An AdAge article yesterday reported on a recent study of the effectiveness of online advertising. The study examined two online ad tactics - targeted* advertising and obtrusive** advertising - to see their impact on consumers' intent to buy.
The results showed that consumers were 0.9% more likely to buy when they saw a targeted ad rather than a non-targeted one, and that they were 0.5% more likely to buy when they saw an obtrusive ad over a non-obtrusive one. However, when an ad was both targeted and obtrusive, consumers were only 0.3% more likely to buy than if the ad were a typical, non-targeted, non-obtrusive ad.
The study suggested that privacy-concerned consumers may find targeted obtrusive ads to be manipulative.
The bottom line is that marketers exist to serve customers, not the other way around. We aren't serving the customer when we use ads that interrupt what the customer is doing. And we aren't serving customers when we interrupt them with an ad that says, "I know you're looking at Product X right now, so you should stop what you're doing and come look at my Product Y to go with your Product X." Even if these interruptions create more "brand awareness," they don't create the brand awareness we want. If it's not serving customers, it's not worth it.
We serve the customer when we make ourselves available for them to choose when they need our services.
As marketers, our attitude should not be one of pushing ourselves, our products, and our messages onto customers, but one of waiting on customers. "Waiting on" customers the way a server "waits" tables. Or the way a servant used to "wait on" his master. Paying the utmost attention, capable and diligent, doing everything in our power to be available, letting them know that you're there for them, waiting for the slightest request, ready to provide what the customer needs.
Marketers, wait on your customers. Don't interrupt their lives.
*Targeted advertising is that in which the advertised product relates to the content of the site, i.e. an ad for camping gear on a site about outdoor recreation.
**Obtrusive advertising was defined by the study to include pop-ups, pop-unders, ads in an audio or video stream, takeover ads, non-user-initiated audio/video, full page banner ads, interactive ads, floating ads, and interstitials (ads displayed before a page loads).
Showing posts with label interruption marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label interruption marketing. Show all posts
Friday, June 18, 2010
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Musing about Twitter
I've been on Twitter for a few months now, and am still trying to explore and understand all of its potential uses. Recently, people to whom I have no connection have started to follow me. This set me to thinking and wondering:
- I'm new to this phenomenon of having businesspeople I don't know start following me on Twitter.
- It's weird. Perhaps I should be happy and honored, because ostensibly it means that more people are reading what I have to say, that they like what I have to say, and that they might someday be interested in hiring me.
- But I wonder if they are just following me because they hope that I will follow them back.
- How did they find me, anyway?
- Is this what most companies are using Twitter for? Following others just to get them to follow back? Cialdini's old "reciprocity" principle?
- I wonder if there is solid data yet on how and why companies are using Twitter?
- Maybe it's just the sleazy, value-less ones who are doing this "serial following." Is it akin to spamming and pop-ups?
- A couple of the strangers who just started following me seem to subscribe to services like www.TweepMe.com ("Get 4,000 Twitter followers for $19.95"); www.GetMeFollowers.com (Register; follow/refer users; get points; get more followers); www.TopFollowed.com ("reciprocal following"), etc.
- Why? Reciprocal following makes sense, if it's organic. But why manufacture it? Why follow/be followed by people you don't care about? Do you really want quantity instead of quality?
- Are there people out there whose goal is to get thousands of followers on Twitter, simply for the sake of being able to say they have thousands of followers on Twitter?
- Why?
- Are they viewing Twitter as a new [business] toy? Whoever has the most followers wins?
- Is it based on the human desire to be heard?
- Is it because they're expecting those followers to turn into new customers?
- Don't they believe that if they truly have a great product or service, that they will gain loyal fans anyway? And those loyal fans will then want to follow them on Twitter? Not the other way around?
- There's another stranger following me on Twitter, who tweets 20 times a day, posting links to other peoples' online articles. I wonder why.
- Most of these people who seem to be "serial followers" (aka they try to follow as many people as they can, in order to get as many followers as they can), may have numbers of "following" and "followers" in the hundreds or thousands, but they have more they are "following" than they have "followers."
- It seems to me that a well-known, successful company who is known to be excellent and has lots of loyal customers, will have a lot more followers than people they are following. As in 100:1 or 1000:1. Or maybe they don't follow anybody at all, but all of their customers/fans follow them.
- That would be my measure of success for Twitter: is your Followers/Following ratio greater than 1?
- If you're following more than you are being followed, it tells me that you don't have much of value to say. And why are you following so many people anyway? Are there really that many people whose words are meaningful enough that they are worth your time to follow them? I haven't found quite so many sources of excellence whom I want to learn from and emulate.
- But perhaps I'm on Twitter for a different reason than these people are.
- As for the people I don't know who are following me on Twitter, it would please me more to see them follow my blog instead.
- If they follow my blog, it tells me that they like what I have to say.
- If they like what I have to say, maybe we can have a conversation. Maybe they'll want to do business with me in the future.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Ever since I subscribed to a few daily marketing e-journals a couple weeks ago, I have been hearing a lot about search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO). I mentioned this fact to a friend who does SEM at TMP Directional Marketing, and she commented that SEM seems to be remaining "a very strong part of marketing budgets, even during this recession."
Perhaps SEM/SEO is viewed as a "safe" (non-risky) part of interactive marketing - it is formulaic, and helps companies reach customers who are already looking for their products - and so marketing managers rely on it when money is tight. Or perhaps SEM/SEO is so foundational to interactive marketing and e-commerce, that companies must invest in SEM/SEO if they are to have any online presence.
Whatever the reason for the prevalence of SEM/SEO, it seems (at least according to one MediaPost publication) that there is a gap between the demand for good SEM and its supply. A study by [x+1] revealed that while 65% of respondents planned to maintain or increase their SEM budgets this year, only 21% of respondents were "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with the results of their SEM.
MediaPost's Online Media Daily suggests that the poor satisfaction with the results of SEM/SEO stems from failing to improve the user's experience after they click on a link. As OMD put it:
"Paid search or SEO professionals might say: 'It's not my job, man' to determine what's next once a person clicks on a link or paid search ad and ends up on a client's Web site landing page. That kind of thinking could cost the industry revenue in the long term."
It's never good business to use the excuse, "It's not my job." If a person wants to be successful at what he does, he should look for ways to be remarkable and exceed his customers'/clients'/boss's expectations. If he finds a related task that is typically considered to be outside his arena, he should jump at the chance to provide an extra service that will increase his value in the eyes of those he serves.
Wise SEM/SEO professionals should take the hint from MediaPost and extend their focus to help create more integrated (and more successful) online marketing. Use their data on who clicks which links and why, and help the web design teams to develop more customer-centric landing pages that give viewers what they need. Web design teams, embrace this knowledge of users' search behavior in improving your websites. Let the data inform your design.
Keep integrating, marketers. Get past your job titles. Work together. Improve your services. Achieve good results. Help people. Win more (and happier) customers. Be successful.
Perhaps SEM/SEO is viewed as a "safe" (non-risky) part of interactive marketing - it is formulaic, and helps companies reach customers who are already looking for their products - and so marketing managers rely on it when money is tight. Or perhaps SEM/SEO is so foundational to interactive marketing and e-commerce, that companies must invest in SEM/SEO if they are to have any online presence.
Whatever the reason for the prevalence of SEM/SEO, it seems (at least according to one MediaPost publication) that there is a gap between the demand for good SEM and its supply. A study by [x+1] revealed that while 65% of respondents planned to maintain or increase their SEM budgets this year, only 21% of respondents were "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with the results of their SEM.
MediaPost's Online Media Daily suggests that the poor satisfaction with the results of SEM/SEO stems from failing to improve the user's experience after they click on a link. As OMD put it:
"Paid search or SEO professionals might say: 'It's not my job, man' to determine what's next once a person clicks on a link or paid search ad and ends up on a client's Web site landing page. That kind of thinking could cost the industry revenue in the long term."
It's never good business to use the excuse, "It's not my job." If a person wants to be successful at what he does, he should look for ways to be remarkable and exceed his customers'/clients'/boss's expectations. If he finds a related task that is typically considered to be outside his arena, he should jump at the chance to provide an extra service that will increase his value in the eyes of those he serves.
Wise SEM/SEO professionals should take the hint from MediaPost and extend their focus to help create more integrated (and more successful) online marketing. Use their data on who clicks which links and why, and help the web design teams to develop more customer-centric landing pages that give viewers what they need. Web design teams, embrace this knowledge of users' search behavior in improving your websites. Let the data inform your design.
Keep integrating, marketers. Get past your job titles. Work together. Improve your services. Achieve good results. Help people. Win more (and happier) customers. Be successful.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
A Return to Soap Operas?
We are seeing a welcome shift in the marketing world - a move away from trying to capture customers by shouting at them with ads and commercials, and a move toward gaining fans by creating simply excellent content. Certainly we are still inundated with traditional "interruption marketing" (to borrow the term from Seth Godin) in magazines and newspapers, on tv and billboards and the Internet. But more and more marketers are letting great content speak for itself. They are doing and creating remarkable things that get people talking. (To learn more, read Seth Godin's Purple Cow, if you haven't already.)
I think the rise of smartphone apps and customer-created media (a la YouTube) has aided this trend toward remarkable content. Marketers are communicating via things that can be enjoyed as entertainment even without a brand message.
There is Gillete's uArt iPhone app that lets you add facial hair to a photo of yourself, then shave it into designs of your choice. There is the microsite for Coke Zero, which is really a video game in disguise. And how many company-created YouTube video phenomena do we see now? Like the Frosty Posse from Wendy's.
I see this trend, and I like it. This model inspires us to deeper levels of creativity. It makes me wonder whether we will soon see a huge reinvention of traditional advertising, such that we no longer see magazine ads and billboards and tv commercials as we have them today. Instead, will we see pure content - art, music, videos, games, short stories, poetry, etc. - "sponsored" by companies? For example, instead of tv commercials between our programmed viewing, will we see fun, 60-second short films with a simple, one-line message at the end: "brought to you by [insert brand name here]"?
It would be as if advertising (at least tv and radio) were coming full-circle, returning to the soap opera model. Soap operas got their name because a consumer products company (i.e. Procter & Gamble, who may have been the first?) would sponsor the radio or tv show. They would promote their cleaning products (i.e. Ivory soap); hence the name. If we see more pure content coming from marketers, it will be like a return to our roots.
Regardless, it will be interesting to see where advertising heads in the future. With the rise of the Internet and other "new" media, there has been talk of whether traditional advertising is on its way out. I can still see television, print, and radio ads as having a place alongside (instead of being replaced by) interactive, social media, viral marketing, etc. But these traditional advertising media may look very different in just 5-10 years than they do now.
I think the rise of smartphone apps and customer-created media (a la YouTube) has aided this trend toward remarkable content. Marketers are communicating via things that can be enjoyed as entertainment even without a brand message.
There is Gillete's uArt iPhone app that lets you add facial hair to a photo of yourself, then shave it into designs of your choice. There is the microsite for Coke Zero, which is really a video game in disguise. And how many company-created YouTube video phenomena do we see now? Like the Frosty Posse from Wendy's.
I see this trend, and I like it. This model inspires us to deeper levels of creativity. It makes me wonder whether we will soon see a huge reinvention of traditional advertising, such that we no longer see magazine ads and billboards and tv commercials as we have them today. Instead, will we see pure content - art, music, videos, games, short stories, poetry, etc. - "sponsored" by companies? For example, instead of tv commercials between our programmed viewing, will we see fun, 60-second short films with a simple, one-line message at the end: "brought to you by [insert brand name here]"?
It would be as if advertising (at least tv and radio) were coming full-circle, returning to the soap opera model. Soap operas got their name because a consumer products company (i.e. Procter & Gamble, who may have been the first?) would sponsor the radio or tv show. They would promote their cleaning products (i.e. Ivory soap); hence the name. If we see more pure content coming from marketers, it will be like a return to our roots.
Regardless, it will be interesting to see where advertising heads in the future. With the rise of the Internet and other "new" media, there has been talk of whether traditional advertising is on its way out. I can still see television, print, and radio ads as having a place alongside (instead of being replaced by) interactive, social media, viral marketing, etc. But these traditional advertising media may look very different in just 5-10 years than they do now.
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