Category: marketing

If it’s numbers you want …

Fabrizio1 Comment

When marketing is in total and complete service of sales, it is very easy to fall into traps.

You get what you reward, after all. And if it is numbers you are after, you will find somebody who can sell them to you, or somebody who can induce you to believe in a new made up trend, or again somebody going rogue who will ask you for a ransom to get back what is yours in the first place.

I have written about this before, but the intensity of this collective allucination is baffling. Marketing is about experience and relationships, and the only way you can build a great relationship is by continuosly looking at quantitative and qualitative data combined.

When is the last time you have talked to one of your customers?
When did you spend half a day skimming through reviews?
When have you done something that does not scale, just to impress one single member of your audience?
When did you use Voice of Customer to make an important decision about your next campaign?

We all get to measure [success] differently. You know how many people in here are all about math, conversion, and quantity? You know what that’s called? That’s called salespeople. Marketing and branding doesn’t get measured by the hour. For me, how I measure it is “how do I feel about where I am positioned?”, “how well is my company doing?”, “how well is my speaking requests coming in?”, “how many people are watching my stuff?”. But I don’t measure it on a tactical day-to-day, it’s an overall feeling of a vibe, intuition, and some baseline metrics. Many people are into landing page optimisation, and by the way that shit works, but that’s sales. People did not come here to see me speak because I cookie them, and target them with my message. It’s because I give them value, and they hope to get even more value from seeing me speaking live. This is branding.

Gary Vaynerchuk, see also this article

Here is what we do

FabrizioLeave a comment

When you go on a first date, you are not expected to discuss the most intimate recesses of your mind, nor your most embarassing habits. At the same time, if after being married to a person for few years you would find it difficult to open up and you would refuse to discuss yours and your partner’s feelings, that would sound strange.

Yet, more often than not, when a company approaches its customers, there’s one level to the conversation: here is what we do.

For awareness: (since you don’t know) here is what we do.
For acquisition: here is what we do (we know you are interested).
For activation: here is (a taste of) what we do.
For retention: here is (more of) what we do.
For revenue: here is (how much) what we do (costs).
For referral: here is what we do (tell others, pretty please!).

This is a strategy that would not work in any kind of relationships under the sun. And we expect it to work in a business setting, because for some reasons people are extremely more rational when they wear a suit than when they are in their pijamas. If we only get the chance to tell them once more about what we do, they’ll certainly be convinced!

How broken is this?


Either-or

FabrizioLeave a comment

When you broadcast a message, some will get it and subscribe, while others will resist it and deny it.

You can either foster and engage with those who get it, or you can attempt to convince and prove wrong those who resist it. Sometimes it will look like you are doing both at the same time, but do not fall for it. It’s either one or the other.

Spend your limited time wisely.

Unrealized potential

FabrizioLeave a comment

Customer service should be a function of marketing.

It’s an opportunity to establish a personal relationship with the customer, right in the moment when the customer wants to speak to you and is willing to provide information about their experience.

Not only.

If an organisation is smart enough to mine the information collected from customer service interactions and analyse them qualitatively (sentiment, voice of customer, etc.) rather than quantitatively (first rime response, contact rate, etc.), a treasure trove of customers insights could be found, good to use in messaging, positioning, differentiation, price and promotion, and more.

Customer service has the potential to become a true channel for personalisation, as well as the source from which all other personalisations originate.

Targeting millennials

FabrizioLeave a comment

Few years ago, during an hiring process, I was asked to come up with ideas to improve how the company was presenting the product to prospects. I decided to title the presentation I put together “targeting millennials”.

The presentation featured few suggestions that still today I believe would have benefited the company, but of course the very same idea of “targeting millennials” is nonsensical.

“Millennials” is a wide group of people that has in common only the fact of being born between 1980s and 1990s. Sure, there are some similar traits, a shared cultural background, some icons everyone from those years can relate to. And yet unless your product is really, truly a mass product, targeting a generation is as ineffective as and article about knitting on the front page of the Financial Times.

A better way to approach the assignment would have been asking “why do people buy this product?” (instead of “what type of people buy this product?”, as it typically happens when targeting based on demographics).

I was out of the hiring process after this stage, and to be honest I think they did take a sensible decision.