The Marketing Plaza

Marketing has long been marred by metrics. Great marketing can’t always be directly measured. It is the bane of a marketing director’s position, especially during a recession when every penny of the budget requires justification.  The flip side, however, is during high times, “fun” marketing that is clearly not effective is indulged or encouraged beyond the parameters of good business sense.  A recession forces marketing creativity in finding new ways to do things cheaper, faster, more effectively.

Here’s where social media has helped immensely.  In prior recessions, the technological tools were limited both in reach, capabilities and cost.  Web development that previously cost in the thousands, could now, if needed, be done on the fly by amateurs.  Indeed, the result is not as professional as a web pro might do, along with poor landing page optimization, stock graphics, and perhaps even poor content development. But, if push comes to shove, at least through GoDaddy and other templates services, an entrepreneur or one-man marketing shop could get the word out.

Then there’s email.  Even the worst of us technologically can seem to draft an email message today.  It’s a way to stay in touch with clients and prospective clients at relatively low to no cost. And here’s the best part — Google Analytics, email analytics, and social media analytics make it all measurable!

Of course, there’s the question if any of the available metrics mean anything, but that was always true even in the traditional market days of DECs (Daily Effective Circulation) and out-of-home media.  Out-of-home sales people still quote DECs as it’s all they’ve got, but is the count of  the number of cars that pass a billboard in a set time period really any measurement of marketing effectiveness?  In the same vein, the measurement of web hits or followers may not tell you much either.  All of these metrics only let you know the potential exposure of your message to an audience, not whether the message resonated or not.

In the end, there’s really only one marketing metric that every matters – how many times the cash register rang. If business is growing, you may not be able to attribute the exact level of the growth due to marketing, but you can tell what’s working and what falls on deaf ears.  As with any marketing,you need to continually ask how the lead was generated, talk to customers about what resonated with them, and track when surges occur.  Even without a coupon code on an ad, if an ad runs and the phone rings to a much higher degree than previously, there is a correlation.

In marketing, never ignore coincidences, because there are none. If a customer walks into your store, they reacted to something. Find out what it was.  It might be your sign, an article about you in the newspaper, an ad you ran, or plain old word-of-mouth.  But something created the lead. Find out what it was so you can learn and repeat it. Because, repeat business is true marketing success.

Did you ever consider that newspapers were the original targeted media? In fact, it was so accepted that newspapers were targeted that most felt USA Today was insane to believe it could be a national (read mass marketed) newspaper when it launched in 1982.

Today, many believe the Internet is leading the way to the demise of the newspaper. In fact, all the Internet has done is what USA Today attempted to do – reposition newspapers as mass media in an increasingly micro-niched world.

While many business moguls might have you think the current problem facing newspapers is its business model, I believe the real challenge before the industry is a marketing one – repositioning (or going back to its roots) as an effective target marketing vehicle.

When radio and TV were first introduced, they were considered a threat to newspapers, but history has proven that theory wrong. The reason it was wrong was that cost of entry (advertising time) was so high and the medium was so different. Network TV is true mass media. Network radio is as well, but radio was first to come closer to the newspaper model with news radio geared to a regional audience.

Cable TV finally broke the TV mass marketing mentality and soon appealed to local car dealers, in particular, followed by restaurants and jewelers whose egos made them adore seeing themselves in their ads. If newspapers can learn anything from Cable TV it should be to encourage entrepreneurs to feature themselves in the ads instead of their products as entrepreneurial egos trump ROI every time.  “My wife’s third cousin saw my commercial,” was a common response I’d hear when accompanying news account reps on sales calls to local car dealers. ROI didn’t enter the ad buy equation, not by that point. The value was more basic.

But as the famous newspaper cartoon line from Pogo goes:  “We have met the enemy and he is us.”  Newspapers have done as much, if not more, to damage their own unique selling proposition than the radio, TV, or the Internet by forgetting who and what they are.

USA Today has done more to change how newspapers are expected to look and their positioning as a mass media and The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are eternally chasing the national newspaper moniker as well.  Meanwhile, regional newspapers are being caught in the middle – never a good marketing position. They have the big guns above them and the micro-niched weeklies, direct mail and Internet sites beneath them.

The goal then, is to move from the middle, and not to regain the higher ground. Papers never had that ground. The answer may be retrenching to lower ground and sticking to the knitting.  Meanwhile, the first order of business is to agree that the middle ground is not the place to be.  Let’s learn from the retail market newspapers cover so well… big box stores do well as do well-positioned boutiques.  Middle of the road stores don’t last long.  The middle is not generally the place to be for long-term market success.