Marmite shortage "Marmageddon" by Global Culture

And so I think we’ve changed some of the ways we shop and how we socially engage while shopping and afterwards how we talk about our experiences.

Have you done these things in a shop:

• Photographed an item you like but aren’t ready to buy yet
• Compared prices in store with online websites
• Recorded price or size information on your phone rather than writing it longhand

I nearly got kicked out of a furniture store yesterday.

Wanna guess why?

He was caught red handed photographing some of the merchandise.  Not with malicious intent but with a view to comparing it to the space available in his house to fit it into.

The storm of commentary proves that this is not an isolated case.  I’ve done exactly the same thing – photographed price tags or descriptions in order to get dimensions or colours or to show it to friends before deciding to buy.

Retailers – When you review your mobile marketing strategy (see our posts here and here) think hard about how you can encourage your customers to buy and share the experience all the steps along the way through photography.

P.S. have you noticed how Pinterest is full of boards about things people want to buy in the future?

Here’s how.

We had a client commission us to do a lovely campaign to promote a national holiday with “21 Things to do ….” type of activity.  Trouble was, the main focus was to build social media followers on Facebook.

Making a landing page on a website is easy.  Facebook was a challenge.

We like challenges.

Our first big discovery was the ebook How to Master Facebook Marketing in 10 Days.  Here we learnt that you can create custom welcome tabs with an iFrame application and set it as the default landing page for visitors who have yet to “like” your product.

A welcome tab fit right in line with our purpose, because it encourages liking and boosts followers while highlighting our clients creative holiday campaign.  But it had some shortcomings too.

As suggested in the ebook, we used the Wildfire iFrame app. For this clients’ needs, the welcome page was to be predominately made up of text, which meant that it was time to roll up our sleeves and do some coding.

Having to translate our text to HTML programming was doable, but a bit of a pain.  Ensuring that our page had the look and feel that we wanted required switching between the html backstage look, and the finished product, to check and recheck that our links were in fact opening in another tab, that the right words were bold and underlined, and that we approved of the overall look of the page. It was tedious, but we did it.

Our ‘hack’ here was to create the page in our WordPress blog and when we were satisfied with the look and feel, to then copy the HTML into Facebook.

Next step was to take it live.

To set the newly-created welcome tab as the default landing page, we (as admins of the page) hit the ‘Edit Page’ button in the top right hand corner, taking us to the Manage Permissions tab of the Page Dashboard.  Selecting the drop-down menu next to the Default Landing Tab section, we chose the name of our newly created welcome tab (which, unless you change the name yourself, will automatically show up as ‘Welcome’). Our page was up.

But the happy “ta-da” moment quickly wore off, when we refreshed and still ended up, by default, on the wall of our page, rather than our sparkly new welcome tab.

Did the hack fail?

By testing different accounts and comparing, we discovered that only viewers who have not yet liked our page will automatically land on the welcome tab.  Admins and consumers who have already liked your page will be taken directly to the wall, skipping the welcome tab altogether.

Well, that just wasn’t going to work for us.  To get around this unfortunate feature, for each post that we made about our list, we linked back to the welcome tab, which featured the list in whole. Although, something to note, each time we posted a link to the Welcome Tab, a preview of our ‘about’ section showed up.

But with all of the glitches, our Facebook welcome tab did just what we had hoped.  Before the welcome tab launch our client had under 50 followers, now, not even a week later, they have over 500.

It was a learning process, but a successful one.

Tell us about your experiences – ever tried something like this?

Take a read and weep!

But before I lose your attention to the fun, check out their blog rationale / objective.  Think I might copy this….

Our big hairy goal? To be the best 5-minutes of your day.

I badly want to add in a column for “Business Development Director”.  I know JUST what I’d write.

Enjoy.

Nick’s latest views are about the integration of advertising, marketing and social media in the context of the internet being the central plank of a brand’s marketing, recommendations and opinion-formation with audiences.

This is a really important part of comprehending how the “Old” marketing techniques are migrating to the “New”.  For example, do you know how to change your communication methods so that your “old” customers are not alienated by the “New” tools and so that the “New” tools can sit comfortably alongside “Old” styles?

Nick Burcher's Paid:Owned:Earned

Take a look at the image here.  This is Nick’s thesis.

There are websites whose purpose is based on payment (brands pay to advertise on them); there are others where brands own the information up there (mainly content-led) and lastly there are others where brands have earned the right to be listed.

Note that some sites (Facebook, Twitter) are listed in all three categories…. this is a really important part of the paradigm.

Your Brand needs to have communication strategies that work in all three contexts, and uses the feedback arrows at the top and bottom as well as in the ones middle of the diagram.

Here is the strategy we use for a client, Rowperfect.  They sell rowing sports equipment.

Paid: Google adwords and other sports sites who carry banner adverts.

Owned: Blog content, You Tube videos, forum discussions, Twitter feed, Facebook page.

Earned: followers on FB, Twitter, YouTube and others linking back to the Owned

I was delighted to watch this video where Nick sets out the lessons behind the simple headline “Paid-Owned-Earned”.

Does this have resonance for your brand strategy?  Where do you think there may be issues or conflicts with traditional brand-led marketing?

New Trends in Digital Advertising [exclusive video] from Hayko on Vimeo.

Related articles

• Paid Owned Earned – how it works [image and video] (nickburcher.com)
• Paid Owned Earned: Paid Owned Earned on Star Wars Day – VW The Force and Blackberry (huguesrey.wordpress.com)
• Advertising’s Future Is 3 Simple Words: Paid. Owned. Earned. | Story Worldwide (huguesrey.wordpress.com)
• Separate content from platforms (beingpeterkim.com)

1. Become a force to be reckoned with.  AKA, get found.  Hopefully, you have a website and you can add a blog section to it.  If not, start a blog to develop a reader-base.  Start writing about your area of expertise, and get the word out that you know what you’re talking about.  The power of the internet lies in getting found.  If you create a reader-base first, your e-book is going to sell much better.  It’s all based on generating high quality content on your website, and helping people find you.  You can also start a newsletter to keep track of any followers.   Give them an incentive to join, by offering them special tips over time, or discounts on your products.
2. Get in on the conversation.  During your morning coffee, make it a habit to do a daily search on relevant content being published on other’s blogs.  Read what other people have to say and contribute to the conversation.  If you have something good to offer people will start searching for your name, and your own blog will come up.  This is not blatant marketing, mind you.  Don’t scrawl your blog site all over everyone else’s blogs in flashing letters—nobody likes that.  Simply contribute to other people’s conversations in the areas of your expertise, and traffic will come to you.
3. Tweet about it.  Number 2 flows right into number 3 here.  You already know who has good blogs out there and you’ve joined in on the conversations, now, share the gold!  Tweet about those great blogs you’ve found and show that you know what great content is, even if it isn’t your own.  The authors of these blogs will see that you’re linking to them, and then take a look at your blog.  If they see you know your stuff, they’ll link back to you too.  Do the same with Facebook, LinkedIn and any other relevant social media sites.
4. Listing the book. Selling your book through a variety of websites is key.  It’s this simple: the more hooks in the water, the easier it is to catch a fish.  Using sites such as Amazon, Fishpond and Barnes and Noble will open you up to a bigger audience.  It will also create links to a highly ranked website.  In addition you can sell directly from your own website (now that you have one!).
5. A discount for the loyal followers. By this time you have established a following that you are hopefully able to track, perhaps you have Facebook fans, Twitter followers, newsletter subscribers, etc.   Just before your book is released offer your loyal followers a limited time ‘buy early’ discount, to get the ball rolling on sales.  This also encourages more people to become your fan, or subscribe to your newsletter, etc.  They get special offers from it, and honestly, who doesn’t love a discount.

Remember, like most things, persistence pays off… it may take weeks or months to get the audience and the traction that your book deserves, but keep going and little-and-often will definitely get you noticed.

We have 5 free E-books by Norman Evans to give away. Please contact us if you would like to be one of the lucky recipients!  This is actually true, so hurry and send us your details and see if you get to read ‘Becoming an Entrepreneur’ for free!

Now, get out there and market your e-book and let us know how it goes!

For brands who are growing  and becoming profitable there comes a time when you choose to professionalise your marketing.  Many businesses decide at this point that they have two choices: to hire a staffer or to buy in expertise from an agency.

Why you need better marketing

The needs are clear – you want more traction with your marketing, you suspect that there are better ways of doing promotion and marketing to get inbound leads and you can afford a budget just for marketing.  These are good signs.

You have identified clearly that your brand has a need and the possible shortcomings of your current set-up.

Hire versus buy: the dilemma

There are advantages and disadvantages – the internal member of staff will need to have well-rounded skills in a range of marketing disciplines (web, advertising, PR, copywriting, print design) and therefore a senior hire with this range of skills is more expensive than a junior.

Using an agency also requires decisions about their skills and area of expertise compared with the type of marketing and communications activity your brand has done in the past or plans to do in the future.

Costs are usually the determining factor

It may be less costly to hire external advisers compared to the cost of a senior member of staff – compare the full cost of hiring and paying (including office costs) a new senior marketer with the price an agency would charge you.

Have a couple of ‘chemistry’ or getting-to-know-you meetings with local marketing agencies and ask their advice.  Also ask to speak to a couple of their recent clients to see if they also made the same transition.

A third option worth reviewing is using a freelancer.  You don’t have the full hire costs of a full time person but can often get very experienced people at lower fee rates.  Check out the freelance hire websites like eLance.com and Freelance.com, Freelancer.com and guru.com.  I’ve successfully hired people for my agency and for clients using eLance.

Creative Agency Secrets has two current clients who use us for mentoring work.  They hired a junior marketer and we speak weekly to review their work, priorities and give guidance.  Could this work for you?  Give us a call – we always offer a free 20 minute first call.

In the meanwhile here are a few other articles that may help you figure out what to do

• Advertising – do it yourself or hire
• Hire a PR firm or do it yourself?
• Do it yourself internet marketing, or hire
• Hubspot offers inbound marketing tutorials for people using its website / content marketing system.
• Read Creative Agency Secrets’ assessment of Hubspot and how to do it yourself
• SEO do it yourself or hire a professional
• Small Business marketing – DIY or hire a pro?
• Web design – do it yourself or hire someone
• DIY or hire a market research company?

• Allison Mooney, head of trends and Insights, Marketing Google
• Ben Malbon, Director of Strategy, Creative Lab Google
• Matt Galligan, SimpleGeo
• Rob Rasmussen, Tribal DDB
• Rick Webb, The Barbarian Group

#agileagency

How much do marketers and their agencies need to know about technology.  Code is now on a par with content.

Rasmussen - campaigns aren’t dying but seasonal work continues.  Campaigns work on top of the platform of engagement.  We try to do it backwards – all the funding is against campaigns especially media buying not spend on platforms.

Webb - Platform = brand; Campaign = products

Malbon - at BBH we tried to dismantle the “masterpiece mentality” of it had to be perfect before we show it to colleagues let alone clients.  Tech companies are better at killing stuff that doesn’t work.

Webb - campaigns are humdrum.

Malbon - Tech companies make things that last much longer than a campaign, which lasts 5 minutes

Mooney – creative is being tested on YouTube by BMW.

Rasmassen - it’s almost backwards to create it and later push out to channels… reverse the order the core idea rather than individual executions.

Galligan - FourSquare and Amex combined deals so Amex built a tech platform to enable this it’s more than a campaign because it uses multiple platforms and FourSquare happened to be launch partner – they’ll extend it to others later. It was an experiment the first implementation.  Take interesting bits and remove the poorly performing parts and go on.  Software companies have one core concept we stick to one thing that we do.

Webb - software companis need marketing and Brands can’t take it back like software can.

Galligan - Marketing is every aspect of what you do as a tech company.  E.g. Twitter began as Twittr and was a hideous purple website.  Someone turned that brand round.  The danger is to think the core product is what matters.  We market as a consumer internet comp[any even though we don’t deal with consumers

Malbon - Three things in summary

1. Software companies need agencies to capture and distill the culture.  Because inside tech the world is your company.  Agencies can do this and understand who you’re designing for.
2. Importance of having untethered creatives around the place inside tech cos.  The best agencies have random crazy people who think Tech has too many people who are samey.
3. Agencies push tech companies in directions we could never have thought of.  Brining the two worlds together is great.  Tech can be used to create magic plus agency crazy thinking person.

Also covered by RachCreative

Related articles

• Do Agencies Need to Think Like Software Companies? (adgeek.us)
• SXSW Day One Delivers…Everything (adrants.com)

This is a guest post by Kath Pay from The Email Academy. She will publish another 3 articles over the next few weeks.

For most companies, your database is essential and list growth is one of your key aims. Ideally the subscription process needs to be as easy as possible – my mantra for building a quality list is: ‘Make it easy – and they will subscribe’ (with thanks to the movie, Field of Dreams for inspiration). So let’s have a look at some of the most common barriers which can prevent your list from growing at a healthy rate.

1. Assuming that your all signup procedures are still working and in place. When was the last time you actually went through the entire signup procedure? Not just to reassure yourself that all the links work correctly (it’s surprising how many sites I’ve visited that have this problem), but also to check on the ‘Friendliness’ of the procedure.  It’s advisable to schedule a 3 monthly check up with all of your points of subscription and make sure all function as they should.

2. Only advertising your signup on your website. Don’t forget there are many other places and mediums which lend themselves to promoting your newsletter or email sign up. Some of them include:

• Social media pages such as Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook etc
• Company blog
• Transactional process
• Customer Service/support
• POS (Point of Sale) customer forms
• POS registration by salespeople
• Events, Trade Shows, Networking Events, Webinars etc
• Also – Don’t forget to add FTAF (Forward to Friend) and SWYN (Share with Your Network) tools to your email communications.

3. Not having explicit permission. Ok -so legally you may be covered (depending upon the legislation of the country you’re sending from and mailing to) and your list growth may zoom, but using methods such as pre-ticked checkboxes and ‘conjunction’ acquisition (subtly adding a clause to your T&C’s or Privacy Policy) methods will generally only result in a short term list growth and possibly cause deliverability problems due to the number of spam complaints you receive.

4. Not stating the benefits. Why should they sign up to receive email communications from you? State these benefits clearly and up front. Write the copy with the subscriber in mind.  They will be looking to see ‘What’s in it for me? Think of it as a value exchange. What are you giving them in exchange for their valuable data? If you don’t have the available room to do this at the point of subscription consider linking to a page which provides you with more room to fully state the benefits.

5. Not providing enough value within the value exchange. If your subscription form tends to look like an insurance form, chances are that you’re asking for too much information. If your aim is to grow the list, you may have to consider which is more valuable to you – fewer subscribers with more data or more subscribers with less data? A nice compromise is a two-step form. On the first page you simply ask for their email address and possibly their name (or whatever data is absolutely essential) and then after they click subscribe, they are then taken to a landing page which could be their Preference Centre. Using some wonderful copy i.e. ‘ in order to enhance your experience, we’d love to find out some more about you….’ you then incentivise them to fill in the empty fields – however, make it clear that this is not compulsory and that it is for the subscribers benefit and you may be surprisingly pleased with the results.

6. Using a stereotypical, bland Call-To-Action (CTA). What’s wrong with standing out in a crowd? The below example comes from www.whichtestwon.com, with the results being that Version A increased signups by 23%. Test your CTA and find out what works best for you and your product/offering.

7. Not asking the subscriber to whitelist. Requesting that the subscriber whitelist you or add you to their contacts used to be beneficial, but now with the Gmail’s Priority Inbox and Hotmail’s inbox changes and with the other ISPs soon to follow suit, it will soon be an essential element to your subscription process. Ideally it should be requested on the Thank you page after subscribing, the Welcome email, as well as within all future emails. The trick is to make it easy for them and give them full instructions on how to do it (taking them to a landing page). It could look something like:

Please add name@companyname.com to your email address book or safe senders list. Click here for instructions how to do this.

8. Not setting expectations. What are you going to be sending them? Can you show them an example? How often will they be hearing from you? These are all questions the subscriber will be looking to find answers for. Again – if space is limited, link to a page which outlines all of these, along with an example of an email they can look forward to be receiving and/or past archives if it’s a newsletter.

9. Hiding the subscribe form on your homepage and not having the subscribe form on every page of your website. We all know that the website’s homepage is prime real estate and you have to fight for space within it, however, having the subscribe link/form below the fold isn’t doing anyone any favours – least of all your aim to grow your list. Ideally the subscribe form/link needs to be placed above the fold on the homepage and don’t stop there – add it to every page. Remember our mantra – ‘Make it easy – and they will subscribe’.

10. Not flaunting your Privacy Policy. Reassure your potential subscribers. Spell it out in plain English. Be transparent. If you aren’t going to share their data with a third party – then flaunt it! State this right next to the email field. It could look something like this: ‘Don’t worry – we respect your data and won’t share it with anyone else. Read our Privacy Policy’. Be sure to link to your Privacy Policy again on the Thank you page as well as within every email that is sent.

11. Not optimising your Landing/Thank you Page. Your landing page is an often neglected afterthought in the subscription process. However, it can make or break a relationship with a new subscriber. Continue as you started – make it easy. Have everything your subscriber needs for a wonderful experience with your brand within reach on this landing page. Don’t let it become a dead end. Where would they like to go next? Suggest something to them. Maximise this opportunity to delight and help them.

12. Not testing. Testing is essential for your subscribe form(s)and landing page(s). Don’t just accept that the ‘norm’ works for you and your company. Your company’s subscribers are the best people to judge as to what works. Test factors such as; placement, copy, number of fields, one page form VS two page form, landing page elements etc. This can be easily achieved by using Google’s Optimizer which allows you to set up multiple forms/landing pages and will disperse the different pages to your readers. You can then check the reports to see which form/page succeeded in more conversions.

T: @kathpay
E: @ kpay @ theemailacademy.com

“Hoped-for-interest-based-on-a-guess ads”

This is going to be a theme that runs and runs as discussions rage online and off. eConsultancy has written a nice summary of the issues – and I added a comment below.
My view is that consumer choice about what adverts they see will increase but won’t be driven by ads being served in the current manner.   The consumer will start to enact advert blocking and only allow ads that meet trust criteria or current needs to be shown on personal channels. Vendor Relationship Management will switch the control into the consumer’s hands so she decides what to see, behavioural or otherwise.

What do you think?

Rebecca has been asked to speak at a Cambridge University Careers service recruitment evening about our industry.

I’d like to give them a decent informational talk with a bit of humour thrown in.

Here’s the brief.

You may remember we met back in the Spring and amongst other things I mentioned that I may run a Careers Evening of talks around the Advertising and Marketing sector. Unfortunately, this hasn’t come to fruition. However, the Advertising and Marketing Communications Careers Fair is happening on Thursday 29 October and I am putting on some talks during that event.

We talked about the possibility of your doing 20 minutes on understanding the family tree of the sector, what job titles really mean with some jargon busting. Would you still be willing to come along and do this?

Questions:

1. List all the different types of Advertising and Marketing Communications agency specialisms
2. Create a ‘family tree’ of the sector
3. List all the main job titles found in agencies
4. List all the main job titles found in client-side marketing departments
5. What does each title REALLY mean?

Sounds like an A-level exam….. but can you help me out?

I’ll get going with some of the lists.  More tomorrow.

Please post your suggestions below.