Tag: sales

Metrics that distract

Fabrizio1 Comment

Reading this reminded me of the time I found a job ad for Social Media Manager listing 1,000 (or was it 10,000) friends on Facebook as a requisite to apply.

We are easily mislead by what is not important, and so we believe that doing Marketing on social media is about metrics that are as much visibile as they are insignificant. And of course, managers and executives are then disappointed when they come to this very realization.

Continue focusing on bringing consistent value to your audience where they are, and stay clear of distraction-metrics. Long-term success will be your reward.

Numbers have stories

Fabrizio1 Comment

If the chances to contract a disease increase 10%, we would all be much more worried and depending on the disease even panic. Yet it would be more accurate to ask how much the disease is common in our population: if originally out of 100 people 1 catched the disease, the 10% increase would sound much less worrying than if 90 did.

If a company boasts a 100% increase in revenue in the past 3 years, we would feel confident in its good shape. Yet it would be better to ask how it got there year after year: if the revenue progression would be something like 100 – 150 – 250 – 200, than we might want to inquire what happened during the last year and our confidence would fade.

These are just a couple of examples of size instinct, the tendency to be impressed by a lonely number out of context.

Even though it requires more effort, we should always attempt to evalute things within their stories, to avoid being pulled back and forth by the latest trending number. This is true also when we try to tell about the latest marketing campaign, or the results of the latest customer satisfaction survey.

This is Marketing

Fabrizio4 Comments

What I wrote yesterday about the commoditization of marketing is deeply inspired by the work of Seth Godin.

This year, I have read his most recent book, This is Marketing, and despite having followed his blog for years now, and being familiar with most of his ideas, I felt it was the missing piece in my approach to marketing. A way to translate things that are already profoundly rooted in my practice into easy and plain words that everybody can understand.

You can’t be seen until you learn to see is the subtitle of the book, and that is a common thread througout the pages. The focus on empathy and on the necessity to deeply understand who you are serving is one of Seth’s mantras. There’s a metaphor he uses this time around, that is not only great at describing this approach, but also in differentiating it from the other side of marketing, the commoditized side.

It doesn’t make any sense to make a key and then run around looking for a lock to open. The only productive solution is to find a lock and then fashion a key.

Seth Godin

Marketing is about building a relationship, this should be nothing new to anyone who has read Kotler and his principles. And despite this being one of the oldest precepts of the field, we keep forgetting it, because other ways are more alluring and promise shorcuts to achieve results.

For Seth, it all starts by understanding what is the change you seek to make. Because every marketer is in the business of “making change happen” (and everyone who wants to make a change is a marketer). Then, understanding that changing everyone, seeking the mass, is not only unrealistic, it also sets us for mediocrity and disappointment. The only real possibility is identifying our “smallest viable audience“, the smallest market we (or our company) can survive on. And do our best work and responsibly bringing it to them.

This is Marketing is about a way to do marketing that considers affiliation more important than dominion.

Modern society, urban society, the society of the internet, the arts, and innovation are all built primarily on affiliation, not dominion. This type of status is not “I’m better.” It’s “I’m connected. I’m family.” And in an economy based on connection, not manufacturing, being a trusted member of the family is priceless.

Seth Godin

Affiliation, though, does not happen when you talk about how perfect your features are, or when you bombard people with flashy and catchy ads. It is a slow and long process, one that requires patience and consistency, and one that cannot be measured. And that’s where most marketers fail nowadays: they use the prime tool for affiliation (content marketing) and pretend to dress it for dominion (us, us, US!).

Eventually, if the marketer is successful, they will have served people that will spread the word (“the best reason someone talks about you is because they’re actually talking about themselves”, about their taste, about what is important to them) and that will speak up if they are missing (permission marketing).

This is Marketing is a beautiful read about mindset and change, one that is not for marketers only. Actually, it is for marketers only, but we all are marketers nowadays.

For a long time, during the days when marketing and advertising were the same thing, marketing was reserved for vice presidents with a budget. And now it’s for you.

Seth Godin

 

The commoditization of marketing

FabrizioLeave a comment

Trust in digital advertising has never been so low. As a global industry, advertising is now considered to be the less trustworthy, coming after the likes of banking, energy, and telecoms.

This is nothing new.

Gary Vaynerchuk is right when he says that marketers ruin everything. His point is simple. It happened with TV, radio, mail, magazines, newspapers, internet, e-mail, and it is now happening with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat. When a marketer finds that the attention of the audience is somewhere, millions will follow, and soon (with TV, radio and magazines it took decades, but now it’s faster) people will veer somewhere else. The chase resets, and this process is never ending.

I would actually go as far as saying that it’s not only marketers. As human beings, we have the tendency to repeat what worked yesterday, to emulate success wherever we see it, to go down beaten paths.

Gary Vee says that this is inevitable, that there is no way out of this downward spiral. He might be right, yet I believe he would agree that there is a huge value in leading rather than following, in going after the niche rather than the mass, in finding your own unique way of doing things rather than copy-pasting what others have done infinite times.

Because after all, what really makes people shut down and move on to the next thing is the race to the bottom, designing for the lowest common architecture, dumbing things down to reach the maximum result with the minimal effort.

Art has never driven people away. And marketing, if done well, is art. It might not be for everybody, and that is perfectly fine.

Learning from the past

FabrizioLeave a comment

In 1900, Édouard and André had a problem.

About 10 years earlier, they had started producing pneumatic tyres for bicycles in Clermont-Ferrand (France), and after a while they expanded their business with pneumatic tyres for cars. Their pneumatics were special for the time, as they were not glued to the wheel, and therefore could easily be replaced. The problem was that in the whole France there were about 3,000 cars. Not much to have a viable business.

Their idea to overcome this obstacle was somewhat revolutionary. Instead of perfectioning their product (already excellent), or trying to gain market shares from competitors (whose product was inferior), they asked themselves a question that each marketer (and business person, to be fair) should ask themselves: what problem can we solve for our potential customer so that they would be more willing to buy a car (and our tyres)?

In one of the very first examples of content marketing, the Michelin Guide was born. A list of hotels and restaurant to make it easier for people to tour the cities, information about how to change tyres (Michelin tyres, of course), as well as a list of mechanics, car parts ads, maps and other basic information. Nowadays, more than 100 years later, when we hear about the Michelin Guide, we barely associate it with a tyre manufacturer, yet its name is well known (and respected) by everybody who likes to travel and eat good food.

The history of marketing and business is full of such anecdotes – another good one is how Procter&Gamble basically put the “soap” in “soap operas” when it started producing radio dramas in the 30s.

Content marketing is not an invention of the new wave of digital marketing. It is good to remember that the examples from the past who stood the test of time and deeply impacted our culture, have all started from a business need and a consideration that nowadays marketers seem to have forgotten: if you do not know who you are selling to and what they value, it will not stick.