Tag Archives: viral marketing

Why most shared content has virtually no impact on your brand…

02 Friday Mar 2018

Posted by in Branding, Content Marketing, Digital marketing, Direct Marketing, Email marketing, Marketing, Marketing Automation, Media, Remarketing, Thought Leadership, Viral marketing

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Originally published 2016…

Any marketer, advertising agent, researcher or social scientist worth their salt, knows for any marketing content to resonate with, let alone influence, the typical punter, it must be consumed numerous times in a short space of time. Seeing something just once, rarely makes a serious impression (though it is rated as such in media terms – an impression that is).

Unless the message is designed as a direct response message, giving prospects all the information they need to ‘act now’, most marketing messages hardly penetrate our grey matter if only seen once.

Just look at the way we learn at school – through repetition. A message has to be repeatedly consumed for it to eventually make it through our distracted craniums and finally embed itself into our conscience. This is called learning. It’s a rare human indeed, who can read or view something only once and then remember the content.

raked-classroom1937

Information retention comes through repetition not from glancing at content

So what does this mean in the world of digital chewing gum for the brain? This is the world where the people mostly share content in social channels, which requires less than a metaphorical chew to consume. The receivers of said content quickly scan it, dismiss it, then start to chew on the next piece of content, ad infinitum.

digital chewing gum

The majority of content shared by consumers is mostly images, video, memes, jokes, fundraising appeals and personal stories. People rarely share words or phrases, particularly lots of words like those populating ebooks, whitepapers, brochures and the like. Of course people communicate back and forth using words, but it’s not sharing in the content marketing sense.

The act of sharing on social media often has less to do with the content being shared and more to do with narcissism. “Look at me, I’m sharing this before anyone else” or “look at me I’m sharing something – how many likes did it get?” or “look at me, I liked something”. Though sharing in business channels can have less selfish motivations.

The average adult attention span is now roughly 8 seconds (just less than a goldfish) and ASS Times keep getting shorter and shorter – less than 1 second for many image-based channels like Instagram. So the ability for any snack-size marketing content to resonate at all in the memory of consumers, is nigh impossible. Did you like that piece of digi-jargon – “snack-size”?

attention span

And what about all that thought leadership content floating in cyberspace? At best, much of it remains in the ‘download folder’ of computers, because we’re too busy to print it or consume it in any depth. It’s why good quality email messages to opt-in subscriber lists, along with blogs, are still the best performing content online.

Ironically the content marketing failure is being driven by the content itself and FOMO. I’ve talked about the infobesity problem before. The average punter is waterboarded with content from friends, strangers, government, institutions and brands every second of the day. Add to this deluge, the modern dilemma of FOMO forcing consumers to have minimal engagement with content, and you can see why brands gain almost zero benefit.

Consumers know there’s loads more content coming down the digital pipe and they don’t want to miss it. So they quickly and disengagingly ‘like’ something, or ignore it, before moving to the next set of pixels.

content hipster

Hipster training to consume marketing content…

Just as we chew gum without thinking and then spit it out, it’s the same with content. We consume it without thinking and with almost zero emotional engagement. We swipe, pause, swipe – in a constant process to churn through the non-stop current of content. And the pause is usually shorter than the time it takes to spell ‘pause’. And even if consumers do take a few seconds to read or view your content once, will it really make a lasting impression?

Hmmm that reminds me, I’d better check my emails. Oh look there’s a dog…

dog

P.S. Please feel free to share this content with as many as you like:)

The cost is high when FOMO and trend blindness run your marketing…

30 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by in Advertising, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Digital, Digital marketing, Direct Marketing, Email marketing, Social Media, Viral marketing

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It’s a cliche to say the only constant in our lives is change, but it’s also a fact – hence why it’s a cliche. And it’s a cliche to say there has never been another time in marketing history where the Fear Of Missing Out has wasted so much marketing budget.

FOMO 3

Every time a bright new shiny digi-object appears (which is almost daily) marketers rush to spend money on it, before any evidence exists to prove its worth.

In her brilliant book “Viral Marketing – The Science of Sharing” Dr Karen Nelson-Field, Senior Research Associate at the University of South Australia’s Institute of Marketing Science, reveals many truths about viral and digital marketing channels.

The obvious fact is the most common issue affecting success in the digital world is simple – change is occurring ahead of learning.

hart7

The same thing happened when CRM and database marketing first appeared in the 1980’s – and millions of dollars were consequently wasted. In the early stages of any new media adaption cycle, marketers become so enamoured with the possibilities of the new channel, they only see the positives and only promote the ‘successes’. They actively choose to ignore failures.

As the Dr says; “when the wave of new devotion is so strong it is easy to ignore research that is counter to popular commentary.”

A self-fulfilling wave of anticipatory enthusiasm puts pressure on marketers to over-invest to avoid being left behind – FOMO. Decisions are based on hype rather than evidence. And like lemmings the individuals follow the crowd.

This medical condition is known as trend blindness. But as I’ve learned over the years, most people don’t want to speak out against the madness of crowds – popularity always trumps commonsense.

unpopularopheader

If you believe some experts, the way to viral marketing success is to have a cute cat, dog or kid doing unusual things in your video. And while some of the most viewed videos on You Tube include these species, more videos have failed than succeeded with cats, dogs or kids in them – but we only ever hear of the successes and assume that’s the full story.

kidsanddogs1

Elements for instant viral success

Being a researcher the Dr quotes many experts in their field to support her case:

Jenni Romaniuk, Research Professor, School of Marketing, University of South Australia said in 2012: “early knowledge is patchy in substance: research findings are often reduced to soundbites that get passed on without any regard to the quality of the underpinning research. Case studies – particularly ‘successes’ are taken as gospel instead of being treated more appropriately as single points in a larger story.”

And Bruce McColl, Chief Marketing Officer, Mars Inc says: “Don’t be seduced by new! Technology is there to serve your strategy; your strategy should not serve technology. Rigorously explore new media to enable a better execution of your growth strategy. Any other approach is a gamble with your shareholder’s money.”

This is an issue facing businesses when it comes to social media – they are letting the technology rather than the facts drive the strategy. I see it daily when consulting to marketers on their social strategy.

One client of mine is in the food business and increasingly a constant publisher of food porn. And while it’s a nice activity to post appetising food shots, now that we’re tracking the Instagram, Facebook and Twitter posts to sales, the head hours involved are certainly a long way off paying for themselves.

computer sweatshops

social media labour costs are not cheap

That’s not to say the channels won’t become profitable. But unlike traditional channels where you know the minute you post a paid ad whether it works or not, the social channels require long term investment of expensive labour – something most small businesses for example cannot afford, or are reluctant to invest in.

The other issue in the social space is the qualifications of the alleged experts. There appears to be the old attitude of “I work in digital, therefore I am… an expert”. Curiously when I ask audiences of digital marketers to nominate the books they’ve read recently (published by legitimate experts) the silence is deafening.

Some will argue that the increase in spend in new channels is part of the investment in learning, as the channels are new. The fallacy with that argument of course is that if you are going to invest in new media, it should be bench-marked against existing media over time to determine its value. And most of the investment in digital channels is not being accurately measured against existing channels that work.

Only when a new media proves it can pay for itself, do you add it to your marketing mix – either by investing additional funds or at the expense of channels that don’t perform as well.

So at the risk of being unpopular for having a contrary opinion, I’m off to read the Docs book again – I learn something new every time I do. For example, did you know that arousal and valence are key to viral success?

Wait there’s more…

steak knives

 

The rise and fall and rise of email marketing…

07 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by in Digital, Direct Marketing

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Never in the history of marketing (although telemarketing runs a close second) has a media been so readily accepted by customers, yet so comprehensively abused by marketers, that within a few years of the media being invented, laws were passed to ban its use.

E-mail

And so it is with email.

Thanks to marketers and digi-scam-merchants abusing the privilege they were given to enter people’s in-boxes, spam laws and security systems now exist to protect consumers against marketing via e-mail and to stop messages reaching in-boxes.

The other big mistake made by marketers was to replace direct mail with email, because it was cheaper for the marketer, rather than because it was what the customers wanted.

The impact of these activities has driven down the open-rates of email messages and in some categories has made the media less effective than it used to be. My company owns an email software service, distributing and tracking millions of emails per annum and we know through our monitoring, that average email open-rates have declined. Only those who are smartly segmenting, constantly testing and multi-stage messaging have maintained or increased open-rates.

So if you moved from mail to email to save money, you’re going to have to move back again and contact customers and prospects using both mail and email if you are to succeed. The best results are achieved when email is integrated with direct mail and other personal media.

Interestingly, when I ask for a show of hands of marketers who want more email in their inbox, nobody raises a digit. Yet when I ask who wants to do more or better email marketing, many volunteer their hands.

Email is still the most popular way of communicating and will continue to be for a while yet. Here’s a table from Mark Garner’s research last year about what Australians do first thing each day.

Australians and email

I opened Australia’s first email marketing agency BuzzMail in the 90’s and wrote the world’s first non-American book on the subject; Email Marketing Made Easy. In the early days we sent Flash files as attachments. I remember a driving competition we created to promote Comm Banks car insurance – huge viral effect. Then streaming video emails appeared that started immediately in your inbox when you opened the message. We launched PlayStation’s online gaming this way, getting a massive increase in registered users as a result of the message ‘going viral’ as they say.

Most viral email is in fact viral-lite – see previous post. To see how to really do a viral campaign, view the Obama message that was sent the week before his original election. It was to encourage people to go to the polls and vote. Click here. It’s way more professional than the digital dross dished up by the dullards during this diabolical election.

Eventually the spammers forced legislation to be created and technology started to block streaming content and now even blocks images.

Despite being used for over 15 years, many marketers still don’t understand how to use email to its fullest potential. Email is not a once-only blast. To make email really perform at its best, don’t just send one email message and assume the job is done. The beauty of email is the ability to track who opens messages and who clicks on links. This allows the marketer to send more relevant follow-up messages to recipients based on their behaviour to the first message. You’d be surprised how many marketers don’t use email this way.

Whenever I send a follow-up message to people who have opened and clicked on a link in the initial message, the follow-up message almost always gets twice the open-rate as the initial one. Try it yourself. This simple tactic works. And it’s one of the reasons email open-rates will rise again, as marketers learn how to use email marketing more professionally.

Wine lovers love mail

Curiously, a number of wine clubs that stopped sending statement inserts and replaced them with email, have now moved back to mail. The reason statement inserts work is because they are tactile – people cannot ignore them when they open their financial statement. Consequently when financial statements moved to email distribution, the associated wine clubs lost business. 

wine glass

And the largest wine club in Australia still receives up to 90% of their orders from e-mail offers, via that digital device – voice over data lines – known as the telephone. People don’t trust that their order has been received unless they talk with a human. Though as time goes by, I suspect this attitude will change as trust in online ordering improves.

Email is a lousy acquisition media, but excellent for retaining customers and reducing attrition. The only way email is effective for acquiring new customers is through referral campaigns, known digitally as viral marketing.

Here’s a simple tip: The “From Line” gets an e-mail opened and the “Subject Line” gets it deleted. People only open messages from people or companies they know – and they only open messages they believe are relevant to their relationship with the sender.

They subconsciously ask themselves:

1. Who is sending this to me? Do I know them? (From Line)

2. What is it about? Is it relevant to me? (Subject Line)

If they know who you are, then you have a chance your message will get opened, but only if the subject line is relevant to their relationship with you. The appearance and design of the email content doesn’t matter if the recipient doesn’t open the message.

One of the other impacts of the protectionist technology that blocks e-mail messages, is that formats have regressed and are far more restricted than they used to be. You can no longer stream video into an in-box direct within an email message – you have to link recipients to landing pages, or stream the content from a link within the message. So the new rule is; the simpler your content, the more likely it will be read.

If for example your email message uses an image as the masthead, it may be working against your open-rate, because recipients can only see an instruction to download the image to view it, or a red x in a box. So they don’t bother opening it. Many marketers now use a colour background and a text headline as their masthead and get higher open-rates as a result. This is because recipients can read the masthead in their preview panel and make a decision without having to download images.

If you’re wondering how often to e-mail your customers, ask yourself two questions:

1. “is this relevant to my relationship with this customer or prospect?”

2. “will it enhance the relationship in a positive way?”

If the answer to (1) is “no” then don’t bother with question (2). If the answer to (1) is “yes” but to (2) is “no” – have second thoughts.

Another way to plan your email marketing is to consider what you like and dislike about using email – you’ll probably find it’s much the same as what your customers value. Go figure.