Direct Marketing

Archive for February, 2010

Here are some specific tips for how to market depending on what you are trying to do and sell.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is a delicate process. Customers don’t want to buy from you if they can buy from the original seller. You must cloak your affiliate links. Here are some specific traffic generation strategies [...]

Source: Kareena

For brands, advertising has always involved finding a third-party shop and letting the young guns rip on a riveting, inspirational concept that can be worked up by the art-crew into a striking visual nugget and blasted out across the mediasphere.  Central to that process has been the relationship a Marketing Director has with his Agency.  The effectiveness of which can easily determine the future wage-packets, postcodes and kids' schools of everyone concerned.  However, like many others aspects of marketing, that’s changing.  ‘The unwritten rule used to be three decent TV campaigns and you’re on the Board,’ an ambitious brand manager from an FMCG Mega-Corp whispered to me last year, under cover of his cappuccino.  ‘But not any more,’ he said with the glint in his eye of someone who has realised the goal posts have been moved but that not everyone has noticed.  So what’s the future for the upwardly mobile brand manager?  And indeed, the ambitious Agency Chieftan?  Will the pivotal relationship between the two survive as the media landscape shifts? 
As ever, it’s a question of balance.  Third-party suppliers will always be a vital part of the marketing industry.  If only because the economics make it sensible to use an agency that’s beating media owners over the head with a bigger stick.   Or wise to buy into a PR company’s network or a creative hotshop’s spark. 
However, the growth of networked media may well start a shift away from branding created by third party suppliers to marketing driven by internal teams.   In networked markets customers don’t want to talk to the brand, they want to be heard by the business.  And that might be difficult to achieve when the customer hotline goes through to a PR company in Soho.  For marketeers, the way to the top table could then be more about smart investment in new assets that sit on the company’s balance sheet (even if they are white-labelled from GoogleBook).  And less about buffing up the agency’s awards cupboard.  Indeed, P&G’s Tremor network, a product sampling platform, is not only shifting goods but is rented out to other companies as a service, thereby adding to the bottom line. 
Of course, the future will always be about results and who can deliver.   However, even the vast media players will admit they don’t have the iron-like grip over the new media barons such as Brin, Page & Schmidt, whose revenues are largely made up of thousands of smaller direct customers, as they did over the old guard.   ‘We used to show up at ITV and say if we don’t sign this cheque, you are going out of business’, a Media Grand Fromage once told me. ‘You can’t do that at Google,’ he added pointedly. 
Furthermore, Google’s Adwords system has educated the marketplace in the ways of media self-service, a development that Facebook…

…may now compound.  After all, there aren’t any economies of scale in the keyword auction system – only brute financial power and SEO nous.  And why hand over a small fortune to a media shop when all it does is boost its revenues and plump up their buyout price?  Furthermore, the auction models and other live data systems are being applied to traditional media, such as TV.   Marketplaces that currently rely on planning teams reporting back on abstract notions such as OTS, TVRs and GRPs.  Media reports over Lunch at the Agency may be fun, but a real-time Feed analysing media investment on your Blackberry will impress the Chairman more. 

Certainly on the social side it’s difficult to see how an outsider can provide what the marketplace requires ie direct, two-way communication with a company representative.  Undoubtedly, an agency can get the ball rolling and advise on the approach.  However, a Facebook page run by an agency is always likely to leave the customer feeling that he is being held at arms length.  Dell’s social success has been about an internal team jumping into the conversation, not an agency adding doublespeak. 

And when it comes to campaign measurement, how long will brands bother measuring media, when they can just track sales?  As media is gradually all sucked onto one cloudy-IP platform or another, it will become easier than ever to see how loudly marketing activity does or does not make the tills ring.  Who wants to know about the research house’s view of Awareness and Recall, when a new daily dashboard reports back on Sales and Shekels? 

More radical still, what if networked media means, as MIT's Professor John Maeda suggests that, 'the product is the message and the message is the product'?'.  That's certainly the Steve Jobs view of the world, where internal systems are building a brand so powerful that new product extensions become world news. 

The exciting aspects of media and marketing at the moment is that it feels like everything is up for grabs.  Including that special Client-Agency partnership.  No one expects the Big Four Ad Networks (aka WOIP) to disappear anytime soon. However, the rebalancing between internal systems and external suppliers may be the greatest change of all as the era of networked media becomes ever more real.

Source: James Cherkoff

Being able to contact previous and potential customers is extremely important. It is one thing to have them find your website, it’s another entirely to personally invite them. This section deals with telling people to go to your website.
Newsletters & E-Mail
One of the most important lessons you will learn from this course is [...]

Source: Kareena

Marketing is an absolute necessity for any business that is going to succeed. The problem is that you aren’t opening up your mind and thinking about where your customers are. Just because you own a website and do business online, doesn’t mean that your customers have to live 1000 miles away from you.
Face to [...]

Source: Kareena

With the mind-boggling degree of innovation occurring in digital technology and networked media, it’s very easy to forget that, in commercial terms, we are still only talking about markets. And markets are still just made up of people.  The other commercial task that hasn’t changed is the need to deploy resources to work within the marketplace to realise specific aims effectively.  Such as building sales and keeping shareholders content.  What is changing, as every marketeer worth his Cluetrain now knows, is the nature of that marketplace.  However, these changes are still yet to be fully reflected in the marketing industry because the most important cog of the business – media finance – continues to lag the trends driving networked markets.  Big marketing shekels remain driven by two words – reach and frequency.  An approach akin to asking as many people as possible out on a date until one or more of them falls for the smooth new chat-up line.  And this view of the world is all about size.  Bigger.  Louder.  Harder.  The problem is that in the new marketplace this approach doesn't build relationships – it wrecks them.  Of course, awareness is absolutely vital for any brand, particularly a new one.  And there’s always going to be a need to get out the big guns out and fire away at the marketplace to remind the world that a brand still means business.  But consumers (aka people) are fed up with brands only offering them a one-night stand, time after time.  Just think about the financial services industry where enticing offers are sprayed around, only for the love to be slowly withdrawn once the deal is done.  The bank’s rate of interest gets lower and lower until it just fizzles away and the corporate desire for new accounts on the bedpost grows.  Which leaves consumers more cynical and determined to stay footloose.  Or to become ‘rate tarts’ as they are tellingly known by the industry.  For brands to break this Tiger Woods lifestyle, they have to change not only their ways but also, crucially, their means.  And that means a very serious redistribution of their cash.  For if a corporate or brand is only in town occasionally for a night out on the campaigning tiles its long-term reputation suffers.  These days consumers see reliable brands as being there for them 24×7 – when they need the help and support.  And how can a brand do that if it spends its marketing wad on the first night?  It’s not easy changing long-standing behaviour.  But unless brands spread their love, attention and cash throughout the year, and are able to hold some back to respond to people's demands, no one will believe their clever words and lovely promises.  In the world of marketing and brands, the size of your wad still counts.  But in marketplaces driven by networked media, people are more interested than ever before in how you use it.

Source: James Cherkoff