Improve Your Sustainability Efforts

The United Kingdom's Two Sides initiative has jumped the pond and is making waves right here on the shores of the grand ol' USA.

Even in today’s digital age with the availability of alternative media, paper’s unique practical and aesthetic qualities simply can’t be achieved by using electronic alternatives. That’s not to say that one is less suitable than the other. Both paper-based & electronic communication have a role to play and can compliment each other.

In recent years, however, paper has been the target of negative and often misinformed environmental criticism. Listening to some people, its benefits are outweighed by the mass of misleading environmental disadvantages; shrinking forests, excessive energy consumption, and overflowing landfill sites. So as far as the environment is concerned, paper appears bad.

This site is actually quite interesting and it dispels the myths surrounding paper in a very quick and informative read.

Everyone is familiar with the "Marketing Mix." The right mix for your communication strategy is just that, a mix. Rarely are we advised to throw our proverbial eggs in one basket, and marketing is no exception. A strategic and collaborative mix of communication and messaging is best to truly serve our varied audiences. And paper can serve a portion of your audience.

4-Steps to Improved One-to-One Marketing

Marketers are taking a pragmatic view of the recession due to customer anxiety, reduced spending, slow complex selling cycles and more. However, research shows that online marketing is effective, so marketers increasingly need to find new ways to optimize their online and offline activities.
What's crucial is pinpointing the individual customer so precisely that they feel they're being offered a service rather than a sell. With budgets under pressure, the range of activities will be limited, so a much greater focus will be placed on retention and development of existing customers. High-value customers must be singled out, along with those with the greatest potential for upselling. Such one-to-one marketing has traditionally been difficult to achieve -- segmentation can be expensive and last year's data is less valuable if a significant percentage of database contacts has changed.

The good news is that marketing technology has advanced to make one-to-one marketing real, without necessitating more time and costs for new research. Four key areas can be addressed by these technological advances and innovative marketers may find among them ways in which they can turbo-charge their existing resources.

1. Targeting
Targeting is critical, as it's essential to identify, distinguish and reach customers. Rather than re-populating databases, software can help build a customer picture by drawing on data in various formats and from different locations and channels. Integration with data mining tools makes it possible to perform complex customer analysis, segmentation, and profiling, while detailed browsing behavior gives a view of customer needs and preferences.

2. Messaging
Messaging captivates a customer's attention. Irrelevant messages won't garner a second glance. With the right technology, you can customize a message's text, graphics, et al., at an individual level. Personalization is taken to new heights when thousands of different offers are based on customer attributes and business rules.

3. Timing
Timing is everything. It's possible to pinpoint more than ever the right moment to communicate to customers. Through analyzing customer behavior and events, marketers can detect when customers are likely to be most receptive to offers, or when they're at risk of leaving. Not only can technology monitor risk points, but it can be used to analyze unusual patterns in customer behavior.

As such, marketers have valid reasons to contact customers, be it with opportunities to provide advice or new offers, or to prevent customer loss. By signaling when a customer is most likely to respond to a communication, technology can increase cross-sell opportunities and improve customer satisfaction.

4. Personalized messages
Delivering personalized messages whenever customers connect with a company is powerful. If customers feel that the contact with your organization is not just a one-way process, their receptiveness will increase greatly. Today's interactive marketing technology allows marketers to bring together all forms of marketing communications from scheduled campaigns, event-driven programs, and real-time conversations with customers across multiple channels -- from electronic and print to face-to-face and telephone.

A coordinated approach enables marketers to reach individual customers at the right time with the best offer on their preferred channel. An integrated approach not only builds loyalty, but brings immediate benefits in terms of response rate and ROI.

Success in 2009 and beyond is about making the best use of limited resources. While it's widely accepted that companies should market harder in a recession to be better placed for the economic recovery, not all have the means or conviction to follow this through in the form of increased marketing budgets.

Marketers who can truly get to know their customers will find that the framework they develop will serve two purposes: to maintain and develop the existing customer base now; and grow it when the economic climate becomes rosier.

Source

The Battle Between Art & the Algorithm

"...It's a world of perfect targeting. Optimization. Zero wastage. Absolute utility. Total accountability...What could possibly be wrong with all this? In this new world where relevance -- of information, of entertainment, of advertising, even of new social contacts -- is increasing by the atomically measured second, all powered by the extraordinary power of the Almighty Algorithm, what are we losing?

Well, these shifts are triggering a smoothing out in our experiences, prompting a reduction in serendipity and introducing a spooky predictability to many facets of our lives. It's becoming clear that ultra relevance comes with a hidden price. Because if everything's relevant, then nothing's unexpected, and if nothing's unexpected, then nothing surprises you, and if nothing surprises you, then that's a strange, neutralized, vanilla kind of life to lead. Think John Anderton meets Truman Burbank.

We're talking about the end of surprise...And right there is the opportunity for marketing: to deliver not just relevance, but revelation..." - Ben Malbon

We believe this is the opportunity for the marketing and communications industry.

Happy Earth Day Everyone!

As we celebrate Mother Earth and all her complexities and necessities, it is appropriate to look back over the past year and see how we have minimized our impact and helped our clients minimize their impact on the environment.

The desire for "green products" continues to grow (no pun intended!) and while marketers are faced with more pressure to meet these growing demands, it is important that we refrain from green washing (side note: earlier this week I came across a study conducted by TerraChoice Environmental Marketing regarding greenwashing, while I didn't post about it, I did tweet about it @VisitAGC with a link to read the full study) .

There are many ways to "balance our environmental. social and economic needs and impacts" and making smart choices about the companies you choose to partner with is one of them. AGC has implemented several practices to assist you.

~ AGC is certified to both the Forest Stewardship Council and Sustainable Forestry Initiative. Our initial certification was September 2007. In 2007, we were the first commercial printing facility in the state of Ohio to receive dual-certification.

~ All of our "house sheets" are either Forest Stewardship Council certified or Sustainable Forestry Initiative certified. This means, even if you don't specify an environmental sheet; we're using it. In addition, there is no cost to add the FSC or SFI label to your printed communication.

~ AGC exclusively uses Soy- and Vegetable- based Inks and Varnishes. This also means, even if you don't specify an eco-friendly ink; we're using it. Additionally, there is no cost to add the EcoSmart, EcoPride or Soy Ink logo to your printed communication. We've been using Soy- and Vegetable-based Inks and Varnishes exclusively since 2003. While the choice is environmentally preferable, our initial decision was for the health and safety of our employees. Additionally, pieces printed with eco-friendly inks are easier to de-ink and recycle (see earlier post about DeInking Digital Printing).

~ As many of you are familiar, AGC is the publisher of 52 Weeks 52 Works, the desk calendar featuring Northeast Ohio area artists. The 2009 edition won a National Award for Green/Sustainability Marketing. The entire calendar was produced with a neutral impact on the environment! The press release and production notes are available, please email us if you'd like a copy.

~ At AGC's commercial printing facility, Sustainable Print Solutions, we actively recycle our paper waste, printing plates, waste inks and solvents.

~ AGC's design team, The Creative Advantage, is trained to maximize the printed sheet to minimize waste during production.

~ AGC's Fulfillment Yields Interest mailing team can help you maintain a clean, up-to-date mailing list to help you reduce your direct-mail's environmental impact.

These are just a few of things we're doing to minimize our impact. As we look forward to 2010 we hope this list will continue to grow with more innovative and eco-friendly solutions.

For more information, or if you'd like to share any ideas to help us improve upon our eco-initiatives please post your comments or email us.

4 Reasons Social Media Marketing Fails

And to keep the conversation rolling, we'll play devil's advocate and present a study that has found how Social Media Marketing Fails to deliver on it's promise. At the Web 2.0 Expo in early April a panel was assembled to discuss why "Social Media Marketing Fails". They outlined four key reasons why social media fails to deliver and proposed solutions to strengthen it. The panelists included: Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang, Altimeter Group's founder Charlene Li, and Peter Kim, an enterprise social-technology researcher.

1. "Social media doesn't match up with our corporate culture."
Social media participation requires change management, Li told the crowd, adding that any effective change management process takes years. Marketers often expect social initiatives to work right away -- and that's rarely how things pan out. Owyang said that social media involves a different model, one that most corporations aren't familiar with: It's a transformation from the classic top-down business model with the CEO at the top to a "bottom-up bubbling" with customers driving ideas and actions.

The transformation won't happen overnight -- especially if senior management isn't involved. "If you want cultural change, you have to get the big guns involved," Li said. "And the only way they'll see this working is if it's aligned to corporate goals."

Kim posed the question of whether it's a good idea for an organization to appoint a chief social officer to take on the pains and sole responsibility of social media marketing. Li said no. The burdens, she said, should essentially be collective and no one particular person should own social media. "That's the most thing dangerous to do, [to say] 'It's not my problem, it's someone else's,' " she said. "It's everyone's responsibility."

2. "My social media marketing campaigns aren't working."
"The biggest problem is using the word 'campaigns,'" Li emphasized. "This is not a campaign - it's a relationship with a customer." Owyang pointed out that a campaign implies a short-term effort. Social media, he said, needs to be long-term. Without long-term goals for social media, projects end up looking like interactive marketing with a social presence. With that in mind, Li brought up companies that often have Facebook fan pages that resemble press releases. The information is vapid and unchanging and there's little conversation.

For conversation to occur, Li said marketers must recognize a shift from "interruptions" to "collaborations." Kim expanded on that notion saying businesses need to change relationships not only with customers but with employees and external constituents, as well. "The way organizations are structured ... and the way they relate in an ecosystem has to be transformed in how we build relationships," he said.

3. "I don't know how to measure this stuff."
Kim said this is probably the biggest fail for marketers in general. Owyang agreed saying that most marketers are measuring social media incorrectly. "They are focusing on the measurements of yesteryear with click-throughs and page views," he said. Yet conversations are occurring in places where those metrics aren't available like on Facebook or on external blogs. "You don't have access to server logs on Facebook or blogs where the conversation spreads," he said. "Even if you have that, it's not effective enough to tell you what's happening."

Owyang relayed that things like page views and the number of comments don't measure emotion or the depth of discussion. He provided a nice automotive example of marketing metrics. "Measuring based on a dashboard is typically the way marketers measure," he said. They look at basic stats. "Instead," he said, "you should be measuring based on your GPS system -- it tells you where have you been, where are you now, and where you are going." In other words, Marketers need to begin listening, rather than just recording numbers.

Li contended that although it's tough to know what to measure with social media, you have to measure against other marketing metrics -- otherwise, it's going to get cut from the budget.

4. "I'm not sure social media matters, anyway."
Owyang made an interesting point in reference to the Motrin Mom ordeal that exploded on Twitter and the blogoshere in November 2008. For kicks, he asked the crowd who hadn't heard of the Motrin Mom occurrence -- a marketing campaign that infuriated moms and blew up on Twitter. Surprisingly, many attendees hadn't heard of the controversy. Owyang made the statement that despite the temporary reputation tarnish, the kerfuffle, essentially drew more people to Motrin's Web site and led to more searches for the brand. Did it lead to fewer purchases of Motrin pain reliever? Probably not. Li stated that at the core of Motrin Mom is the fact that Motrin didn't respond in a timely manner. What's important is that customers wanted to engage with Motrin at the time of outrage, but they couldn't.

The Motrin Mom campaign can be written off as a "social media fail," but that might not be a terrible thing for the brand. In fact, Owyang pointed out Dell's tremendous success now in social media, which essentially sprouted from many failed attempts. It's been a similar strategy for mega-brand Wal-Mart, as well, Li added. Wal-Mart, she said, has kept at it for years, picking itself up after failures and coming ahead stronger with its buyer blogs and mom communities. Kim summed it up by saying that social media might not have the implications on a brand that one would expect -- but it will -- and soon.

Within the conversation of social media fails, Owyang revealed what he sees to be as three main ways organizations interact with social media:

The "tire": Social media comes from the edges of the company and is authentic because there are key stakeholders who are interested and invested in furthering social media efforts. However, Owyang said, one side of the tire has no idea what the other side of the tire is thinking or doing -- and that can be a problem.

The "tower": This approach occurs when management wants to centralize social media. On the upside, this means that employees will have common strategies and resources. However, it "tends to look like rehashed press releases," Owyang said. It's not authentic and customers can tell.

The "hub-and-spoke" model: This is when people from different parts of the organization come together under a centralized goal, but they all link out to different business groups. It's cross-functional, yet not exactly centralized.

Source: Destination CRM. To contact the editors, please email Editor@DestinationCRM.com

Top Social Media for Marketers: Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook

"An overwhelming majority (88%) of marketers say they are using some form of social media to market their business, though 72% of those using it say they have only been at it a few months or less, according to a social media study by Michael Stelzner, sponsored by the upcoming Social Media Success Summit 2009.

The study found that Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook - in that order - are the top four social media tools used by marketers, writes Marketing Charts.

The research also included an analysis of nearly 700 open-ended responses, which revealed the top-three questions marketers are asking about social media:

What are the best tactics to use?
How to do I measure the effectiveness of social media?
Where do I start?
When asked if they used social media for marketing purposes, 88% said they are employing some form of it. Business owners are more likely to use social media marketing (90+%) than employees working for a company that is not their own (81%), and respondents ages 30-39 are most likely to use social media marketing (92.8%), the study found. 72% say they have either just started or have been using social media for a few months.

The survey found that there is a direct relationship between how long marketers have been using social media and their weekly time commitment. For people just beginning, the median weekly time commitment is two hours per week. For those who have been at it for months, the median jumps to 10 hours per week. For those who report social media marketing use for years, the median is 20+ hours each week.

Respondents report that the #1 benefit of social media marketing is gaining attention for the business, and 81% say their social media efforts have generated exposure for their businesses.

Improving traffic and growing marketing lists is the second major benefit, followed by building new partnerships. At least two in three participants found that increased traffic occurred with as little as 6 hours a week invested, while those who have been doing this for years reported better results. Owners of small businesses (2 - 100 employees) are more likely than others to report benefits.

More than half of participants say a major benefit is the resultant rise in search engine rankings that often comes with increased efforts.

Though about one in two found social media generated qualified leads, only about one in three said social media marketing helped close business, though this percentage was higher (61.6%) among those who had been using social media for longer periods of time.

By a wide margin, Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook are the top four social media tools used by marketers, with Twitter in first place."

Source: Media Buyer Planner

Commodity vs. Artisanal - Starting a Conversation

Last night I had the great pleasure of seeing the simulcast World Premier of Beer Wars. The film was broadcast, via satellite, to 440 different theaters across America.

Synopsis
In America, size matters. The bigger you are, the more power you have, especially in the business world.

Director Anat Baron takes you on a no holds barred exploration of the U.S. beer industry that ultimately reveals the truth behind the label of your favorite beer. Told from an insider’s perspective, the film goes behind the scenes of the daily battles and all out wars that dominate one of America’s favorite industries.

Beer Wars begins as the corporate behemoths are being challenged by small, independent brewers who are shunning the status quo and creating innovative new beers. The story is told through 2 of these entrepreneurs - Sam and Rhonda - battling the might and tactics of Corporate America. We witness their struggle to achieve their American Dream in an industry dominated by powerful corporations unwilling to cede an inch.

This contemporary David and Goliath story is ultimately about keeping your integrity (and your family’s home) in the face of temptation. Beer Wars is a revealing and entertaining journey that provides unexpected and surprising turns and promises to change the world’s opinion on those infamous 99 bottles of beer on the wall.

So you might be asking, 'How does this relate to the mission of this blog?" Well, it's simple really...the preferences of consumers are changing. And changing for the better. For far too long the 'corporate behemoths' have been setting the bar (pretty low if you ask me) and using clever advertising to convince us that we want their product.

Consumers have started asking: where was this produced, what was used to produce it, who's behind the brand, how far did this travel to get to me, who's benefitting from the sale of this, who am I supporting if I purchase this, does this company's integrity align with mine, etc.

Choosing to partner with and patronize local businesses - from your local brewery (The Brew Kettle and Great Lakes Brewing Company), to our fabulous local restaurants (The Greenhouse Tavern and The Flying Fig), to your local bookstores (Loganberry Books and Blue Heron Bookstore) and your local marketing service provider, AGC - you're helping to create options in the marketplace, supporting the city we love and the people who live here, and assisting the next spirited entrepreneur get a little closer to their American Dream.

Supporting local, independently owned businesses leads to innovative, creative products, brought to you with care and enthusiasm. Next time you have the choice between a corporate behemoth or a small business, consider the questions above before making your purchase.

A Perspective on Marketing in a Recession

We needn’t tell you that business today isn’t what it used to be. And we don’t want to be presumptuous or oversell our ability to help make things better (or at least keep them from getting worse). But our years of marketing communications experience, including having been through similar conditions before, gives us a perspective we’d like to share.

Pare expenses, spare investments. It’s easy in a time when income declines and costs rise to want to cut back on everything not immediately essential. Need we say lack of discrimination can be risky?

Truth is, some activities, marketing communications among them, are only a temporary drain on resources. Because they are investments in generating future business, they have the potential of ultimately bringing in several times their outlay.

Right now is also a good time to be making such investments. The more the economy declines and competitors retrench, the greater the impact and potential rate of investment return (ROI).

So while scaling back some marcom activities might be appropriate, cutbacks shouldn’t be drastic. Too much too soon is not only penny-wise and pound-foolish now, it will make it more difficult and costly to regain market momentum and share later on.

Re-think strategies and tactics. We are not, however, recommending business as usual. Rather, this is the time for reviewing and modifying marketing communications plans and priorities.

Strategically, concentrate on short-term, hard objectives, the type more likely to generate immediate sales, not longer-term, soft ones, which are more effective in market positioning, branding, and share protection. This is also the time for focusing more on retaining existing customers (better immediate profitability), less on finding new ones (better future profitability). Also, when you should be spending less on growing your markets, more on making sure you at least maintain your share of existing markets.

Tactically, less focus on qualitative features and top-of-the-line products, more on quantitative features and products that can offer demonstrably better values. Also, appealing to the tendency of recession customers to be less inclined to experiment with unfamiliar products or suppliers, more likely to stick what they are familiar with. In short, modify your materials to accent familiarity, reliability, durability, safety, and performance.

Maintain visibility. There are three related points that have greater significance during a business recession.

The first is that customers forget just as rapidly. Without constant reminders they will fail to remember an organization, products, or features. And the cost of reestablishing awareness later is high. Simply, it is less expensive to maintain awareness than create it all over again.

The second point is that awareness is enhanced when materials are consistent in style and message. So any modifications in strategy and tactics must retain the same family appearance. This is not the time for a style change.
The third is that when activity falls below a certain level (the customer awareness threshold) the return on investment is so low as to not be worth doing.


Learn from history. It’s an old adage that those who don’t learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. During a business slowdown we see this in three ways.

1) Organizations that make too few or too late adjustments to their marketing communications activities squander away scarce resources.
2) Those that cut back too drastically end up paying a heavy price in lost market momentum and share when business returns to normal.
3) Only those organizations that modify their strategies and tactics while continuing promotional activity weather a recession with the least damage.

It is well documented in business histories and case studies that organizations that maintain at least a moderate level of promotional activity during a recession, when competitors are cutting back, get the highest return on their investment, and stand to improve their market share when the recession ends.

We suspect you would like your organization to be in this category. And we’d like to help you get there.

For more information please contact Candice Champion, Vice President, candicechampion@agcinc.org or call 216-661-2550