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Monthly Archives: April 2015

Two marketers walk into a bar and laugh at Eliot Goblet…

24 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Advertising, Content Marketing, Direct Marketing

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Tags

Elliot Goblet, Those two marketers

Jack Levi, aka Eliot Goblet, is one of Australia’s favourite comedians – particularly in the corporate world. As his bio states, for 33.6 years, he has specialised in Live Public Shows, Business & Corporate Events, Charity Events, Weddings, Parties, Corporate Videos, Television Commercials and Film Cameo Roles.

ElliotGobletComedian

I’d like to change the pace a little bit now…

Years ago, I was lucky enough to hire him as talent in what became an award winning marketing campaign for Telecom and we’ve both appeared on the same conference agenda occasionally.

He’s just released a new album “goblet’s greatest bits”.

Click here for a preview on his Facebook site and here for his new single – a cover of the classic “Friday on my mind“.

avagoodweegend…

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Should ‘meteorology’ be an essential marketing skill…

22 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Advertising, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Digital, Digital marketing

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advertising, branding, content marketing, destination NSW, digital marketing

Last month I spoke about digital marketing at a regional tourism conference for Destination NSW. I first worked on the brand 20 years ago, creating the first ever Tourism NSW customer database.

One of the points I obviously missed in my session about the pros and cons of digital marketing, was the necessity to be a meteorologist. International readers of this blog are probably not aware that Sydney is currently experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime/decade (depending upon the media owner) wet weather event.

I happen to be right in the front line of this ‘event’, as I’m in a local area flood zone. Most of last night I spent with torch in hand watching the neighbouring river merge with my back yard.

This morning I went online to check the news about the overnight events and predictions for today. On the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald site, there was a ‘roadblock’ advertising campaign by Destination NSW:

Destination NSW 1

Love every waterlogged second of Sydney in Winter

Destination NSW 2

Destination NSW

People have died but you can still love every second…

Personally I don’t believe you need meteorological skills to be a marketer. You just need a dose of commonsense – even sticking your head out the window will give you an idea of the weather. And there is a Weather Channel on the television, not to mention sites – the BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) site is one of the most popular in the country.

The advertising is digital, so it can be changed pronto – which I suggest Destination NSW does immediately. Who in the advertising agency or marketing department hasn’t realised this fact? Maybe their brains are waterlogged?

Man with suit carrying swimming mattress

I’m off to put on my formal wetsuit as I have a branding workshop to run for an insurance company in two hours. Am sure given the weather, “claims processing” will be high on the agenda…

 

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Marketing advice from the Dalai Lama…

16 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Advertising, Branding, Content Marketing, Digital, Digital marketing, Direct Marketing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

advertising, branding, content marketing, digital marketing, marketing

I’m not a follower (to use social media and religious vernacular) of the Dalai Lama, but some of the statements attributed to him are worth contemplating.

Dalai Lama

One that resonates is his comment about what surprised him most about humanity. Here’s his observation:

“Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”

It’s great advice for marketers. In the last few years, FOMO has driven us to sacrifice everything that has always worked for acquiring and keeping customers, in pursuit of the bright new shiny digi-object.

We run around like headless chooks, trying to make the new new thing (the latest digi-object) work as well as the proven thing did. But we get so caught up following this marketing fashion, that we ignore the marketing fundamentals.

We forget that customers are king and develop the false belief that content is king. And we think that if we just keep moving to the next new new thing, no-one will ever discover the truth that most of those new new things we tried, often failed.

And we spend our marketing careers having never really achieved anything of significance, except to spend a bunch of marketing budgets. All we have to show for it is a legacy of digital white noise.

It doesn’t matter if you have an online business or an offline one, or a combination of both, you only need to know these four things about your customers to succeed:

  • name
  • phone number
  • street addresses
  • email address

Of course you will need to use other channels to acquire and keep customers, but you can test these over time to determine the most cost-effective.

Curiously I’ve just been asked to preach to a bunch of marketers because to quote the owner of the SEO company involved: “my clients are complaining that digital channels don’t pay for themselves and they want to know more about direct marketing, so can you help please?”

Personally I think the Dalia Lama should write a book on marketing – I just found this quote that could easily apply to those alleged digital marketing experts:

“You must not hate those who do wrong or harmful things; but with compassion, you must do what you can to stop them – for they are harming themselves, as well as those who suffer from their actions”

Peace be with you…

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Two marketers walk into a bar and laugh at sales jokes…

10 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Marketing, Sales

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Business Development Manager, marketing, Sales

Remember, despite the preaching by alleged content marketers:

NOTHING HAPPENS UNTIL YOU SELL SOMETHING!!!

Avagoodweegend…

sales joke

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Consumer brands virtually absent from Facebook and Instagram Top 100

07 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Content Marketing, Digital, Digital marketing, Social Media

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

content marketing, digital marketing, facebook, Instagram, social media, Twitter

Last week I explained the numbers behind Twitter users, based on available information online.

Each month I take a cursory look into the top couple of hundred social media sites to see if consumer brands are making any inroads. And each month nothing surprises, as not much really changes.

binoculars_convergys 304

The one thing it does reinforce is that the most popular sport in the world is, and always will be, people watching. It seems our fascination with celebrity is insatiable. And it’s why social media will primarily be a social channel rather than a business channel for consumer brands.

Instagram is not as easy to categorise as Facebook or Twitter, as there are accounts that are not always easy to define. Some describe themselves as actors and models, or actors and musicians, or TV stars and models, so I may have put one or two in categories that don’t represent their primary skill – so to speak.

Here’s the most recent summary of the Top 100 Instagram accounts. The only international consumer brand is Victoria Secrets – which I suspect has lots of young male followers who aren’t really customers. There is also a huge bias to American accounts.

The training videos refer to bloggers of nail polish and make-up application lessons. The top account in Instagram is Instagram itself with 65+ million followers, while the second highest is Justin Bieber with 23+ million. The 100th account has 4+ million followers:

  • Musicians – 28
  • Actors – 18
  • Vacuous celebrities – 13
  • Models – 11
  • Sportspeople – 9
  • Sports clubs/brands – 7
  • Social media brands – 4
  • Fashion retailers – 4
  • Training videos – 3
  • Magazines – 2
  • TV Shows – 1

Here’s the latest list of Top 100 Facebook accounts. The top 3 accounts are Facebook accounts with 534 million+ down to 161 million+ followers. The next is Cristiano Rinaldo with 102 million+, while the 100th account is the TV show The Big Bang Theory with 32 million+ followers.

Interestingly there are two accounts of dead people – Michael Jackson and Bob Marley. And Bob died before the internet was invented.

There are only 7 consumer brands in the Top 100 – apart from Red Bull, they are all American global brands that have spent $millions on their accounts: McDonald’s, KFC, Oreo, Pepsi, Starbucks, Walmart and Red Bull.

  • Musicians – 39
  • TV Shows – 13
  • Sportspeople – 9
  • Intanet/social media brands – 8
  • Actors/Celebrities – 9
  • Movies – 8
  • Consumer brands – 7
  • Sports clubs/brands – 6
  • Politicians – 1

Here’s links to the Instagram and Facebook resources.

The concern of course, is for the future of marketing. Global brands have a collective marketing budget of $billions and thousands of degree-qualified marketing staff to do their bidding. Yet only 7 brands are in the Top 100 FB accounts and handful of lingerie/fashion brands are in the Top 100 Instagram accounts.

Yet the musicians, celebrities, actors, models and the like, generally have minimal marketing budgets, a PR Manager and maybe a handful of marketing staff. But they dominate the Top 100 social media accounts.

$_20

If they can dominate the social media space with comparatively minimal marketing support – what does it say about the skills required for the future marketer? After all, you can fail Year 10 at high school and easily be a social media manager – there are no skills/qualifications required to Tweet or post images to a social site.

Social media management continues to be the new industrial age job function – unskilled labour, doing mindless repetitive tasks at a machine – tweet, retweet, hashtag, upload, Like, tweet, retweet, hashtag, upload, Like, repeat infinitum…

typists

unskilled labor dominates social media employment…

I’m off to teach advertising strategy at university tonight – might have to revise the notes…

 

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To be ‘malcolmed’ or to be ‘dinosaured’ – which hurts you the most?

02 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Advertising, Branding, Digital, Digital marketing, Marketing, Media

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

branding, copywriting, marketing, press advertising

I’ve been consulting occasionally to a friend of mine since she started her business 21 years ago – both paid and unpaid advice – and have written copy, newsletters, ads, emails, managed PPC, SEO, built websites for her and more.

The marketing mix has evolved from one of mail, telephone, fax, advertising, events and publicity, to one of websites, email, mail, social media, SEO, PPC, publicity, events and limited advertising.

The business is now a pure online retailer. So in simple terms, it can only grow if the site visits continue to increase and those visitors convert to customers.

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One thing we learned early-on about this category, was that press advertising rarely paid for itself in terms of leads or sales – we did a lot of testing. And we also learned that publicity in the form of articles in newspapers, magazines and radio interviews always generated sales.

This of course has evolved online. Now, publicity in the form of articles in paid online media, as well as earned media such as reviews by bloggers, generate lots of leads and sales. The long tail of some of these articles continue to generate leads to the website. We know this through the simple wonders of the website analytics.

A couple of years ago she launched a complementary brand in a growth segment. A creative team developed some very good brand imagery that is used on the website, delivery vehicles and in a press ad. It features a hunky bloke, a headline and URL. The press ad has run about ten times over a couple of years in a colour magazine insert in a weekend newspaper.

As you would know, the cost for a small business to continuously invest in creating a desired brand image via paid advertising is never cheap and often unaffordable. Other tactics are usually more profitable. Even advertising agencies don’t do brand advertising for their own agencies – here’s why.

bw_advertising_breaks_bank_

And the cost versus return of the press advertising has been concerning my friend, who naturally, would like to see more sales as a result of her advertising investment – particularly given previous experience.

I made the simple suggestion of giving people a reason to visit the website – test an offer in the ad to see if it increases site visits and sales. It’s marketing 101 – easy to track and is used by every successful online retailer on the planet – so I cannot claim proprietary IP:)

Even luxury brands like Tiffany offer incentives in press ads to encourage website visitors – in this case it’s complimentary shipping.

Tiffany

Cheap Tiffany Jewelry, Discount Tiffany Jewelry On Sale]

Tiffany also make offers on their site – they know that wealthy people love offers

As you know dear reader, every marketing message is a brand message in the mind of the customer. And interestingly, prior to the internet, research revealed that brands using press ads with coupons, were regarded as more credible than brands whose ads didn’t include them. These days I’d suggest the same applies to press ads with search boxes or offering white papers versus those without them.

But you only know this stuff if you’ve tasted blood on the job, or if you study the marketing and advertising industry thoroughly. I teach brand strategy at university, given I’ve spent my whole career marketing all manner of brands. Things such as the body language of your message are important to understand when you are educating our future advertising legends.

My friend briefed the brand creative team to test an offer. Here’s their response:

“We can sort out your ad for you but just so you know, it sounds like you’ve been ‘Malcolmed’ again. If the ad isn’t pulling as many heads as you would like, perhaps we need to add another ‘hunk’ into the mix. It’s a strong campaign and will only get stronger with a refresh.”

To say my friend was stunned would be an understatement.

Like most marketers, I was under the impression the old dinosaurs of brand advertising were extinct. You need way more than the simple skills of creating brand ads to survive in advertising today.

dinomen

On which planet does changing the (fully clothed) talent in a single brand ad (it’s not a campaign) increase traffic to an online retailer’s website? How could anyone with an ounce of marketing knowledge advise a client to replace the talent to grow business?

So dear reader, with humble respect, I ask you a simple question:

Would you rather be ‘malcolmed” and get valuable advice on how to grow your business profitably, or would you prefer to be “dinosaured‘ and rely on changing the talent in a brand ad to do it?

dinosaur-marketing-hed-2012

Mate – the market can’t wait to see our press ad so just stick a new bloke in the shot

Anyway, I’m off to trademark “to be malcolmed” – who knows, give it some digi-spin, write a book about it and I could be traveling the world key-noting seminars as I explain this new digi-phenomenon?

To be malcolmed or not to be malcolmed, let’s make that the question – or maybe even a hashtag:

#tobemalcolmed

I could build a brand around this…where’s that creative team?

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