“It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
In the last 3 months, I met several Digital Marketing professionals at various large and small companies. I hear a common refrain that they are not seeing much traction from their Digital Marketing programs. Often the blame is attributed to their Digital Agency or to the failure of the popular Market Automation tools they brought paying through their noses. I scratched the surface a little deeper and here are my impressions-
As Amin Toufani, the world’s best guitarist (check google results) and strategy savant observes in one of his talks, we are mistaking abundance of information to the sufficiency of Knowledge. We suffer from knowledge inflation and knowledge pretension. (Because not professing to know is a virtual death knell in a corporate setting) There is a widespread syndrome of people believing and claiming to know more than they actually do. There are very few people willing to admit that they don’t know what they don’t know. It is not a supercilious remark or a pompous looking down but an attempt to give a humble nudge for more soul-searching. This “know it all” affliction is too widespread, and I too have not been spared of its ill-effects.
So, this is where awareness of the concept of Lygometry1 comes up. It is a process “…where you measure things you know that you do not know. It questions on the knowledge that you know you don’t have, it’s like searching or asking the questions about those dark or shadowy place which you know you know nothing about”.
Professionals need to own up that their googled and sometimes academic knowledge is not sufficient. A tactical strategy doesn’t constitute Marketing strategy. Doing a performance campaign and driving web traffic is not sufficient. Tool-oriented thinking is no panacea. There is a thing called Statistically significant data and that it takes time and multiple campaigns to build such data. Marketing Automation and Predictive marketing is not a silver bullet for everything.
Data was promised deliverance in the digital economy. And the truism still holds. The problem is when there is a failure of measuring what is important at the cost of measuring something obvious and easy. Especially when the site and campaign traffic become the holy grail of success metrics. The seasoned marketing pros would wallop me for saying the obvious, but a little survey would reveal how rampant this practice is.
Also, a performance campaign can only yield so much. It cannot create or grow the search volumes significantly unless there are other extraneous reasons. In the pre-digital age, there was a thing about growing markets. The task, however, was less urgent. In days of yore, ambitious brands and companies planned to do it in a time horizon of 3-5 years. The expectation was money would be invested today to be amortized and accounted over a period depending upon how deep the pockets were. The PE funded unicorns spend huge amounts for creating the market with the bravado of rampaging conquistadors.
But the rest of the market feels, just because it is digital and most of the services like Google, Facebook and WhatsApp are free, digital marketing should be free or cost very less. The digital economy has certainly made it cheaper for brands to reach out customer compared to the pre-digital era, but there is definitely no free or cheap lunch.
The paradox comes into play the moment digital campaigns seek to go beyond performance campaign. How do we measure brand momentum through a digital campaign growing to a point it actually pushes the sales/revenue needle? How does one measure “Favourable Selling Environment” resulting from a digital campaign? How do we qualify impressions? Engagement metrics like likes, comments, and shares are good first line indicators, but it doesn’t speak of the silent masses who are “lurkers” and who might constitute 90% of the audience.
There have been loose metrics to attribute brand salience where there is a brand impression leading to some recall and action but not directly resulting in a click or site traffic. And we have not yet spoken about brand uplift from community management efforts, nurture streams, email campaigns and every other digital tactic that have been deployed.
While the global average CTR of Display Ad is around 0.35%, is there a way we can capture customer behavior where impression “not leading to clicks” led to other action immediately or later, attributable to the campaign. In essence, how do we confidently and accurately measure lagging indicators like Brand affinity? Revenue figures are final arbiters of the success of the digital strategy, but traceable data points for Brand building campaigns can really help optimizing digital efforts better.
Brands have to be realistic. If despite optimizing, the immediate results are not so encouraging, it only means that the search volumes and hence customers in “Ready State” are limited and performance campaign alone may not be the answer. A less than promising results from any other digital marketing tactics like emailers or social media is also indicative of this problem. This will mean that a brand campaign, where metrics are not clicks but increased awareness, likeability, and acceptance, will have to be run along with the performance campaign. While such campaigns will not have any hard metrics to show, it will still help to run such campaigns.
In the pre-digital world, every brand took pains to paint themselves into a character which their audiences lapped up. Companies have to learn to create such brands again. In the current circumstances, they do have to be more authentic and not over-promise or go overboard. Rediscovering established brand frameworks like David Kapferer’s Brand Identity prism, Brand Archetypes, Brand Key, among others will definitely help. This will actually help with arriving at story pegs and in building interesting narratives for the brand. The digital media is the only mass media today. The format for storytelling has to be modified accordingly. Internet video commercials (IVCs) will be an important way to build likeability and eventual brand connect. It’s going to be jostling for attention span, but there is also the possibility of algorithmically reaching the audience when they are in adjacent spaces online.
Too many companies are giving up too early on Market Automation, complaining that it is either unviable or inefficient or both. If your lifetime marketing universe is less than 1000 contacts, a decent xl sheet might really help. But if your lifetime customer list is going to grow eventually or exponentially, it will help to start with market automation early. Market Automation will not multiply revenues multiple times overnight. In certain instances, it can help discover new opportunities and give a short-term bump before normalizing. However, in the long run, market automation will help optimize campaigns, build a repository of a validated database for nurture campaigns and optimize customer acquisition costs. It will also help orchestrate fast and scalable campaigns and build automated workflows. This will in turn help provide more time to analyze and implement better strategies.
Market Automation implementation will also fail if it is only a tool led approach. Companies will have to build the proverbial system of People, Process and Technology to harness the power of automation. It needs the investment of time, people and sustained efforts to crank the systems and reel in the benefits.
Being aware of Lygometry
The universe of knowledge, tool and skills are rapidly expanding on all sides. Every day, it creates swathes of “I don’t know, what I don’t know” zones for everyone. Ignoring this zone often proves dangerous for people, companies, and countries. To tackle such an eventuality, Amin Toufani also speaks2 about a role called Chief Adaptability Officer (CAO). The job of the Chief Adaptability Officer would be to continuously map the zones of “not knowing” and push boundaries of knowledge and help companies avoid pitfalls of ignorance. I think every person has to be their own Chief Adaptability officer, more so, Marketing professionals. For they have to account for the contour shifts that are happening or going to happen in the market and be ready for it. The awareness of the concept of Lygometry will help keep everyone humbled and open minded to revisit new ideas, tools, and methods for success on an ongoing basis.
* 1 & 2 – Amin Toufani on
If yes, can help you unravel a better strategy.
I have straddled both the world, that of traditional and digital advertising. I have seen traditional agencies create more consistently the larger-than-life brand stories and also more user-generated content which digital marketing agencies only talk about. I have also seen Digital agencies deliver phenomenally cost-efficient and measurable results for advertising tactics. I do know that it is not either “This” or “That” choice for companies. They have to break the silos and look at taking best of both the worlds moving forward.
If you are a small to midsize company, interested in exploring ways to navigate ahead in this way, I would be more than glad to work with you on this. My specialization includes Brand Strategy, Digital Marketing, Market Automation strategy, and implementation.
Lygometry :
“…where you measure things you know that you do not know. It questions on the knowledge that you know you don’t have, it’s like searching or asking the questions about those dark or shadowy place which you know you know nothing about”.
“Rapid Disruptive Change” is the blandest of cliche that can be mouthed now. Change is actually happening faster than we can describe it. Digital Ad platforms are tweaked every day. The audience engagement and affinity shifts from one new product to another. New tools and products based on AI are maturing to a point of delivering a tangible result. Therefore what was learned 6 months ago or achieved 6 months ago, doesn’t mean much now. The good part – You have a fresh slate now. You can leapfrog into the new marketing. You haven’t missed much. Experiment. Pilot small. Scale-up faster.
The new technologies and changes, unfortunately, do not promise new Silver Bullets for marketers. They just offer newer and smarter ways of doing things.
For example, buying yourself a shiny new Market Automation tool will not help you increase your business by any X times that you would want to factor. Deploying Market Automation will, however, streamline your marketing workflows. Its a statistics and heuristics driven tool. It gets better with more programs and campaigns that you run. You will have statistically significant numbers to derive good insights. With each campaign, the tool and you would have learned something. Eventually, the cost of customer acquisition will come down. But before that, you will have to crank it more often. And that is what Market Automation tool will allow you to do. Do more stuff. Fast. And in the long run, increase collective marketing wisdom and intuition of the company.
So there is a choice. To be overwhelmed with the change or be the new Industry veteran. For the next 6 month at least.
The story of a woman in North Carolina losing a diamond from her wedding ring when she was trying on clothes at one of Nordstrom’s stores and finding it with the store’s help is now an important case study in branding. An oldie, but a goodie. A store worker saw the woman searching for the diamond, and soon enough others joined, and finally, the diamond was found in one of the vacuum cleaners in the store. Nordstrom had just earned itself some loyal customers, thanks to the manner in which it went out of the way to help the customer. Winning customers is hard work, but retaining them? That’s harder, but makes it well worth it.
Getting a new customer for your product or service is much like that introductory handshake, but brands need to work harder than that to ensure the customers keep coming back for something more substantial than a handshake. So, how do you go about adding some heft to your relationship with customers?
Like attracts like: One of the first things to do is actually understand your customers, their pain points, lifestyle, needs etc. Then, create personas and give them a chance to identify themselves with you. If your messaging is in line with a customer persona, chances are the customer sticks with you. Typically, customers like to engage with businesses who know them, and businesses whose brand philosophy and traits are like theirs
Who are you: It is important to identify who you are, and what your brand stands for. Clear messaging about your values make it easier for customers to identify with you, which means you need a strong brand identity.
It’s not always about big bucks: Doling out discounts, freebies and extra points can make a dent in your business, and may or may not work all the time. For customer retention, you should ensure that you make the right gestures from time to time. Small acts of warmth like notes, or sending along a packet of cookies could work in building that sense of warmth. Speaking of the digital world, thank you emails and messages that are personalised with your customer’s name can help.
Work on feedback: Don’t forget feedback from customers; instead see how you can work on it to improve relationships. You can do that by monitoring customers’ reactions on social media, feedback section on your website etc.
Proactive service: Do you respond immediately to social media to customer queries? Do you constantly check mentions on Twitter and respond to customers? Handling any kind of customer issues effectively and quickly is very important
It’s all about creating experiences: Like they say, you should invest in experiences, not things for happiness. The same applies to brands as well. The secret to customer retention is creating the right experiences. Great brands provide great experiences. If you want to be one of them, use social media channels effectively. Tell your brand stories, get customers to share theirs on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter etc. Draw your customers in, and make it a two-way street.
Good content marketing strategy: If you want your customers in, you should give them something so compelling that they keep coming back to you. Having a good content marketing calendar, be it by way of blogs, guides, content that is actionable and videos will go a long way. So, if you are an online grocery store, how about sharing recipes, creating quality content on nutrition etc?
Customer loyalty program: Never undermine the importance of a good customer loyalty program. One of the most well-known loyalty programs is that of Starbucks, the coffeehouse chain. The brand has a mobile rewards app wherein customers can pay for their orders via the phone, apart from the Green and Gold Cards for frequent customers with a line-up of rewards, offers, and freebies. Such programs not just help brands retain customers but also open up a platform or route for increased customer engagement.
Now that you have your customers hooked, you can pull out new tricks from the bag! There’s no getting off the merry-go-round, though!
“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark