Poor Geo Targeting = Poor Results in Marketing

So, I don’t know if I mentioned it…but back in the day, I used to work for a direct marketing firm. It was the last job I took before I did an about face and started my own company. If you’re not familiar with direct marketing, it’s essentially a segment of the marketing industry that focuses on data acquisition and prompting consumer response to advertisements, marketing campaigns, physical collateral (mailers, etc) and a major chunk is dedicated to email marketing and website registrations. I mention this because I’m actually a member of Sponsored Tweets – which is basically an affiliate marketing network for Twitter users. We get paid to create “sponsored” tweets that are sent out to our twitter networks with links to specific websites. Typically pay outs are based on the cpc (cost per click) or on the actual tweet itself. This can range anywhere from $0.02 per click to as high as $2+ per click – depending on a number of factors. (P.S. Scoff if you want to at $0.02 per click, but if 1 million people clicked a link, that’s $20,000 in revenue. In direct marketing, this is a very standard cpc value – and there are a ton of companies making big bucks off of cpc earnings of less than $0.05 per click/registration/etc.) I’m not here to wax poetic about direct marketing. I’m not a huge fan of it, but like the P.S. note I referenced above, it taught me a lot about “remnant” revenue and how no revenue should be left on the table!

This post is about failed targeting. If you’re in the DM industry, you know how essential it is to target the correct demographic for an offer. Sure, you can send a batch and blast message to a generic mailing list, but you’re likelihood of consumers actually taking the desired action will most likely dramatically increase the more fine tuned your demographic/mailing list becomes. In other words, you can send out a blast email about the X Games to a mailing list comprised of all Americans (~310 million) , but typically less than 10% (31 million) will open the email and of those maybe 1% (310,000) will click through & potentially complete the call to action. Sure those numbers might sound great anyway (assuming we’re talking about a $0.05 cpc time 310,000 clicks [uniques only - no double clicks allowed] for a potential total of $15,500]) but for those in the industry who consider themselves reputable…you would never want to send a batch and blast to a mailing list that large without fully vetting that the email subject matter matched the demographic being targeted. (A lot of extra caveats I won’t delve into – but that pesky “click as spam” button will deter you from wanting to blindly batch and blast a huge mailing list).

There are tons of ways to properly target consumers based on the data within your mailing list. Often you can segment by gender, age, education, household income and location. Typically, the most common is location, age and gender (as the other ones really require a fine tuned and up-to-date mailing list). Location is obviously based on your geographic location associated with your information and in the US and N. America at large – is typically determined by your zip code. So, in theory, someone who lives in 90210 (California) should not be getting an email that’s only relevant to people in the 10018 (NYC)  zip code and surrounding codes. Why? Because it’s irrelevant and to the Cali person…that message is equal to spam at that point. So, I’ve been waxing poetic for three paragraphs because Sponsored Tweets just asked me to consider the opportunity of creating a tweet that is only relevant to Canadian residents.

Sponsored Tweets - Offering an NYC member the chance to market a Canada only offer

Now, before you rush to their defense, when you join Sponsored Tweets, you have to authorize them to have access to your Twitter account. And, last time I checked, Twitter makes you tell them where you’re located. My profile definitely says that I’m located in NYC. Although NYC is just but a few hours away from Canada – it is not IN Canada. So, why would I be receiving an invitation to create a tweet that I can’t even access because according to the company requesting it, I’m in the wrong country?! Additionally, Sponsored Tweets assumes that you’re just John/Jane Q. Public – not that you’re an affiliate marketing firm with multiple Twitter accounts geared to specific regions. So, that even further reduces the possibility that I would have a huge Canadian following. This is a FAIL on Sponsored Tweets (which is owned by Izea – who should really know better since they’re very active in the search/direct marketing industry) for not using the information from user’s Twitter profiles to properly direct offers to appropriate members.

Oh How I Hate Twitter Spammers!

A quick post….

Nothing irks me more than twitter spam – it actually bothers me more than email spam! So, some tweeter just sent me a post that when mousing over the the url they provided – will lead people to some kind of site that will capture their IP address. Once again, some poor person has been duped into believing that you can easily run a low level cpc marketing campaign  (pay per click typically) just by posting a link and sending it to as many random people as possible.

Twitter member with poor rapport attempting to run a marketing promotion

I don’t claim to be a social media expert, but the one thing that will always remain true about it, is that rapport counts for quite a bit when you attempt to market to people on a social network. The goal of social marketing is to have the general public buy into your marketing campaign and like your brand so much that they end up promoting your message just as hard as you are (hence “likes”, RT options on Twitter, hashtags and share options). Considering that this person who tweeted me has no followers, isn’t following anyone, has no real avatar and has only sent out 3 tweets – all of them with the same message to more unsuspecting individuals; it’s pretty safe to say that this is a basic spammer. More than likely, this person has more than one account with Twitter, and they’re all probably trash. They’re not interested in truly connecting with the general public but just pushing a message and hoping that someone (anyone rather) will click their suspect link as a way of either harvesting info or receiving a measly cost per click revenue share.

Now, for those of us who really do want to make a positive impact and receive meaningful feedback from consumers please be sure to do the following:

1. When marketing via social, transparency is key: If I’m going to promote a message about a client, I don’t pretend to act like I’m a “random fan”. I identify myself as their marketing consultant and then leave it to the receiver to draw their own conclusions about whether or not they like the content.

2. Building rapport is key: Before I ever started using Twitter or Facebook for business marketing, I was just a simple tweeter! I followed people, had twitter conversations with others and basically made sure to post about things that I genuinely liked. It was almost a year after joining twitter before I started seriously using it to also promote my business as well. Consumers don’t want to feel like they’re just dealing with marketers – create a personality too!

3. The Consumer Sets the Pace: Unless you really know the person you’re chatting with, sending a random post to someone like you know them is (in my opinion) crossing the line. You can’t fake familiarity – and when you cross the line, and fail…you’re left with potentially ticked off receivers, who have no problem blasting you for your mis-step (kind of like this post).

Commercials that FAIL – Schick Quattro for Women Trim Style

Okay…women know that bikini line trimming is an annoying part of life. I seriously don’t know any woman (including myself) who gets a thrill from going for a wax or from shaving down there. Seriously, it’s an annoying but necessary evil if you actually care about how you look in a bikini or if you want to look neat and groomed for that special someone. But what isn’t cool is this commercial from Schick Quattro.

Now, this commercial isn’t new by any means…but it did pop up  a few times while I was watching the weekly Monday night Golden Girls marathon on the We Network tonight. The FAIL factor about this commercial is how random bushes and shrubbery suddenly go from wild and unmanageable to well groomed shapes (downward pointing triangles, hearts, rectangles, circles and more as women pass by them).

My thoughts: “Seriously?!” I would love to know which agency green lit a commercial concept that literally says “hey ladies, trim your bush”…it’s a little too obvious in my opinion.

Email Communications Done Wrong – Check It Out Below

Not so long ago, I used to heavily work in the promotional modeling world. If you’re not familiar with what that is, it’s basically when agencies/brands hire individuals to basically represent their brand to the public (whether that be b2b in the form of trade show events or b2c in the form of consumer interactions in public places). There’s quite a bit of money in it (I almost never worked for less than $25/hour) and it’s an awesome way to network your way into a better position – working for retail industry trade shows parlayed into becoming an actual account executive for a multi line showroom in the Garment District in NYC.

Anyway, this isn’t a post about a trip down memory lane. This is a post about probably the worst email message I’ve ever seen in my life. So, there’s a modeling agency out there that once upon a time I had signed up to receive their casting emails. It ended up that I never actually worked for them, and from what I’ve heard (and seen via the emails), I’m glad I didn’t. Last night I received an email from said agency regarding a casting call. But before we could even get to the actual casting call, I was greeted with the world’s longest, poorly written blast where the agent was yelling at her potential workers about not following her on twitter, how she was going to delete all of them from her email list, so on and so forth. It was so horrible that I ended up thinking “gee no wonder people treat you like crap, because you talk to them like crap too”.

Poor email communication from a model casting company

Part 2 of poor email communications

To make it worse, before you can actually see the job details (which is what really matters in a casting email), you had to sail past four or five rambling paragraphs that were poorly formatted which all said the same thing. I know this casting agent thinks that they’re coming off tough with this email approach, but in the end, it just sounds desperate and pathetic. And, to top it off, at one point the agent goes on to say that work has been slow in the last year because of the recession – but that people should continue to follow her on Twitter and Myspace to continue to receive casting leads. So, wait a minute…you just finished reaming people out for not following directions, but you’re not even bringing enough jobs to the table to give people a reason to want to follow you?! Sweetie, that’s a marketing and business fail!!!

This is no way to run a company by scaring off good talent and opening every email by coming out on the defensive. If you feel that there are too many unresponsive emails on your list, rather than harassing them, purge those non-responders. Then move forward and focus on the “good” talent. Let this be a lesson to the rest of us to never run our business this way! EVER! Unfortunately, this email makes it into the memorable category, but for all the wrong reasons!  o_O

*note: the agency name has been carefully omitted to save embarrassment on the part of the agency.

Social Media Strategies Gone Wrong

Okay this is a short and sweet post – social media is a great tool. But when used incorrectly or with odd “end goals” in mind it can be a bit of a fail. So, last night my Twitter notifications email pinged me 4 times to tell me I had a new follower. Only problem – it was the same person with 4 separate accounts – and almost all the accounts were the same name. The only difference between them was each one had a different number at the end. What makes this worse is that this person is claiming to be a marketing coach and guru. o_0 I know…a tad strange. As a marketer & someone who uses social to disseminate info quite frequently, I can pretty much say that there’s no reason for one company/person to have 4 twitter accounts if they’re doing legitimate consumer outreach. Four accounts with the same name and a number differentiation means only one thing – a direct marketing ploy to send out probably highly unwanted tweets to anyone foolish enough to follow them.

Make no mistake, I’ll be blocking these accounts as I don’t want to receive any direct messages or random tweets from them trying to convince me that they’re a marketing guru when they’re already making a fatal social marketing flaw from the jump.