ISSUE THREE
JANUARY 2016
FROM DISRUPTIVE TO DISCOVERY MARKETING
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T I ED IAL OR
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Selling something, earning a dollar, has always been about connecting with people. The Internet, social media, analytics, big data, programmatic haven’t changed that. Rather than taking marketing further away from the need to make those human connections, technology has only heightened, amplified and emphasised the demand for human connection even more than ever – it has made engagement the absolute first law of marketing. Baby Boomers and some Generation Xers look aghast at the technological DNA of marketing in 2015/16, and shake their heads sadly because, they say, a ‘handshake used to be important’, ‘people used to be important’. Well actually, if anything, the new way of things puts more emphasis on people than the old ways ever did. We’ve gone from passive recipients of marketing — watching dumbly as Ad after Ad was pushed our way over the box – to demanding that marketers first understand us and our needs, and give us what is relevant to us (not them) if they want to engage. Technology has empowered human connection by giving us the ability to both understand and
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communicate better, and content marketing has emphasised the need to tell stories that are relevant, personal and timely. In this issue, the article ‘From disruptive to discovery marketing’, Facebook’s Chief Creative Officer, Kiwi born Mark D’Arcy, tells us that the power to connect is greater than ever. What we don’t mention in the article is that he maintains that there is no linear content set now – we are not competing for eyeballs on prime time at 8pm anymore – because connection happens at any time, anywhere across multiple channels – marketing is ruled by our priorities now. As Mark says: “We are authentically connected to all the people in the world at any time”. Wow, think of the possibilities! Happy New Year
Colin
From disruptive to discovery marketing 6. INBOUND Quick and easy web landing pages with Unbounce 8. LEAD NURTURING Your lead nurturing four step starter plan 12. SOCIAL MEDIA Generation X - The internet files 14. C ONTENT MARKETING Six steps to a good content marketing story 16. BRANDING ONLINE Why relevant brands are so much more than graphic design, even online
ABOUT / Short and sharp, Marketing Online is a free eMagazine delivering thought provoking and enlightening articles, and industry news and information to forward-thinking marketing people. EDITOR / Colin Kennedy ART DIRECTOR / Jodi Olsson
CONTENTS
4. ONLINE MARKETING
CONTENT ENQUIRIES / Phone Colin on 027 2456060 or email colin@espiremedia.com ADVERTISING ENQUIRIES / Phone Jennifer on 09 522 7257 or email jenniferl@espiremedia.com ADDRESS / Marketing Online, C/- Espire Media, PO Box 99758, Newmarket, Auckland 1151, New Zealand WEBSITE / www.marketingonline.co.nz
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ONLINEMARKETING
FROM DISRUPTIVE TO DISCOVERY MARKETING W
hen Facebook’s New Zealand-born VP, Chief Creative Officer Mark D’Arcy is asked ‘what’s the best Ad on Facebook?’ His response is usually, ‘Whose Facebook?’. Mark told this story to the recent ad: tech New Zealand conference to illustrate the point that we have moved to what he calls a ‘personal media world’ in which technology wraps media feeds around the individual, according to what is useful to that person’s personal and specific needs and wants. “There is no Facebook,” says Mark. “There are many Facebooks.”
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He points out that we have moved from a world where disruption was easy because people had limited choices and no control – one of the newspapers and two channels on the TV – to one that is characterised by discovery, where there is infinite choice and total control. “The power is all going in one direction, and the question now is not ‘how do we disrupt?’ but ‘how do we make things worthy of discovery?’ It’s time to stop marketing to people and move to a world of marketing for people because people only see the things that are relevant to them.”
To answer the question about ‘what’s the best Ad on Facebook?’, Mark suggests we begin thinking more about building moments in time for people that add value to them, and we can do that by marrying the science of marketing – data – with the art of marketing. “Use data to imbue your ideas with greater value. There is no more simplistic distribution. We need to tell stories in different ways. The ability to put these stories in the right place at the right moment has exponential value - the idea of building crowd moments, which has value for them, is very good.” Facebook itself has followed a progression from a text-based platform to photos, to video and more recently 360 videos. By tilting their phones or dragging the cursor, users will be able to explore the full circumference of an environment. A good example is the ability of users to pilot a 360-degree clip of Star Wars: The Force Awakens . “The burden is on us as marketers to wrap the world around what we know about people. To turn data into ‘actionable insight’ that connects with people.” He believes the greatest innovations ahead are going to come from developing markets using the mobile platform.
“Mobile first is a bigger shift than the Internet itself. New Zealand suffers from the tyranny of distance, but if we make ‘mobile first’ a national goal around business, and take this landscape seriously, we can really accelerate into this space – the world has more mobile phones than people. “Begin to think, learn, build, brand and export on mobile. With the power of mobile, you can put your beer in the hands of man sitting in a pub in New York. Parnell can connect with somebody in Dubai. We’re in a globally connected market, and if New Zealand can move into this space quickly, we will have an advantage. “I said earlier that the move from disruption to discovery is awe-inspiring, but we must be able to understand, then create and measure.” The ’ice bucket challenge’, which was started by Pat Quin and three families in the US, is an excellent example of something that was simple but which really connected with people and, as a result, evolved into something extraordinary. A good start to what makes a good marketing campaign, let alone a good Facebook Ad, begins with the question: ‘What is the best way we can connect with people?’. ▼
Marketing Online Editor Colin Kennedy is a journalist, content marketing strategist and a professional speaker. With more than 20 years experience in journalism, public relations and marketing, his previous roles include newspaper and magazine editor, CEO of New Zealand Agritech Inc. and marketing director for BNI New Zealand. His guise to creating compelling content for a New Zealand audience can be found here.
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INBOUND
QUICK AND EASY WEB LANDING PAGES WITH UNBOUNCE BY Rebecca Caroe
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G
etting your website to perform for the business is the second most important part of online marketing today (I’ll tell you what the first one is later on).
page using advertising or EDMs. This has the benefit of keeping the reader focused on doing one thing only. A normal web page has many distractions, not least menu items and social sharing which can take the visitor away from the path you desire.
One of the major changes I have been introducing to all our client websites are ways to shortcut the path a visitor takes from arriving Recently we have been using Unbounce Pages , on the site to getting the information she wants. an app that allows non-developers to build lead It’s challenging because many websites nowadays capture or click-through pages very quickly comprise thousands of pages, and so signposting using drag and drop design techniques. You can build a page and then embed it into the existing fast navigation and setting up the sitemap to site, or use a WordPress plugin. support a range of customer journeys is a really important part of planning each website. Simplification takes many forms but one of my favourites is to try to reduce the number of menu items and also shorten the words. So a real estate agent site which previously had ‘Vendors’, ‘Purchasers’ and ‘Investors’ now says ‘Buy’, ‘Sell’, ‘Invest’. Simpler words and use of verbs rather than nouns affects the way a visitor decides what to do too.
LANDING PAGES I love using landing pages to achieve a single conversion objective. Keeping with the theme of simplification, we try to help site visitors use the fewest clicks possible. As an example, a client who uses Yellow Pages for incoming enquiries now has a landing page just for visitors from yellow.co.nz . It welcomes the visitor by thanking them for using Yellow for search and giving them three quick links to the popular parts of the site. This also helps us to funnel visitors appropriately as well as track inbound leads for ROI. I use landing pages to funnel visitors into taking a particular action without the distraction of the full website. I rarely link the landing page from the site menu, preferring to guide traffic to the
Take a look at this page designed for a Christmas gift promotion. It is built using a template and styled similar to the main website. The visitor tracking and conversion rate is contained within Unbounce and so you can re-set this to suit your daily or weekly goals. And it’s one click to create a duplicate page for an A/B test or to view the mobile version of the site. Smart development tools allow for easy embedding of video, buttons, images, text or custom html. Saving time for the team of marketers is also part of website simplification for the modern marketer. Give a landing page a quick try for your own website – I promise you’ll be delighted with the simplicity. After that, it’s up to your ingenuity to build a campaign around the landing page.
WHAT’S THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF ONLINE MARKETING? I promised I’d reveal the first objective for modern marketers - finding your audience and making a connection to them. Once they know, like and trust your brand, getting the audience over to your landing page is much easier to achieve! ▼
Rebecca Caroe is the CEO of Creative Agency Secrets, experts in getting websites working hard for your business.
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YOUR LEAD NURTURING FOUR STEP STARTER PLAN BY Chris Price
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s buyers, we all know when it is time to ‘tell’ rather than ‘sell’. This weekend I met a salesperson who knew the difference between the two. My eldest daughter, Maddy, is in the early stages of looking for a new Apple iMac computer. So we ended up at one of the hundreds of Apple retailers in Auckland. We picked it because it was near a cafe we planned to go to for lunch afterwards.
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We started in front of some shiny Apple screens not knowing exactly what we were looking at. Now fortunately for us, we managed to flag down the right salesperson. She sauntered over and started to gently ask Maddy a few questions. Questions about what she wanted the machine for, the applications she would be running and how long she expected to spend using it.
HERE’S HOW TO GET INVOLVED.
#1: Produce great content to capture your prospect’s attention – and their email address. We all head to the Internet when researching that next chunky purchase. We will trade our email address along the way for content that will make our search so much easier. Think value, not necessarily volume. The salesperson brought with her a small piece of paper showing the product specs of the range. After a short chat, she pointed out the ones would be ideal and why. I then asked the ‘Dad Question’: why wouldn’t she buy the cheapest of the two? The assistant did a great job of explaining the technical differences in a way that we both could understand. And then she said nothing. No fancy close. No whipping out a handheld computer to tap in stuff to give us a special deal. Just handed us her card and told us which of the two we were in front of. Advising us to have a play and get a feel of what we were considering. And considering it, we were. Spending over $3,500 takes a bit of time to digest. So we left knowing more than when we arrived and with a feeling that this business: (a) could help us, and (b) knew a lot about how to match the right iMac to the right Apple purchaser. As I said before, there are probably hundreds of Auckland retailers who sell Apple products but after that simple exchange, these guys would now be at the top of our list. Effective lead nurturing helps you get to the top of the list your prospects have for what you sell.
Automatically most people think ‘eBooks’ here, but that doesn’t have to be the case. We have a customer who created a very simple MS Excel calculator plugin that was extremely valuable for his prospects. When they registered to get it for free, which many hundreds did, it solved a very complex calculation in a jiffy. This same theme permeated their very comprehensive and expensive software product that these prospects were ideal customers for.
#2: Talk to them as long as it makes sense Maddy will need her new computer before March. I would guess that a three month consideration period is usual for a computer like this. Deciding on what car to buy could take a lot longer, and likewise deciding which graphic designer should design your next logo may be faster than picking a car but longer than buying an iMac. Let’s also assume that all decisions that should be made by prospects: will be. So there’s an ideal period to say what you need to say while people are considering. Leave it too late and the purchase would have been made and the relevance lost.
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▼ LEADNURTURING
#4: Dissolve the complexity with the right technology.
#3: Givers Gain Capturing your prospect’s attention is the top task after they have traded their email address for your content. Just a quick refresher: now is not the time to sell, but to tell. And the ‘telling’ part focuses on helping the prospect through the decision-making process. Those that sell complex services have a distinct advantage here, especially when there’s a lot that can go wrong with a poor decision. Think ‘complex software purchases that never go live’, i.e. business rebranding exercises that reduce sales rather than increase them. Situations like these where the risk of a negative outcome can be quite high. Any content you can offer here to help people avoid these steps will be well received. Drip-feeding it to people in manageable chunks of email ensures you remain at the top of people’s minds as the time of consideration continues. This leaves you with the task of managing who gets what and when. Thankfully there’s a range of technology to make this a breeze.
So you are drip-feeding snippets of highly valuable content to possibly hundreds of prospects who are “considering” what you offer. Some are more active than others at this and could be clicking the links in your messages with a frenzy; others could be a bit more passive. The rest flit between the two states while receiving the series of messages you provide. Somehow you need to isolate those who are keen to buy, possibly for some telemarketing activities, and respectfully and gently nurture those who are still pondering their choices. Thankfully there’s a range of lead-nurturing technology that can make this mind meld act a relatively simple task. We support a range of tools that do just this. You can start from just $10 per month and head northwards. The more you pay, the more complexity you can manage. However most starting out have quite simple needs, so the low-cost technology is usually a starter. Our experience doesn’t start and end with the tools. We have expertise in creating the content to get the system started AND the messages required to keep the momentum going to the successful end. Follow these steps and you should end up with a pipeline packed with prospects slowly moving, further along, their decision-making process. Contact us today to learn how to design a pipeline like this for your business.▼
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Chris Price owns Ark Advance, a web optimisation business that specialises in online marketing, and offers customised support services for a wide range of service based companies who want to grow their effectiveness online. Ark Advance also offer a free monthly email newsletter focused on helping business owners grow their services online – sign up for free at www.arkadvance.com
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GOT A PRODUCT, SERVICE OR BUSINESS WORTH TALKING ABOUT? Want to grow brand awareness in a more effective and useful way? TALK TO ESPIRE MEDIA ABOUT OUR CONTENT MARKETING SERVICES We offer a range of ways to attract and retain customers, by creating and curating relevant and valuable content to engage and add value to your audience. BENEFITS: • Expand your digital footprint • Grow brand awareness • Increase traffic to your website • Thought leadership • Media exposure • Attract new customers • And... grow SALES!
Get in touch with Jennifer now to discuss our options. +64 9 522 7257 (NZT) | jenniferl@espiremedia.com | www.espiremedia.com
Check out our blog for content marketing advice, tips and ideas, plus a free copy of our content marketing guide The Content Creation Cookbook!
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SOCIALMEDIA
GENERATION X - THE INTERNET FILES BY Kashan Preston, Intern
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uckland has a rich assortment of businesses that vary from marketing to hospitality – and the city is thriving with people of the younger generation who have utilised the Internet to run smooth independent businesses. There is one independent business in Auckland that has handled itself very well, having been built from practically the ground up with little or no money, and only a large amount of dedication and a dream. This company is the Hot & Flustered Shadowcast, consisting of mainly Generation X members. Hot & Flustered is a non-profit organisation that was founded in 2014 by two hard-core fans of the 1975 cult classic film, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A Shadowcast is not an original Auckland concept. In fact, it is a cult ideology on a near global scale. The idea is people will dress up like the characters from the film and silently perform on stage while the movie plays in the background. In other words, they ‘shadow’ the film. Call backs to the film are status quo, making the night all the more fun while prop kits are designed by the cast and sold to the audience. The prop kits are the only source of income that Hot & Flustered can depend on, aside from the money that comes from the group members’ pockets. Hot & Flustered has so far performed ten shows since their debut and has amassed a substantial Auckland fan base. Serving as New Zealand’s only Shadowcast, they mainly perform at the Victoria Theatre in Devonport,
having also performed once at the Academy Cinema and in Hamilton for the anniversary of the Riff Raff statue on Victoria Street. The cast was granted the opportunity to promote themselves to the crowd and even met and took pictures with the famous Richard O’Brien, writer of the musical and performer of Riff Raff in the movie. The cast utilises Facebook for promotional purposes. With a public page, the group ‘admins’ post regular updates when it is nearing time for a show. Facebook events are made, and several people are invited. News about the shows is posted to catch the interest of potential audience members. The company also collaborates with businesses like the Victoria Theatre and Academy Cinema, which include information about Hot & Flustered on their ‘coming soon’ sections. The posts include information about the movie, while giving information about the cast. Hot & Flustered also looks to promote themselves via online media, and the company has an Instagram account with 89 current followers – a small amount compared to its 391 likes on Facebook, but brilliant none the less. If a business that was started with no money and a dream can become so successful, thanks to some great social media usage, then anyone can follow in Hot & Flustered’s footsteps. The Internet has provided excellent usage for so many businesses over the years. Lots of money and the best ‘knowhow’ isn’t what’s needed. Just a great idea, some support and a heart burning with passion! ▼
Kashan Preston is an Espire Media intern and a student at Unitec Institute of Technology
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CONTENTMARKETING
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ccording to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends — North America, more than half of B2B marketers plan to increase their content marketing budget. Even 57% of those who are least effective at content marketing plan to increase their budget. From the talk around New Zealand, it’s conceivable that many local companies are contemplating doing the same thing. With content marketing on the rise, it is important to understand what it is, and how to do it.
Definition: “Content marketing combines the skills of marketing and journalism to create brand influenced editorial content that meets the information needs of your customers. It educates, informs and entertains – just like mainstream media would.” In this age of search behaviour and Internet influenced buying decisions, content marketing is about using your intellectual property – experience and expertise – to help people with good advice, in an interesting and informative manner. But how do you write a good value-added story that grabs attention? Problems sell. Newspapers understand that. Journalists and copywriters understand that people are more likely to be motivated by the prospect of pain than they are by pleasure. The neuroscience book, ‘How We Decide’, by Jonah Lehrer, tells us that a person who has damage to the emotional centre of their brain
will be unable to make decisions because their rational brain will repeatedly debate the pros and cons of even insignificant decisions, such as a choice between white and brown bread. Findings from research conducted by Antonio and Hannah Damasio (reported in part in A. Damasio’s “Descartes’ Error”, Grossett/Putnam, 1994) “suggest we are unable to make decisions having personal relevance unless we have been motivated by our emotions. “Reason, they say, plays an analytical role, not a decision-making role, and emotion is needed to motivate somebody to act.” (as reported by Jim Gilmartin). It’s pretty clear that motivating an emotional response in your target market and or customer is a very powerful way to call them to action.
Here are six steps to prompting an emotional response in your audience – steps you can use to put together a presentation or promotion: 1. Acknowledge their emotion e.g. frustration, anxiety 2. Tell them why they are feeling like that i.e. what the problem is 3. Tell them why they will continue to feel that way e.g. why the problem persists 4. Explain why your product or service alleviates their problem 5. Paint a picture of how good life will be after applying your solution 6. Back it up with proof to appeal to our logical brain. ▼
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BRANDINGONLINE
WHY RELEVANT BRANDS ARE SO MUCH MORE THAN GRAPHIC DESIGN, EVEN ONLINE BY Fraser Gardyne
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ust because we are living in an age of Internet and digital dominance, doesn’t mean that branding is in its twilight years. Branding has never been about the paper. It has, and always will be, about you, regardless of the communication channels you use. The sheer volume of communications that are made possible by digital media means there is now, more than ever, need to stand out and differentiate yourself from the clutter – people’s perceptions of your personality and the value of what you offer are just as important but far more difficult to influence. If (as claimed by some market research companies a few years ago) the average person is indeed bombarded with more than 4,000 marketing messages a day – which
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is perfectly feasible – then poor, average, mediocre and even good branding will not be enough to stand out from the crowd; it has to be relevant. People who live in the city, or alongside a motorway, will report that eventually they no longer notice the noise. The same can be said for bad smells. The reason is that the mind focuses on priorities and filters out anything that is not essential – like your own built-in firewall. The greater the frequency and types of media we are faced with (the level of noise), the more powerful the firewalls become. As a result, only relevant brands – that match your customer’s priorities – have any hope of finding their way through the filters.
As if the firewall challenge wasn’t enough, technology has given consumers the power to pick and choose what they will engage with – fast forward on television remotes and the ability to skip advertisements online, are just two examples.
SO, WHAT MAKES A BRAND RELEVANT? A relevant brand is not one that sells an attribute. A relevant brand is one that communicates your understanding of the customer’s challenges and needs, and which also offers them a solution. For example, let’s say you’re selling fresh produce to people who are concerned about pesticides, contaminants and toxins in their food. They are concerned about their health and the environment. This is not so far-fetched when you consider the recent Fonterra botulism scare. How do you communicate the normal things, like fresh and high quality (which good branding would do) while presenting yourself as ‘relevant’ to your target market’s needs and concerns e.g. organic, respectful of the environment and trustworthy?
A relevant brand: • Is consistently ‘on message’ in its appearance and experience; • It communicates an understanding of customer needs and concerns; • It extends beyond a logo and a tagline all the way down to how you answer the telephone and the kind of cars you drive; • It is about finding ways to relate to your customers beyond a sales message e.g. a content marketing campaign that informs and educates them about healthy food and sustainability; • A relevant brand is a philosophy and practise that everybody in your organisation subscribes to; • A relevant brand practises what you preach; • A relevant brand evolves with its market.
When you have a moment, take a step back and have a really good look at your brand. Is it consistent in appearance and experience or has the market moved on with more compelling brand options?▼
WWW.GARDYNEHOLT.CO.NZ
Fraser Gardyne is the Creative Director of gardyneHOLT a graphic design and branding agency located in central Auckland. The company specialises in branding design that can easily translate across all media channels, as well as national, cultural and language barriers.
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