Marketing

Top of Mind – But Not to The Point of Annoying The Customer

in Marketing

Sure, you want to be top of mind with your customers. You want to stay in touch via all the channels available to you, including social media, direct mailings such as catalogs, and of course email.

But overdoing it can seriously backfire, and while junk mail is more difficult to tame, unsubscribing from your email list, or adding you to a junk filter, is very easy to do. So is unliking your Facebook page, or unfollowing you on Twitter.

In fact, research shows that one of the main reasons customers unlike a company’s Facebook page is too-frequent postings.

So keep the conversation going, interact with your customers and make yourself accessible, but keep the quantity relatively low and the quality high.

“High quality” in this case means only sending emails and posting items that should be of interest to the customer. The individual above is likely complaining about the widespread habit of sending three separate emails for each order – a “Received your order” email, a “your order is on its way” email, and a “would love your feedback” email. I agree with her that three emails are too much. The last one can probably go.

Another common complaint is that after you’ve registered with a company, they send you frequent emails even though you do not respond. Companies should have tools in place to monitor customer reaction and send less frequent emails to customers who are not responding to the offers in their email blasts.

In terms of social media, keep your postings short, few and interesting. “Interesting” can be a really good offer such as a Facebook-only coupon code. It can also be a relevant news item, a hilarious Youtube video, or anything else that should be of interest to your target market. “Interesting” is rarely company news – while these might be interesting to you, these postings are rarely interesting to your customers, unless you find a way to make them interesting by adding a question or asking for their feedback.

When it comes to communicating with your customers, tread very carefully. “Too little” in this case is better than “too much,” because too much can cause you to lose them forever.

Social Media Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

in Marketing

I write a marketing blog for one of my clients, where I often discuss the need to align marketing and sales. The best companies are those where both marketing and sales work in collaboration to find and qualify leads. A company where the marketing organization listens to sales reps and works to bring them the leads they need, and where sales reps keep in line with the company’s messaging as created by marketing, will be more efficient and close more sales.

Recently, I realized for the first time that there’s also a tension between traditional marketing and social media marketing.

Social media marketing is about creating fresh content and basically giving it for free. We publish content on our blogs and on our social media channels, and we allow people access to it, no strings attached. We don’t require registration, we don’t harvest their emails. The focus is not on single campaigns aimed at getting as many leads as possible, but on a long-term relationship.

Of course, the assumption is that in the long run, those relationship WILL contribute to the company’s lead generation efforts. But unlike a contained traditional marketing campaign, where you blast a whitepaper that requires registration to access and can tell exactly how many new emails you got from that campaign, leads generated from a social media ongoing campaign are not as straightforward to measure.

The tension between traditional marketing and social media marketing becomes apparent when the social media marketing people want to use an asset created by the traditional marketing folks. If you’re in a social media mindset, you will tend to simply put the link out there, or to write a blog post based on that whitepaper. But for the traditional marketing people, that would be a disaster! They have worked hard on that asset, and the way they see it, if you just give it away for free in social media, you derail their efforts.

The solution is to respect traditional marketing’s efforts to generate leads. Let them use their assets for as long as they feel necessary. Then when they have used that asset to the maximum and move on to the next asset, you can double check with them, and – with their OK – start giving it for free on social media.

Whitepapers are expensive. Using a whitepaper as the basis for several blog posts is common practice, and it makes sense – after all, it’s a great way to make the most of an expensive asset. But before using a traditional marketing asset in social media, where you give it away for free, do wait until it has been used to the max by the traditional marketing folks.

The Power of Making it Right

I went into the Godiva store with my daughters. We were shopping for back to school clothes and supplies, and wanted to take a break. Lunch, we decided, would be followed by a piece of Godiva chocolate for dessert. When we entered the store, it was fairly busy. There were two customers ahead of us [...]

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T.J. Maxx: Using Social Media to Change the Brand’s Image

Last week I was invited, with several other bloggers, to attend a T.J. Maxx event at the company’s San Francisco store. The event was part of a complete overhaul of the company’s image, from a ho-hum, off-price retailer who caters to frumpy housewives, to a vibrant, fun store filled with fabulous designer finds. The typical T.J. Maxx shopper is now a Maxxinista, a nice play on the term fashionista – a fashion conscious woman who wants designer clothes but is unwilling to shell out the inflated department store prices.

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Marketing A Lame Product

If your product or service is lame, you can’t expect your marketing people to do some kind of magic and make it sell. I have a few software development and software testing blogs in my feed reader, because one of my clients is in the software testing space. When I came across this blog post [...]

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Viral Marketing, Or: Twitter is Over Capacity. Again.

Twitter is over capacity. Again! !%$@#!%#@!^$%@# Twitter is over capacity a lot, it seems. Yet we still flock to it, millions of us, every single day, forgiving Twitter all its server issues and spam issues and scams and the fact that the service basically gives us nothing – it’s the Twitter apps that enhance the [...]

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