Tag: email marketing

Data

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Data is everywhere these days, that also means we got accustomed to looking at data to find meaning in situations that are difficult to interpret.

And so, if you present numbers or percentages, be aware of two things.

First, if that is all you have to say, people will get bored fast. If you do not have a story to accompany your data, if you cannot tell what the data means to you, to your organisation, to your purpose, if you cannot express how things could look different in case an alternative path had been chosen, then the time is pretty much wasted. Sure, you can look at history and see how those numbers and percentages have evolved, compare them with similar ones, but eventually none of that will inspire action.

Second, what numbers and percentages mean to you is not necessarily in line with what they mean to somebody else. Data might be universal, their interpretation is not. And so, be prepared at being challenged and having to inspire people to believe the story you read is more accurate than others. Follow up on that, repeat, look at it from different angles, and be consistent over time.

Data can change your world, but as a matter of fact it probably isn’t now. It’s up to you to fix that.

Brand

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A part of marketing is generating sales. And a part of marketing is fostering brand.

There are some myths around this that should be debunked.

Starting with the fact that the two things are separated and can live independently. Perhaps that is true in the short term, but building a business is a long term effort, and eventually brand and sales need to go hand in hand. Brand is what gets you your best-fit customers after all.

Then, there is the idea that sales is (mainly) for the early stages of a company, and brand is for when a company already controls a certain share of the market. This is a belief that comes from an era (and we are talking about probably 10-15 years ago) when markets featured a bunch of players (say between 10 and 50 – now there are hundreds, thousands in some cases). It is also backed by the assumption that investing in brand is something only bigger companies can afford, probably because when talking about brand one thinks at tactics.

Finally, there are many who argue that generating sales is infinitely more measurable than fostering brand. And there is some true to it. But of course, the reality is that most sales-focused activities end up being not measured, mismeasured, unoptimised, and eventually most organisations just throw money at a problem without really understanding what is going on. And on the other hand, we still get emotional in front of marvellously crafted brands and often decide to buy A instead of B in the heat of the moment.

So, perhaps instead of saying that a part of marketing is generating sales and a part of marketing is fostering brand, we could say that marketing is both.

The sooner we get to look at the two things together, the sooner we will stop wondering why the 105th whitepaper is not driving pipeline or why the new logo is not resonating with our audience.

That is a waste of time.

The distance

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You have spent resources improving your product with features analysts said are necessary in your category.

You have hired hundreds of new employees and built an organization that can sustain higher revenue.

You have rolled out a new tool because the old one was clunky and not providing enough flexibility.

You have gone all-in on that campaign because your experience and guts told you that was the right thing to do.

You have increased your marketing spend to better feed sales pipeline, investing in ads that interrupt people and are clicked only by robots.

You have changed your management team because the targets were not met.

And in the meantime, out there a potential customer is still wondering how to fix the issue your product is supposed to solve.

The distance between what happens within companies and what happens in the market is often shocking. Organisations and the people they are supposed to serve play in different fields, sometimes in completely different sports. The only way to fill such gap is to religiously do two things over time: figuring out who your customer is and understanding their world better than they do.

It is a strategy, not a tactic. And for this reason the distance continues to grow. And grow. And grow.

Graceful humility

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If your story is about how good you are, how much money you make, how big of a house you own, how many cars you have, how resounding your title is, how easily your product sells, how fantastic your company is, how many employees you have hired in the past year, how much revenue you made last year, how many new features you have released in the past six months.

Why should we care?

Tell us about the challenges instead, and we will be hooked. Even better, we will empathize.

If you cast a corporation as protagonist, do not brag about its size, its reach, its wealth, its influence. If you cast a product as a protagonist, do not brag about its newness, its hipness, its celebrity. The world spares no empathy for an overdog; market with a graceful humility.

Robert Mckee, Thomas Gerace – “Storynomics”

Advertising trends

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A couple of considerations looking at the charts in the tweet below.

The growth of Facebook (including Instagram) is surprising, in that it comes at least in part from erosion of the share of Google (including YouTube). That means, of course, that Zuckerberg and friends will change very little of what has made that growth possible, even if at the expenses of social and civic well-being.

It is quite a thing that print still gets 7-8% of ad spending, despite people spending just 1-2% of their time with print. Considering a similar ratio was also valid in 2010, print had probably been seen for a while as a cheap option to spread the brand. And perhaps one that can get pretty granular (niche and lifestyle magazines) in front of a pretty high level of control (that companies lose with programmatic, for example).

Despite the attempts of innovating and the limitless potential of the platforms, advertising on digital (both mobile and desktop) is still pretty much a copy of what was previously happening on television, radio and print: interrupting the attention of somebody who is there to do something else. Nothing particularly new regarding what advertisers are looking for.