Tag Archives: marketing

November 29, 2017 · 11:28 am

Actions And Words

I’m a believer in watching what people or organizations do as opposed to what they say. Words are too easy while actions are often difficult. Words can also distract from actions that belie the message the words are attempting to convey.

English: This icon, known as the "feed ic...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

No, that’s not a political statement (although feel free to take it as one). It’s more a response to a couple of things that happened this morning while I’ve been going through my morning email. Like you, I subscribe to quite a few newsletters as a simple way to stay on top of industry news and developments in technology. I also use a newsreader (Feedly, which I highly recommend) to digest dozens of websites in a brief period of time.

I was reading a newsletter from a respected site for digital mavens. It tries to help those of us on the digital side of things to grow our businesses. The lead article in this morning’s newsletter caught my eye. It was about strategy and leadership in data and actually was important enough for this organization to use it as the subject line in today’s email. I read the blurb and clicked on the “read more” button. In response, I got a “404 Not Found” error. The redirect URL was empty. I tried clicking the headline and that did, in fact, get me to the article, but the call to action wasn’t the headline. What happened here was just someone being sloppy.

The same sort of thing happened when I clicked on an article in my RSS feed. The article headline – about some people receiving promotions at a former competitor – got my attention so I clicked through to read the article. Whoever set up the RSS feed for the publication had this link click through to the publication’s homepage, and the article I wanted was nowhere to be found. I’m not sure if this is willful or sloppy but, as in the previous example, it’s a bad user experience and makes me less likely to click through in the future.

Broken links suck. Besides frustrating the reader they carry an SEO penalty. They’re also easy to check – there are several free tools to do so. Misleading links – or headlines/teasers for that matter – are just as bad. While they might not hurt your search ranking they will hurt your reader. Which really leads me full circle to actions speaking louder than words. If you claim to be a leader in digital marketing, you can’t put broken links into your newsletter. If you claim to be serving the advertising and marketing community, you can’t serve us by forcing us to look for the useful information with which you’ve teased us. The same holds true for any business, by the way. Customers see what you do and that makes it easy to discount whatever it is you say. Does that make sense?

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August 14, 2017 · 11:23 am

Thanks For Nothing

I get emails all the time urging me to win something. In a previous life, I used to send those emails as well. Because of that, I became very well acquainted with the rules that govern sweepstakes and contests. I’ve had multiple lawyers explain the three-legged stool of chance/prize/consideration to me on more than one occasion, and I’ve never run afoul of the gaming laws either here in the US or in Canada.

I thought about those rules as I reviewed an email from an electronics company this morning. The email urges me to “Get Rewarded For Sharing Your Opinion.” I had a couple of immediate thoughts that might just be pertinent to your business, whether you’re running a contest or not (BTW, I know the difference between a “contest” and a “sweepstakes” but I’m lumping them together today, OK (damn lawyers…))?

My first thought was to wonder if asking someone to write a review isn’t consideration? We used to wonder if asking for a photo or a video as part of an entry constituted consideration. My take is that even if it’s not deemed to be such by a lawyer, it is still asking someone to take some time and write a review. For some of us, writing is like breathing but for many people, cranking out a couple of hundred coherent words is grueling. Asking them to do so for a CHANCE to win a $500 gift card with nothing else as a consolation (a coupon, you cheap bastards?) seems like an unfair trade-off.

More importantly, the headline on the company‘s landing page is “Your Thoughts, Our Thanks?” Really? Unless you dive deeply into the fine print of the rules, you might not realize that unless your review contains a very specific phrase it won’t be counted as a contest entry. That won’t, of course, stop the company from using it in advertising and by entering, you’ve signed away all rights to it as well as the right to contest the company’s use of it and your name.

The bigger point is that the company is positioning this as a “win-win“:

Write an honest review and you’ll automatically be entered for a chance to win $500*. How’s that for a win-win?

It’s not, actually, You win. You get the content you can use to sell your products. A consumer might win but the vast majority of them will send off the review and get bupkis, maybe not even an entry if they haven’t read the rules carefully. You’re awarding cards every two months (and by the way, your entry doesn’t count after the two month period in which it was received). $3,000 over the course of a year for an important type of social proof – consumer reviews seems awfully cheap on your part, particularly when most of what you’re selling costs hundreds of dollars.

We can’t ask our customers for something beyond buying our products without offering something in return. Don’t hype a relatively low-level reward that’s not universally available to everyone supporting your brand when all you’re really offering is a fuzzy “thank you.” Your thanks? Thanks for nothing in this case. Do you agree?

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July 26, 2017 · 10:20 am

Staying Alinged

One thing that bad golfers do (and I’m speaking from personal experience here) is to misalign themselves. They might point the clubface at their target but they fail to get their hips, shoulders, and knees properly aligned. When they go to hit the shot, inevitably the ball goes someplace other than where the golfer desires.
I thought of that this morning as I read the results of a study on marketing compensation. Conducted by MediaPost, the study found that:

Agencies and their clients are far apart in terms of what they deem to be the most fair method of compensation, according to findings of a survey of advertiser and agency execs conducted recently by Advertiser Perceptions for MediaPost. While labor-based fees are the No. 1 method preferred by agencies (45%), incentive methods were the top choice among marketers (40%).

You might not be a marketing agency or a marketer, but there is something to be taken from that for whatever business you’re in. Think of a car’s four wheels. When they’re properly aligned, the car is easy to hold on the course you set. If one wheel is out of alignment, the car pulls left or right and you’re constantly having to fight to keep it heading where you want.

Your business is no different. Your goals and your customers’ goals have to be in alignment. So too do yours and your team’s. Being paid fairly is a critical part of the employer/employee relationship, and no one is going to do their best work if they feel like they’ve been treated unfairly. I’ve known agencies who’ve resigned clients because they felt that they were losing money servicing the account. I actually had a client who hired me to complete a project over a few weeks. When I presented the completed work in a little over a week, they asked to reduce what I was being paid since “it didn’t take as long as we thought.” In that case, it was my fault for not being sure that their expectations (how long it would take and the value of that time) were in alignment with how I did the work and the value of the project regardless of the time spent. Sure, I could have sat on the completed work until it was due, but that has no benefit to my client and only helps me justify what they’re paying.

All the wheels need to be aligned. The club face and your body need to be aligned. The goals and expectations of everyone in your organization need to be aligned, and that alignment must extend to your customers as well. Hard to do sometimes, but always worth it, right?

 

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