A Friday Night Marketing Strategy

So you think marketing is just for marketing people, right? Wrong. Marketing is for everyone, regardless of what walk of life you come from. After all, everybody, at some point in their life, is selling something. A car. A house. An unwanted sofa on Done Deal (which is me at the moment incidentally). Perhaps even yourself. This week, as we gear up for Valentine's Day (which is this Friday lads by the way), spare a thought for those looking for love. Those who find themselves in the nightclub on Friday night trying to successfully market themselves. Here's how marketing strategy could be applied to your efforts.

Firstly, you could go the direct route. So, you see that gorgeous girl and you approach her and say "I am very rich, would you like to go out with me?". That's direct marketing.

Alternatively, you could send your friend over to the gorgeous girl to say "He's very rich, you should go out with him". That's advertising.

Perhaps you'll be lucky enough to have that gorgeous girl walk over to you and say "You're very rich, I'd like to go out with you". If so, you have got brand recognition. 

Or maybe you'll be like others who have taken the walk of shame back to your mates, after you walked over to the gorgeous girl and said "I am very rich, you should go out with me", and she slaps you in the face. That, by the way, is customer feedback.

Or, imagine you walk over to her and say "I am very rich, would you like to go out with me?", and she introduces you to her husband. That's demand and supply gap.

And finally, what if before you even get to say "I am very rich, would you like to go out with me?", your wife arrives. That's restriction from entering a new market.

So, you see, everyone's selling something. And a knowledge of marketing is, in fact, of benefit to all. A drop of Armani's finest smelly stuff might just help too. Good luck lads!

(This blog post was inspired by a Mike Coleman tweet @DigitalEmerald.)

Gavin Fox MSc, MII Grad

W: www.foxmarketing.ie

E: gavin@foxmarketing.ie

T: +353 87 649 7660

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5 Advertisements You Will Never See Again

So, do you think marketing has changed much over the last, say, 50 years? Here are some advertisements that featured from around that era. I think it is fair to say these emphasise the dramatic changes in how brands communicate with their audience.



Ethics and corporate responsibility have become a dominant feature of modern marketing and rightly so. Cigarette brands are not permitted to promote their products at all in many countries (including Ireland) and the sale of such death-inducing products take place in what is often referred to as a 'dark-market'. The other reason this communication would not work in the modern era is because consumers have become much more savvy. They don't just believe advertisements but question what they see, even if a doctor apparently endorses the featured product. (Perhaps it also tells us that doctors have got a little bit smarter in that time too.)

I bet she won't. In fact, producing this on Christmas day morning is more likely to result in its use as a weapon rather that a household appliance. (Although the young lady in the advertisement does look happy, it has to be said). The role of women in most western countries has changed. No longer is it acceptable for us men to convey sexist remarks that stink of inequality (and, again, rightly so). Although, I do dare the Marketing Manager at Hoover to re-run this campaign. Just don't reveal your identity as doing so could greatly reduce your life expectancy.

Everybody knows Coca-Cola is really good for you, right? And what could be a better start in life for your treasured little ones than a regular intake of caffeine mixed with about thirty odd spoons of sugar? Marketing communications aimed at children have become extremely strict in recent times, especially concerning high-sugar food and drink brands that lead to obesity, diabetes, and other associated possible health problems. What parent in their right mind would give this stuff to a baby? Well, perhaps some do, but the likes of Coca-Cola are not allowed to target them with these sort of communications any more and, even if they were, doing so would put the brand in the firing line for some pretty hefty criticism.

In writing this I'm thinking "perhaps this campaign would work today", but for quite different reasons. It would be a handy way to consume this sort of thing without getting that white powdery stuff everywhere. Nigella for one would be delighted I'm sure. Ok I'm joking. This one is wrong and would never be allowed today. And, let me officially put on the record, that I do not condone nor encourage the consumption of cocaine, in toothache drop form or otherwise.

So, what's wrong with this one then? Perhaps these guys could team up with Coca-Cola and do a joint promotion, they would be, after all, targeting the same audience. Well, even if you do produce clothing for the slightly larger child, calling them "chubbies" is a big no-no. We live a world of political correctness and, let's just say, discriminating against the minority (even if they are a growing audience) is not the way to go anymore.

So, there you have it. Marketing has changed, forever. Consumer needs have changed. Our roles in society have changed. How we react to advertisements and the control we each now have as a result of social media has meant that we have much more of a say than ever before. The thing that hasn't changed is the fact that marketing is still about finding and keeping customers. It's just that how we now go about doing so is radically different.

Gavin Fox MSc, MII Grad

W: www.foxmarketing.ie

E: gavin@foxmarketing.ie

T: +353 87 649 7660

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Search Marketing: Selling to People Who Want to Hear From You

“Selling to people who want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t.” So says Seth Godin, the post-modern marketer who announced the death of mass marketing and the rise of micro-marketing. But what is micro-marketing? Is it not just a fancy new term that only serves to dress up the traditional marketing process of segmenting, targeting and positioning (STP) brands? To answer this, let’s briefly consider how traditional STP works. You identify groups of individuals who are all similar in some way. It might be based on demographics, lifestyle, behaviour, or whatever. You target this ‘homogenous’ group with a marketing program and you aim to position your brand on some point-of-difference. However, as the global proliferation and adoption of all things digital has shown us, this process is fundamentally flawed. Why? Because no matter how ‘homogenous’ the segment is, it is inherently ‘heterogeneous’. Although the people within the group might share a similarity, they are all individuals, with individual needs, preferences, behaviours, values, and lifestyles. Marketing is about meeting customer needs profitably, not pigeon-holing people and adopting a one-size-fits-all solution. Marketing has become personal. Really personal.

One such manifestation of the highly personal nature of marketing in the web 2.0 era is search marketing. Search marketing involves making sure your message is put in front of those who want to hear from you (as opposed to interrupting strangers who don’t through mass marketing). We now spend as much time online as we do consuming any other media. In fact, if you are a generation Y consumer (someone born between roughly 1978 and early 2000’s), you most likely spend more time online than you do watching television, listening to the radio or reading newspapers/magazines. This time spent  online has affected how consumers search for brands. The fact is, when people want to find out about a product, a service, a brand, they don’t rely on mass media; they rely on micro-media. They trust a search engine. They “Google-it”. They search for what they are looking for and Google returns results that best fit their search. Whether the goal is to achieve a click-through (to achieve sales) or just to achieve an impression (for brand building), your brand simply must feature. Why? Because if it doesn’t, not only are you not considered, but you don’t exist.

In today’s highly connected world, where people demand immediacy in having the information they want at their fingertips at any given time, day or night, brands simply must be found online or they will die. And they must be found easily. 73% of search engine users never look beyond the first page. Marketers must invest their time in search marketing and ensure that their brand is showing up in both paid and organic results above the fold (visible at the top of the first page). Having a nice website that cannot be found is about as useful as designing and printing a nice brochure and hiding it in a cupboard. It starts with making sure your website content is keyword rich. And not words you consider key, but words the people carrying out the search consider key. Marketers must track these keywords to make sure they are still relevant. Ask yourself, what words do my customers and prospects use when searching for my product? Although nobody outside of Google fully understands the ‘secret sauce’ that is the algorithm, which is made up of over 200 spiders or bots of weighted data used to evaluate how relevant your website is with respect to the user’s search, we do know that certain things help. Like updating your website content regularly and updating it with highly relevant and compelling content. Using, not just keywords, but meta-tags (keywords written into the code of your website). Having links to your website from other trusted third-party websites helps too. It’s all about building relevance, authority and trustworthiness.

And with all this technology, marketers need to be careful not to forget what the whole thing is about. “Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is not about optimising for search engines, it’s about optimising for humans” (Dharmesh Shah, Hub Spot). And when you optimise for humans, you ensure you can be found; with relevance and authority. Search marketing has given marketers a fantastic tool that enables them to personally sell to people who want to hear from them.   

Gavin Fox MSc
W: www.foxmarketing.ie
E: gavin@foxmarketing.ie
T: +353 87 649 7660

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A Marketer's New Years Resolutions

Well, the festivities are now over and it's time to get stuck into yet another new year. It's the time we when we tend to make resolutions, objectives for the year that are usually forgotten about within a few days. Get fit, lose weight, learn a foreign language, you know the sort of thing. But, from a marketing perspective, what should be your new years resolutions? What should be your marketing objectives for 2014? Here are some suggestions, some things to consider when aiming to improve your marketing strategy in the coming 12 months.

1. More Marketing and Sales Integration Required -
It still amazes me how the marketing department and the sales department are best of enemies in many organisations. Sales teams blame the marketers for not knowing what's going on on the ground. Marketers blame the sales guys for not implementing the marketing strategy effectively. And, while the internal turf war continues, the organisation suffers. When both departments are closer aligned they make each others' job so much easier. Marketers can provide opportunities for sales people to make sales, which in turn helps in making marketing campaigns successful. Marketers can benefit from feedback from sales people, as they act as very effective market researchers, which can help marketers design more effective marketing campaigns. It's win-win. A key objective for many organisations this year should be to get the best of enemies to be the best of friends again. They, are after all, trying to achieve the same thing.

2. Digital Marketing, Social Marketing...It's Just Marketing -
If you are still struggling to get to grips with the new world of marketing, you need to catch up quickly. Many still discuss 'marketing' as being a separate discipline from 'digital' and 'social' marketing. But, guess what? The distinctions between each no longer exist. Its just marketing. The new world of marketing involves engaging with an audience through many channels. Integration is the key, as is implementing a coherent strategy across whatever relevant channels possible. So this year, forget about pigeon holing marketing and just get engaging with your audience, wherever they happen to be (both on- and off-line)

3. Entertain the Audience -
Consumers have been bombarded with one-way communications of droll, boring and meaningless marketing communications for too long and they have stopped listening. If you want consumers to give their time and attention to what you have to say, your communications need to have the entertainment factor. Ask yourself; will the communications I am planning for this year entertain the audience? If the answer is no, go back to the drawing board because it will not work.

4. Marketing Eyes Wide Open -
Marketing has got so much smarter. It used to be the case that marketers put a campaign together and hoped the sales followed. Now, as a result of data analytics, marketers can use a real-time 'dashboard', telling them what's working (and what's not), when its working, how its working, and so on. For online campaigns, you can track how many views a communication has received, how many click-throughs, whether or not users continued past the landing page, at what stage they made a purchase or submitted their details. The use of a CRM system, giving access to the sales pipeline and providing a 360 degree view, linking sales back to specific campaigns, is an essential tool enabling a smart marketing approach. Now, marketing is no longer conducted in the dark. This year aim to have your marketing eyes wide open by using the data. Smart marketers put a spotlight on their efforts. Don't leave it to chance. Measure and evaluate.

5. Prove a Return -
Accountability has become a hot topic in marketing and rightly so. As a marketer, your job is not done when you plan and implement marketing campaigns. Your job is done when you prove a return. If marketing as a profession is to be taken seriously at board level, a more scientific approach must be taken. If you want to be taken seriously by your board (and particularly by those who hold onto the purse strings in your organisation) make sure you talk the language they understand the most; money and profits.

If I can help in anyway with your plans for 2014 let me know, I would be delighted to have a chat. In any case, I hope you have a successful year.

Gavin Fox MSc
W: www.foxmarketing.ie
E: gavin@foxmarketing.ie
T: +353 87 649 7660

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The Foodie Tribe

I have just completed a research project investigating the effect of electronic word-of-mouth (on social media) in influencing the consumer's choice of restaurant. What it has shown is that marketers need to wake up and smell the coffee. The old style of marketing is not working and a new age of marketing has been born where the real influencers are consumers.  For decades marketers have actively targeted audiences with monologue-style communications whose sole purpose was to interrupt people with messages they may not be interested in hearing. Now, the best brands on the planet sell to people who really care about what they have to say and get them to tell their friends. And they tell their friends. And so on, until the brand has a loyal following of advocates or, as Seth Godin calls them, a tribe. What is a tribe? A tribe is “a social division in a traditional society consisting of families or communities linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties, with a common culture and dialect, typically having a recognized leader” (Oxford Dictionary). Marketing is now about leading tribes. The Apple tribe. The Red Bull tribe. The Starbucks tribe. The One Direction tribe. The 50 Shades of Grey tribe.

The leader of one particular tribe in Ireland is www.dineindublin.ie (a website owned by Dublin City BID). This is a website, supported by social media interaction that includes a loyal following of almost 8,000 on Facebook, whose purpose is to lead the foodies, the epicures, the gourmet explorers who love the refined sensuous enjoyment of food and drink. This is a small tribe in number but their influence on other consumers is powerful and now, through online communications, wide-reaching. To this tribe, food and drink is more than an act, it is an experience, probably the greatest experience in life. They are passionate about the taste, the history, the texture, the science (and the art) and the production of unique and special eating occasions. 

As a general rule, members of this particular tribe are amateurs, as opposed to professionals; they are self-taught. And they are, as Malcolm Gladwell would call them mavens, food mavens. They are socially driven to tell others about their experiences. They are epicurean evangelists who are devoted to talking about great food. And, as a result of their infectious passion, they are incredibly influential. To them, eating is serious business and others should make informed decisions. To those outside the tribe it doesn’t really matter all that much. This might make members of the tribe branded by some as ‘food snobs’, but they don’t care. To them, food and drink is their passion and, if you are not a member of the tribe, you wouldn’t understand. 

I can report that, if you are a restaurant marketer, you should be interested in getting these influencers talking about your restaurant, especially through social media. Restaurant marketing is now about forming and leading a tribe, starting a movement, creating an army of brand evangelists who care so much they will communicate your message in way that will be many times more influential than any communications you could create yourself. So, the process should look like this; find the influencers, organise them, get them talking. Simple, right?

What do Cheryl Cole and Peppa Pig Have in Common?

Cheryl Cole's
New Bum

Firstly, sincere apologies to all of you out there who have missed hearing my marketing meanderings over the past few months. I have been crazy busy (no excuse I know), but I am back on the blog now and those queuing outside my door can head off home and start reading.  So, what do Cheryl Cole and Peppa Pig have in common then? No, they do not both share the same bum tattoo artist. The answer is they both get paid obscene amounts of money to promote brands to a target consumer audience. 

We all know that celebrity endorsement works, right? Certain consumers, whether they admit it or not, will be influenced when they see Brad Pitt endorsing Channel No. 5, David Beckham sporting the latest Armani budgie smugglers or Cheryl Cole uttering the words “because you’re worth it”. (I wonder would there be any room left on Cheryl's bum for a L'Oréal logo tattoo?)

Well this week, while doing the grocery shopping, I came across a real-life example proving celebrity endorsements are alive and kicking in marketing to four-year-olds as well as those a little older. This eureka moment occurred when we got to the TESCO aisle containing the spaghetti hoops (one of their 5-a-day apparently). My little genius didn’t rationally say; “It doesn’t matter to me mammy if I have the TESCO own-brand or the Heinz product, sure they’re all the same”. No, he incessantly requested the Heinz product until he sufficiently influenced us 'decision-makers' into making the right purchase. What was the difference between the two near identical products?  The difference was my four year old son's feelings for a young farrow with a cute little snout and strange squeaky accent (no, not Cheryl, the other one).  Peppa Pig. And that got me thinking; apart from the obvious ‘parental yielding’ that was taking place (in other words, anything for a quiet life), from a consumer behaviour theoretical viewpoint, what was going on here?

Well, the clever marketers at Heinz have obviously heard of Heider’s Balance Theory (developed in 1958, believe it-or-not, well before Peppa was even born), which considers relations among elements a person might perceive as belonging together. The perspective (the perceiver’s subjective point-of-view) involves relations between three elements resulting in an attitude structure called a triad.  Each triad contains (1) a person and their perceptions, (2) an attitude objective, and (3) some other person or object. The perceptions between each can be positive or negative, but the theory specifies that the triad must be balanced to be effective in formulating consumer attitudes. So, what would my little fella's triad have looked like for the two alternative products? Because of his positive perception of spaghetti hoops and his positive perception of Peppa Pig, the product that featured both resulted in his positive perception of it, meaning the Heinz product won. 

And so it is, for four year old and forty-four year old consumers, celebrity endorsement works. You just have to find out who your target consumer is into or who they aspire to be like. Not that my little genius aspires to be like Peppa Pig (at least I hope not), but you know what I mean.

Facebook Marketing - 5 Smart Tips

It’s not quite a ‘rags-to-riches’ story, more of a ‘dormitory-to-stock market’ story. Surely Mark Zuckerberg and his pals couldn’t have foreseen the global potential of their social networking program which, at the time, was called Facemash. Facebook is a phenomenon. (Okay, so tell me something I don’t know.) Did you know just how much of a phenomenon it really is? Here are some stats -

• The social media giant will very soon reach 1 billion users worldwide
•  If Facebook were a country, it would be the 3^rd largest country in the world
• 50% of users log on every single day
• More than 700 billion minutes are spent on Facebook every day
• In Ireland, 2.2 million people are users of Facebook (that is 47.23% of the population or 71.76% of the online population)
• 47% of users are male, 53% female
• Traffic is highest midweek between 1-3pm
• Engagement is 18% higher on Thursdays and Fridays
• The average time spent on Facebook is 20 minutes per visit
• The chart below shows the split by age in Ireland.

So, the stats act as a reminder for what we already know. If you are marketing to just about anyone, you have got to include Facebook in your plans. And, if you don’t, you better have a very good reason. But what specifically should you be doing? Here are 5 tips for marketing on Facebook.

1. Facebook Advertising – Facebook advertising is powerful, not just because of the potential reach but, more importantly, because of its ability to hyper-target. Seth Godin put it well when he said “Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than selling to strangers who don’t”. Facebook advertising lets you sell to people who want to hear from you. How? Before your ad goes live, you select the exact demographic you want your ad to appear to, by ticking various boxes based on age, gender, interests, even location. The result? A much higher chance that the ad will be relevant to those who see it, meaning they are far more likely to act on it. And guess what? If they don’t act on it, you don’t pay. Facebook advertising is pay-per-click, so you only pay when users click on it. Facebook will give you a click rate, which is based on the target audience they reckon you will reach after you select your demographic choices. You then set your daily budget and, when that is reached, your ad will not feature again until the next day. You can very easily see if the ad is working or not and you can stop it or adjust it at any time. But, because your advertisements are highly relevant to those seeing them, they tend to be highly effective. 53% of shoppers who click through from Facebook make a purchase. This is smart advertising. That mass marketing stuff was for the cavemen.

2. Contests & Competitions – This is a sure-fire way to get engagement from your Fans. Facebook users love contest and competitions, especially if they are relevant to them and you are offering something that is useful. Very simply offer a prize when users answer a question correctly to encourage engagement. The prize can be anything, so long as it is relevant to the user; one free month’s service, discount off their next purchase, free product, event tickets, a free t-shirt, whatever. And when the competition relates somewhat to your business (and it should) you are encouraging relevant engagement that gets them thinking about you.

3. Provide Exclusives – Your Facebook Fans like to feel like VIPs, so they feel it is worth being there, that you are doing something for them they can’t get anywhere else. Is there anything you could share with your Fans that isn’t currently available anywhere else? Could you announce a new product launch, give sneak previews to new product designs, provide priority purchase for an event? Again, the exclusive must be relevant to the user, not just to you. If you share unique content like this with your Facebook community, they are encouraged to return.

4. Upload Videos & Photos – Have you heard of EdgeRank Algorithm? It’s a little bit like how Google decides what shows up in search. EdgeRank algorithm decides what shows up in a Fan’s News Feed by giving different types of content a weighting. Videos and photos have the highest weighting, because this type of content is the most engaging, users love them. On average there are 300 million photos uploaded to Facebook every single day. So what could you upload? A series of product demos, customer testimonials, a series explaining various industry jargon, recorded interviews from experts in the industry, quick snippets from your team inside your organisation, content from events you are involved in. If you think about it there is a lot you can do with a cheap digital recorder (or i-Phone) and a bit of creativity. But make sure to be creative.

5. Simply Engage – It would be a real shame if you were to create a Facebook audience and then neglect it. Facebook communities need someone around to keep prodding for engagement, stimulating conversations, and various forms of content. And, don’t just pump automatic updates from other sources; provide relevant content that users will appreciate. Hang out with your community, that’s what “Friends” do. Make a few comments back to some who have taken the time out of their busy day to engage with you. 95% of wall posts are currently not answered by brands. Just being there keeps people interested and puts you ahead of a lot of companies, probably even your competitors.

There is so much more marketers can do with Facebook. It deserves some careful planning if you are to get results. “I have to get on Facebook because everyone else is” is not a good enough reason to get involved. If you are to do it, do it right. And treat it with the level of importance it deserves. Don’t just hire a marketing junior to ‘do a bit of Facebook marketing’, the channel is far too important for that. Plan a Facebook strategy that is right for your business and execute it professionally. Oh, and if you have any questions or if I can help in any way, let me know. 

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