Traditional Marketing shortcomings
what is outside-in marketing based on? It is based on the simple premise that successful digital marketing allows the audience to tell you what they need so you can provide it. “What if your audience doesn’t know that it wants what you are trying to sell? How can you attract them?” We have often been asked these questions by folks who have a vested interest in the status quo of inside-out marketing. For them, a part of every campaign involves some cold calling of prospects in a list they bought somewhere. The only intelligence they use in this method is to verify that the prospects have some likelihood to buy the product or service in the future. But they typically have no idea where the prospects are in the sales cycle—how ready they are to receive the message. http://ift.tt/1Xz7OHsYou might think that in the age of do-not-call lists and other consumer protections that telemarketing is dying. Not so. The Bureau of Labor Statistics claims that there were a quarter of a million telemarketers engaged full time in the United States in 2012. This is about the same as it was in the previous reporting period. So telemarketing is still widespread and does not seem to be decreasing, especially when you consider that robocalls are allowing the same number of telemarketers to make even more calls per person. But telemarketing techniques usually fail or at least produce ill will that costs you in other ways. Why? Because prospects don’t like getting interrupted. Even those who tolerate interruption are less apt to act favorably to these interruptions for a simple reason: It takes a lot of mental effort to change one’s train of thought. Think about the last time you got a call from a group that fit with your attitudes—perhaps a charity that supports the families of kids with cancer. If you said “no,” the likely reason is that you were engaged with some other project, and you just didn’t want to think about something else at that time. This is the problem with interruption marketing. Even those who might be interested at some time are rarely interested at the time marketers interrupt them. This is no diatribe against telemarketing. Telemarketing is merely an example of interruption marketing. Some marketers claim that it’s normal for at least part of your market not to know that they need your product. And it is. But “educational” marketing is no different from any other kind of marketing: It’s much more effective when your audience is pulling the knowledge to them when needed than when you push it at them, regardless of need. The data suggests that prospects are much more likely to respond favorably to messages if they are not required to change their train of thought to grasp them. When you intercept prospects already looking for answers to certain questions, and you give them the answers they are looking for, you are bound to be much more effective. Event Marketing: Short Shelf Life vs. Long Shelf Life A common practice in marketing is to hold events to announce a new product’s marketing calendar, enlisting the lion’s share of resources leading up to the event. Once all the work is done and all the materials are published, you forget about the last event and start working on the next one. It’s reminiscent of magazine publishing. At one time, James was editor in chief of ComputerUser magazine, a monthly tabloid style magazine distributed in large markets across the United States. His team spent all month working on the publication. As soon as it was at the printer, they started working on the next one. The only time they worried about previous issues was when they needed to issue corrections, which was rare. About halfway through James’ tenure at ComputerUser, the company started a website that supported the print publication. It started simply by publishing content online and by adding daily columns from columnists such as James. This inaugural website predated blogs, but the concept was the same: It allowed moderated comments not just on the daily columns but on the magazine articles. The publish-and-forget model didn’t work too well once ComputerUser moved to the web. ComputerUser soon found out that the articles published needed regular updates as users commented and otherwise contributed alongside the community of readers of the publication. Eventually, the community influenced the print editorial calendar, making it much more responsive to what the readers of the website showed the most interest in. This experience convinced James that web audiences differ in fundamental ways from print audiences—and that is the main point of James’ book Audience, Relevance, and Search: Targeting Web Audiences with Relevant Content, which he wrote with Frank Donatone and Cynthia Fishel. The difference can be summed up in the attitude of the audiences: Whereas print audiences lean back to consume the content you provide, web audiences lean forward to interact with the content you provide. This might seem like an obvious thing, but when you unpack it, it gives you a rich way of understanding how to better engage with digital advertising audiences—because digital marketing content invites interaction, too. While very few people engage with your digital content (share it, comment on it, like it, etc.), everyone is clicking their way to every piece of content they see, which is far different than in traditional media, where the content is essentially curated for consumers once they open a magazine or choose the TV channel. In other words, nothing happens online unless you click a lot. A lot can happen on TV if you click once. This difference makes the event marketer’s publish-and-forget model untenable on the web. James’ print publication was recycled the moment after people read it. (ComputerUser’s copy editor lined her bird cage with it.) Print periodicals are archived, but the vast majority of readers experience it only in the month it is printed. Unlike print, web assets are available to users long after they are published and need to be updated as the facts on the ground change. When you publish and forget on the web, your old assets become clutter that gets in the way of the assets you are trying to promote. A lot of event marketing sites are shut down after the event is over, which is a complete waste of much of the equity the event produced with the audience. But if you manage to have the same site for related events, one year of regular events with their own sets of assets soon becomes an incoherent mess of vaguely related content. Fragmented sites become less useful and more expensive over time. The way to avoid this mess is to develop a content strategy that enables you to build a coherent site from repeated events. Before you publish content, you must plan to maintain and add onto that content to create a coherent and more comprehensive site over time. You also must plan to archive content when it is no longer useful or timely. The best content management tools automate these activities. Lest this all sound neat and tidy and easy to plan, we must remind you that the data sets we use to understand audience preferences and attitudes are imperfect collections—and those preferences change over time. Natural language is fraught with all kinds of ambiguities and vagueness. Because you can never know in advance exactly how your audience will interact with your content, you must adjust content after publishing. Unlike with print, you can progressively improve your web content to better fit the needs of your audience over time. This is the premise of Mike’s book Do It Wrong Quickly, in which he explains how to fail faster in order to succeed more fully in the end. via Blogger http://ift.tt/1Xz7Kr4 May 18, 2016 at 03:48PM
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Digital Advertising: Broad Spend vs. Narrow Spend
Advertising is designed to generate interest in a product by producing clever and visually stunning ads and then flooding the market with them. We are all so familiar with this method from iconic brands such as Coke and Apple that it hardly requires analysis. It is no exaggeration to say that most big brands were built using this method on TV and in print. And the practice is effective to this day. http://ift.tt/1Xz06gpThe same advertising agencies that create and manage these offline campaigns tried to follow the same playbook in the digital world. Read any story in Advertising Age about these campaigns, and you’ll find that it hasn’t worked nearly as well online as it worked offline. A big reason is one we’ve mentioned already: Digital users are in control and choose to ignore or subvert digital advertising in large percentages. Traditional advertising requires a captive audience. Jared Spool, an expert in user experience, simplified the argument of advertising vs. content in a 2013 speech (Confab, Minneapolis, 2013). “Ads don’t work,” he said. “You get a tiny fraction of the clicks on a page to ads. With the advent of smaller screens in mobile devices, almost half of the tiny fraction of clicks you get are mistake clicks—those where a user is trying to click a content link and accidentally clicks an ad.” In his talk, Spool cited case study after case study showing that the user experience of banner ads in particular is antithetical to usage of the web. Web users are typically trying to get the information they need in the shortest possible time. In this context, banner ads are just in the way, unless they are legitimately calling attention to quality content that people will share themselves once they discover it. If most display ads shared quality content, the use of ad blockers would not be on the rise. In some cases, the only way to get users to click banner ads is to deceive them into thinking they’re clicking something else. This is a sure way of destroying any trust you might have gained from them. Again, once you destroy user trust, you will rarely get it back. Not all online advertising is ineffective. Google introduced the pay-per-click model of search advertising in 2000, and this model is the primary reason the company has a $1 trillion market cap. But this kind of advertising is fundamentally different from banners. Users who see search ads have already indicated interest in the topic by entering a search keyword. This kind of advertising works because it fits the general pattern of outside-in marketing. Still, not all paid search advertising works. Some advertisers have tried to use the same shotgun approach to paid search that they have used in offline advertising, buying hundreds of somewhat relevant keywords pointed to the same landing page, in the hopes of casting a wider net for prospects. Because they are paying by the click, they figure they will get their money’s worth. The best practice is to buy only the words that are most tightly targeted to a campaign and then to pay careful attention to the experiences users land on when they click the ads. This narrow approach yields better results. We call this narrow-band paid search advertising. Contextual advertising works much the same as narrow-band paid search advertising. Advertisers buy words that are relevant to their campaigns and specify on which sites they want their ads to appear. Not only are the semantics of the words narrowly relevant to the interests of the audience, but the sites narrow it further. And because you pay only by the click, narrowing the context will lighten your spend and reduce your cost per response. And because the context is narrow, the spending can be light. You can turn your ad campaigns into surgical strikes, testing multiple variations of ads and landing pages and ultimately using the most effective ones. In short, search advertising has much in common with other forms of outside-in marketing: You use big data (search keywords or words in context) to attract an audience that is likely to buy into your offers. And you optimize the campaign over time to produce a higher yield. via Blogger http://ift.tt/1XyZWpe May 18, 2016 at 02:37PM
What is Outside-In Marketing?
Outside-in marketing is the practice of learning the language of your clients and prospects and building messages for them on (and in) their terms. This might seem like an obvious thing to do, but until recently, it was rarely practiced in industry. Typically, marketers have sought to differentiate their products by branding them with clever names and marketing them with novel messages. Let’s call this inside-out marketing, to distinguish it from what we are attempting to promote in this blog. http://ift.tt/1TVonY6If you’ve ever suffered through a radio commercial at three times the normal volume for a local car dealership where the announcer races through three minutes of script in 30 seconds, you’ve experienced inside-out marketing. One of the biggest goals of inside-out marketing is to get attention—to get the audience to wake from its reverie to actually listen, watch, or read the message in front of them. Inside-out marketing worked in the days of captive audiences, who passively watched TV or read periodicals. Perhaps it worked when events were the center of marketing campaigns and those who attended events were captivated by pomp and circumstance. But inside-out marketing does not work in digital media. Digital audiences are not captive. They are in control. They reject attempts to spam them with information they don’t want. Any attempt to do this can do more harm than good. If you want to be effective in digital marketing, you need to engage with clients and prospects on their terms. You need to build trust with them by providing the information they need when they need it. And you need to continuously prove to them that you will not violate this trust by trying to force them to do business on your terms. The good news is that clients and prospects actually tell you what they want by searching for things in Google, Bing, and other search engines. Throughout this blog, we refer to anything the searcher types into the search box as a keyword. The second piece of good news is that they tell you what they think about what they want in social media. All you need to do is gather the data and mine it to better address what clients and prospects need from your marketing activities. Gathering the data might be the easy part. Everybody has access to search keyword tools, such as Google Keyword Planner. Most of us can find more conversations through social listening tools, such as Salesforce’s Social Studio (formerly Radian6). The challenge lies in analyzing the data we find. When customers enter a keyword, what exactly are they looking for? We assume that they’re looking for something related to the topic expressed by the keyword. But exactly what do they want? And what do they need to do with the information once they get it? It is not helpful to merely offer encyclopedic amounts of information. You must help prospects take action to actually solve their problem with the information you help them find. But what actions do they want to take? How can you learn this from a few simple search keywords and some social conversations? You are not serving your client if you merely mine the data. Clients expect you to recommend the right things for them to do. They want to be told what to do, in words of two syllables or less. They might be experts in what they do, but they are not experts in what you do—until you make them so. We will start to answer these questions in this chapter and continue throughout the blog. To answer these questions, we want to more strongly differentiate outside-in from inside-out marketing. Table 1-1 shows the differences. As we refine the definition of outside-in marketing, we can begin to answer how to do it. Is Outside-In Marketing Really That Different?The ideas discussed so far in this chapter seem like Marketing 101—all the same things we have always done with offline media. And, indeed, there are similarities. Direct marketers, for example, have long used customer insights and optimization metrics to improve results over time. Copywriters have for many years built audience personas and written audience-centric copy. And advertisers have always tried to place ads at the decision point for their audience.Direct Marketing: Push vs. PullWhen you consider the psychology of direct marketing, you realize that it is fundamentally different from outside-in marketing. Leaving junk mail and other spammy methods aside, the best direct marketers use facts about the target audience to try to understand what they need and push it to them. In that respect, it is outside-in, right? Well, not exactly.For example, James recently moved and had to notify the U.S. Postal Service of his change of address. When he opened the envelope from the Postal Service, it was full of ads for home improvement centers, insurance firms, and other businesses commonly frequented by those who have recently moved. After he moved, he received the same ads in direct mail that had been included in the envelope. Not only did those companies know he probably would need to do business with companies like the ones in the ads, but they knew how to reach him most effectively, by repeating the ads multiple times. In psychology, this is called priming—repeating the same message multiple times to get a desired result. Direct marketers have used this technique successfully for decades. The key difference between outside-in and (well-done) direct marketing is in the word push you probably noticed. Direct marketers push messages to those who are somewhat likely to be interested in them. They don’t wait for the audience to tell them that they are in fact interested. They are willing to concede that they might get only 1% response for their direct mail campaigns. But, even if they do, they will get a solid return on investment. So they push messages and hope for the best. In the process, they effectively spam the other 99% of their audience. And they don’t care. The reason they get the ROI is that you are an audience that is somewhat captive to their messages. You can’t choose not to receive your mail. When you open your mail box, there might be a check or an important letter or card. There will also be the direct mail pieces. You can choose to recycle them instantly, but you must at least look at them. In short, you must “opt out” of them. A small percentage of users don’t opt out. These are the ones who give direct marketers their ROI. Digital marketers have tried the push model from the beginning. But it never worked very well. Why not? Because web users are not a captive audience. They “opt in” to only the information they want to consume. You could say that opting out, such as deleting an email or abandoning a web page, is a lot like recycling a piece of direct mail. The difference is that you can keep sending direct mail to the same customer even after he has recycled 100 pieces, hoping to hit the mark with some of them, but web users are always moving and seeking information rather than waiting motionless for information to find them. It’s always been called “surfing” for a reason. Automated spam filters constantly evolve for a reason. Other techniques can cross the line from “welcome” to “spam,” also. Readers believe that they have developed banner blindness and do not even see display ads. But marketers now retarget ads by showing display ads informed by searches and other activity. And people do seem to notice them, whether they click on them or complain about them. Whether these ads are “welcome” or “spam” depends on how relevant they are to the reader, but they are at least more relevant than random display ads. Once a digital marketer violates the trust of the audience, which is based on allowing them to opt in rather than forcing them to opt out, they never come back. Over time, relying solely on push marketing in the digital world is a losing proposition, as your user base slowly dries up. Websites become ghost towns. Email newsletters end up in spam folders. And social platforms die. While all this might seem obvious to some people, others might reasonably object, saying, “One man’s pushing is another’s sharing. If the content is good, why can’t you push it?” And that is the real question here. What kind of sharing violates the trust of the audience, and what kind increases it? Every marketer must make the decision between spamming and sharing and must realize that spamming does have real consequences. It’s not that push marketing never works. And we aren’t trying to get you to stop all push marketing. We are trying to persuade you that employing solely push techniques causes you to send more and more emails, to buy more and more display ads, and to blanket your audience with more and more interruptions. If 99% of them are not interested, eventually your audience will find ways to tune it all out. That said, it is also true that you need to prime your audience to help them discover you. If your content is high quality, sharing it will be welcome—and that’s what you are aiming for. If you learn what your audience needs and pull them into your experiences through search and social media, you will develop a loyal audience—and ultimately get better results. Users who are allowed to “opt in” to messages are prequalified as interested parties. They will spend some of their precious time and attention exploring your site to get answers. Once you gain their trust, you can begin to subtly influence them to try (and ultimately to buy) your products and services. We usually refer to this content-first approach as content marketing. Unlike push techniques that must start by getting attention from your audience, pull techniques require paying attention to your audience. Because you can’t pay attention to every single audience member, you analyze data as a way to know them. That’s the essence of outside-in marketing—using data to focus your content marketing. via Blogger http://ift.tt/27vkinG May 17, 2016 at 07:11PM
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Welcome Readers! http://ift.tt/eA8V8JThis is your destination for management case studies around the world! via Blogger http://ift.tt/1V32eMJ May 15, 2016 at 11:36AM |