Seasonality is an Excuse

Posted on April 27, 2011May 5, 2015 by MD

I hear a lot of people say their product is seasonal and I see a lot of companies treat their products as such. But in many cases, is your product really seasonal? Or are you simply using that as an excuse?

I won’t deny it, some products are definitely seasonal. Most people don’t shop for Easter candy in June or Christmas trees in September, but outside of holiday specific products, is it truly seasonal?

Take for instance the sport of lacrosse. It has a definite seasonality, right? After all, lacrosse isn’t played year round. The National Lacrosse League plays from January through May. Major League Lacrosse plays from May to August. High school and college have two seasons with girls playing in the fall and boys in the spring. Many cities and organizations hold summer tournaments.

Wait a second. That looks like lacrosse is played year round, doesn’t it? So why is it treated seasonal? Because that’s how those involved treat it. If it’s not NLL season, teams don’t tweet or update their Facebook pages and news is virtually nil outside of major events like draft day.

Does that mean fans quit looking for relevant products? In some cases, yes. You will always have a group of customers who also view your product as seasonal, either because they’re ready to move on to other things, or because they’ve been conditioned to view it that way.

Others find themselves frustrated because a product they want is no longer available. Many lacrosse blogs and news sites go dormant for the season, gear becomes hard to find unless you are lucky enough to have a lacrosse specific store nearby or shop online. Sometimes even that doesn’t help. Just ask a lacrosse playing girl whose gear, to save valuable real estate may only be stocked ahead of the season and cleared out immediately after.

Do you really believe anyone heavily involved in the sport quits thinking about it simply because it’s not lacrosse season? A lot of opportunity exists but is overlooked because lacrosse is seasonal.

So now, is your product really seasonal? Or is it only seasonal because you view and treat it as such?

What “Dry Erase Board Girl” Can Teach You About Marketing

Posted on August 11, 2010May 5, 2015 by MD

If you have no idea who Dry Erase Board Girl is, click here first. You can find her follow up to it here.

1. It doesn’t have to be fancy

33 photos that appear to be taken in someone’s living room were engaging and got the point across. Not only did it get the point across, it made it easy to share (and boy did people share it) because you could view it from just about anywhere whether you were using a computer or a smart phone.

2. It needs to resonate

While some people are upset over this not being real, most are still okay with it. Many people suspected it was a hoax before it was announced but still shared it. Why? Because it resonated with them. Who hasn’t worked at a job where they wish they could quit like this despite the repercussions?

3. Yes, sex sells, but it can still be subtle

Would this have gone viral if it were a cute guy instead of a cute girl? Probably not. But it also didn’t take a mostly (or completely) naked girl either. Yes, there is a photo of her in a tank and short shorts highlighting her HPOAness, however, the remainder are a head shot and a dry erase board. One thing I’ve heard over and over is how great the actresses’ expressions are. Proving just how powerful a smile can be.

4. Keep it real

While the situation itself may not have been real, the concept was, as well as the actress. Going back to the sex sells point, they could’ve hired someone who looked like a Playboy Centerfold or a model, but they went with someone who was more girl next door. Why? Any of those descriptions would have fit in with the HPOA quitting frustration. Because it would have taken this into the realm of over the top and wouldn’t have resonated as strongly with the audience. Most people know someone or might even be someone like Elyse Porterfield. It added to the realness of it.

5. It needs to fit your goals

The big marketing cliché lately is taking something viral. But… why? Why do you want or need something to go viral? Unfortunately, too few marketers can answer that, or answer beyond a mass marketing mentality.

Does Viral=Sales? Sometimes. Does Viral=Money? Maybe. Does Viral=Branding? Sometimes.

See a trend here? Nobody can accurately predict what will or won’t work 100% of the time.

For TheChive.com, which describes itself as “Probably the Best Site in the World”, the goal more than likely was to drive traffic and probably subscriptions. You know what? I bet they succeeded.

What Opportunities are You Overlooking?

Posted on April 13, 2010May 5, 2015 by MD

Twitter is often cited as a great new marketing tool that truly brings one-to-one marketing to the forefront.

But truly, what good is this tool if you don’t really use it?

A few months ago I was looking into getting a new cellular phone, and as there were so many fantastic new options, I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to get. Knowing what a fantastic resource Twitter can be, I asked my network what phones they had and what they liked or disliked about them. As I already have two iPods, my only requirement was no iPhones.

As expected, I got lots of terrific feedback from a wide variety of people. But guess who I didn’t hear a word from? A single person in the mobile industry.

This would have been a great opportunity for Palm and Sprint to jump into the conversation if not to put their two cents in, than to thank their customers who were speaking so highly of their products. Or for T-Mobile to jump in to keep me as a customer, or Verizon to try and steal me away as I was no longer under contract.

Plenty of opportunities presented themselves all the way from the store level to the mobile brand to the cellular carrier, but not a single person took advantage of them. Needless to say after three days of conversations on Twitter, I made my choice which I’m happy with.

Recently I was surprised to actually have a company do on Twitter exactly what too few companies take the time to do.

The Toronto Rock saw my tweet regarding a specific product of theirs I thought I was out of luck on and responded with a direct link to it on their website.

(Well, at least the closest thing to it as the specific item I was lamenting was a game worn jersey auctioned off for charity.)

The result? They made a sale.

It doesn’t matter how niche or mainstream your product is, plenty of opportunities exist if you’re genuinely willing to take the time to not only search them out, but respond to them individually in a way that shows you actually are paying attention and not just searching specific keywords regardless of context.

Think You Can Automate Your Marketing?

Posted on March 3, 2010May 5, 2015 by MD

With the growth of social media, many companies want to get involved, but don’t really want to divert resources to these untested areas. Often, companies set them up and forget about it, or they try to keep it active by passively automating it. After all, why should you pay for someone to manage your social media when you can automate it?

I need to point out that I don’t believe this Twitter page is associated with the Levi’s brand as they list their twitter account as Levisguy on their home page, however, it is associating itself with the Levi’s brand and regardless of its legitimacy, provides an effective example.

Why You Should Understand Domains

Posted on February 24, 2010May 5, 2015 by MD

Why in the world should I care about understanding domains? I’m not an IT person, I’m a [fill in blank].

Understanding domains is important for more than your tech team for a number of reasons, not the least of which is so you don’t get taken advantage of.

Communication
Having even a basic understanding of domains will help you to communicate with others who do need to deal with them. The more you know, the better you can convey what you want, or when you need it by. It can also help you to recognize when someone might be taking advantage of you. For instance, if you know how to change your DNS or add a CNAME record yourself, than you’ll know someone is blowing smoke when they try and tell you it will take them hours to get it done.

Strategy
Understanding domains will help you to better evaluate strategic moves whether at the business level, the marketing level or the product level. This will also help you to understand what issues you may run into or what steps you should take to avoid issues. For instance, imagine your marketing department has come up with a great new name and campaign for your latest product? What’s one of the first things you should do? See if the domain is even available. Honestly, this should be done even sooner in the process but I digress. It’s scary to me how many companies completely develop and launch products without a second thought only to find afterward that the domain is already registered and they’re unintentionally sending traffic to a completely unrelated company or product, or worse, a competitor.

Ramifications
It seems like an obvious question, but do you know what happens when domain is not renewed (or is not configured correctly)? I’m not referring to the details of what happens at the registrar level, but what happens at the other levels. Your website goes down. Possibly your email goes down. You potentially lose customers who suddenly can no longer find you, or can’t find you for the first time. Sometimes registrars will put up some kind of a notification alerting visitors or a place holder page such as coming soon. But more often than not, especially on misconfigured or non-configured domains, they may put up a page advertising that your domain may be for sale or use it to host relevant Google AdSense links (or similar). As these ads are often automatic and keyword based, you may drive traffic to your competitors.

Learning from your customers

Posted on October 8, 2009May 5, 2015 by MD

Do you know how your customers use your product? It seems like a simple answer to a dumb question, but sometimes, those are the ones that you have an iceberg of an answer for. Companies are often surprised to learn how differently customers use their products from how or what they intended. Sometimes of course, this results in new legal warnings, but other times, the company is actually able to learn something.

Samsung’s new DualView line of digital cameras is a great example of what can happen when you pay attention to your customers. When camera’s were still film reliant, consumers did whatever they could to make sure every picture was a winner because otherwise they were wasting money developing bad pictures. Digital cameras of course have changed that. Consumers are a lot less likely to worry about pictures not coming out because it no longer matters if it takes one time or ten times to get the shot. The arm length self-portrait shot has become commonplace, but as many people complain, it’s often difficult to get the shot you want unless you’re willing to take several shots. This is where Samsung has paid attention and gotten innovative. To be honest, I can’t believe it took this long for one of the camera companies to do this, nor do I think it will be alone on the market for long. What Samsung has done is put a small screen on the front of the camera so you can see what you’re actually taking a picture of if you’re taking a self portrait. They have some additional features that you can use the front screen for, but this is a big one.

Are you listening to your customers?

Is Social Media Right for Your Business?

Posted on September 25, 2009May 5, 2015 by MD

Right now, there’s a lot of talk about social media. How great it is and how much it’s changing everything from how we interact to how we do business. It’s true, social media is impacting everything from the way we communicate to the way we do business. But, this doesn’t mean it’s the right strategic choice for every business. It’s hard not to get caught up in the excitement of a shiny new toy, but before your company jumps into using social media (assuming it hasn’t already), here are some things to think about.

What are your goals? What do want to get out of it?

This is the first area you should really spend some time on. After all, how can you expect to see results or benefits from using social media if you really don’t know why you’re using it in the first place? Knowing what you want to achieve from using social media will not only impact how you use social media, it will also help drive your selection of social media platforms. Your goals can be revenue based such as increasing sales by 2%, or more general such as increasing brand awareness or interact with your customers in a more personal way. The how and why you want to use social media will impact on all of your decisions regarding your social media strategy.

What social media platforms do you want to use?

Once you’ve determined why you want social media in your marketing strategy, you need to consider what social media platforms you want to use. Just because Facebook and Twitter are getting a lot of press right now doesn’t mean they’ll always be top dog nor that those are automatically the platforms you should choose. This is a very important area to consider simply because of the economics of time. If you choose too many social networks, not only are you spreading yourself too thin, you’re going to be spending too much of your time just trying to manage them all. This will result in plenty of frustration because you won’t see as much benefit from your efforts and therein you’re unlikely to reach your goals whereas a targeted approach across a few platforms is more likely to be successful.

Do not just give this step just a cursory approach. Take the time to really analyze the benefits and challenges you might face with each platform. For example, Twitter is useful because it allows for real time results, but you’re limited to 140 characters per post, and because it’s a very active environment, there’s a lot of noise which increases the likelihood that your message may not be seen.

Take into consideration how you want to use social media, and what you hope to accomplish by using it. Do you want to share videos or pictures? Do you want to promote limited time offers? The platform you choose will dictate what you can or can’t do with it. Look at the tools available for the various social networks to make it easier for you. For example, Ping.fm allows you to update several social networks all at the same time. If you only want to link Twitter and Facebook/MySpace it’s possible. However, anytime you consider using tools that either automate your posts or post the same information across several platforms, you will want to consider your audience. The same message might not work on every platform, and depending on what your goals are, automation may not be the best choice.

Are your customers there?

While this might seem like an obvious question, you’d be surprised at how many people don’t bother to ask it. While some consumers have embraced social media with open arms, others have been very resistant. Some platforms attract an older demographic, some a younger, others are male or female dominant. Although this is a necessary question to answer, it’s also one of the most difficult. How much do you know about your customers? You might be surprised at how little many companies know.

Analyzing your database may provide you with enough information to make educated guesses but it might not provide you with all the answers. Some information can be gleaned by analyzing your customer database against data appends, however, this can be costly and still may not provide you with the information you need to make a decision in your social media strategy or choice of platforms. Don’t let lack of customer information discourage you though because there are other methods you can use if your database isn’t as useful as you would like.

For example, if a large portion of your customers are in China, you would want to consider Qzone, a very large Chinese social media site. Many social networks can provide you with information on their user base, so be sure to look at it to help with your decisions. Another great way to find out if your customers are using a social network is to search the site for mentions of your company or products. If people are talking about you on the site, then you probably have current/potential/former customers there. It’s not infallible nor the only site that does what it does, but socialmention.com can be useful for searching out mentions of your company and products across the internet. It’s kind of like a Google for the social web.

Is your competition there?

Probably the easiest way to figure this out is by searching the sites for your competition and their products. Your results won’t necessarily give you black and white answers but they will provide you with plenty to consider. Just because your competition has a presence on a site doesn’t mean they’re using the site effectively, nor that you should have a presence there. If you discover your competition is on a social network, look at how active they are and how they use the site. If your competition isn’t there, try and determine if maybe they should be. Your results may show you plenty of opportunity or obstacles. Either way, what you find will aid you in your strategy and platform decisions.

Can you let go?

Letting go is the biggest obstacle most companies face in regards to social media. Although it was written before social media and Web 2.0 were common terms, Alex Wipperfurth’s book Brand Hijack is still very applicable. (It’s one of my favorite marketing books too so I tend to mention it a lot.) Wipperfurth talks a lot about sub-culture and customers impacting a brand’s perception. Essentially, your customers are your biggest advocates for your brand and you have to decide whether you can let them run with it. Truthfully, this is rhetorical because as many companies are discovering, it doesn’t matter how close you fight to keep your brand within your company, customers are going to impact it either positively or negatively. Only time will tell, but from my experience, the most successful brands using social media are those that let their customers run with it and have some fun.