Great Interview with Best Buy CMO Mike Linton about flexibility....
Given that innovation is the only sustainable advantage these days, advertisers need to allocate at least 10% of their marketing budget to foster it, even in these economically challenged times, said former eBay and Best Buy CMO Mike Linton, who spoke to an audience at the Aberdeen Group's Chief Marketing Officer Summit here yesterday.
Mike Linton Innovation, by Mr. Linton's definition, is any action taken by the brand that changes consumer behavior in favor of the company, and that can range from a new product to a new way to service customers. While it's no surprise that Starbucks has managed to build a massive social-media audience, considering that it gives away latte coupons on Twitter and Facebook, innovation is also when a toilet-paper brand can get consumers to tweet about how soft its product is and show brand in a new light.
Any marketer standing still at a time when the consumer is ahead of the brand is bound to lose, said Mr. Linton, now a Forbes columnist. And amid the wide array of choices that consumers have today, fickleness represents a greater challenge than ever and loyalty dissipates that much more quickly. "Without innovation, you end up in a defensive position," he said.
Yet at a time when marketers are challenged to produce immediate returns, how can they balance the need to innovate against the pressure to produce bottom-line quarterly results?
Mr. Linton offered a few tips for driving innovation that don't require rich resources:
1. Just go for it.
If it's true innovation, you won't know everything about it, including how to measure it. Don't spend precious resources planning and testing your new approach or product until everything's in perfect alignment, he said. Though it can be a bit scary to navigate in uncharted territory, the price to pay for holding back is that your competitors may be on the verge of launching the next big thing that could render your brand passé.
"You have to keep pace with the market, and [that means] the marketers have to get comfortable with the ambiguity," Mr. Linton said.
2. Give your team incentives to innovate.
One tactic Mr. Linton has leaned on is to compensate his teams not only by how they measure specific functions, but by the totality of the customer experience, such as store sales, customer complaints and other metrics.
"I paid my team on total ROI first," Mr. Linton said.
If you pay your search-engine optimization guru solely by click-throughs or the media buyer strictly on media efficiency, you're encouraging them to think in silos and not outside the box. For example, if you set the success metric for customer-service reps to handle incoming calls within five minutes, you could be compromising their level of care in handling more time-consuming, complex customer-service issues.
3. Make sure you have at least one new thing every year.
As you prepare your annual business plan, ask yourself if you have anything new in the roadmap that wasn't there last year. You have to constantly ask: "Are we on the offensive? Who's our real competition?" Mr. Linton said.
"What are you doing that's new this year? If you don't have something new, someone else will," he said.
4. Use the 70% rule.
If your team feels there's a 70% chance that an out-of-the-box initiative based on rough math and intuition will deliver significant learning and success, you should go for it. "You have to have a belief that it's going to work for you," Mr. Linton said.
5. Don't be blindsided by the competition and get lost in what innovation is.
Record labels still believed they were each other's competition even as they engaged in legal battles with music download, peer-to-peer sites and the consumers who used those sites. They didn't see that consumers were bypassing the $19.99 CD en masse while Apple created a colossal digital-music franchise.
By the way, innovation isn't printing $1 coupons when the 50-cent coupons don't work. "If you temporarily buy your way to greatness, that's a problem and it's not going to solve the long-term problem," Mr. Linton said. "Pricing only solves long-term problems if you only compete on price."
Friday, September 11, 2009
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Stop Talking Marketing-ese....let's talk about BUSINESS!
Salespeople understand the concept of deadbeat conversations and avoid them like procurement-driven RFPs, but marketers haven't yet learned a very critical lesson: A lot of the conversations we engage in aren't worth the effort.
Conversations that don't go anywhere drive me crazy. You know, the customer service rep who never sends you that critical e-mail he promised. Or that prospect you take out to lunch once a month who never hires you. Or those 2,000 people who follow you on Twitter but never even glance at your website.
Yet for some reason, we marketing folks worship the conversation. If the economy ran off of talk, we'd be rich. But it doesn't. We can talk with an audience forever, but if we can't get them to take an action that helps get money into our pockets, our business is dead.
Salespeople understand the concept of deadbeat conversations and avoid them like procurement-driven RFPs, but marketers haven't yet learned a very critical lesson: A lot of the conversations we engage in aren't worth the effort.
Most conversations are wastedMost marketers fail to build a strategy to get what we want from our conversations. The main reason we tend to ignore conversation strategy is because most of us have been raised in marketing silos. Brand advertising may not drive sales right now, but sooner or later everybody buys, right? That's what we've wanted to believe.
But the proliferation of addressable media is giving us the ability to highlight, for the first time, the conversations that meet the goals of our strategy and, perhaps more importantly, those that don't.
My team is just as channel-agnostic as I am, and we work with analysts who can pick up the faintest signal in the most chaotic of background noise in any channel. You put these two together, and you begin to see patterns: People who are exposed to a bunch of brand impressions, banner ads, magazine articles and social media messages about a product have a much higher propensity to buy.
We've been studying and practicing this for years. We might, in the best of all worlds, get as many as 10% of targeted prospects to make a purchase over a five-year period. And we're giddy from that. Slaps on backs all around.
But then think about the inverse. Nine out of 10 of those conversations we had for five years didn't get us any financial return.
Marketing drives sales, not conversationsI see evidence that marketers are paying more attention to what is worth doing and what is not. Gian Fulgoni, chairman and co-founder of ComScore, speaking at the OMMA conference on July 31, said we should stop using clicks as the primary measurable unit in interactive marketing. Why? Because display ads and search ads play off of each other in ways that mere clicks won't capture.
He's a smart man, and he's right. But I think he'd agree it's much, much bigger than clicks.
In the new world of marketing, agencies are more like orchestra conductors than musicians. No channel has much value on its own and good ol' Internet Protocol (IP) can tag nearly everything from banner clicks to TV commercials, which allows clever analysts to discern whether the guy on the freeway who's looking at your billboard is going to buy your product. What really excites me in all this is our growing ability to identify and filter out the deadbeat conversations.
From the perspective of business strategy, all media and communications are the same. There are conversations going on all the time, some of which mention your product and influence sales but that aren't directly due to anything you've done. That's the background business as usual, the sales you'd have if you stopped doing any marketing at all (in the short term anyway -- the background sales would also slowly fade without marketing support). But then there are stimulated sales that result directly from some action we've taken.
Is there an equivalent of stimulated sales in social media? Absolutely -- it's the conversations we have that spur a sale. Even more pointedly, can we measure it? The answer is yes, we can. There are lots of companies out there doing it, including my own. We're getting better at it all the time. And while details are proprietary to our clients, I can say with certainty that social media mirrors all other conversational channels -- about 98 percent of conversations are really just people talking, the business as usual background noise that defines modern society.
And that's fine. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's admirable to sustain all the conversations you can, but if you're doing it for business reasons, you must realize that there is zero return on your investment for nearly all those conversations, regardless of where you have them.
The trick is to identify the wasted conversations before you have them, or at least as soon as they become obvious. The good news is we marketers have been doing that for decades in channels from telephones to email. Now we just need to start doing it in social media using the same business rules.
All it takes is knowledge and the discipline to hang up the phone on unhelpful support reps, stop buying lunches for prospects who will never help or hire us and unfollow those Twitter people who do us no good. Only then will our conversations start being worth our marketing effort.
Conversations that don't go anywhere drive me crazy. You know, the customer service rep who never sends you that critical e-mail he promised. Or that prospect you take out to lunch once a month who never hires you. Or those 2,000 people who follow you on Twitter but never even glance at your website.
Yet for some reason, we marketing folks worship the conversation. If the economy ran off of talk, we'd be rich. But it doesn't. We can talk with an audience forever, but if we can't get them to take an action that helps get money into our pockets, our business is dead.
Salespeople understand the concept of deadbeat conversations and avoid them like procurement-driven RFPs, but marketers haven't yet learned a very critical lesson: A lot of the conversations we engage in aren't worth the effort.
Most conversations are wastedMost marketers fail to build a strategy to get what we want from our conversations. The main reason we tend to ignore conversation strategy is because most of us have been raised in marketing silos. Brand advertising may not drive sales right now, but sooner or later everybody buys, right? That's what we've wanted to believe.
But the proliferation of addressable media is giving us the ability to highlight, for the first time, the conversations that meet the goals of our strategy and, perhaps more importantly, those that don't.
My team is just as channel-agnostic as I am, and we work with analysts who can pick up the faintest signal in the most chaotic of background noise in any channel. You put these two together, and you begin to see patterns: People who are exposed to a bunch of brand impressions, banner ads, magazine articles and social media messages about a product have a much higher propensity to buy.
We've been studying and practicing this for years. We might, in the best of all worlds, get as many as 10% of targeted prospects to make a purchase over a five-year period. And we're giddy from that. Slaps on backs all around.
But then think about the inverse. Nine out of 10 of those conversations we had for five years didn't get us any financial return.
Marketing drives sales, not conversationsI see evidence that marketers are paying more attention to what is worth doing and what is not. Gian Fulgoni, chairman and co-founder of ComScore, speaking at the OMMA conference on July 31, said we should stop using clicks as the primary measurable unit in interactive marketing. Why? Because display ads and search ads play off of each other in ways that mere clicks won't capture.
He's a smart man, and he's right. But I think he'd agree it's much, much bigger than clicks.
In the new world of marketing, agencies are more like orchestra conductors than musicians. No channel has much value on its own and good ol' Internet Protocol (IP) can tag nearly everything from banner clicks to TV commercials, which allows clever analysts to discern whether the guy on the freeway who's looking at your billboard is going to buy your product. What really excites me in all this is our growing ability to identify and filter out the deadbeat conversations.
From the perspective of business strategy, all media and communications are the same. There are conversations going on all the time, some of which mention your product and influence sales but that aren't directly due to anything you've done. That's the background business as usual, the sales you'd have if you stopped doing any marketing at all (in the short term anyway -- the background sales would also slowly fade without marketing support). But then there are stimulated sales that result directly from some action we've taken.
Is there an equivalent of stimulated sales in social media? Absolutely -- it's the conversations we have that spur a sale. Even more pointedly, can we measure it? The answer is yes, we can. There are lots of companies out there doing it, including my own. We're getting better at it all the time. And while details are proprietary to our clients, I can say with certainty that social media mirrors all other conversational channels -- about 98 percent of conversations are really just people talking, the business as usual background noise that defines modern society.
And that's fine. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's admirable to sustain all the conversations you can, but if you're doing it for business reasons, you must realize that there is zero return on your investment for nearly all those conversations, regardless of where you have them.
The trick is to identify the wasted conversations before you have them, or at least as soon as they become obvious. The good news is we marketers have been doing that for decades in channels from telephones to email. Now we just need to start doing it in social media using the same business rules.
All it takes is knowledge and the discipline to hang up the phone on unhelpful support reps, stop buying lunches for prospects who will never help or hire us and unfollow those Twitter people who do us no good. Only then will our conversations start being worth our marketing effort.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Don't Give the Client what they think they want...
...Give Them What They Never Dreamed Possible!
“Isn’t that why they hire us in the first place?” I remember it like it was yesterday. My first real mentor at a client showed me a creative philosophy that he wrote. His philosophy had ten simple ideas about how to run a department. This was one that really stuck with me. It also forced me to ask this question at least a thousand times through the years in this fantastic, frustrating, exhausting and exhilarating business. "Why are we so quick to give a client good when great is out there waiting to be found?"
Creativity and accountability are alive and kicking, so how do we surprise our clients and prove that we’re worth our salt? I believe the answer is simple: Stop trying to just solve advertising problems and start solving business problems.
Cut to the chase to find out what the real problems are with our clients' businesses. What keeps them up at night? What are they not getting from their other strategic partners? We stop trying to come up with the next cool creative, and instead help them understand how to transform their business. Ironically, most of the time, a subject line or creative comes out of it. When all is right in the ad world, all of these things are working together.
“Isn’t that why they hire us in the first place?” I remember it like it was yesterday. My first real mentor at a client showed me a creative philosophy that he wrote. His philosophy had ten simple ideas about how to run a department. This was one that really stuck with me. It also forced me to ask this question at least a thousand times through the years in this fantastic, frustrating, exhausting and exhilarating business. "Why are we so quick to give a client good when great is out there waiting to be found?"
Creativity and accountability are alive and kicking, so how do we surprise our clients and prove that we’re worth our salt? I believe the answer is simple: Stop trying to just solve advertising problems and start solving business problems.
Cut to the chase to find out what the real problems are with our clients' businesses. What keeps them up at night? What are they not getting from their other strategic partners? We stop trying to come up with the next cool creative, and instead help them understand how to transform their business. Ironically, most of the time, a subject line or creative comes out of it. When all is right in the ad world, all of these things are working together.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Marketing Do's & Don'ts...case in point, VW.
In the marketing world, be it online or offline expectations are key. Working with clients is challenging in not only meeting expectations, but having those expectations change. Advertisers are great in understanding what they think they want. What they don't really have much understanding is how to get to where they want to be. Case in point, Volkswagen. Volkswagen wants to triple its US market share in the next 5 years. With a serious of 'edgy' ad campaigns both on TV and online, they have become a serious auto play in the consumer market. So what's the next logicial step? Fire your agency. At eLink, we stress to clients that consistency is king. Whether it is being consistent in messaging, or in campaigns, hitting the panic button and pausing existing campaigns is not in anyone's best interests and gives the client a bad reputation in the market.
Keys to success for advertisers:
1) Be Consistent
2) Stay on Point
3) Remember that marketing is trial and error, not an exact science.
Keys to success for advertisers:
1) Be Consistent
2) Stay on Point
3) Remember that marketing is trial and error, not an exact science.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
eLink Media and confirmation of the value of email marketing...
Growing businesses need to increase their measuring of email marketing metric in order to improve their results, according to one expert. One chief strategy officer, claims most email marketers only measure aspects such as open rates, click rates and bounce rates.Writing in a post for DMNews.com, the expert added that other aspects of measurement need to be implemented, including asking what proportion of site traffic came from email marketing and "how much revenue" that extra traffic brought.Other essential metrics include knowing how long people brought to the site by email marketing stayed there and which "landing pages and products" were popular among them."The fundamental shift that web analytics integration brings to your email marketing is clear and accurate visibility into financial results. You'll find your thinking will change from driving behavior at the beginning of the sequence to driving revenue at the end," he stated. More competitors need to follow eLink's advice and find out information about industry trends and new approaches in order to remain competitive.
Monday, August 3, 2009
CMO positions influx!
eLink Media prides itself on better service and better client support than anyone else in the industry. With so many CMOs under fire at large advertisers (PepsiCo, GM, etc.) our position has been what we always preach: Consistency. Consistency in the market, consistency in service, consistency in campaigns. When will big players understand that the strategy is a plan, and you need to stick to it in good times and in bad?
Record August!
With all the talk about economic conditions, and the lack of quality publishers available in the marketplace, eLink Media has broken our company record! Thanks goes to all staff and campaign managers, but most of all to our clients. You have instilled faith and trust in us and we have not let you down. In beating expected targets, this month gives us the resources and flexibility to be able to provide you with more data, more services, and even better results. A great job by all!
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