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