Don’t turn your idea company into job shop factory

One of the biggest obstacles for all medium and small agencies to avoid is to devolve from an idea company to a job shop. A job shop just executes the work with no plan or strategy.

Financial pressure has been so great for agencies to “just satisfy the client” that innovative ideas become rare the longer the client and agency relationship lasts. The thinking goes as follows: Why take a chance in upsetting the clients (who tend to be conservative in their marketing approach) with an innovative new idea? Revisit your client relations in 2019 and see whether you can apply the same strategy that landed you the client in the first place.

Strategy for Media Buying

Don’t be complacent. Reevaluate the media you’re buying, both traditional and digital. Many media companies have been bought and sold over the last eighteen months. Ratings, impressions, and rates have changed. Contact all your media reps and ask them whether they have new metrics or rates to share with you in 2019. The value you received in 2018 from a media company might be better spent with another media company in 2019.

That goes for digital, too. AdWords is still a valuable marketing platform for most businesses. However, its cost has increased exponentially over the last ten years. Contextual Facebook ads, including Instagram Story ads, are still undervalued (in our opinion). There is a huge opportunity in using these platforms that should continue through 2019.

LinkedIn ads are still pretty pricey, but organic reach is still very effective, especially if you’re a business-to-business (B2B) company. Continue to use the platform to post engaging content this year.

Strategy for Creative

Because creative is so subjective, the tendency for agencies is to play it safe and not be a disrupter. It is so difficult to cut through the clutter of ads these days that it requires you, as the agency, to persuade your clients to embrace the emotional card of creative, either through humor or authenticity. Yeah, it’s scary to walk into a client’s boardroom with your team and present a brand new idea, but isn’t that your job? Your years of experience in the communications and ad world, following case studies of successful national campaigns, should give you the ability to articulate your argument for presenting new cutting-edge creative.

And while we’re mentioning “ads,” be careful of the hard sell. Unless you want to compete entirely on price, you need to include some value to your client’s product or service beyond just price. The trend has been moving away from “ads” and toward documentary storytelling about your client’s business and his or her brand. Anybody under forty will tell you they don’t want to be sold.

Quality and Quantity Content Developer

Now that each company can become its own publisher and media company, a huge amount of digital content must be created on a weekly basis for every business. This means creating blogs, photos, and videos for websites and social pages.

Almost every company will be falling far short on the amount of digital content needed to sustain its brand in 2019.

This year, have the conversation with your clients to help them ramp up the amount of content they need to stay competitive and provide for them high-quality content, especially video, that you, as an agency, should be capable of producing. Make it easy for your clients’ customers and prospects to have multiple touch points to their brand each week by building lots of quality content.

Less Advertising and More Documentary Storytelling

Unless you want your company to be known as just a commodity, you will have to include some storytelling, authenticity, and transparency in how their business works. How many times have you visited a company’s “About” page on its website and found just a trite sales pitch with no story about the company, no photographs of the management staff, and no explanation of why the company exists? Clients tend to take the “who, what, where, and how” of their brand for granted because they live it every day. They assume their customers live it, too.

Include a Philanthropic Component

It seems obvious, but if your clients’ businesses have been established with some success, they will want to give back. If they have a business-to-consumer (B2C) company, it’s even more important. There are a multitude of ways to do this.

If your clients feature charity events, volunteer your time (for no fee) to document the day through blogs, photos and videos, and social media platforms such as Facebook Live. You will feel just as rewarded as they do after the event.

Get excited! Your 2019 agency will have lots of new opportunity, particularly if you keep you and your team looking forward.

Cerami Creative is a full-service digital and traditional marketing company founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1995. Cerami Creative has worked with national, regional, and local companies like Yuengling Beer, Penn Medicine, and Rita’s Water Ice. For a free evaluation of your company’s marketing strategy, contact Cerami Creative at info@CeramiCreative.com or call 215-893-3004.

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If you have read anything on marketing communications or spoken to a marketing company expert in the past fifteen years, you have heard the advice to develop “a story” for your brand.

“What exactly do you mean . . . a story?”

For a company’s brand communication, a story, on the most basic level, consists of three acts: setup (explain the situation), conflict (explain the challenge or pain point within that industry while illustrating drama), and resolution (explain how that company resolved the conflict with its service or product). During the resolution portion of the story, you also want to include the capabilities of the company, including case studies, marquee clients, number of years the company has been in business, and awards and accreditation the company has received.

Whether you are writing content for a company’s “about” page on its website, writing a script for a radio or TV spot, or producing a company profile video, this blueprint remains the same.

A Company Video Story

Recently, we had the pleasure of producing a profile video for a company called BenefitVision (click video thumbnail above).  BenefitVision offers benefit packages to companies throughout the United States. It allows Human Resources to outsource their benefits for employees, directly to BenefitVision. The business model frees up the workload of Human Resources and enables companies’ employees to receive a very detailed and hands-on approach when choosing a custom benefit package. BenefitVision’s clients include the Coca-Cola Bottling Company, Los Angeles County public employees, and Pep Boys.

If you have viewed the video (this is the six-and-a-half-minute version. We have also created shorter versions for their sales staff and social media pages), you will notice the first thirty seconds describes the setup—what is happening in the industry. The second minute has the CEO explain, in a compelling and dramatic tone, the conflict within the benefits industry (notice the music bed we chose for this portion of the video to increase the drama). The final part of the video (from about the 1:40-minute mark until the end) consists of the resolution. Also notice the change in music here. It is up-tempo, hopeful, and optimistic.

Readers, listeners, and viewers are more engaged when your marketing message contains a story.

The Psychology of Using a Story

The advantage of designing your communication this way, as opposed to just creating a sales video trumpeting your assets, is that it draws in your audience by showing conflict and characterizing pain points.

Human psychology has always favored stories resulting in the listener or viewer being engaged in the outcome.

As Kimberly A. Whitler, a former Proctor & Gamble marketing manager, says in her July, 2018, Forbes article, “Storytelling enables marketers to develop a deeper connection with the audience. Storytelling is a fundamental human experience that unites people and drives stronger, deeper connections.” See the complete article here: https://goo.gl/vJWX5f.

Great Salespeople Make Great Storytellers

By the way, we have noticed that many CEOs who started successful businesses using their stellar sales abilities are expert storytellers. If you are one of them, get your story on video and market it on your website and social media platforms.

As you develop your next campaign, try applying the story model to your communication. If you execute it authentically, you will see better engagement than you’ll see with just a selling-and-telling communication.

Cerami Creative is a full-service digital and traditional marketing company founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1995. Cerami Creative has worked with national, regional, and local companies like Yuengling Beer, Penn Medicine, and Rita’s Water Ice. For a free evaluation of your company’s marketing strategy, contact Cerami Creative at info@CeramiCreative.com or call 215-893-3004

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Video production is one of the key services we provide for our advertising and marketing clients. In the last three years, that has included Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS, or drone) video and photography.

To protect our clients from lawsuits, we acquired a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Part 107 commercial UAS pilot certificate and an aviation liability insurance policy.

On many occasions, we have had clients request aerial video and surveying of their businesses only to find that they were located in FAA-controlled, no-fly airspace, in and around airports. That includes Class B, C, D, and E airspace. The FAA has provided a waiver application system to fly in C, D, and E airspace, but that application process takes ninety days or more. We obtained various waivers for local airports, but they often expired after six months.

Class Bravo airspace, like the Philadelphia International Airport, had no waiver system. That meant whole parts of Philadelphia, like South Philly, Southwest Philly, West Philly, and even parts of Southern New Jersey like Paulsboro and Deptford, were no-fly zones for drones—ever!

LAANC is Brand New

PHL; Philadelphia International Airport LAANC Map

That all changed in September 2018. The FAA now provides a system called Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability (LAANC), a collaboration between the FAA and industry. It directly supports UAS integration into the airspace around key larger airports.

The LAANC system now contains over five hundred US airports (view the airports on the FAA website here: https://goo.gl/7Ni9xR). Through an online portal, Part 107-certificated UAS pilots can now apply for a waiver in controlled airspace and receive permission almost instantaneously.

LAANC; How it Works

The FAA has determined that a certain part of controlled airspace will be out of the way of manned aircraft and safe for UAS pilots to fly to no more than four hundred feet above ground level (the FAA maximum allowed level for UAS operations except in the case of a structure).

The map shows a series of grid boxes within each controlled airspace that is one minute of longitude wide and one minute of latitude tall. That makes each box about one square mile (please see the illustration of the Philadelphia International Airport, PHL, LAANC map).

The red number in the middle of the box is the maximum altitude, in feet, above ground that the FAA will approve for UAS operation. As you might expect, approaches to runways have a 0-foot maximum or no-fly zone for a UAS. As you move farther away from where manned aircraft would be approaching runways, you will find grids with 50, 100, 150, 200, 300, and 400 feet above the ground markings. The entire grid system is superimposed over a choice of maps, such as one that denotes street names. You can locate the exact area where you will be flying, create an application online, and receive almost instantaneous airspace authorization.

We hope all business owners are prudent enough to hire only certificated UAS pilots with an aviation liability policy. Make sure you and your UAS vendor are aware of this brand-new technology that makes the waiver application process for flying in FAA-controlled airspace seamless.

Cerami Creative is a full-service digital and traditional marketing company founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1995. Cerami Creative has worked with national, regional, and local companies like Yuengling Beer, Penn Medicine, and Rita’s Water Ice. For a free evaluation of your company’s marketing strategy, contact Cerami Creative at info@CeramiCreative.com or call 215-893-3004. For a link to their UAS (drone) services website, go to www.WingsVideosUSA.com.

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This Casey Neistat YouTube video illustrates Vaynerchuk’s point: https://youtu.be/a49xvHviVds. In the video, Smith drops by Neistat’s Manhattan studio for a tour. When he gets ready to leave in his limousine, all the fans on the street, except two, bypass Smith and congregate around Neistat, who has 10 million YouTube followers. It’s astonishing to see only two fans on a Manhattan street trying to get a picture with Smith or ask him for an autograph, while Neistat is deluged by fans—whoa!

This is the future for your business marketing, folks. Social media and online marketing, where your company regularly pumps out compelling content—text, still images, and especially video—is like TV advertising was in the 1950s. It’s scary and exciting.

It’s scary because most companies are still trying to understand how to do it correctly, just like the first brave advertisers who jumped into TV advertising in the 1950s. Google some of those early local or even national TV spots. They were awful in their execution.

It’s exciting because, right now, it’s relatively cheap, and it’s completely democratized, creating a level platform for businesses of every size. You as a business can be a publisher and a TV network, instantly. And you don’t need an FCC license.

The people we meet with at many companies understand that social media and online marketing are part of their marketing mix, but they dabble in it without developing a 365-day-per-year strategy.

Some just post sales content without offering much value to their followers. Others don’t know how to optimize their posts for maximum engagement.

Always check your engagement—the number of people interacting with your posts and the number of views your videos receive. Still images receive more engagement than text content does. And video content, especially if it’s compelling, receives more engagement than still images do.

Many of us are guilty of not generating enough high-quality content. But if you put this in perspective, ten years from now, you may ask yourself what was so difficult about it. Of course, by then, all your competitors will have the same hindsight, and the cost to advertise on these platforms will be much greater.

As an experienced marketing company, we know—even us guys who are not so young—that you will look back on this time as a golden opportunity for when your company should have begun to employ a well-developed and reasonably priced online marketing strategy.

Will Smith has started his own YouTube channel seven months ago that chronicles his personal and professional life, albeit, it looks like he has hired professionals to shoot the video for him. Most YouTubers shoot their videos, themselves.

Smith, a hometown Philly guy whom I had the pleasure of meeting during my early Philly radio days, looked a little befuddled out there on Broadway in New York City with only two fans around him. But at least he understands where he needs to go next to sustain his worldwide brand.

Cerami Creative is a full-service digital and traditional marketing company founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1995. Cerami Creative has worked with national, regional, and local companies like Yuengling Beer, Penn Medicine, and Rita’s Water Ice. For a free evaluation of your company’s marketing strategy, contact Cerami Creative at info@CeramiCreative.com or call 215-837-8194.

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As marketers, we are the experts in the art and science of communication. There are only three considerations when communicating a message: what the communication says, what the medium is, and what the recipient perceives. Any other consideration is irrelevant. The art and science of these communications (the difficult part) is understanding that all three considerations are constantly evolving. That means you as a marketer must have a keen sense of what is happening in the marketplace including everything from understanding the current cultural whims to understanding the economy and how it affects various psychographic groups you will be targeting. Marketers get in trouble when they apply yesterday’s rules to today’s communications. And boy, have the rules changed.

Nothing illustrates this point more than the current presidential race. All the rules of marketing, packaging, and gross rating points for purchased media have been thrown out of the window. It is simply not working anymore.

What is working is authenticity; or to be more cynical, perceived authenticity. Americans are more media savvy now than at any other time in history. The populist success of Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sander’s campaigns is based entirely on their authenticity. Americans are so desperate for truth in the marketing messages they consume, something that is not prepackaged and is not slickly sold to them, that they are grasping onto candidates they perceive as authentic even if they occasionally say outrageous things.

Perhaps it is a result of being exposed to fifteen years of reality TV and listening to characters on TV who espouse ridiculous and profane remarks. Maybe it is the result of being exposed to years of mostly unfiltered content from social media. Nonetheless, they see these candidates as authentic. They are willing to accept flawed authenticity over slick, prepackaged, and pandering candidates because they seem more “real.” The only question they ask is, “Do they appear to ‘walk the walk’ or ‘talk the talk’?”

Yes, the pandering prepackaged politician is on life support. As is the talking-head news pundit, especially with Millennials and Generation Zs. With new media readily available to anyone with an Internet connection, Americans can research any political topic. Political blog websites like Drudge and Brietbart on the right and Salon, Huffingtonpost, and Media Matters on the left, and all of their connected links to other news sites and blogs, can make any person just as informed as any talking head “expert” on television.

New media and the resulting democratization of information also give the public complete insight into a business. Websites like Yelp and Glassdoor give anyone with a smart phone and an Internet connection the power to know everything about a company in about an hour. This new media environment has profound implications on us as marketers, for businesses, and for communications as we relate to our customers. Through traditional media, their websites, their social media pages, and their public relations (PR) messages, businesses should all speak with the same overarching brand message. The message should be authentic, and it should not insult their customer’s intelligence.

As a CEO, CMO, or company spokesperson, you cannot make a misstep in your communications to the public. Trying to cover up a crisis or communicate an inauthentic message is a recipe for disaster. You would think that companies as large as Chipotle or Volkswagen would understand that. But they did not.

Chipotle, the fast, casual restaurant chain has been riding a wave of great branding for years. They were one of the first brands to offer an alternative to fast food chains like McDonalds, with perceived healthier food, more customized meals, a worker empowered staff, and a sensitivity to social issues. Customers embraced the brand with true affection. Then, the bottom fell out.

Chipotle’s PR disaster followed a string of food-borne illnesses in its outlets in August. The stock lost 35 percent of its value in six months. The company’s founder and CEO, Steve Ells, apologized for the outbreaks in a December 10 interview on NBC’s Today Show. Why didn’t they do that immediately?

Volkswagen’s PR disaster followed an emissions scandal, which revealed that software had helped the company circumvent emission rules, rather than undergo the necessary engine modifications—modifications that would have added to production costs. It is going to take an extraordinary amount of time and effort to get customers to trust the Volkswagen brand again.

Companies need to understand this dynamic when applying it to their creative, both digitally and traditionally. It affects everything from the tone of their TV ads to their digital media communications. Marketing messages that insult the audience’s intelligence by hyping a message or an ad are just as inauthentic as a politician promising the “same ol’, same ol’.” That leaves only three kinds of effective creative for marketing communications these days. Those are: unique selling propositions, commodity-like products and services, and the truly genuine and authentic.

Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Your product or service should solve a real problem for your customers. A problem that other companies cannot fix and have not thought of how to fix. Often times you will see these products marketed on QVC or HSN because it requires more than thirty seconds to communicate their benefits or USP. A USP product or service is also a good place to invest in Google keywords or building a strategic social media-selling plan. If it is truly a USP, then the Google keywords surrounding your business or service are probably not priced too high, especially if you choose variations on the keywords.

If your USP is a little less obvious, then you need your website and social media pages to relay the story. Find the unique story in your company and elaborate on it with compelling content including writings, images, and video. Every piece of content should flow from your company story.

Commodity-Like Products and Services

If you are selling a commodity-like product or service, your advertising should fall under this category. Seventy percent of products and services fall under this category and this is where a branding campaign is most effective. Rather than force a hard-to-distinguish USP into your communications, this is a great opportunity to use humor, distinct design, or distinct music, particularly with spot advertising or on-line videos. Creating an emotional response to your marketing message using one or more of these elements provides an opportunity to bypass the skepticism that people have toward advertising. Remember, you are starting at less than zero with your audience when you are selling something. Would you walk into a cocktail party by sticking out your business card and immediately attempting to sell your product or service? No. Worse yet, when communicating your message using a TV, radio, computer, or mobile device, you are invading the recipient’s personal space. Should you leap out of the box with a sales pitch? No. You must first engage them.

If you can infuse humor or drama within your message and make it distinct, both in the visual and aural sense, it will disarm your prospect’s natural skepticism towards advertising and marketing. In addition, an emotional message creates a marker in the human mind that other marketing messages are not able to do. This is scientifically proven fact based on neuroscience studies in marketing.[1]

The less unique your product or service, the more important the emotion and the execution. Telegraphing a message that says you have a USP when all you really have is another unexceptional commodity and without an emotional connection within the creative, will render your message impotent by insulting the audience’s intelligence. It is imperative to use superior design, humor, or drama to communicate emotionally and effectively. Additionally, if you are using traditional advertising to attract people to your website, the message must be simple to understand, yet distinct in its delivery. The goal is to drive your prospects to your website and social media pages where you can further engage them with great content.

The self-effacing or analogous advertising campaigns have been one of the most effective creative strategies for marketers. By creating an over-the-top character within your marketing communications,[2] you are inviting the recipient in on the joke by disarming their natural contempt of old school “sell and tell” advertising. Neuroscience and behavioral studies have tested people using an MRI machine while they were watching a humorous or genuinely heartfelt TV ad or online video. There are visible changes within the subject’s brain waves resulting in the viewer being more apt to like or accept products or services.[1]

From here, it is a question of exceptional digital content (a compelling story, writings, images, and videos) on your website and social media pages. The longer you can keep them engaged (quantified with pages viewed, time spent, and bounce rate), the better chance that your prospect becomes a customer, and your customer becomes an advocate for your brand. Examples of effective campaigns that you have seen are Direct TV using humor or Apple and Kohler Faucets using design and music.[3]

Note that even the lowly direct response communication has been most successful when they began with a distinct, outlandish, almost self-effacing TV ad. Remember Vince Offer selling ShamWow? Who can forget Tony Little selling exercise equipment while yelling his catch phrase: “You can do it!”? Both characters set sales records for the direct response products they pitched.

Truly Genuine and Authentic

This approach works best for non-profits and for serious health related issues. They often use heartfelt testimonial videos to communicate their message. Examples of this category include hospitals, cancer treatment centers, and non-profits like Wounded Warriors and Shriner’s Hospitals. It should only be used for products or services if the execution is flawless. It should seek some USP in the company story (e.g., the Budweiser Clydesdales ads), but be careful here. Audiences are so skeptical, if there is a hint of inauthenticity, this approach will have the complete opposite effect, creating apathy or worse, contempt for your product or service.

If you can combine two of the three approaches above, your message will be even more effective. Consider Geico. Their advertising has always been entertaining and self-deprecating. Their USP goes back to their first campaign: “15 minutes can save you 15% on your car insurance.” At the time (2001), using the Internet when shopping for car insurance was truly a unique selling proposition. As companies like Progressive Insurance and Farmers Insurance (with actor J.K. Simmons) chipped away at Geico’s USP, Geico has had to rely more on the entertainment quotient in their advertising and marketing.

As we plan our marketing for 2016 and beyond, we should take into account the ever-increasing cost of traditional and digital paid advertising. Should we revaluate our marketing message? What sense is getting huge gross rating’s points and massive impressions if your message is not resonating with your audience? Jeb Bush spent over one hundred thirty million dollars in his failed presidential campaign. Donald Trump has spent about thirty million. Couldn’t you get an improved ROI on your marketing dollars if you focused more on the quality of your message and how it is delivered (using the right mix of traditional, digital, and PR)?

We see business marketing executives brag about their low cost per point (CPP) or the large number of gross impressions they have, but then they deliver a marketing message that is benign, pedestrian, or that insults the audience’s intelligence with tired “selling and telling” marketing.

Consider the monumental shift in how people perceive communications in 2016. Now review your communications and the message. Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sanders’ success in the poles are clearly examples of how voters consume media. Take a lesson from them for your company communications.

[1] For more information, see Douglas Van Praet, Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2014).

[2] Examples include Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man” and the Geico gecko.

[3] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIWiV1AQoas

Cerami Creative is a full-service digital and traditional marketing company founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1995. Cerami Creative has worked with national, regional, and local companies like Yuengling Beer, Penn Medicine, and Rita’s Water Ice. For a free evaluation of your company’s marketing strategy, contact Cerami Creative at info@CeramiCreative.com or call 215-837-8194.

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Start Working Those Visual Content Muscles

High-quality visual content in the form of still images and video is paramount to communicating your marketing message, both online and in traditional advertising. Most traditional marketers have understood the importance of this in their traditional advertising for decades. But with the growing focus on keyword strategy and other written content, they have forgotten to apply that knowledge to their online media.

Website content and social media posts should always have, at a minimum, an accompanying high-quality image. The best marketers also include regularly produced video content. Short videos (no longer than two minutes) can be in the form of customer testimonials or key company personnel explaining the value proposition of the company’s products or services.

This past year, we assisted clients in setting up small spaces for video recording within their company facilities. Some clients have forwarded the raw video back to us for quick editing and adding necessary b-roll, music, and additional voice-over.

Adding regularly scheduled video content to your company’s YouTube page also builds your SEO score. Remember, YouTube is owned by Google and is the second-biggest search engine.

As you fine-tune your company’s marketing strategy in 2016, understand the power of quality visual content in your digital and traditional marketing efforts.

See the story by Media Post’s Jack Loechner on the latest neuroscience studies of the power of visual content in communication: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/267368/what-you-see-is-what-you-get.html

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Earlier this year, we were told by one of our retail automotive clients that he needs more “ups” in one of his dealership showrooms. For those of you outside the retail automotive business, “ups” are the prospective customers who drive directly to the dealership when they are shopping for a new car, truck, or SUV. We pointed out that if he looked in his CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software system, he would find that we had grown his online leads from just under 700 to over a 1,000 and his appointments from 198 to 270 in four months. The problem was that after viewing the CRM data, the dealership sales staff never followed up on the leads or even on the people who had made online appointments.

As you might have guessed, the way people are buying retail products has changed dramatically over the last five years. During this past January’s NADA (North American Dealers Association) convention in San Francisco, almost every seminar that discussed marketing for automotive dealerships  showed that the vast majority of all car buyers (one automotive 2015 study has this figure at 80 percent) begin their shopping online, whether they were motivated to go to the website by a radio or TV ad or they just did an online search for the best price on a particular make and model in their geographic area. Five years ago, the average person visited five dealerships. Today, they visit 1.5. If they are under forty-five years old, they visit even fewer (see https://youtu.be/CNL0XjovbIM).

Expect the number of retail visits to drop even more when the final data is released for 2015. According to Rocket Fuel and Qualtrics, who surveyed 600 retail buyers for the 2015 holiday season, the following changes represent the shift from in-store buying to online buying for retail in the 2015 holiday season (from 2014):

Automotive: +35%

Appliances: +96% (WOW!)

Games and Toys: +15%

Sports and Outdoor Gear: +19%

(Source: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Will-Consumers-Flock-Stores-Online-Holiday-Purchases/1013311).

There are also categories that continue to dominate in-store buying, but these tend to be more personal items such as jewelry, clothing, beauty, and cosmetics and items with hundreds of categories and subcategories such as housewares and home and garden supplies.

The trend is the more commodity-like your product is, the more you will find your customers doing the majority of their shopping online and stopping by the retail store just to complete the sale and pick up their product (if they haven’t made the entire purchase online).

As an owner or general manager selling these commodity-like products, it is imperative that you have a comprehensive retail marketing strategy, from initial engagement (perhaps using distinct and impressive creative in your traditional media) to inquiries (including lightning-fast responses to e-mails, texts, and even phone calls) to online shopping and e-commerce pages that use your digital marketing strategies. We foresee, in the not-too-distant future, retailers such as automotive adding several experienced digital marketing salespeople to their business development center to focus entirely on online sales.

A CRM system such as Salesforce or Infusionsoft will give you the ability to track all of your prospects through different levels of the sales process and as they traverse your sales funnel. Furthermore, this system gives you, as an owner or CMO, the ability to instantly track and measure the results of your salespeople. Lastly, it creates a direct link between your marketing and the sales results, allowing you to tweak the marketing strategy until you get the best ROI.

Sometimes marketing strategies are based on just providing the best price, but they should also be based on offering great value through customer service. Use your retargeting strategies to keep the item in front of your customers no matter what other websites they visit.

If you are a retailer in 2016, understand that your “ups” are no longer just people who arrive in your retail showroom (or store), ready to be sold to. They are now the unseen and savvier digital shoppers poking around your website. You had better be there to greet them, engage them with compelling content and timely responses, and close them online, if necessary.

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Soon after I posted the article, I received a few comments about the article from a radio executive. His first comment touted the value of radio; his second bashed display ads on the Internet; and his third called the article “the dumbest thing I ever read.”

Whoa! I never realized that what I considered a fairly innocuous article could generate such a negative response! I suppose the commenter was upset because the article did not specifically point to radio as a medium to consider when engaging this particular generation. However, it was clear to me that the article had implied that radio should be part of the traditional strategy mix, even though TV was the only traditional medium I mentioned. (A side note: We absolutely believe in the power of radio as part of the marketing arsenal. In fact, we use the commenter’s radio station for one of our clients.)

Last month I was invited to listen to a television sales executive speak about the values of using TV advertising in a world where digital advertising grows stronger every year. The presentation began with information regarding the new analytics and metrics available to TV advertisers to measure ROI on your TV advertising budget. But it soon evolved into a lecture on how to counter the digital marketing firms banging at the door of the advertisers and asking for a larger share of the marketing budget. At one point, the speaker referred to digital marketing firms as simple “resellers” of Google AdWords campaigns. His remarks, however, didn’t take into account the value of using an experienced AdWords buyer to ensure that an advertiser does not overpay for broad keywords or phrases when choosing and measuring the correct AdWords.

A few months ago I attended a seminar on digital marketing and heard the principal of a digital marketing firm condemn traditional media as “antiquated,” overly expensive, and almost completely ineffective.

In the midst of all this vitriol coming from the digital and the traditional sides, are we marketers doing our clients any favors?

Brad Jakeman, president of PepsiCo Global, commented in a recent Ad Age magazine article about the horrific state of current advertising and marketing, and bashed the polluting nature of campaigns without engagement. He also admonished readers to stop using the term “digital marketing” because it is too limiting.

I agree, but only up to a point. All of these “channels” or “touch points” to the consumer are changing at warp speed, converging into one communications octopus with numerous tentacles. Soon it will be difficult to distinguish what is digital from what is traditional, what is viral, what is public relations, and so forth.

Until we have a new lexicon that everyone is conformable with, we will just have to use the existing terms of “digital” or “new,” “traditional,” and “PR”—as long as we know they all need to be employed in unison in order to have a proficient marketing plan.

Think of the marketing mix like baking a cake: We need to choose just the right ingredients, in the right amounts, in order to create the perfect-tasting cake—or, in this analogy, to put into place a potent and effective marketing plan for our clients. The “right” recipe requires us to look at the individual businesses and their industry and study what’s happening in the marketplace. For example, should we increase market share from competitors if it’s a saturated market, or should we target new prospects who might not have considered the service or product? Then we review the existing budget and employ a multistreamed marketing plan.

As the marketing landscape stands today, TV and radio are amazingly effective, but they are most effective if they are used for reach and for emotional branding at the top of the sales funnel. Once we engage prospects and bring them further into the sales funnel, our digital strategies can be most valuable, particularly if they are used with our clients’ CRM systems.

As prospects reach our website, it is imperative to track and engage our prospects all the way through the process and, finally, convert them into customers. Many companies fall short here because they don’t have an internal team to monitor these prospects. In many retail businesses, if a prospect is not engaged by someone in the company within twenty minutes, the customer leaves your sales funnel and goes to a competitor’s. That means your investments in traditional media to bring them into your sales funnel and the investments you made in your digital strategies are completely wasted.

The other sad result of all this conflict is that compelling, creative has suffered. Even national companies are no longer paying attention to emotionally driven branding campaigns; instead, they are churning out forgettable and often benign creative. However, the idea is to begin with a distinct brand that generates large initial engagement by bringing prospects into the top of the sales funnel. If done successfully, that initial step is followed by a digital strategy that simultaneously reinforces the brand message while taking the prospect further down the sales funnel, focusing more on selling proposition and price. If you execute your strategy this way, the results are high rates of conversions to sales.

Often, we focus so much attention to only one or two ingredients in the marketing cake mix (and don’t see immediate results), that we forget to measure the other ingredients (and lose site of the macro vision of the marketing plan).  When it doesn’t work, we quickly discard the strategy for a new plan. Really, though, seeing the entire marketing process through (done correctly) takes patience and endurance. After all, people are bombarded with 5,000 messages a day. If you are a CEO or CMO and your company does not have the resources to afford a full, experienced marketing team, then it is essential to hire a marketing firm that has the acumen to apply the right amount of marketing  (within your budget) to each communications channel.

The good news is this: plenty of metrics and analytical tools exist to measure the success of your marketing channels, and that includes measuring your traditional media.

 The challenge is to get the cake mix recipe perfect to maximize your marketing ROI.  And that includes putting together a well-crafted creative strategy that has traction from the beginning. It’s more complex than ever—and not for the faint of heart. For the sake of our clients, let’s understand this, stop whacking each other’s media, and work together to increase our clients’ profits through great marketing. If we can help you navigate the marketing maze, please contact us.

If your company’s marketing is not producing a ROI, contact us today at 215-893-3004. And to view our video on traditional marketing versus digital marketing, click here: https://youtu.be/reB8bm7330A. Also, be sure to see our case studies and client work.

Frank Cerami is President and founder of Cerami Creative , a full-service digital and traditional marketing company founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1995. Cerami Creative has worked with national, regional, and local companies like Yuengling Beer, Penn Medicine, and Rita’s Water Ice.

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