Trying Something

Like many marketers, 2009 came to me bundled with a mandate to re-think about marketing spend. We want to be extremely pragmatic about where we spend. Think Stevens' Extreme Marketing.

So, I needed to figure out how to reach a very niche audience. People have been banging on my door to sell me lists of 5000-10000 contacts, but those cost thousands of dollars and about 85% of the contacts in those lists are not in our target audience. So, they wouldn't like hearing from us. Other efforts, like magazine or e-zine advertising reach 30000 viewers, most of which are again outside of my target. And they cost a huge portion of this small pragmatic company's desired marketing budget.

So, how do we get feedback from our target audience while putting our brand out there without spending a fortune? Well, we're trying something new. Not that someone else hasn't likely done it before, but it's new for us.

In short, we launched a viral contest. We are offering $1000 to the winner of our simple contest. Real money. No tricks. But those who enter need to encourage their peers (our intended audience) to also participate because we need 1000 entries to validate the contest for pay out.

In the end, everyone wins. We get some highly targeted feedback, which is critical for us. Some additional people learn who we are. And the participants get a real chance to win a decent prize while having a little fun (the contest is to provide the best caption for a cartoon). They also, by the way, should be interested in our solutions since they have matching job responsibilities. And nobody who absolutely shouldn't care will get bothered by unsolicited contact.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Email Marketing Tips

Some useful tips on email marketing from the folks at Pinpointe:

• 10 Best Performing Email Subject Lines
• 10 Worst Performing Email Subject Lines
• 9 Tips for Writing Email Subject Lines That Work
  (includes the 50/50 rule and the 80/20 rule)
• The Ideal Email Subject Line Length

Bottom line: keep subjects short, descriptive, and accurate.

NIN & the iPhone

Trent Reznor lives on the cutting edge of technology, which makes perfect sense when you look at his creative process and the music of Nine Inch Nails. His latest foray - the NIN iPhone app - is one example of how willing he is to experiment with technology while making his music, and more importantly his brand, that much more accessible to fans.

The iPhone application has some great features. The community building via Google Earth is a great idea - showing forum posts, uploaded photos, and concert chatter in real time, whether the poster is at the concert or half-way around the world. Viewable on the iPhone app of course, but also within a web browser for those at home or using some other type of smart phone. But the best part - it's free.

Free for the taking.

Like the fan-created remixes of his music, submitted by anyone with an internet connection who visits the NIN website and registers to get started. Here, we'll give you the software and the MP3 files of original songs. Go ahead, show us what you've got!

Some artists embrace this kind of openness and sharing with their fan base (see also: Moby), while others struggle to reconcile copyrights and revenue with an internet-fueled market where users continually expect higher levels of access. Rather than strain against the tide of file sharing, remixes, and mash-ups, these creatives have figured out a way to harness that power to become more ingrained in fans' lives. And their brand cache gets a bump in the process.

New, Easy Open Cap!

Some product improvements are just bad business.

If you've ever opened a jar of Hellman's mayonnaise, you might have had to struggle through the shrink-wrapped tamper-evidence seal. I usually have to grab a knife out of a nearby drawer to slice open the plastic. Some products use a perforated vertical strip to make it easier. Others use a hard plastic tear-strip that pulls right to left. The Hellman's jar I opened today had a better experience.

There was a big sticker on top exclaiming New, Easy Open Cap! ...something I didn't notice as I grabbed it off the shelf. There was no plastic shrink-wrap and no tear-strip. All I had to do was spin the cap open just like I do normally and listen for the snapping sound as it opened for the first time. Better? Sure. But do I really care? No.

Although I regularly felt the inconvenience of the tamper-evidence seal, it NEVER occurred to me that I should switch brands to make it easier to open. Or that I should use less mayo. ...which leads me to the point. Hellman's no doubt went through focus groups, re-engineering, changes to the manufacturing process, and lots of other costs to make this simple change. If it doesn't cause someone to buy who wouldn't have already bought, then all of that cost was unjustified.

I see the same type of moves in technology product sales. Vendors spend time and money building and delivering features that won't influence sales. I know that a group of useless features could be bundled into some category like "innovative" that makes people buy, but that misses the point.

My point is simple. Prioritize the road map based on what will deliver real value to buyers. And don't waste money on improving the tamper-evidence seal – even if the new seal is considered super cool by everyone in the industry. Increased value for customers is the only clear indicator of money well spent.

Google's Ultimate Power

Recently, I decided to make some adjustments to one of my Google PPC campaigns. ...normal stuff like adjusting bid prices, adding keyword phrases, and adding broad-match or exact-match phrases. Next thing I know, Google dropped my quality scores on just about every keyword in that campaign. ...from around 7-8 to 1-2. That's the difference between life and death in the PPC world. And then the ads weren't showing. Was it something I said?

A few months back, I attended a seminar on SEO that told me to use a domain name that matched my ad copy. So, I did. I bought domains that matched my keywords and ran ads back to landing pages on those domains. It seemed to work. I don't really know if worked better than if I didn't use a matching domain, but I was getting results. Then, Google decided to un-list my site. Why? Because it saw two domains with the same content and determined that to be fraud. I found this out only because I happened to be in the Google Webmaster Tools. Luckily, I removed the alternate content, applied 301 redirects, went through the objection process and they re-listed the site. What a Hassle.

Google has the power to effectively shut down a business if that business is relying on web traffic. And they don't give you a rule-book to play by. So, it's a game of hit-and-miss. And web has become the de-facto mechanism for B2B research. You don't use a phonebook or rely on the physical mailbox to find an enterprise software solution. You use Google. As a marketer, my audience is screaming at me to NOT use email and NOT use (cold) phone calls. So, we are choosing to limit our options to Google. It's dangerous.

Google is essentially limiting your choice to companies who have savvy-enough web marketing to survive. And sometimes simple mistakes or misinformation cause a de-listing. It's bad for sellers and buyers. I think it's time to start advocating a better way. I'm not saying that Google should do anything different. They're good at what they do and provide a fantastic service for navigating the billions of web pages out there. But as a B2B buyer, I can't rely on Google to help me find my best options. And I don't know where else to go.

Marketing via the Social Web

This week, eWeek posted an article discussing a study done on social technologies and marketing by Forrester Research. Something struck me as a bit off. Consider this excerpt:

But when it comes to being swayed to spend their dollars on business technology, 84 of the surveyed decision makers were more likely to rely on word of mouth from peers and colleagues, while 45 percent said they were swayed by forums, online communities and social networks.

I get that buyers are most motivated by word-of-mouth and people they trust. But isn't that the exact point of social technologies. The social web is a mechanism of communication – not a source of information. The buyers' peers and colleagues are still the source.

Maybe what they're saying is that they don't trust social web sites to paint a true picture of the people they're communicating with? Maybe they think it's a conspiracy amongst software vendors? I don't like the way that the data was presented here. Peers and Social Media are not alternative sources of information.

Wash, Rinse, Repeat

When I was a programmer, everything was trial-and-error. I would come up with a set of functions and techniques to get a desired result and then it was: [try it > troubleshoot > scrap it > start-over] in cycles until the code worked.

It's similar in marketing, but on a much bigger scale. Instead of a few lines of code, it's an entire campaign. [Identify an audience > pick a medium > create a message > implement] No results? There goes a nice chunk of change. Embrace failure and try it again. ...or if you're not comfortable embracing failure, apply a different success metric.

But it's not just a problem for us small fries. Pepsi is dumping the new packaging for it's Tropicana line of Orange Juice. That's a failed campaign that must be worth millions. But, that's the nature of the game -- you have to try new things to see what works. Marketing is a Wash, Rinse, Repeat type of process.