Eggblogg

How does advertising work?

Anyone who knows me knows I tend to warn small businesses not to spend their scant marketing 'budget' on advertising. ('Budget' is in inverted commas, as most small businesses don't have a marketing budget.)

So when I read a report that says 'everything we think we know about how advertising works is wrong' my attention is guaranteed.

What I'm referring to is Les Binet's paper The dangers of common sense in the June 2009 issue of Market Leader. The crux of the piece is not that advertising doesn't work, just that the way we think it works just isn't the case. I thought it was worth summarising the main points of the article (which also contains charts and stats to back up the claims). I've added my thoughts about what this means for the small business.

Advertising works by increasing sales - no

Campaigns that focus on generating sales don't do particularly well. The best thing to focus on is reducing price sensitivity. 'Using ads to firm up prices is almost twice as profitable as trying to increase sales'.

Comment: In my experience, small businesses are more likely to try cutting prices rather than bolstering them. A sobering thought.

Advertising works by increasing brand loyalty - no

Brand loyalty hardly ever changes, and it's not something that responds to advertising. Focus on increasing market penetration, however, and your campaign is likely to be three times as effective as trying to increase brand loyalty.

Comment: small businesses need to nurture brand loyalty, but it won't happen through advertising.

Awareness and image are the keys to a strong brand - no

Here, Binet is adamant. What you really want to aim for is fame. Fame means people are thinking about and talking about your brand. 'Fame is the real key to business success, and in particular word of mouth seems to be crucial,' says Binet. 'It seems we're willing to pay much more for the brands that everyone's talking about.'

Comment: word of mouth, fame... these are not the sole preserve of global brands. With social media on the up, even small brands can make the big time, look at Moonfruit for example...

Advertising works by communicating brand messages - no

Oh dear, another lovingly-held tenet bites the dust. Forget the strategic messaging, says Binet. Emotion is why people buy. 'Ads that simply aim to generate pure emotion turn out to be twice as profitable as ads that use emotions to support a rational proposition.' So what about those ads that make you want to chuck a shoe through the TV? Surely they won't make me buy? No, you have to like it...

Comment: I love this idea! No seriously... as they say - 'people may not buy what they need but they always buy what they want'.

Advertising needs to stand out to work well - no

'According to our data,' says Binet, 'what matters most is not how well the ad stands out, or communicates, or persuades, but how much people like it.'

It's a thought-provoking piece. If you want to read the original it's available here.

What do you think? What's the relevance of this kind of research to small businesses?

Getting a new perspective on my Twitter followers with a Tweetdeck groups re-jig

It's impossible to keep an eye on all the tweets from all your followers - I started to realise this as the number of people I was following grew to over 500, and then over 1,000.

I've heard some people say that if your follower numbers get too big, you must be on an ego-trip. Or you've lost the whole point of social media and are only interested in broadcasting.

I really don't agree with that - there are plenty of people on Twitter whose follower numbers have grown organically. But it's true that you start to lose the human contact of the early days. I've found I tend to have exchanges with the same small circle of tweeps, perhaps only 1% of my total followers.

But ... I do check out everyone who follows me, and if they look interesting I tend to follow back. Hundreds of interesting people. I'd like to see what they have to tweet, but the problem is:

a) I don't see their tweets because they're in a different time zone
b) I don't see their tweets because I'm focusing on my small 'friends' group I've set up on Tweetdeck
c) with so many tweets scrolling by, they just haven't made my radar

... or even all of the above. It could also be that they rarely tweet, of course.

Then, the other day, I started re-jigging my Tweetdeck groups. I started very simply, by adding some new people to my 'top friends' group. Immediately, the Twitter landscape changed. I saw stuff from people I'd never seen before and discovered a whole new set of interesting posts.

Just when I was starting to think Twitter is too much to handle, I saw the possibilities.

I could keep tabs on several groups, themed by interest or by influence. (Before, I'd only really had a 'top friends' group.)  I could plan to re-jig the membership of the groups on a regular basis, favouriting the Tweeters who had caught my eye, joining in some new conversations and developing some really useful mini-networks. In this way, I'd be able to put more followers onto the radar (a small number at a time) and I'd be less likely to miss the best tweets.

I think I was also fired up by re-reading parts of Clay Shirky's excellent 'Here comes everybody'. His explanation of community as a network of 'clusters', or sub-groups, really inspired me.

So if you're at the point when your Twitter landscape is getting a bit stale, or simply too big to handle, I'd recommend regular reviews of your groups.

Btw, here's a useful article about how to set up Tweetdeck groups.

What is permission email marketing?

Last week I was the guest of Louise Barnes-Johnson of FrontLine Results on her BlogTalkRadio show. Louise asked me about the legalities of email marketing - permission marketing, my interpretation of what's legal and how things have changed over the years.

If you'd like to hear all about the EC Directive and how it applies to both B2B and B2C email, you can listen to the show here. It's based on the situation in the UK although I do touch on the US also.

All views are purely my own interpretation - no legal advice is intended!

What's your definition of Twitter spam?

I have my own ideas of what is Twitter spam - too many promotional tweets, for example, or too many repeated, automated tweets.

But then again, I always tell people 'spam is in the eye of the recipient - if they think you are spamming them, then you are, whatever you think.'

Well I seem to have got a taste of my own medicine. On Twitter, I keep any eye on tweets that include the name of my home town, so that I can see who's tweeting and what's going on. The other day I spotted a local business making what appeared to be its first tweet - something along the lines of 'trying to figure this out'.

So I jumped in, became their first follower, and welcomed them to Twitter. I used the person's first name, to show it was a personal message, and I also said 'you might be interested in this - ' and included a link to my first 'introduction to social media' workshop in Lewes, which happens to be taking place this week. I guess this was my mistake.

It seemed logical to tell them about something relevant happening in their own town, and I probably wouldn't normally have mentioned it when first making contact but for the time factor - but maybe it came across as pushy. Something I'm not generally known for being, apparently.

Whatever the reason, I had no response from this person, not even when I sent them another note the next day to say 'Did you get my message? Let me know if you need any help with twitter..' Uh oh - my second mistake. In my keenness to make contact, I probably compounded the first error!

I checked their homepage, and they were now following one person (not me!)  Plus, they had started tweeting. I was puzzled and a bit hurt - why wouldn't they want my help? Wouldn't it be natural, as a newbie, when there are so few tweeters in a small town, to follow those who are more experienced in order to pick up tips and develop contacts? Not to mention just friendly to respond to a personal note?

'Relax', said my Twitter contacts, 'they probably didn't see your tweets, or are just finding their way round the system.' Maybe. But I think it's more likely, as one person pointed out, they probably thought I was spamming them, and in that case, I've learnt a lesson or two - in particular, good intentions count for nothing.

Ce n'est pas une telephone

This week I finally succumbed and bought an iPhone. If you asked me why I'd probably say because having made the move to Macs I just want it to be easier to sync everything up, but to be honest there's also the 'sheep factor' - since many of the people in my industry seem to have them, I must be missing out. Oh, and I also want to be able to easily post Twitpics and make Audioboos.

Thinking about phones got me all nostalgic about the phones of my childhood - big, clunky, with a fat handset and a curly cord, dial you stuck your finger into and it went round with the finger still in it. We had one phone in the house, in the living room. It was cream, which I remember thinking was a bit trendy, because it wasn't black.

I think it's funny how the common phone icons used today are in fact graphic representations of the sixties-style phone handset. I doubt anyone under thirty will have ever used such a phone, but they know what the graphic represents.

The 'iconic' phone has gone but it lives on as an icon. Magritte would have enjoyed that.