Marketing Talk

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but e-newsletters are really quite polarizing in the world of marketing, online and off. On the one pole you have people who role their eyes and make vomit sounds when you mention e-newsletters. You might hear something like, “OMG I get like, 27 gazillion a day. The whole reason I went to the Inbox Zero conference is because I need to figure out how to get RID of the e-newsletters!” On the other pole you don’t have as much talking. It’s really more about action. These are the folks who send all of those e-newsletters. Though I cannot prove it, I would bet there is even some overlap between these two disparate groups of people.

So what is going on here? Why are we getting so many e-newsletters, all of which drive us nuts, all while we keep sending our own? I have a theory. I think that just like we see in the world of social media, the thought is that creating an e-newsletter and sending it is so cheap and so easy that there’s no earthly reason why NOT to do it. As a result, people tend to jump into the process without really thinking about it first.

I’m going to give you a little quiz at this time. Now, whether or not you tell me the results, hopefully it will get those little brain hamsters rolling a bit. Ready?

1. Have you added people to your recipients list without their knowledge or permission?

2. Do you make efforts to indicate to your recipients that you want them to talk back?

3. Do you use your e-newsletters to sell, inform, or both?

4. Do you send your e-newsletters on a regular schedule?

5. Do you have a content plan for your e-newsletters?

Now, let’s talk about each of these five things in a bit more detail.

Who is receiving your e-newsletters?

One of the reasons that e-newsletters are perceived of as being really easy is that it IS really easy to add a person to an email database, especially now that platforms like Constant Contact and MailChimp exist. You literally just type peoples’ contact information in. Pretty darned easy. There’s an important step that I fear a lot of people miss, however, and that is making sure that people opt in to your e-newsletter. In fact, best practices indicate that people should opt in twice, once to sign up for your e-newsletter and then again via an invitate to unsubscribe if they wish.

I receive at least one e-newsletter from a person whom I know. We’ve had online conversations only, never phone or skype or anything like that. I’ve never met them in person. I’ve visited their blog a few times. And yet I receive their e-newsletter. Now how did that happen? When I converse with you, am I opting in to your e-newsletter? I don’t think so.

Always remember that the people who receive your e-newsletter will feel just like you do when you receive an e-newsletter you didn’t ask for. It may make them think less of you. They may unsubscribe. They may wonder what other sneaky things you do to try to grow your business. Going through the business cards you gather at a trade show and inputting all of those e-mail addresses is NOT the way to build your e-newsletter list. Stray away from this practice.

Are you inviting your readers to talk back?

Just like anything that is done in the marketing world today, it’s important to remember that your readers are the same people who have adjusted to the realities of Web 2.0 (or are we at 3.0 now?). They want to be able to talk back to you. They want to feel like you WANT them to talk back to you. Are your e-newsletters leaving some breathing room for participation? Do you actually invite your readers to respond or reply?

Say what?

What are you using your e-newsletters for in the grand scheme of your marketing campaign? Are you using them to sell your products or services? Are they loud and filled with images? There are ways to reach out to existing and potential customers with your e-newsletters, but nobody is going to be happy to receive a yelling salesman in his or her inbox, right? Besides, spam filters are getting pretty clever (except for all of the actual spam email, which seems to always get through). Images with blatant sales messages in the headline and lots of images may not even reach your readers.

Truthfully, your e-newsletter is a chance to help you nurture relationships with existing and potential clients. Yelling and screaming, doing nothing but selling, or creating extremely aggressive messaging is a great way to make people run away. Hard to nurture relationships that way, don’t you think?

Now for your regularly scheduled programming

Like a blog site, e-newsletters can be used to build a sense of expectation. If you send daily, try to send around the same time every day. If you send weekly, try to send on the same day. And so on. Scheduling your e-newsletters not only helps your recipients know when to expect your content, it also helps you track traffic to your website more reliably to when your e-newsletter went out. If your traffic keeps spiking at the same time you send out your e-newsletter, it’s a lot easier to make that connection.

A Man, A Plan, An E-newsletter…

Ok, that’s not exactly a palindrome, but having a plan for your e-newsletter content can be a great help in integrating your content into the rest of your marketing campaign. For example, if you are going to be exhibiting at a trade show, talking about that in your e-newsletter can be useful. While the plan does not need to be rigid or highly detailed, having some idea of what you will talk about can help prevent things like last-minute ideas and repetition.

These five aspects of e-newsletter planning and sending represent only the tip of the iceberg, and we’ve just touched on each one a bit. Now, is it possible to send an e-newsletter without all of these considerations? Sure. But what are you risking? Being black-listed as a spammer. Losing your reputation as an up-and-up business person. Losing relationships with existing or potential customers. That seems like a lot to risk just because of the myth that e-newsletters are easy to create and send.

Don’t you think?

1st  image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/xiaming/50391986/ via Creative Commons

2nd image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tambako/3593686294/ via Creative Commons

I have been really astonished that so many people have asked for #tweetdiner to come back. I think committing to every Saturday night got too hard for everyone. Hey, even I like to have a Saturday night away from my computer. But once a month isn’t so bad, right?

With that in mind, and with Valentine’s Day weekend now behind us for another year, tomorrow, February 18, is the day.

For our February chat, we’re going to talk about the power of pictures and what exactly that means. Whether it’s InstaGram, Pinterest, or Infographics, it seems like pictures, not content, are becoming king. Why is that happening? What does it mean?

Let’s talk about it, eh? Join me on Twitter at 9 PM EST Saturday, February 18, 2012. Just look for the hashtag #tweetdiner.

I’ll see you there 🙂

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brent_nashville/4155724023/ via Creative Commons

If you are a regular reader here, or even if you aren’t, I want to preface this by saying that I am not trying to attack any one company or any one person. Rather, an opportunity has presented itself to demonstrate the kinds of irresponsible advice that are openly floating about in the world of social media when it comes to marketing your business.

In this particular case, the article comes from HubSpot, a highly respected company, a company I respect a great deal. But that respect and credibility is *exactly* why I find this content so disturbing. We’ve come to expect better from them.

Let’s take this article a little bit at a time and talk about why I think this represents irresponsible advice.

So this post’s title is “Blogging Trumps Traditional Advertising in ROI Head-to-Head Case Study.” The post, near the beginning, sets the stage for what this HubSpot customer did with their super bowl ads:

The ads used a tracking phone number — which means the business knew which incoming calls were a result of the commercial — and encouraged viewers to visit the company’s homepage; other than that, there was nothing in the ad campaign integrating the offline efforts with their website or another online presence like social media.

One thing I have always said about super bowl commercials – they might be clever, they might be super funny, but quite often you don’t even know what the ad was for. They are more entertainment than anything else. The fact that this advertiser used a special phone number to track leads is interesting, but given that that was the main way to track leads, one would also assume that TV watchers were encouraged to respond via telephone. In that scenario, hyping the website or the social media presence of the company would have reduced the number of leads. Right?

Let’s move on.

The article shows a graph indicating that during the period that the ads were running…

along with several inbound leads, the customer’s blog generated twice as much traffic as its TV spots. To make matters worse, the ads resulted in no online leads, only 7 phone calls, and zero opportunities or customer conversions. Needless to say, the company was not very satisfied with the ROI of the Super Bowl ad campaign.

Now, let’s think about this really carefully.

First, the customer’s blog out-performed the TV ads. Is it possible that the TV ads generated interest, people didn’t want to call the trackable phone number, but they Googled the company and the blog site came up? It’s possible, right?

Second, we must again note that the primary call-to-action, it seems, was for people to call a special telephone number that was featured in the ad. Given that, the goal would not have been to drive website traffic, which would not have been trackable to the television ad campaign.

Third, OK, yes, 7 phone calls out of a reported 2.8 million person audience is not a great percentage. We can agree on that one. Then again, Super Bowl Sunday is still a Sunday. Do people really want to take time out of watching the big game to call about a product? Given that context, 7 calls may not be all that discouraging after all.

So, HubSpot company is not super duper pleased with the ROI of its super bowl campaign. OK. Fair enough.

Now here’s the part that really fried my friddle (and you can quote me on that).

This customer has (understandably) requested to remain anonymous, but they asked us to share this story with the marketing community as a reminder that, more often than not, outbound marketing just isn’t worth the cost. This customer has seen a much higher return at a fraction of the cost doing inbound marketing with HubSpot software.

First, let’s get one thing out of the way pronto-pup. Saying something like “more often than not” based on one case study is simply irresponsible. In fact, it’s rather laughable. What if medical scientists said that they had cured cancer based on results in one lab rat? We’d be kind of appalled, right? We should be similarly raising our eyebrows in this scenario. We don’t know what kind of company this customer is. We don’t know what else they are doing to market their products. In fact, we don’t even know what their products are. We know that they had $54,000 to spend on super bowl ads in a targeted area. One would assume they are a B2C company based on the campaign. Do we really want to offer comprehensive advice based on all of this stuff we don’t know? Well, I don’t.

Now, there’s another little red herring in here too. If you noticed a few paragraphs up, the article noted that there were no online leads. Now, I get a little hazy here, but if there were ZERO online leads, that means all of that website traffic and all of that blog traffic didn’t result in any leads either, right? So even if the inbound marketing seemed to out-perform the super bowl ads traffic-wise, no leads still equals no leads.

Also somewhat absent from this equation is how much that HubSpot software costs. The products page does not seem to list pricing. I’m guessing it isn’t free.

Let’s end by looking at this paragraph:

Marketers, if you focus on inbound marketing, you will see consistent results. It takes time, dedication, and hard work to create great content and generate inbound leads. But those who are willing to do the work (including the company referenced in this post) get to see a real return on investment. In fact, since this company started using inbound marketing with HubSpot, it’s increased its organic traffic by 567% and its overall traffic by 583% in less than a year.

The problem with this statement, of course, is that this does not prove the ROI of the HubSpot software or of inbound marketing. Increasing traffic is great, but if your sales numbers aren’t climbing (and these figures are noticeably absent from the article) you’re still in a hole, right?

To me, the article was surprisingly misleading, possibly at the peril of a lot of companies who will be swayed by the words of such a reputable and respected company. The only point that I would agree with whole-heartedly is that neither outbound or inbound marketing should work in a vacuum. Integrating tactics is the most effective way to ensure positive results.

You can read the full article here. I’d like to see if your take differs from mine. If so, why?

 

1st image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aguichard/357212691/ via Creative Commons

2nd image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ehousley/2657942647/ via Creative Commons

My pal Mark Schaefer wrote that this week is a good time to “hug a blogger.” Being a Star Wars fan, I figured an appropriate sequel would be, “The Blogger Hugs Back.”

Now, just to be clear, I’ve never really been a fan of Valentine’s Day, so that’s not *technically* why I’m doing this. It’s not just that I never got a flower on the big day in high school (sniff sniff) but it just seems so …pressure-filled for couples that really should be confident in each others’ adoration not to need a day to make it clear (well that’s my opinion, anyway). On the other hand, I am a completely sappy person. Studies have shown that I am 70% sap instead of water. So, if there is a love fest going on, for any reason, I am apt to take part.

Besides, I have a lot of reasons to spread joy.

So, here is a by no means complete list of people who make my days brighter (or at least more interesting) on an awfully regular basis. I would encourage you, just because Valentine’s Day offers up a good enough excuse, to think about the people who make a difference to you. Sometimes just telling people they are important is a lot more meaningful than a giant diamond ring (although the top ten people on this list can of course expect a package from Kay Jewelers any day now).

That’s a blatant lie.

Ehem, anyway, here we go 🙂

Gaga, Brandie, Sam, and Jeff,

Nick and Josepf plus Mitch Neff,

Cate and Gini, Lisa P,

Sean and John and Lisa D.

Lisa A and Danny Buntu,

Jack Steiner is fun to talk to,

Julien and Rufus, Geoff with Soleil,

Chris and Nancy and Olivier,

Dan Perez and Danny Brown,

Billy Delaney in my home town.

Mark and Chris and Chris and Jay,

Amber N, Amber C and Amber O,

Sumner the awesome daddy-o,

Carl and Cristian and Tom and Patrick,

Paul and Dave and Peggy Fitzpatrick,

Nic and Ian, Nickles, too,

Dawn Westerberg friended me when I was new.

Ellen and Alan and Alan and Fred,

Ann and Liz and Raul and Ted,

Stan S and Stan F and Chris Eh Young,

I could go on forever, it’d be so much fun.

And so my list goes on and on, as you can plainly see,

Lots and lots of people who make me über happy.

I’m one lucky lady to know these great folks,

Even if sometimes they pop my dreams’ yolks.

Alternating between funny and smart,

Sometimes we even talk about…tarts.

Happy Valentines to all you awesome people. I hope you have a great day, but then I’d hope that regardless. And I do.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sivinjski/4353431281/ via Creative Commons

 

 

 

 

 

One of the first things I learned in the marketing world was the importance of evaluating publications that I was thinking of proposing for our clients’ advertising campaigns. Once unknown, the world of BPA circulation statements became the norm for me. I evaluated media kits to look at how each publication broke down its audience. Were they the people our clients wanted to reach? Did they ask to receive the publication or was it available on a doctor’s office table?

Not thinking it would be anything apart from logical, I carried that mode of evaluation and thinking into all other facets of marketing that I learned (and I continue to do so as there is always more to learn). You can probably imagine my surprise, then, when I started seeing stories in the blogosphere and on Twitter about how companies that didn’t try everything online were either scared or just way behind the times.

For example:

As recently as August 2011, Erik Deckers wrote a post called, “Why Companies Are Afraid of Social Media”

Back in 2009 Mack Collier wrote a post called “Why is your Business Afraid of Negative Blog Posts?”

Also in 2009, BL Ochman wrote an article called “The Top Six Reasons Companies Are Still Scared of Social Media”

More recently, Mitch Joel wrote a post called, “You Are Free To Try Everything,” noting that it is much easier to do so in the online world than it was/is with more “traditional” marketing channels.

Now I will admit that maybe there are some companies out there who get frozen with fear. After all, it’s almost impossible to consider any one sector of the marketing world a 100% known entity, right? Things are changing daily, sometimes by the minute. And the unknown, well, it can be scary. Especially if something like your livelihood depends upon it.

But I would wager there are a few companies out there who are refraining from social media marketing or email marketing or whatever else because they actually know that it will not benefit them as much in the long run. It’s not a fear that xyz won’t work. It’s actually a full-fledged, fruit of research conclusion.

Let me give you an example. A lot of people were saying a couple of years ago that if you weren’t hopping onto the Foursquare wagon, you were really going to regret it. There was not a nuanced segment to this argument. You either were going to try Foursquare or you were a scaredy cat, essentially. But let’s say you’re a B2B medical products manufacturer. Apart from letting your friends know that you have checked in to work, how is Foursquare going to help your company? Are people going to jump into your factory and buy something? Probably not. You probably don’t need it.

Here’s another one. Let’s say you’re any type of company anywhere doing anything. You’ve done some social media research and you’ve discovered that while there are a lot of videos on YouTube relevant to your industry, there’s hardly any action on Twitter or Facebook. Your competitors aren’t there,  your customers aren’t there, there is no buzz, there’s just a whole lot of nothing. Are you just being afraid if you fail to jump onto social media at that point? I don’t really see it that way.

There are two other stories that feed into this myth. The first is the celebration of failure that exists in today’s world, and the second is a failure to understand actual costs of marketing tactics that on the surface appear to be free. Let’s talk about that a bit more.

I failed! Woot!

A lot of the people who argue that you should try everything in your marketing efforts are the same people who believe that failure is something to be sought in the business world. If you throw yourself into something and it doesn’t work, well, at least you learned something, right?

Take a look at this recent post by Danny Brown, where he indicates that the Toyota Twitter fiasco is actually the fault of the agency and not the brand. If that is the case and you’re the agency that got Toyota such bad PR, is failure looking like something to celebrate? I’m thinking probably not.

The fact is, there is a ton of pressure on marketers to make sure their efforts reap benefits, not yuck. The idea that you should try everything because failure is just a learning experience has never struck me as being spot on.

But social media is free!

Again, this is a common misconception. Signing up for Twitter is freer than the freest bird. But those people you hired to run your Twitter initiative? Probably not free. Most aspects of blogging are free. Finding someone who can create content for you? Probably not free. For everything that you try, you need people (or your own time) to make it work. Your time is not free either. Or it shouldn’t be anyway. Before you try something, you need to consider what will happen if it actually works really well.  You also need to consider how much time (aka money in the business world) you want to invest before you quit.

Don’t feel like you need to try everything. You’re not a scaredy cat or backwards if you don’t jump onto every new platform out there. Just make sure you do everything you need to do to succeed, and you’ll be doing just fine.

Right?

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikefischer/2517778046/ via Creative Commons

Much of American history, if you look at it, was molded by one single mineral -gold. It was gold that caused President Andrew Jackson to force the Cherokee out of Georgia. It was gold that pushed people to California, and it was the presence of the valued mineral that encouraged the US to go to war with Mexico so that California could become a state. In every gold rush in American history, or nearly every one, there were two things that could be counted on. First, people were hoping to find gold so that all of their life’s ills could be cured. Second, the desire for gold made the value of other human lives, particularly Native American lives, far less a priority than it may have been in other circumstances.

Each time there was a gold rush, hope for America sprang large. Each time there was a gold rush, Americans continued to act in ways that were abhorrent, and in this way forever tainted the history of their optimistic country.

This same irrational behavior – this same reckless pursuit of the silver bullet, has overtaken the world of social media, and it could be ultimately the bullet that mortally wounds businesses around the world.

If your foundation is shaky, your house will fall down

Last year, the big news was Quora. Businesses needed to jump on to Quora. It would enable you to become an expert in your business and your customers and potential customers would LOVE that. Later last year Google Plus came along, and oh goodness – the power of the Google search engine, the ability to combine social media with your YouTube channel, Google Documents, and everything else Google – this is what would make your business succeed.

This year, so far, maps are being circulated that show all of the hot points in Pinterest. It’s all you are hearing about, practically, and in fact, the online world is so saturated with talk of how Pinterest is the next big thing for businesses that I have refrained from even mentioning it here.

The problem is that people aren’t learning how arduous the process of digging for gold really is. They think, perhaps, that you can jump in, bend down, cup your hands, and your hands will be filled with gold. People don’t understand that you have to stand in that water day after day. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to try different spots and different techniques, and meanwhile, the person who is running the story where you purchase your food is already ten times wealthier than you.

It doesn’t matter that Pinterest can drive tons of traffic to your site if your site is crap. It doesn’t matter that Pinterest may be great for SEO if you don’t know what that is or why it’s important. It doesn’t matter how much traffic you are getting to your site if that traffic isn’t buying from you. It’s all of the same problems that we encounter on Twitter, and in blogs, and on Facebook, and everywhere else.

If you don’t know how to run your company or if you do not know how to market your company, Pinterest, Google Plus, Quora, Twitter, Facebook, or the man on the moon won’t be able to do a gosh. darned. thing. for you.

Back to the ring of power

I fear that blog traffic, retweets, and shares have sullied the minds of some people who write in the world of social media. They sense they have power. When they tell you to use a site or go here, they can drive enough traffic that their one action can cause the site to go down. News about new platforms like Pinterest are easy pickings. You put the word in your title, people click it, they link to it in their own Pinterest posts, and you soon have a snowballing, mad orgy of blog love. “Only the lame companies are refraining from getting a Pinterest account now,” these voices seem to say.

And yet, where is the talk about how this new site will ACTUALLY work for companies? Do you think a picture of a tiny piece of tubing manufactured in the medical manufacturing sector will get repinned? What about the company that makes the machine that makes one part of one car? Will a blog post from that company spread through Pinterest, or Google Plus, or Facebook like wildfire? What if you are a commodity brand, even if you are in the consumer market?

We are being stupid. We are being irresponsible. We are acting like gold diggers.

For the record

I like Pinterest. I think it’s fun. I think it’s interesting. I think it’s a neat way to pass on information that maybe wouldn’t quite fit on Facebook or that would be hard to pass around on Twitter. But all of the chatter that Pinterest is the newest silver bullet for companies struggling through the recession? No. I don’t get that. Even though there are at least 200 posts out there that would aim to prove me wrong.

What do you think? Will this pattern of gold digging behavior result in negative ramifications, or will we simply carry on, moving to the next savior of the business world, whatever that may be?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/27117418@N07/2559014732/ via Creative Commons