Production

There isn’t a Home Depot for Marketing

RollerAs I write this, my house is in complete disarray.  We have a contractor tearing up my girls’ old bedrooms and converting them into a guestroom and an art studio for my wife. It isn’t pretty…but soon will be.  As I walk past the tarp and power tools and stepladders, I’m so appreciative that there are people whom I can call on who know how to do this with an assured and desirable outcome.  I use experts to prepare my taxes, to check under my engine, to tell me my cholesterol is too high.  I leave the do-it-yourself projects to things that have very low consequences if I screw it up.

Marketing is not a low-consequence endeavor.  If it doesn’t succeed, company fortunes and employee livelihoods are at risk.  And yet, for too many companies, marketing continues to be a do-it-yourself project.

It doesn’t take an expert to see the results of this by simply flipping through the pages of any newspaper or magazine.  Home-made ads are usually the ones you ignore, are plainly designed (or far worse) without style or a fresh point of view.  The same goes for websites, Facebook pages, direct mail, radio commercials and company brochures.

D-I-Y is pervasive – but hardly ever persuasive!

We get inquiries all the time from businesses who have been creating their home-made ads and realize that the outcomes haven’t been what they’d wish for.  But just as quickly, they pull back, fearful of relinquishing control and suffering sticker shock when they compare the cost of their D-I-Y efforts to professional services.  What they’re missing is that by spending money for professional objectivity, expertise and talent, they dramatically increase the chances of their marketing actually having serious bottom-line impact.

The results of making the leap from D-I-Y to seeking out professional help can be dramatic.  I’ve seen countless times sizable changes in traffic, sales and inquiries that resulted from putting the marketing in the hands of experts who excel in that craft.  That’s how after 20 years, some businesses become overnight successes!

And by “experts,” I’m not talking about letting the shop that designed your banners or flyers design an ad.  They’re experts in quick print projects. They’re not a marketing firm or an advertising agency whose portfolio of work comes with recognizable brands; as a result they don’t know how to help you build a long-term competitive position in the marketplace. Nor am I talking about brother Bernie’s kid who took two semesters of computer graphics and makes rock band t-shirt designs.

Every town has ad agencies and marketing firms who can provide you the ideal strategic guidance and talent required to make a difference.  As you know, they come in just about every flavor, from one-man shops to multi-floor mega-agencies.  Selecting the right company is a matter of chemistry, portfolio, history of success and their desire to win your business.  It’s no different than choosing an accountant, contractor or garage mechanic.  Price is a factor, but should never be the deciding factor – any more than seeking out the cheapest physician when you’re worried about internal bleeding.  (Remember, it’s your company’s life on the line.)

Here are some tips in selecting a marketing provider (or better yet, a marketing partner!):

  • Look at their work.  Does it surprise you?  Would it stop you if you were to stumble across it?  Will you remember it an hour later?
  • Ask how they would approach your business, learn about your audiences and develop strategies to attract new business.  This is especially important if they don’t have your specific category in their client roster.
  • Ask how they’ve handled similar marketing challenges in the past.
  • Look for a range of client types and industries.  Good ideas cross-pollinate.  On the other hand,  one-industry agencies limit how far you can go because they’re always reaching into the same old bag of tricks.
  • Ask for references, and then follow-up.  Ask their references if the company is easy to work with, do they listen, how do they deal with failures (’cause they happen even to the best of brands), and how responsive they are to requests and changes.

Just remember, success isn’t about your being able to do everything or know everything.  It’s about being able to find the very best resources to complement what you do and know.

That’s why I know when to run to Home Depot myself and when to call on the guys who are ripping out the girls’ closets right about now.

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Rolf Gutknecht is vice president, director of account services for LA ads. To discuss your thoughts with Rolf on this blog or any marketing matters, email via this link, or visit www.LAadsMarketing.com.  You can also connect with Rolf on LinkedIn.

Finding the WOW Factor

Imagine if you had some magical warning sound that alerted you before you made a misjudgment or a social faux pas.  You know, like you’re about to bet on a bad hand and, HONK!, so you pull back your bet just in time.  Or you’re about to give a future employer one of those cool “street” handshakes and, HONK!”, you think better of it. There’s a clever commercial for the Nissan Altima that plays out this funny notion as it promotes a cool new feature on the car: a warning honk that alerts you before you over-inflate your tires.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9xFgyv8BJI]

Now admittedly, we’ve all managed this long without the benefit of an automatic over-inflation warning, but still, it’s pretty cool. And it dramatizes a point that as a marketer you should be asking yourself:  What’s the cool feature you have to sell?  What do you produce, offer or do that excites your audience and makes them think “Wow!”

This is a pretty ho-hum world we live in and we’ve all seen ads, commercials, websites and Facebook pages up the wazoo.  So the challenge of breaking through today means finding the one or two out-of-the-ordinary things people don’t expect or don’t know about you that fascinates them. We all know that to be the all important  “Wow Factor.”

In your specific industry, you already know what the baseline of expectations is (quality product, made from quality materials/ingredients, great customer service, affordable prices).  That’s just the opening ante that anyone in your business must provide.  But where is the Wow that you alone can talk about?  That one thing, or series of things, that is not merely unique but deserves an exclamation point in the eyes of your customer.

In books such as Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach To Customer Service, or Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, the authors write about the need to be remarkable or else become invisible.  In your marketing, the same rule applies, that you must find the Wow Factor and express it in a fresh and unexpected manner so that it excites the audience and sets you in a league all your own. That way, it grabs people’s attention and has them focusing on the message and not thinking about the other stuff that might come into their minds. They’re engaged…captivated.

In doing so, you start connecting with your audience on a more intimate level, and that better allows you to persuade them, get them to trust you, get them to believe you,  and get them to want to buy from you. So when your competitor tries to pull them away, they’ll stay loyal to you.

Back to the example of the Nissan Altima, the commercial demonstrates that promoting one small but really interesting feature is better than loads of features or bland generalities.  That nugget of marketing gold for you might exist in one “small” aspect of your operation  but demonstrates everything holographically about the way you do business.  Whether it’s some unique characteristic about the what makes up the product (i.e., it doesn’t rust…even when submerged in salt water) or a particular service that you alone are offering (i.e., you’ll return every inquiry within 2 hours), it just needs to be a Wow.  Anything short of Wow, whatever it is, will be background noise and nothing more.  And if it’s a Wow, no matter how small it is, your marketing can make it big.

It’s time to do some corporate detective work and discover – or develop – your own Wow Factor.

And hey, did I mention the marketing director’s daughter who (HONK!!!!) … oh, never mind.

“Give It to the Amateurs” or Marketing by Abdication

I had a phone call with a previous client last week and during our talk she told me more than once how she felt like the role of her marketing department was being marginalized. Apparently, over the course of the last few years, various internal departments who relied on the marketing team to support their activities are now more or less telling them what they want said and how they wanted it represented in the various forms and channels. They’re playing Copywriter and Art Director. The reason why this has happened was summed up by what more and more people in organizations think: “Anyone can do Marketing.”

Unfortunately, there are people in C-suites around this country, self appointed ‘marketing experts’ on the web (who are generally selling something), etc., who believe that to be the case.  In fact, the marketing department is also occasionally to blame. How’s that? Well, have you noticed any of the job postings for marketing people? Some of the position descriptions are impressive and ask for proficiency in a number of specialties like SEO, CRM, social media, Photoshop, along with more traditional marketing areas.  And then comes the kicker: 2-4 years experience required. What??? Obviously, marketing management who wrote the job spec doesn’t view its role as that complicated or requiring suitable experience to do the job correctly. No wonder respect is hard to come by.

As we know, businesses depend on professional attorneys to oversee their legal affairs and experienced accountants to manage their finances. But some executive level business people don’t think twice about turning over their revenue-producing marketing efforts to someone who doesn’t have a clue what the 5 P’s of Marketing are. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say “Troy, I know you’re a engineer by training but you took a class in junior college about law, didn’t you? Hey, would you mind doing some international patent registration for us?” Yet a very similar conversation happens with marketing.

Misguided companies everywhere assign the marketing role to anyone who they think is “creative” or can write. And people in your company know people outside of your organization who fit that bill. So why should they think that you’re different? What’s been done to offset that perception?

In the organization I mentioned, the marketing department first let some things go that they shouldn’t have and ultimately as a result they’ve abdicated their role as experts and brand stewards.  They’re now seen as mere fulfillers.  In their zeal to make people happy, they took the thoughts offered up by the internal stakeholders as the easy way out in order to get through the work in their queue.  Having overseen a creative services team for a large financial services company, I know how this can happen and how tempting it can be when it “just needs to get done ASAP!”  But you’re just opening up Pandora’s box when you go down that road.  So what are a few ways for people to better understand the value that marketing offers? Here goes:

  1. Don’t accept work without setting up a meeting to discuss. If it’s important to get the work done, then it’s important for the time to be spent up front getting it right.
  2. Come to the meeting prepared with questions that need to be answered…thoughtfully, like, for starters, “Why does this need to be done?  What should be the outcome?” Show the value of why these questions are being asked.
  3. Bring research that can help in addressing the issue but also ask for research as well (this stops a lot of opinion-giving). Talk about ways that the work could be repurposed.
  4. Set clear expectations on a timeline because some of these people think it can done in a day or so (remember, this is the group that believes “anyone can do marketing”).
  5. Bring insights into the equation…not just facts. Facts are “on the surface” while insights are “beneath the surface” and give birth to the type of emotional messaging that connects with your audience.
  6. When the time comes to present your ideas/creative, make sure they’re really good. Not sort of good but really good. Anyone can rely on clichés (“For all your ______ needs.”) or rip offs (“Got ____?”) or poorly executed puns.
  7. Should things not go splendidly when the work is presented, do not let yourself be pushed around in order to accept the ideas initially offered up by the internal stakeholder. If you do, you’re really not accomplishing anything and in fact, you’re seen as a roadblock to getting work done quicker.
  8. Make the process standard operating procedure and non-negotiable and stick to it.
  9. Distribute finished work to various internal departments for awareness purposes

At the end of day, the value of your department or specifically, your job, is more at stake than you might imagine. A so-so marketing plan, a mediocre tradeshow booth or ad or collateral piece, a ho-hum status quo “integrated” campaign…they all make you look more like a fulfiller of marketing needs and less like the marketing professional that the company is counting on to drive revenue, awareness, brand preference, etc.  In fact, not showing value is the quickest way to have the work you do be discounted as nothing special.

So if your organization believes that “Anyone can do Marketing,” consider whether or not you have a role to play in that notion.

Lights, Camera, Boredom!

VideosI saw a video over the holidays and it got the better of me so much so that I have to say something because these types of videos just need to stop being created by “marketers.”

I’m talking about poorly conceived and produced online videos that we find on countless company websites and social media channels which are completely ineffectual.  You know the kind of video I’m talking about: it starts off looking like it was homemade and it never gets better; the on-camera ‘talent’ has none; it doesn’t know when to end; there’s an information overload going on which leads to boredom; no clear understanding of who the audience is; and most importantly, the “WOW factor” is completely hidden or missing.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what some companies have haphazardly slapped together in the name of “meaningful content video.”

As we all know, online video content has just exploded over the past couple of years and it’s going to keep getting bigger in the foreseeable future. For example, did you know….

  1. Each day, over 100 MILLION American watch online videos, an increase of 43% since 2010.
  2. About 46% of people say they’d be more likely to seek out information about a product or service after seeing it in an online video.
  3. 70% of B2B marketers use some form of online video with their overall strategies.

Yet we still have too many companies that create and post videos which are visual train-wrecks that unfortunately their customers and prospective customers will see.  With that in mind, and so that the next video you develop has a chance to be all that it can be, let’s talk about what good videos have in common:

  • Good videos contain real content
    • Good content should be engaging, relevant, and appropriate for the audience. Good content takes a stand. It has a voice, a point of view. It may be informative, useful, or funny but it always leaves you wanting more. Is the storytelling or narrative coherent and does it hold your attention? Does the content stay with you long after viewing it? Is the video like that of a woman’s skirt – short enough to be interesting but long enough to cover the subject?
  • Good videos are truly interesting from the viewer’s perspective
    • Internet viewing has created a world of people with ADHD.  Viewers will click the second they lose interest, so you have to hold their attention on every frame. Your scripting has to be based entirely on the viewer’s wanting to know “what’s in it for me?”  I’ve written about outside-in thinking.  Here’s where it really comes into play.
  • Good videos know who their audience is
    • Determine who you’re speaking to with the video. Are these new website visitors? Are they returning customers? What’s their mindset? How much do they know about your product or service already?  What do you want them to do next? What are their demographics?
  • Good videos have a purpose and know where they’ll “live”
    • Prior to the video having been developed, company/agency folks have decided how they want to share the video given their communication plan and goals. Synergies between different online social media channels (Facebook, YouTube) and other uses (emails, blog posts, landing pages, registration pages and corporate websites) have been determined…as have offline uses. Shooting and editing a video only to then decide what to do with it then creates unnecessary messaging and expense issues.
  • Good videos are leveraged
    • Good videos have relevant keywords incorporated into their descriptions and postings to insure they come up when searched.  Website or landing page URLs have been imbedded in the video for users to click (remember you WANT them to do something, right?).  The video is promoted through various means ranging from PR releases to e-newsletters, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
  • Good videos have high production values and a consistent look/tone/feel
    • Cheap-looking productions imply cheaply products from the company.  There is a level of production value that really good videos simply don’t dip below.  The audio and camera work for good videos is such that one can easily understand what’s being said and view the video without feeling the need to click away due to poor audio or shaky camera work. On-camera talent is professional. Users can easily spot a poorly done video, and if your video is not well produced, it suggests that you do not value your product/service.  Also, a consistency of look and branding in your video to the rest of your marketing efforts is a must.

So whether you’re creating a testimonial, promotional, “how-to” or other type of video, the idea is to make sure that people find it interesting, worth spending the time to watch and that it leads to the desired next step. Repeated viewings of your video generally indicates a positive overall experience. Repeatedly having your video, or future videos, being ignored means, well, you know what that means.

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