They realised that the landscape of personal data availability online has changed hugely in a very short time and despite hysterical outcries about Facebook privacy settings, it is an important area that both brands and consumers should be knowledgable about.
Their concept of “personal data stores” is a really interesting concept that is being built out – imagine you, the consumer, setting the ‘terms and conditions’ for a brand to access your personal information?
It’s called Vendor Relationship Management read more here and here.
But see their great Personal Data infographic published in full with a brief snapshot below showing the 2012 situation…it describes the landscape for legislation, technology, entrepreneurs, corporates and consumers and looks forward in scenarios for each to 2017.
Ctrl-Shift the Personal Data Landscape future
“Your responsibilities”.
Imagine an agency telling a prospective client – not one we’re working with already – that they had to actively participate in delivering to make the marketing programme effective?
I love it.
Now I’m recommending we put this into all new client proposals. It’s authentic and transparent and gives the brand clear boundaries and guidelines that will help us give them exactly what they hired us to do.
What do you do in order to improve your client briefing and agreements?
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Celine Rich and Julian Darley of Post Carbon Institute (Photo credit: terriem)
Golden questions are a way to uncover more information from a discussion than your prospect is aware. See our other blog posts on the topic in the categories list on right sidebar.
Fund raising to make a movie is difficult for people new to the industry. Here’s a question Julian is using when he works coaching other script writers and directors
Have you ever tried to raise money from your friends and connections?
Were you successful?
The answers you get, tell you the degree of commitment the person has to the project…and whether they are ballsy enough to see it through to the bitter end.
Julian gave us another example of a script writer who came to him for advice and the conversation was looking like it was wasted time….He had approached Julian despite not wanting him to direct his film. Julian turned the conversation - and it was only when money came up that the real conversation emerged and the real needs of the scriptwriter came to the fore. After this point they had a constructive discussion about doing business together.
Low budget movies
Take a look at the movie below – it was made by Julian and his team.
Please write a comment and tell us how much you think it cost to produce…. We’ll reveal the true answer next week.
The subject is topical and so if you know anyone in the restaurant business please share it with them. This is a real issue in a recession and deserves to get more notice.
If you ‘like’ it, you’ll be helping Julian and his team as they prepare to go to the Cannes Film Festival in mid-May.
Thanks for your support for our clients. We appreciate it and so do they.
It doesn’t work like that.
There certainly are many agencies who sell themselves as inbound or content marketing specialists. And there are just as many brands who say they use Inbound Marketing as part of their promotional mix. Some unscrupulous agencies sell this as the modern web solution and imply that it’s all you need to do to succeed online.
It isn’t.
Inbound marketing Has to be balanced with outbound marketing.
We were listening to Jay Baer on a podcast with Copyblogger and in it he says
“You don’t create demand with inbound marketing, you fulfil demand.”
You are capping your upside
You are reaching out to people who will take the step to find you.
For these people inbound marketing is great, it works.
What about other customers?
But what about all the ones who haven’t yet realised they might need you? For them you need outbound demand generation activity.
Classically this is ‘campaigns’ – executed in many ways, online and offline. Ways to bring your brand to the attention of prospective customers in different marketplaces and with a range of communications.
But there’s more to modern marketing than this. Baer comes back in again with a new catchphrase “YouTility” – this is where you keep your brand front-of-mind in the intervening period between gaining awareness and the point at which the client is ready to purchase.
Blogs and other inbound marketing tools are good at maintaining youtility. And coincidentally these are also good tools for inbound marketing.
See the connection?
Related articles
- Inbound Marketing Attracts Millions from Google, Salesforce and Sequoia (seomoz.org)
- The Ins and Outs of Inbound Marketing [INFOGRAPHIC] (contently.com)
Ben Wightman
How did you end up working in an agency?
I come from a sales background selling TVs on the high street 14 years ago. I was prompted to make a move to the online side of retail off the back of increasing numbers of customers speaking at great length about the products but ending the conversation by saying they were going to go online and check the prices.This was frustrating for any salesman.
I learnt about SEO, paid search and managing websites, affiliate marketing and then after a few years I decided to specialize in paid search.
What has changed for the high street retailer in the context of PPC?
Mobile is going to be a revolution for the high street retailer. There always seemed to be a division between the online and offline worlds. Many felt the internet was a threat to the high street then but more recently the growth of mobile and smartphones for mobile web access has changed.
In my opinion – this is the glue that will bring together the online and offline worlds.
Mobile is the medium that connects web users with the physical world. Mobile has a great synergy with above the line magazine or TV advertising.
What are your main findings in the Mobile Internet Report?
We have a home improvements client running TV campaign and we noted during the evening hours (8-10pm) when these run up to 39% of web traffic is from smartphones and there are significant increases in mobile traffic during these hours.
Before, the normal rates were 13-14% for that advertiser.
One study by Tesco found that 50% of all smartphone users used it for web browsing while watching TV. So we quickly worked to tie this in with a mobile optimized paid search campaign to pick up the interest driven from the TV adverts.
How do you serve mobile ads?
We created a Google Adwords campaign tailored specifically to serve adverts to mobile users – in the ad settings set to serve out to mobile and smartphone devices and desktop.
Add to that writing advert text that speaks to mobile users. Anyone working in mobile search has to appreciate the subtleties of behaviours between mobile versus tablet and desktop users.
What is a customer trying to do while using these devices? e.g. mobile web use peaks during commuting hours and after the evening meal (watching TV or social time) but desktops peak earlier during the day during working hours and in the evening.
But the trends for mobile are very different. Using a smartphone for searches in a lunch hour means the likelihood is they are looking for quick easy information – not wanting massive detailed content. So mobile ad texts and landing pages should be configured to service that requirement,.
Do you do PPC for your own work at Latitude?
Yes – we do have a small one. Is it effective? As far as I’m aware yes – it only has a small keyword inventory.
[We are interested in #FutureAgency - do agencies practice what they preach to clients].
How do you do new business development for Latitude?
I act as a voice of authority in paid search for new business.
Our agency set up is quite differently from others. We have a dedicated client services team who do the day to day contact with clients and our production team focuses on making the magic happen by building and managing the search campaigns. We work in different pods but close together. Attending a pitch we’ll typically have a client services leader accompanied by a representative from each of the relevant production teams.
Are many Brands moving into paid search for the first time?
No most of our brands have a long established history with paid search – most come with an existing account and we optimize that. Many are moving from in house to outsourced experts. occasionally they move from another agency.
How can readers get the report and get on your mailing list?
When they are published we send the new report to clients first and on our Latitude Group site.
Get the Latitude Mobile Report for 2012
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?
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easy. Today we showcase a client and their challenges and a book and a blog post. Together they give you the one principle you need to write a B2B online brand strategy.
How to get customer community integrated into your marketing
Three things we read and discussed coincided this week:
- Planning with the Silver Fern Farms marketing team
- Reading The B2B Social Media Book
- Commenting on Confused of Calcutta’s blog post – Musings about communities and prices
Start with the blog post - there are three main points: Everyone in the community is a customer; Communities expect a range of prices for each product or service; A connected community converges to act as a single, composite customer.
Take the range of prices – some customers are happy to read free offerings; others will contribute to comments or test purchase items while others are avid fans. The Silver Fern Farms team were discussing how to organise messaging across different geographical marketplaces – not all their range is sold in each country. [They sell lamb and venison in supermarkets.]
Treating all the customers and prospects as a single, composite customer enables us to deliver into separate marketplaces with variable messaging. Yes, we do not use the same message to each group. BUT we know the customer is smart and can read. Being clear about what products are available in which supermarkets matters. It builds awareness of the wider product range and helps customers appreciate the global nature of the Silver Fern Farms business.
Is B2B any different for online?
Slant these ideas into the business to business B2B world. This is where I find clients have the greatest problems “coping” with a singular community. And ironically, this is where the greatest opportunities exist for B2B.
Read this quote from the Book
Most B2B companies live with fear. The fear of giving away too much information, saying something wrong, giving competitors an advantage.
But I know B2B companies have another fear. Integrated messaging.
This is perceived as hard to do. Mainly because of the territoriality of the agencies and staff who service the brand.
Each market, each customer, each group of buyers fits into a hierarchy of customer-types. From the inquirer who wants to read for free but not participate up through to the possible purchaser. Your brand needs to set up its marketing to allow and
enable each customer type to engage at the participation level the customer chooses.
I wrote that in bold because this principle is the key to your strategic marketing plan.
How does engagement work in practice?
Set up a range of marketing activities that allow any customer from the vast pool of possibles to enable customers to get what they need.
Think of it as a staircase, each step has an increasing level of engagement and possibly a higher price.
When planning your online messaging think of your brand’s online presence as if it were a niche magazine. You should aim to be the best ‘trade journal’ magazine you possibly can be. Dominate your niche and the customer will figure out which of your offerings (from free to paid) she wants and where/how to acquire for herself.
How would you address this tricky database marketing challenge?
A B2B marketer relies heavily on postal mail to promote their offerings. They use email marketing but have yet to see results strong enough to justify a reduced reliance on the Postal Service. Each purchase secured via postal mail averages $1,500; average lifetime customer value exceeds $6,000. The call-to-action is “buy now” (not lead generation), so response rates are fairly low. In fact, one purchase per thousand pieces mailed is an acceptable response rate. Customers and prospects in the marketing database receive no more than 20 mailings a year. Offerings are highly specialized, so the mail quantity for most offerings is relatively small. The marketer has not studied how different segments of the marketing database have performed over time. They know a significant percentage of the database is waste, but with a minimum of a .001 required response rate (a rate they often achieve), and insufficient frequency to study how recipients behave after many mailings, they’re reluctant to delete many records. (i.e., They’re concerned about deleting a non-responsive record after the 20th mailing that could produce a response on, say, the 21st mailing.)
Have a solution or know anyone who may?
Here’s our response:
I may be wrong but it sounds like marketing and sales don’t work together here – in fact there may not be any ‘sales’ folks in the business. I would also suggest having a discussion with sales to see if they’d consider moving to a lead generation model rather than direct response as that will almost certainly improve the metrics. Get Brian Carroll in to give an overview??
A bit of telephone customer research about historic purchase decisions that got insight into why they bought and when they bought may aide creating database segments and also migrating some people onto email; off the postal mailing altogether and improve the metrics of this offering in the long term.
Here’s some ideas of ways to get over this barrier by appealing to your existing customerbase. They know you, they know your brand and they also know their local area:
1. The English Cut – bespoke Savile Row suits – adding a ready to wear range
English Cut Savile Row suits
I have been on Tom Mahon’s email list for years – not because I buy from him (he only clothes men) but because of his promotional methods using social media and email marketing. In the message I got today he links to a video in which he asks his readers for two things: Recommendations of stores local to their home who might stock his ready to wear range and secondly, introductions to Tailors who might want to make the suits.
The one mistake he made was not specifying ONE SINGLE PLACE for the replies – it came from a noreply email address and the video is both on his site and youtube – so he’ll have to collate answers from a range of sources. I would have chosen to set up an unique email address for replies and mentioned it in the video – printed it on screen.
2. Global Culture wants to expand its retail stockists
The other is an iconic kiwi t-shirt brand who is keen to get new outlets in three cities in New Zealand. Using a trade magazine, we helped them write a short article about the company and its recent growth which included the appeal for new locations.
Global Culture has its target audience in towns where there is a mix of both tourist visitors and locals and so is well-represented in New Zealand towns like Queenstown and Christchurch. It is trying to get introductions to retailers in Gisborne, Napier, Wellington, Tauranga and around the Hawkes Bay region who might be willing to stock their range.
Idealog is the business magazine and website that features innovative businesses and new products or services and so getting the article about Global Culture published there and also included in their daily email news roundup to a recipient list of 5,000 business people was a good start to opening dialogues.
Any of you know of businesses who’ve succeeded in getting expansion plans promoted by customers?
It’s rare for a class act like Disney to get a project like this so badly wrong. We spoke to low budget movie blogger and Client of Creative Agency Secrets, Julian Darley about why he thought this happened.
- Be honest in your product budgeting. In the movie business, budgets are kept secret. This conceals reality. People forget that the marketing money is not usually included in a film budget. If it is included its obfuscated and so the headlines are probably wrong either over- or under-estimated by pundits and critics.
- Disney kept changing the marketing pitch they knew it was going wrong so they were thrashing about with different versions of trailers which only served to confuse audiences. Do your market research and don’t keep changing your pitch.
- Unless your product is a world-beater, don’t keep spending until you have to have a winner in order to make it pay. Changing your approach may be OK when your product budget is small but when it’s this big that’s dangerous
- Choose a title that helps the audience guess what the movie is about. John Carter is neither a famous person nor a clear explanation of the genre of film.
Julian goes on to explain,
Look at the trailers, Disney kept changing their minds and releasing different trailers. Was it sci fi or a straight hero/rescue or a historic romance (it starts in period costume) and there are lots of battles in it so is it an action/adventure battle. or an interplanetary sci fi film?
These many angles are different – they reveal a different part of the story and the way we’re telling it. In my opinion you’d better test it on the public first.
The main lesson for brand marketers
It is amazing how clear people’s opinions are and how unchangable they are, once they are formed. Disney found that no amount of huge budgetary spend on promotion and influence can retrieve a bad opinion after those initial impressions have taken root.
Take a read of this Problogger article – 10 famous things David Ogilvie said and how they influence blog writing. The answer that Disney ignored is there in the list at number 9 ”
“Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”
Julian Darley said that as a film maker and script writer he’d add to this “and do your market research early“. Audiences are the key to great money in movies – and few can afford to ignore their views, as Disney shareholders may soon learn.
Related articles
- ’7 Business Lessons I Learned From The Artist’ (openforum.com)
- It’s a Shame About John: How the Failure of John Carter Only Ensures More Hollywood Unoriginality (thebrowntweedsociety.com)
- Great Geek Debates: Disney Princesses vs. Hayao Miyazaki (wired.com)
