diary of a digologist

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We're not one-at-a-timin' here! We're mass-communicatin'!

Peter Drucker says, "the purpose of business is to create a customer," not to create a sale (as the sales-driven strategies of olden days purported) or even a product (as our more enlightened "market-driven" selves proclaim). So the big questions really haven't changed, whether your media focus is the local newspaper, a radio contest, or Twitter: can you create customers out of this audience? Is this where your target market hangs out? Is this medium consistent with your brand's personality? Do you know how to be relevant here?

There is a lot of discussion on the web about what's different about social media. It's equally important to understand how it's the same. While the path to the customer may be a different one, the goal is the same. To create a customer (and, I would add, to keep your customers). If you can't do that with social media, then maybe you should rethink your presence there.

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Google Wave Invites. Come play with me!

Well, it finally came! I got my Google Wave invitation. In thinking about who I would like to invite, I realized I want to experiment and engage with others who are as excited about this medium as I am. So...I will give out most of my 20 allotted invitations to people who leave relevant, interesting, substantive comments on any article in my blog. They don't have to be nice comments...just relevant and extensive enough that it is clear you have a deep interest in marketing and social media. Note: if you leave a comment and would like a Google invite, you will have to DM me @digmktg or email me at djjones318@gmail.com with your email address. I'll need that to submit your name.

Let's play!

Deb

UPDATE! I have an even better idea! Let's start a virtual book club with a wave! We can call it "Marketing & Innovation BookWave." Actually, it's already started and we need more members, so if you HAVE a Google Wave ID, you can email or DM me and I'll add you to the "bookwave." If you NEED one, post a fabulous comment to one of my blog posts (as above) THEN email or DM me your undying love for marketing books, and I'll submit your email for a Google Wave invitation. Once you get your ID, I'll invite you to the bookwave. Fair? I thought so, too.

ALSO, I am offering a Google Wave invite to anyone willing to make my logo (top of this blog page) look cleaned up and professional. I'll send you the clean graphic.

Tagged book club Google Wave innovation marketing

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Periodic Table of Marketing Elements

via twitpic.com

...according to Blinds.com. A bit overwhelming, but clever.

Tagged marketing

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Own yourself

About a year ago, someone gave me a very good piece of advice about branding yourself on the web: find a unique way to express your name and own it everywhere you can. "What a good idea," I thought to myself. Then I searched and learned that the URL http://debjjones.com was available, so I purchased it, and...nothing. I just held onto it for a long time, because I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do with it. But when LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter offered opportunities to have a username, guess what I picked? Go on and Google debjjones right now and see what you get... I'm not pretending to be an expert, but a year ago, you would have thought I was in the Google witness protection program. I was nowhere to be found.

In my case, I have an extremely common name, which is a disadvantage. I overcame that by coming up with a unique configuration that no one else was using (at least not on the Internet) which included my middle initial and no period. When I first did it, it seemed a little silly, but now I'm glad I did. A presence on Google fits my professional goals and paves the way toward more extensive PR and marketing activities. http://Twitter.com/debjjones is not in use right now, because I choose to promote my marketing activities; however, I did go ahead and get control of the username to protect my "brand."

Try it for yourself. http://www.Godaddy.com has a simple interface for checking on the availability of URLs. That's a great placed to start. If you find one that works for you, try to append it to your favorite social networking sites that allow you to select a username, such as http://facebook.com/debjjones, http://linkedin.com/debjjones, and http://twitter.com/debjjones .

Tagged branding Facebook Google LinkedIn marketing Twitter

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Speed TV: a lesson in target marketing

If you think cable TV has gone a long way toward sorting and segmenting America into respective target markets, take a deeper look into just one channel that has shown how specific you need to get when talking to your markets: Speed TV. Yes, sometimes they have NASCAR, but there is a whole lot more to this network and their viewers.

See, here's the trick about talking to car guys: this is a brand loyal group and very clique-ish. Big time. You can't talk to domestic car guys about imports. You can't talk to Ford guys about Chevys. You can't talk to Mopar guys about Fords. Show car guys wouldn't dream of strapping slicks on their trailer queen and throwing rubber all over the quarter panels in a big, smokey burnout. Drag racers don't want to sit in the stands and watch the roundy-round races: they want to do it themselves. Then there are the motorcycle guys...which is a whole other article! The point is, in the car-guy world, you can't generalize. The only way to break through the noise is to make them feel like you are specifically talking to them. Like you understand them. Look in the newstands: you'll find sport-specific and brand-specific magazines out the wahzoo.

Now, on the other hand, car-guys are a pretty good target market. They will eat beans for a week to afford a new carburetor when a car show or a race is at stake. In other words, they will actually forego a "necessity" to purchase what most would consider a "luxury" item. While this is not to imply that the car hobby is recession-proof (the wives do step in at some point) there are plenty of enthusiasts who are able to keep the category going even when times are tough. So, smart marketers know that this is a group worth pursuing.

What makes Speed unique among cable networks is how it appeals to so many different specific areas of interest within the motorsports category. You can find shows that address many different subject areas:

Modification: Pimp My Ride, Chop Cut Rebuild, Unique Whips
Gear-heads: Gears, Two Guys Garage,
Trucks: Truck U, Livin' the Low Life
Drag Racing: Pinks, Pinks All Out, Pass Time, Drag Race High and IHRA Drag Races
Collecting - Barrett-Jackson Auto Auctions
Auto Racing: NASCAR, Formula 1, road-course races, World of Outlaws and many commentary shows
General interest: Wrecked - a show about towing (I cannot make this stuff up); Jacked - stories about stolen cars

And that's just some of the more popular shows. Pull up www.Speedtv.com/programs and you'll see what I mean.

Another brilliant move: aside from the national sporting events, many of their shows are reality-based, which means that regular guys get on the shows and get all their friends to watch them on t.v., which naturally leads to more guys getting hooked, and so on, and so on... So when a show like Pinks All Out holds tryouts, 500 racers show up to race at around $50 a pop and as many as 35,000 spectators come just be part of the action at $25 per ticket. That's a cool million in revenue for a single episode of a weekly t.v. show before it even airs and we haven't gotten to t-shirt sales and concession stands yet! And out of the people who attended, how many do you think told their friends to watch, Tivoed the event, even held viewing parties? That's just one show, folks, yet most of the people reading this have never even heard of Pinks or Pinks All Out. Because it's targeted to a very specific audience. Just because it's not mainstream doesn't mean it can't be wildly successful.

My point? That is one smart network, my friends, and if you are a marketer, you can learn a whole lot from Speed TV about target marketing.

Tagged marketing speed tv target market target marketing television

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Why demographics are useless in the real world

Okay, I don't mean to say they are TOTALLY useless, but demographics form only part of the picture when you are defining your target markets. After I tweeted my last post title, "Twitter demos remain female, young, shifting toward African American," I got a response from @madmain (a white "adult" ad guy on Twitter) that said, "Yep! That's me alright!" And I turned a little red, at least in a virtual sense. Because he made an excellent point: when it comes to products that are lifecycle oriented (diapers, college loans, rascal scooters) demos might be relevant. But not all products can be easily segmented this way and not all target markets are so easy to pigeonhole.

So why do we keep doing it? Well, first of all, it's human nature to name, label, tag, organize, categorize, understand and control. It's part of the job of being at the top of the food chain. But the practical answer is that when it comes to identifying our target markets, there are only a few ways they are "findable." One of those ways is by their demographics and another way is by the media they use. The fact that Twitter users use Twitter probably says a whole lot more about them than their demographics do. But what's equally interesting about the demographics is who's NOT using Twitter, or at least not to the extent that you would assume. It just goes to show that social media is resonating with a broader audience than the naysayers would suspect, that different communities are leveraging different platforms, and that the potential for this medium is in no way tapped out.

So, yes, use demographics to define your target markets. But add to that lifestyle factors, media choices, and any other key motivators of purchase for your particular product. How important a part each perspective plays in finding customers depends on your particular product. The better your understanding of your customer base on every dimension, the better shot you have at finding more customers

Tagged demographics marketing target markets Twitter

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Social media isn't a fad. It's just media and customer karma.

It's funny to read all the speculation about the destiny of MySpace, Twitter, Digg, etc. It makes you picture boardrooms across America, nay, the globe, discussing whether their companies should start a Twitter account. Almost as plentiful are the articles giving advice about how companies should be dealing with social media, what it takes to be a "social media expert" (as if such a thing existed), or whether social media is replacing search.

The bottom line is this: there is one simple truth. The rules for social media are just like the rules for every other kind of media.

1. You decide what media your company should be in based on what media your target markets are in.

2. Your target markets and resulting media strategy will reflect the personality of your brand.

3. If you're testing your CPA (cost per action or cost per acquisition) across all media, you'll know when it's time to invest more in a particular media, no matter what it is. Whether the expense is a media buy or a staff to engage with your customers via social channels, you can still calculate an ROI. If you want to control the ROI, make sure your staff time-boxes their activities in that channel.

It really is as simple as that. The questions are no different now and they won't be any different when the next big thing comes along. I don't mean to come off like a crazed MBA and make it sound like numbers are the only thing that matters. There is something else. It's called customer karma, and that's where the exception comes in. The exception is in customer service and managing your brand image. The first part of which you are compelled to do in social channels regardless of that channel's marketing ROI.

And the second part of which is simply not possible. "Your brand is whatever your customers say it is."(1) So whatever else you do, you'd better get out there and listen, not just to what your customers are saying about you, but to what they are saying about your competitors, too.

(1) Marketing in the Groundswell by Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff

Tagged CPA customer service marketing media ROI target market

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We need a new word for "optimization"

Many would agree: SEO's are the rockstars of the web marketing world. [Post editing note: This applies to good, real SEO's. Not the snake-oil salesmen who try to pass themselves off as SEO's.] Not that they shouldn't be. Ethical SEO's provide a critical service to website owners and web surfers alike, when they help websites find targeted visitors and make it easier for visitors to find exactly what they're looking for. But over and over you hear, "Internet marketing is a 'numbers game'." What does that mean? To a certain extent, all marketing is a numbers game. But a weak way to play the game is to get as many people as possible to your site in the hopes that you will get lucky and somebody will convert. That's just not very smart, because it can be extremely costly, thereby driving down your ROI and wasting the time of those who don't find your website of interest.

Enter "the other kind of optimization": website optimization. If you are looking for more information on website optimization, good luck. You will be swamped with information about how to improve traffic to your website with search engine optimization. Is website optimization the redheaded stepchild of the web world?

It's a mathematical fact that it is cheaper to have a higher conversion rate than it is to get more traffic. SEO's are important here, too. They are the ones who get you the targeted traffic that has a higher interest level in your product or service. From there, the types of things you can practically test are somewhat dependent on your audience size. If you are Amazon, you may test every dot and tiddle; You have the numbers to deliver a statistically valid result from which to make a decision. If you're a little smaller than than that (most websites are) then you have to be a bit more judicious about what you are testing. Since you may not have the opportunity to dynamically generate an experience based on a visitor's past history, you will probably be focused on figuring out what motivates your various target segments to take a desired action. Both disciplines require the cooperation of your creative team, copywriters, web analysts, IT, etc. Both disciplines require careful planning and consideration of the overall marketing strategy. But they NEED each other, otherwise the SEO's beautiful traffic gets wasted as it heads out the back door and the website optimizer's tests never get enough numbers to be conclusive.

Everyone involved in marketing on the web has heard of SEO by now, or, the less frequently used "search engine marketing." I think we should find another term for website optimization, because it's confusing to many people. Any suggestions?

Tagged marketing ROI search engine optimization SEO web analytics website optimization

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Marketing Execs Struggle to Show ROI

via marketingcharts.com

Really? Data availability and integrity is the number one barrier to showing ROI? Technology and infrastructure is number two? This is shocking! When so much great information is available, when web analytics and website optimization tools are FREE, this is very hard to believe. Is it possible that the survey results are dead wrong? That the issue is a lack of people who understand the data or know what to do with it?

One big gap that companies struggle with is inter-channel results, meaning, someone goes online to research a product, then finalizes the purchase in the bricks-and-mortar store. But hasn't it always been the case that retail purchases could not typically be attributed to a particular broad-market advertising activity? That may be a part of the ROI of the site, but you have to get creative about what you are capturing. You may not always be able to capture the sale itself, but if you can at least capture the fact that the visitor achieved their purpose on your site, that is one type of ROI that is also important.

Tagged data quality Marketing ROI

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Advertiser Perceptions About Twitter