Marketing is Simples
It is. It always has been, always will. It’s about having a conversation. Sometimes with people you know, sometimes with people you don’t. Whether it goes well or not is entirely dependent on your banter. Make it interesting, relevant and engaging. Listen and respond.
In order to demonstrate the point behind this posting I’d like to use an example from everyday life and from a place where a lot of the best conversations take place… the pub. However, this isn’t exactly a shining example of how good pub banter can be but more of an abject lesson in how bad it can be…
I was having a few drinks the with a group of friends I’d not seen for a while, one of my female friends introduced me to her new boyfriend; let’s call him ‘Cuthbert’ for the purposes of this posting. Now Cuthbert was the walking, talking embodiment of an old school approach to marketing. He used interruption and a ‘shock and awe’ conversational style in order to converse with his target audience (myself and 4 others). He hijacked our conversation on more than one occasion and when he did quite quickly steered the conversation onto the topic of him, what he did and how generally great he was. Oh how the time just flew by.
Now this did work to a point, it certainly made us stop what we were talking about and listen to dear old Cuthbert prattle on about how his “hedge fund” investments were “really coming to the fore” and how (and I kid you not) “this was going to be the year of The Cuthbert.” Now I’m a relatively patient person when it comes to this sort of situation because there’s usually a good reason why people are like this and I’ll try and give them the benefit of the doubt. However, after 45 minutes of Cuthbert’s verbal battering of me and my friends we were alienated, disengaged and rapidly losing the will to live. His girlfriend (my friend) was oblivious and content that she’d left him to mix it up with the boys whilst she caught up with the girls in the group.
Cuthbert was the marketing bludgeon, ram raiding his way through a set of conversations in the hope of impressing us to a point where we really ‘bought into’ him, his philosophies and just how amazing he really was. Cuthbert was a poorly conceived direct mail campaign. Cuthbert was a garish press advertisement. Cuthbert was a badly angled press release.
If our high flying friend had taken the time to listen to his target audience (us), understand us and respond in a personal and relevant fashion we’d have formed a far better opinion of his product – which in this instance was Cuthbert himself. If he’d done this then the next time we’d have found ourselves in the pub with him we’d be far more likely to embrace him as our own, instead he will be avoided like the Nora Virus.
"Marketing is Simples."
He should have recognised that not one of the people in the group worked in finance and therefore tailored his conversational content and vocabulary accordingly. People won’t engage if they don’t understand you or even worse you make them feel stupid. Exactly the same can be said with regards to how you market yourself. Send communications that demonstrate that you understand me and value me, you know when I want to talk to you, you know where and how I want to have the conversation (email? SMS? print?) . Give your audience the chance to have the conversation, a one way relationship doesn’t really cut the mustard in this day and age.
I’d like to close with a glancing reference to a very current example of how a straight forward marketing strategy and concept can capture the imagination of its target audience and above all engage with it. Alexandr Orlov, the talking Meerkat and anti-brand hero of the ‘Compare The Meerkat’ campaigns has mass appeal across the CompareTheMarket.com customer base. He engages across multiple channels, be it social media, web, SMS, direct mail, television, etc, in all instances the consumer is prompted to engage and have interaction with the brand in a manner of their choosing. Alexandr is now synonymous with the main brand (whether you like him or not) and has become a trusted, fun and truly engaging brand ambassador that resonates whether you’re 16 or 60. Everyone can understand him and what he’s (Comparethemarket.com) trying to do, it’s transparent and in the words of the Meerkat himself it’s marketing that is ‘Simples’.
By James Smee.
Is Facebook the Biggest Waste of Time?
It would appear that the average user spends 4 hours and 39 minutes a month (based on June 2009’s statistics) on Facebook, which is the highest of any of the top ten online brands.
This is all according to the most recent Nielsen report and has been digested and commented on by those reliable chaps at Mashable.
Click here for the full article
Facebook losing money ?!
Today to my astonishment I read that facebook, commonly recognised as the biggest and most successful social media website in the world is currently running at a loss and has not yet generated a profit in any financial year since launch. What I think makes this even more astounding are some of the facebook statistics which they actively promote via their own website -
- More than 200 million active users worldwide
- More than 100 million users log on to facebook at least once each day
- More than two-thirds of facebook users are outside of education
- The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older
With this kind of consumer audience and what seems to be a fairly cost effective and simple advertising model, what is going wrong? Is too much time being spent on developing clever functionality and not enough focus being put into generating revenues?
If we are to believe what is reported, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg isn’t interested in making money, it’s more about connecting people (which I think is easy to say when you reported to be worth over $1.5 billion!!) but with his personal fortune depleting at a rapid rate, will his focus change?
In a recent interview the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones speaks to facebook Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg about facebook revenues, piracy and what the future holds.
Facebook losing money interview
However much Sheryl claims that it’s all part of their global plan, in my opinion facebook needs to get its business model in order before they miss the boat, in case they haven’t heard, Twitter has arrived!
Twitter: here today gone tomorrow?
From Barack Obama to Paris Hilton everyone is at it, Twitter has taken the digital world by storm, the human urge to know what other people are doing is fuelling the growth of the website (we are a nosy bunch!) but does it have a long term future?
A recent Nielson report called ‘Twitters or Quitters’ identifies that while the uptake in new Twitter accounts is monumental the drop out rate of users beyond the first month of usage is around 60%, on this basis the future may well look bleak unless Twitter are able to reduce this number considerably, getting members = no problem, keeping them = problem!
So why is it that so many people join the Twitter bandwagon and then decide it isn’t for them after just 30 days? Well we’ve got our thinking hats on in the office and come up with a few thoughts as to why this might be:
Facebook or Twitter – I think a great deal of web users are weighing up whether to dedicate their ‘web time’ to either facebook or twitter, which each vying for a large proportion of our time we feel that the majority of standard web users are making a choice of one or the other, and Facebook with it’s extensive functionality seems to be winning the way, albeit they are very different websites with different pro’s and con’s, but that’s another post!
Too much work – To begin with, twitter is great, you search and follow people with similar interests/views and can pleasure in reading their thoughts and what they are up to (the nosey side of us again!) However, very quickly as the numbers of followers and following increase, managing your twitter account can become a very time consuming and arduous task, there are a number of tools on the interner designed to help you manage your twitter account, Tweetdeck is one of them, a great app to help you organise your tweets, replies and direct messages, there are litterally hundreds more a selection of which can be found here.
Boredom – Ultimately everything has its shelf life and whilst knowing the ins and outs of everyones business is attractive to a lot of people it soon wears thin. Unless people have an underlying reason to use twitter i.e. personal gain, brand building/management for businesses I believe that their interest in twitter will quickly dwindle, not coming close to the long term attractiveness of sites such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace.
Social Media – Tool or Weapon?
So the media burbles on about Social media and it made me think – is this a tool by which we can meet our customers or is it just a weapon they can use to publicly humiliate us?