Tom Lindmeier’s Blog @ MarketPlanB

Anyone who manages or is an employee in a marketing department faces the constant demands of driving revenue. After celebrating a successful campaign you will hear the comment, “that’s great, but what have you done for me today?” There is a constant debate concerning short term gains and long term strategies. Unless you are blessed by leadership that always places priority on long-term strategies, the short term tactics always seem to win out. This can result marketing campaigns that hurt, rather than help the long-term viability of your business. A good example of this is squeezing in the extra email campaign. The tactic goes something like this: lets take our best campaign and do it better. The result may be something like this: let’s give ‘em free shipping and scream it louder.

With this in mind, it’s no wonder that successful email and banner advertising is facing diminishing returns. We have taken this viable form of advertising and ruined it for all. The cacophony of obnoxious screaming has caused users to completely ignore these forms of advertising. The only reason they still survive is because these programs are so cheap that substantial returns on investment are still possible. It won’t last long.

This brings me to the title of this article: Small Acts of Kindness. Here in Minnesota, we have recently have been deluged with rain (as well as the entire Midwest). My neighbor Brad has a sump pump in his house with a drainpipe mounted a few feet above ground that was eroding the ground underneath. The pumped water was flowing right back into the foundation. I took two minutes to go into my garage, grab some PVC pipe and mount it to move the flow of water away from the house. Two days later, Brad came bearing gifts. The generosity they extended (bottle of premium gin, case of premium beer and a great bottle of wine) was worth about $80. It was a very nice gesture for my two minutes of action.

I’ll leave you with a tactic that is a small act of kindness. The next time you plan to give away a widget for a purchase of $150 or more in an email campaign, do something different. Just give it way with no strings attached. Include it as a package insert and say “thank you for being our customer”. This may not give you extra revenue tomorrow, but it may give you 10 times the revenue over the coming months.

There is also another twist on this topic on Seth Godin’s Blog where he asks “If you didn’t want anything in return, nothing at all, what’s the most generous thing you could do for your best customer, your best friend, your most important prospect?”.

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Here’s my list of the three most significant common factors of the great social phenomenons of recent years.
1) The originators never saw it coming
2) Very few have anything to do with marketing a business
3) They peak quickly and are then forgotten

With this in mind, the prospect of achieving success is seems daunting. If we do everything right we may achieve some level of success and maybe, if we’re very lucky, we can do something big. This makes it very difficult for ROI focused marketers to justify the effort. But every good marketer has got to swing for the fences now and then and this is as good a place as any to do it.

Social marketing has become the buzz at every conference related to internet marketing. When I attended was the Internet Retailer in San Jose, it was very interesting to find that most attendees were still more or less stumped on how to proceed. Web 2.0 is a rather unfortunate term because it seems to point us in the direction of starting with tactics such as blogs, videos, reviews, etc. If you focus on viral or word-of-mouth strategies and include off-line tactics, you’ll get there much quicker.

There are some very intelligent minds who have done a wonderful job analyzing this. Seth Godin and Andy Sernovitz are at the top of my list. Visit their blogs and read their books and you’ll have a great foundation.

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Let’s say you’re looking for online marketing expert to push your business to the next level. You have limited resources and can only fill one position for the time being. Who should you hire, a marketer or a technologist? Though it’s possible to find a person who can perform both, I doubt you will ever find one. I started my career as writer and art director and honestly believe that I excelled at both. Yet I only met one person in my lifetime that could do the same. Even for those exceptions that can do both, they are not at the very top of their field because their demands become too scattered.

I’d love to get your response to my reasoning behind this hypothesis: Online marketers have a fundamental interest in selling and view technology as a tool for accomplishing marketing goals. Internet technologists have a fundamental interest in technology and view marketing as a means to exercise technology. I realize there’s some gray areas but I think I’ve hit the nail right on the head.

I’m ranting on this subject because I see postings for online marketing positions that require a long list of programming skills and the solicitations for preposterous online marketing tools that I would never consider because they can’t provide a reasonable argument for their value. If you know of a blog that compiles a list silly online marketing tools I would love to join in.

So here’s the result of Round 1… the fight is ended by TKO. Hire the salesman and outsource the geek. By the way, I love geeks.

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All moderately sophisticated Ecommerce businesses to know how users navigate their site, how they entered, how they were referred and the domains they prefer. They compile profiles that users volunteer and engage in user testing and constantly tune their web sites to run at peak efficiency. All the data is gathered and cleverly analyzed so marketing programs can be designed to leverage strengths and improve weaknesses. All of this activity leads to real improvements, grows the business and realizes a return on investment that brings wealth to the owners and employees.

The people who engage in this activity are some of the brightest and most skilled I have ever met. Yet I many times find that they really can’t get beyond the behavioral data and demographics when it comes to knowing the heart and soul of their customers. If visitors are nothing but data they are still invisible if you don’t understand their desires and motivations. Once they become visible, you are then positioned to make strategic decisions that result in major breakthroughs.

We all know that the route to understanding our customers is engagement. The discipline to do it on a regular basis is where most of us fall short. I had the good fortune to work as the Director of Ecommerce for the women’s apparel site Junona.com. During my tenure there were many accomplishments and also our share of mistakes. But the one thing we aways did right was to stay tuned-in to our customers. The owner and president as well as all of the employees kept a constant dialog and shared that information on a daily basis. When it came time to ask the question, “is this right for our customers and propects?, we almost always had the right answer.

The reason I have cited the very basic concept is twofold: 1) It is frequently ignored, 2) It is the first step to unveiling a strategy for social marketing (which I will address in future posts).

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