Beware the Pettiness of Marketing Agencies
Photo by Kev Seto on Unsplash
One of my staff just spent the weekend rebuilding a new clients’ AdWords campaign that was “mysteriously” deleted without notice or cause.
What happened?
Traditional Media is expensive, therefore must be treated carefully. Split testing your ad copy is key, for that will in turn optimize conversion rates.
[Podcast] Lost Revenue Finder Live
We have this cool, free five-minute process we call Lost Revenue Finder. Through it, we can find out if you’re losing millions of dollars in Enrollment Revenue due to small oversights within your Enrollment Management process. Click here to try Lost Revenue Finder yourself.
We usually run this exercise one-to-one, but we thought it would be fun to ask listening schools to try it live.
[Podcast] Is it Time to Fire your Marketing Company? Education Marketing Strategies with ER
Is your marketing company helping or hurting you? Unfortunately, marketing companies can harm your school’s marketing efforts if they don’t have a proper understanding of the education sector. The same tricks that work in other industries may not be effective in the education field, or worse, may be detrimental to your school’s marketing efforts. At ER we have your back! Learn education marketing tactics that work and indicators that your marketing company may not have your best interests at heart.
Check out our Podcast #36 “Is it Time to Fire your Marketing Company?” to learn helpful education marketing strategies. With 1 click you’ll have access to over 30 podcasts featuring industry insiders sharing their wisdom to you – for free!
Is Your Marketing Information Selfish or Empathetic?
Is your promotional information written in selfish ‘feature language’? Consumers are like selfish six-year-old kids and hate reading other people’s selfish language. It’s all about what’s in it for the consumer when parting with their dollars.
Tip:
Write in benefit language, become an empathetic organization.
Embrace Disruption
Seventy percent of companies within the Fortune 1000 did not exist 10 years ago. The disruption and consumption of 100-year-old enterprises are now commonplace. EDU is like the Telecomm industry 15 years ago. The natural lifeforce of Western Commerce is many companies looking to take advantage of inefficiencies (ie: Uber, Craigslist, Udacity).
Tip:
Embrace this disruption by doing an do an ‘amazing’ job of filling needs. There are many ways to do this: competency-based learning, blended learning, flipping classrooms, day 1 externships, employer-funded training, etc. Put safety nets in place, then attack with aggressive split-testing.
Is it Time to Embrace Fear as a Marketing Strategy?
One of the outcomes of mobile phone adoption is we have the ‘entire’ world available to us sitting within this little rectangle box, which in turn is constantly attached to our person. ‘Content’ is being dumped into the internet slipstream landing in the little smartphone boxes. Professional branding and PR types compete intensely for your attention. The bi-product is an incredibly pervasive stream of unfiltered media content: cute kittens followed immediately by cops killing people. We as consumers chew on what is mostly crap, each and every day, whether we like it or not.
Content one, two and three point zero
Back in the day, PR people would get hired by companies to wine and dine assignment editors, writers and personalities to speak favourably about their clients. Media controlled the message and they shaped the content. My Dad was a photo editor at a major Daily. One of his jobs was to sort through images, match them with stories, then write captions and headlines, gluing the story and photos together. His lament was 90% of his job involved being negative, but that’s what sold papers. His thinking behind this was readers would say, ‘at least my house didn’t burn down or my car didn’t crash’. Basically, consumers gained an appreciation of their lives by comparing themselves to the misery of others being displayed in the papers or on the news. Negative news garnered readership which garnered media buy.
The dawning of 2.0 actually came pre-internet, when TV started channeling horrendous footing of war atrocities from the Vietnam War. This jarring violent footage of freaked out miserable villagers, soldiers, mutilated bodies, etc. helped to kick start the Vietnam War protests in the 70’s, catalyzing social change. The Korean War was just as hideous, but its documented footage was not pushed into the living rooms of the masses while eating their TV dinners.
Now 2.0 is firmly entrenched; with thousands of Clickbait sites feeding content to massive information addiction portals such as Facebook. We as consumers have sort of become our own photo editors plus consumers of this massive surge of content engulfs us; most of it salacious, violent or negative in nature.
We have direct daily access to massive amounts of footage that often elicits negative feelings. It is pervasive. Facebook paying over 150 Clickbait companies hundreds of millions a year to generate footage is a ‘small’ example of how big this trend has become. We are being pounded and pounded with amateur and professionally produced news footage everywhere, every day. Much of the footage has an agenda. SUGGING – ‘selling under the guise of’ – is a staple of the PR industry.
Fear that seeps everywhere…
In my opinion, this phenomenon is generating a palpable angst with many folks within society, more negative crap than any average person ever needs to know. Marketers need to deal with this collective angst like never before. Salespeople now often have to unspool partially or totally false information previously gleaned online. But mostly marketing and sales types must now fold into their marketing plans the new reality of dealing with the collective and individual fear pulsing within their target market.
…like carbon monoxide.
If you are asking me how to deal with this societal angst within the context of marketing our stuff, heck, I don’t totally know. I am thinking that perhaps the day of marketers just ‘selling stuff’ is over. Marketing now shapes opinion and self-esteem, in turn shaping our society. Is it our duty now to market in such a way that we leave society in better shape along the way?
I will say, that having awareness and an intention around this question, will in turn, allow ideas and solutions to bubble to the surface…
I’m curious about your thoughts….
Namaste, Gregg Meiklejohn
Reputation is ¾ of Everything
I was leafing through Douglas Magazine, an excellent tome on local business issues. I came across an excellent article written by an old friend Mike Wicks, a reputable dude who has made his living in sales training, writing, etc… Mike’s article was about the value of a reputation from an empirical perspective. In other words, one can attach a financial score to a weak reputation and it’s not pretty. Mike’s article got me thinking about a few things on this topic;
Product Delivery is the premix for Reputation
My partner Shane Sparks and I are fond of saying “Nothing can destroy a crappy business like a great Ad Campaign.” The outcome of a branding effort is to leave the consumer with kind of a buyer’s insurance policy that they are making good choices. If a business is delivering crap, the branding efforts will not grab, and it will simply accelerate negative word-of-mouth. Read more
