So many marketing books, so little time...

Like me you're probably constantly on the lookout for new ideas, ways of thinking and ways to work better. [It may even be why you're reading this post].

Personally I love nothing more than a good marketing/business book that leaves me inspired. But I'm notoriously bad at making the time to read long text. Or indeed choosing the right book to read in the first place.

That's why I'm pleased with the idea of the Silverpop Book Club.

We’ve curated some of our favourite books and reviewed them, plus asked leading authors to join us and share their expertise.

As a sneak preview – here are just some of the books & leading authors we have joining us for some special webinars over the next few weeks:

•         Will McInnes introduces ‘Culture Shock’
•         James McQuivey discusses ‘Digital Disruption’
•         Scott Stratten explains why ‘QR Codes Kill Kittens’
•         Lee Odden shows you how to ‘Optimize’

So let us be your digital librarian, and join us over at: www.silverpop.com/bookclub. Sign sign up for updates; it’s the best way to get the latest and greatest book club news and to join our events.

 **B2B Marketing Best Practice Footnote**

From a professional point of view, I love this initiative. Curation of 3rd party content is a great way for us to provide some value to our community, without picking up the megaphone & shouting about our products. It allows us to enter a different conversation with customers and prospects and by sharing innovative content show that we ourselves are aware of, and part of, the latest thinking.

John Battelle on making advertising "inherently valuable"

For "advertising" think "marketing".

For the whole interview think "behavorial marketing".

Simple :)

Can retargeting work in B2B marketing?

My good friends at Velocity Partners recently ran an experiment using content retargeting to promote their business.

The concept is simple - firstly, present ads on other sites (all of which are signed up to a specific ad network) to people who have already visited your site. And secondly, on subsequent visits to those ad network-enrolled sites, change the content so you progress the visitor down your sales funnel.

Whilst I applaud Velocity's efforts to try new ways to reach their target audiences, it for me was also a great example of the good & bad of using retargeting in B2B. 

So, the good:

1. I think retargeting has more of a place in B2B than B2C, as considered purchases are a long haul and any opportunity to reinforce a brand over multiple touchpoints is worthwhile.
2. I actually experienced the experiment and was retargeted by them & thought - hey that's Velocity!

However, the bad:

1. I get really annoyed by B2B brands interjecting themselves into my consumer experience. Its bad enough pre-rolling car adverts, but I really don't want to sit through even 4 seconds of a middleware software ad when my kids are wanting to show me a Minecraft tutorial on YouTube. 
2. In Velocity's case, I experienced (1) but even worse - I'm already a customer! So I do not need more (intrusive) advertising thanks!

So a couple of things need to change to stop the current platforms being a bit of a blunt instrument:

1. Ad networks need to provide more granularity in letting advertisers choose which sites their ads appear on.
2. Retargeting needs to develop a behavioural dimension, which lets advertisers serve up ads not only on whether a consumer has previously visited their site (and nurture them thru a funnel) but also on other data such as purchase history,  CRM profile or other digital behaviours.

Anyone else have thoughts on the matter?

Favourite email campaigns #342 - The loyal customer pay-back

Loved this email campaign from Withings. I was an early adopter of their Wi-Fi scales not long after it launched. And it looks like I've fallen into their long term customer segment, rewarding me with a sizable discount in upgrading to their later model.

Nice.

I was only thinking today how uninteresting typical promotional deals of 10% off were, so the 25% in this offer grabs my attention. Plus I love the "thanks for your loyalty" message.

Great example of reactivation/segmentation. And you know what, I'm more than likely to make that purchase. Plus I'm also intrigued by their soon-to-be-released Pulse wireless activity and heart rate tracker. So maybe double upselling.

Great job!

Why your marketing "signal" should be analog not digital

In the world of music production, you fundamentally have a choice between digital and analog techniques. Whilst for many years this choice was constrained to the murky world of studio technicians, engineers and sound geeks, consumers became famously aware of the differences in the debate over whether CDs (digital) are better than vinyl records (analog). 

Ignoring factors like convenience, longevity and corporate monetization, digital v analog has a more fundamental, scientific difference.

Sound is basically a bunch of waves coming at you like a series of gently rolling hills. The waveforms generated by vocals, instruments and electronics all create these hills. An analog system (such as that used to create vinyl records) takes these waves and tries to faithfully reproduce those gently rolling hills (albeit with some old tech). A digital system however uses the latest in smart tech to convert those sound into a series of ones and zeros, creating a series of jagged peaks.

Which means a digital signal is either there (as a one) or not there (as a zero). Whilst an analog signal always exists.

Difficult to grasp?

Well, the easiest example to relate to is radio. A radio station on AM/FM wavelengths may very well fade out, or suffer from interference. However the same (digitally enhanced) station on DAB gets no interference or noise whatsoever, and can sometimes just cut out. In the DAB digital world the signal is there or not there. There is no interference. No half-way house. No faint signal. Which is the downside of ones and zeros - they either exist or they don't exist.

Which is also the danger with a lot of marketing. The temptation is to be digitally perfect on a periodic basis. We're all scared of making mistakes (weak signal) or saying the wrong thing (interference) but the reality is we need to be on all the time. And if the signal we're projecting fades in and out occasionally, thats fine. We should all learn to experiment, and not be afraid of failure.

Of course prolonged (or repeated) failure over time is a bad thing, but with online marketing we can try, measure, fail and improve over a few days (and in some cases over a few hours). Which is why we should all go analog.

So to get analog I suggest 4 things:

1. Find a way to be continually in tune with your market. The most obvious way is to set up Google alerts on your industry, competitors & markets. Or have pre-built streams in a social media tool like Hootsuite.
2. Get in to a real-time measurement mindset. Set up a daily dashboard in your CRM system, or a daily analytics reports from your web analytics tool.
3. Automate your analog-ness by investing in an automation platform (such as Silverpop) that can be constantly pinging your audiences with the right information at the right time.  All the time.
4. Set aside a small amount of your budget (say 10%) to spend exclusviely on experimental projects. Try that whacky ad copy or build a fun viral video. Even the most modest budgets can support experimentation.

Being analog is a state of mind, not a thing you can buy. The chances are your competitors have made the move already and are out-marketing you. They're out there right now, spoiling your digital perfection with their analog noise.

So, forget stalling and remember, practice makes perfect. So get playing!

[Infographic] Things I say a lot on Twitter (this time it isn't personal)

I love a nice visualization - and was really taken by my work/life profile as envisaged by vizify. 

Its a nice, easy to set-up service that takes your facebook, linked, twitter, instagram and foursquare data and mashes it up into 5 or 6 neat graphics, fronted by a cool home page. 

Of particular interest was the twitter infographic below (click thru for the real thing), showing the words I use the most. As you can see, i'm all about marketing, b2b & silverpop. Which is no surprise as I took the decision mid-2012 to restrict my twitter posting activity to work-only content (I do follow non-work folk, but its consumption only). This wasn't a keep-my-personal-life-private decision, just a realisation that most of my followers come to me thru work engagements, and that I got very little interaction on personal content. So, like any good publisher, I paid attention to my readership. I stopped sharing my kids' experiences, family dinners and weekend check-ins and concentrated my valuable time on stuff people wanted to read & share. Thereby saving me a whole lot of wasted hours looking at my iPhone in the process! That said, I do get personal over on instagram (public access) and Facebook (invitation only). 

So give vizify a go - not only does it show your most used words, it also show those that get the most shares. And who knows, you may get to know a little bit more about what the people want and save yourself a lot of effort!

Jon Hopkins, Forrester and the fight for attention in marketing

Recently I did something very unusual. I gave my full attention to some content.

I know, amazing right? It sounds a strange thing to say, but I've come to realise that for most of my waking hours I can't go 10 minutes without checking social media, "second screening" (or, worse still, "third screening") or flicking refresh on my iPhone to check my email.  

But, for once, I decided to check out of the digital firehose and focus. OK, so it happened to be music related. I'm an avid music fan and have 13,341 (i checked) songs in iTunes. And in this age of ADD, for most of my recent purchases I (sometimes) couldn't name the artist, (most of the time) couldn't name the track and (definitely) couldn't tell you the album name. But this time was different. It was the release of the new album "Immunity" by the London-based experimental electronic musician Jon Hopkins. Someone whom I admire a lot and, to use a marketing term, has a lot of "share of mind" with me. 

So on my daily train commute I put away my phone(s), kept my Kindle shut and just listened. And very enjoyable it was too!

But it did raise the question that in my professional life, how many of my target audience lavish such attention on the content I'm producing? It's said the average consumer is exposed to upwards of 30,000 marketing messages a day - on their way in to work, on radio/TV, in their email inbox, online and in social media. That's an amazing amount of noise to compete with, and no surprise that Fournaise Group estimate that the average consumer attention span is now 4 seconds.

And don't think this is just a B2C problem. I was recently speaking to someone at technology research firm Forrester who told me that their analysts have to cover at anywhere between 100 and 1,000 vendors. And of course, as human beings, they're doing well to know 12-15. Which poses "interesting" challenges for us vendors who want to be known in our respective sectors.

So our fight as marketers, whether its reaching through the 30,000 to get to our customers or making the final 12-15 of an analyst, is in getting attention. 

So how do we do it? This is what I think:

1. Stop: thinking that people care about your products as much as you do. Start: appreciating the attention game & really honing your messaging skills.
2. Stop: believing that people have the time to read, re-read and digest deep content. Start: thinking like an entertainment brand, and produce engaging, stimulating, even amusing bite size chunks of content.
3. Stop: spraying & praying, bombarding your database with emails timed to when it's convenient for you. Start: building behaviour-triggered messages, that are relevant to the individual and timed to when its best for them.

The solution is clear: marketing automation + content marketing are powerful forces in the fight for attention. Get them right, and you may be my next Jon Hopkins. Get ithem wrong and I won't even remember your name. On which note, its time for the new Boards of Canada album. 

Photo credit: http://foxgotbass.com/jon-hopkins/

Google, The Matrix & Getting Personal

I read a really interesting article in The Guardian recently that asked us to all stop thinking of Google+ as yet another social network but as The Matrix of the internet. Having a G+ account is not about participating in the G+ community, its about having a passport (remember that Microsoft terminology, funnily enough released the same year as The Matrix?) that gets stamped everytime you cross the borders of content, data and interactions. Watch a Youtube video, ask directions on a Google map, click on a search result or open a Gmail message and all of these interactions are recorded and used to better personalise your Google-based experiences.

Of course, the jury is out on whether this is a good or bad thing. We continue to tread the line between wanting better experiences and not wanting to have our privacy invaded. But the future is inevitable - we will get more unique interactions from brands. Consumer demand is too strong.

I, like many, am fed up with the impersonal, irrelevant and downright annoying content shoved in my digital face on a daily basis. I've also posted before about the woeful lack of personalisation from companies such as Apple. Especially (in Apple's case) when i've thrown my heart, soul & wallet into becoming a loyal customer. That in essence is behavioural marketing - letting brands tailor the experience within their owned web, email, social & mobile assets to hopefully make the consumer experience just a little less frustrating, and dare I say it, enjoyable.

And it doesn't have to Big Brother/Borg/Vogon-like either. You have enough explicit information to personalise your marketing today, without the need for covert operations. Consider the wealth of behavioural data you have already: 

• Email : opens, click thrus, time of day preferred, device used
• Web : views, downloads, visit history, device used (again)
• Social : likes, shares, posts/comments
• eCommerce : cart abandonment, items purchased, previous purchases
• CRM : customer segment, age, marital status, location, preferences
• ...and so on.

So I welcome anything that helps to ease my digital day. Even if we tag it as something as menacing as The Matrix. And nothing could be more gratefully received then on today, my very birthday, a personalised Google Doodle (see below) wishing me Happy Birthday.  As I've always said, It's the little things...

Practice what you preach - a powerful way to market yourself

Many of us are in the lucky position to sell products that we ourselves can use in our own business operations. SFA, CRM, ERP, business intelligence, web analytics, email marketing and marketing automation are all great examples that aim to make the life of the sales/marketer easier and can be demonstrated in anger by the companies making them.

By how often have you dug deeper into these companies and come up with the old "Cobbler's Children" adage. Turns out the producers of the tools are just as immature in the use of their own tools as the companies they're trying to sell to. Sales people in some CRM vendors don't update the system with their activities and BI companies ​use Excel for analysis & reporting. You get the idea.

Which is why I'm extremely proud that the all new silverpop.com is a model example of what behavioural marketing can be. The site demonstrates what is possible from a behavioural marketing approach, listening out for behavioural cues from individuals and self-optimising to deliver the perfect, individualised customer experience.

Or put more simply, the more you use it, the more it learns and the more it serves up a personalised experience built just for you.​

Here are just six things (and one "...and finally") I love about the site:

1.  Social Sign-In which allows individuals to automatically populate a form with their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google and, most importantly for B2B organisations, Salesforce.com account.​

2. A personalised sidebar which serves up relevant content based on information gained through progressive profiling:

​3. A resources section that displays case studies and other pertinent content based on my specific industry:

4. Personalised contact information on who to speak to in Silverpop, based on data in our CRM system (in my example BTW i get a generic contact)

​5.​ A view of my interaction history with Silverpop (downloads, emails received etc.):

6. The opportunity to self opt-in to nurture programs (wow!):

...and finally:​

I love that our company website has become a living, breathing commercially active demonstration of what we can achieve. No canned demo or screen show. A powerful message to our prospects that we practice what we preach. And also an open, honest, transparent view of what we do. Something I believe all brands in a similar position should try & do.​

The power of great story telling in marketing

I was absolutely blown away by the volume (and quality) of tweets that came from the delegates at our Silverpop Connect Dubai event yesterday. I've snapped some of them here during my session, which made up just 45 minutes in an all day programme.

Much is talked of the role of social media in the Arab Spring of 2010/2011, but my point isn't necessarily to do with that. Dubai isn't a hotbed of political unrest and upheaval anywhere near comparable to Egypt and Tunisia.

My point has to do with the power of storytelling, and the basic need of us humans to communicate.​ Being a relative novice in doing business in the Middle East, I'm told its a very relationship-based region. You have to get to know people and build trust. And I saw some of that at this week's event.

Trust only comes when you have a story that is believable and credible. If you have a good story, tell it in an interesting/timely/relevant manner and relate it to the issues/wants/needs/desires of your audience then you'll go a long way.​ Story tellers and raconteurs have known this for years, and this core human skill has been practiced around campfires, in bars and over the dinner table for centuries. Social media gives the individual the uber-megaphone to tell or share a great story, and I'm pleased to say the story we had to tell in Dubai was ripe for repeating.

As marketers, we should continually bear in mind the power of having a great story when trying to build an emotional connection with consumers or business customers. ​Get the story right first and the channels will do the rest.

Finally, you'll see below a snapshot of the twitter activity, curated as a Storify. Have fun & enjoy the story!​