Vision Graphics Inc. Connect Magazine Jan/Feb 2015

Vision Graphics Inc. Engaging Marketing Minds

The biggest mistakes marketers make today

INSIDE Technologically yours Social change agent Tim Leberecht How do you SEO?

Vol. 5, Issue 1, January/February 2015

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publisher’s letter

Hang with us S

uccessful people know that the secret to success lies with the people you spend time with the most. Legendary inspirational speaker Jim Rohn would have us believe that we are the average of our closest friends. Even without validating data, it still is pretty easy to agree that the people I surround myself with determine how I think, how I act and, ultimately, how successful I will be.

It follows that it really doesn’t matter how smart you are, how talented you are or which skills you possess. All that matters is who you spend time with. If you want to be successful, hang around successful people. Great marketers understand this better than anyone.

Marketing is all about who your company hangs out with – not what it produces. If you want to endear yourself to a community of buyers, hanging out with them is a good start.

In turn, marketers are not afraid to lose a few along the way. They realize that not all customers are created equal and that some of their old “buddies” can bring them down.

Good marketers focus their time on the types of people who ooze success. That way, they too will prosper, but to be more specific, they will engage with clients and prospects that embody the qualities that represent their perfect customers. They cling to them enthusiastically in order to share in their perspectives and ambitions.

We’d like to think we’re hanging with the right crowd. In fact, we’re very proud of this issue, because we believe it demonstrates that we are, in fact, spending time with remarkable people. In our cover story, “7 Deadly Sins of Marketing,” we uncover some of the biggest mistakes marketers make today. We believe that knowing how to navigate this complex and constantly changing landscape is key, and we want to help you create a unified strategy that works.

In our second feature, “Technologically Yours,” we show how marketers are connecting with consumers in the New Age, showing how marketing strategies have changed during the last 15 years. We hope you enjoy hanging with us on the following pages.

Marketing is all about who your company hangs out with – not what it produces.

Happy New Year and warmest wishes,

Mark Steputis Publisher

CONTENTS 03 Publisher’s Letter Hang with us

04 The Inbox

06 7 deadly sins of marketing The biggest mistakes marketers make today

10 Technologically yours Marketing in the New Age

14 Trending with...

Social change agent Tim Leberecht

15 How do you SEO? Survey shines light on tactics for achieving objectives

Publisher

Mark Steputis mark.steputis@visiongraphics-inc.com

Managing Editor

Michele McCreath michele.mccreath@visiongraphics-inc.com

Art Direction

Brent Cashman Connect is published bimonthly copyright 2015. All rights reserved For more information contact Michele McCreath at michele.mccreath@visiongraphics-inc.com Vision Graphics Inc. – connect • January/February 2015

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The

Inbox

N Selling

sales

Survey shows roadblocks to sales success

4

January/February 2015 • connect – Vision Graphics Inc.

ot many topics can incite a good debate like sales training. Look around, and you will see a number of different methods.

The question is: Do they work? According to Brainshark’s “State of Sales Training” survey, 61 percent find it difficult to coordinate schedules for in-person training, 48 percent believe their content isn’t engaging enough, and 45 percent think their reps are too distracted and lack focus.

Design to Grow:

How Coca-Cola Learned to Combine Scale and Agility

By David Butler & Linda Tischler

L

ook around: Success – survival even – is predicated upon your ability to respond to rapidly changing market conditions. Every company – large or small, start up or established – is at risk. David Butler and Linda Tischler believe that tomorrow’s winners will be companies that know how to combine scale and agility.

In Design to Grow: How Coca-Cola Learned to Combine Scale and Agility, Butler, Coca-Cola’s VP of innovation and entrepreneurship, and Tischler,

senior editor of Fast Company, take a behind-the-scenes look at both the successes and failures of one of the world’s largest companies as it learns to use design to be both agile and big. They not only show how this strategy works at Coca-Cola, but how you can use the same approach to grow your business.

This must-read book proves that attention to design detail at every level of the organization, in every product line, by every employee is critical to market dominance.

We recommend adding Design to Grow to your “must-read” list.

Did you know?

Next year will be a new, more stable year for the average shelf life of chief marketing officers (CMO). According to a recent report by Forrester Research, the average tenure of a CMO will reach 60 months – or five years – in 2015. That’s a reassuring upgrade from 2014, when executive recruiting firm Spencer Stuart had CMO job security at an average of 45 months.

60

The percent of marketers who believe personalization such as name, gender and location is the key feature of online marketing, according to the “Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing: Why Marketing Should Be Personal” report by Ecoconsultancy and Adobe. The report also says that 54 percent currently are working to provide a personalized web experience.

No topic is local or even regional anymore, as social media has made every conversation global.

Today, a trending hashtag equals a homogenized culture where influential ideas seamlessly flow not just across borders but across brands.

– Atmosphere Proximity CEO Andreas Combuechen on why marketing and advertising firms use similar words and phrases in their communications

Vision Graphics Inc. – connect • January/February 2015

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January/February 2015 • connect – Vision Graphics Inc.

“ Mistakes you can learn from; sins stay with you forever.”

– Corey Taylor

W

e learn something new every day. That’s the idea anyway. We exact plans and strategies.

Some work and some don’t. Then, we sit down and sift through the pros and cons of every single move. We are pawns in the big game – whatever that big game may be. Win, and the world is a better place. Lose, and, well, you know the story. The trick, as we know, is never make the same mistake twice. Success can be gleaned from the ashes of failure – period.

When it comes to marketing, there is no shortage of challenges. Just look at how the marketing world has evolved during the last decade, and the amount of cross-training marketers have experienced: VoC, data collection and analysis, and product and message development.

Today, marketers continue to face a barrage of new tech- By Michael J. Pallerino nologies aimed at making things easier, faster, more cost effective and more transparent – all in real-time. The key is navigating this complex and constantly changing landscape, and then creating a unified marketing strategy – one that’s focused on driving customer engagement and can impact the bottom line.

If you’re looking for a consensus of where the true art of marketing lies, it would go something like this: Build brand and marketing campaigns, develop sound messaging strategies and create products that deliver a good customer experience. The key is listening to your customers and the world around you to craft meaningful conversations that spark imagination, inspire loyalty and create interest in your solutions.

“Marketers are a naturally inquisitive, inventive group who are excited about possibilities,” says Tracy Hansen, CMO of Tealium, a leader in enterprise tag management and digital data distribution platforms. “The key is to channel this passion for the creative and the new into a learning opportunity to understand what is possible, and then employ the power of pause. By taking the time to craft an integrated, unified strategy that employs technology to drive business value, marketers will find that their investments are leveraged fully and that they have the appropriately trained staff to take advantage of their visions.”

The biggest mistakes marketers make today

Vision Graphics Inc. – connect • January/February 2015

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7 deadly sins of marketing

Sounds easy, right? In this technologically driven world, we decided to look at the seven deadliest sins marketers are making today. Here’s what we uncovered:

The Safe Route Marketers often are stuck in “safe mode” and are not willing to take risks that stray from the “status quo.” They often are too comfortable with their own processes, creative, communications, target audience, etc., which reduces their ability to drive new conversations about the future.

“A marketer should never be comfortable,” says Chris Cottle, executive VP of marketing for the customer experience (CX) software and research firm MaritzCX. “They need to be responsible for leading the conversation about the next phase for the company, and lead the charge in developing new tools, new communication vehicles and new ways to get the message out creatively.”

Misuse of Technology According to a review of customer data-centric software listed on Capterra, more than 3,000 marketing technology products, platforms and point solutions are being deployed across nearly 30 application categories. Combine the proliferation of solutions, plus a constantly contracting and collapsing market, with the fact that most marketers were not educated as technologists, and you have a recipe for confusion and frustration.

“By neglecting to take the time to understand how marketing technologies can work together and how data can be unified, marketers are falling into the same trap that so many technology buyers find themselves in,” says Tealium’s Hansen. “They have a host of siloed applications and fragmented data sources that are being under-utilized, because the processes, training and skills are not in place to take advantage of the technology’s original promise.”

I ncreased access to data is a tremendous gift modern marketers have at their disposal. A mistake, however, is to use data to the exclusion of their own knowledge and experience.

– Matt Voda, CMO, OptiMine

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January/February 2015 • connect – Vision Graphics Inc.

Inefficient Data The ability to use technology and data (or science) to further marketing’s reach, to create more personalized campaigns and to be more relevant is paramount. Both sides must be weighted properly and used appropriately to maximize impact. One without the other is pointless. If content is king and context is queen, data is the emperor. Today, the firstparty visitor data gets recognized as the most valuable kind, because it allows marketers to take true, real-time action to increase results across channels and devices.

“Increased access to data is a tremendous gift modern marketers have at their disposal,” says Matt Voda, CMO of OptiMine, a leader in cloud-based omni-channel marketing analytics and optimization. “A mistake, however, is to use data to the exclusion of their own knowledge and experience. For example, some marketers invest based on which channels traditionally have been easiest to measure, and therefore direct more spend to lower-funnel digital channels (search, etc.). They scale back or exclude brand awareness investments that, when measured properly, can contribute even more lift to the lower funnel.”

Undersharing

Stuck in the Short Term

The prevalence and sheer volume of Big Data allow most companies to see the very essence of their customer bases and their activity. But unless more people in the organization have access to customer feedback and analysis, the data simply is rendered useless. You must have a process in place to analyze and act upon it.

“Our independent research has found that most companies are more effective at capturing and sharing customer feedback than they are at analyzing, integrating, and acting on it,” MatritzCX’s Cottle says. “Many companies put their departments in silos (product development, sales, call center, IT, marketing, etc.) that fail to communicate with each other.

Strategy means nothing unless it can be consistently implemented across the enterprise.”

Marketers are under increased pressure to deliver results and prove their value. Therefore, it’s natural to gravitate toward direct-oriented, late-funnel channels that are most tangibly measured versus early-funnel/brand channels and/or emerging channels whose impact on business results historically have been more challenging to quantify.

“Marketers often become hyper-focused on short-term results, leading to a lack of new innovation, new channels and consumer dialogue,” OptiMine’s Voda says. “For example, focusing on the most measureable “last click” will drive more budget to channels like search, only to lead to a major dead end in terms of future growth and market development.”

The Original Plan Too many marketers hold on to the concept of the annual marketing plan, which is quickly becoming a relic in a “real-time” world where the landscape changes overnight. While it’s important to outline goals, objectives and strategies for the upcoming year, marketers are wrong if they don’t allow – or even plan – for change. They must have a test-driven mindset and set aside a portion of their budgets to test new approaches and tweak strategies regularly as the year progresses.

“Getting locked in and pursuing the same strategy, despite evidence to the contrary, is wrong,” says Rob Gelphman, VP of marketing and member relations for the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA). “It can be difficult to justify change and take on risk when everything is seemingly going well, but marketers have to continuously scan the horizon for storm clouds. Though a sunny day, rain may be in the forecast.”

Broad Targets Many companies fail to define the target customer(s) narrowly enough. Too often, the target is defined much too broadly. Serious problems with marketing effectiveness begin with a broad target, because it becomes increasingly difficult to define the needs of the target customer. This impacts the type of content developed to reach this target. Messages become less refined and, thus, less effective.

“This stems from an overly broad target,” says Ron Hess, professor of marketing at William & Mary. “A broad target creates difficulties in specifically defining the needs of these customers. The best positioning statements clearly identify three to four reasons that a company’s offerings are different from the competition. These reasons must be relevant/important to the target customer.”

Vision Graphics Inc. – connect • January/February 2015

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Technologically Marketing in the New Age

By Lorrie Bryan

yours

“ In this ever-changing society, the most powerful and enduring brands are built from the heart. They are real and sustainable.

Their foundations are stronger, because they are built with the strength of the human spirit, not an ad campaign. The companies that are lasting are those that are authentic.”

– Howard Schultz, “Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time”

P

eople have been drinking coffee concoctions for more than 1,000 years. In fact, the beverage hasn’t varied much throughout the centuries. Today, the caffeinerich beans, harvested from trees that trace their heritage to the ancient coffee forests on the Ethiopian plateau, are roasted and brewed to produce an energizing drink – one that fills more than 400 billion cups consumed annually across the globe.

While coffee beans usually are harvested by hand and sun-dried much the same as they were centuries ago, the Industrial Age changed the way the beans are milled and roasted. And, in a time when technology continues to change everything, the Digital Age is drastically changing the way a cup of coffee is marketed.

“Technology is having a tremendous impact across all aspects of marketing, including research, distribution, advertising and strategy,” says Joe F. Hair, Ph.D., founder and senior scholar of the DBA Degree in the Coles College of Business at Kennesaw State University.

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January/February 2015 • connect – Vision Graphics Inc.

Vision Graphics Inc. – connect • January/February 2015

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Technologically yours

Instead of traditional marketing campaigns that rely on magazines, billboards or TV ads, Starbucks Coffee Co., the global coffeehouse leader, has used the marketing strategy of EWOM (electronic word of mouth) advertising, the high quality of products, and, legendary service to promote its brand. This strategy has played a huge part in making Starbucks a success.

Today, the brand is creating more buzz, attracting new customers and building loyalty by rolling out an innovative mobile app that enables customers to pre-order and pay for their coffee selection on their smartphones.

Using technology to gauge its customers’ distances from the coffee shop and expected arrival time, the program alerts the barista to prepare the drink at the optimal time to ensure the place-and-pay patron gets a fresh, hot cup of coffee. Upon arrival, customers enter a designated cue for pre-orders, thus avoiding the long lines during the morning or afternoon rushes.

Hair, the author of numerous marketing textbooks, says the app is a highly successful marketing tool. “Pre-order apps significantly increase in-store traffic and the average order size, and they encourage repeat purchases.

These apps are going to be huge, particularly with Millennials.”

Social Media Strategy, Media Management & Content Marketing As marketers begin adapting to the evolving consumer mindset, other food retailers are testing pre-order apps, too. As we see every day, technology is fundamentally changing the way we buy things, so businesses must market accordingly.

“We’re fed up with unwanted phone calls,” says David Meerman Scott, an online marketing strategist, and author of several books on marketing – most notably, “The New Rules of Marketing and PR,” an international bestseller. “We hate wading through hundreds of unsolicited emails. We’ve had it with intrusive social media messages. We’re tired of poor service from companies that don’t treat us with respect or that send us into an automated phone maze that wastes our time and never connects us with a living person. At the same time, all of us – you, me and all our existing and potential customers – turn to the web to solve problems.”

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“ Technology is having a tremendous impact across all aspects of marketing, including research, distribution, advertising and strategy.”

– Joe F. Hair, Ph.D., Coles College of Business at Kennesaw State University

January/February 2015 • connect – Vision Graphics Inc.

As we see every day, technology is fundamentally changing the way we buy things, so businesses must market accordingly.

There still is a huge disconnect between the way people research products and services they’re interested in, and the way companies market and sell. “The good news is that we can do something about it,” Scott says.

“The web has liberated us from the tyranny of paying for attention. You can earn attention online by creating great information that your buyers want, such as YouTube videos, blogs, Twitter feeds, photographs, charts, graphs and eBooks – and it is all free.”

Not only does Starbucks excel at serving a great cup of coffee, it also excels at earning online attention by executing an effective social media strategy and engaging its customers online with great content. The brand boasts nearly 38 million Facebook fans and nearly 7 million Twitter followers, as well as a huge presence on Instagram and Pinterest.

Its content is clever and engaging, and strikes a good balance between fun contests, helpful tips for java lovers and subtle sales messages to its customers.

The Starbucks team also monitors its Twitter feeds frequently and encourages dissatisfied customers to connect with the company for follow-ups using a Twitter-specific email address.

Starbucks can deal with customer complaints before they have a chance to escalate.

Targeting Millennials During the five decades that Hair has been studying and teaching marketing, affluent and influential Baby Boomers have been the target of

most marketing strategies. But things changed when the bulk of today’s marketing emphasis started to focus more on Millennials.

Starbucks rode the Baby Boomer trend in the 1990s, creating an affordable luxury whereby people could share and enjoy a good cup of coffee with friends and colleagues. But today, it is one of the top-ranked brands for Millennials. By going digital, offering relevant rewards that foster loyalty and creating an environment where Millennials want to hang out, Starbucks is enjoying immense popularity among this generation in the United States and globally (Starbucks is in 66 countries).

Data Analysis As it turns out, Millennials likely are going to be the most scrutinized consumer group ever.

Anna Viotta, author of “Unlocking Generational CODES,” says that one of the reasons for the distinction is that they have grown up with hypercustomized marketing. “Millennials expect to be engaged and are digital powerhouses.”

Using the technology facilitated by iBeacons, smartphones and cookies, it is becoming easier to track consumer locations (both online and physically), track purchasing behaviors and market to them accordingly.

“There is a tremendous amount of data available,” Hair says. “It has become inexpensive to collect and store. The time between data collection and use has collapsed, and we are seeing an increase in real-time marketing. Impulse purchases used to be the result of good in-store signage and merchandising. Now it’s migrating to the smartphone. Targeted ads based on good data analytics often result in a conversion rate of 50 percent from interest to action.”

But millions of petabytes of data are no substitute for a friendly barista who always remembers how you like your coffee and serves it to you with a smile. That “old-fashioned” engaging behavior is a direct reflection of Starbuck’s steadfast commitment to its altruistic values and mission: “To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.”

In his latest book, “Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul,” Starbuck’s CEO Howard Schultz summed it up best, “For all the promise of digital media to bring people together, I still believe that the most sincere, lasting powers of human connection come from looking directly into someone else’s eyes, with no screen in between.”

Vision Graphics Inc. – connect • January/February 2015

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Q&A:

Interview with Tim Leberecht

Trending with ...

Social change agent Tim Leberecht

T

im Leberecht believes in the power of romance. The CMO of global design and architecture firm NBBJ even wrote a business book extolling the power that romantic marketing holds in making connections with today’s consumers. The book, “The Business Romantic: Give Everything, Quantify Nothing, and Create Something Greater Than Yourself,” shows how small, everyday actions can help build a more humane economy and offers a glimpse into why brands that create such moments in their customers’ experiences are winning. Here are his insights to why injecting greater meaning into your marketing matters.

Does today’s marketing and branding rely too much on technology?

Technology often drives art and intuition out of marketing. Increasingly, we hear that marketing organizations are hiring “chief marketing technologists” or data scientists. Marketing is becoming a data play. This brings with it a fear that personal data, surveillance tools and, now, neuroscience will allow marketers to anticipate our every need and automatically fulfill it before we’re even aware of them ourselves. Our hyperconnected times expect us to be consistent, transparent and predictable as employees and consumers. Automation, Big Data and smart algorithms tell us what we should like and share.

What’s missing in today’s marketing strategies?

Marketing can help create and lead a romantic counter-culture that posits intuition and creativity, as well as genuine human-tohuman connections, against the regime of the machine.

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Marketing is intrinsically about creating empathy and behavior change. It is uniquely positioned to establish a different concept of “a good life” and bring back the romance. But marketing is, too often, stuck in the paradigm of the smart age, in the thinking that smart equals good. Smart means accumulating as much knowledge as possible about customers, analyzing every corner of our “quantified selves,” and delivering hyper-targeted messages and interactions to optimize our behaviors. That datadriven, algorithmic model of marketing has its merits. But it’s not enough. We need both data and delight. In fact, we must use data for delight, to honor our “un-quantified self.” We can now use technology to romanticize.

Give us some examples of “romantic” marketing.

It’s all the experiences that defy rational logic, quantification and automation. The little distortions

January/February 2015 • connect – Vision Graphics Inc.

of reality, the cracks of imperfection, the exuberant passions that vie for nothing but passion itself, the moments we lose control. In other words, the moments we begin to love. Brands that create such moments in their customer experience realize that romance is the ultimate differentiator in a world of optimizers and maximizers. When every company is doubling down on either purpose or precision, romance can be “third place.” Romantic brands will create a genuine bond with their customers, which will help them defy competitive pressures in the long run.

Without romance – a deeply emotional devotion to an organization, brand or purpose – customer loyalty remains fickle.

How do we put passion and creativity back into our messages?

Be an amateur again. Make your customers view the world with fresh eyes. Surprise them and violate their expectations. Do things as if you did them for the first time. A growing number of brands are turning into activists who put their organizations’ values into action. The Stratos Jump by Red Bull or Dove’s Real Beauty campaign, which address real issues with real people. All these efforts took a risk by turning brands into actions, rather than statements.

The message can flip-flop, the conversations can vary, as long as the aura and the personality of the brand comes through. Use the excuse of marketing to do exciting things, and exciting things will happen. Create some beauty in the world, and they will come.

Why is it so important to create a “human economy?”

Few cultures have a greater impact on us than business: as employees, consumers and even citizens. We live in a market(ing) society, whether we like it or not. What we buy and what we do for a living reflects – and even determines – who we are. Our career paths offer up many of our most salient opportunities for self-realization, and most of us spend the majority of our lives at work. In all these ways, business binds us in its various chains of meaning. If we seek meaning, work is our arena. It’s “where we make or break ourselves,” as the poet David Whyte once wrote. Marketing can help create and lead a romantic counter-culture that posits intuition and creativity, as well as genuine human-to-human connections, against the regime of the machine.

Before You

Go

How do you SEO? Survey shines light on tactics for achieving objectives

No matter what size your company is and how far your brand reaches, one of the most effective search engine optimization (SEO) tactics you can employ is content. A recent study by Conductor and Ascend2 examines the most effective SEO tactics for achieving objectives. Here are the strategies that topped the list:

54

46

%

Quality content creation

17

%

50

%

Frequent website updating

Keyword research/ management

%

28

%

Social media integration/Local search optimization

Frequent blogging

13

%

Link building

Vision Graphics Inc. – connect • January/February 2015

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