Online sales can reduce your revenue…

22 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by Malcolm Auld in B2B Marketing, Branding, Customer Service, Digital, Digital marketing, Direct Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Automation, Sales, social selling

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

B2B Marketing, catalogue marketing, online selling, social selling, testing

A couple of years ago my agency created catalogues for an office supplies company – different catalogues for different areas of their business and different types of customers.

They had a catalogue for typical office stationery, another for bulk purchases of products delivered on pallets, and other specialty catalogues. They did some sophisticated testing, with the objective of moving clients to order via their website to reduce the dependence upon the call centre, as it took the majority of the orders. They also believed they’d make more money with online ordering.

The test results revealed some interesting insights. When the company migrated customers to online orders, they lost revenue. The average order size via the website was much less than the average order via the call centre. The reason is simple and one which any salesperson can explain.

Online sales reduced average sales value and revenue…

Once the customer was on the phone, the customer service person could upsell via questions and sell even more products than the customer might have bought if they simply went to the website. The customers who did use the website for orders, usually only bought a small number of items.

Another insight they discovered was that most customers had the catalogue with them when they called to order by phone. This gives the customer service person another way to engage with the customer, by referring to the catalogue pages and discussing them together.

customers have the catalogue with them when they call…

The grim discovery was that the move to online ordering had the potential to damage the business and reduce sales. While website sales can possibly cost less to process, the average sale value was less than telephone sales.

The company had to work a delicate balance of telephone and website sales and eventually hit on a strategy of telephone follow-up to online sales. As online orders were received, the outbound telemarketers would call the customer and upsell based on the products in the online order.

This became a productive use of the call centre staff, giving them options for inbound and outbound selling. Customers appreciated the ‘service calls’ and nearly always increased their order value.

let me help you spend more money…

So don’t believe everything you hear about the marvels of digital disruption – it can damage your business rather than improve it.

The old adage continues to apply – just because you can doesn’t mean you should…

How digital marketers destroyed one of the most profitable media channels…

19 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by Malcolm Auld in B2B Marketing, Content Marketing, Digital, Digital marketing, Direct Marketing, Email marketing, Marketing, Marketing Automation, Sales, Social Media, social selling

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B2B Marketing, content marketing, digital marketing, email marketing, influencer, social selling, Thought Leadership

As many of you will know, one of the major weaknesses of digital marketers is their lack of knowledge of marketing history.

They naively assumed that just because a technology was new, all previous technology was useless, all existing media channels no longer worked, proven techniques suddenly failed, and human DNA changed forever. So they ignored everything that had worked pre-internet.

The nature of technology is to constantly evolve. Experienced marketers have lived through a constant stream of technical innovations – in television, radio, outdoor, mail, print, sponsorship and of course online. So for most, the digital channels just offered additional media options for marketing purposes.

One of the most profitable channels – for both the media owner and marketers – was the humble mailing list. Mailing lists existed for every consumer and B2B category. You could rent them or create your own and reach every person on the list. Many list owners rented their lists both for profit and to keep the list current.

But then the marketing toddlers in their digital nappies arrived. When they realised the power of direct marketing via email, they really went to town – spamming, abusing privacy, ignoring unsubscribe requests and generally operating without any ethics. They were so appallingly bad at the use of email lists, governments around the world were forced to take action to stop them.

In countries across the globe new laws banning spam, banning the sending of unsolicited emails, and protecting the privacy of consumers, were legislated. These were the direct result of digital marketers abusing their privilege – to communicate directly with consumers.

The backwash from these bans was devastating. Here’s why:

The new privacy and opt-in laws, spilled into the databases of mailing list owners, not just email list owners. These new laws meant once-compliant mailing list owners had to comply with laws designed for email list owners.

So, if you owned a list and it contained contacts from more than one country, you now had to comply with multiple privacy and spam laws. The cost of this compliance became prohibitive. When coupled with the reduction in subscribers to printed magazines, the cost versus revenue for list ownership and maintenance became unsustainable. The penalties for non-compliance were too high and not worth the risk of human error.

For the uninitiated, prior to these new laws, any marketer could rent a mailing list and send direct mail for business purposes. Let’s say for example, you wanted to reach IT professionals. You didn’t have to advertise and hope you reached them. You could rent a list and mail them anything from a letter to a white paper, even include an involvement device. Then you managed responses and followed-up the non-responses by phone.

Here’s one of the world’s most successful B2B campaigns from a pre-internet age. It paid for itself within 4 hours of delivery.

But that simple way of doing business has been severely damaged. Thanks to the spam and privacy laws, there are way fewer lists available to rent – particularly in niche markets.

Now B2B marketing for example, has become much more complicated and open to abuse. It is reflected in the growth of the fake influencers and fake thought leaders. Instead of renting a list or building one, marketers are being told they have to do social selling. As against anti-social selling? What sales process isn’t social?

Here, according to the digital marketing experts, is what you have to do today to reach a B2B prospect.

Connect to as many executives as possible on LinkedIn or other social channels.
Pay a third party, usually in a third-world country, to create a white paper, or ‘content’ for you to send to every contact you have, via the social channels.
Don’t use proven sales techniques in your messaging, as selling is evil.
Just hope the contact has nothing better to do but read your content and love it so much they contact you.
To convince your connection your ‘content’ is worth consuming, call it “thought leadership” and call yourself “an influencer” – for no reason other than to big yourself up in your own eyes and hopefully fool some poor sucker that you know what you’re talking about.
When your social selling fails to work, use the KPI of “thought leadership” and “content marketing” to fool your boss that things are OK. One way to do this is to send your boss all your content when you send it to your connections.

This process takes way longer and costs much more than simply mailing your prospects and customers with relevant information and reasons to respond (known as selling). But hey, it has digital buzzwords attached to it so it must be worth destroying a profitable media channel.

I’m not saying that contacting people on LinkedIn and gradually converting them to a customer doesn’t work. Though most social sellers don’t practice what they preach. Instead, they connect and start flogging their wares immediately, without any credibility, using puff-words like “awesome”, “killer”, “secrets”, and “mind-blowing” in their message.

Here’s an example of one I received this week from a person who asked to join my network, I didn’t invite him. It arrived courtesy of marketing automation: “…5 killer LinkedIn tactics we used to generate 50 appointments and 13 closed deals in 2 months” I have no idea why he thinks I’m a prospect, these killer tactics are the last thing I need to grow a business. The message has zero credibility.

Interestingly, many of the thought leaders on social selling have never used direct mail, so they have no credibility when claiming social selling is the solution. You can prove it too – do a split run test. You might be surprised at the results.

In my experience, using mail supported by the digital channels will get the best result – but I’m only speaking from experience. Given current marketers don’t care about marketing history aka “experience” the message will probably fall on deaf ears.

Blatant Plug…

If you live in Brisbane and want to know how to make your mail work in a digital world, here’s a blatant plug. Join Steve Harrison, the man Campaign magazine described as “The greatest Direct Mail creative of his generation“. He’s won more Cannes Lion awards for direct mail than anyone else. You’ll learn how to do award-winning, effective direct mail at this event on 11th March 2019:

www.creativemail.com.au

How to get executives to dine at upmarket restaurants for lunch…

22 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Advertising, B2B Marketing, Branding, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Direct Marketing, Marketing, Sales, social selling

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

B2B Marketing, branding, copywriting, database, direct mail, direct marketing, marketing, social selling

Today’s Throwback Thursday features two campaigns promoting fine dining restaurants in the Sydney CBD. These campaigns would still work today, 21+ years after they originally ran…

Fine dining restaurants located in 5 star hotels, are quite different to your everyday cafes and restaurants located on the high street or in food lanes. They have their own peculiarities, one of which is their location inside a hotel without street-front exposure.

They’re also expensive. Most are frequented for one of four reasons:

the chef’s (food/wine) reputation
celebrating a special occasion
the company/employer is picking up the tab
money is no object for the customer

Here are two case studies promoting fine dining restaurants to business executives:

The Astral Restaurant located at The Star Casino in Darling Harbour
The Galileo Restaurant located in the Observatory Hotel in Kent Street near The Rocks

The Astral Resturant was located in a separate top floor of the casino as part of The Endevour Room, the casino’s private gaming room. The casino is just too far to walk from the CBD for lunch – but it had free parking. The agency drew a map of streets west of George street down to Darling Harbour, with boundaries north and south in the CBD.

A list of senior executive contact details within the map boundaries was then rented and the names/job titles were qualified by phone. The mailpack is the size of a typical dinner plate and used the plate imagery within.

The mailpack had three incentives to visit and dine at The Astral:

$75 dining voucher for The Astral
$50 gaming voucher for The Endeavour Room
1 month free membership to The Endeavour Room

So recipients could go for lunch or dinner, then get to gamble in the private VIP high roller room. Of course they probably weren’t aware that an entree cost about $75 and the minimum bet was $50, but the incentive worked its head off.

Front of mailpack

Rear of mailpack

Mailpack opened…

Letter

Letter, brochure, vouchers

Vouchers and membership card

The mailing generated a response of more than 25% and all respondents were put on a database for future mail/email communication. (email was just starting in the business world)

The Galileo Restaurant is also located on the fringe of the CBD. The agency hired people to walk ten minutes from the restaurant towards the city centre and create a map of the catchment area. Staff walked the floors of each building and built a list of senior executives for each company in the catchment area. A list of senior executives in North Sydney was also rented to so a split-run test could be conducted.

The mailing is an A3 piece of parchment card stock, folded into thirds and sealed with a black tape. It unfolds into a food art poster. There is an invitation with an excellent incentive:

Free lunch for two people – three courses plus coffee
The recipient can bring a guest along and enjoy lunch together

There is a reservation card to hand in when the respondent arrives at the restaurant. It captures the recipient’s name and their guest’s details. This doubled the size of the database and gave the restaurant a reference point for a ofllow-up mailing. This also generated more than 24% response rate. Local executives responded more than North Sydney executives, which was expected.

Front of envelope

Rear of envelope

Envelope folds open into an A3 poster

Reservation form, letter and menu

More importantly the staff offered the lunch guests a backroom tour of the hotel. While showing the guests around the inner sanctum, the hotel staff asked for the contact details of the person who books accommodation and events at the guest’s company. So the hotel built three databases – restaurant, accommodation and events.

Both these mailings would work today – the only difference is the reply device would most likely be a personalised landing page (PURL) supported by a confirmation email and/or SMS.

All this talk of fine dining is making me hungry. Where are last night’s leftovers?

The definitive reason why definitive guides aren’t really definitive…

15 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by Malcolm Auld in B2B Marketing, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Digital marketing, Direct Marketing, social selling, Thought Leadership

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B2B Marketing, content marketing, copywriting, definitive guides, digital marketing, direct marketing, social selling, Thought Leadership

Let me share a personal secret with you dear reader. I’ll whisper it to you:

“I collect definitive guides”

It’s true. I download each one that arrives in my inbox and save them into a folder. And that’s where they stay, because I rarely read them. They’re usually so subjective and full of fluff, it takes too long to find any worthwhile stuff.

I use a false name and an email address I reserve just for subscriptions. It helps to redirect the inevitable automated follow-up by a computer, and in very few cases, by a human.

Nobody ever calls though. Last year, after using the “Premium” LinkedIn service without getting any benefit, I didn’t renew my subscription. Nobody called to ask why, or to re-sell it to me. Seems LinkedIn believes people don’t need to deal with people in B2B marketing.

Strangely, while I had the subscription, each time I opened my account, I was made an offer to subscribe to the Premium service to which I was already subscribed. One has to question LinkedIn’s marketing automation.

But back to definitive guides.

The following is typical of the opening paragraphs in many of these guides.

“With new marketing channels and technologies popping up every day, marketers must adapt and evolve their analytics strategies, skills, and solutions to survive. As big data becomes increasingly critical for informed decision-making, marketers and their organizations will find themselves along a spectrum of analytical maturity.”

That’s a concern. Nobody I know wants to find themselves on a spectrum of analytical maturity. Most, like me, have no idea what it even means.

But, given that everyone in the industry agrees we live in constantly changing times, with new marketing channels and technologies popping up every day, how can any guide be definitive? By definition, it’s out of date the day it’s published.

If you claim the reason for publishing a definitive guide is constant change, then the guide is only as current as the most recent change? By the publisher’s own reasoning, the guide cannot be definitive, except at a very small moment in time, or to justify the publisher’s self-serving purpose.

Maybe the name of these guides should be changed to reflect the truth? Here’s a suggestion:

Title: An Indefinitive Guide To <insert marketing topic>

Subhead: A self-serving opinion about <insert marketing topic> designed to convince you to buy our marketing stuff. Best before <insert date>

This is an honest description and puts a timeframe to indicate the guide’s currency, given it will be out of date pretty quickly and by definition, no longer definitive.

Hmmm. There could be an opportunity here. Maybe I could publish the definitive guide to publishing indefinitive guides?

Where’s my definitive guide on how to write…

Looks like content is no longer king…

26 Thursday Oct 2017

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

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

content marketing, digital marketing, King Content, marketing, social media, social selling

Republished at the request of nervous marketers…

One of the most common conversations in marketing circles over the last couple of years, has been how to replicate the King Content hustle and flog a fledgling content marketing agency for an outrageous amount of money, making oneself filthy rich.

Hardly a marketer I’ve spoken with could believe Isentia paid $48 million for this unproven content marketing business. “Where is the value” everyone asked? Well it looks like there wasn’t much – value that is.

Recently, as most of you are probably aware, Isentia announced it was shutting down the King Content brand after a $4.4 million loss in the previous financial year. Mumbrella reported Isentia wrote down $37.8 million and close offices around the world.

And as reported in Mumbrella today, Isenta has now written off the purchase price as part of a profit downgrade, which it advised in a statement to the ASX. It has also decided to get out of content marketing. It certainly didn’t get anything out of content marketing, so to speak.

It reminds me of the first dot.con when big ad agencies rushed around like headless chooks overpaying for website production studios that had fancy names. I sat in one meeting where a young kid with a very small company, but building websites for some well known brands, turned down a $1,000,000 cheque. He wanted more, despite the cheque being more than twice his annual revenue.

Suffice to say, after the dot.con collapsed, nobody knocked on his door and his business is still about the size if was 17 years ago and he’s still just making websites and apps.

But content marketing is an industry in itself, though Gartner’s Hype Cycle already has the alleged industry on the slide into the trough of disillusionment.

Which brings me to a speech I delivered last month at the NZ Direct Marketing Conference. As I’m curious by nature I asked the audience (about 200 marketers and agency types) the following questions:

Who wants every brand they come in contact with to deliver more advertising and an increasing volume of content to them at every opportunity possible?
Who wants more email in their inbox?
Who wants more notifications on their mobile?
Who woke this morning craving relationships with consumer brands? Can’t wait to read the thought leadership on toilet roll brands?
Who has walked out of a retail store or café because you didn’t get served?

The answers were fascinating.

Not one marketer in the room wanted more content delivered to them by marketers.
Not one marketer in the room wanted more email.
Not one marketer in the room wanted more notifications.
Not one marketer in the room woke up thinking about brands, let alone wanting relationships with them.
Every marketer in the room had walked out of a store because a salesperson hadn’t tried to sell them something.

This is fascinating stuff folks. After all, if marketers and advertisers don’t want what the content marketers and the cyber-hustlers are flogging, why do they believe their customers want it?

Taking their answers once step further, the whole audience believed the premise of content marketing – that brands should deliver content at every opportunity possible to anybody who remotely comes in to contact with the brand, but should not try to sell anything – is complete and utter bullshit.

Not one executive in that audience believed, by show of hand, that marketers should be doing content marketing. As consumers, marketers hate content marketing.

So if the industry doesn’t believe in content marketing, why are marketers wasting shareholder’s precious investment on it??? It appears that content marketing has rapidly become a punch-line to marketing jokes.

But one has to wonder, why didn’t the management at Isentia ask these questions to protect their shareholder’s funds???

And why do I have images of the emperor’s new clothes, and lemmings jumping off cliffs???

Gotta go. I have an idea for an anti-content marketing, content marketing business. You can check it out here: www.thecontentbrewery.com

The 3 essential questions you must ask for content marketing success…

17 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Content Marketing, Copywriting, Digital marketing, Direct Marketing, Email marketing, Marketing, Marketing Automation, Remarketing, Social Media, social selling, Thought Leadership

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

content marketing, social media, social selling, Thought Leadership

“Any fool can create lousy content… sadly many do”

Like many of you, I am extremely suspicious of the claims of the content marketing zealots. I cannot count the number of times marketers have asked me what they should do when it comes to content marketing. They don’t understand its purpose or why they should bother – and they suspect they are being sold digital snake oil. The “emperor’s new clothes” is quoted regularly.

wanna buy some content marketing?

So to help marketers and business owners with their content marketing, I have created the 3 essential questions you must ask before embarking on your content marketing journey. Do you like how I was able to get the word “journey” into my sentence, to make me sound more digi-credible?

So here they are – answer these honestly and you’ll be able to solve your content marketing conundrum.

The 3 Essential Questions…

Question 1:
Do you as a consumer want every brand you buy or consider buying, to deliver an ever-increasing amount of content to you at every touchpoint you have with those brands?

Like 100% of consumers, your answer is probably a resounding “no” – so why do you want to do it to your customers and prospects?

Question 2:
What facts, research or data do you have, to prove your customers and prospects are demanding you increase the amount of content you disseminate to them?

Where is your evidence? Where are the facts? Or are you just following marketing fashion and the FOMO created by cyber-hustlers?

Question 3:
What will your time-poor, infobesity-ridden customers and prospects give up in their daily lives, so they can consume your increased volume of content?

They already have extremely busy, content-filled lives – why should they consume yours?

Now, if you can answer these questions in such a way as to demand you immediately start mass production of content for marketing purposes, please contact an alleged content marketing expert. They’ll know how to make money out of you, rather than for you.

But if you are not sure what to do, but are serious about producing content that persuades, really sells your brand and grows your bottom line, go to the website I’ve created to help you – www.thecontentbrewery.com

It’s an anti-content marketing, content marketing website – if you get my drift…

(To learn how to create content that persuades and sells, get a ticket to www.draytonslasthurrah.com)

Looks like content is no longer king…

17 Sunday Sep 2017

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

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

content marketing, digital marketing, King Content, marketing, social media, social selling

Recently, as most of you are probably aware, Isentia announced it was shutting down the King Content brand after a $4.4 million loss in the previous financial year.

And as reported in Mumbrella today Isenta has now written off the purchase price as part of a profit downgrade, which it advised in a statement to the ASX. It has also decided to get out of content marketing. It certainly didn’t get anything out of content marketing in the first place, so to speak.

Suffice to say, after the dot.con collapsed, nobody knocked on his door and his business is still about the size if was 17 years ago and he’s still just making websites and apps.

But content marketing is an industry in itself, though Gartner’s Hype Cycle already has the alleged industry on the slide into the trough of disillusionment.

Who wants every brand they come in contact with to deliver more advertising and an increasing volume of content to them at every opportunity possible?
Who wants more email in their inbox?
Who wants more notifications on their mobile?
Who woke this morning craving relationships with consumer brands? Can’t wait to read the thought leadership on toilet roll brands?
Who has walked out of a retail store or café because you didn’t get served?

The answers were fascinating.

Not one marketer in the room wanted more content delivered to them by marketers.
Not one marketer in the room wanted more email.
Not one marketer in the room wanted more notifications.
Not one marketer in the room woke up thinking about brands, let alone wanting relationships with them.
Every marketer in the room had walked out of a store because a salesperson hadn’t tried to sell them something.

This is fascinating stuff folks. After all, if marketers and advertisers don’t want what the content marketers and the cyber-hustlers are flogging, why do they believe their customers want it?

Not one executive in that audience believed, by show of hand, that marketers should be doing content marketing. As consumers, marketers hate content marketing.

So if the industry doesn’t believe in content marketing, why are marketers wasting shareholder’s precious investment on it???

It appears that content marketing has rapidly become a punch-line to marketing jokes.

But one has to wonder, why didn’t the management at Isentia ask these questions to protect their shareholder’s funds???

And why do I have images of the emperor’s new clothes, and lemmings jumping off cliffs???

Gotta go. I have an idea for an anti-content marketing, content marketing business and I need to write some content about it…

More than ever before, customers want to be sold too…

28 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by Malcolm Auld in Advertising, B2B Marketing, Branding, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Customer Service, Digital, Digital marketing, Direct Marketing, Email marketing, Marketing, Marketing Automation, Remarketing, Sales, Social Media, social selling, Thought Leadership

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

B2B Marketing, content marketing, customer service, digital, digital marketing, email marketing, marketing, remarketing, Sales, social media, social selling, Thought Leadership

There is some serious B.S. being peddled claiming human DNA has miraculously changed in the last few years. The peddlers (known as content marketers) claim people don’t want to be sold anything anymore. They claim businesses that try to sell things to their customers and prospects will fail.

I’m not kidding, such absurd claims are being made at marketing seminars – if it wasn’t so sad it would be hilarious.

The claim of course, is complete rubbish and without supporting evidence.

content marketers shoveling content

The plain fact is this – people love to be sold to by good salespeople. And when they have a great sales experience they rave about it and call it “excellent customer service”. They tell friends at social functions and on social media. Some marketers even label them advocates.

Great sales technique doesn’t make the customer uncomfortable. It doesn’t sound “salesy” – to use an emerging piece of jargon. A good sales person is highly regarded by customers. And we all have our favourites, whether they be at our local cafe, clothing store, pub, hairdresser, mechanic, IT supplier, butcher, baker or grocer.

But when it comes to lousy salespeople or poor sales messages, people share a universal dislike. Since the beginning of time, people have disliked them – it is not a new sentiment just because of the internet or claims by content marketers.

How many times have you threatened to take your business elsewhere because a salesperson wasn’t available to serve you? We all love salespeople.

So to push a self-interest content marketing barrow and state all a marketer has to do is publish more and more non-sales information and the world will flock to your door, is pure fantasy. The content marketers may be smoking the wacky tobacky, but the punters aren’t having a bar of it.

Are content marketers smoking the wacky tobacky?

The common thread among modern consumers is they are time-poor and suffer from severe infobesity – much of this caused by useless content marketing messages that don’t give people a reason to act, or consider a brand. Content for content’s sake. Yet the last thing people want in their busy lives is more content.

Human beings are the laziest species on the planet – we always seek the path of least resistance. One of the key reasons apps are so popular for example, is their ease of use. So marketers have to make it as easy as possible for people to buy – which is why giving punters incentives, offers, propositions and reasons to “buy now” are key to getting sales.

To quote my old boss, David Ogilvy, “you cannot bore people into buying“. Yet content marketers are adamant you can. Waste more of people’s valuable time and you’re guaranteed to sell them more, they preach to the gullible.

Let’s examine some facts shall we:

The single biggest innovation in online shopping was an in-your-face sales tool. It was invented by Amazon – and customers love it! They call it customer service, because that’s what great selling is all about – serving customers and prospects well. The technique is now used on all major transaction websites.

Here’s an example with which you are all familiar – you visit Amazon and click on a book you are considering buying. The site then tells you “customers who bought this item also bought…”

Look out, Amazon is daring to “sell things”…

Even “Facebook with a necktie” (known as LinkedIn) uses this technique. When you view a person’s profile, you are prompted with a message “People also viewed” and there is a list of people’s mug shots linking to their profiles. This is a sales technique as old as retail selling – suggesting alternatives to get customers to buy at least one option. It’s a sales tool, not a non-sales tool.

Companies have always published non-sales information, it is not a new invention. And they made the information available at every point possible along the “customer journey”. Sorry, I had to drop the journey buzzword at least once. Some of you ancient marketers will remember such non-sales content as brochures, websites, booklets, newsletters, educational videos, signage, on-pack instructions, seminars, user manuals – the list goes on.

This is all designed to assist customers and prospects to make buying decisions, or as after sales service. Why would the punters want more ‘information’?

Yet the content marketers are claiming the whole world has changed just because people can do some online research before buying. This is stretching credibility beyond truth. Just because a marketer can reach a prospective customer in more places than ever before, does not automatically translate into “don’t sell to consumers, just post information as much as possible“.

wanna read content rather than buy a product?

By all means, help build your brand by publishing relevant content that cost-effectively drives people to a sale, or keeps them coming back after they’ve bought. But make it easy for the punters to buy – they are already inundated with infobesity and can’t be bothered doing all the work themselves.

So please, you self-interested content marketers, stop the lying about content marketing and making fake claims all a brand has to do to succeed, is publish non-sales content. It’s dishonest. Brands have always published non-sales content, as well as sales content – and it’s the sales content that has the biggest impact on the business and always will.

I’m going on a customer journey to get a drink of water from the kitchen. Better check some influencers to see what non-sales content they have, so I can make my buying decision – do I get cold water from the fridge, just run water from the tap, or maybe drink sparkling water from a bottle? After all, I want to ensure my water-drinking customer experience journey is the best it can be…

Is your digital marketing leaving cigarette burn marks on your customers…

02 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by Malcolm Auld in B2B Marketing, Branding, Content Marketing, Digital, Digital marketing, Direct Marketing, Email marketing, Marketing Automation, Thought Leadership

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

content marketing, digital marketing, linkedin, remarketing, retargeting, social selling, Thought Leadership

Depending upon what you read, almost two thirds of all activity on the internet is computer generated. Bots, crawlers, scrapers, autoresponders and marketing automation dominate the internet. Human connectivity is in the minority.

Given our love affair with social media, this is pretty scary stuff. As marketers lean on computers and data points to trigger activity, more and more marketing messages come from machines than humans.

computers create more content than humans…

One current trend is remarketing or retargeting – depending upon your preference for buzzwords. And the result is not always positive.

Burning customers didn’t start with the internet though. The first instance of the “cigarette burn” problem in marketing came with the proliferation of telemarketing. The problem of unsolicited calls into homes became so bad, governments around the world created ‘do not call‘ registers, so the public could opt-in to opt-out of getting telemarketing calls.

Then came the ‘do not mail‘ registers so people could opt-in to opt-out of getting mail. And thanks to marketers and online scam-merchants abusing the email channel, spam laws were created to protect consumers.

“It’s a sad reflection on the industry that anti-marketing laws were passed, because marketers abused the personal media channels vital for connection with the people who make them money – customers.”

One of the problems with personal channels and personalised messaging on websites, is the way marketers measure success. We only measure one half of the activity – those people who respond. We never measure those people who don’t respond – the majority of people who get the message. So you may unwittingly be leaving lots of little cigarette burns on your customers.

Are you leaving cigarette burns on your prospects and customers?

Your intent is to make a positive statement about your brand. Your measurement says you are successful because it only measures results from your point of view, not the customers. But what are you doing to the majority who have no interest in your content marketing?

Here are some insights to help you when creating your content:

Amazing Insight 1: Customers don’t really care about brands

Amazing Insight 2: Customers don’t want relationships with brands

Amazing Insight 3: Customers don’t want to engage with brands

Amazing Insight 4: Customers don’t want to join a conversation with a brand

Amazing Insight 5: Customers get pissed off if you irritate them with irrelevant content marketing about your brand

Yet given every brand is now a publisher, customers are being burnt more than ever before with an oversupply of content designed to help the brand’s search results, or trying to position the brand’s alleged thought leadership in the false belief consumers will be seduced by the charms of the content.

LinkedIn has become the ash tray of B2B marketing

Sadly LinkedIn appears to be a constant stream of smouldering cigarette butts leaving burns on the collective memory of customers and prospects: regular approaches by fake accounts trying to connect; people asking to connect who then immediately flog their wares to you; lists of secrets to success; personal posts with no relevance to business; saccharine, glib motivational posts which depress rather than inspire; content, content and more content – you cannot avoid wincing each time you log-on.

Sadly, LinkedIn is becoming the ashtray for content marketer’s cigarette burns

The social selling industry is addicted to leaving burn marks on prospects, with its belief you need to smother people in self-serving content, rather than invite them to respond or buy.

I recently had one bloke in the UK send me a direct message on LinkedIn to promote his thought leadership whitepaper. He didn’t even have the courtesy to invite me to connect with him. He assumed I would be more interested in his content marketing, than connecting. This constant mediocrity driven by the new social salesperson is becoming depressing.

Social selling is a confusing paradox

If you believe the hype, you no longer need to do any selling to succeed in B2B marketing. All you have to do is provide content and your prospects will automatically buy as result of your amazing thought leadership.

If the Social Selling B.S. is true and there’s no longer any selling, why isn’t it called Social Content or Social Mediocrity or Social Business Development? Why is it called Social Selling if there’s no selling involved? Hmmm?

Me thinks there’s another digital scam afoot – driven by trend blindness and people who don’t like being accountable, or just aren’t very good at selling.

I think that’s enough content for today – I have to go earn a living…

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