We have written before about how the word strategy is abused within the world of digital marketing and the temptation to rely on tactics, but one of the biggest casualties is often the Marketing Process. To explain it I need to define terms.
A marketing strategy is the big picture plan that looks at the resources available to you. That can include the budget, available channels, your skill set, the prevailing market conditions, distribution, your customers themselves and of course all of the 4 Ps from the marketing Mix. Collectively these form a battle plan of how to create customer satisfaction, product sales, and secure revenue for the organisation.
A Marketing process is the application of this strategy as a turnkey solution. It consists of a series of tactics. Imagine a machine that you turn the handle and it produces results out the other end, so that whenever the process is activated, you can predict the results of what will happen each time.
As an example, a process could consist of writing a blog post about your products and then promoting the blog post on Twitter and Facebook. Each time you do that, you can expect a number of people to click on the promotional links and read your blog post.
This is definitely a process, but it isn’t a strategy and nor is it strategic because it only gets people reading your blog post. It delivers nothing in product sales and it can’t legitimately claim to have secured any profit for the organisation. If it has a bill attached to the activity it has in fact cost you money. The best you can say is that a few people have now heard of you.
That kind of process can only be considered tactical and the sad fact is that tactics are what an awful lot of digital agencies offer to clients. The results can be hugely disappointing. As a strategic digital agency, we appreciates the need for bottom line results and work across the various digital channels such as Search, Social Media, User experience, Web Design, Email, eCRM, analytics, and advertising. Because of this we have a different proposition to make to clients than traditional tactical digital agencies. That can be a little difficult to appreciate because the focus for us is on customers and the bottom line rather than technical disciplines.
An awful lot of online activity results in a lot of noise that ultimately achieves very little. To avoid this. your online marketing strategy must place a focus on the commercial needs of the organisation and engages prospects, It should also plan the route through to a point where customers are created nurtured and retained. That is why an online marketing strategy should be the basis for online marketing processes, and should also be a priority for all organisations.
The decade is barely a few days old and already the marketing industry is in full swing. I read yesterday that display advertising is promoting itself with a series of ads designed to court controversy and prove its ability to cut through.
The ads feature controversial slogans such as “Working women make bad mothers”. Aside from the fact that my own mother was a working woman and still managed to be the best mother in the world ever (and I am prepared to commit an act of violence on anyone who tries to argue with me on this), I can’t help feeling that the campaign isn’t so much proving how display advertising can cut through and provoke discussion as proving that nothing cuts through quite like controversy in any medium. This was after all the corner stone that tabloid journalism was founded on and the Daily Mail has proved itself to be highly effective for over 100 years.
Advertising has been known to court controversy as well and achieve enormous cut through. I am reminded of the print ads and window displays used for Benetton in the 80s and 90s and the absolute storm that the All the colours of the World campaign caused in South Africa whilst the company became the fourth largest in Italy.
The difference between great advertising like that and simply making a controversial statement is that Benetton had values. There are many politicians that court controversy as well but unless they have values that others can admire the controversy tends to engulf them and damage them rather than lifting them to dizzying heights of success.
I therefore can’t help feeling that the display advertising campaign could have done with a bit more planning to actually prove its point but there again, I and many others are writing about it so maybe it has got something going for it.
This morning whilst enjoying my cup of tea and hangover curing sausage sandwich I flicked the television on and say what seemed to be a hastily put together piece on BBC Breakfast Time.
In it several people were discussing the Procter and Gamble ad for Olay. The ad is for the well known anti wrinkle treatment but the (still amazingly stunning) Twiggy had been airbrushed to hide her own wrinkles. The ad has been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), Procter & Gamble were apparently (according to the piece I saw) unaware of the level of photo retouching that had been applied and were quoted as saying that the level of airbrushing was inconsistent with their own policies.
The ad received two complaints via Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson’s anti airbrushing campaign which has now received over 700 complaints in total referring to a number of ads.
The fact that this story which I would normally only expect to read through my industry bulletin emails has made the nations news service is certainly indicative of the strength of feeling on this subject.
A few years ago Dove created the Evolution ad which won a host of awards at the time and is widely believed to be one of the finest Ads of the decade
This seems wholly out of step with the news today, I mean Twiggy is a national treasure and gorgeous, she doesn’t need any help persuading people how gorgeous she is.
It also underpins what we have been saying for ages
1) Consumers don’t believe what you tell them
2) Consumers don’t believe what you show them
3) They will believe what an acquaintance says no matter how little they actually know them
The Olay ad is a fine example as to why this attitude exists. It’s a wrinkle cream, and you showed someone with their wrinkles airbrushed out. What bit of that made sense and how silly do you feel about doing it? Naturally P&G didn’t authorise or suggest it, but somewhere in the chain someone decided that Twiggy without a touch up wasn’t enough, and that was a huge mistake.
The digital marketing world in which we inhabit forges relationships between consumers and brands and is centred on the customer. This ‘old advertising’ example is a megaphone shouting out the big idea (buy our product and you will look like Twiggy). I don’t think I can highlight any clearer the difference between the two approaches.
We think that this form of advertising not only doesn’t work, but is actually harmful to a brand, after all who wants to be branded as a liar?
As much as I think any improvement for display advertising is a good thing, I can’t help feeling that geographical targeting is a bit of a waste of time. On the one hand you have media that makes time and place irrelevant and then on the other you try and segment the audience based on the things that by nature of the media don’t matter. It’s something that intrinsically feels wrong to me. Surely it would be better to serve up ads based on site usage, so that if I started to look at online content about financial products then the online ads would be based on financial products, and if I started to look at geographic content then the ads would be relevant to that area.
Essentially I don’t think that display ads are direct response because they are intrusive. I’m not saying they are a bad thing because they do have a significant brand awareness role to play as part of an overall media multiplier but in and of themselves I cant help but feel that their role is to establish an ambience of brand around the content rather than demanding a click through.
Does this sound strange to anyone or is that how you view banner ads as well?
I see t all over the place online, and particularly on commercialised blogs. People have content articles which you start to read when suddenly a hover ad in a style sheet dims the article you are reading and demands that you interact with it, or close the article. Well guess what, I close the article and I suspect everyone else does as well.
Some of them do at least have a close option on them but others are so badly written (or so determined to get a click and a bit of commission at any cost) that the rest of the site becomes useless and pointless for the visitor.
This kind of advertising isn’t a million miles away from the shop assistant who immediately accosts you and pesters you from the moment you walk into their shop until the moment you get fed up and storm out vowing never to go back.
In both cases there is absolutely no engagement, and the only thing in their eyes is dollar signs. It is also an attitude that is more likely to actually prevent a sale from happening than pretty much anything else
Any sale is completed by consent from both sides. These types of site are not destined to produce any real revenue for the owner because the vast majority of visitors will close down and go somewhere else. As a result any useful content that the site has amassed is completely wasted.
We know that Google’s Adwords work because they give you exactly what you are interested in at exactly the time you are looking for information on it. Compare that to an Ad that isn’t targeted and won’t go away and interrupts you whilst you are researching something else. How likely is that ad to succeed?
As a professional I am incredulous that people persist with these tactics and would urge everyone to sit and think about what they were doing. There is a way to market, advertise and promote yourself online and it works. Why would you want to pick techniques that didn’t work?
There is a huge amount of debate going on the web suddenly where everyone is talking about Strategy. Most of it is concerned with Social Media and both singular, (Strategy) and plural (Strategies) are being bandied around. The thing is that most of the time the people saying it are not talking about strategy (either singular or plural) at all. What they are talking about is tactics.
Just so we get this right. A strategy is the grand plan, and in marketing terms it has a business goal. That business goal might be to increase sales (and if we are talking about digital media I would argue that any strategy that doesn’t have this goal is shooting too low), it could be to raise brand awareness, gather more prospects, increase customer retention (which by nature should include an element of increasing sales as well). The point is that it is tangible. It is related to the business as a whole and says “This is what success looks like and this is how we are going to measure it. I like to apply an acid test when I define a digital marketing strategy and that is to ask myself “Would David Ogilvy agree with me and understand what I was talking about”. It’s amazing how focused this little mantra can make you.
Now at no point in defining my strategic goal have I used the words blogging, Facebook, Twitter, email, eCRM, display advertising, social media, search, SEO, SEM, Website, user experience, usability, accessibility, backlinks, Google, Bing, ad exchanges, PPC or any of the other terms that make up the digital marketing armoury. That’s because these are not strategies, they are tactics. Another dead giveaway for when people don’t understand the difference seems to me to be when they start talking about strategies in the plural. It’s a pretty intense and complicated thing for a campaign to achieve one strategic goal so bandying them around like baubles on a Christmas Tree is a dangerous thing to do and could quite likely lead to a confused campaign.
Once the strategic goals have been set my next task is to look at the customer. Another little mantra I like to use comes from my days as a drama student.
(As an aside, I was probably the worst drama student in the world but there were lots of extremely cute girls that were also drama students and I was in a minority of heterosexual men so this suited my strategic goal at the time and enabled me to employ many tactics to achieve it.)
The mantra takes Stanislavsky’s seven questions of An Actor Prepares and refers them to my customer.
Who are they?
Where are they?
When is it?
What do they want?
Why do they want it?
How will they get it?
What must be overcome?
There is another three that I like to add in as well which are:
What will they do with it once they have got it?
What do they currently think?
What do I want them to think?
This paints a very clear picture for me of my two ends. I know what I want to achieve and how to measure it and now I know a lot about the people who are going to help me do it.
At this point I start to look at my tactics. I look at how to contact them, and I start to plan the journey we need to undertake together in order to reach my strategic goal. It’s only at this point that I will start to talk about the elements of digital marketing that can help us, and there is absolutely nothing to gain by limiting myself to one tactic. I want to use as many as I can and as many as the budget will allow.
This process keeps me focused and ensures that everything I do has the goal in mind.
I suspect it’s no different to a boxer whose strategic goal is to knock his opponent out in the fifth round. He looks at the strengths and weaknesses of his opponent, studies previous fights and looks for ways to achieve his goal. He then decides to tactically use his jab and concentrate on body work. He plans the journey the fight will take so that he is ready in the fifth to land his big punch and achieve his strategic goal. Never will he talk about his body work strategy.
We have been approached a lot of times by potential clients who do not have very much budget and our policy is to help wherever we can, and to be honest about where we can’t. One of the biggest misconceptions that seems to come up is that you can perform parts of the overall mix and expect it to work. You can’t, or at least you shouldn’t. The interactive Mix works because it deals with a cause and effect basis that engages with consumers may not be aware of your products and services but are open to finding out more about them. It does so using techniques that have been proven to work but which are never quite the same for each client but which rely on careful measurement and analysis throughout each stage to ensure that the results are kept optimum. We can work across a number of budgets but the ROI we deliver is in terms of actual sales and revenue which we create demand for through the process
It isn’t enough to simply build up the database, it is what you then do with the database that makes our techniques deliver. We build up trust and begin to test offers whilst segmenting the data based on a series of criteria. Its all about building relationships between clients and customers, and to build on this through to first sale, repeat and regular sale and then referral.
When we have created the process you will then be able to see it working for you as an overall marketing process, so that for an agreed spend you will already have an idea of how much money you are going to make.
We do pride ourselves in being different and offering up a joined up digital marketing solution because we don’t actually see too many other agencies doing that. At the same time there is an argument raging about whether digital agencies are grown up enough to act as lead agency for clients. We think that the reason many digital agencies are not able to offer this is because they are still focused on providing tactical solutions rather than looking at the strategic marketing process that is needed for each client and offering a joined up solution to meet it. I’ve been having a lot of discussions online about this very subject and the longer the conversations go on the more I am convinced that the solution is to look at all digital media as a strategic toolbox, and not focus on providing individual disciplines.
A lot of this isn’t necessarily the fault of the industry because most agencies started out as tactical suppliers of the shiny new thing, whether it was web design fifteen years ago, or display advertising twelve years ago, or search ten years ago, or email eight years ago, or analytics seven years ago or social media five years ago.
That made a lot of sense then because the accepted sensible way to do things was get in bed with an offline brand or advertising agency and become the digital guys for them whilst getting introduced to a great client list and charging whatever the market would pay. Digital Agencies were the remora fish to a bunch of sharks, cleaning off whatever needed to be done and some have grown extremely large doing it. That symbiotic relationship now though is challenged because clients have heard that this digital media lark is cheaper and works better than the offline stuff. Of course Ad and brand agencies are still telling the world not to panic and that they are still the top of the food chain. More over they are still looking at the world in terms of the way that they have always done things, and therein lays the problem. The world isn’t like that that anymore and it won’t work.
Clients want it and digital agencies have to stop thinking tactically if they are going to provide it. Its taking the strategic approach that will give digital the showcase it deserves and deliver the benefits to clients.
It used to be said that ‘the big idea’ that permeated agency output was all important and that the channel was secondary. What was meant was that a good idea would translate to any media (although they usually meant TV) and so it was just a case of adapting it. I’ve sat in meetings in rooms painted with blue skies (see what they did there?) whilst the great and the good of the creative team argued about the difference between pantone colours 2592 and 2602. (As an aside if anyone can tell me the intrinsic difference between the two and why it’s worth two hours of two highly paid individual’s life arguing about it then I’ll buy the drinks).
I felt at the time that this was all a bit ridiculous and far too up its own arse and I am even more convinced of it now.
Then along came digital, and everyone proclaimed that it was just another channel. I’ve been guilty myself of towing this party line to make sure that the delicate sensibilities of the creative department were not offended and they didn’t suddenly erupt in a re-enactment of mount Vesuvius as it destroyed Pompeii. I know better now than to play that game, and would much rather be the little boy asking why the emperor has no clothes on.
Here is an analogy to explain what I mean.
There was a hierarchy of things, with brand and mass advertising occupying the high seats of power on the client’s right hand. From there came PR and direct and a multitude of below the line suppliers. Then there were the dogs of digital who padded around on all fours sniffing the distinguished guests and looking for the scraps, whilst everyone complimented them on their intelligence and fine breeding. All was well in the universe and everyone knew their place whilst the people were told to admire the fine clothes of the emperor.
Then came the knock on the gates and the people of the kingdom rose up to create havoc in the order of things.
The very definitions that denoted an agency’s place in the hierarchy is vanishing quicker than the new receptionist and account manager at an agency Christmas party. Consumers don’t care if the media they interact with is called Brand building, advertising, direct response, PR, experiential or anything else. What they care about is whether it engages with them and facilitates a relationship with two way communication.
Does this emperor truly care about and listen to his people? The megaphone of power marketing is being ignored, and the royal decrees that it issued are now rejected as twaddle. Moreover, there are mutterings that are spreading throughout the kingdom that the emperor is wearing no clothes.
Now the people are demanding that their needs and experiences are taken into account because they know best what they want to wear. Consumers have overtaken agencies in knowing what they want to achieve and what they want to get out of the media they consume.
So where does this leave us? The high table is in confusion and in the general melee the dogs are having a wonderful feast whilst the people cheer.
The actual point is that we will still need creative and creative ideas but instead of thinking of it in a simplex manner the creative will now be conceived with the added ability for customers to interact with it as they want to, and consumers will surprise everyone by how they choose to interact with it. This is what we term as ‘duplex creative’. If something is duplex it is two way and it flows. Simplex is the advertising of the 80s, semi duplex assumed that the advertiser could choose the direction that it was led, but only when you reach full duplex communication is the customer’s needs actually served. It can go either way and be led by either party. Communication is the secret to all relationships and is definitely the key to customer relationships, because the focal point is the customer.
This is why I believe that the old ways are gone forever. Naturally I think that the digital dogs will inherit the places at the top table but I also think that old media itself will morph into new and exciting forms of media. What I hope I have seen the last of is someone looking at me and saying “but what is the big idea?”, and be under any illusion that what they are saying is intelligent. The big idea is that we are going to be brave enough to interact on a personal level with customers.
I spent a day at Ad Tech a few weeks ago in the company of one of my favourite New Media Age types. We wandered around and caught presentations, discussed technologies and generally got a feel for the marketplace as it stands right now. One of the big buzzes was about Ad Exchanges. For those that do not know about them, you can read a good description of what an Ad Exchange is and what it does.
What it amounts to is that display ads are suddenly becoming a lot more targetable. Ad exchanges let you target your ads based on a series of criteria such as geographical location and connection speeds. The aim is to cut out the number of wasted impressions that are delivered, and only deliver ads to the marketplace that is geographically relevant and content which connection speeds can handle. The claims being made are that response rates (click through) are increased by 50%. Now colour me unimpressed but on a lot of sites I’ve seen this would increase click through from 0.02% to 0.03%. Still not amazing.
Also I am yet to be convinced by media that still charges by the impression instead of the results it produces. That’s the acid test and the one that I suspect will shut most Ad Exchange and media owners up. Are you prepared to charge on a CPC basis, and if you are how does the price you put on it compare to a Google Adword click?
Suddenly I hear silence across the void. When the media is of suitable quality that media owners feel able to offer it on a CPC basis then we may have something to talk about.
The simple truth is that whilst this is a very good step forward by display advertising it doesn’t alter the fact that the ads themselves are invasive and distracting for users who are actually there to view the content. The reason Google works is because it gives me an ad for the thing I am looking for at exactly the time I am looking for it. Do display ads do that? Are they spliced at the DNA level to the content they accompany? Most of the time I don’t think so. Display advertising still is yet to move beyond the realm of brand based advertising. It isn’t direct response and despite this leap forward with Ad exchanges it isn’t likely to become direct response any time soon. It will help your email produce better results and your eCRM campaign will love Ad Exchanges as part of a media multiplier but when it comes to getting clicks. Our advice would be stick with Google.
Iv e started seeing the ad for the new Windows phone appear on TV. Now I know that I do tend to do a bit of Microsoft bashing but I can’t get away from the fact that some of the icons that the ad is claiming as ‘Windows stuff’ actually hasn’t got anything to do with Windows whatsoever. Twitter and Facebook are given very high prominence but they are websites and can be viewed by a myriad of browsers on a plethora of operating systems. To claim it as ‘windows stuff’ is just plain wrong. Fair enough it was showing you Windows specific functions, but it isn’t. I just can’t help feeling that this is an example of a company that thought that the desktop was everything when the world has moved on to a cloud environment.
If you haven’t seen it, have a look and judge for yourself.
