Tag: social media

Learning from the past

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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.

Permission marketing

Fabrizio1 Comment

Permission Marketing is a book (and an idea) by Seth Godin that is 20 years old this year. And yet, its message is still so powerful and actual.

Permission is the opposite of interruption.

With traditional media, people’s attention is constantly interrupted with an advertisement, that basically asks them to focus on something they did not want to focus on in the first place. It is an invasive form of doing marketing, and the customer is powerless as the choice is little: whether you are watching television, listening to the radio, driving home after work, your entertainment and train of thoughts is subjected to messages that are short, catchy and completely not requested.

With the Internet and the multiplication of information (and of promotional messages), Godin argues that there is a new possible way to do marketing. A way that aims at establishing a long term relationship with your target audience. A way that is respectful of and empowering for the customer. A way that is possible because, after all, the Internet is not a mass media, but a niche media, “the biggest direct marketing platform that ever exhisted”.

This is permission marketing. Instead of running ads to the mass, you seek to craft a message that resonates with some people (your audience), so that they consent to hear from you again. Permission marketing has three key characteristics.

  • It is anticipated, as people long for it, they want more. They ask “what happened?” if you stop sending them messages.
  • It is personal, or at least it reflects a need for self-identification, and as such it resonates deeply with the wanted identity of the receiver.
  • It is relevant, as it is supposed to be just what the receiver was looking for.

The message is still relevant, as the way we use the Internet today as marketers is much more similar to the way you would use a mass media.

Our inherent laziness makes us believe that by running ads, everywhere, to everyone, and by scaling them when our budget increases, we can actually be successful. And sometimes, that is the case. Yet more often than not, we end up being ignored.

The ironic thing is that marketers have responded to this problem with the single worst cure possible. To deal with the clutter and the diminished effectiveness of Interruption Marketing, they’re interrupting us even more!

Seth Godin

Permission marketing is a long-term effort (Godin compares it to dating to find a life-time partner, while interruption marketing would be more like clubbing) and it consumes one of the scarcest resources in a world that lives at the speed of life: patience. The final result, though, is the creation of a tribe, a passionate relationship with our people that can last forever. Or at least, until we end up betraying the trust we have been given.

 

 

There is no such thing as a free social media platform

Fabrizio1 Comment

We are hitting our heads against a wall.

For years, we have believed in the myth of “free”. Listening to music was free, watching a video was free, posting your piece of content was free. Whether you were an individual or a company, you could get in front of a fairly wide audience with a very small investment of energy and time, and essentially without spending any money. And of course, as we were getting blinded by the allure of “free”, we forgot about a very important fundamental.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Even when things appear to be free, they are not.

While we have not paid a dime to publish and distribute our content for the past decade or so, we have most likely contributed to the impoverishment of our society and to the extremization of the public discourse.

Furthermore, as marketers we keep banging our heads against the wall every time a platform curbs our potential to reach our audience (current or wanted). We might just understand and accept that those platforms do not exist to allow us to spread our message to whoever we want. And instead we first spend weeks over weeks complaining about how our posts used to get 1000 and now gets 200. Then, we try to game the algorithms, we hack a bit further to try to squeeze more, we ask strangers of dubious reputation to publish or click on links just to try to increase our content’s rank, we use shortcuts to boost metrics that have absolutely no business relevance.

The basics of marketing have been the same for decades, and if we manage to stop our head just for a second, we can see that is what still matters nowadays.

  1. Understand who your audience is.
  2. Ask what they need help with.
  3. Match your product or service to the help needed.

The rest is noise. It distracts us from achieving things that matter and from delivering meaningful change.

Honest and open stories

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We are surrounded by stories.

We tell stories all the times. About ourselves, our family, our work, the situation we are in, what happened yesterday, the last weekend, the last time we went on vacation, our childhood, our adulthood. Others do as well, and so all we hear all day long, every day of the week, are stories.

Companies tell stories as well. The story of a company is sometimes more complicated, as it is a mixture of its values, products, customers, stakeholders, shareholders, and so on. There are, in general, more interests involved in the story of a company, yet that does not mean it is not a story.

As your exposure increases, and this is valid both for individuals and for companies, you progressively lose the grip on your story. Sometimes you might hear that somebody does not believe it, that they have a different version, that they have seen you do something that is not line with what you are narrating.

Facebook has for long time been the platform bringing people together. Its story was one of communality, of moments and likes, on sharing interests (and stories) with your friends and family. Nowadays, Facebook is the platform that has rigged elections in many countries, where hatred and fraud spread, and people with mean intentions can organise to easily find an audience.

Amazon has for long time been the best shop in the world. Its story was one of outstanding customer service, attention to details, low price and convenience. Nowadays, even though it is not remotely in as bad waters as Facebook (and other social media), we hear more and more about how it basically pays no taxes, how it devours every competitor in every market it chooses to enter, and how its CEO is the richest person in the world while its employees are sometimes overworked and strictly surveilled.

The more a story is told, the more its audience grows, the more the power of the person or the people telling it, the more it is difficult to believe it. It’s just how it is, and the only thing that you can do to attempt to mitigate this risk is being honest and open.

Honest, because the closer the story you are telling is to how things actually are, the easier it is to stay on its track. How do you behave when nobody’s watching? If your interest is in getting people together, why is your main source of revenue advertising?

Open, because in telling the story you need to be sensible of the people you are affecting. Is my story beneficial to my community? Am I willing to lose profit to address something that unexpectedly happened while I was living my story? Am I ready to quit, should the damage be too much?

Telling stories is complicated, and we don’t spend quite as much time as we should trying to define them.

What marketing is not

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The inability to listen. The idea that by interrupting and telling your story people will be amazed. The practice of segmenting into hundreds of small niches to feed them whatever they want today. The ideas of optimization, hacking, ranking, fans and followers. The belief that data is better than interactions. The effort to second-guess needs and wants to stay clear of the risk of asking. The easy shortcut of personalised and automated user journey. The unrelentless focus on growth.

Marketing is not ruining the world. The things above are. And at the same time they set expectations, both for marketers and customers, that cannot be met, leading to inevitable dissatisfaction.

Key insights and themes from the research include:

  • Data is a dilemma. But “big data” isn’t marketing’s biggest challenge. It is actually the “small data” – the data used to describe the small, specific attributes delivered directly from the customer through, as an example, the Internet of Things. 36 percent of respondents believe that small data will be the greatest challenge for the organization.
  • We’ve lost the ability to be human, and we can’t blame the machines. Some 41 percent admit that they are overly focused on driving campaigns, forgetting that they are building relationships. Nearly 30 percent admit they think of their customers in terms of targets, records and opportunities – interestingly an equal amount admit that they are also struggling to define and deliver returns from customer experience strategies.
  • Going small could bring our humanity back. Marketers believe small data will help extract better signal from the noise (45 percent), reveal the “why” behind customer actions and behaviors (41 percent), help focus on the people behind the data to deliver more human interactions (35 percent) and aid in filling key gaps across the customer journey (35 percent.)

CMO Council Research