Smarter campaigns

Every day, marketers and their agencies devise their next big digital marketing programme: the websites will be visited by millions, their iPhone app will rise to the top of the Apple store, and videos will go viral. Jonathan Richman explains why most of these expectations are fantasies

Let’s first try to understand why it is so difficult to make something that people even notice these days. When we marketers sit around and devise our plans we like to analyse our competition. It makes sense. Who is doing what? Which products have advantages over ours and which have weaknesses? When we do these exercises, our definition of ‘competitor’ is usually pretty narrow. You can’t account for every product in the world in your SWOT analysis after all.

While it may be appropriate to narrowly define our competitors when we’re talking about devising our key messages, our in-store product placement, or even our packaging and branding, you don’t have the same luxury when it comes to digital. The simple reason is because when it comes to digital, everything is your competitor.

Your competitors in digital are everything else that takes time away from your digital programme. Your competitors aren’t just a product in the same category or even brands in the same industry. It’s everything. That means that your competition online isn’t just your arch nemesis’ brand site, it’s also missed TV, blogs and friend networks.

You need to think of these types of digital properties as your competitors because when it comes to your customers’ time, there isn’t much of it to go around. Every minute they spend doing something else online means another minute they won’t be spending on your site, with your app, or perusing your Facebook page.

Social media: the new ‘porn’?

The old adage that many people became used to hearing over the years was that pornography was the most popular activity online. Whether or not you believe the numbers is up to you but, suffice to say, it was a pretty big segment of online traffic. Times have changed, so you don’t need to worry quite as much about losing time to this set of competitors. Instead, you have a bigger, fiercer rival that seems to have universal appeal: Facebook.

A recent Nielsen study showed that social media surpassed the number-two online activity (gaming) two fold: 22.7% of Americans’ online time was spent on social media in June 20101. That’s a lot of status updates and ‘Like’ buttons clicked.

The point is that you now have even more competition for your customers’ time and attention and it’s getting worse every day. You need to reframe how you think about your competition in order to be successful. Here it is: if your customers can do it online or with a digital device, it’s a competitor. Why would someone spend hours learning about every detail of the molecular composition of your motor oil when they could spend it watching videos of dogs on skateboards on YouTube? That’s your challenge.

No guarantees... or are there?

The cynics among us would say it’s impossible to know in advance what will work. The fickle internet population cannot be understood. The optimists might suggest that we simply follow our research and we’ll be loved. Sadly, they’re both wrong, but there is good news. Determining if your programme will be a success is fairly straightforward. It doesn’t require spending millions of dollars in research, complex mathematical formulas, or understanding some inscrutable, semi-secret algorithm.

Knowing if your programme is going to be successful or not comes down to one thing: will people ‘Like’ it? My choice of ‘Like’ with a capital L was intentional. Can you picture anyone clicking the Facebook Like button to indicate their appreciation or love of your programme? The tremendous growth of Facebook and the almost ubiquitous Like button make our research pretty simple.

Of course, to do this research correctly, you need a few things. First, you need a completely objective mind. It might help to think this way: would I ever click the Like button myself for this programme? You may as well be honest since it’s your reputation on the line if you launch a tremendous digital flop. If the answer is ‘no’, give yourself two points for honesty, but now head back to the drawing board.

Second, you need to understand what people are actually willing to do for you and your brand. This ranges from one extreme where you might find your brand evangelists getting tattoos of your logos to the other where your brand is nothing but a splattered speck on your customers’ windshield of life.

Most people these days don’t have a lot of patience online. We hate filling out forms and clicking seven times to get to what we’re trying to find (assuming we can ever find it). Powerful search engines have given us the luxury to jump from site to site if we don’t almost instantly find what we expected. Cap this with our shrinking attention spans that drive us with an almost primal force to seek out something even better than what we’re seeing right now. When you put it all together, you see that most people don’t have the time or interest you need them to have for your ideas to work. That’s why you need to think differently.

The four big blunders

When making digital marketing programmes, often the same four mistakes are made over and over again.

• Blunder #1: trying to do it all. I get asked one question a lot. The question is: what is the worst website you’ve ever seen? As someone who has seen his fair share of terrible sites and beautiful ones, this is a difficult question to answer. The reality is that there are a lot of ‘worst’ websites out there and they mostly all have one defining characteristic.

No white space. It’s got everything in it, which makes it impossible to see or focus on anything. You have all your ‘key messages’, probably a few ‘call to action’ boxes or links. You’ve also got some giant images from the photoshoot on which you spent a small fortune. You’ve got links to your other sites and to your brand extensions. You’ve got a call-out or (ugh) a pop-up featuring your latest promotion. You also certainly have a few different boxes imploring me to ‘Like’ your page or share it with friends and I know you have a sign-up box for your email program.

• Blunder #2: random targeting. For most big brands, you can probably find a study lying around that cost well into the six figures that was commissioned to help identify ‘the target’ – the people who are the ideal audience for your brand messages. We pick the right age of people to show up in our TV commercials and pick the right magazines in which to place our print ads. But, when it comes to digital marketing, we seem to forget who our target really is. Just because it’s digital doesn’t mean that ‘Marketing 101’ rules don’t apply.

Too often we don’t bother to understand what our target audience really does online and what it is likely to do. If the average person in your target audience doesn’t own a smartphone, it doesn’t make much sense to create an iPhone app.

• Blunder #3: bored to death. Many of the digital marketing programmes I see have a common, fatal flaw. They’re boring. And not just a little boring, but mind-numbingly boring. This blunder is as simple to recognise as it is difficult to avoid. Creating interesting content isn’t easy. It’s a skill and a gift. There’s a reason why about 30% of all videos on YouTube have fewer than 100 views, and 55% have fewer than 5002. The reason: they are not remotely interesting to watch.

• Blunder #4: one for all and... one for all. There is nothing more frustrating to your customers than this final blunder. In a digital world where they are used to being able to easily search (and find) what they want, read reviews from friends, and customise their viewing experience online, your customers don’t react well when all of this power is suddenly taken away.

This is another by-product of the new expectations your customers have for all digital content. They expect to be able to see what they want, when they want, and exactly how they want. They want to be able to view it anytime whether online or off. They want it in whatever format they feel like at that moment whether it be on their laptop or fancy new iPad. They expect this because they get it from other websites and it’s exactly the experience that they’re used to with mobile apps.

Big solutions for big problems

There are four big solutions to each of our four big blunders.

• Solution #1: do one thing really well. The good news is that this solution is one of the simplest to understand of the four I’ll offer you. The bad news is that it might the hardest for most marketers to implement. The concept is simple after all. Instead of creating an app, for example, that does ten things, each in a mediocre way, create something that does one thing really well. Simple, right?

It’s hard because you have to make difficult choices. Of all those brilliant features you dreamed up and all the things your customers told you that they wanted when you did research, which do you focus on? That’s actually easy. Pick the one that you can do the best. That might not be the one that’s the top need for your customers, but it’s better to put out your best effort than something that’s just average.

My favourite example for an app that does one thing and does it really well is the ‘Sit or Squat’ application from Charmin. It helps you find a clean, public restroom no matter where you are. Of course, you’re not going to use the app every day, but you’ll be really thankful that you have it when you need it. That’s all the app does. It does this simply and it works every time.

• Solution #2: apply some digital savviness. The idea is to understand what digital technologies members of your target audience use and are comfortable with and to focus there. I call this digital savviness. I break each person’s digital savviness into four categories. You could be high (ie really savvy) in one category and low in the others or high or low in all of them. There’s no one right answer and no single answer for everyone. You just need to understand where your customers are in each category.

Social: how people connect with others. This means everything from email to photo sharing to social media.

Entertainment: how your customers have fun online – watching videos, playing games, or reading blogs.

Navigating: how your customers get around online and what hardware and software they use – which browsers they use or whether or not they have broadband or an iPhone.

Productivity: how your customers use technology to make life a little simpler such as online shopping and banking and online auctions such as eBay.

For each category, rank your target customer as high, medium, or low then match your digital programmes to customers’ savviness level in the category.

• Solution #3: create ‘Likeable’ content. Does it excite you or bore you? As a first step, honestly ask yourself that question. If it does bore you, then you need to reassess what you’ve created. If you wouldn’t share it with your friends on Facebook, then you might need to reconsider.

The rest of the test is a bit more subjective. There are a couple of things you should check, especially when it comes to video, but it also applies to applications and websites. First, are you eliciting any emotion with what you’ve created? When most people think of ‘viral videos’, for example, they think of videos that are funny. Well, that’s just one possible emotion. A few others to consider: joy, fear, wonder, anger, jealousy, sadness, hope, grief, disappointment, affection and so forth. The more your content can cause one (or more) of these emotions, the more successful it will be.

And here’s the final check: will anyone click the Like button for this? That’s a big distinction from simply ‘liking’ (lower-case ‘l’) because when you Like (upper-case ‘L’) something, you’re announcing to all your friends that this is something worth checking out.

• Solution #4: personalise and individualise. You need to create individualisation. It should elicit this response from people: ‘Wow. They wrote this just for me.’ Not ‘someone like me’ and not ‘every other man in Ohio’. No. Just For Me.

Of course, you wouldn’t write it just for him or her. That gets prohibitively expensive in the time and money categories. You just need to invest enough effort in your back-end systems to allow this to happen automatically and dynamically. That means it happens without you doing anything and it happens in real time. Your system should know and figure out things about me and match this to your products and offers. Among the best in the world at this is Amazon.

You don’t need a complex back-end system like the one that powers Amazon’s recommendations, but you do need to invest in ways to ensure that what people get from you appeals to them on a very individual level.

Jonathan Richman is group director, insights and planning for Possible Worldwide [email protected]

This is an edited version of the winning entry in the digital category of the WPP Atticus Award 2010.

References:

1. Source: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/what-americans-do-onlinesocial-media-and-games-dominate-activity/

2. Source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/30/context-is-king-how-videos-found/

Knowing if your programme is going to be successful or not is down to one thing: will people ‘Like’ it? Customers expect to be able to see what they want, when they want, and how they want. They want to be able to view it anytime, in whatever format they feel like at that moment