Successful marketing campaigns

Hi Brian - I'm confused.

You said that some of the 100 most mentioned brands on Twitter don't even have profiles. That doesn't indicate to me that they squandered an opportunity - that indicates to me that Twitter has little bearing on brand loyalty at all. Can you offer any more insight?

Agreed, just because your company is discussed on Twitter doesn't alone justify why you should be twittering. Better to get employees already twittering to add to the conversation (if you have passionate engaged employees, then they will), and then come up with a communication plan for the central company voice.

I think marketing is very important, and much needed. A successful and smart marketing initiative will offer brand awareness to the consumer. It can help provide information what the company is about.

Twitter is just another tool you can use in your marketing initiative if used correctly. Meaning you are personable in your tweets to your followers and you engage with them. Marketing really is about synergy of all your campaigns and initiatives be the same theme. It is also about interacting between you, the company, and them, the consumer. I think that is why some companies with Twitter are so successful because they interact with their "followers".

At the end of the day, I think what some companies have lost focus on is their company. Flashy and smart marketing campaign gets attention and perhaps profit for the short-term, but it is the longevity that really counts. Companies forget that the people who work for the company are the front line, and they are the ones who can help increase your customer retention rate. Companies need to start treating ALL employees fairly and treated with respect. A happy employee is an employee who will go above and beyond their job description to help your company succeed.

Many times, no offense, management needs to learn how to manage effectively. I have worked in different places, retail and corporate and often why a company does not do well is quite reflective on management. Management position means that you need to know how to lead others, through celebration of victories, as well as leading by doing first.

Finally, I find that Canadian wireless companies are horrible. They have great marketing ideas, but they focus so much on getting new clients they forget to treat their current clients happy. Isn't the basic business acumen is about keeping your current clients happy since they are more profitable to you, and cheaper to retain than to find new customers? At the end of the day, it is about the quality of your product/services but as well as good customer service and interactivity. Without it, all is lost in my opinion.

I think we are seeing less of a distinction between "branding" and other forms of media, not that I think the gulf was ever as wide in reality as it was in marketing budgets.

A useful way to think about this is a brand/response ratio in marketing. Aflac's advertising is 100% brand, because there is nothing really a consumer can act on, since the policies are offered through employers.

Much of Dell's marketing is much more response-oriented: they want you to call or order online in response to an online ad or catalog. That is not to say that Dell is not helping its brand, but that brand is very oriented toward price and convenience.

Most companies have had a a mixture of spending on brand and response, but the branding channels (e.g. TV) were the sexy and expensive ones and dominated spending for many. Part of the idea was that brand awareness led to more customers (which was often true) who, if the product was right, would be brand loyal. And brand advertising was also seen as a way to keep existing customers loyal.

Online marketing makes these distinctions more difficult to support, partly because of simple things like real estate and partly because of the channel's "measurability" (even if that is sometimes mythical). If I place an online ad, I cannot tell my brand story for 30 secs. I have a fraction of a second to command attention. If I succeed, I get a prospect to my site, where again I need to persuade to them to take in the message. In most cases, it will be difficult to get successive branding messages to that consumer, because they are unlikely to click through again. So all things, being equal, I should probably try to promote some buying response, rather than trying to build brand.

Social media are another factor that will be important. In the short term, they may be more negative than positive for brands: unhappy customers have motivation and "content" that can now be distributed via their social networks...in public. Happy customers have less motivation and less "content" to tell positive stories. A poor brand experience can now get broadcast to hundreds of people.

It's not just interactive that has driven these changes...it's been a change occuring for several decades at least (direct marketing, cable TV, brand proliferation, etc.). But the increasing important of interactive and social media will accelerate the trend. In some sense, brand loyalty will be more important than ever, but harder to "push" through media spend.

Anyway, that's my opinion.

The problem with the thousands of discussions about "branding" and "marketing" is that the vocabulary tends to mean different things to different people, and the discussions, in my opinion, too often go off into neverneverland...

For me it's useful to go back to the basics of what we're trying to ACCOMPLISH with marketing. Bottom line, we're "greasing the skids," moving the minds of the target market to think more favorably about a product/service so that they will buy more of it than they are presently.

For me, the fastest, most powerful way to make that happen is to DIFFERENTIATE my product/service from everybody else's. Branding is not a medium, it is what happens if your marketing program has been successful in
differentiating you.

As for "social media," it is not the all-purpose silver bullet that it's often touted to be. It is simply "electronically enhanced word-of-mouth" (my phrase). Nothing more, nothing less. The reason it's so hard to "channel" social media is that word-of-mouth has ALWAYS been hard to channel...

You will notice, however, that the companies that get the most and best word-of-mouth are usually the ones that do the best job of differentiating themselves through OTHER marketing means.

If you are taking about driving qualified sales opportunities for your business, there are seven key things you must have/or develop:

1) You need a strong and simple value proposition (specific and measurable)
2) You need a well-defined target market
3) You need to map customers buying processes and roles -- a matrix
4) You need to map marketing content to that matrix.
5) You need a killer website with remarkable content 100% focused on the needs and problems of your buyers.
6) You need to fill that website with great content and thought leadership.
7) You need to make sure you have the right keywords and rank high for them in Google.

95% of companies flunk one or more of those seven must-haves, in my humble opinion. I could point you to dozens of examples, but what do you think?

By the way, I invite everyone to join the radio show next Thursday, September 17th at 3:30pm in which I am the special guest discussing Lead Nurturing on SalesBuzz radio. To sign up or read more info, please visit http://brooksgroup.com/thesalesbuzz/

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