Perceptint Musings

I am continually surprised by how many marketers are just pushing buttons to launch campaigns supposedly built to support their website or other important initiatives. They’re sending millions of emails, placing hundreds of banners, testing five versions of their creative in paid placement and signing up for as many co-reg programs as they can to grow their email list.

But just because you use those channels, does it mean you’re a smart marketer? Are you listening to and participating in the conversation about your products and services that are taking place online? Or does your consumer base see you as a one way communicator, a blind corporation pushing buttons you think they want or need? Do you even know what people’s opinion is of your brand online? It’s time to stop and listen.

Marketing in general should start with business goals. The goals in turn drive the appropriate marketing channels. I don’t think I’m into any rocket science yet. With the mad rush that started in the late 90’s to “be online” most marketers were charged with ambiguous goals like growing traffic to their site or simply delivering a lower cost-per-lead. The lack of resolve bleeds through and communicating consumers can tell the companies that are “online and get it” and those that don’t.

Those defined expectations are beginning to shift within some companies, but not in waves. Channels like paid search and paid inclusion can demonstrate very quickly that they are a much cheaper source per lead. In some instances, I’ve seen clients cost per lead drop by as much as 800% or greater. But just buying those leads doesn’t really support the overall growth of your business online. It just means you’re a qwerty input device, programmed for short-term success.

How much of a real conversation can you engage in from a search result? A very limited amount in my experience. You can ensure your Titles and tags and ad copy speak as much to your target audience as possible. We’re talking about a small number of characters at most, just a few snippets, to get a short conversation started.

Before you rush into another channel your agency is recommending, it’s important first for your company to identify the three to five critical marketing goals that your various channels must support. Reinforcing your brand and reputation, beating your competition, growing your customer base, retaining your current and new customers and producing cost-savings for your organization - all are valid goals to try and achieve with digital marketing technologies.

Each goal should have a separate and defined strategy and a clearly identified metric for measuring success. It should also begin to answer questions like where is your target audience congregating? Are they on topical discussion boards sharing stories and tips with others? Are they active in the social networking world? How do those locations match up with the things you are trying to influence them towards? Answering these questions is critical to evolving from push button marketing online to creating connections and deeper conversations with your market.

Your brand is the extension of your organization and should represent the goodwill that your customers have toward your products and services every day. Branding goals should revolve around maintaining positive ambassadors for your organization, both internal employees and loyal customers, whose passion for your brand is strong without appearing biased.

This is a fine line for many organizations, especially when they’re considering internal brand ambassadors. Blogs, discussion forums and social networks force conversations to happen and they force organizations to listen as well.

The conversation won’t always be positive and your company likely won’t have an angels perfect record. But if you ignore and refuse to participate in the conversation, you’re implying that the negative points are true and need not be refuted. Just like you would defend your trademark, maintaining your reputation online is just as important.

It requires the same level of diligence and follow up. Setting up news feeds with your company name, subscribing to blog monitoring services, trolling through forums and social networks to make sure you have a view of the bigger conversation must be done. And this can also help in monitoring what your competition is up to online.

Let’s be clear, this doesn’t mean all out negative wars against your detractors. It means showing an adult level of patience, letting the steam out before you start talking, sticking to your guns and making the points you want to make in the conversation. And the expectations have changed from you pushing your marketing message out, to you being expected to be honest, without an air of spin and ready to talk when consumers are. Not when your PR agent blesses a carefully crafted message.

Know your competition inside and out. Are you watching what they’re doing? Are you keeping track of their initiatives and the channels they’re exploring? If you have strong  competition online, they might even be releasing new products and services based on information they’re getting from a two way conversation with their market.

The more you understand your market and its conversation online, the more influence you have in growing your customer base. If you’re just pushing the online marketing buttons, every channel will degrade over time. No budget can save you from that reality. Your customers want to engage your brand on their terms and how you respect what they tell you says a lot about what your brand brings to the relationship.

If you’re running a large paid search campaign and every keyword ad points to the same landing page, you’re signalling your market that you are disengaged and only interested in the power you hold in the relationship. Someone searching for “golf club” and “golf” probably aren’t ready to buy your new putter yet. The whole relationshop feels weird from the first click.

If you’re running a large paid search campaign with ads tailored specifically to a keywords position in the buying cycle, you’re signalling that you want to engage your market on their terms. If it’s information they want, give them as much as they can handle. If they want to start chatting with a service rep or call someone, make it easy for them. Good service and good brand experience starts this early in the marketing chain, so don’t ignore what your customers want.

And if it doesn’t feel right to you, just ask them. If they are the potential ambassadors your brand needs in the 21st century, they’re ready to tell you much more than you might imagine. But you have to ask, and not with the 20th century marketing hammer.

The same goes for retaining your customers. I think its okay and up front to ask people how, if ever, they want to hear from you. And then follow through with it. Be prepared to act on the learning’s of the few or many who will speak up. They represent even more of your base than you imagine.

One fear I’ve heard brought up around this idea is that the loony or fringe customers will be the loudest. That may be true sometimes, but its a disservice to your customer base to dismiss them that easily.

What do you do if someone walks in your office building every day and yells, “FIRE”? After a few days, that person is intercepted on a routine basis and led to nicer sidewalks by security. So it is with online communication. The true hot heads will run out of steam if given a blowhole to spew into. Don’t forget to set one up.

I’ll close with this. If digital marketing channels aren’t producing more cost effective results for your organization, you are doing something wrong. Jumping into dynamic markets like Google AdWords with no real strategy, marketers can blow through budgets faster than NASA trying to get to the moon, racing after some misconceived idea that their whole market could be captured by a few keywords in that L-shaped slice of real estate heaven.

Marketers who use AdWords as part of a bigger online marketing strategy, one that supports all of their unique goals and needs, are the ones that never talk about how good its performing. They don’t want to mess up that temporary mojo they’ve found in the river. They know they might need to engage their market differently as soon as tomorrow. But today, while the fishing is good, they’re going to hang tight and catch what they know is there.

© 2008 Keith Boswell

My family was about ready to leave our house in Oregon for the last time. The last thing we were doing was meeting with our realtor. In the middle of that meeting, we got a call from the people who were shipping our two cats cross country.

The cats had left a few days ahead of us, and we were told that Maya, our female, had escaped the van at a truck stop in Laramie, Wyoming.
 
They told us they searched all day for her, but she ran off into some junked out cars and they could not find her. They had posted a $500 reward for the return of the cat, but that was the most they could do. They had to get moving for the rest of the animals they were delivering, and our now solo male cat. We didn’t know what to do; we could only think that we’d never see her again.
 
Our reassuring realtor chimed in with, “Someone is going to find that cat. I just know they will.”
 
The rest of that meeting was a jumble as we finished up the agreement to sell our house and get our two daughters off to our hotel for the night. And all we could think about was Maya. I called a good friend in town that had two cats and told him what had happened. The rest just doesn’t seem possible but it is true and can be verified by others.
 
While driving my two crying daughters to our hotel, I get a call from my friend. He and his wife were searching for and posting to local animal resources in Laramie. What great friends!  In their search, they had also found an article about a woman in the Laramie area who is known for recovering people’s lost pets. He had called the number from the article, and left a message.
 
Finally after getting into our hotel room, I get another call from my friend. He has spoken with Cathy, the animal detective, and she happens to be in Laramie at the moment, very close to the truck stop. I call Cathy and give her a brief description of what happened. I also ask her to call the driver and get additional details about where everything happened.
 
Soon I get a call back that Cathy is going to put up posters advertising the reward. She also said that based on talking with the driver, she has a good idea where to start looking and she was going to take her search dog to assist in better locating where Maya might have gone when she ran from the van.

So now, we’re in the hotel trying to get our girls to sleep and Maya, as we later learn, is just trotting about on her own private junkyard journey. The unfolding conversations with Cathy and Curt, her husband and partner in Cold Nose Investigators, felt like we were watching a web based episode from an Animal Planet investigation that happened to feature our family cat.

We flew from Oregon to Michigan and picked up the conversation where we left off online. First the pictures showed up. Cat prints in the snow from a long-haired cat.

The crashed out semi that Zoe, the search dog had honed in on.

Maya was lost on a Monday and by Friday, Cathy had determined that Maya was only coming out at night based on the prints. Friday night at 3 in the morning, they saw her for the first time using night vision. Cathy said she appeared to be on a summer stroll in the -1 degree Wyoming night. That’s our Maya. And all I could think was that the capture of Maya was quickly becoming a paramilitary affair.

What impressed us the most throughout the whole thing, was Cathy and Curt’s determination. They were out looking for Maya every night, in extreme conditions, using very high tech equipment and we’d never even met them or sent them one dollar. And I could tell from Cathy’s voice on the phone that once they had seen Maya, they knew they could catch her.

And like some Disney on Tundra Ice show with a  happy ending, two nights later they did catch Maya. They had determined where she was feeding, the path she was taking, and they adjusted their strategies every night to get her into that trap. Sunday, November 25th we got a call in the morning that Curt and Cathy had Maya and were headed back to their house to warm her up, and see how she looked.

No one could believe it, but it was true. The animal delivery people were great too, they went out of their way to head back to Wyoming and pickup Maya and deliver her to us as originally planned. But none of it would have been possible without the Internet, some great people, some great detective work, and lots of well wishes and thoughts.

The thing people say most often after we tell the story is “There really are pet detectives?” We can’t say enough about Cold Nose Investigators and what great people they are and what professionals they are in their work. Be sure to learn more about them and tell them thanks on my behalf at www.coldnoseinvestigators.com.

It still doesn’t seem real, especially now that she’s here and lounging about in her usual diva manner. And that it happened to our cat while we the rest of us moved cross country makes it even stranger. Our furniture showed up before she did. Maya must have longed for her last taste of the wintry west and from what Cathy said, she seemed to like it.

I am constantly reminded that this type of “rescue operation” wouldn’t have been possible without the Internet and search engines. The timing of this event was crucial and the speed with which the right information was accessed was impressive.

Trying to mount this using the phone and dialing could have taken a day more to coordinate. The catalog of information that is available to us at any given time on any given topic is mind blowing, and Maya sitting here purring away will always remind me of the ultimate good that is possible through being connected.

© 2008 Keith Boswell