Marketing Manner

Many people think of mobile advertising as a subset of Internet advertising. But it’s actually more far-reaching than Internet advertising.

Mobile advertising is a form of advertising, but is somewhat separated from Internet advertising. Mobile advertising has its own set of rules that differ from Internet advertising. With Internet advertising, you have the whole computer screen to work with, which means you’ve got cool graphics that can tell your story. Many people have cell phones and BlackBerrys that can get the Internet, but mobile advertising doesn’t only target these people. Mobile advertising also reaches those cell phone users who don’t have the Internet on their phones. SMS (short message service) is a communication protocol that cell phones users use – it’s most often referred to as text messaging. Not all text messaging services use SMS, but SMS has become synonymous with text messaging so that’s generally what people are talking about when they say SMS.

Mobile advertising is growing at rapid rates in Asia, Europe and the United States, but is also slowly growing in other countries as the technology gets cheaper. Mobile advertising is growing because of the ability to catch people when they’re not at home in front of their TVs or computers.

According to Informa Telecoms & Media, a research firm, just under $900 million was spent worldwide on mobile advertising. Doesn’t sound too shabby until you compare it with spending on Internet advertising: $24 billion. Total worldwide ad dollars spent in 2007 topped out at $450 billion. That makes Internet advertising look small as well. They’re small now, but both mobile and Internet advertising are growing.

Currently, mobile ads mainly comprise text messages, but in the near future could most likely include video clips, mobile-only Web pages, music downloads and game downloads (Economist.com).

However, with the current economy in the slumps, The Financial Times has reported that mobile advertising will be affected for two years, after which marketing agencies will expect companies to increase their ad budgets. All forms of advertising will be affected be the economy, but Jean-Paul Edwards, executive director of futures at Manning Gottlieb OMD, which is part of Omnicom, a marketing agency, said “advertisers become more conservative in downturns, and retreat into what is most proven….The current economic climate will push things back a bit. If money is tight, mobile is not proven yet.”

Revenues from mobile advertising will still grow, just not at the rate that some would like. Google, Yahoo!, Nokia and Microsoft won’t be thrilled with the downturn, but they won’t be totally disappointed: Research firm Informa forecasts that revenues from mobile ads will rise to $12 billion by 2013. So far in 2008, only $1.2 billion has been spent on mobile ads.

As with any wave, mobile will have its rises and falls, so it’s best to get in when the wave is low so you can ride high with it when the tides turn in a few years.

The concept of a print and mail service is simple: you send a digital ad file to a company that will print and mail your ad, usually along with many others to make up a packet of ads, and the company will use their own mailing list for your ad. Bam! – thousands of new clients, just like that. You pay them one fee and they do all the work. If you use a few services at a time, you could potentially mail your ad to thousands of prospective buyers within weeks.

Sounds good, but unfortunately, it doesn’t work quite that smoothly.

Many print and mail companies don’t have a high level of return on the offers they churn out. I say churn because these companies often take as many advertisers as they can without care about the quality of the ad presentation. That means that you’d have to reach tens of thousands of people to get the same return on your offer that you would if you mailed out your postcard or print ad yourself. If you get a 3 percent return from mailing your offer by itself, you can expect to get about .5 percent return if you use a print and mail company, and oftentimes it’s even lower than that.

Why Such a Low Return?
The reasons for the low return rate are speculation from many differing Web sites and marketing experts. No one has done any official research into why the print and mail companies have such a low return rate. Here are a few reasons:

They have a non-targeted mailing list.  For products or services that only a chosen population needs, a print and mail company’s list won’t do just because it’s not targeted. The list might be geographically targeted, but that’s about it. The mailing list is one of the most crucial, if not the most crucial, part of a successful direct mail campaign. Your ad can’t do any good if you don’t get it into the hands of the people who are likely to be interested in it.

Poor quality materials. Many print and mail companies use the thinnest paper they can and don’t use quality inks or quality printers. Many of the ads come out looking amateurish or even worse, smudged from the printer.

Double-sided printing. To cut costs and make a bigger profit, many print and mail companies will use double-sided printing, with two ads on one piece of paper. This makes the consumer have to choose between the two ads if there are coupons on each side: which one will the consumer give up? There’s a good chance it’ll be yours unless your product or service appeals to everyone, which is pretty hard to do.

Dishonesty in number delivered. There is no way of knowing if the company actually sends out as many ad packets as they say they do. If the company says it’ll charge only $3 per 100 ads sent out, how do you know that they are actually sending out 100 ads? Many companies cut costs and pocket profit by sending out a smaller number of ads than promised. 

With all of these negatives associated with print and mail services, it’s smart to research the company before you hand over any of your hard earned money. Your best bet is to look for complaints on forums and Web sites and to compare the price of the print and mail service with the separate prices of using an online printing company (which is generally cheaper than an offline printing company) and mailing the ads yourself. It might take some time, but time is money and you don’t want to waste either element.

Social media directly influences how we make purchases, according to research conducted by Universal McCann, a global media planning company. In their report, “When did we start trusting strangers?” the company interviewed 17,000 people in 29 countries to see how social media impacts their buying decisions. The leader of the report, Tom Smith stated “This has huge impacts on the way that advertisers and brands have to think about social media – moving involvement from a ‘nice to have’ to an ‘essential to have.’”

Here are some of the stats from the report:

• The top channels for informing people about products and services were Instant Messenger and email, at 44.5 percent and 42 percent respectively.
• Over 29 percent of those polled have commented on a product or brand on a blog
• About 27 percent have posted an opinion about a product or brand on a social networking profile
• People gave their opinions about entertainment most often, with 60 percent having recommended a film and 52 percent recommending music
• Technology was also a big topic to blog about: 57 percent have recommended home technology and 54 percent have recommended some kind of portable technology or mobile phone service on a social media channel

This report shows that everyone that uses social media is an influencer to a certain degree. Of course, some more than others. Many blogs are dedicated purely to reviewing certain products. And, how many times have you recommended a book on Amazon.com or have written a bad review of a Web site that you didn’t get good service from? I know I’ve done both and I don’t consider myself a social marketing guru. That’s the point of social marketing – you don’t have to be a guru, you just have to have your own opinions. And other people will trust your opinion on social media sites.

Universal McCann is using this report to give their clients the following advice:

1. You must participate in social media. If you don’t have a social media presence, you’re toast. (I’m paraphrasing here, of course .) Basically, it’s no longer a choice because people are going to be talking about you anyway, so you might as well be proactive and join the discussions.
2. Be transparent. You must be honest and open about how your company works. If you made a mistake, own up to it and control the discussion. If you just ignore it you won’t be able to do any damage control.
3. Invest in your product. People review a product because they had a good experience with it. With the market now being driven by consumer recommendations, the good, responsive companies that have an online social media presence will stand out. 

If you don’t get involved in social media, you can’t influence anyone. Traditional advertising and marketing alone won’t do it; people don’t trust companies, but they do trust strangers.

I don’t know the future and I don’t know what will ultimately become of the print medium for advertising. Perhaps in enough years color printing truly will be a thing of the past that no worthwhile marketer will bother with.

I do know a few things about history though that would suggest it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. After all, radio ads didn’t put it to rest, nor did TV commercials topple print advertising as the king of marketing. Now online advertising is making a play for dominance over the world of marketing, but based on what I’ve seen in the past, I have a feeling that the print world is more than up to the challenge.

Why has traditional marketing survived this long to still stand proud in the world of marketing? Radio and TV didn’t topple it for the same reason that the internet isn’t going to right now.

Not everyone had access to a radio when it was first introduced, or not everyone really cared to listen to one. That meant anyone who didn’t have a radio was automatically not going to hear that ad, which meant you were cutting yourself off from a certain part of the population.

The same is true for TV. It took a lot of years before they spread to be in nearly every home, yet even now they aren’t really in every single home there is. And even in the homes that do have a TV, not everyone watches it that much, or pays attention to the commercials on it.

The same is true for the internet. While computers have spread rapidly over the past ten years, not everyone owns one, and even fewer people actually have an internet connection. I’d say that yes, the majority of homes probably have some form of the internet these days, but that still isn’t all of them, and that’s still a portion of the population you’d be cutting yourself off from.

Here’s the thing about print advertising: a person doesn’t need to have anything in order to be handed a flyer on the street. They don’t need to pay a single cent to buy a computer or TV in order to pick up a brochure. All of those other forms of marketing require a person to spend money in order to get the equipment needed to view the marketing.

With printing you’re footing the bill for all of it and simply handing a person the advertisement. You do all the work and they get to benefit from it by reading what you have to say. The world of print advertising requires the least amount of effort from a person, and that’s why it has stuck around for so long.

Maybe that will change, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon.

Marketing professionals provide a service to their clients. The knowledge, time and experience of a professional needs to be figured into the final fee for a marketing project. The client doesn’t need to know exactly how much time you spent on her project to get it done; she just wants to know if it’s going to be done on time.

Actually, many clients prefer to get a fee-based quote rather than an hourly quote. People want to know how much they are going to be paying you when everything is said and done. It’s just easier to budget when you already know what the final tab will be.

The more experienced you get, the less time it will take you to do things. For instance, I can write a press release in less than an hour because of my experience because I have a general idea of what needs to be said and where things go. Does that mean I should charge less than a newbie who takes two hours to write the release because he has to look things up? That’s ridiculous, but that’s exactly what happens when you charge by the hour. You end up devaluing yourself because you get faster at certain tasks. You can make more money as you get better at your job by charging a flat project-based fee rather than an hourly fee.

Not only can you make more money by charging a flat fee, I think it seems more professional. Hourly workers are generally at the low end of the totem pole at companies, with salaried workers in managerial and executive positions. Charging an hourly fee can make you seem like an amateur.

Charging by the project is a way to market your service as more of a product, which I think is a good thing. Clients know what they’re getting – they know they’re paying X amount for Y service (or product, if it’s a brochure or press release) no matter how many hours were put into the project. Plus, it eases clients’ minds because they don’t have to worry about you padding the bill with hours of surfing the ’Net. Charging a flat fee eliminates a lot of guesswork and worries that clients face. When you shop at the grocery store, you don’t care how many hours it took to make that sweater, you’re only concerned with how much you’ll have to pay for the sweater. You care about the end result. That’s how many businesses that outsource marketing functions think as well.

Blogs such as Duct Tape Marketing endorse the fee-based approach, as does consultant Alan Weiss. Weiss even wrote a book about it: Value-Based Fees: How to Charge and Get What You’re Worth.

If you’ve been basing your fees on the hour, think about how that can affect your future business. As you work faster, you’ll end up making less money, so seriously reconsider your fee structure.

Whether we are in a recession or not, and experts say it’s surprising we aren’t yet in a recession, times are definitely tough. With the government’s bailout signed last week, the stock market plummeted and is likely to take up to 5 years to bounce back.

With people not being able to borrow money as easily before, and we are a nation of borrowers, it’s tempting for many businesses to stop marketing and to use their marketing budgets for other business costs. But unless you really need that marketing money in other business costs, it’s best to keep marketing. The economy will eventually bounce back and people will be borrowing and buying again. Many people are still able to purchase goods now, so don’t leave those people hanging.

What needs to be done now is to change your marketing approach, but still market. When creating your marketing plan for next year, here are some factors to keep in mind that will help you market successfully during this hard time.

1. Keep researching your target market. You knew your market last year or whenever the last time you conducted research, but now times are different and your target market’s spending is probably different. You need to know how consumers are responding to the imminent recession. Consumers are negotiating more than ever and are willing to trade down, postpone purchases or just buy less. Interest in new brands disintegrates in a recession, so focus on your current customers rather than look for new ones.

2. Focus your marketing on family values. More people will stay at home with family and friends during hard times. Use marketing scenes that show cozy home scenes with family, rather than adventurous destinations that people can’t afford to travel to. Telephone use, home entertainment and home furnishings will likely hold up well in this economy as more people stay home.

3. Maintain your marketing spending. It has been documented that brands that up the marketing effort, or at least keep it level, during a recession can improve market share and ROI at a lower cost than during a good economy. This is because those that can, do. Those that can’t – your competitors – fall away from the front lines, allowing room for you. If you must cut back, try to keep the quantity of ads up, but switch to cheaper ads – switch 30-second ads to 15-second ads and use radio ads instead of TV ads. Just keep your name out there, even if you can’t do it in the same capacity as before.

4. Alter pricing tactics. Customers are looking for good deals now. They want quantity over quality now because they need to make their dollar stretch more than ever before. Offer more sales and discounts, and price smaller packages more aggressively. When people don’t have as much moolah to spend, they concentrate on price more than promotions such as mail-in offers.

5. Alter your product line. You may need to favor and market multi-use products over specialized products because people want to get the most for their money. Gimmicks won’t work during a recession; you need reliable, durable, safe products that have shown to perform well in the past. Your marketing image should stress price for performance rather than a favorable corporate image.

Despite the rough economy, digital marketing is still going strong and is actually growing. According to eMarketer data released in August 2008, advertisers will spend $25 billion online in 2008 in the United States alone. This is about 17.5 percent more than 2007. eMarketer projects that the recession will cause growth to slow a bit in 2009, with projected spending at “only” $28.5 billion.

eMarketer is expecting the economy to recover by 2011 coupled with an increase in online video advertising to push the online ad spending to more than $40 billion that year. They then expect online advertising to grow by about $10 billion each year after that to 2013. eMarketer gets its projections by benchmarking against the Interactive Advertising Bureau numbers.

Digital marketing doesn’t only include online advertising – it includes everything from online video ads to search media to in-game and mobile advertising. A report from analyst firm Parks Associates also forecasts growth in digital media advertising segments. Parks Associates gives a breakdown of everything from Internet display, rich media, search, DVR, mobile and in-game advertising. New categories, such as in-game ads and mobile ads will have the highest gains because they’re starting from lower bases than other forms of digital advertising like online ads.

Parks Associates projects digital media to compose 10 percent of overall ad spending or about $24 billion by 2010. eMarketer predicts a higher number for 2010 of about $33 billion.

Of course, these are all just predictions, and each research firm has its own numbers that tell a different story.

JupiterResearch, for instance, forecasts display ad spending to reach $7.2 billion by 2010, while Parks Associates forecasts display ad spending to reach only $2.4 billion.

JupiterResearch believes by 2010 search marketing will reach $7.5 billion in revenues. Parks Associates sees search marketing growing more than that – up to $9.7 billion. 

New categories like rich media, in-game and mobile advertising shows the most growth according to Parks Associates. Internet rich-media ads are projected to bring in an estimated $5.7 billion by 2010. In-game ads will grow at least 50 percent according to the study, bringing in about $430 million annually. Mobile advertising is expected to grow to $2 billion in the same time period.

Even though all the numbers are different, quite different, actually, they are all projecting an upward trend for digital marketing. The Parks Associates report says that media is moving from mass to niche, forcing advertisers to adapt to new content and ad formats. “We believe that advertising over the next five years will go through some changes,” said Parks Associates Research Analyst Harry Wang in a Webcast presentation of the report. “For content providers as well as media publishers, they have to provide content in a form that the audience prefers.”

First, email was too much. Too much info, too much time. Then we used MySpace and Facebook to keep in touch with our social networks. Now, even those have gotten to be too much. Who has time to create personal, long blogs to let her social circle know what’s going on? IM-ing is too time-consuming because you have to interact with everyone individually. Entering stage right: Microblogging! 

Microblogging is like IM, but instead of messaging just one person, you message everyone in your social network at one time. Twitter and Plurk are two popular microblogging sites, in case you think you’ve never heard of microblogging. You’ve probably heard of one of these sites, right? 

Microblogging is a way to let your friends know what you’re doing at all times. It’s kind of like the “status” feature on MySpace. Using Twitter, for instance, allows you to let everyone in your social network know what you are up to in that precise moment. Right now, in my Twitter profile I’ve got “Working on a blog, laundry is going, dog is snoring under my chair.” Fascinating, I’m sure. But, isn’t “What are you doing?” the first thing we ask when we call up a friend? And the answer we give is basically what goes into Twitter and other personal microblogging sites. But more and more microblogging sites are cropping up that are getting more business than personal. 

Yammer is a site that answers the question “What are you working on?” for those in the corporate world. The nice thing is that you can screen those outside of your company so that only your co-workers know what you’re working on. So why would Yammer and other microblogging sites be useful to the corporate world? 

People are starting to ignore their email.  People’s inboxes are filling up at a much faster rate nowadays, so much so that many emails are ignored for days at a time. With microblogging, you often don’t have enough room to be longwinded, so you can let people know what you’re doing in a sentence or two. If you’re working on a project with a boss that likes to call every half hour to get an update, you can just microblog your status. This also helps to deflect any annoying “check-in” phone calls that turn into “By the way, can you also do this or add this?” 

It’s easier to store info. Many companies trap their knowledge in PowerPoints or in one top dog’s email that gets deleted after said top dog leaves the company. Companies are starting to upload content onto company Wikis, which can then be linked to and indexed by conversational microblogs. Now it’s getting useful, and we can’t have that! Something that was intended for fun being business-oriented!? The horror! 

Managers can see who their “connectors” are. The connectors are the people who control the flow of info through the department or company. If the managers see that there are only one or two people that are distributing info, they can add other connectors, or narrow down who is diluting or screwing up company messages.

I hadn’t heard of place branding until today. At first I thought it seemed odd that a place like city would need branding, but then I thought of Las Vegas. New York City. Those places definitely have brands attached to them. Now it’s starting to all make sense.

Place branding is being used by more and more locations around the world to compete for their share of foreign and domestic investment dollars and capital. One good example is Cincinnati USA’s communication of its brand – the tourism site and campaign is all over the place! Of course, living only a few hours of Cincinnati maybe I’m more inundated by the TV commercials and ads than others. But being in the Midwest and about the center of the United States, I bet Cincinnati USA has reached much farther than the crossroads of America.

Cincinnati USA’s campaign shows that Cincinnati is not a boring city – it’s got sports, recreation, “family fun” and culture. 

I’ve found 7 tips from the Branding Strategy Insider blog that work well for place branding:

1. Get marketing advisors on your team. Before you even start thinking about how to incorporate place branding, you need to get some people on your side that can help you understand the jargon used by ad agencies and place branding consultants. You might even be able to find a marketing pro on your Board of Directors that can help you recruit a few more marketing minds. These people can help you plan your strategy so that you don’t waste any money or resources and get the response you want.

2. Include thought leaders from your community in your plan. These community leaders can help influence others in your community to get on board in your branding initiative. When you brand a place, you have to have the community’s buy-in or it’s not going to work.

3. Focus your branding to a few industries. All of the companies in your place want to be part of your branding effort. Anytime you include them, it’s like free advertising for them. But at first, you should focus mainly on the big money makers in your town. A nicer way of saying this is include those who represent the majority of your gross domestic product. To balance the focus, you should include one or two emerging industries in your branding.

4. Get to know industry experts in your community. Become buddies with the execs at the companies of which you’ll be touting in your branding. Local experts can let you in on emerging trends in the area that will affect how well your place is received nationally and internationally. Use them to keep your branding info current and relevant.

5. Translate your place’s features to benefits. A marketing mantra is to sell benefits, not features. Do the same with your place. A state-of-the-art hospital is a feature; having experts near that up your chances of surviving a heart attack is a benefit.

6. Partner with nearby communities. If your place is interdependent with another close-by, there’s no reason you can’t both share the region’s assets. A capital investment made in either place can contribute to the region’s brand.

7. Make sure you have the time and money to do the branding. Branding doesn’t happen overnight. You need to make sure you have the resources to devote to building up your place brand. This is a hard challenge, but it can be done. Look at Cincinnati for inspiration when you think it can’t be done.

I came across a good slideshow (yes, slideshow!) about marketing – “Future of Marketing and Advertising” is actually the title. It’s a frank, somewhat humorous take on what works in marketing now and the trend of integrating marketing into the product. The slideshow is full of good quotes from marketing greats and CEOs, ranging from Seth Godin to Steve Jobs. You can find the slideshow here: http://www.webmyc.com/blog/2008/06/22/future-of-marketing-advertising/. There are 91 slides, so if you don’t want to take the time to look through it, I’ll highlight it for you here. That’s just how nice I am! Ha ha.

Products that Integrate Marketing into the Product
The author, someone named Bob, uses some photos to show marketing integrated into the product. He uses an iPhone, a Wii (or at least I think it’s a Wii) and a Starbucks cup. All of these products have a marketable piece to them as is. The iPhone marketed itself because of all of its cool features, the Wii looks cool and you just have to see it in action to understand it and want it, and it’s much cooler to walk into work holding a Starbucks cup than an “am/pm” gas station coffee cup. But what if your product isn’t cool? What if it doesn’t have any neat functions? It’s kind of easy to market the iPhone, but what about a car tire or diapers?

How to Integrate When You Don’t Have a Cool Product
Bob’s answer is to add content. Add content so useful that people don’t know what they did before they knew your brand. Another answer is to engage people. Get people interested in your product and do something interactive that will get people’s participation. Each of these answers only has one or two slides, which to me means they aren’t as important as Bob’s answer of utility.

Utility means a brand that gives something back to the customer – the brand is helpful. Don’t just give people info about your product, give them info they can use in other parts of their lives. So, Huggies diapers, for instance, could not only include inserts about their diapers in their packaging, but useful info for new parents, like about preventing diaper rash or treating diaper rash; or how to feed babies solid foods. If Huggies gives parents something other than their diapers they can use, something useful like this type of info, then their brand just got stronger through their packaging.

Which one of these answers do you use? Like a lot of things in marketing, it depends on your audience. Bob says to conduct surveys, focus groups, 1-on-1 interviews and the like to figure out what your audience wants and needs. Whatever you do, just make sure you get the message across that your product is useful. If your product makes people’s lives better, you’ve done your job.