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Five things NOT to do when planning your marketing strategy 1024 683 Tom Brady

Five things NOT to do when planning your marketing strategy

When defining your marketing objectives for the year ahead, it’s essential to have a thorough marketing strategy, so you know how best to promote your product or service.

Marketers with a solid strategy in place are 313% more likely to see success than those without one.

However, not all marketing strategies are built equally; and the consequences of a poor marketing strategy can include a loss of profits, a loss of market share and a loss of customer trust.

With this in mind, here are the five things I recommend you should not do when it comes to planning and creating your marketing strategy.

1. Fail to do your research

Canadian entrepreneur and founder of Hootsuite Ryan Holmes famously said: ‘If you form a strategy without research, your brand will barely float and at the speed industries move today, brands sink fast.

Writing a good marketing strategy is not a five-minute task, and it is imperative to do your due diligence before you send your strategy to your manager for final sign-off.

If you don’t do marketing research, then you risk targeting the wrong audiences, using the wrong marketing channels and underestimating the marketing efforts of your competitors. And this could ultimately mean that your product or service fails.

There are many examples of marketing missteps throughout history that could have been avoided by doing thorough marketing research in the initial stages.

For example, genealogical company Ancestry had to pull a television ad which showed a mixed-race couple eloping during the slavery era.

The advert was targeted at people who may have been curious if they had mixed-race ancestry, but many people pointed out on social media that it was potentially problematic and romanticised slavery. This lead to the advert’s removal.

Better research into target audiences and potential reactions may have meant the ultimate goal of the advert could have been adapted into something more positive and less controversial.

So what do you need to consider when doing your market research?

  • Who your target audience is (more on this later)
  • Who your competitors are and how their product, service and marketing compare to yours
  • The unique selling points of your product or service (more on this later too)
  • What the current state of the market is and if there are any risks or opportunities on the horizon

A great place to start when doing your research is by carrying out a SWOT analysis. By determining your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, you can work out where you stand and what internal and external factors may help or hinder you.

Alternatively, a PESTLE analysis may give you a reliable indication of the current marketing landscape.

2. Appeal to absolutely everyone

As marketers, we’ve all had some variation of the following conversion with our managers at least once in our career:

‘Okay, I’m currently working on our marketing strategy for the year ahead. Have you done any research already into which customer you want to target?

‘Oh, I think we need to focus on selling to everyone. That way we won’t miss out on any potential sales!’

As tempting as it is to want to appeal to as wide a range of people as possible, this approach can be counterproductive.

By trying to appeal to everyone, you will ultimately appeal to no one at all, as your marketing strategy will be too broad.

Take Tesla as a prime example of a company that knows who to target. It focuses its marketing on affluent people in their thirties and forties – prime users of the web and social media.

The company took the decision to close all of their car showrooms and sell all their cars online instead. Tesla also has a powerful presence on social media, with founder Elon Musk taking the time to answer customer’s questions personally on Twitter.

You can see why the company has 16% of the global market share!

Take the time to work out who your target audience is. Things to consider include:

  • How old are they?
  • Are they male or female?
  • Do they have children or pets?
  • What are their hobbies?
  • What websites do they visit?
  • What type of house do they live in?
  • Which social media platforms do they use?
  • What problems are they experiencing?
  • What do they want to achieve from life?

You can then customise your strategy to target this specific group of people and resolve the pain points that they have.

Remember that you can (and will) still sell your product and service to people who aren’t your target audience, but focusing on your target audience will help you increase the effectiveness of your marketing spend.

3. Focus on vanity metrics

What is a vanity metric? It’s a metric that you measure that ultimately doesn’t tell you anything about your business. All it does is make you feel good.

Take for example, social media followers. You may have over 10,000 followers on Facebook. It’s a stat you take to your manager and they’re delighted that the brand is doing so well.

However, if these 10,000 followers do not engage with your brand or convert on your website, this number doesn’t really mean anything at all.

Other vanity metrics include page visits, the number of likes on social media posts and number of customers.

A basic rule of thumb is that if it doesn’t result in getting more customers, higher-quality customers or happier customers, it’s not worth measuring.

If you’re looking for actionable metrics to use in your marketing strategy, why not try the following?

  • Conversions on your website
  • Cost per conversion
  • Social media engagement per post
  • Follower growth over time

In 2016, Head of the Xbox brand Phil Spencer announced that they were no longer going to report on the number of Xbox sales, a standard vanity metric. Instead, the company made the decision to report on active users of their Xbox Live service, which is a more actionable metric, and more closely tied to Xbox’s revenue.

4. Don’t know what you sell

One of the trickiest parts of writing a marketing strategy is learning about the products or services that you are trying to promote. This is especially challenging if you are writing the strategy on behalf of an external marketing agency.

To help market your products or services effectively, you not only need to know them inside out but how your target audience will respond to them.

A great example of a company that didn’t do its due diligence on their new product is Clairol. In the late 1970s, they launched a ‘Touch of Yoghurt’ shampoo. Unfortunately, the shampoo bombed as customers didn’t want to put yoghurt in their hair as they thought it would go rancid. Some people even tried to eat it!

This could have been an entirely different story if Clairol had done its research and told prospective customers the benefits that using this shampoo could bring.

When you are researching your product or service, think of how it will benefit your customers.

  • How will it save your customers time and money?
  • How will the products or service make your customer feel?
  • What unique selling points does your product or service have in comparison to your competitors?

5. Leave your strategy alone once you’ve finished it

Winston Churchill once said ‘However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.’

When your strategy has been completed and signed off, that shouldn’t be the end of it. You should review it on a regular basis and revise it as required. If you don’t, you run the risk of your product or service stagnating.

I recommend going back to your strategy at least once a quarter to see how things are going. Are you achieving your goals? If not, what can you do to get back on track?

Also, update your strategy with new information.

  • Has the market changed?
  • Have any of your competitors changed their product or service since your last review?
  • Are any elements of your marketing strategy working better than others?
  • Has your product or service changed at all?
  • Is your marketing budget on track?

This is where having a SWOT or PESTLE analysis as part of your strategy really comes in handy.

In conclusion

98% of marketers believe a marketing strategy is vitally important.

Be this as it may, there are still a lot of badly written and poorly structured strategies out there, and your strategy could be the difference between your campaign succeeding and your campaign failing.

If I can offer you one final tip, it would be to take your time with your marketing strategy. Do thorough research to establish the selling points of your product or service, and the ideal audience you would like to sell it to.

If your manager is demanding that you turnaround a strategy in double-quick time, explain that investing time in your strategy right at the start will ultimately pay dividends for your business.

What are your top tips when it comes to creating a high-quality marketing strategy?

References:

Marketing Myopia in Higher Education 1024 683 Tom Brady

Marketing Myopia in Higher Education

Why marketers must break free of short-term tactical campaigns and start to focus on building long-term brand value

Developing an effective marketing strategy in the higher education industry is nothing if not challenging. Unlike other industries, regular application deadlines, limited student places and requirements to fill programmes with culturally diverse cohorts all distort the traditional approach marketers would ordinarily take to capture market share and increase sales. Imagine for example if a company that sells shoes could only sell its shoes during four brief windows each year (applications deadlines) . . . the pressure to focus on conversion-based activities during those windows and in the preceding months would be overwhelming, right? Or imagine if an online software provider could only sell 300 licenses (or student places) each year . . . how would you justify brand-building campaigns (or any marketing activity for that matter) when such a low number of sales are required to meet the quota? These distortions in higher education have seemingly led many institutions down a path of short-term thinking, where marketing teams move from filling one cohort to the next with little consideration for their institution’s long-term growth or reputation.

For guidance on how to address these unique challenges, marketers in the higher education space can look to a report published by Les Binet and Peter Field, two heavyweight researchers in the field of marketing effectiveness. The report, entitled ‘Effectiveness in Context’, is a manual for brand building and organisational growth that any marketing strategist would benefit from reading cover to cover. While offering a new perspective on how brands grow in differing contexts, the core principle of the article would not be unfamiliar to anyone close to Binet and Field’s (2018) previous publications.

According to Binet and Field (2018), there are two kinds of marketing, Sales Activation, or that which focuses on short-term sales uplifts and involves behavioural prompts that nudge consumers to want to buy now (think promotional messages), and Brand Building, or that which focuses on long-term growth and building brand awareness and reputation. Binet and Field argue that in most contexts, businesses will want to strike a 60:40 balance between the marketing spend that is attributed to each of these categories, with 60% of the budget going towards brand building and 40% towards sales activation.

The logic is simple, while sales activation is more likely to drive consumers to take an action in the short term, these initiatives will do little to build any kind of lasting connection with the consumer, while conversely, brand-building activities may not lead to a short-term uplift in sales, but they will build a connection with the consumer that makes them want to choose the brand in the future (potentially multiple times).

According to ‘Effectiveness in Context’, there are key situations when this 60:40 ratio is even more polarised, and where marketing spend should be skewed even more towards brand-building activities, this includes:

  • When a brand’s product attracts a high degree of consideration before a purchase is made;
  • When a brand’s product is purchased for rational reasons rather than emotional reasons; and
  • When a consumer is likely to do a high degree of online research before making a purchase.

Consideration

There are few products that a person will buy in their lifetime that have the potential to influence their life as greatly as tertiary education, and with the exception of real estate, or perhaps an especially nice car, there are few investments that are as costly (and thus as high risk). All this leads to one conclusion — that consumers are likely to give more consideration to tertiary education than they are to most other investments they are ever likely to make. According to Binet and Field (2018), ‘the more consideration that people give to purchase, the more effective sales activation will be’. But rather than using this as a justification to invest more in conversion-based activities, Binet and Field argue that marketers should do the opposite. They contend that if it is relatively easy to convert consumers with Sales Activation campaigns, and relatively more difficult to establish brand awareness and reputation, then marketers can ‘get away with’ spending less on the former and have a need to spend more on the latter.

Rational purchases

The degree to which higher education is a rational decision is widely debated. According to Hossler, Schmit and Vesper (1999), ‘students want to maximise their utility and minimise their risks, i.e. they assume that a student’s university choice is a rational process and that students will always do what is best for them’. In contrast, Kotler and Fox (1995) argue that university choice is more heavily influenced by ‘status-attainment’, which, in turn, is driven by emotional factors such as ‘socialisation, the role of the family, social networks and academic conditions’.

Regardless of this debate, it’s difficult to see how rational factors wouldn’t play a dominant role in most student’s higher education decisions. Looking specifically at business school applications, the Graduate Management Admission Council’s latest ‘Candidate Decision Making Summary Report’ (2019) identified that ‘Candidates most often say quality/reputation (e.g., rankings, accreditation, faculty) is the most important selection criteria they have in choosing a school’.

According to Binet and Field (2018), when a purchase decision is more rational, people will respond more immediately to direct activity and promotions. This means consumers are more likely to be susceptible to sales activation than brand advertising, and as with high consideration purchases, marketers can afford to divert their marketing budget away from conversion-based activities (where it will be relatively easy to achieve results) and towards brand-building activity (where marketing communications will be relatively less effective).

High Online Research

Finally, in areas where consumers perform a high degree of online research before making a purchase, Binet and Field (2018) argue that consumers will be more aware of and responsive to sales activation activities. If consumers are actively researching their alternatives, they are simply more likely to download a brochure or engage with a higher education institution’s conversion-based campaigns. Simultaneously, brand-building campaigns will be less effective as they will not help the potential student assess the purchase decisions that are available to them.

The importance of online research in higher education would surely come as a surprise to no one. The internet is rife with websites that help students assess the range of tertiary options that are available to them, and university websites offer a wealth of information about specific programmes. According to a report authored by Google Insights and TNS Australia (2018), ‘97% of students considering higher education researched their options online…with 57% using a search engine at some point during their path to purchase’.

Ultimately, as with products that require high consideration and that are bought using rational criteria, Binet and Field suggest that ‘smart brands will take advantage of the relative ease with which sales activation results can be achieved and divert money out of activation and into brand building’.

So what does this all mean?

In short, marketers in higher education institutions need to break free of short-term thinking and start to see the forest for the trees. Short-term sales activation or conversion-based marketing can be achieved with relative ease (and for relatively less money) as prospective students are already giving a high degree of rational consideration and doing a high degree of research before making a purchase, and as a result, those institutions that will grow in the long term will be those that break free of the short-term mould and focus instead on brand-building campaigns that develop a unique value proposition that distinguishes their offering from their competitors.

 

References

Binet, L., Field, P. (2018). Effectiveness in Context: A Manual for Brand Building. Available at: https://ipa.co.uk/knowledge/publications-reports/effectiveness-in-context [Accessed: 05 July 2020]

Kotler, P.; Fox, K. (1995). Strategic Marketing for Educational Institutions, (2nd ed.), New Jersey, Prentice-Hall.

Hossler, D., Schmit, J. and Vesper, N. (1999). Going to College: How Social, Economic, and Educational Factors Influence the Decisions Students Make. Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore.

Graduate Management Admissions Council. (2019). Demand for MBA and Business Master’s Programs: Insights on Candidate Decision Making. [online] Available at: https://www.gmac.com/market-intelligence-and-research/research-library/admissions-and-application-trends/demand-for-mba-and-business-masters-programs-summary-report-2019 [Accessed: 05 July 2019].

Google / TNS, (2018). The path to enrolment for higher education: why engaging students online is the new syllabus for success [online]. Available at: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-aunz/consumer-insights/path-enrollment-higher-education-why-engaging-students-online-new-syllabus-success/ [Accessed: 05 July 2020].

Social media – will it help win the 2020 US Presidential Election? 1024 683 Tom Brady

Social media – will it help win the 2020 US Presidential Election?

In previous years, elections were won and lost through television debates, campaigning on voter’s doorsteps and by politicians touring the country for weeks on end. However, in 2020, the political landscape is entirely different to how it has been in previous years.

Not only has social media started to play a role in the US Presidential Elections, but highly targeted ads that utilise personal user data seem to be having such a significant impact that it begs the questions – just how much influence do these social media platforms have? And in turn, how fair and unbiased are the elections?

Social media and the 2016 Presidential Election

Although candidates had used social media in previous elections, the 2016 Presidential Election was the one where it came to prominence, with Co-Founder of SocialFlow Frank Speiser claiming “this is the first true social media election“.

However, the election was not without its share of allegations and wrong-doing. Two social media controversies arose after the election. The first was a Facebook data breach.

Over 87 million Facebook users’ personal data was gathered without consent by Cambridge Analytica. The data was collected through a Facebook app and sold to political campaigners, including Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

The breach was confirmed in 2018 by a former Cambridge Analytica employee who testified against the company. It resulted in Cambridge Analytics being disbanded and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying in front of the US Congress, publicly apologising for the errors that were made.

The second controversy was that of the Russian government interfering in the election, creating thousands of social media accounts and paid advertisements across multiple platforms that were pro-Donald Trump and anti-Hilary Clinton.

Though it is hard to determine whether this interference led to Trump winning the Presidency or whether other factors contributed, social media platforms were criticised for not doing enough to stop the spread of what has now come to be known as ‘fake news’.

So, what measures were brought into place after these scandals?

Facebook reacted to the Russian interference by bringing in new transparency policies for social media advertisements. Now political advertisers have to provide evidence of their identity and location before they can create ads, and they are only able to serve such ads in the country that they reside.

Twitter also pledged to do more to identify suspicious accounts and improve account verification measures.

In response to Cambridge Analytica, Facebook suspended thousands of apps that they saw as inappropriately using customer data, with a promise to give users more control over their data in the years to come.

For some countries, these measures did not go far enough, and they decided to take matters into their own hands.

The German Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz (Network Enforcement Act or NetzDG for short) came into force in October 2017 and obliged social network providers to delete or block unlawful content within seven days of receiving a complaint, or risk a fine.

So that’s what happened in the past but how is social media being used in the final weeks of the 2020 election?

People using social media to get their political news

62% of Americans get their news through social media platforms, and it is easy to see why:

  • People can access social media through their mobile phone, 24 hours a day
  • They can follow the news networks and politicians they choose, creating their own curated feed
  • Social media is updated regularly, meaning users can always be up to date with the latest news
  • Information is provided in easy to understand formats like videos, cartoons, graphs, infographics, and even memes
  • People can share stories with their own networks, and comment with their opinions
Candidates using social media to reach out to voters

Before the introduction of social media, candidates could only reach out to potential voters with rallies, debates, leaflets and newsletters. They can now reach out using social media, meaning they can appeal to a broader range of people, as well as those not necessarily in their jurisdiction.

According to Pew Research, the typical member of Congress tweets twice as often as they did in 2016 and has three times as many followers.

Social media also makes communication a two-way street. Candidates can message voters, and voters can message them back. It makes the whole process more inclusive and is more effective at involving citizens in the democratic process.

However, let’s not forget for all the advantages of social media; there are disadvantages too:

The risk of manipulated data

Even though political platforms put more stringent measures in place after 2016, social media can still be used to manipulate voters.

On 15 July 2020, a range of high-profile Twitter accounts were hacked, including the corporate accounts of both Uber and Apple, as well as the personal accounts of both Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

It got to the point that Twitter temporarily blocked all verified accounts from tweeting. The issue was resolved quickly, but if it had happened closer to November with political candidates, it could have had a major impact on the election results.

If a message came from Donald Trump or Joe Biden before the election saying they were withdrawing from the race, the fallout would be catastrophic.

The spread of misinformation

News on social media can spread quickly, and this is something that is both an advantage and a disadvantage.

Misinformation can be anything from a misunderstanding to an intentional slight on a candidate, party or policy. Once this information is out in the public domain, it can be hard to take back.

For example, right-wing news website Breitbart posted a video claiming masks don’t protect you from COVID-19. This video racked up 20 million views on Facebook before it was taken down. Even when it was removed, the video continued to be posted on other social media platforms.

The only effective way to halt the spread of misinformation is to remove offending posts. Facebook claims to have removed 22.5 million posts containing hate speech between April and June this year, significantly more than they had in the first quarter of the year.

Social networks are now encouraging users to think before they post. Twitter is testing a feature that asks users to read a post before they retweet it, and is hoping to bring it to all users in the near future.

Social media platforms have admitted things still need to be done, with Mark Zuckerberg saying the lead up to the election could be “a very heated period“.

Facebook has advised new political ads will be banned on its platform in the week leading up to 3 November and will apply warning labels to posts that may undermine the election’s outcome. Any posts from candidates declaring victory before the official results come in will also be flagged.

Twitter similarly advised it will remove or add labels to any tweets that claim false results or that incite unlawful conduct. Some posts may be kept up, but will only be viewable by those who follow the account.

Even Pinterest, a social media platform generally not associated with politics, has stated it will remove or limit the viewability of posts with misleading content, and no longer show any ads to users searching for election-related information.

Social media platforms have also banned and restricted social media access to key players in the election. Donald Trump Jr was banned from Twitter for 12 hours in July following a post about COVID-19, showing nobody is exempt.

Most recently, Facebook and Twitter banned users from sharing links to a story about Hunter Biden. It is alleged in the story that emails were illegally retrieved from a computer containing his personal data.

The move came under criticism as both platforms were accused of controlling the news, something they have pledged not to do. Following the backlash, Twitter advised that while they stood by their decision to block the story about Hunter Biden, they would look at labelling similar stories in the future as potentially being misleading, rather than blocking the content altogether.

Summary

Social media can be a double-edged sword for political candidates. It allows them to interact more and broadcast their opinions but conversely, those opinions are open to a lot more scrutiny.

Social media grows and evolves fast. A lot of changes were made in light of the issues raised by the 2016 election and changes are still being made in the final few weeks of the 2020 election.

This is not only down to people using social media differently but due to more and more data being available. Currently, 500 million Tweets are sent every single day!

More people using social media means more information and a higher risk of misinformation. Can social media platforms keep up with this immense volume of posts?

Trump has even advised if he remains President after the election, he will go as far as to repeal section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This act protects social media platforms against liability for anything posted by third parties.

Repealing the act could mean platforms like Facebook and Twitter would be legally accountable for the content that their users’ post, changing the way social media is used and censored yet again.

It will be interesting to see how social media continues to be used in the lead up to the 3 November election, and beyond. Will social media be criticised as unfairly influencing the election? Will Mark Zuckerberg be hauled in front of congress again to account for his wrongdoings? Or will the 2020 election mark a turning point in the perception of social media? Perhaps it will instead be seen as a force for positive change and a more free and democratic way for information to be disseminated to the masses? One thing is for sure – time will certainly tell.

References:

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