Marketing Talk

You’ve probably seen it before. You’re going along minding your own business when you read a book or a blog post that says something like,

“…some ways in which you can convince the management team to reduce traditional marketing.” from Hubspot

or maybe you read this post by Scott Stratten where he notes that before questioning the ROI of social media, the ROI of other more traditional aspects of marketing should be questioned.

Or maybe you read Likeable Media like I did and had a similar feeling that there was a set up dichotomy between Social Media and traditional marketing.

Whatever the case, you’ve almost certainly encountered the idea that with the onslaught of social media, you really don’t need to do anything else. Traditional media is either dead, too costly, out of touch with the 21st century, or any number of other colorful descriptions.

Of course, the problem is that killing off everything except social media can create rather huge problems for your company.

The message you stop sending

Let’s talk about advertising first. A lot of people who are social media evangelists have a field day attacking advertising. Take, for example, this infographic called “Stop Advertising, Stop Doing.” Lots of undercurrents to that message, huh? Then of course there are the arguments about how advertising is too expensive, it can’t be tracked, it doesn’t work, blah blah blah.

Factually, advertising can be pinned down rather accurately if you know what you’re doing. Using a publication that has an audited circulation can tell you what job positions and industries you’re reaching, how many people are actually requesting the publication, and more. An effective ad tracking device will assist you in filtering leads down even further. You just have to know what you’re doing.

But let’s talk about what happens when you stop advertising.

Let’s say you’ve been advertising six times a year in the same publication for years and years. Suddenly you pull the plug completely because you’re doing the Twitters now. Let’s say you’re doing this while the economy is shaky (like it has been for the last 5 years, say). What are your competitors and customers likely to think? Even if they notice you’re doing more in social media, it’s going to be easy to think that you have made that move because you’re short on cash. Is that a good message to send out? Couldn’t that cause your social media presence to be tinged with a bit of shade?

I think so.

By the way, one might note that this exact same logic applies to other traditional marketing tactics. What if you suddenly don’t show up at a trade show you’ve gone to for years? What if you suddenly stop producing the really high quality pieces of literature your company has committed itself to in the past? It doesn’t matter what you’re doing on social media if your audience is used to finding you in these channels. If you abandon them without warning, they can only assume that the tough times got to you.

That’s letting PR get out of control in a bad way.

The possibilities for integration are endless

The really sad thing, as I’ve mentioned many times here, is that the possibilities for how to integrate traditional media and social media are almost endless. We are just at the beginning of exploring the possibilities. Television ads are leading to Facebook pages. Print ads are promoting Twitter hashtags. QR codes are leading to YouTube channels which lead to a blog. All of these tactics can be braided in different and exciting ways to create really interesting new marketing campaigns for your company and/or brand.

If we keep painting a this/that, black/white choice between traditional marketing and social media marketing, and particularly if we continue to do so while maintaining that social media has no measurable ROI, companies are going to find themselves in really big trouble, and they may not have the first clue how they got there. That might sound severe, but I believe it 100%. Everything in marketing is measurable. Everything has an ROI. If nothing you are doing seems measurable or if nothing you are doing seems to have a good ROI, social media will not be the silver bullet you’re looking for.

Your thoughts?

Of course, this is just how I see it. What’s your take on whether social media is all you need these days? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/charlieeclark/5985024438/ via Creative Commons

One thing you run into quite often in the social media world is talk of entrepreneurship. A lot of it is advice – how to monitor your time, how to make the sale, how to deal with failure of your start-up stops up. A lot of the advice too is meant to be motivational. “Bring your website design in house. You can do it!” “Run your own social media campaign – here’s how!” And the list goes on and on.

Not coincidentally, another common thread of conversation has to do with a lack of time or time management or how to balance life and work. It’s as if the left hand isn’t telling the right hand, “Hey, you just decided you want to do everything having to do with your company all by yourself.” But in fact that is just what you have done. No wonder you’re short on time!

What do you need to do for your own company?

If you haven’t read Carol Roth’s The Entrepreneur Equation, you really need to buy it or get it out from the library and read that thing. I’d recommend buying it because if you’re interested in starting or maintaining a company, Carol outlines everything you need to worry about as the head of a business. A bit of a glimpse?

1. Actually running your company – making sure money is coming in and going out as it should

2. Managing your clients

3. Looking for new clients

4. Marketing your product/service

5. Coming up with new products/services

6. Managing employees if you have any

7. Worrying about things like new tax structures, new healthcare structures, retirement plans – whether just for you or for you and your employees

And of course each of these categories includes endless sub-categories of other stuff you need to do. If you think just about marketing, the list can be nearly endless. Website, SEO, content, PR, developing your brand, advertising, mailing, email, e-newsletters, social media (yes, social media is *just* a sub-category under marketing in this case)…phew.

When you look at that list, it sure seems like any entrepreneur has more than enough to do. And yet, many entrepreneurs insist that they can do every single thing on this list (and more) with no assistance whatsoever. Speaking as a person who has spent a career (so far) *just* working on the marketing aspect of a business for other companies, I have to say that this seems rather delusional and probably dangerous.

A lack of understanding about marketing (real marketing)

One of the reasons I started this series, as you might have guessed, is that I feel social media is diluting what marketing really entails. That’s too bad because one of the things I love about most marketing tactics is that there’s an art to it. There isn’t just a simple “Do this for dummies” approach that I would be happy with.

Take, for example, the much maligned art of media placement. This is how I started in the marketing world. You might thing (assuming that you haven’t been convinced advertising is stupid) that placing an ad is really pretty easy. You choose something like the Wall Street Journal, you buy an ad, done. Right? Well, if that is your approach in your effort to do everything, you are missing out on so many important considerations. For example, where are your competitors advertising? Are they advertising? What is the circulation of that publication like? Can you get a better deal or does the publication stick pretty close to the rate card? Is there an extra fee for good placement? Would an insert be a better investment than an ad? Is it worth it to run a quarter-page black-and-white ad?

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Most marketing tactics include a lot of details that I fear people are now glossing over. If you want a new brochure, are you making sure all of your brochures share the same general aesthetic so people know it’s you? If you’re sending a direct mail piece, are you aware of all of the strange postal rules, like how far down on the piece you are allowed to have content?

Since I’m an agency woman, it might be easy to dismiss my concerns as self-serving. Sure, I would love if every entrepreneur contacted us and said, “Ahhhhhhhhh!” Well, maybe not. But this is not about a sales pitch for our agency or agencies in general. My concern is that no one seems to be really concerned about this “do everything” mode of work in which people are engaged. Is it realistic to think you can continue to handle the SEO for the website you designed and wrote the copy for while managing your new product/service and also keeping a grip on the latest tax rules? To me, this seems like an unnecessary invitation to harm. Because on any facet of work you are doing yourself, whether it’s marketing or customer service or HR, a big mistake can literally spell doom for your business.

Whether you hire an agency to handle your broad spectrum of marketing, a freelance web designer, a person to help you with your HR, or any other sort of help for any other facet of your business, I don’t want you to feel like you are now a failure. Getting help in all of these areas is a sign of realism. It’s proof to me that you are fully aware of all of the minute details that can come back and bite you in the butt. So long as the general chant is, “You can do everything,” I feel like many don’t truly understand how business as a whole, or any part of it, really works.

What do you think? Should an entrepreneur do everything, or is that just crazy talk?

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wilhelmja/2947831308/ via Creative Commons

Phew. As I sit down to write this, I am one tired lady. We’re busier than we have been in quite some time. My brain is back to trying to finish up projects in my sleep. When I come home from work, pretty much the last thing I want to do is sit down at a computer and type some more. In fact, these days, sitting outside to read, exercising, doing anything that doesn’t involve sitting at a desk is where I wanna be when I’m not in the office. Maybe you’re feeling that way too. Things are looking up. Things are getting busier. You know, those things that don’t have anything to do with Facebook or blogging or Twitter. Those things that kept you busy before social media exploded right along with our economy (one in a good way, one in a bad way).

This has been on my mind since a friend of mine noted that Twitter seems to be getting more and more quiet these days. Someone said, “Maybe more people are working. Maybe people have less time to tweet.” That resonated with me. As people are getting jobs that keep them busy, or as business begins to pick up, they also have less time to spend Facebooking and blogging and tweeting. They’re doing their work. I’m doing mine. Twitter doesn’t make the cut.

What could this mean for all of these social media platforms? Am I saying that “social media is gonna die?” Nah. I hate those kinds of posts and anyway, social media as a marketing tool won’t be going away anytime soon. But I do think “social media the fad” will be fading away as time goes on. Time spent on platforms like Twitter and Facebook will be more targeted, more carefully planned. There will be fewer chats, perhaps. Maybe even less online drama. People will be busy. Drama almost always takes a back seat where busy-ness is involved.

Maybe blogs that teach you how to do social media will begin to evaporate in favor of companies using that knowledge to do their own industry-specific blogs. Maybe the age of the social media consultant will fade back to the future, to a time when marketing consultants just bring newer tools to the table.

People may not have a lot of time or desire to sit at a computer or at their iPad and read post after post about how to tweet. They might just say, “Come visit me and give me the basics. Offline. Face-to-face.”

Maybe we are gearing up for a counter-revolution. They always happen, you know. The revolters become revolting and are revolted against. It’s a tale as old as time. Maybe people will want to use all they have learned about how to nurture customer relationships and take that knowledge back to the golf course and the nice dinner. Twitter and Google Plus may begin to seem more and more impersonal. Distant. Virtual.

These are all wild guesses on my part, of course, but I find it likely that I am not the only person who is noticing their online time dissipating. I am making sure I peek in when I can. I am maintaining my friendships. But from blogging to Twitter to the whole shebang, I am less, dare I say it, engaged.

What about you? What are you seeing out there?

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Here we are on letter I of the marketing myth series, and we’re going to talk about what integrated marketing means. Now, often times you’ll see folks talking on social media sites about how it’s important to make sure your different social media efforts are “integrated.” They’ll note that it’s important to integrate your blog with your Facebook page. They might note that it’s important to integrate your Twitter presence with your blog and your Facebook page. This advice isn’t wrong, although I think it might be behind a lot of efforts to automatically import tweets into Facebook and the like. But this is actually NOT what integrated marketing is all about.

First, let’s take a look at how our good friend Wikipedia defines integrated marketing:

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) is defined as customer centric, data driven method of communicating with the customers. IMC is the coordination and integration of all marketing communication tools, avenues, functions and sources within a company into a seamless program that maximizes the impact on consumers and other end users at a minimal cost.^[1] This management concept is designed to make all aspects of marketing communication such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing work together as a unified force, rather than permitting each to work in isolation.

Now, the concept of “customer-centric” is one that you don’t see bandied about much in the world of social media, so let’s talk a bit about that too. The awesome Beth Harte, whom I was fortunate to meet on Twitter early on in my social media career, offers this excellent definition:

Integrated marketing communications is about connecting with, listening to, understanding, and analyzing (communications) customers and delivering (marketing, product development, operations) on their needs and wants, hopefully in a meaningful way that serves both the customer and organizational goals. Perhaps that seems overly simple, but really, it should be that simple.

You should really read her full post from where I pulled that quote.

So what does this all mean? Well, it’s hard to narrow it all down into nice Twitterable lingo. But the bottom line is that the current buzzword – “Social Business,” is not too far off from what Integrated Marketing Communications has always been about. Your communications across the board, from advertising to booth graphics to social media to the balloons you send up at your party should all give the same line of thinking, it should all be about your customer, and there absolutely should not be any silos.

Why are we not talking about this?

If Social Business as a concept is getting a lot of attention, how come we still see so much ignorance or mythological thinking surrounding Integrated Marketing? Well, one potential answer is that the social media world has really painted itself into a corner. Take, for example, Dave Kerpen’s Likeable Media, which I recently read and reviewed. It’s a great book so far as its social media guidance is concerned, but throughout the book, a very black-and-white scenario is established. You can do social media. You can do traditional marketing. There is no real evaluation on how you could make all of it work for you.

This is pretty typical wherever you travel in the world of social media. Traditional marketing, be it email marketing, direct mail, print advertising, radio, television – all of that is sort of scoffed at in the face of all of this new “social media stuff.”

That’s a real shame.

The other problem may be that a lot of people became “marketers” (the new way we sort of define this word) with the onslaught of social media. They did not have a lot of marketing experience before Twitter started to catch fire. Therefore, they do not have a lot of experience with other forms of marketing, and hence they can’t really properly talk about it. So, as humans do, they focus on what they are good at and exclude the stuff they’re kind of weak on.

Or maybe there is another explanation I’m unaware of (I’m open to suggestions).

The sad thing

Here’s the really sad part about this increasingly common new “definition” of integrated marketing – it’s preventing companies/marketers from trying some pretty cool things. There are now entirely new ways to eliminate silos in your company, learn from your customers, and carry your message from platform to platform. You can develop products based on what your customers are actually saying and then speak to them through different mediums based on how you KNOW they want to be talked to. A press release can now link you to a YouTube video. An ad can suggest that input can be offered on the Facebook page. The possibilities are limitless. But we are missing opportunities to expand marketing as we force people to choose between “old” and “new.”

Do you agree? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/syoung/3955230375/ via Creative Commons

When I first started at our family’s agency, it was July, which is about the time that we start revving up for something called planning season. I took a pretty steep crash course in what that meant. It meant contacting publications, looking back over what had happened in the last year, and creating a cohesive campaign that would carry the client through to the next year. It’s a lot of work, and it can be very intimidating when you are new to a client or new to the marketing world. After all, this isn’t just a task you are doing. This is your client’s welfare in your hands.

All of this might sound kind of crazy if you have been learning about marketing via the Social Media prism. For some reason, in the online world, the idea of planning has joined the ranks of Santa Claus and the unicorn. You hear about it on occasion but you don’t really see it much, and in fact quite a few people suggest that it doesn’t really exist. Planning is time-consuming. By the time you create a plan, someone else might have already beat you to the punch. You’ve probably heard all of this before.

The main argument against planning that you see in the online world, of course, is that social media is free. Experimenting with something like Quora or Google Plus or Pinterest or whatever the next big thing will be is a no-lose proposition because you aren’t at risk for losing anything big. As we have already discussed, this is a dangerous thought process to carry with you into the online world.

Why planning matters

Let’s use Pinterest as an example. Let’s say your boss (or you if you run your own company) want to start “doing things” on Pinterest. It’s hot, it’s driving traffic, and it just seems like it would be silly to NOT try it out. So, you decide, without a plan, to dump a few product pictures onto a board with your company name as the title. Fine. Easy enough to do.

Then you start noticing that some of your images are getting repinned all over the place and there seems to be a lot of interest in them. You think, “Wow, this is great!” But then another thought crosses your mind.

“Now what?”

Without a plan in hand, how can you make sure that those repins and comments are going to translate into something really good for your company? It’s pretty hard to catch all of the fish if your net is up on the boat for half the trip, right?

Now let’s take a different example. Let’s say you decide to take the initiative and throw up a Facebook page for your company. You have learned all about the shiny new Timeline features, everything looks great, and you’re even getting some conversation on the page.

Then one day, a person starts trolling the page because they had a bad experience with your product. How are you going to react? Not only do you need to react to this online scenario, but you probably also need to wonder if your product is really having issues. Since you acted of your own volition with no plan, you’re going to have to inform other folks of what all is going on. That’s not gonna be too comfortable.

Finally, consider this example. One part of your marketing team has put together an ad campaign saying that your new product is ideal for ant collecting. No real plan was put together surrounding these ad placements, and no other kind of plan was put together either. Later in the year, you start some social media marketing, and you note on your various platforms that your new product is great for collecting ladybugs but not so much ants. That’s something silly the other companies do.

Well, you’ve got yourself a bit of a problem, don’t you? If your left hand isn’t talking to your right hand, they might both be signing completely different things. Without a plan, there is no way to even double check that everyone is on the same page.

While the idea that social media is free can seem like a compelling argument against planning, these sorts of problems are definitely not free of charge.

Finding a middle ground

The thing about planning is that it doesn’t have to be written in stone. Plans can be flexible. Plans can even change. But working out a general idea, even, of what you want to accomplish and how you are going to get there is essential for businesses today. Perhaps it is even more important now because there are so many different tactics that can be used.

Planning can seem like it is too time-consuming, too this, too that. It’s definitely not something that seems romantic, right? But it is a preventative measure. Planning can stave off true marketing and PR problems. That seems worth the time, does it not? That seems worth the energy.

So what do you think? Is planning lame, or is it worthwhile? What are your thoughts on this whole issue?

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