Manhattan Marketing Maven

What Tactics Work Best in a Recession?

The budget axe is falling. Marketers everywhere have to choose which campaigns and which channels survive. As a result there is a robust debate about which tactics work best and which channels are "must haves" versus the fun but expendable "nice-to-haves."

As usual, the decision often depends on the objectives marketers seek to achieve. In this environment, management wants low-cost, fast-acting and dependable ways to get attention, traffic, interaction and sales. Many branding and positioning initiatives get quickly sacrificed when cash runs short, even though the media for accomplishing these objectives is heavily discounted and subject to aggressive negotiation.

A key decision criterion seems to be the ability of a campaign or a media channel to convert a prospect into either an active lead or a sale. Viewed through this lens countless blog readers and Facebook friends become more of an abstraction and less of a measurable means to deliver business value. Ironically many of the highly hyped tactics -- online PR, web video marketing, Twitter and social media marketing --  are sorted OUT because of their limited track record in delivering quantifiable results. Though today they are cheap enough and accessible enough for marketers with a few extra bucks and some extra imagination to use creatively and break through to hard-to-reach customer or prospect segments.

Search (both SEO and PPC) and e-mail are the work horses in a recession. The costs are containable, the targeting can be quickly and effectively tweaked plus the ROI has been proven again and again.They are sufficiently interactive to meet "social" marketing needs and can be deployed almost on-demand to suit anxious CFOs.

Another recession-centric focus is on current customer bases and CRM tools. This starts with the notion that its easier and cheaper to sell more to existing customers than to seek out and persuade new ones. But a farming versus hunting orientation depends on the agile use of data, since one-size-fits-all campaigns against a house list rarely meet expectations. In looking to upgrade CRM capabilities marketers have to assess the incremental lift of improved data mining versus the incremental cost and total ownership costs of systems or software.

As more and more marketers hunker down, look for inventive uses of the tactics that work. And keep an eye out for wacky experiments to try to break through to new audiences or to road test emerging channels. 

How NOT to Do Social Network Marketing

Reunion.com borrowed a sleazy porn-like come-on to attempt to convert me from a freebie member to a premium spender. It's a bait and switch tactic that gives marketers a bad name, pissed me off big time and offers lessons in worst practices for social network marketing.

They start with a e-mail that's a phony as a three dollar bill. The Subject line uses my e-mail address and says " Your Ex-Has Searched for You". It certainly got my attention. In fact, I madly started cataloging through my memory banks asking myself which one of my many ex-girlfriends or wives would try and track me down. I had momentary thoughts of either amourus reconcilliation or protracted litigation. But when I logged in the site showed zero inquiries. So I instantly knew the whole thing was bogus.

Lesson 1: Don't lie. Be consistent. Don't let your marketers distort your service. If you are going to pitch me on the basis of data, use real data.

The "TO" line read "Your Old Friend" with "reunitetodayforgood2allthepluto.com" in parentheses. In real life the click took me to reunion.com. So while I knew it wasn't really my old friend, I was still disappointed.

Lesson 2: Be real or be gone.Bogus addresses and false fronts are a huge turn-off. Even if I valued the service and the connections once provided by reunion.com, I'm now convinced they are sleazebags. And I'll tell everyone I know this opinion. Spammers suck. Don't be one.

The colorful internal call-to-action was catchy, conveyed urgency and did indeed prompt action. The red line said "Someone is looking for you." The orange line said "Don't keep them waiting. Click Here." Now even if this arrived on a day i was feeling, lonely, nostalgic or hopeless, this simple messaging works. The problem is the boomerang effect. I'm taken in. I click. And I go from happy expectation to blind rage in a nanosecond.

Lesson 3: Don't Waste Good Technique. These guys invested time and money to turn me from a registered and passive user into a vocal critic and enemy. What do you suppose the ROI on that marketing spend effort was?  What started out as a potentially effective usage stimulation campaign yielded a kill-off-your consumer result. Repeated hundreds of thousands of times, how do you suppose they justify it to their management?

Lesson 4: Social networking relies on trust. Trust is a direct function of familiarity and truth. The strength of your appeal is a function of your willingness to play fair and be straight. If not, you deserve the scorn and the hatred you deserve.

Recession Lesson: Driving Clicks

Everyone wants to drive clicks effectively and efficiently. This is especially true for my client, an unknown  New York City cultural organization who wants to turn a one-time event into a branding and traffic bonanza by spending as little as possible.

Since they have a very limited budget to reach their target audience of upscale, literate, liberal New Yorkers (35+) they need a mass reach vehicle that can give them sufficient frequency and strong engagement within a 5 day flight period to drive traffic to their web site. The idea is to invite prospects to the event with provocative copy in print or on the radio and convert them to attendees or members on the website and/or on the basis of delighting them at the Saturday afternoon event.

Radio -- the classical broadcast station owned by the New York Times, WQXR – generated sufficient traffic for a similar event in Fall 2008. And a small space ad adjacent to the crossword puzzle in the New York Times was actively considered because it attracts the right psycho-demographic, has predictable pass-along value, would have an added branding benefit and is arguably one of the most trafficked pages in the paper. These became the two viable options especially since direct response prices could be negotiated.

We rejected pay-per-click search ads because there is so little brand awareness that nobody knows to search for these guys or the event. And we eliminated online ads adjacent to the puzzle on NYT.com because we are targeting an older crowd; one of the few demos that still carry around and read the printed newspaper.

To check our tactics, I pinged 75 media and DR friends on LinkedIn. About 40 percent voted for each option. Ten percent waffled, lectured me on media theory or made bad jokes. This reminded me why everybody hates ad agencies who want to toss out glib remarks and cleaver lines but never want to put skin in the game..

Many responded by calling this a puzzle, a test or a mind bender, which suggests that the question of which traditional DR media works best with online media is not clear and is open to debate and testing

The critical variables are, as always, targeting, frequency against the target and mnemonics. The client chose radio. The station was flexible in both price and scheduling. The flight will run in early April. Stay Tuned.