You can’t reach your audience until you know what they have in common.
Consider: On one hand, you have a 24-year-old welder, living in a small house in a small town; on the other, you have a 32-year-old university-educated hipster art director, living in a loft in a ‘creative’ area of Toronto. What do they have in common?
Not demographics. Not even psychographics.
What they have in common is bugs.
Our 24-year-old welder just bought a fixer-upper in his small town, and is facing a termite infestation left behind by the previous owner. Our urban hipster has just discovered that the reason he got his loft so cheap is because half the beams also have termites.
Of course, when you start drilling down into the bugs, you begin to realize that our welder and our hipster have plenty of other things in common, too: They’re both spending weekends at the DIY store, surfing the internet for renovation tips, searching for termite inspectors, etc. They may also be looking for lawyers to sue the pants off the previous owners of their new homes.
Reaching your target means knowing what they’re doing in a day
Trying to reach both of these guys online using basic demographics isn’t going to work; trying to reach them by using psychographics isn’t going to work either.
But you can reach them by mapping out a Day in the Life of your ideal consumer.
It starts by starting with the product and working backwards: You’re selling anti-termite treatment. You know that one of the prime target audiences are people who’ve just bought homes, probably on the cheap because they decided not to spring for the full house inspection before closing. From there, it’s just a matter of describing their day in reverse.
For the new homeowner of a fixer-upper, the days probably look like this:
- Up and out the door early, because they’re working super-hard to meet the mortgage payments
- These are go-getters who aren’t faffing around on the internet all day – a 24-year-old who can afford a house in a small town, and a 32-year-old who can afford a loft in Toronto, are driven, entrepreneurial types who aren’t spending 4 hours a day ‘exploring’ Google+
- After work, they aren’t wasting too much time and money partying with friends or eating out – they’re going straight home to spend their time and money on their new places
- When they get home and do get online, they’re price-shopping for DIY supplies, searching for termite solutions, or watching how-to videos about how to install new countertops
- Their online time is primarily spent on weekdays, because the weekends are big project days
…and suddenly you know exactly how and where to advertise your anti-termite treatment: You need to be on YouTube, DIY sites, and invest in some SEO and good relevant content development. A customized online promotion with Home Depot or Canadian Tire wouldn’t hurt either.
You even know the kind of message you need. It’s going to be a combination of price and credibility, since these guys are on a budget and they feel like they got totally screwed by the people who sold them their new homes.
It’s all about figuring out what your consumers have in common.
Not everything should be advertised with cupcakes.
In my travels around the interwebs lately, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in online advertising: Cupcakes.
Today alone I counted 14 different online ads, for 14 different products (none of them cupcakes or even bakeries, by the way), which featured brightly coloured images of cupcakes.
Look, I like cupcakes as much as the next guy, and I get that well-lit cupcakes make colourful stock photos which turn into good thumbnails which say Fun! and Happiness!, but at a certain point you have to ask yourself: If everyone else is using cupcakes, am I doing my brand any good by using them too?
Variety is the spice of life key to cutting through the clutter
When you use the same imagery as everyone else, you don’t just risk blending into the background. You miss an opportunity.
Canada’s diversity population – not just ‘visible minorities’ but people who identify with cultures outside the ‘mainstream’ – is closing in on 25%, and may even be higher, depending on how people self-identify. And in many regions, even the ‘mainstream’ is far more diverse than we sometimes assume. Not everyone dreams of eating pink cupcakes in a redbrick Colonial behind a picket fence. Given a choice, plenty of us would choose samosas instead, every time.
Just a little thought to take with you the next time you’re choosing imagery for your online campaign.
By now you will all have read that Google has agreed to purchase Motorola for a mere $12.5 BILLION DOLLARS. This represents the single largest deal in Google’s history. Like many of you, I feel I have a fairly good understanding of what this deal will mean for Google… its a massive first step into mobile and comes with more than 17,000 patents that Motorola currently holds. What I don’t know is whether this deal will actually close.
Google has come under scrutiny with the Federal Trade Commission. They’ve launched an investigation of the entire Google’s business (likely due to their ridiculous growth and impending worl d domination). The FTC will be all over the Motorola deal and could force Google to sell off some of Motorola in the interest in keeping the industry competitive… that alone could kill the whole deal right there. It’s an interesting space right now as this comes on the heels of Microsoft’s buyout of Skype. Really looks like the battle lines are getting drawn between the empire that is Google and the rebel alliance of Microsoft-Facebook-Skype.
What do you think?
More on the Google / Motorola transaction - http://adage.com/article/digital/google-bought-motorola-means/229265/
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Chris Patheiger is a Vice President of Business Development at Redux Media, a leading international online publisher network of top-quality, specialty websites and media representation firms. Chris is responsible for Communications, Sales and E-Publisher of TheMediaPath.com online advertising Blog. He can be reached at chris@reduxmedia.com
You’ve spent a lot of time and money defining your target.
How well do you know your actual customers?
 There's a reason this picture is creeping you out. We're not comfortable with faceless people. The other day we talked about how it can be hard to draw a straight line from ‘advertising’ to ‘impressions’, and from there to actual ’sales’.
But there’s a fantastic, underutilized source of information about how well your online advertising is working: Your online customers.
Over the years, I’ve participated in a whole lot of focus groups – on both sides of the one-way glass – and I’m always surprised at how much time, money and effort companies put in to assessing ‘intent to purchase’, and how little they spend on asking actual customers why they made a purchase after the fact.
I’m not talking about feedback surveys here, and I’m not talking about Facebook groups which allow every Tom, Dick and Harry to comment on what they think of your new Velveeta packaging. Those are fine for general feedback on service delivery, for fostering the impression of a transparent and accessible brand, and even for engaging large groups of consumers.
But online sales can be so random, and so anonymous, that without actually asking customers specific questions, you’ll never really know why you made the sale. Was it
- That your ad was really compelling?
- That they saw your ad so many times they just gave in?
- A recommendation from a friend?
- A combination of offline and online advertising that happened to dovetail nicely?
- Some other alchemy that you hadn’t considered?
Where’s the gap?
Every C-suite executive I speak to always says that s/he’d like to know more about the efficacy of their advertising. So why isn’t it happening?
Well, we see 2 problems:
- No one is being specifically tasked with getting information on the connection between advertising and sales
- Most generic ‘customer feedback’ applications attached to online sales sites focus on customer service and delivery rather than origin of sales
The problem with relying on opt-in customer feedback applications (which tend to be high on the generic, maybe-you’ll-win-a-prize approach) is that you tend to get responses from the extreme ends of the spectrum. For every 10 people who respond, 8 are replying because they’re really cheesed off, and 2 are responding because they had the best experience of their life. Neither are particularly good at telling you what advertising message got them to make the purchase in the first place.
Closing the gap: It’s an easy fix.
It’s not difficult to get better information than you have now. Here’s how to do it:
- Put one person in charge of following up with customers
- Get them to make 50 phone calls or direct emails per week (more is better, but 50 is a good start). Not overly-scripted phone calls; not generic, auto-generated emails. Personal phone calls or emails, from a real person, that are designed to engage the customer in a dialogue
- Make sure the questions about the tipping point/advertising/origin of sale aren’t afterthoughts or have yes/no answers. Engage the customer in a conversation about how they decided to make the purchase – chances are the decision-making process was more complex than you think
- Offer a participation reward to everyone. Instead of the usual “One in 1000 will win an iPad!”, try “Everyone who responds gets a $5 Starbucks card” or “Everyone who responds gets a coupon for a free lipbalm”. This generates more responses, more responses from ‘average’ consumers, and has the added benefit of engaging the customer and probably creating a long-term relationship (everyone likes to be asked for their opinion, and rewarded for it).
Do this for 6 months in a row, and I promise you’ll know a whole lot more about which of your advertising efforts are working best for you.
Measuring advertising isn’t a new problem.
Social media hasn’t made it any worse.
When I was first working in advertising, I read a quote that’s always stuck with me, because I mostly think it’s true: ”I know half of my advertising dollars are wasted. I just don’t know which half.” The quote is attributed to John Wanamaker, the famous department store mogul – who died in 1922.
In other words, the problem of measuring advertising spend against results has been with us for at least 100 years.
Last week, Shiv Singh, the Head of Digital for PepsiCo Beverages, posted a piece on his blog entitled “When a Trillion Impressions Aren’t Enough“, which seemed to provoke a lot of discussion. His point was that with so many online advertising opportunities (”Largely thanks to the social media phenomenon….”), advertisers are spending too much time (and money) generating impressions, and too little time measuring what they’re actually doing for the brand or for the business.
He goes on to say:
“For example, I cannot accurately quantify the value of a Pepsi display banner advertising impression versus a paid search impression, a mainstream news story about Pepsi impression, a FourSquare check-in impression at a Pepsi location, a Get Glue impression of a Pepsi branded sticker, or a Facebook edge ranked surfaced newsfeed impression of something the brand is doing.”
Well, call me old-school, but quantifying almost any of these is infinitely easier than quantifying impressions delivered via billboards, transit ads, television or radio spots used to be, back in the days when we just had to spend $1 million to put billboards by the side of the highway and hope that sales in that city increased within 3 months.
“I’m not even sure if the Pepsi target consumer is seeing these impressions. I also don’t know exactly which is more important, how do they influence brand affinity and which drive purchases the most.”
Again, I get what he’s saying: Online advertising has a certain amount of ’spill’ (i.e. reaching people outside your target audience while trying to reach the target). But I’d still argue that most online channels, combined with some common sense and a little trial and error, delivers far less spill than traditional advertising ever did.
And I don’t think social media is exacerbating the problem – in fact I think it’s compensating for the limitations of defining a target market. For example, as an advertiser it’s appropriate to say that your target market is, say, urban dwellers aged 18-34. However, that kind of definition doesn’t really allow for familial and social circle influence: The 21-year-old city dweller who is within the target market may well be in a position to influence younger siblings and older parents who aren’t in the target market – and that’s where social media-based impressions can be valuable, even though they’re almost impossible for the advertiser to measure since they aren’t really looking for them anyway.
A brand like Pepsi also has challenges that most other brands simply don’t face. Getting a “mainstream news story” might not even register as a blip on their website traffic, which is likely quite high anyway, whereas for smaller brands, a mainstream news story would have an immediate, demonstrable effect on their website traffic and on their awareness levels.
Should advertisers continue to come up with new ways to measure the value of their advertising spend, and devise creative ways to test the efficacy of specific channels? Of course. Are we already light years ahead of where we were even 15 years ago? Absolutely.
Congratulations – you’re driving engagement!
How are you rewarding your ‘engagees’?
If you’re reading this, I probably don’t have to tell you about the importance of engagement when it comes to online advertising (actually, engagement is important in virtually all advertising, but that’s a different blog post).
The goal of engagement, of course, isn’t just to have users caring about your brand – it is, ultimately, to get them to take action. For a retail brand, this might be ‘liking’ your page on Facebook; for an online retailer, this might be making a purchase. Either way, getting the consumer to take action shouldn’t be the end of your engagement efforts. In fact, it should be the beginning of a whole new round of engagement.
Ask any salesperson and they’ll tell you: Once you’ve motivated a consumer to take an initial action, it’s easier to get them to continue to take action – to recommend your product to a friend, make a purchase, or pay attention to your message.
So what are you doing to foster this engagement?
It’s all about making them feel part of the ‘inner circle’.
The challenge is that once consumers have engaged with your brand, they have certain expectations: They know the value of their engagement, and they expect to be treated differently from the uninitiated. Strangely, this may have little or nothing to do with the amount of money they may have spent. Someone who ‘likes’ your Facebook page may feel you have the same obligation to them as someone who spent $500 on your handbag – it all has to do with how public they’ve made their brand loyalty.
Reward this loyalty, and you retain it; ignore it, and you risk losing it to the competition.
So how do you reward engagement?
Well, if 32 million ‘likes’ are any indication, we could probably all take a lesson from Coca-Cola. Between their Facebook page, which regularly offers special deals to members, doesn’t do a whole lot of self-promotion, and allows users to discuss their love of Coke amongst themselves without deleting the negative comments; and their iCoke rewards, where users can collect points which can be redeemed for various rewards, they seem to be doing a good job of engaging users in a variety of ways.
I also like what Audible does: Not only do they offer me special ‘member deals’ when I visit the site, they also email me occasionally (not too much!) to let me know when new books arrive, and – possibly most important – they recommend books to me based on my past buying behaviour. (And their algorithms must be pretty good, because 9 times out of 10 their recommendations are totally accurate.)
Mobile devices, of course, offer brands a fantastic opportunity to reward engagement with a high-perceived-value reward: When popular College Humor characters Jake and Amir went on a roadtrip last year, they tweeted things like “We’ll be at the Arby’s at the corner of Main and King in 10 minutes”, only to arrive to find sometimes hundreds of fans waiting for them. (And make no mistake – YouTube stars are definitely monetized brands.)
Sure, you can still send out monthly newsletters to your past client database – and in the B2B space, if you have good content, these newsletters may still have value – but if you’re asking people to ‘like’ your Facebook page or follow you on Twitter or buy your product and then not offering them interesting rewards, you’re missing a huge opportunity.
Advertisers will choose customers over traffic, every time.
No one ever accused the News of the World of high-minded journalism. Between royal scandals, half-dressed ‘glamour models’, and celebrity gossip, it was either a (very) guilty pleasure or representative of all that was wrong with the British tabloid press, depending on your viewpoint.
It was also Britain’s best-selling Sunday paper, with 7.5 million weekly readers. The website was less popular, having recently gone to a paid model, but was still ranked #317 in the UK (compare that with, say, gossip site PerezHilton, which ranks #288 in the US).
Which meant that, scurrilous content or not, News of the World was one of the few newspaper-based content providers who were seeing real growth in advertising. In 2010, advertising was up 10%, demonstrating what many cynics already think about advertisers: That they care more about readership, eyeballs and traffic than they do about ‘good’ content.
A scandal too far
Even when News of the World admitted to hacking the phones of various celebrities (Sienna Miller was the most recently famous, as the first to win a settlement from NOTW), advertisers stuck around. After all, readership was still up, website traffic continued steady (even with the paid model), and for all the media outcry, the average person secretly thinks that part of the price celebrities pay for their lavish lifestyles is a certain invasion of privacy. And anyway, even the British Prime Minister seemed to accept that it was only a handful of bad apples who’d done the hacking.
Everything changed when it emerged last week that NOTW journalists had hacked the voicemail accounts of 13-year-old murder victim Milly Dowler, giving her parents false hope she was alive and triggering a criminal investigation. News of the World announced that it would close down, after 168 years in business.
At first, everyone assumed it was shutting down to avoid the inevitable onslaught of lawsuits. But it was simpler than that: NOTW was going out of business because advertisers were pulling out in droves.
Consumers speak louder than ‘readers’
 Some of the top (former) advertisers in News of the World - and their annual spend Image from The Guardian.
Turns out that NOTW readers not only comprise a valuable demographic (they over-index in the lucrative 35-44s) but are also better-educated – website visitors, for example, were more likely to have attended graduate school.
Which meant they were better equipped than most audiences to express their displeasure to advertisers – and advertisers listened. Big-name advertisers said they were deluged with calls and emails expressing disapproval, and social media channels also went crazy.
Of the 250,000 tweets mentioning News of the World on Thursday, about 16% also mentioned another brand: ”Dear @TheCooperative, will you be reconsidering your advertising with #notw given that we now know they hacked Milly Dowler’s phone?” was typical.
By Friday, NOTW had become toxic, with advertisers apologizing for current advertising and promising they had no plans to run future advertising in the paper, the ‘Fabulous’ supplement, or on the website.
Most experts agreed that it would take months for NOTW to recover – if it ever did – and in the world of big-budget publishing, who has months these days?
Content may be king, but the consumer is sovereign.
Some pundits are saying the whole News of the World scandal will transform tabloid journalism, especially in the UK. Maybe – the threat of criminal prosecution may help to keep some of the unscrupulous on the right side of the ethical divide.
For the rest of us, however, it’s just a good reminder that at the end of the day, consumers, not ‘traffic’, are the holy grail.
The thing is, intrusive ads often work.
As a digital media specialist, I have a pretty high tolerance – and even affection for – online advertising, even the ‘intrusive’ kind like pop-ups, pop-unders, floating ads, and interstitials. What’s more, I accept the tradeoff: If advertising is the price I have to pay in order to access great content online, that’s fine with me – it’s better than having to get out my credit card every time I want to check out a website or article online.
But even my patience was tested the other day when I visited one of my regular news sites, only to find that they’d started using automatic video ads with the volume cranked up to a million. There I was, listening to a nice quiet iTunes playlist on my headphones, when suddenly my ears were assaulted by a REALLY LOUD ad for a Frank’s Red Hot Sauce commercial.
Now, I happen to like Frank’s Red Hot Sauce, and I even like that commercial, but the experience was so jarring that I had to ask myself: ”Is this intrusiveness really a good idea?”
Intrusiveness increases ad performance
The simple answer is yes: Online advertising which is considered more intrusive (pop-ups, floating ads, etc.) will not only almost double the recall of an advertisement, but significantly increase clickthrough rates.
What’s more, studies show that display and video ads work best, while search and text ads perform worst.
So Frank’s Red Hot Sauce was following a perfectly legitimate strategy: They have a stable of short, amusing video ads, and they know that running them online is going to generate more attention than a banner ad or a text ad.
However.
Intrusiveness + contextual targeting = reduced performance
While intrusive ads work well when the goal is grabbing the attention and recall of the user, they work less well when the ad has been very highly targeted.
(SOURCE: How Our Brains Engage With Online Ads.)
A recent study by professors at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto the Sloan School of Business at MIT found that while intrusive ads work well for increasing awareness and recall, when highly intrusive ads are combined with very narrowcast targeting, they work less well.
Why? It seems to have to do with users’ perception of privacy: Combining high degrees of intrusiveness with high levels of contextual, personalized information can be read as ‘manipulation’.
In other words, Frank’s Red Hot Sauce’s ‘intrusive’ strategy is a good one: They’re not looking to read my mind or get me to click through to purchase their product; all they want is to build some brand awareness and keep themselves top of mind. A similarly intrusive ad for, say, a prescription medication for a health problem I researched online yesterday isn’t going to be nearly as palatable.
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