunch of buzzwords. Nobody knows how that works. You can’t actually look into it, it is all just black boxes. But underneath, there is no real special sauce for a lot of these companies.

In other words, smoke and mirrors. Billions of dollars are spent this way and marketers are (finally) demanding to know how their money is really being spent. They’re turning on the lights and blowing away the smoke. Which leads to the second piece from MediaPost. It mentions “the terrible murky waters of rebates and contracts” and the same lack of transparency to which the other piece alludes. P&G is demanding more transparency, insisting that media agencies show that they are using providers that apply industry standards in measuring viewability and fraud. Ogilvy and Mather is reorganizing under a single P&L accounting structures for clients and thereby boosting transparency. Both of these moves are sending the magicians home.

We all need to ask ourselves about smoke and mirrors in our businesses. We need to challenge sources behind reports and assure ourselves that what we’re reading or hearing is rooted in fact and not someone’s fiction. A good practice outside of business too, don’t you think?

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January 23, 2017 · 12:07 pm

Digging Into The Cart

One thing our digital age has given us is the ability to measure and understand what is going on in our businesses. We can learn even more by layering research on top of the data so that we understand not just the “what” but also the “why.”

A piece of research from Episerver has done that with respect to consumer shopping behaviors and their expectations for brands. While the study is focused on online commerce, I think many of the data points it surfaces apply into other business segments as well. Let’s see what you think.

The primary finding is that 92% of consumers will visit a brand’s website for the first time for reasons other than making a purchase. Of shoppers visiting a website for the first time, 45% are searching for a product or service, 25% are comparing prices or other variables, and more than one in 10 are looking for details about a physical location. A third of consumers who visit a brand’s website or mobile app with the explicit intent of making a purchase rarely or never complete checkout. Further, 98% of shoppers have been dissuaded from completing a purchase because of incomplete or incorrect content on a brand’s website, underscoring the need for descriptive, accurate content.

When consumers are prepared to make a purchase on a website or mobile app, the report found 60% go directly to the product page for the item they’re looking for. Another 18% look at sale items first, and 7% seek out customer testimonials before anything else.

What does all of that mean? In a word, engagement. Your ability to engage the consumer is key because the odds are that unless they feel engaged they’re not coming back. The fact that the overwhelming majority of first-time visitors are NOT there to buy points to an opportunity. How can you serve the real reasons why they’re there? How can you provide them with the information they need (accurate content, easily visible sale items, obvious, verified customer comments, etc.)

Hopefully, this is yet another piece of research that falls into the “duh” category. Most of the findings point to actions we should take that are just common sense. They’re the way we’d all like to be treated when we put on our consuming hats, aren’t they?

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