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Marketing Is Often Driven by Nuances - and HubSpot
Google in Pictures
We all intuitively sense Google’s presence in our daily (computing) lives, and this infographic does a tremendous job of conveying Google’s online dominance graphically. Click here to view enlarged image.
Video Taken Too Far
Our agency saw a dramatic increase in our
online video production last year, and many clients have recognized that
video offers and content often generate the strongest response to web
and email programs. However, one company recently took the video concept
too far when it emailed a news release to editors that consisted ONLY of
a video! No text, nothing for the editor to review, revise, and edit.
They expected the editor to listen to the video, type a transcript while
listening to the audio, and create a new product news item. Sometimes
marketers do the darndest things!
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Another
Example of Sports Imitating Business Imitating Sports
Imitating...
My daughters gave me the book Scorecasting for a birthday present, which talks about the surprising patterns that determine who wins games – applying a bit of the Freakonomics approach to sports. In the book’s first few pages, the authors identify four themes that drive sports, and they are amazingly similar to the same success factors behind most businesses:
•
That
which is recognizable or apparent is often given too
much credit, whereas the real answer often lies
concealed. •
Incentives are powerful motivators and predictors of how
athletes, coaches, owners, and fans behave – sometimes
with undesirable consequences. •
Human
biases and behavior play a pivotal role in almost every
aspect of life, and sports are no exception. • The role of luck is underappreciated and often misunderstood.
Go Tribe!
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Why CAN'T I Have Your
Undivided Attention? 
It’s sometimes common for executives today to diagnose themselves as having ADD, or Attention Deficit Disorder, when they appear forgetful or impatient. But the truth is, particularly with young people, we live in a world that is increasingly based on doing two things at once. We do email during meetings. Talk on the phone while driving. Read something else when we should be listening to a speaker. Some even (gasp) can’t resist texting while driving!
As communicators, we have to accept that giving someone your “undivided attention” is rapidly becoming a thing of the past – and that communications are often better packaged in short, scannable, “Twitter-sized” bursts and videos rather than in longer blocks of prose, no matter how beautifully crafted. The explosion of online video isn’t necessarily due to us becoming too intellectually lazy to read. It’s just a reflection of the way we’re being conditioned to communicate – short, fast, to the point, and with the understanding that there will be something else distracting our audience from the message we’re trying to share.
Can't We All Just Get Along?
Alignment is a challenge for every organization. From our experience as marketers, we all know that alignment between the B-to-B sales and marketing departments is rarer than a snorkeling vacation in Lake Erie.
Forrester Research recently studied the problem and gave us some data to back up our anecdotal evidence. In its report, “B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment,” only 8% of companies said they have “tight alignment” between sales and marketing.
What’s the barrier? The greatest obstacles,
survey respondents said, was long-term thinking by marketing vs.
short-term thinking by sales (58%); different goals and measurements
(46%; and not enough time (45%).
Going Negative
Google AdWords programs have become increasingly complex, as marketers have become uber-sophisticated about crafting ads, campaigns and strategies to make the greatest use of their paid search budgets. From sitelink extensions to accelerated delivery schedules to remarketing campaigns (one of our favorites), Google provides a wide range of methods for getting extra value from an AdWords budget.
One technique we see growing in popularity – but which is still too often overlooked – is the effectiveness of including “negative” keywords in a campaign. We all focus on what keywords we should run for clients but forget to think about those negative keywords that really should be added to the account. For example, we have a client that manufactures portable batteries but their marketing efforts are only targeted to OEMs, not consumers. Buying “laptop” as a negative term dramatically improved our efforts to avoid casual consumer shoppers for replacement laptop batteries. Another example was the diode manufacturer that marketed a product called Avalanche, which certainly called for negative keywords to minimize snow avalanche traffic.
