Tag Archives: Digital marketing

September 24, 2018 · 12:33 pm

A Foundation Of Trust

Bruce Springsteen wrote about trust on his “Magic” album:

Trust none of what you hear (trust none of what you hear)
And less of what you see

That’s good advice these days but it’s far from a current issue. In far, The Boss was only echoing Edgar Allen Poe, who wrote in the short story “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether”:

“Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.”

I don’t think Poe, however, envisioned the dramatic lack of trust that most consumers have in the very people upon whom much of their digital lives rely. We see it in the reports that Pew stated that over 40% of Facebook users between the age of 18 and 29 had deleted Facebook from their phones in the past year. While Facebook disputes that number, there’s no doubt that even one user choosing to avoid your product or service on the basis of trust is a huge problem.

How do we solve this? As is my style, I tend to dumb it down to a very simple thing. Don’t do anything to your customers that you wouldn’t want to be done to you or to a member of your family. If you’re OK with your spouse being surveilled and his or her data sold to the highest bidder than be my guest in doing so to your customers. If that notion gives you pause, however, maybe you ought not to be considering doing so to anyone, at least without their full knowledge and consent. That means what you’re doing is front and center and not buried in a 3,000-word terms and conditions clickwrap agreement.

Once trust is lost, it’s extremely difficult to rebuild. You might have experienced this on a personal basis with a friend. As difficult as that might have been, it’s even harder for a business where there is generally not a human face on the brand or service nor an individual with whom to speak. The best solution is never to jeopardize trust in the first place. It’s a foundational issue. Your customers need to trust you and all of what you say. Don’t prove Bruce and Poe right, ok?

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September 17, 2018 · 10:36 am

You’re The Customer Too, Dummy

We haven’t had a screed in a while in which I point out the on-going silliness of many of us in marketing, so let’s start the week with one! There was an article in the eMarketer newsletter about a recent study. I’m just going to quote it directly:

In an August 2018 survey of 103 ad agencies, publishers and marketers in North America conducted by Pressboard, 27.2% of respondents said they use an ad blocker to block ads on the websites they visit. These figures are similar to those found in the general population. According to eMarketer forecasts, 25.2% of US internet users will use an ad blocker in 2018.

Pressboard’s research showed that advertising professionals are more likely to rely on their friends than on ads when they decide whether or not to purchase a product. Nearly eight in 10 respondents (78.6%) said that word-of-mouth from friends influenced their recent purchase decision. Just fewer than 16% of those surveyed reported making a purchase after being influenced by banner ads.

I hope you can see immediately why this precipitated my response. It’s might be easy to shrug this off. I mean, what does it really say? Marketing and advertising professionals are humans too? How is that a surprise? Well, it’s not, but it does point out a fundamental problem. Apparently, when they put on their business hats and get to work they forget how they feel as consumers. After all, if they react badly to banner ads and rely more on word of mouth, why do they persist in figuring out how to invade the consumer’s website use in as many ways as possible? They use ad blockers because, to paraphrase Barry Goldwater’s campaign slogan, in their hearts, they know it’s right. The state of web marketing is akin to that of an Arabian bazaar or a NASCAR driver. Ad blockers at least make the web tolerable.

The message to any of us is that we’re customers too. We need to think like customers and not as marketers when we’re figuring out the best ways to interact with our audiences. How can we solve their problems? How can we deliver information that’s useful to them and not just scream at them? Keep that in mind and not only will your customers be better off, but you will be as well. Make sense?

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August 27, 2018 · 9:55 am

The Sense Of Being Valued

I was reading an article about an emerging form of advertising the other day. It’s a form in which people who view ads are paid for having done so. You can read the article about it here but one thing in the article got me thinking and I hope it has the same effect on you.

The CEO of the company that’s doing this – AdWallet – was asked if this was just “slackers” trying to put a few extra bucks in their pockets. What he had to say was this:

They’re not Millennial slackers looking to earn money on the side, he says. Instead, the average AdWallet user is 45 years or older and earns more than $100,000 a year. The main reason they have been using the platform, he says, is not the money, but the sense of being valued (emphasis added).

That’s something that often gets lost in the marketing process, especially when expressing value to our customers takes a backseat to making more money off of them. For example, many companies are using chat-bots for customer service. Nothing infuriates me more than when I have a problem and, after having tried to solve the problem myself, I call customer service only to reach a phone tree. Reaching a bot instead of a human using many companies’ “live chat” help feature is just as bad. The message I get is “we value profits more than we value you.”

It’s almost as bad as when I get a human and they have no insight at all as to who I am. I give them account information or order numbers and they have no record of past transactions or the fact that I might have called in the past with an issue. I had this experience recently with one of the large ticketing companies. I was supposed to get a CD with at ticket purchase and the code they sent didn’t work. I spent 20 minutes reaching a human who promised me to get back to me with an answer. It’s been two months: No CD and no explanation. Message received: “we are so damn big that we don’t have to care.”

I’ve had similar issues with financial service companies (almost an oxymoron there since their “service” is non-existent) and many others, as I’m sure you have. Yes, I sometimes express my frustration via social media and here on the screed. More often than not I do whatever I can do to avoid interacting with this company again, taking my business elsewhere is at all possible.

When I was running an online commerce store I used to remind our customer service types that I didn’t expect them to solve every problem that arose. What I did expect, however, is that every single customer knew that we valued them, were listening. and would do whatever we could to rectify the issue even if it meant we’d sacrifice some margin by expending time and resources to do so. It’s always easier to retain and up-sell an existing customer than to find a new customer. You do that by letting them know how much you value them on a regular basis. What was the last time you did that?

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