"We tried advertising. It didn't work."?

What's your quick response to a new B2B client who says "We tried advertising. It didn't work."?

Most of us who have worked with B2B clients have heard it the context of both traditional print ads and discussing Google AdWords.

It seems to boil down to 5 issues:
1. Wrong message
2. Prospects didn't see the ad when and where they were looking
3. Customers just don't need what you're selling today
4. You had them, but lost them
5. Mismatched expectations

Free Offers work in both B2B and B2C

Today, I got an interesting email from copy writer guru Bob Bly where he discusses how traditional advertising is learning from old direct marketing practice.

He start reciting a reciting a radio commercial for McDonald's. In the commercial, a guy walks into work late carrying a cup of McDonald's coffee. The rate boss berates him: "You're late because you stopped and bought a cup of McDonald's coffee?" "Nope," the worker replies. "What do you mean, nope?" the boss says, irritated. "It's right in your hand." "But I didn't BUY this cup of McDonald's coffee," our hero corrects him. "I got it FREE when I went to McDonald's and bought a delicious breakfast meal."

What they are selling, of course, is not the brand or the food. They are selling the offer: buy a breakfast and get the coffee free.

As all direct marketers know, offers are essential for generating advertising response ... and free offers are usually the most attractive.

Here is another example he makes:

Take Oreck vacuum cleaners, for instance. In their mailings, the offer is a risk-free home trial of their 8-pound vacuum cleaner. The incentive to respond is a gift -specifically, a free "dust buster" type of handheld mini-vacuum.

His point is: more and more general advertisers are taking a cue from direct marketing - and creating and promoting strong offers designed to get the cash register to ring.

Here are some more examples:

• The local dry cleaner recently made this special offer: bring in any two garments to dry clean, and we will launder your shirts for just $1 each.

• A local Italian restaurant puts out free bread (a common practice in restaurants), but accompanies it with a plate of fine aged parmesan.

• Gevalia coffee. The deal is this: get one monthly shipment of coffee at a discount price, and they will send you a free coffee maker.

p>What kind of offer can you make your prospects that could attract more business and sales?

Here's a quick checklist he recommend to get you started:

• Stress your guarantee ("satisfaction guaranteed or your money back").

• Let your prospects use the product for a month without risk -meaning if they don't like it, they can return the merchandise for a full refund ("send for your FREE 30-day home trial").

• Give them a discount ... with a reason for the discount, if possible ("save 40% during our 25th anniversary sale").

• Be like Oreck and Gevalia: give them a free bonus gift with their order ("reply now and get this valuable FREE bonus gift").

• Or, have a two for one sale ("buy one, get one free"). This works well for products the prospect wants more than one of, such as cleaning fluids or plastic storage containers for the kitchen.

• Offer to pay return shipping charges via UPS if your customers decide to return the product for a refund ("if you're not 100% satisfied, we'll come to your door, pick it up, and take it away- entirely at our expense").

• Make a logical connection between the product and the offer - e.g., the Sovereign Society, a financial newsletter on offshore investing, offered a free Swiss bank account to new subscribers.

• One more tip: if you can't think of a reason to justify why you are making a special offer, get creative. A record store, for example, could have a half-price sale – one day only - on Elvis's birthday.

No logical tie-in for your product? Create your own. If you run a photography studio, declare this month "National Family Togetherness Month" ... and send out a press release to the media suggesting a family portrait to celebrate.

A super excuse tip!
A good source of ideas is Chase's Calendar of Events, which gives you all the special events and celebrations for every month, week, and day of the year that there is one.

And he also gives us this for free:
Offers are vital to generating a healthy response to your marketing. And they work in both consumer and business marketing. For instance, a local janitorial service was willing to clean a plant or factory at no cost to demonstrate the quality of its services and hook new accounts who would hire them as their regular janitorial service. There is a known direct marketing principle, called "the magic of a dollar," that says offering something for a penny or a dollar can be as effective - or sometimes even more so, since it is less common. In this case, the janitorial service sent a letter with a penny glued to the upper right corner of page one. The copy said, "We will clean your entire plant or office for a penny ... and I've even enclosed the penny, so it really costs you nothing!" Mailing stamps or money with your direct mail letter is an old trick ... and yes, it worked like gangbusters.

Thank you Bob!

I you don’t like QR codes, here is an alternative

Quick-response (QR) codes let users actually do something with old media: They make packages, print ads and magazines clickable and linkable to websites or apps. But do they work?

There are far too many steps: To scan a QR code, you have to carry the right phone with the right camera, be connected to the internet and have downloaded one of the many QR scanning apps out there. Then, you have to stumble across one of those boxes.

Enter Zoove. You can get the QR results -- a link to a website or app download, a coupon, a video -- but to get there, you there's no camera, app or smartphone required. All you do dial is a number on a mobile phone and make a call.

Here's how it works: Advertisers or media companies register a StarStar code with Zoove -- recent campaigns include - **Suzuki -, - **GSCookies for the Girls Scouts - and - **GMA for Good Morning America -- and when consumers dial, they get a text message with a link or voice recording. Dial **GSCookies and listen to a recording text message with a link to the App Store to download a cookie locator or **Suzuki and get a link to a video. Ad messaging aside, it worked!

On the first try! Shouldn't technology be this easy?

By now, Zoove has partnered with all top-four U.S. wireless carriers so StarStar vanity numbers work on 95% of all phones, and not just the smart ones. TV shows like "Good Morning America" and "CBS Early Show" are testing StarStar codes for ad sponsorships or to collect viewers' votes. Now, imagine, instead of no-one-remembers short codes on "American Idol," you'd just have to **Lauren to vote for your girl.

Company: Zoove
Founded: 2004
Location: Palo Alto, Calif.
Funding: $40.5 million
Major investors: Cardinal Venture Capital, Highland Capital Partners and Worldview Technology Partners
Key execs: Joe Gillespie, CEO; Tim Jemison, founder and chief operations officer
In short: It's like QR codes, but the app is making a phone call

Technology and multichannel interactive communication

We need to change our mind set from campaign management to interaction management. Consumers and clients interact with brands using a number of communication tools – email, mobile, Twitter, Facebook only to mention some. Therefore has dashboards and automated features become a pre requisite for multichannel interactive marketing.

A study conducted by eConsultancy reveal that 98 % of all marketers use at least three channels to deliver multichannel messages to their customers, but more than half still store the data they gather from each channel in separate, siloed locations. In the same study, only 35 % collect data from different sources and store in a single database. 71 % cited maintaining high-quality data as a major challenge. Why?

Because the tools that promised to be the best solutions are insufficient. They often are too formulaic or static and fail to make us truly understand and engage in specific type of customers. The answer lies in finding a tool that allows us to not only analyze the conversation about the brand, but also react – in real time. Every customer record, every text sent, every Twitter conversation we engage in should form an integrated, comprehensive view of the customer allowing you to create more accurate, meaningful relationship with the client.

No matter what channel we use to engage the customer, each and every interaction we have with them is highly influential to the way the client will ultimately view your brand.

At Exact Target they love software, check them out if you need to unsilo and link customer profiles through cross-channels.

Retail: Awesome Strategy and Segmentation Based on Customer Data Insight

This is an awesome case which shows how you by using customer data insight to segment and make differenciated strategies based on potential and behavior resulting in a $21.5 million revenue gain for Brazil's Cooperativa de Consumo (Coop).

"It is important to create differentiation," says Celso Furtado, marketing manager in charge of change management projects for Coop. "Being the only retailer in the country to have a registered customer base due to our business model, Coop can generate customer value and [gain] a competitive advantage."

Database analysis of its members revealed that 60 percent of Coop sales were driven by 17 percent of customers, and a large number of customers had low consumption rates. As a result, the company decided to define goals and action plans for different customer segments.

Coop created a customer-centric program to increase customer engagement and spending. The program is supported by a central data warehouse that contains member information and transactional data, including store preference, payment options, purchase frequency, shopping time patterns, buying behavior within product categories, and brand consumption.

Members were grouped according to their buying behavior, and five portfolios were created based on members' gross purchases and margins generated in four-month increments. This level of customer insight allowed the company to develop different treatment strategies based on the attributes of the customer portfolio, household value, and consumption behavior. It also guides overall strategic decision-making in all parts of the business.

The company set goals for each portfolio (i.e., segment). For the best-value (A) and high-consumption segments (B), Coop's goals are to recognize, maintain, and retain them. For the average-consumption segment (C) the goal is to maintain and develop; Coop wants to develop and recover the low-consumption segment and reactivate inactive members. The company customized direct mail and email campaigns based on these objectives. In addition, to provide a consistent and informed experience, store associates and other customer-service employees receive monthly training to update them on the types of campaigns sent to customers.

One way Coop recognizes customers of portfolios A and B to help retain them is through communication that "is exclusive and unique," Furtado says. "We present exclusive products and pricing." For example, high-value customers who hadn't purchased perfumery products in the previous four months recently received a direct mail piece offering a specific soap for R$ 0.01 if they also purchase moisturizer and body wash.

Meanwhile, "for customers of portfolio C, we aim to develop them and lead their migration to portfolios A and B," Furtado says. Marketing communications sent to portfolio C members talk about how Coop values their business and explains the benefits of increasing their purchases at Coop. In one campaign customers were offered a reusable shopping bag for R$ 0.01 if they bought R$60 worth of items. "We add a minimum amount of purchase to develop the member always a little bigger than his average ticket."

Coop's 2010 campaigns earned US$ 21.5 million in incremental revenue, which corresponds to 2.6 percent of Coop's annual revenue. The company generated an ROI of 64 percent, Furtado says.
Furtado emphasizes that customer data is not a static entity. Household data is evaluated every two months, and inactive households, email addresses, and opt-out customers are removed. In addition, the company encourages members to regularly update their profiles and provide more data in return for a more personalized experience every time they shop.

Next, the company will incorporate new data fields into the database to represent more individual interactions, and will combine internal and external data to improve each customer record. In addition, there will be more attention paid to optimizing relationship channels, especially digital and interactive ones such as email marketing, point-of-sale, and mobile. The company also plans to deploy "relationship agents" in each store to monitor the service and relationships there.

The company's numerous efforts all have one central goal, Furtado says. "The end result is the creation of a productive relationship cycle that increasingly helps our customers and helps us attend to their needs."


Source: 1 to 1 and Gartner

Strategy for Unsiloed Digital Dialogue

In the future there will be two kinds of companies; those that are agile and adapt to consumers’ changing media behavior and those that goes out of business (Forrester Research).


We want to create a uniform view of the customer, helping to fuel more genuine, rewarding relationships. The goal is to make the customer’s experience with our brand more cohesive, more accommodating and more enjoyable.


No construction crew starts building a house without a solid set of blueprints. Why should our approach to integrated marketing be any different? Here is a simple frame work to follow when developing a strategy for communication that seamlessly moves from one interactive channel to another.

1. Start with the brand promise, what does the brand stand for, what are the unique value props and what do we promise the customer. This will help us delivering the same promise across all channels.


2. Get to know the customers, in and out. Where do we find them?


3. Pick and be present in the channels most of them are; email, mobile, social such as Twitter and Facebook, wall posts, blogs, video posts.


4. Find out who in the organization communicate regularly with the customers; customer support center, sales, marketing, PR? Get a greater communication impact by knowing where the customer touch points our company.


5. How you define success drives the strategy. What is success for us? Customer satisfaction, complaints answered, returning customers…

Answer these five questions and we have a good base for developing our communication strategy for the future.

Source: Exact Target

My favorite book this week is Curation Nation

The last sentence in chapter 4: Curation is the future of consumer conversation. Curated content is a buzz word in magazines and newspaper, but far more than that, marketers find that their brands can longer tell their story in a massive one way voice.

Customer conversations about their product are happening in big, public, uncontrolled ways. Brands no longer control their own story, mass media is turned up side down.

Lessens to be learned
“Dell sucks” – do the search on Google. Try your own company too.

Negative talk can be gathered and amplified as blogs such as Jarvis’s handful of personal blog posts that turned into a full- fledged platform of consumer unhappiness and anger with Dell. Another example is ComcastMustDie.com which had 10 000 visitors and 1000 comments the first 2 months of the site’s operation. Comcast started to listen!

Brands can’t dictate their entire brand story; it will be influenced by good and bad customer stories. The only choice is to aggregate and organize – curate the brand and customers stories.

Learn the lesson of listening
Shut up and pay attention to what is being said about your brand. After all the people on the receiving end have their online voice, they are collaborators, participants and members of a community. Then engage proactively by curating the content.

The best?
Pepsi listen to what people say and give voice to their perspectives through public voting on grant projects and inviting its core customers in planning brand and product innovation, Mountan Dew Voltage is a result of this approach and is regarded as one of the most successful launches in PepsiCo’s history. Their strategy is to crowd source an aggregation of suggestions, feedback and complaints.

Watchdog group
Crowd content without curation tend to drive and amplify negative voices, but when you add a human editoral layer, a curational perspective that organize gathered content and community participation, you will get results.


No doubt, balanced communities curated to be about honest feedback and customer solutions will emerge as a new and powerful force in consumer and brand interactions.

And that was only chapter 4...

Company Research Made Easy!

Before signing on a new client, going for a job interview or inviting a new partner on board, do your home work! A proper company research can save you a lot of pain and headaches later and allows you to discover whether or not a company is going to be a good match for your needs. Effective research may help you discover that your dream company might actually be a nightmare!

• A great place to start is your local Better Business Bureau website http://www.bbb.org.


• Conducting a quick Google search on any company will provide a plethora of information from a variety of sources.


• Your local Chamber of Commerce has great information about local companies. You can use the search tool at http://www.chamberofcommerce.com to find your local Chamber branch. Most will have links to the city or county's Economic Research Bureau to provide a local economic outlook.


• Google also has a great news article search tool, http://news.google.com. Conducting a search on the company, its competitors, and the overall industry can provide insight into how a company is positioned within an industry.


• Hoovers.com - http://www.hoovers.com


• Yahoo Finance - http://finance.yahoo.com


• Inc. 5000 - http://www.inc.com/inc5000/


• Sperling's Best Places - http://www.bestplaces.net/

Note to self: NFC

What is NFC - Near Field Communication?

It is a short range wireless RFID technology that makes use of interacting electromagnetic radio fields instead of the typical direct radio transmissions used by technologies such as Bluetooth.

It is meant for applications where a physical touch, or close to it, is required in order to maintain security. NFC is planned for use in mobile phones for, among other things, payment, in conjunction with an electronic wallet, and for setting up connections between Bluetooth devices (rendering the current manual Bluetooth pairing process obsolete). The technology is promoted by the NFC-Forum.

Simply said, it is the use of the cell phone as we now use our credit cards. The techonology does not seem to find it break through yet, but maybe as the use of smart phones are exploding, we will see credit card companies will take the lead?

Crowdsourcing basics

Crowdsourcing takes the phrase “two heads are better than one” to a whole new level. Online, this encompasses a range of things, but essentially asks users to share their knowledge, come up with new ideas or simply engage with one another.

Its originator, Jeff Howe http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com./about.html calls it "the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call." Arguably the first example of crowdsourcing comes from Google itself. A site’s ranking on a Google search engine results page largely depends on how it links to other sites. In essence, this means that if many other sites link to yours, it is deemed more reliable and creeps up the rankings. So, from sourcing opinions from a crowd of other websites, Google is assisted in creating its rankings.

Here are some of the most interesting crowdsourcing sites:

Wikipedia – Perhaps the most well-known, Wikipedia is an online encyclopaedia entirely compiled by user-generated entries. Today it has been called an equal to established volumes like Encyclopaedia Britannica, proving that crowdsourcing is not only effective, but also valuable.

Idea Bounty – Big brands offer creative briefs, anyone can submit ideas and the best one gets paid. A great way to get fresh input.

Gogme.biz – This is more than just a business social networking site, Gogme.biz allows entrepreneurs to form partnerships and turn their ideas into realities. The site is a one –stop shop for everything entrepreneurs need, from advice to tools to business partners, showing how crowdsourcing can be used for the business-good.

iStockPhoto – This is credited as the Internet’s first photo sharing site and allows artists to upload their work and for anyone to purchase it. The basic premise is that anything bought off the site is royalty free, giving creatives a platform to exhibit and sell their work and brands or companies a cheaper, more creative place to find what they need.

According to an article in 1to1Executive Dialogue, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, another example of crowd sourcing is in customer service where social media is used by customers to help other customers. Verizon has customers who spend up to 20 hrs per week online answering customer questions from other customers about technical issues. How it works: If you have a question about how to set up your new high-def television, you may not find the answer on the FAQs at Verizon’s website. But if you post your question on Verizon’s customer service website, odds are it will not be answered by a Verizon employee, but by another Verizon customer. And the advantage is obvious: Provide customers with rapid support while lowering the customer service cost.