TAT. For my readers outside of the UK, it’s a slang word we use for rubbish or poor quality. My headline is a play on words using TAT as an acronym for Time, Attention and Trust, the things that buyers are lacking most these days.
So what does this all mean? Firstly, interruption based marketing is become more and more irrelevant. Disturbing peoples working days or downtime is a sure fire way to turn them off of your company. Businesses have to think smarter and have to act in new ways to generate their sales leads. Secondly, communicating with an audience who increasingly see advertising as an intrusion into their precious time is becoming more complex as social groups divide and divide again, you have to be smarter.
Twitter is a great way of starting new conversations with new people. Thirdly, buyers are mistrusting of what you say and Corporate babble. You have to be transparent with clear values. Just look at the damage that Levi’s and GAP have inflicted on themselves recently with the revelations of the pollution their manufacturing facilities were causing African villages. Todays transparent world means Corporatewash is exposed. Acquiring new customers is turning into a fine art. So, when you’re spending money on the same old stuff you always do for customer acquisition, just stop for a moment and think T.A.T.
Retaining and acquiring customers can be a tug of war, only in this competition, you don’t want either side to win! You need a balanced portfolio with existing and new customers. Looking earlier today at an NUSDL (New, Up, Stable, Down, Lost) analysis, it reminded me that sometimes it’s not as easy as a simple pull between two parties. NUSDL allows you to segment your customers, so you can see – more clearly – how you are performing.
How many brand new customers you gained, how many existing customers grew, how many were stable, how many declined and how many you actually lost. When you attribute values to these, it’s a great way of focusing your time, attention and spend on where you should be assigning your resources. For example, if you downs and losses are far in excess of your new and ups, then you may want to focus more on goalkeeping, rather than goalscoring, make sense? Right now, protecting what you’ve got should be a priority.
Although
this article in
Management Today, might make you think twice as to how hard you try. The main thing is to do your analysis. NUSDL is a great start to establishing where you’re at, where your problems are and what your priorities should be.
Marketing and Advertising industry website How-Do have released their Top 100 list for 2009. I’ve made the list for the second year running, you can view it
here. There are some top people and top brands there, I’m really flattered to make the Top 10 and would like to mention the excellent team of people I have around me, who make me look great. I’d also like to congratulate Richard Hayes from Warburtons who made it to the #1 spot. A deserving individual who has done a great job with the Warburtons brand.
Speaking in Manchester this morning, I described the different process that B2B brands have to go through to reach their audience. Conventions are changing, buyers are stressed and difficult to reach, the recession is a big distraction. Traditional interruption marketing just doesn’t work anymore, people are too time poor and “spray and pray” campaigns are yesterdays news. So, digital allows us to reach out and get better bang for buck. However, according to research I shared, search engine marketing can be a major switch off as there are so many aggregators and affiliates that they can have the opposite effect, there’s just too much clutter. So, search engine optimisation has to get better. More original content needs to go on, case studies and white papers are the way forward to reach IT procurers in B2B. In all areas of the buying cycle, the web was core for customer research and therefore digital strategy and deployment is key. Basic pay per click isn’t the be all and end all, it’s right for some areas of fast acquisition, however check carefully before you spend a fortune. Overall, life continues to get more complex, digital isn’t simple, social media networks are exploding and offer a new dimension, however listen and lurk before you leap in. If you can grab all of the above and get it into a coherent digital strategy, you’ll be going places.
The internet is changing the very world in which we live. Good or bad, it’s here to stay. I’m staggered by the number of companies I come across that think a web strategy is just having a site. I’m fed up with the promises of businesses that think they can get you to the top of Google’s natural searches by link farming and posting syndicated content. GET REAL. The web is a dynamic tool, Google are moving the goalposts every day, their algorithms are evolving. GET SMART. Read up, use google to search for the latest thinking, spot trends, evolve your thinking. UNDERSTAND.
