Anyone over the age of 30 who expresses strong views about this medium is taking their life in their hands. The reality is the world is divided now into a series of cohorts defined more by age than culture. I love the Farmer’s Boy Band rap commercial for Yeo Valley but it speaks a different language from mine. Quite simply, modern English is not the tongue of most of the population.
A friend said to me, ‘You can try and understand it (and good luck) but don’t try and do it. You’ll die.’ But there’s one thing that matters.
Forget the medium. Worry about how good the message is first. People buy stories, not media.
A good idea is a good idea and always was and always will be. A medium is a platform, not an idea. A digital media strategy is as tangled a piece of tautology as my saying, way back when, to a client, ‘our strategy for your brand is – magazines.’
One of the saddest things I recently heard was from a young man in advertising who said ‘I hate digital. At our agency they talk of nothing else and I know if I tried to talk about advertising ideas they’d think I’d lost it.’
Human needs and technology
Old world meets new world. Basic needs are introduced to new technology and we leap into a new world of communication. Of love, of friendship, of gossip, of facts, of games, of news and of photographs. For many, the thought of being away from the internet is quite depressing. But technology hasn’t changed human beings, the feelings are the same – the speed of communication and the medium have changed, that’s all, although racheting up the speed brings its own issues, as we shall see.
When in doubt pick up the phone. When you really need to make a sale, go and meet your customer.
Because the problem is, and always has been, the human interface, or lack of it. Frank Joshi of MVine writes:
‘IT has always been about transactionalising and eliminating people but you always need a human in the process.’
The need is not for better technology now but better reasons for trusting the people from whom we are buying things – the need and the biggest marketing challenge. Trust is earned, not claimed or assumed.
Welcome affordable communication
The great thing about digital is we can all do it. At home. In our bedrooms. On the move. And because we are doing it ourselves we are learning at three distinct levels:
- Dexterity of fingers and minds.
- Stuff that we can access and didn’t before know.
- A sense of how people today are really thinking and responding to things. Doesn’t ordinary TV news seem plonky now? And we only want to watch commercials on YouTube.
The key issue is that any business has a chance with digital because the cost of entry is small. Digital marketing allows the smallest to use film as a tool, which historically could only be used by big chest-thumping brands – remember the slogan ‘as seen on television’. Now anyone can get their 30 seconds of fame.
Purple Cow, Blur and beyond
Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer call the speed of change in the connected economy ‘Blur’. Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow – the seminal book on marketing, says whinging about change isn’t a scalable option. The truth is nothing will ever be the same again. But the thing about this ‘Digital Revolution’ is it’s a cultural thing as much as a technological thing and there are a number of rules we can draw from it:
- Do everything in real time – tomorrow is too late. Sometimes delivering faster = worse, less thought through or plain dangerous. But in a global economy a 24/7/365 attitude is demanded as the default service by most people today.
- The emotions matter more than ever they did in differentiation. Branding matters – underpinned by trust, prestige and stories. It needs constant news and buzz.
- The Otis Lift story – technology rules OK. Sensors in their lifts tell Otis Control online when a lift is about to break down and what needs to be done at its next service. Saves time and money for Otis and improves customer service.
- Work-life and life-life blur. What they call ‘bleisure’. Many don’t stop working now in bed, on the beach, even on a horse. People want your brain, not your presence.
Give more away. Knowledge is only powerful if it’s shared. Be the first to pass on what you know.
- Create new the whole time. We live in an ‘Innovation Age’. Retailers thrive on ‘new’. Everything that you do now has to be renovated, innovated or replaced the whole time.
- Moonlight. Go work for your client, for a retailer, for a TV station, for a magazine, for an MP. Do new stuff. Learn. See things from different angles.
- Tear down your firewalls. Confidentiality is a thing of the past. It’s not what you know but what you do with it that matters. If you want to be seen as transparent (doesn’t everyone?) don’t hide stuff.
Be big and small (at the same time). Big gives you scale and wriggle room but the best will always act small – service like a small company, with the reach and systems of a big company.
- Don’t plan – adapt. Old-fashioned, ‘alpha male’ hugely detailed three-year plans are a thing of the past. Broad, simple plans, constantly changed, are right for today.
- Innovation never starts with the customer. The consumer knows what they know but seldom speculates about what’s next – if you’d asked what the consumer wanted in the 1880s they’d have said a faster horse that pooed less!
- Churn is good. The places to worry about are those where there’s no change. People, products and ideas – change in all of them is healthy.
Get attention by having something new to tell – attention is the scarcest global resource.
Understanding and using the formats
Web marketing
It’s hard to imagine there not being an internet, odd to think of not having a web site and even stranger to still think of paper as the medium. If you’re over 40 you may find reading on-screen hard. But the benefit of a lively or interesting web site is it defines your business and lets potential customers check you out. It also makes you work out how to present your business. It encourages you to be brave. And it makes you study the medium so you can see what else is around. My web site is www.colourfulthinkers.com, which was designed by Adam Crowley (www.bombsite.co.uk). Its creation was an interestingly interactive, to-and-fro, conversational experience – I learned a lot during it, not least that there are a lot of things hard to work out by yourself that become very easy when working with an intelligent person who listens well.
Mobile marketing
- You can set up a mobile web site by converting your PC version to the smaller format using Wordpress or 60 second Marketer.
- Establish who you are, what you do and where you are by ‘claiming your business’ with Foursquare or Gowalla. This gets you free listing in the equivalent of online Yellow Pages.
- Download LinkedIn to your smartphone – fiddle around and have fun. ‘This is your new marketing channel,’ and as with all things digital the more you play the more you’ll learn. For most of us the issue is time, but spend a few hours seeing what’s what.
- Run a mobile ad campaign using Google AdMob or Apple’s iAd.
- Scan QR (Quick Response) codes on products or mobile web pages that have special offers. Visit BeeTagg.com to download the QR Code Reader.
Email marketing
Direct marketing by email is big news. In the USA they spend $400 million per annum on it. It featured hugely in the Obama campaign. It’s easy to track and establish ROI and the benefit of email is if you don’t get a fast response you probably won’t get one at all. Data suggests only about 56 per cent of email messages get through and a further 28 per cent are either rejected or filtered. The further ‘couldn’t be bothered to read’ per cent must also be quite high. But experience suggests if the message is thought-provoking enough the response rates shoot up.
Search engine marketing
This is the Network Rail-end of digital, all about track, efficiency, popularity and ‘beating the system’. In the USA they spend $13 billion on this. It’s where geeks take over (and rightly prove why they are so important). There are some key things that need doing:
- Keyword research and analysis:
- Making sure the site can be indexed in the search engines.
- Finding the most relevant and popular key terms and phrases for the site and its products.
- Using those key phrases on the site in a way that will generate and convert traffic.
- Web site saturation and popularity: show how many pages of the site are indexed on each search engine (saturation) and how many times the site is linked to by other sites (popularity). The more web presence you have, the easier it is for people to find your site.
- Web analytic tools can help you to understand what is happening to your web site and measure its success. They range from simple traffic counters to more sophisticated tools that are based on page tagging (putting JavaScript or an image on a page to track actions).
But this is all quite technical and unless you are technical (in which case, hurray, and have fun) you are far better off sitting down with an expert and being told how much it will cost to transform your site from just being there to being ‘active’.
Data mining
The most exciting thing about this technology is we can begin to play with customer data in a way never before possible. We can not only see where, when, how often and how much people buy, we can track how their buying patterns change, we can see how they correlate to external factors such as weather, advertising and sales drives. We can also establish who they are linked to and who they are influenced by. We can actually do that thing that Peter Sarstedt sang about in ‘Where do you go to, my lovely?’:
‘Tell me the thoughts that surround you,
I want to look inside your head.’
Any marketer worth his salt will find this amazing. Big ideas are great but the engineering of consumer behaviour is the stuff that really turns us on. We are all geeks at heart.
Apps and all that
Application software can either be bundled as a portfolio of software applications that come with Windows, for instance, or be individually available as what are mildly described as ‘killer apps’. Here are the seven best practical ones according to Tech Crunch in 2011 – their words, not mine:
- Slacker Radio A fantastic alternative to Pandora, which carries a larger catalog and offers Premium accounts that offer something we’ve always loathed about Pandora – unlimited song skips. (Similar: Pandora, WunderRadio, Last.fm) http://www.youtube.com/v/lPFdmjR30kM&hl=en&fs=1&
- Hey Where Are You A beautifully simple application that takes advantage of Push Notification, by letting users ask and answer the question ‘Hey, Where Are You?’. (Similar: Loopt)
- Textfree Unlimited Currently the best alternative to high SMS plan costs, offering free text messaging using Push Notification.
http://www.youtube.com/v/S4hiEGo9Hv4&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1 - Bento Create simple databases to store information about every aspect of your life.
- TweetDeck Our new, favorite Twitter client that takes advantage of the same layout as its desktop counterpart – multiple columns, separation of user groups, and more. (Similar: Tweetie, Twinkle, TwitterFON)
- Print and Share Print files, emails, web pages, contacts, images and even snapshots direct from your camera, straight to your home printer. Simple setup and works perfectly.
- Flight Tracker Watch flights in real time and get up-to-the-minute arrival and departure times. This has saved me countless delayed pick-ups from the airport.
The role of iPad
The legacy Steve Jobs leaves is a very big one. But until he fixed the concept of a tablet (which Apple didn’t invent) there were laptops, notebooks, increasingly smart phones and PCs. The iPad has transformed business as well as being a wonder toy. It’s portable, book-sized, has amazing graphics and a huge memory. So many people just like it (simply like it) so much that it’s invaded places normally controlled by the IT Department. Like board rooms. Like departments. Like universities. Like executives on the move who had, until recently, not understood how virtual working could be.
A technosceptic was introduced to it on a train journey and shown the painting app ‘Brushes’. After a few minutes of silent trial she asked ‘How much is this thing?’ That is what I think is called a ‘buying signal’.
Well, small business, what do you think?
Research amongst American SMEs recently showed 43 per cent didn’t think social media were necessary to their business – a big ‘no’ – whilst only 12 per cent said they were a must – a small ‘yes’. But I bet this is changing as I write.
Word of month is regarded as by far and away the most important marketing tool. Advertising and PR are not seen as very important at all.
This only goes to show the terrible job agencies have done at helping good small businesses work on their marketing strategies. And how slow people have been to realise that digital marketing is all about creating word of mouth very efficiently.
Digital lets you try things out – fast and cheaply.
The lovely thing about digital is nothing gets written in stone (sorry, Moses) – you can try new things and you can change track. But remember one thing. A bad idea is a bad idea. A good idea is a good idea. And people usually respond to good ideas.
Digital makes us all the same size (except smaller is better)
For the first time in my life literally anyone can start a business, can create a brand or can actually bring a dream to life for virtually no money.
Digital means you can think differently and faster. You look bigger but you think about detail. You are in control of your vision and are not being ruled by a bureaucratic monster.
Suddenly anything is possible:
- Imagine launching your brilliant British pie business without digital to help.
Imagine not having to get supermarket distribution.
Imagine making pies fresh to order and delivering them the same day.
Imagine the story you have to tell. - Imagine launching your own PR company by giving online advice.
Imagine writing up some great case studies.
Imagine being positioned as a source of great information.
Imagine no one knowing you are launching this business from your bedroom. - Imagine creating your own florist online.
Imagine how brilliantly colourful your site would be.
Imagine the benefit of carrying little stock until you’ve worked out how to run the business.
Imagine focusing on what you are brilliant at – arranging flowers.
Imagine turning your old car into a brilliantly decorated flower-mobile – checking out young artists on the web who can do it for you.