Tag Archives: Marketing and Advertising

January 2, 2014 · 10:46 am

Most Read Posts Of 2013 – Part 5

For our final installment of last year’s most read posts, I present one that was published way back in January.  This was the most read post I wrote last year which I find surprising. Given that it was originally called “The Most Effective Marketing Words” (link bait alert!), maybe not.  As I read it again today I realize that it’s a good basic overview of a few of the marketing tenets I hold near and dear.  Let’s see if they resonate with you.

Since I seem to be emptying my “possible posts” research folder this week, here is something recent that comes to us from the good folks at Weber Shandwick.

It’s a study called “Buy It, Try It, Rate It” and you can read the study here.  While this may fall into the “duh” category of research, the study found that consumer reviewers trump professional reviewers as the key purchase influencers and further shows that 65 percent of potential consumer electronics purchasers are inspired by a consumer review to select a brand that had not been in their original consideration set.  It turns out that the average buyer consults 11 consumer reviews as they get ready to purchase.   A few other key findings:

  • Consumers report that they pay more attention to consumer reviews (77 percent) than professional critic reviews (23 percent). The gap between consumer and professional reviews closes noticeably, but not entirely, for more advanced technologies like tablets and computers.
  • The most influential reviews include certain elements. In consumer reviews, the most helpful ones are those that seem fair and reasonable (32 percent), are well-written (27 percent) and contain statistics, specifications and technical data (25 percent).
  • Shoppers trust consumer reviews on Amazon.com (84 percent) and BestBuy.com (75 percent) the most, topping Consumer Reports (72 percent). Consumers show no apparent discomfort in getting their research from a seller of the products they’re considering.

This gets to the notion of authenticity.  I’ve remarked to some people that the next review I find in a golf magazine which gives a bad review to a piece of equipment will be the first.  It’s pretty obvious that without golf manufacturers advertising in the books most of the publications would be in deep financial trouble.  Professionally generated content about electronics, cars, and other goods can have the same skew, or at least raise the issue in consumers‘ minds as the study shows.  What can you do as a brand?

First, be transparent.  This means, among other things, don’t do everything you can to have negative reviews pulled down and certainly don’t censor them on your own site.  Second, as the study suggests,

companies need dedicated resources to manage social network communities for purposes that go beyond branded content. An online community manager should be encouraging customers to review products, disseminating positive customer and professional reviews through social channels, and working in tandem with customer service to respond to customer feedback or issues quickly.

Third, be authentic.  Don’t use marketing speak – write as if you are a consumer.  Finally, don’t be afraid to engage on other sites – Amazon, for example – which have become so influential in the process.  Do so openly though.

The most effective marketing words are those coming out of consumers’  mouths.  While we as marketers can’t put them there, we can listen carefully and respond honestly   That can help make sure those words are positive.  You agree?

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December 18, 2013 · 11:08 am

Has Facebook Played Marketers For Suckers?

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Nearly every client I have worked with in the last few years has had a presence on Facebook and the few exceptions have felt as if they should have one. As you can tell from a number of my posts here on the screed, I’m generally a skeptic of any medium over which a marketer doesn’t have control. Today’s news just reinforces that and makes me wonder if Facebook has been playing the marketing community for suckers. Let’s see what you think.

Facebook puts a fair amount of energy into recruiting brands and other businesses to set up pages.  Once those pages are established, anyone who does it right can tell you that supporting the pages is like the plant (Audrey II) in “Little Shop Of Horrors”: a constant refrain of “feed me.”  Where does that content reside?  Facebook.  Who controls how much of it your “fans” see?  Facebook.  In fact, Facebook themselves said a year ago that pages organically reach about 16% of their fans on average.  Yep – 84% of the people who like a page won’t generally see it unless they take a specific action to seek it out.  In their words: “Newsfeed uses an algorithm to rank content based upon the likely interest to a user to help deliver the most relevant and valuable content.”

That was then.  Facebook recently changed how that algorithm works (which is, obviously, unknown to the brands making investments in the platform and totally out of their control).  Here is one what study found:

Facebook’s December News Feed algorithm change is so far punishing brand pages, regardless of how interested fans are in that page’s content, according to a new analysis by Ignite Social Media. Ignite analysts reviewed 689 posts across 21 brand pages (all of significant size, across a variety of industries) and found that, in the week since December 1, organic reach and organic reach percentage have each declined by 44% on average, with some pages seeing declines as high as 88%. Only one page in the analysis had improved reach, which came in at 5.6%.

So the 16% has dropped to around 3%.  Of course, Facebook is more than happy to have brands pay to promote their content, the very content that keeps the platform interesting and vital.  Many studies have shown that organic content drives better results than paid yet organic is almost impossibly hard to get front and center.

My take is this.  Facebook may just be playing a con where the mark doesn’t want to give up the investment they’ve already made.  Even if unintentional (BIG stretch there!), they seem to be finding ways of restricting the reach of page fans by page owners as a way to force them to advertise.  These same owners already had to spend money with campaigns to build up fan bases.  Now you want the brands to pay again to reach an audience that has already said they want to receive page updates by “liking” the page.  Put yourself in the place of the social media person at a business who has to explain that one.

People are not the customer on Facebook.  Paying brands are.  As with any business, Facebook won’t be around for the long haul if their priorities are making a buck rather than serving their customers’ needs or by playing them for suckers.  That’s my take.  What’s yours?

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December 17, 2013 · 10:53 am

What’s That Sound?

For our TunesDay installment this week I want to write about a style of music rather than a particular song.  As with most musical styles, nearly any song can be rendered this way although I’m not completely sure why anyone would want to do so.  That style is what many of you would call “elevator music.”  Don’t confuse that with “easy listening.”  The folks who created the latter meant you to listen.  The former, also known by the main practitioner of the style commercially – Muzak – is meant to create a mood while staying in the background.

In the late 1930’s and 1940’s, the sound of Muzak was used as “stimulus progression” to improve productivity.  The music wasn’t meant to be listened to, just to set a mood.  The increasing pace of the music  was meant to keep workers energized and was popular through the 1960’s.  It was background music – the stuff you heard in elevators: comforting, unobtrusive, and inoffensive.  By the mid 1980’s, background music had gone out of fashion.  Besides on-going accusations of “brainwashing”, the fact was that musical tastes has changed.  Music was more a part of people’s lives and the stimulus part of the program died.

The music we hear today in malls, airports, restaurants and, yes, elevators is meant to be in the foreground.  The mood music we hear can often be anything but comforting, unobtrusive, and inoffensive.  It can be hard to ignore.  Maybe that’s what many people just opt out by plugging in to the ubiquitous ear buds and creating their own aural environment.  Which raises the business point.

If you’re trying to move your marketing from being “elevator music” that plays in the background to being front and center, you run the risk of people opting out altogether.  I’m not advocating staying in the background.  There is too much marketing noise, I know, but standing quietly in a corner hoping a potential customer will take pity and bring you a glass of punch won’t work either.  The real challenge is to attract attention the way a skilled teacher does in a noisy class: by continuing to do your thing at a volume that requires people to pay attention and delivering information that people find important when they do so.

Is your marketing going to be Muzak – forgettable background sound that attempts to alter people’s moods –  or is it going to be something people hum to themselves because it’s had an impact?  Which sound is yours?

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