Beyond the Buzz Marketing

We’ve been talking lately about burned out clients, so I thought maybe I should devote a blog entry completely to the topic. There are a lot of them out there and it can be disheartening. We know that marketing is a tough business. It’s hard to know who you can trust and who you can’t. The land of marketing is littered with the empty bank accounts of clients who have trusted someone with a boat load of their money and gotten little to nothing in return.

With this happening daily, it’s not hard to see how many people equate marketing with old fashioned snake oil salesmen. It’s a sad state of affairs. It’s an even worse state of affairs when you’re the marketing company that happens upon these clients after their most recent encounter and they’re so burned and so desolate, that they are afraid to dive back in to marketing their company ever again.  At best, they’re gun shy. At worst, they have a virulent hatred toward anything marketing and refuse to consider it again.

A few years ago, when I was attending a national conference on broadcasting, I had the pleasure of seeing a highly creative person that I admire speak before a crowd of eager listeners. He’d created a worldwide phenomenon with one of his products and everyone in the room was basking in the joy of sitting in his presence. And then he opened his mouth and started to speak and my world crashed. His entire speech was based on a bitter hatred of marketing people. Though his company had done well enough to sell worldwide and be in (literally) every store in the United States, a marketing company had caused him financial failure that resulted in him selling his company and losing everything. He blamed the marketing company.  Not surprisingly, I don’t.

Marketing is just like any other part of your company. If you watch revenue and sales carefully, you should also watch your marketing company and budget carefully and make sure that the choices match what you desire for your business.  Here are a few tips to consider:

Budget: Your marketing budget should never dominate the rest of your budgetary requirements for your company. When the speaker I mentioned above talked about his company, he made mention that at one point, his marketing budget was three times the amount of total sales he was bringing in. There’s no way to recoup that loss and the marketing is just not doing what it needs to do. That’s when it’s up to you to reevaluate and cut your losses. A good marketing company will work with you to ensure that your marketing works with your budget. Not the other way around.

Ask Questions. No Marketing Company will ever hesitate to answer your questions. If they do hesitate or if they give you an answer that you don’t completely understand, push them. Ask for more. You’re getting ready to turn your entire company’s reputation and message over to them, so don’t be afraid to push and make sure it’s the right fit. If you don’t understand some term or phrase they use, ask. Don’t just buy whatever they tell you. Do the research yourself.

Expectations: A good marketing company will give you specifics of what you can expect from them at the end of either your projected contract or on a regular basis. Make sure that you understand exactly what they’ll be delivering, when and how. Bumps in the schedule could arise and need flexibility, but the main goals and deliverables should never founder.

Do the Research: Find out what, specifically, you’re paying for.  I have run into a huge number of clients lately that are paying tens of thousands of dollars for things that are available for free online. This means you’re not paying for something original or for a program. You’re paying someone’s hourly wage. In some instances, I’ve seen web design work and copywriting that surpasses that of high level attorneys. (In a few cases, upwards of $500-$600 per hour.) There’s no way that their work is worth this. But in the contractual stage, their flowery language and promises of specific design, etc..makes a client feel like they’re getting something amazing and built specifically for their business. They’re  not. It’s a template. And in fact, it’s completely updateable by the client, but in many cases, they never receive the password/login, therefore paying the web designers thousands of dollars for simple text updates that may take ten minutes.

Wrap:

Make sure that you know specifically what you’re going to get when you hire someone.

Your budget should be something you’ve put in place – not them.

Make sure that their marketing plan fits in with the overall goals of your company.

Lori Twichell is the owner of Beyond the Buzz Marketing. She is also the Marketing Director for Christian Work at Home Moms and JV Media Design. In her spare time, Lori is co-owner of Radiant Lit and a professional book reviewer for Fiction Addict. Lori and her husband live in San Antonio, Texas with their three kids and two dogs.

“I just don’t get the point.”

That’s the biggest comment that I hear when I discuss Twitter with people. I’ve gotten into the whole microblogging definition and then the necessary explanation about social media and the benefits, but usually, none of these argument sway people in the least. They still don’t understand the point of Twitter or why it’s become so popular. This surprises me since Twitter is one of the fastest growing social media trends ever seen. According to Twitter’s own numbers, some 50 million tweets are sent every day. FIFTY. MILLION. In 2009, ‘tweeting’ grew 1400%. According to Alexa statistics, Twitter.com is the number twelve site in the world. Obviously someone out there understands it. So why this amazingly fast growing trend?

It’s very simple.Twitter provided the arena for instant connections and conversations with people you don’t know. Now wait. So do a plethora of other social media websites right? What’s so different about Twitter?

Safer Connections: Twitter created an online venue that allows for nearly instant conversations and connections with people who are interested in the same things. Twitter allows you to make connections with anyone about anything. And it does so more safely than Facebook or Myspace. Both Myspace and Facebook require you to be ‘friends’ with someone before you can make a connection with them. If you aren’t already friends, these sites require you to make that connection and call them ‘friends’. Giving someone the title of friend implies a much more intimate connection than what is comfortable for most people. It also gives them access to all of the details of your life that you put into the site. Twitter doesn’t require that. The only ‘bio’ on Twitter is a 140 character ‘micro’ sentence. You choose what you share. In fact, it’s more like real life conversations. Think about it. When you meet someone for the first time, you don’t pull out all of your family photos, your job pictures, your hometown, your spouse’s name and birthday, the names of all your relatives…the list goes on and on. With Twitter, you share only what you want, when you want.

Ice Breaker: At some point in our lives, we’ve all experienced the discomfort of being in a room full of people that we don’t know but with whom we’re expected to make some connection. Then the person in charge of that room pulls out the dreaded ‘ice-breaker’ game, designed to help you make that connection. Twitter is the ultimate ice-breaker. Instead of being forced into uncomfortable conversations, you can choose what you talk about and with whom you connect.

Conversations: Finally, the best part of Twitter is that it feels more like a real conversation. When you’re sitting at lunch with a group of people, think about how the conversation sounds. Everyone interjects their comments, opinions or ideas on the topic being discussed. Sometimes you have a longer ‘rant’ or diatribe, but the meaningful connections happen when there’s a back and forth to the conversation. These virtual connections allow people to easily inject their opinions into a relevant conversation and then create an ongoing dialogue.

Push/Pull Marketing with Twitter: Marketing can always be defined in two ways. Either it’s ‘push’ or ‘pull’. Push marketing entails ‘shoving’ a message to the audience, whether they want it or not. Some examples of this are television advertising (you don’t get to choose which commercials air) or spam email. You are pushing your message to the consumer. Pull marketing involves bringing the audience to you. Whenever someone visits a website or signs up for a mailing list, they are expressing their interest in hearing your message and finding out more. A good push/pull campaign could be a television commercial (push) that intrigues someone enough for them to visit a website (pull).

Twitter is the first fully effective instant use of push/pull marketing. Prior to Twitter, most social media involved push marketing. Blogging revolves around the assumption that an audience wants to read or see what you have to say. Messageboards or bulletin boards are conversations, but they are definitely not instant. Sometimes it can take weeks or months to have a complete conversation.

In short, Twitter changed the face of social media and gave us a new platform for marketing. Last year Twitter had over seventy-five million visitors and statistics show it’s still growing. Maybe now’s the time for you to give it a chance.

Lori Twichell is the owner of Beyond the Buzz Marketing and the Marketing Director for both JV Media Design and Christian Work at Home Moms. She is also a creative managing partner at Radiant Lit and a reviewer at Fiction Addict.