Klenske Ink's blog

By Lisa Hartmann for Klenske Ink

YouTube has been rallying businisses to post their TV commercials on YouTube for free exposure. YouTube announced it is launching a program in order to fuel this development towards becoming the new channel for entertaining commercials. “With a global audience of 800 million monthly visitors to YouTube, every day can feel like you’re advertising in the Super Bowl, and one video can launch a business,” group product manager Baljeet Singh announced.

I say: Youtube is stating the obvious. Posting commercials you have already made gives you free exposure on yet another communications channel. However, you need to keep in mind that if you do not already have and use a YouTube channel, it is essential to familiarize yourself with the unwritten “code of conduct” of the platform.

For example

• Disabling the comment function on a video sends the message that your company does not value feedback.
• Taking a video down based on bad responses as soon as possible can prevent bad PR.
• Make entertainment your first priority. The advertising function of your video emerges by exposure.

If your company wants to spend extra effort to maximize your YouTube success, you can post interactive, engaging, funny commercials that specifically target the YouTube audience and the sharing trend. Entertainment will be shared.

Note: YouTube’s launch of this support program is of course also advertising for YouTube AdWords (YouTube’s paid advertising service whose efficiency is debatable).

The Problem with Having a Definitive Value Base for Your Marketing Campaign

By Lisa Hartmann for Klenske Ink 

Connecting to the consumer on a very personal level can, in extreme cases, make your company part of your consumers’ personal identities. We usually buy products that fit within our own self-image. The traditional American will open a can of Coca-Cola, while the young, active rebel might prefer to sip of Pepsi. We sub-consciously consume a set of values with the product.

While marketing these values can stengthen your products’ popularity, a value-based public debate can also take you down.

Dove is a company that has from its onset tried to radically differentiate itself from other beauty products by working against the stereo types of the beauty industry. Dove commercials and advertisements make a point of depicting women of all ethnicities, colors, and shapes in order to discredit the unhealthy myths of other conglomerates.

Dove published a YouTube video that expresses exactly this set of values in a determined way. The message to parents: educate your children on the advertisements around them and make them understand that looking like a model is not natural. The message of the film is difficult to disagree with. However, the public debate sparked by the video was just as popular as the video. Viewers remarked that a company selling products that are meant to make consumers look better is discrediting itself when saying ‘don’t listen to anything the beauty industry has to say’.

Over-promoting values or going a step too far with the claims you make can alienate customers and gives your audience more ground for criticism. Even though the values attached to your company and product fuel branding, values are a controversial subject.

Note: Using controversy to spark debate and create a buzz can be a successful PR strategy. No risk, no fun!

By Lisa Hartmann, for Klenske Ink

The way we act and interact online is based on our self-image. Consciously and subconsciously, we create external identities for ourselves when using social media and online tools. When creating a profile, for example, we present to the world who we want to be – we present what we would like for the world to see.

In other words, online identities can express a lot about our psychological state.

By targeting online identities, you tell your audience what they want to hear and you target the person they want to be. A person’s digital body language or online behavior can be tracked and examined by various software programs.

Combining this quantitative data collected by software with qualitative analysis by psycho-analysts is the ultimate targeting strategy. Your audience receives only the information that interests them.

The problem with a marketing strategy that is customized to this extent is that your ‘floating voter’ – the consumer that would not usually fit your customer profile but could be convinced to buy your product – might never be exposed to your efforts.

After all, your individual consumer is not a statistic.

The concept is as old as business itself: long-lasting customer relations are perpetuated by dialogue. If you keep on communicating with your clients, you remain at the top of their list and thereby build yourself a firm client base.

This doesn’t necessarily mean inviting them on a ‘business trip’ to Atlantic City, even the simplest strategies pervail: a phone call, a letter, an inquiry for feedback. Targeting propensity by sending coupons to former customers is a popular example.

The only rule in dialogue marketing is to engage, engage, engage – especially through non-technological channels.

Face Time

In B2B, getting face time is vital. Having coffee with a former business relation is dialogue marketing in its purest form. Further, your dialogue marketing plan has to be highly customized:

Define your audience

Ideally, you need to draft different exemplary psychological profiles of your customer base, focusing on communication channels. Which communication channels do your customers use daily and most frequently?

State your objectives

You need to have clear goals in any marketing strategy. Stating your objectives and acting by them sets a clear timeline. What are the tangible results you want from dialogue marketing and by when will you reach them?

Seek the most original channel

In order to maximize the potential response to your dialogue marketing, you need to find channels that your audience will not only access but respond to. Think interactive!

Case Study: 

Repeatedly, Ferrero has used points to cut out and collect on their Kinder products. If consumers collected a certain amount of points before a certain deadline and send these points to the company, they receive select merchandise items. This very standardized, commercial example of dialogue marketing makes sure that Ferrero customers keep on buying Ferrero products and interact with the company.

The Crème de la Crème of Marketing

Businesses are refining their strategies when marketing to connoisseurs

By Lisa Hartmann of Klenske Ink

Marketing to those who are marketing mogols themselves demands a different skill set than marketing to the general public. Additionally, the Business-to-Business marketing world is undergoing a similar change in techniques as the digital shift has caused in the general marketing world. In summary, marketing has become less quantity-oriented, less outsourced, less push and more pull, and more content and value-oriented.

Some of the most popular B2B marketing trends of 2011 were:

• Developing content marketing strategies
• Developing value oriented communication
• Targeting “online identities”

 Value Oriented Communication

Convincing statistics and numbers quantifying how valuable a company is to the client has become one of the top trends of the marketing world.

“Many organizations are finding that some of the more traditional customer satisfaction or customer loyalty measurement systems like ‘net promoter score’ are fall short of providing a real financial measure on ‘how much more money am I making doing business with your company verses Company B or C?,’” says Keith Pigues, co-author of Winning With Customers: A Playbook for B2B.

Investing time and resources in investigating the services and products a company provides in numerical terms communicates serious consideration to clients’ needs.

Content Marketing

Putting time and effort into outputs from which clients profit, but actually brings the company no direct revenue, is still considered unnecessary charity by many businesses. Even though the impact of content marketing is less tangible and less measurable than the impact of traditional marketing strategies, B2B marketing moguls like Siemens consider content marketing as the new secret of success.

In the “B2B Marketing Trends 2011 Survey” by Curata, content marketing is defined as “the creation and publication of original content, such as blog posts, photos, website resource pages, case studies, or white papers”.

The Survey showed that content marketing is part of the marketing strategy of 82% of B2B marketers.

Online Identities

Along with making online B2B marketing strategies a top priority comes the need for intricate refinement of targeting the “online individual”.

Tracking a user’s digital footprint, or what experts are beginning to call “digital body language”, has become increasingly prevalent. In B2B terms, targeting online identities means specifically finding out at what exact point in the buying process the potential customer currently is.

Software, such as Tableau, score visitors per website visit in order to direct them to relevant programs within the site. “Every engagement with a company is really an engagement with a person”, says Elisa Fink, vice president of marketing, Tableau Software.

Conclusions

Marketing revolves less around the product and more around the audience as individuals.

Instead of pushing a product or service, a business now needs to pull the potential customer in and create “attractive” marketing outputs. Sensitive reactions to shifts in the marketing world and a focus on the individual buyer will propel marketing strategies to the top of their league.

New Marketing Starts at Klenske Ink 

Looking through the web, one comes across several websites that seem to target the interests of the company rather than what the audience cares about. These sites are cluttered, have conservative layouts, are full of long articles and, most importantly – boring! 

How can you avoid bad website reviews? What makes a web presentation bandazzling?

Clearly formulate the purpose of your website

What are you trying to achieve with this carefully constructed, virtual net of communication? For most companies, the answer is to increase their client base and promote the company. But you need to go deepr. Include your company profile, past branding efforts, and your company’s positioning in your purpose statement. Once you are on a clear path – keep your purpose statement in mind when making decisions about content, editing and layout.

Create psychological profiles for your different audiences

Put yourself in your audience’s shoes and ask ‘why would someone come to visit our website?’ What are the different psychological profiles within your target audience? What do people with these profiles expect from you and your website?

For example, a potential client and a current client have completely different agendas when seeking you out on the net. Think about how to best cater to the needs of both.

Declutter your flow chart

Your company has a lot to tell. There’s a history and a profile, and advertising and news, and special characteristics, and special offers, and perks… 

We can all talk about ourselves for days if someone lets us. But do you really need to present all this information online, or do those who need it have your contact information? Instead, consider clearly paving the way for one-on-one communication. This is usually a better option than drowning someone in a bunch of information of which they need only a small fraction.

Put on different pairs of shoes!

From your previously defined audience profiles, pick one. What is this person’s objective for visiting your website? Go through how they will find the information they’re looking for. Is it logical? Clear? Easy to find? 

Then try this same thought process again for a different psychological profile.

Remember: if you get frustrated, your audience will as well – exponentially more so!

A click per minute…

Keep the short attention span of Internet users in mind. Write content according to the inverted pyramid: from most important to least important because most readers never get to the end. 

And most of all: “Keep It Simple, Stupid.”

Is your website working for you? Get your free web consultation at Klenske Ink.

Stay on your toes and check up on user studies and media demography statistics… They might surprise you!

A recent study in Sweden indicates that 75% of 9-14 year old Swedes prefer newspapers, radio, TV, and books to the Internet. It seems, in terms of media consumption, the Internet is merely a complementary medium for the young generation.

The main purpose for the age groups 9-14 and15-24 for using the Internet is music downloading, video sharing, and social networking.

Equally, the use of tablet computers and e-books withing these age groups are not prevalent.

What has boomed significantly, however, is the use of smart phones, which multiplied over the last few years.

The age group surrounding 30 listed the Internet as a medium preferred to TV and non-fictional/educational books. This age group also provides the primary customer base for tablet computers and e-books.

Deviating from media experts’ expectations, this study suggests a surprising shift in the target audience of for several forms of media. Of course, this study only gives information about Sweden, and of course, one must also ask about the methodology of the study and its validity.

If you go by what was found, however, TV and radio do have a more substantial young audience than generally suspected.

Lesson Learned: Media developments are not common sense and users surprise you every day.

Stay on top of the latest marketing trends at Klenske Ink.

And now for the ultimate failures of recent years:

JC Penny

Does Search Engine Optimization count as manipulation? The New York Times thought so in 2011 when exposing J. C. Penney’s in-your-face SEO techniques. The J. C. Penney website popped up so often on search engines that it was becoming obnaucious. The New York Times stated that for “Samsonite carry on luggage”, the clothing retailer J.C. Penney was on the Google results before Samsonite.com. J.C. Penney overdid it on their black hat techniques and rightfully got called out on it.

Fake Money

In an innovative attempt to promote the online game “Mafia Wars”, the Zynga Game Network had fake money glued to the sidewalks of San Francisco. Unfortunately, what generated the most publicity was the law suit for vandalism that followed, forcing Zynga to pay $45,000 to the city of San Francisco for inconveniencing the Department of Public Works.

Walmart

In 2007, Facebook users united to start a grand anti-Walmart wave which caught on ridiculously quickly. Still new at social media marketing, Walmart was bullied to the ground, continuously trying to post ads or pro-Walmart comments to fight the wave. Needless to say, Walmart learned that sometimes you have to pick your battles.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Another marketing campaign gone wrong was all over the media in 2007: Turner Broadcasting’s Boston bomb scare. In order to promote their film “Aqua Teen Hunger Force”, Turner hired someone to hang up score-board-like screens with movie characters all over Boston. Passerbys did not get the joke and suspected the screens to be bombs. A minor panic attack stirred Boston, alarming the police. The man who was hired to hang the screens was accused of trying to cause a mass panic. Turner tried to deny they were involved and the whole affair just escalated beyond what Turner had in mind… or did it?

Fight of the Gladiators

Greenpeace versus Nestlé in 2010. As we all know, Nestlé went down. Nestlé products contained palm oil which was detracted by destroying rain forestst. Greenpeace spread the message that Nestlé was destroying the natural habitat of orangutans. With Greenpeace members crashing a Netlé press conference in ape costumes and with Greenpeace’s Nestlé-Killer viral campaign, Nestlé was overwhelmed and powerless. Essentially, Nestlé lost a lot of money and had to re-assess their global sourcing chain. And all of us who have seen this ad, think twice before biting into a KitKat…

Several serious marketing failures during the last couple of years resulted from companies experimenting with new marketing techniques and new media.

Here is a selection of some of the most prominent ones for you to peruse… (and learn from).

Honda

Facebookers were less than impressed when, with grand gestures and pompous words, Honda released a sneak peek of their new car on the Honda Facebook page. Users’ comments were too downbeat for Honda. One day, someone joind the conversation out of the blue and started posting over-excited comments about the new model: he would “buy it in a heart beat”.

Turns out that the comment was made by someone working for Honda – hence more bad publicity for Honda’s new car.

Lesson Learned: Facebookers are not stupid, they can smell self-promotion from a mile away, so don’t try to hide it.

Rentokil

Having a Twitter account to directly communicate with customers was a step in the right direction for Rentokil. However, when the pest control company started following random Twitter users, confusion and suspicion spread throughout the network: spam alert! In a blog, called “Why is Rentokil following me?”, the company tried to explain, essentially openly admitting to following users in order to improve its social media marketing.

Rentokil developed a very condescending voice on their blog: “The beauty of Twitter is that you get to meet all kinds of people online, and not all of them with something in common with you. And that’s why you need to start talking to people, a bit like when you go to a party and know no-one but the host. Remember that thing called mingling? Try it, you might like it!”

Lesson Learned: No one is inclined to interact with those who talk down to them…

Dutch Bavaria

You know you shouldn’t do it, it’s forbidden. But it’s so tempting…

The Dutch Bavaria beer’s ambush marketing at the football world cup in South Africa was highly illegal and they knew it. The over 40 people they had recruited to simultaneously strip off their Danish geer to present orange Bavaria beer clothing were immediately taken off the stands by South African authorities. Bavaria was fined and the two women in charge of the ambush were questioned for hours. Was the trouble worth it for that tiny little moment of exposure?

Netflix

Netflix lost it in 2011: they were the ultimate communication fail of last year.

First, they abandon their philosophy by raising prices. Years of careful branding went down the drain. What’s more, Netflix’s conveniency drastically decrased when they changed their DVD rental sercive from top to bottom all at once without a word as to why. Suddenly, Netflix users did not recognize the brand anymore: different website, different payment method, higher prices… and all for what?

In the end, it was all for a massive profit loss.

Domino's

Why does your company have strict policies aagainst mentioning your job on social media? To avoid anything resembling Domino’s 2009 disaster when Domino Pizza employees filmed themselves violating Domino’s health code! What’s more, they proudly posted their masterpiece on Youtube for all the world to see. Domino took harsh measures by firing and taking legal action against them, but in the end it was the company who suffered from some seriously bad publicity.

That’s enough disaster for a day!

To be continued...

Avoid Social Media Pitfalls with Klenske Ink

This little guide will help you optimize your LinkedIn presence and marketing strategy

First, the number one rule in all social network marketing and profile maintenance: log on frequently, not only when someone contacts you.

Passivity is not going to work in real life networking and it’s not going to work in online networking either (unless you or your company enjoy a prestige status). Therefore, post, like, add, introduce, comment, update, etc. Activity is what generates buzz and defines your online presence and visibility.

These are the most important LinkedIn tools that contribute to your visibility:

• Your company name popping up in LinkedIn searches
• Introductions (you get introduced and you introduce)
• Testimonials of others about your business displayed
• Your status updates
• Your group participation and activity
• Start groups, add others to groups

Insight into the LinkedIn tool box:

• Research potential clients. See who the companies and individuals you want to do business with are connect with. Sometimes you can infer from their connections what or who they are currently looking for. Maybe one of your contacts is able to introduce you?
• Research the competition. Do not stalk your competitors, but find out who they are connecting with. Are they up to new projects? A more sophisticated strategy involves anticipating when a client of the other company is not satisfied. Your company could possibly soon become a suitable alternative.
• Introduce contacts to each other. By introducing others, your value as a contact goes up, but keep control of who you introduce to whom. You do not want to damage your image by having someone you introduced spam one of your valued contacts.
• Group activity is great PR. However, the type of group you join is more important than the number of members the group has. Think about the type of audience for your posts. It’s quality, not quantity.

One convenient circumstance concerning LinkedIn is the large amount of comprehensive self-tutorials on the web about LinkedIn. You can teach yourself how to use it and develop your own strategy. (Meaning, besides an increased exposure for your company and great networking opportunities, LinkedIn also increases your media competency). 

Tip: edit your LinkedIn URL and use it on your other web tools.

More tips at Klenske Ink