No More M*A*R*K*E*T*I*N*G

by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 30, 2007 | Blog, Marketing

Nancy Schwartz asks, while soliciting entries for the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants:

How do we, as nonprofit communicators, engage audiences who are overloaded with marketing messages and images?

Context: Marketing and communications are everywhere. On steps, windows, tray tables on airplanes. You know the deal – and all that’s in addition to everything else that’s online and offline. Ubiquitous is the only word to describe it.

• As a result, our audiences are more saturated than ever with data, images.
• And more skeptical.

How do we:

• Penetrate the glaze of audience overload when eyes, ears and brains are simply overwhelmed
• Communicate not only the basics, but the often complex or new ideas necessary for success in nonprofit advocacy and fundraising campaigns, program delivery, etc.
• Compete with for-profit marketers who have far more resources than we do (how can we be smarter)?

All good questions, and ones that social marketers face constantly. Rohit recently wrote about the ubiquity of advertising and even the examples he came up with as so-far unused advertising space (e.g., fruits and vegetables, public restroom doors and hubcaps) have not entirely escaped the ad industry’s touch.

Despite this expansion of advertising into anything and everything that might be seen by a pair of eyeballs, marketers are also starting to realize that advertising is not necessarily the best way to get their product noticed. Hence, the trend toward product placement in television shows, movies, and even blogs.

I’ve written about this before, and I think they’re onto something. Think about getting your message out in the places that people actually pay attention (as opposed to the increasingly Tivo-ed commercial breaks or mind-numbing advertising everywhere we look). Move away from methods that shout out in blinking lights M*A*R*K*E*T*I*N*G. Move toward becoming integrated into the things people are already doing and engaged with. Embedding your message into entertainment content is one way to get that attention.

Developing relationships with your audience is another way. If they like and trust you, they will listen to what you have to say even while screening out the thousands of other marketing messages they are exposed to during the course of a day.

What are some ways a nonprofit or public agency could do this?

• Reach out to fan communities. While not every nonprofit has the resources or connections to persuade the writers of Desperate Housewives to show a character getting a mammogram or talk about getting her kids immunized, there are ways of reaching TV fans outside of advertising or “product placement.” If a show has a character that is dealing with a particular health or social issue that your organization addresses, you can reach thousands of the show’s fans by leaving a post on the show’s message board with information and a link to your website (e.g., the Desperate Housewives message board has almost 45,000 posts and probably many more people reading the messages without writing anything). Or perhaps a character on the show has a blog you can leave a comment on. Writing about the episode on your organization’s blog and tagging it in Technorati will reach anyone searching for information about the show.

• Go to where your audience is and talk to them there. You can go into virtual worlds like Second Life or MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach to talk to people about your issue. Engage in discussions on health-related message boards where people are asking questions and looking for information. Offline, sponsor a race car and distribute information at the track, work with a local restaurant to highlight healthy alternatives on the menu and create placemats or table tents with nutritional information, supply handstamps to clubs with the phone number of your safe ride program on them.

• Create your own content in which to embed your message. Saturday’s Wall Street Journal has an article (WSJ subscribers only) about how the New York Federal Reserve Bank has created a series of comic books to teach students about banking, foreign exchange and other kinds of financial information. (I just have to share this great line from the article: “Although a certain former Fed chairman ranked as a superhero on Wall Street, these comics do not feature Alan Greenspan in leotard and cape, wielding a magic clarinet against the evil forces of inflation.”) Another example is advergames – online games designed to feature a product in the context of an engaging game. mtvU and the Kaiser Family Foundation are sponsoring another contest to develop a web-based game along the lines of the previous winner, Darfur is Dying. This time they are looking for a game related to HIV/AIDS. Other ideas for content could include things like a concert, an entertaining video posted to YouTube, a ringtone, or whatever your audience is into.

• Make it easy for people to share your message with friends. When your message goes from peer to peer, it is much more powerful than coming directly from you. Provide ways that people can easily send content from your website to their friends. Provide coupons or incentives for bringing a friend to your organization. Make your fans into your brand ambassadors. A friend’s recommendation gets past the marketing filter.

• Develop a relationship with your audience members. Blogs are a great way to build a community and develop relationships with the people who are interested in what your organization does. Get the permission of people who visit your organization’s website or attend your events to send them updates on your activities and offerings. Put a human face on your organization so people feel like you are an old friend. Provide them with ways to create content and engage in a conversation with your organization and other supporters like themselves.

• Partner with other brands to integrate your message. Your audience already spends time shopping — whether at the grocery store, the mall or online — and has emotional relationships (positive & negative) with certain products. Find the brands that they prefer and try to develop partnerships with them to get your message out through cause marketing approaches. Even if you are too small to get Coca-Cola or Target to pay attention to you, look at local resources like small businesses or the branch of a larger company in your neighborhood as potential partners.

By avoiding glaring M*A*R*K*E*T*I*N*G methods and focusing your efforts on embedding your message into content and building relationships with your audience, you can get past the glazed eyes of advertising overload and into their attention zone. Make sure you make it worth their while when you get there.

[UPDATE: Here is the link to Nancy’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, which features perspectives on the same question from 14 other bloggers. It’s well worth a read!]

Photo Credit: e d d d d d d d i e

Technorati Tags: marketing, nonprofit, advertising

The Funny Thing About Marketing…

by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 16, 2007 | Blog, Marketing

Is it just me, or is comedy just not as funny anymore? I went to a comedy club in Hollywood last night for the first time in I don’t know how long (well, to give you an idea, the last time I went, smoking was still allowed in the clubs in California). In the B.K. era (Before Kids), I had gone to many comedy shows and remember laughing so hard it felt like my sides were going to split. In contrast, last night there were a few guffaws, but the rest were small giggles, if that. So that the night did not go entirely to waste, I’ll use it as blog fodder to relay some marketing principles that you can apply whether you are using humor in your campaigns or not.

• Freebies can help you get customers. We chose the club we went to because it offered free admission before 9 pm on Sunday nights. But with the two-drink minimum, the club still made money instead of having two empty seats. Plus, with more people in the room, the comedians perform better, which improves the overall product and presumably makes people want to return another time. By giving a little, they get a lot.

• Use your internal resources wisely. The first part of the evening showcased some of the comedy club’s staff, who are mostly struggling comedians hoping for their big break. Each person had about 5 minutes on stage, and we must have seen at least 10-15 people in that time. Some were funnier than others, but from the club’s point of view they get an unending stream of hungry comics wanting to work for them, as well as the possibility of being able to say that they discovered the next big star. Do you have staff who could be more involved in improving and marketing your product in ways beyond their job titles?

• Shock value is overrated. Having seen so many stand-ups perform one after the other, the truism emerged that the number of swear words in the act was inversely proportional to how funny the person was. Dropping F-bombs seemed to be the fall-back position when someone did not have much talent. In marketing, companies are sometimes tempted to do flashy publicity stunts when they don’t have much of substance to back them up. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that getting people’s attention for a moment is all you need to do to be successful.

• Pay close attention to your audience. A good comedian is constantly gauging the audience’s response to his material and adjusting how it’s being delivered. When one joke falls flat, he can take a different tack, changing the topic or energy level or making a joke about how much of a dud the previous joke was. Good marketers also need to constantly evaluate and readjust how they are delivering their campaigns, based on the audience’s reactions.

• Connect with the familiar. The jokes that were the funniest (to me, at least – I don’t know about that weird guy in the row in front of us who howled at everything) were the ones about everyday life. These were things like driving in LA, having kids, having to put the airplane tray tables in a locked and upright position (or else the plane will crash!). Somehow the jokes about transvestite hookers just didn’t connect with me as much. Use the situations or ideas that are most familiar to your audience to make your point.

• Don’t bury the lede. After sitting through umpteen different comedians, we were ready to leave around 11:30 even though the show was scheduled to go until 2 am. We got up and stepped out the door just before we heard the MC introduce the next act — Andrew Dice Clay. I don’t know that I would have particularly cared to see him perform, but at least he was someone I had heard of. If the club had wanted to keep people from leaving early, they could have given a hint that someone well-known would be coming on soon. While it’s good to use the lure of the unexpected to keep people’s attention, if you wait too long, you may lose their interest.

Maybe someone should start a Comedy Marketing School, like they have Comedy Traffic School. But I think next time I’m in the mood to laugh I’ll go see an improv troupe like the Groundlings now that I’ve seen the state of stand-up. And I’ll bet there are a slew of other marketing lessons that we could draw from them.

Photo Credit: stephanieontour

Technorati Tags: comedy, comedians, marketing

A Holiday Gift

by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 11, 2007 | Blog, Marketing

It being January 11th, you would think that a holiday gift that arrived today would be considered a little late. Well, that depends which holiday you’re thinking about.

Today I received a package in the mail from the team at Personality, the cause marketing agency based here in LA. It was a holiday gift… for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which is coming up on Monday. In the box was a “Dream Vocabulary Kit,” based on those magnetic poetry sets made up of words on magnets that can be arranged to form phrases of your choice. In this case, the words are taken from several of Dr. King’s writings and speeches, with an accompanying guide to some of the quotes that can be recreated (e.g., “The time is always right to do what is right,” “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter,” part of his “I have a dream” speech, etc.).

What a creative and appropriate gift, which fits so well with their mission and brand. Thanks to Brian and the rest of the Personality team for the inspiration. Buzz well-deserved. Check out their blog, which is chock-full of cause marketing news and commentary (and the hint they sent out about this gift).

Technorati Tags: personality, martin luther king, cause marketing

Marketing to Introverts

by Nedra Weinreich | Dec 15, 2006 | Blog, Marketing

Reading a post on the Businesspundit blog about networking for introverts (via lifehack), I had a major flash of recognition with the first paragraph:

I have a problem. I’m an introvert. I’m not shy. I’m not afraid of being in public. But I am horrible at chit-chat and gossip. If I spend an evening at a social function with people I don’t know or don’t like, I get home and feel like I’ve spent all day at the ocean. It’s that fighting-the-waves and drained-by-the-sun kind of tired. I would rather spend four hours with my head stapled to the carpet. I would be more comfortable that way.

That’s me. Absolutely. I do enjoy meeting new people and spending time with friends, but the minutiae of socializing does not come naturally to me. If you’re an extrovert, you are probably thinking, “What is her problem? You just talk. About anything. It’s easy.”

I have found that introverts and extroverts have a Mars-Venus thing going on. It’s hard for an extrovert to get inside the mind of an introvert and understand where they are coming from. This article by Jonathan Rauch explains it better than I ever could (and might help you understand the introverts in your life better). We’re just hard-wired differently.

This got me to thinking about whether marketers might need to take a different approach to be more effective in reaching introverts, who make up 25-40% of the general population (but 60% of the gifted population!). That percentage is large enough to think about taking the needs of introverts into account in your marketing, even if you are not trying to specifically reach engineers, writers, researchers, lawyers, programmers, college faculty or Star Trek fans, all of whom are more likely to be introverts.

Here are some tips for marketing to introverts (or just dealing with my people effectively):

• Use e-mail, blogs, message boards and other asynchronous online methods of communicating that allow an introvert to take time to think about what to say, then write and edit a thoughtful response.

• Be aware when you are conducting research, such as focus groups or interviews, that introverts think carefully about what they are going to say before it comes out of their mouths. If you do not give them enough time to think about their answer, you will miss out on their insights. Use a minimum 5-second rule of silence after asking a question or between other people’s questions to give the introverts a chance to respond before you move on.

• Do not expect an immediate purchase or change to be made once you have laid out your case. Introverts need time to process information before making a decision, and will wait until we are sure before letting you know. Don’t rush us or put us on the spot.

• Realize that introverts may have a few close friends, but not necessarily an extensive social network. We may not be comfortable recommending your product to others we don’t know well, but be very happy to have something to talk about with our best friends. You won’t see many introverts with thousands of “friends” on MySpace.

• Introverts hate small talk. We say what we mean and we mean what we say. And don’t make us say it again. And that means that you should also get to the point as quickly as possible.

• Introverts love to read, so give us written information we can look over and go back to as we think about it.

• Introverts may not tell you what we are thinking. Our innermost thoughts are private and not shared easily. Don’t assume that we agree with you just because we are being quiet. But if you give us an opportunity to give you asynchronous feedback once we’ve had a chance to think things over, we can provide lots of thoughtful comments.

• Introverts are great in one-on-one interactions, but we often clam up in group settings. If a lot of people are talking, we may not be able to get a word in edgewise, or we may feel that what we have to say does not add enough new or interesting content to the conversation and is not worth the effort of speaking up. We don’t like to interrupt others who are talking, and we don’t like to be interrupted.

• We like to operate independently, not as part of a team. Don’t force us to interact or compete with others in order to participate in your program.

• Introverts prefer to deal with people we already have a relationship with. Take the time to get to know us and let us get to know you. A blog is an excellent way for an introvert to become familiar with you over time and feel comfortable interacting with you.

• If you have a product or behavior you want an introvert to try out, let us go off and do it by ourselves rather than in front of someone. We will want to explore and make mistakes with it on our own before being comfortable with someone watching us.

• We learn best by watching and mentally rehearsing. Provide modeling of the skills we need to develop to be successful.

• Honor our need for privacy and personal space. Give us the option whether to self-identify as being part of your group or program – we might not want to reveal our participation.

• Because introverts are more internally motivated, we do not succumb easily to peer pressure or following trends. The fact that everyone else is doing something doesn’t necessarily make us want to do it.

I hope I didn’t come off as a curmudgeon, and I hope I am not making too many generalizations from my own experience assuming that most introverts feel the same way. If you are an introvert, please let me know if these tips ring true for you.

Most marketers and sales people are extroverts. Don’t forget about us introverts and you will be much more successful.

Happy Hanukkah to my Jewish readers! First candle is tonight.

UPDATE (12/18/06): Welcome to my thousands of Reddit visitors and fellow introverts! If you enjoyed this article, please consider donating to my ongoing campaign to raise money to fight modern-day slavery through the American Anti-Slavery Group (see sidebar widget on right). Give someone the gift of freedom this holiday season. Thanks!

Photo Credit: Introspectrum

Technorati Tags: introverts, introversion, marketing