Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much!
Things ARE changing. Traditional advertising certainly isn’t extinct, but there is simply too much noise out there, and people are sick of it. They’re shutting out the blast advertising that has crept into every aspect of their lives and centering in on the things they truly care about—friends, family, personal interests and need, and social connections. You need to take a step back and study this shift in order to take advantage of it.
If there’s one marketing mantra that will always be true for businesses, it’s “Know Your Customer.”
Whether you sell shoes, dry cleaning services, computer software or multi-million-dollar widgets, that’s the one maxim that will never change, no matter what happens to society in the future. It’s the one thing marketers and salespeople alike need to master—because you’re not going to turn a prospect into a buyer without both of you knowing that prospect inside and out.
Anyone who knows me knows I am all about the power of relationships. Every once in a while, something unexpected happens that seems almost too good to be true.
So two months and 53,000 YouTube views ago, I had no idea something this unpredictable would happen….
Over the course of 5 episodes, we’ve:
I am talking about this new collaboration I am super pumped over: The David and Ted Talk Show.
Every day, we change. We move (slowly) toward the person we’ll end up being.
Not just us, but our organizations. Our political systems. Our culture.
Are you more generous than the you of five or ten years ago? More confident? More willing to explore?
Have you become more brittle? Selfish? Afraid?
Grumpy and bitter isn’t a place we begin. It’s a place we end up.
Do we intentionally choose the optimistic path? Are we eagerly more open to change and possibility?
Every day we make the hard decisions that build a culture, an organization, a life.
The title of this post is a bit of a paraphrase of something Mike Sands said to me not long ago. Mike is the CEO of Signal, a leader in real-time people-based marketing. And his company recently released the findings of a study done in partnership with Econsultancy that highlights the rise of addressable media amongst buyers and marketers.
I’ll get to more of my conversation with Mike in a bit but for right now let’s look at some of the findings from the study, entitled “People-Based Advertising: Evaluating the impact and future of addressable media” — which may give credence to Sands’ belief that indeed CMOs are deeply dissatisfied with traditional advertising.
Right out of the chute was the fact that the majority of advertisers and media buyers have embraced people-based advertising with nearly seven in 10 advertisers reporting that they have used Facebook Custom Audiences while a significant majority plan to increase people-based advertising buys even further in 2016.
Growing your list is not simply about numbers… it’s about adding value to what you do. In order to ensure that happens, the following are important parts of the process…
In today’s world businesses no longer have the luxury of compartmentalizing the customer experience. Consumers have a multitude of ways to engage with a company: walking into a physical store; browsing a catalogue, visiting a website, or using social media. They also have multiple devices for accessing products or services, from desktops to smartphones. So it’s now up to brands to ensure that a consumer’s experience is seamless across all these channels (Omni-channel). However, that’s easier said than done, because many brands are not used to thinking in these new terms. Ensuring consistent, Omni-channel experience means that marketing and customer service go hand in hand. Or at least they should. In practice, there’s often a huge gulf between the two groups, if they interact at all. Too often, marketing opportunities are the carrot, and customer service “obligations” are the stick.
Why is Marketing best suited to manage corporate social media activities?
At the core social media activities are a function of Marketing, just as PR, Communications and Customer Service should be. Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. IMHO, the CMO should oversee all marketing, PR, communications, customer service, and customer experience management. Every touch point with the consumer needs to come under her purview. Often this is not the case—customer service and communications/pr are often siloed. This is a big mistake in the new marketing/social world since the message needs to emanate from one source. True marketers understand that they must be the lead stewards for brand, reputation, communication, and customer relationships.
Communication: We know that in order to build trust with another person there must be good, two-way communication. It’s central to our existence as human beings, yet we struggle with it every day. Multiply that struggle by the number of people in your organization, and you can begin to see just how essential communication is in building trust with your employees, vendors, partners and customers.