Ouch! As a marketer I am sure this figure does sit well with you. Yet as marketers we are not sure what our marketing return is.

There is the old saying that 50% of advertising work? We seem to be happy to go with this and every day we see marketers dedicating their budgets to the advertising gods.

So What’s The Real Cost Of Advertising?

As part of my research for www.makingmobilemediawork.com, I came across Graham Brown. Graham Graham Brown is director of Youth Research Partners in London who offers really keen insights into the young minds of the future.

He has a weekly webinar, in which he recently shared some really scary stats:

• an 18-year-old has received 800,000 marketing messages in their life
• they now tune out 95% of all traditional advertising
• about 70% of adverting messages are not trusted [seen stats ranging here from 30-70%]

The Advertising Gods Are Nothing More Than Your Toilet Drain

The numbers by themselves are really scary and if they don’t make you sit up and take a serious look at how you market then I don’t know what will.

But to put this into context and to try and understand the impact on this lets step back and put our marketing into context.

The Brand Equation

As marketers were taught a very simple equation for a brand strategy:

Brand = Product + Identity + Mass Media Broadcast

As an example Colgate toothpaste took fluoride toothpaste, essentially a commodity, and created the idea of Fresh Breath Confidence. This idea has been pushed out through every single different communication medium that has been available to Colgate.

It’s quite clear when we look at the brand value of Colgate toothpaste that this approach has worked very well up till now. The brand is worth It is worth billions of dollars.

But Not To 18-Year-Olds

Colgate can spend all they want to buy an 18 years attention but 95% will ignore them and there just isn’t the trust or belief in what a brands say anymore.

If we look at the big four South African banks they are in exactly the same position. Their brand equation looks like this:

• Standard Bank = Bank + Moving Forward*
• ABSA = Bank + Today, Tomorrow, Together
• Nedbank= Bank + Make Things Happen
• FNB = Bank + How Can We Help You

*This was [inspired, motivated, involved] and [simpler, better, faster] created by confused marketing gurus

There really is nothing that differentiates these four banks and nothing that is going make an 18 year old choose one over the other?

Certainly when you look at the options that are available, one will resonate more than the others. But this has nothing to do with the banks advertising or anything to do with the brand idea.

Most people don’t believe these ideas when they are broadcast through traditional media. I don’t and I’m quite sure you don’t either.

But Wait … It’s About Social Media … Dummy!

You would think so when your target market is an 18 year old. But it is not and is the mistake that most marketers are making when it comes to the new media platforms like online and mobile.

Let’s go back to the banks and look at the different media platforms that these banks are using. They are not shy and they are using every media available to them. They are ticking all the boxes:

• Above The Line
• Below The Line
• PR
• Online
• SEO
• Social Media
• Internal Communication
• Sponsorship
• Mobile

Why Broadcasting Through Social Media Will Not Work

The adverting agency is approaching these new technologies using the same traditional media approach:

Broadcast (or propaganda).

The banks communication approach is to take their big idea and push it through every single media that they can find.

Their approach to Twitter is exactly the same as their approach to TV. They believe that they can capture people’s attention, and that people’s will believe what they say. Not so anymore.

Today there is a different marketing reality where:

what your customer says about your brand is far more important than what you say about it.

So Let’s Check Your ROI?

If we take Graham Brown’s figures and apply them to the four banks, it is clear that this approach is not the way to go. Here’s the return you will get on your investment:

• 100 000 customers
• 5% hear you = 5 000
• 30% believe you = 1 500

Four banks targeting 1 500 customers? Spending how much? With the maximum potential return of 1.5%.

Sh!t  - oh excuse me – Ouch!!!!

So, what do we do?

Forget Technology. It Is How Your Customer Thinks That’s Changed

It is quite clear that marketing has changed because how our customers think has changed. And here is the major problem. Most marketers see this as change in media platforms or technology rather than a change in customer thinking.

Its why you see major brands posturing themselves and calling themselves customer centric:

• Through one Twitter account for thousands of customers
• Putting up their latest adverts on you tube for you to drool over (yes, I know, you just cannot wait for the new Standard Bank advert to published).
• Having a call centre that is disempowered to solve your problems.
• Creating business process and systems that ignore their customer’s needs.
• And so on …

When I look at this example above its really clear that marketers have a really long way to go. Maybe more importantly business has a long way to go. Change is hard and as humans we default to what is familiar. This is understandable.

But it’s time some new marketing rules.

The New Rules For Marketing

Here are my five new rules of marketing (and for running a business):

• Your Brand Is A Mindset: Your brand is worth something, because your customers believe it is worth something. This is why Colgate is worth billions – and it is not because of the fluoride toothpaste they use or about your product, features and benefits. It is about what your product does for your customers and how that allows them to express themselves and tell their own story.
• The Desire Already Exists: So stop trying create it with really expensive advertising campaigns. It’s time to channel it, leverage it. It’s time to get your customers involved.  This means you really need to understand how your customer thinks and understand the micro-niche is within your larger market segments.
• Contextual integration: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Whether you use TV, Print, Twitter, Facebook is not the point. It’s time to start talking with your customers rather than at your customers, and become part of a broader conversation that is relevant and meaningful. It is about being contextually relevant through every single touch point.
• Paid Versus Earned Media: Your customers are not listening to you anymore. And what they say about you is far more important than what you say about you. You need to get them on board by creating such a positive, mind-blowing customer experience that they keep coming back to you for more — and they bring their friends with them. (interesting post on Nielson stats by Loic Le Meur on this)
• Loyalty: The objective of your marketing campaign is to create customers who are loyal and keep coming back for more. So stop focusing on awareness, AR’s and any other relevant measurement. It’s not going to help you. Focus on customer loyalty.

It A Golden Opportunity

This shift in how your customer thinks is a golden opportunity. It is there for the taking. All you need to do is stop being a technician and start becoming a marketer. I will leave you with a quote from Graham Brown’s Website from Seth Godin that gives you a clue where to start:

“Don’t waste your energies selling to the unconverted. Find the 10% already sold on your brand and sell to them. They will take care of the rest.”

We call this Fansourcing … And thanks to Graham Brown for his unwitting contribution …

The traditional media eco-system is going through a major metamorphosis. At first glance it would seem that this is largely driven by the changes of an evolving internet platform and mobile media — something where I think many marketers are taking huge strain just to manage the effects it is having on their brand and media strategies.

Changing Consumer Behaviour

Personally, I think this strain is more about the change in how our consumer are making decisions today. And I think this is the flaw where most media strategies fail.

There is no doubt that there is a symbiotic relationship between the evolving multimedia platforms and consumer behaviour. How consumers make decisions and what influences these decisions has  radically evolved from the first TV commercial and marketer’s ability to refine the advertising process.

Today, TV commercials do not have the credibility that they used to. As consumers, we no longer dogmatically believe what a brand says about itself to be true. Now we believe what other consumers say and we the ability to find information in different ways and validate what we want through a peer review system.

How Billions of Dollars Are Being Flushed Down The Toilet

All I have to do is go online validate if I am making the right choice about a product I want. Lets say its a new printer that I am about to buy. It looks like a good product and I know it has a good brand name.

What happens when I use my Blackberry, click through amazon to see what other people say and find 10 bad reviews? I replace the product with one that has good reviews.

For the brand that could mean millions of dollars of advertising investment and years of brand building down the tube. Ouch. And if your consumer believes that you are not being upfront and honest you will pay a severe price.

The Fragmented Media Eco-System

Given this shift in how consumers make buying decisions and the role that Internet and cell phone technology plays in our media, the  traditional media eco-system has changed. We have to include these when we look at our communication strategies and the time will come when they may play a larger role than TV.

In the diagram below I’ve outlined a simple, traditional structure, and how disconnected the mobile and internet platforms are to the traditional structure.

Why a Disconnected Internet?

As marketers we have a degree of understanding of what the Internet can do for our communication but I don’t think most marketers have a full grasp of the extent of this tool. Many still see it as a simple communication device and do not see it as a relationship building tool.

After all it is a key driver in shifting how we as consumers make buying decisions today. And you cannot apply traditional above the line media strategies to this tool.

Mobile marketing is not even in the picture yet. Most brands and media agencies are still trying to figure it out. For me this was highlighted when I saw one of the Big Four Banks in South Africa advertising on an adult content site – and I really do not think it was deliberate .

The internet and mobile media offer us remarkable communication opportunities, yet how do we leverage this?

Dispelling Some New Media Myths

To leverage these tools we first have to dispel three myths that I think are confusing how we apply them:

1. The idea of emerging media:

There is no emerging going on here. Its evolved well beyond this and even the phrase “new marketing” is misleading.

Facebook, with its 400+ million subscribers, is not an emerging media — nor is Twitter. The reality of mobile media is that there will be more smart phone sales than PCs and notebooks by the year 2013. This is not emerging or new.

The idea of the Internet and Mobile media is emerging as a misconception. They have evolved into serious contenders in the competition for advertising spend. As marketers, we need to understand these mediums. This is a non-negotiable – e just have to catch up.

2. Traditional media is dead:

No, in fact quite the opposite. Advertising in the traditional way through TV, print and radio is not nearly as effective as it used to be, but this does not mean it is dead. There is still a huge opportunity of integrating the traditional platforms with mobile media, the Internet and how consumer decision making has evolved.

3. Fragmented platforms:

A key part of Google strategy is the idea of device agnostic. It won’t matter if you’re on a cell phone, smart phone, Ipad, net book, notebook or PC. The platform will become “generic” and the experience will be the same irrespective of how you connect. Its just a matter of time …

One Platform To Rule Them All

For me, the key part of understanding this evolving media platform is to understand how consumers make decisions today. After all this really is the key objective of what we are trying to do as marketers. We are trying to get consumers to make a decision that is favorable towards our brands.

There are six issues that I think we, as marketers and media planners, need to get on top of:

1. The speed of change

When TV was introduced in 1973 it was really easy to get our heads around it. It was a static media. Not so for mobile media or the Internet. Blogs was game changing. Facebook was game changing. Twitter was game changing. What’s next? Who Knows?

As marketers we have to look and see what’s influencing our customers decision making process.

2. The experience is everything

90% of the decisions we make are irrational. They are driven by how we feel, and the environments we grew up in. When we make a decision – it defines us as a person. We are going to make decisions that reflect who we are and that will give us the best experience.

The key objective for any marketer is to create a very powerful experience. This has to be the end result of the communication strategy. This makes marketing a far more complicated process than it ever was before for three reasons.

• We have to make sure what we communicate and the underlying  brand promise ties up with the actual experience
• The experience is now a fundamental part of the communication ecosystem
• We can no longer control the flow of information and who says what about our brands

This is why change management and marketing are becoming far more integrated than ever before. It also why customer service is really a change management process. And it has an impact on what is communicated.

Yes, our role as marketers is changing

3. Live needs replaces implied or explicit needs

In the traditional model, we identify what we presume are the customers implied and explicit needs are, and then market to these needs.

Yet, the pace of change and the increased complexity has become the norm of our lives makes us  short-circuiting to what is familiar. When we find something that is familiar to us, our decision-making process is a lot quicker and a lot more decisive. There is less risks – even if the payoff is a bit more discomfort.

We also know that as our customers move through their experience with us, their needs evolve and change based on what they require a specific point in time. What drives a pre-purchasing decision is very different to our post-purchasing decision.

The communication strategy needs to start understanding this and build in the ability to communicate to a persons live needs.

4. Paid versus earned media

In the traditional model we paid for our communication. This has changed. In 2004 Dell’s word-of-mouth was the equivalent of $220 million worth of advertising.

This is advertising that they earned. They did not pay for it or ask for it. But they did create it through the experience that they created for the customers.

Your communication strategy cannot ignore this component with the Internet and mobile media. These are the key drivers of word-of-mouth today and both have to be built into your strategy [remember the printer and Amazon review example above].

5. Measurement

Half your advertising is wasted, you just don’t know which half. Yet, today I think this is probably not true any more and you are probably wasting close 75%. You just don’t which 75%. We have systems and tools that give us a guideline but now we have an added complexity.

How we measure traditional media and these new media platforms is different.

As marketers, we haven’t got our heads around it and is something that we need to understand in a more comprehensive way. This is something that will evolve over time as some very clever people spend more time working on it.

6. Language

Mobile media is still very much in a techie phase and not to many traditional marketers have mastered this platform. This may seem like a non issue but there needs to be a common language around mobile media and techie speak with what we as marketers understand.

These two different languages, and this is a evolutionary process of understanding these different platforms as they become more integrated. It’s really easy to be confused.

The Map Towards Media Integration

In the diagram below I have taken the original traditional media ecosystem and integrate mobile and online into it.

What is really different here is the “pull factor” that is created by the customer experience and their ability to talk to each other. As marketers, we have to build this process into our strategy so that our customers live needs become more relevant to us and our ability to deliver what they’re looking for.

I see three real big challenges in getting this right:

1. Creating the Experience: The first is getting your entire organisation on board to create this experience. our staff need to understand the customer journey and their role in influencing the key drivers of each of the major touch points. I’m quite sure some people be astounded by the idea that customer journey process is so integrated in the communication strategy but I just do not see any other way. (Of course this is also a matter of degrees, and how far you want to take your communication strategy to make it really affective).
2. The “Pull Factor”: The “pull” impact that your customer experience has on your strategy and your ability to integrate the experience into your marketing strategy. This is not going to be easy, and it is something that is starting to take off in the marketing field.
3. The “Push Factor”: The marketers ability to change how they think about the traditional media platforms, and the impact that their “push” strategies have on the experience.

In Conclusion

While I may have created two rather simple “pictures”, it will take awhile for most marketers to re-educate themselves and create strategies that take into account all the different communication channels available. It certainly something that I will be writing more about on this blog.

Also, the idea that our customers can potentially be our greatest communication asset is a really exciting prospect. And to close off with you with this video of a Heineken campaign in Italy that I think is just superb marketing and part of the process of integrating the different mediums.

Picture Credit at Top: Dr.Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola, Peter Chou, CEO of HTC,
Andy Rubin, vice president of engineering for Google,
and Mario Quieroz, vice president of product management for Google.

In my last post, I gave a viral campaign about a 0.0001% chance success  to get you earned media. This is not a very good rate but does this discount the idea or value of a viral campaign? Or is their simply another way to do it that is more effective? Is there a way to create very effective earned media?

Yes, we think there is. But first we need to see the flaw.

Where’s the flaw?

What marketers want to do is go big. We put a big budget, big idea, big advertising marketing campaign together and hope that we get the return? We want to get the word out to as many people as possible. We want to have the widest reach and the highest possible frequency.

And why not. It’s worked in the past so why should it not continue to work. Above the line was very successful for a long time and successfully built many brands.

But big is not the answer anymore.

Focus, not big, is the key

Kevin Kelly wrote an article that an artist only needs 1000 true fans to be successful. They do not need a huge audience but rather an audience that can sustain them and keep them in paint.

The reality with the new digital space is that a niche is now a sustainable business and that we can make a very comfortable living from a niche. The idea of a niche has been transformed to mean a sustainable quantity.

Yet is this true offline as well?

We all know about the 80/20 rule. It applies to your customers as well. If you had to do analysis of your customer base you would find that about 80 % of your profits come from 20 % of your customer – or there about. If you had a large product range you would find the same true.  80% of your revenue would come from 20% of your products.

I know this from experience when I was in industrial marketing. I was tasked to cull some products and through my analysis I found that I could comfortably kill about 5000 products out of 7000. Of course the sales guys fought me all the way. They would tell me each product has strategic value and was a loss leaser. The only problem was we were making a loss and the factory was under huge pressure to perform.

Back to communication

So if we take this idea and look at our communication strategy, how many people do you need to reach for your communication to work? Not as many as you think you need. The big scatter gun approach is not very effective.

Focus on Loyalty, not the big idea

By segmenting your customer base into promoter, passive and detractor customers you are already ahead of the game. These categories that were developed by the net promoter.

Now focus on your promoters

One of the key attributes of the promoter is word of mouth (or earned media).  This is your viral campaign foundation. They will talk about you, tell their friends and come back for more. And what makes them come back for more? The customer experience.

The customer experience will drive your viral campaign

When your customer experience works, is compelling and makes a difference, then you will win. You will start to build incrementally and start to turn detractors into promoters. They will start to bring their friends and profits will increase. You will get earned media.

When you are looking to do a viral campaign here are some guidelines:

• Just cos you can does not mean you should
• Target who’s relevant to you rather than the whole world (i.e. I won’t know about cos I am irrelevant to your bottom line)
• Build incrementally and allow it to become self sustaining
• Practice what you preach and make sure you deliver

What makes this hard is that the customer experience is really about change. If it sucks right now this means you have to do it differently. This means you have to change how you do things, which become s a people issue.

The customer experience makes this a deep process rather than a publicity stunt. And if you can manage it from that perspective you should do ok.

You want a viral campaign. This is the golden nugget of earned media. And to say that your viral campaign will fail would be misleading. Truth is, I reckon it has about a 0.001% potential of success.

This is why my estimate is a fairly accurate one:

The two sides of potential

The first way to see the potential of something is to use a bell curve; where you take the law of averages and see what the probability is that you will succeed. Using this it’s very easy to say (with accuracy) that we won’t see a 20 foot man walking down the streets – well not in our lives.

The other way is based on the idea the long tail. This is how knowledge and ideas work. Let’s take books sales. JK Rowling will collectively sell more books than next 1000, or even 10 000 people next to her.

Successful Viral Campaigns

A viral campaign is the idea of the long tail, yet in reverse. Chris Anderson has explained the way information is mapped on the internet. The long tail looks at a historical view, and it does not behave in the way of a bell curve.

A viral campaign is the opposite side of the coin. It looks forward and has the opposite mapping to the long tail and works in the opposite direction.

The principle is very simple: If we look at Google, books sales on Amazon or any other distribution pattern online, about there is a very strong clustering of ideas in the fat head.

So we may find the term Barack Obama will be searched for 1.2 odd million time a month. Yet the Jacob Zuma (South African president) will be searched 33 odd thousand times per month. This is the same pattern with book s sales. Dan Brown’s Da Vinci code will sell 1000′s more than some obscure author who wrote the alchemical and mystical properties of copper.

This is how ideas work. It’s how they are distributed. They do not behave like a bell curve.

A viral campaign is a forward looking idea. You are trying to get a whole lot of people to adopt your idea, to get excited about and spread it for all its worth. You are trying to get earned media for free.

Humans are not radical

Yet as humans our behaviour is not that radical. Most of us do not wake up in the morning looking for viral campaigns to promote. We wake up and share what is totally relevant to us and that we feel worth sharing. We would not consider 99% of what we see worthy of sharing.

So where does that leave the agency promoting the idea of a viral campaign and trying to get earned media?

Did you hear about the 1000 failures for the 1 success?

No you did not. Your agency did not tell you. And this does not leave you in a good spot. They are lying to you; misleading you if they tell you they can get you a viral campaign. They want is your money and you take it to them with the expectation of success.

They tell you that they can do it. They tell you that you are going to get the results you expect. They are saying, with 100% certainly that they will do it for you. Even if it was a 50% certainty it would be misleading.

You see the real problem here is we see an old spice campaign that worked but we do not see the 1000′s that did not. We see the potential of the old spice campaign and start to salivate. We start to believe that earned media is easy to get

But if we had to look at this based on a real risk analysis, would you risk your money for a 1/1000 potential return on your money. No, I doubt, I would not.

This is not a go do post. It’s a go and think about it post. Here are three Ted Talks I originally saw on Mashable and convey an important message for your customer strategy and how you create earned media:

It is how we socialise and not technology that we need to focus on.

What makes us human is the ability to reason, to think. Information and knowledge is the raw material of this process.

The internet makes this available in abundance. It has empowered individuals like never before. We have moved from passive consumers of information to become active producers of knowledge. Just think Wikipedia and Google’s quest to bring you the most relevant, high quality information it can and how you go about your customer strategy.

• Clay Shirkey argues that information is now created on mass, is ubiquitous, cheap and global. Citizens are real time journalists that have social power and the real connections are between individuals rather than companies and brands.
• Stefana Broadben argues that the internet has made us more personal and that we can now become more connected.
• Seth Godin argues in his presentation below that one person with an idea and enough passion can change the world, can create a movement. It’s the tribe that matters now.

And given that the internet is becoming more mobile, more device agnostic and more accessible, this will have greater implications for how we live – and how you set up your customer strategy in the future. Something to think about .

You can find the original article on Mashable.

There is a symbiotic relationship between technology and social change. Technology changes how we socialise and how we socialise inspires new technology. It empowers us as individuals, groups and organisations ands improves customer relationships.

Yet, while it’s very easy to see new technology develop, it is can be very hard to see the social impact it has. Take Twitter as an example. Suddenly it arrived. We really saw its social power with the floods in China and how earned media can work.

Of course marketers want to harness this power to develop customer relationships. Yet how do we create a China flood around our brands?

The first thing we do is default to the technology. We see a flood of Twitter accounts, Facebook pages and so on, open.

Yet technological and social changes are two really different things and have one remarkably different characteristic:

• Social change is exponential and goes up. It evolves, grows, expands, and learns. It is about consciousness and subject to evolution. There is no shelf life and its potential is unlimited. Your customer relationships are subject to social change.
• Technological change is limited and goes down. It is a physical thing and subject to the law of entropy. It deteriorates and has a very definite shelf life. Something will replace it. It is a series of bell curves where the new technology replaces the old.

The lesson for marketers (and business)

The idea of marketing in the 1960 was very simple:

Brand = Product + Idea.

This was then broadcast through print, radio and TV. It was a one-to-many conversation where the message was expensive, done by professionals and scarce.

Yet fast forward to the 2010. The internet has taken these one-to-many medium and merged them into a many-to-many medium. Your consumer of information is now a producer of information as it is cheap, easy and there is plenty of it. This makes Brand = Product + Idea irrelevant.

This question of relevance is the cross roads we are now sitting at. And business need to look at how social change is changing their business rather than how technology has changed business.

Marketing must mirror thinking, not technology

Marketing is about converting sales. This is why we need to design our marketing strategies around our customers thought process rather than a technological process or a structured methodology.

To understand the difference in thinking just read the two exerts from the 1960′s when the marketing methodology of B=P+I was developed.

This first almost seems a prank when you see how archaic the thinking, yet we know there was a time when women were expected to behave in this way:

When retiring to the bedroom, prepare yourself for bed as promptly as possible. Whilst feminine hygiene is of the utmost importance, your tired husband does not want to queue for the bathroom, as he would have to do for his train, but remember to look your best when going to bed. Try to achieve a look that is welcoming without being obvious. If you need to apply face cream or hair rollers, wait until he is asleep before doing so, as it can be shocking for a man last thing at night. When it comes to the possibility of intimate relations with your husband, it is important to remember your marriage vows and in particular, your commitment to obey him.

If he feels that he needs to sleep immediately afterwards, then so be it. In all things be led by your husband’s wishes. Do not pressure him in any way to stimulate intimacy. Should your husband suggest congress, then, agree humbly all the while being mindful that a man’s satisfaction is more important than a woman’s. When he reaches his moment of fulfilment, a small moan from yourself is encouraging to him and quite sufficient to indicate any enjoyment that you may have had.

Should your husband suggest any of the more unusual practices, be obedient and uncomplaining but register any reluctance by maintaining silence. It is likely that your husband will fall promptly asleep after relations have concluded, so once he is fast asleep, adjust your clothing, freshen up and apply your night-time face and hair care products.

You may then set the alarm so that you can arise shortly before him in the morning. This will enable you to have his morning cup of tea ready when he awakes.

And if we read from the good wife guide, here is the opening paragraph:

Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal ready on time for his return from work. This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs. Most men are hungry when they come home and the prospect of a good meal (especially his favourite dish) is part of the warm welcome needed.

Prepare yourself. Take 15 minutes to rest so you will be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your make-up, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh looking. He has just been with a lot of work weary people. Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him. His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties is to provide it. Clear away the clutter. Make one last trip through the main part of the house just before your husband arrives.

If there is one thing that we can conclude is that the world has changed and how we think has changed.

Marketing is not a static process or methodology anymore but rather dynamic, evolving process, just like building customer relationships.

Customer loyalty has to be the ultimate goal of your business. Here’s what loyal customers mean to you:

• They tell everyone they know about your business;
• They are quite happily try new products and services from you;
• They spend more money with you;
• They tell you what you need to know to grow your business.

This means that a high loyalty score has a positive impact on your business growth and sustainability.

So it really is a no brainer that your business needs as many fans as it can get and tells you how well you will be now, as well as, five years down the road. Below are a series of articles on how to turn ordinary customers into raving fans and how to increase customer loyalty.

• The Golden Rule of creating loyalty
• Your customer are not dumb!
• Loyalty customer profiling – The three types
• Live Needs — The need that builds loyalty
• Customer Loyalty: The misunderstood metric

Sign up for free updates from RaveTopia to learn more about how to improve loyalty and turn your customers into your greatest marketing force.

The idea of Earned Media is compelling. Very compelling and comes when you create a compelling customer experience. It saves you a lot of money, gets you strong referrals from your customers and has a direct contribution to your bottom line.

Yet the reality is to get some to talks about you and share your brand with others,  you have to earn the right. You cannot buy it.

And the focus of most marketing departments has been on buying rather than earning their comminications. They spray the communication strategy as far and as wide as possible and hoping like hell it works. This has been the focus of big budget, big advertising strategies.

This idea really did work at one stage but no longer. Your customers trust and attention has become hard to capture. This is why word-of-mouth marketing is so important. Ironically it has only really been the industrial or business to business marketing that has focused so heavily on referral.

This is not about Twitter campaigns or Facebook pages. It is rather about gaining your customers trust and inspiring them enough so that they want to pass on your message. It’s about becoming a story teller and helping your customer to tell their own story. It’s about building a Tribe.

Possible the biggest thing for marketers is that you have to give up control, the idea of control and everything it means to you. Hard? No doubt.

Here are a series of posts that will help you on the way:

• Why paid media will only give you a 1.5% return on your investment
• Understanding the media eco-system
• Why focusing on technology is bad for your marketing
• What is Social All about?
• How do my customers socialise?
• Why viral (earned media) campaigns fail
• How to create a viral campaign that works

Sign up for free updates from RaveTopia to learn more about how to create earned media and turn your customers into your greatest marketing force.

What is the one thing that you have a fair degree of control over in your business?

How your customer experiences your business.

How you respond through your call centre, how your products are experienced, your websites user experience, how your receptionist responds are all things that you have the potential to control. You can spend a great deal of time understand and getting them to work better.

And why is this so important?

Your customer experience is the real product and service that you offer your customer. The truth is that products become generic commodities really quickly, features and benefits are easily copied and skills are easily reproduced.

The customer experience is the one thing that is completely unique to you. No-one can do you the way you do you.

Here are a series of articles that will guide you on how you do you and how you create the customer experience.

• Why you have to be different
• What is different about today’s marketing
• Why the customer experience counts
• The brand archetypes and the customer experience
• Understanding real time needs

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Don’t get me wrong. I love technology. I love what it brings to us and what it can do in our daily lives. But it scares me when the IT department is put in charge of a really important marketing tool. This is not good for customer relationships.

As part of our initiative to make technology and marketing work more effectively to build customer relationships, we have set up a new project Create a Website. Our point is simple.

The goal of your website is to focus on customer relationships — and either generate leads or convert sales. YOur website is not a technical coding project.

To get this right we use WordPress – a really powerful – and free content management system and the hosting we use. But this is the email I got the other day (bold added by me):

Morning Michael,

Firstly I must thank you for all the information you sent through.

I have come in today and spoken to my boss about the website the hosting and domain etc; too which she replied we already have all of that….

Our IT company has organized our host and our domain it was just a case of no one actually sat down to create the website.

I am rather upset about this as I was really excited about this project, now all the work that I have prepared for it is going to be emailed to our IT guys and they are going to do everything from them.

So once again Thank you for taking the time to prepare that information from me and I assure you if I ever need somebody for this reason I am saving your contact details and you will be the first I call!

Have a super day!

Missed customer relationship opportunity

Based on the ignorance of this boss a really important part of the marketing strategy has just gone down the loo. This company is a small business and they have just handed potentially their most vital marketing communication tool over to the IT department.

Here is what is going to happen from here on:

• The IT will waste weeks sorted out a website from scratch trying to design a site
• It will then site in cyber space –wasted
• The boss will then be convinced that the web is a useless medium as there were no real results.
• No customer relationships will be developed

And all because the site was left to the IT department – who have no idea of marketing, how to market a website  and how to build customer relationships. Ironically they may not even understand how to code a website.

So how do you set up a website to build customer relationships

When setting up a website the following questions should be looked at and reviewed:

• How does our customer look for information?
• What tools does our customer use to communicate with each other and others?
• What is the point of the website: Is it a marketing site or an online brochure?
• How do we market the site: Howe do we expect to get traffic?
• How do we measure the effectiveness of the site?

When you are looking at the specific website details here is what I would review:

• What open source technology can we use?
• Is the code well designed so that Google likes it?
• Is the code flexible and easy to use?
• How much is it going to cost to make any changes?
• How much can we manage in house versus outside?

The one customer relationship tool that is critical

When it comes to creating credibility and getting people to take there is one major consideration: Content.

Good compelling content is critical for a user. You need to design your content in the following way:

• Your potential customer wants to come into your site and see a theme
• The themed content must be relevant to what they are looking for
• They must want to read it
• Is it up to date
• Is it focused on their needs rather than your own posturing (our directors are on the front page?)

The most important marketing strategy note:

The internet has caused a paradox for many marketers and how to build customer relationships. On the one side it has amplified the traditional broadcast approach. It has opened multiple means of communication for your customers.

It has also amplified your customer’s life. It has allowed them to talk to others, review things and learn about new subjects in a flash. Today they are happy to give their attention to brands that are relevant and are trustworthy.

To simply put up a website and hope that it is going to work is naive. And really hopeful. It will not work. And like all things that you demand in your business it should work. It should get results and make a difference.