The Marketer knows best? Timing and unsubscribes

It's been a rather long blogging break - It's fair to say I have had neither the brain space nor the motivation to pick up the laptop in the evening and think about it. The last six weeks have been an amazing, if somewhat daunting, period of adjusting into life as a Marketer instead of a PR. It really has been fantastic though, and I'm so grateful for how supportive my new team have been.

The inspiration to get back on the blogging-wagon finally came this weekend. Into my inbox on Saturday morning came my first Christmas marketing email, courtesy of M&S.

My immediate reaction was "Noooooooo!!!!!! Way too soon to be thinking about Christmas." I posted this on Facebook, and immediately got a response from a fellow Communications professional to tell me to "Unsubscribe." This came as a surprise to me. I generally like the marketing emails I get from M&S. I like the brand and you can guarantee that I will actually be doing a lot of my Christmas shopping in there. So other than hitting the delete button I wasn't intending to take any action. Should one bad email campaign turn me off to all future campaigns?

I found myself wondering how many brands get it wrong, with trigger finger recipients like my friend immediately opting out from all future contact. Given the number of email campaigns a large business sends out, the risk of damaging those customer relationships with the wrong call to action is pretty high. So how to counter this?

Well, for one thing, one could compare the brand advocacy involved. For me, the "wrong message" (from my point of view being too early) didn't please me, but it only dented what is a strong connection between me and the M&S brand. For my colleague, there could have been a much weaker connection between her and the brand for the reaction to be so extreme. Building relationships is a huge part of what marketing and communications is about. Building up capital is achieved by getting the right messages out at the right time, and providing a pleasing brand experience again and again. 

The other thing I've been wondering about is more complicated and isn't really a counter strategy at all: was the "wrong time" for me the "right time" for the majority of M&S customers? After the initial shock of thinking about Christmas in October was passed, I found myself wondering if it was me that was in the minority. There's actually only ten weeks of Christmas shopping left. That's a scary thought, but I guess some smart marketer knew that, and that October was the absolute right time to get people started on their planning. So basically, that premise that Marketing helps the consumer figure out what it is they want might genuinely be at play here…

What does your online presence say about your personal brand?

So I wouldn't describe myself as vain, but from time to time, I do check out my Google ranking. I found myself doing this today.

Flickr: Aray Chen

Firstly because I've just spent most of the last week out at meetings and conferences, which provide an amazing opportunity to meet new people who share the same fields and passions as me. Several people I met at a conference at the weekend are now connections on Twitter. Assuming they do the same thing I do when I am about to make a new connection, they would have checked out my online presence by either looking at my Twitter feed or blog.

Secondly because I just realised today, when I was researching some potential interview candidates for a job opening at SAGE, that you can no longer (could you ever?) view third-degree connections on LinkedIn unless you have a premium account. I'm not sure how long ago LinkedIn introduced premium accounts, or whether this has always been the case, but it was news to me. It made me wonder what the real value of a service like LinkedIn has for me, when what I really want to do is be able to quickly look up people that I've met at an event (or in this case that I'm about to meet), remind myself of who they are, then connect with them. So if someone is looking for that information about me, if they can't check me out on LinkedIn, where are they looking?

And thirdly because the topic of personal brand has been playing on my mind over the past few days. It started at home when Dan and I were chatting about the rise of the individual employee brand. This is a particularly hot issue in organizations driven by experts, like tech guys in start ups. They each have a personal brand tied to their expertise, which makes them credible within the tech community. But they can also use this brand to enhance that of their companies by leveraging that personal brand. As this article points out, this can be taken even further if you use the voice of your employees to create a personality for your business brand. Blog networks have been a great way to show the people behind a brand, build trust and advocacy. This in turn was fed on by conversations I had with fellow PRs up in Newcastle last Friday. We were talking about the rise of the 'CEO brand', and the power that good management of that voice can have on the broader business brand. I'm not even really talking about the much discussed 'Celebrity CEO', aka the Steve Jobs character. Rather, there are very charismatic figures at the head of organizations who use their social profiles to humanise their corporate brands. Now not everyone believes it's a good thing for CEOs to be building their social media profile, and I would agree it isn't right for every business or every industry. This Forbes post goes as far as to claim CEOs don't need to be strong communicators at all. I'm more inclined to agree with George Anders, who posts on what has worked successfully for CEOs on Twitter.

Somewhere between these three strands, I found myself wondering how sound my own personal brand is right now online. As the above shows, people are looking at your online profile. So do you know how yours looks? This Mashable article reminds us to apply what we know to be effective in PR and Marketing to our own personal identities. Here are just a few ideas:

• Be consistent.  I have to say, in the last three years having a strong online brand has been significantly easier than it had been prior to July 2009 for me, simply because I now have a much more unique name. I'm almost 100% certain that I am the only Mithu Lucraft in the world. That makes my search ranking almost immediately more likely to be accurate. But it isn't just about a name: having a clear naming convention across social channels helps too.
• Keep an active public profile. Regardless of whether it's just on Twitter, or using a variety of mediums, keep an active channel publicly available. Not only does this benefit search rankings but it also helps to clarify what your area of expertise and interest is. For a PR professional, being active on social media feels like a must: how can we advocate for social media if we don't understand how to use it ourselves?
• Be thematic. The best blogs I read have one consistent thread that runs through all posts. Readers then know what to expect from that blog. As this post sets out, an online presence should clarify who you are, what drives you, what your strengths are, how you're unique, and what value you bring.
• Be engaged. Don't just put messages out. Engage. Listen. Join in. Again, Twitter is such an easy channel to use for engagement: follow people that you relate to, respond to what they have to say, and have a conversation. Similarly, comment on the blogs that you rate. Build some connections, and in turn you'll find the same happens in return. 

Look for longer: a great campaign

You know you're reading a good book (which, it happens, I am) when you can't stop thinking about it, and every free minute you dive back into it. It would be fair to say the same is true for any media: really impactful TV, film, theatre and art have all done the same to me at one time or another.

This got me thinking on the way home tonight about the similar impact that marketing and advertising can have. You find yourself suddenly thinking about it or, in some cases, spending ages pouring over it, even though it really isn't something of great significance.

A case in point is a great campaign that CBS Outdoors have been running, called 'Look for Longer.' If you haven't seen it, be warned it has the potential to draw you in for some serious time wasting. In a good way. It asks you to interrogate an image with a number of London's tube stations cheekily disguised as images.

I came across it when a friend posted it to her Facebook wall. Sitting in bed, supposedly winding down, I found myself spending a good half hour looking at this picture and guessing what the pictures were. I then roped my husband into playing too. Then today, when writing this blog I just managed to spend another 20mins looking at it again!

I was at the ALPSP annual conference back in September where the oft-repeated buzzword of the event was, for me at least, 'gamification'. What a great example this campaign is. Gamification differs in some ways from the great book analogy, in that it also ties into the concept of competition. People get addicted to gaming because they are, by nature, programmed to want to do better than their peers. We want to win. I'm so interested in learning more on this that I just signed up for a Coursera module - more on that to come.

The thing about this campaign is it combines the gaming element with something visually stimulating that makes you want to look, and look for longer. And isn't that exactly what brands all want to achieve? If we're looking to engage, build brand advocates and trust, then inevitably we have to start with getting people to pay attention in the first place. Finding a hook to get people spending time on your site like this seems a great starting point to build conversation and engagement around.

Loyalty?

I was catching up on my blog feeds this morning and came across this post by Seth Godin. It's all about loyalty from customers. He makes the point that if you always delivered the best product on the market, that wouldn't necessarily engender a loyal following from your customers ("If your offering is always better, you don't have loyal customers, you have smart ones."). To have loyal customers, they have to be making a choice to buy your product service rather than look elsewhere. I won't summarise the post further than that - you can read it yourself.


What this started me thinking about was the routes various businesses take to build that loyalty, and what role marketing plays in that process. It's got to be the very values that underpin a business that dictate why a customer chooses them over another. In publishing for example, this may be in part down to the ethics of what kinds of books we'd be publishing: the topics and disciplines; the choices we make about authors' rights; the decisions we took on corporate social responsibility;  etc. 


I just got through reading a book (which I'll be writing a separate post about) called The E-Myth Revisited, which in one section discusses what it is that the founder of a particular company envisions for her business (a pie shop). She realises that she set up her shop as an ethically responsible, highly 'caring' company, without having done so purposefully. But having realised this, she identifies that this is what makes the shop special as a brand and has that to build on. In the publishing world again, a great example of this would be Alastair Sawday. Not only is the product he creates instantly recognizable for its personable charm, but the company itself has been set up as a highly ethical business, right through to having a small farm on site for its employees. With businesses like these two, there's a massively tangible brand value that has wide appeal to potential customers. And with such strong brand I think you are bound to garner strong loyalty.


Going back to Seth Godin's post, loyalty isn't something that is guaranteed to last. So this is the part where PR and Marketing have a key role to play. He talks about the relationships you have with loyal customers. What is your interaction? How do you reward them for being loyal?


I had someone tell me at a conference the other day that they'd spent a certain amount of money with an online retailer, and as a thank you had been given vouchers with which they could spend yet more money on that retailer's site. With offers like that, you get the double whammy of making that customer feel special, and at the same time giving them a reason to come back and shop again with you. Easier for some retailers than others? Perhaps, but it's food for thought...