What Marketing can learn from Politics

Marketers’ today (myself included) talk about the customer being in control and the increased need for them to be able to drive the processes that they engage with.   This is being done through delivering increased customization and personalization from simple preference settings all the way to behavioural segmentation.

As their understanding increases of how these systems work, their expectations of what will be delivered to them (when, what, why and how) also increases.

Some brands have allowed customers to help them in product development and actively seek feedback and participation.  Starbucks is the champion of this, and the new Barclaycard Ring has really embraced it.

The ultimate trust you can show your customers, with trust being the path to loyalty, is by placing your brand in their hands.  Being guided by their insights, needs and desires to define and refine your brand will be the next step.

Political policy is shaped like this today.  The ultimate democratic tool, the opinion poll, shapes policy like no other mechanism.  Polls are used to guide politicians on every issue, big or small, so they can understand what their constituents think – and what they want them to do.

Yes, this means that political leasers have become more of a spokesperson or figurehead rather than a leader, but that discussion is for another day.

Thinking of your customers like constituents means a change in organizational philosophy.  It’s more than focus groups or getting them to like you on Facebook, it’s integrating them into your company.

• Put their involvement on your CMO and Executive scorecard
• Give them direct access to Marketing Managers and Communication Plans
• Engage advocates and detractors in product development and product testing

Take the number one thing on the mind of politicians - unless you keep constituents (or customers) happy you’ll be out of a job next time an election (or purchase decision) comes along – and you’ll have the same focus that a customer has when they are choosing you.

Combining Social with CRM - how to, and must do

In the digital age, customers own the conversation.  They determine what is important and what the merits of an individual product or brand are.

Traditional CRM however is based on push messaging.  While advancements in dynamic messaging and customized content are helping, Customers are fatiguing from traditional marketing channels like email and direct mail.  Social CRM allows brands to better support users an improving interaction by entering into a collaborative conversation with them.

Social is the platform of choice for a select group of key natural human behaviours
1.  Giving and getting advice "can anyone tell me where a good place to get my oil changed is"
2.  Establishing or building your personal identity "home with my little one today, time to be mommy"
3.  Sharing your interests with others "I love the new batman, Bane is crazy!"

The opportunity for marketers is to identify these behaviours within their customers and support the conversations that are happening around them.  CRM methodology typically builds towards Advocates and the sharing of their message to recruit other customers and support the brand.  Social let's us identify opportunities to amplify our message through the activity of all the user groups (Prospect, Customers, Advocates).   

How?
Giving them the content that will allow them to create social currency within their networks.  You can use the content that you built for your current website, or you can ask users for content.

Behavioural targeting through social lets us align product offers and engagement with actual user activity.
…"looking forward to my family coming over this weekend"
…"school is back, I haaatttte making lunches"
This can be done through Facebook media and community management.

Combining these worlds as a single ecosystem is tough for a lot of companies / brands to do, but it will become a must-have very soon.

Twitter Ads, and now with Targeting why I like them

Twitter has been making a number of changes recently, and with the launch of their new targeted-advertising I think that they are going to finally find that business model they were looking for.

Twitter has used promoted tweets and more recently brand pages to help marketers reach their audience, but with limited success.
 
Targeted ads will let marketers deliver promoted tweets from accounts based on a specific user (or group of users) interests.  Interests are determined by the topics of tweets.
 
I love the idea of targeting users based on subjects for two reasons
1.    Consumers expect relevancy and convert more off meaningful ads
2.    Marketers will pay for targeting – as it leads to higher conversion (see bullet 1)
 
What makes this more interesting is what it could do to the service offering of influence measurers like Klout.  They have been using their perks program (targeting users based on influence / reach on a particular topic) with some success but there is high skepticism around the model and score calculation
 
Announced changes to their API left some core users, and platform providers upset.  But with this new service offering it makes even more sense.  Changing some of the terms of service (what data gets in, what doesn’t, how much/little), Twitter can now provide further assurances that this advertising will be delivered.
 
The monetization of Twitter has always been a question mark.  People have always been skeptical about using advertising on Twitter, but we knew it was coming.
 
Implementing a proven model of relevant content based on user behavior (see Google, Facebook) will generate future success for the platform.

Using Email and Offers to convert shoppers

A great amount of time is spent designing online shopping experiences with great emphasis on having product availability online.

Despite the best efforts of Information Architects, Graphic Designers, Marketers and yes Strategists over 70% of shopping carts are abandoned online.  There is a huge commitment issue there (which is a whole other story), but amuse yourself about thinking if that’s what actually happened at a place like a grocery stores.  That’s a lot of restocking to be done.

Email is a great mechanism to help convert that sale.  You know what the customer was interested in, and it’s inexpensive communication.  Here is an example of a recent experience I had at happysocks.com after just browsing – not adding anything to my cart.

I went to happysocks.com, browsed and not feeling ready to buy anything provided my email address to receive promotions / communications.

Exactly 4 weeks later I received the offer below – 50% off any order of 10 items or more.  A pretty good deal.  I didn't click through, but I did forward the message to a couple of people.

7 days following that I received another email, with an even more compelling offer – 50% off any purchase, no minimum.  I didn't click through – but was interested to see that they dropped the minimum order requirement

7 days following that I received another email, with their best offer yet – 70% off any purchase, no minimum.  I clicked through, found some great socks and added them to my cart.  

I was interested to see how far they would take this, so I closed my browser window after putting in some order information (but no payment)

That afternoon, I received a follow up email from them.  It noted that I had abandoned my cart (had a link back to it) and encouraged me to tell them if there was anything wrong they could help me with and included a promo code for free shipping for me to use to complete my order.

This sort of escalating follow up is a great way to see a customer through to close the sale.  They know I am interested, they know I am ready to buy.  I'm going to assume (okay, hope) they are capturing these interactions to develop an optimal communications model and offer combinations to ensure everyone wears colourful socks.

How the DM death spiral will happen

You know the routine, come home from work, put your keys down and collect the mail from the day.  There's a normal "pace" to it - a few flyers, some real estate postcards, maybe a bill - but most of it is just junk.

As a marketer I probably pay more attention to it to see what types of messages or programs are in the junk than most people.  Direct mail still can play a valuable role as a mechanism to support acquisition, cross sell and retention in areas like retail banking, automotive, telecommunications and B2B -  but it's days are numbered.

Every client I have though has over time seen diminishing returns from direct mail, and from every perspective.  One benefit of direct mail to the everyday consumer however is that it's volume is what helps keep the price of personal mail - stamps - down.

That got me wondering though about a bad spiral of cost and engagement that could (ok, will) happen with direct mail in the near future.  Follow me on this one.

As people continue to pay less attention to direct mail, the lower the return for marketers.

The lower the return for marketers, the less junk mail will be sent.

The less junk mail sent, the higher the cost of stamps.

The higher the cost in stamps, the less people will rely on mail for meaningful communications.

The less people rely on mail, the less people pay attention to direct mail.

This of course will take time, and isn't going to come to reach a finality for even longer - but this is how I think it will happen

Know what your platform is capable of - and not

Meeting with someone recently they asked me what my favourite CRM platform was.  I've had a chance to work with a wide variety and what struck me about it was it doesn't matter what my favourite one is, but knowing what the capabilities and constraints of the one you are working with does.

In previous roles I've had the opportunity to be a part of the implementation teams for some large deployments, which are massive endeavours.  My role was typically to understand how the business requirements and corporate vision would align strategically to the tool being implemented. 

In the marketing and advertising world the scope is simply understanding what system you are going to be interacting with and what you'll be able to do with it.

The enterprise tools are incredibly similar in terms of capability and it would be very difficult to rank them as a lot of the factors align with their compatibility with your companies current infrastructure, and budget.

The types of tools that I like the most of those that are able to hold customer records of all (or most) of their interactions with you.  Tools like Eloqua are extremely helpful as they offer deployment and analytical (although limited) within it, where as Salesforce.com and it's integration of Radian6 offers another level of social behaviour tracking.


The trick then becomes in knowing what your tool can't do.  Sure, the sales guy said your tool "could" do triggered emails based on interactions or track Facebook posts from linked accounts - but did you buy the module?  I often find that marketing clients only remember what was said in the sales presentation, not what they bought.

Over the last couple of months I've had the unpleasant experience of finding that what a client says they can do (or data they have) is far from the truth.

Adjusting a strategy into phases to show return and demonstrate value can be tough in these instances, particularly when the client has no ability to add new functionality.  Conducting a full discovery process and objective setting can also help prevent these surprises from popping up.