Marketing Automation: a bluffer's guide

This year we at the University ran/are still running our first Marketing Automation (MA)  project.

The primary responsibility for the design and delivery of this project rested with me, which is cool as I like doing new stuff and learning new things.

Now marketing automation has become the buzzword du jour, but what is it really?

In its most basic terms it is this:

"In the ideal world you would make direct contact with your prospective customers with quality content/information/offers at precisely the right time."

Now given that prospects come into your database at all different times, wanting different info about different products, with differing levels of urgency. Doing this manually is downright impossible.

Marketing Automation at least give you a chance at doing this.

So, how did we implement it for us?

Firstly we needed to convince stakeholders to come along with us. That means explaining the concept, describing the realities that in order to grow we need to do different things and then using the powerful word 'pilot program'. Pilot programs are great, they seem less-risky even if they aren't and you are still betting the farm on them! But hey whatever helps get you over the line!

OK so we got internal stakeholder buy in, what next?

Resourcing. We didn't have the appropriate software or experienced expertise in-house nor the funding to purchase it, so we went with an external agency to consult with. In hindsight, I would definitely recommend bringing the expertise in internally if possible. Tertiary education is quite complex and you don't get that depth of content knowledge unless you live and breath it each day.

OK so we engaged an agency now what?

Audience identification. With over 200 product lines we couldn't afford to run an AM stream for each we eventually boiled it down to:

1. Canberra and regional NSW school leavers - a nice broad catchment, with set deadlines to act for uni and a degree of similarity.
2. People wishing to study education
3. People wishing to study nursing and midwifery
4. People wishing to study law and justice
5. Non-school leavers
6. International prospects in key territories

Having identified the targets we then mapped the various 'touchpoints' the number of times we would contact these people, where they were hard points (eg application deadlines, Open Day) or moving points (one day after signing up to our database please send them..., when they reach 100 points please do ...).

OK so onto the next step...

Lead Generation. No point having an ongoing discussion with nobody is there? We need to generate leads right? 

So we developed white papers - How to Ace Your Exams for instance for school leavers, that we advertised on Google and Facebook, people clicked, went to a landing page and in exchange for their personal details where able to download.

This is the education one...

http://info.canberra.edu.au/education/

The Year 12 one worked by far the best, it was the broadest audience and the whitepaper was the one that had the most timely value. Mind you with 5 weeks to go as of late November, the campaign has already met its target overall. Non School leavers was the hardest one to develop content for as this market was the most diverse. In future I recommend good quality persona research on this audience in order to develop better content. 

Alongside this was the next step - content creation. We invested heavily in this making videos about life on campus, videos about why regional students should move to Canberra, infographics about Canberra for International, writing up profiles of students doing exciting work as part of their studies etc, along with other more call to action type EDM's eg Open Day, Application deadlines etc.

I would argue we did OK with content, some if it was really high quality and engaging whereas others tended along the lines of more old school 'push marketing' just using snazzy software to deliver it.

We did learn however that much more successful was our new personalized ebrochures. http://canberra.easybrochurebuilder.com/?_ga=1.130089359.1083457024.1442287867 - we were originally going to treat this as a separate project but it was so successful that we rolled these leads into our MA project. 

Moving along we also schedule telephone call outs with our customer enquiries centre for key deadline periods.

At present the results are positive but we won't know for sure until March next year. 

Observations:

1. You really need internal staff and software to do the best job
2. You need to be well ahead of the game in terms of content preparation as if you fall behind it can be like chasing a roller coaster to catch up and quality can suffer as result.
3. Keep the value exchange for lead generation broad. The more niche you go the lower the returns for effort. Year 12's, Brochure downloads etc were a lot more successful than other types. Even better would be to frame the audiences used for MA around certain broad personas or archetypes and chase after those. So utilize research first.
4. Systems integration is important - we had a lot of challenges getting four separate systems to talk together. Things that can work with existing systems such as website CMS's, existing CRM"s etc are much better.

HOW IT WORKS FOR THE ARTS - Now I know many of my readers are still from the arts world - how can this work for you? Well one piece of marketing automation I always thought would work for arts ticket sales is trigger points. Imagine a ticketing system that knew your genre preferences and your buying patterns and so you could automatically trigger a direct EDM at that precise time - "Dear Ricky - we know you love Paul Kelly, just to let you know he arrives here in six weeks, we've taken the liberty of reserving a seat for you, to take advantage please click here...". 

Of how about the fact that the average attendee of the performing arts only attends each 18 months, imaging sending people a free $20 gift voucher at 18 months to get them into the habit of attending again. Most vouchers never get used but those that do convert will have been saved from slipping into non-attendee land.

There's so many ways this technology can be used.

Anyway that's my bluffer';s guide to my first experience delivering an MA project. If you have worked on one I'd love to here any comments and experiences you may have.

Market Research: some thoughts

Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman says that 95 percent of our purchase decision making takes place in the subconscious mind. (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-subconscious-mind-of-the-consumer-and-how-to-reach-it) With that in mind (ha! geddit?) it makes me question what's really going on with a lot of market research especially in terms of when we wish to test marketing based concepts such as creative, new websites etc.

If most people have no idea why they are doing something surely the last thing we should do is ask them!

But it's not all bad,here's a list of market research that I think is incredibly useful:

1. Product research based on actual behavioral data. For instance it is entirely possible to determine the size of say the labor market for physiotherapists in this country thanks to census data. Once you have this, you can look at other published data around how many universities offer physiotherapist degrees and make an assessment as to whether your University should start up a degree like this.
2. Digital Research based on real life testing. Back in the old days of direct mail smart operators used to AB test their messages and offers, send out two different offers to a small cohort and then implement the best one for the full list. Digital marketing is like this BUT FOR EVERYTHING! Seriously you can roll out small changes to your website, monitor success and keep or chuck depending on result, you can do this daily if you want.
   
   The University of Canberra has an enquiry form, it used to convert at 4%, one change (the removal of the side menu bar) and it now sometimes converts at 40%! This was a small change, that cost nothing to implement and we were able to make the change base don people's actions.

Zaltman says you should always compare what people say with what the DO, and he's right. People SAY they watch Insight on SBS last night but they actually watched Gogglebox.

Now given that this is an Arts marketing blog, ticketed arts companies have access to one of the best forms of market research, the various nuances of people ticketing behavior, speed with which they buy different genres, cross-genre purchasing patterns, do people buy on star power or on company reputation, all of these things are empirically provable without needing to conduct market research.

Generally subjective market research is conducted for the wrong reasons, you have managers that lack knowledge or confidence in the insights they and their team have of the market, you exist in a culture of blame where mistakes are punished and so you seek to minimize or deflect that blame with research to support your decisions, or it could be that your organisation simply cannot afford for X initiative to be a costly failure. Or its a mandated KPI for board reports (urgh the WORST!)

I would say that none of these reasons is a good reason to conduct subjective market research, and by subjective I mean "which feature is more important to you", "Which designs is more attractive to you" type research. I WOULD say that in circumstances where empirical data is contradictory then research is a good way to seek to understand that contradiction.

At the leading edge of this form of research is brainwave responses. Some research says that when people see their favourite brands the same receptors go off in their brains that are triggered when they see family and friends. This sort of research, stuff that seeks to understand the subconscious has value for marketers as it becomes more established.

As always when thinking about market research I remember Henry Ford when asked about it... he said "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse!"

He's right, research is great but nothing without vision, insight and leadership.

POST SCRIPT
I actually found some notes I made on this topic and whilst I covered most of it above some extra thoughts include; 

1. Be careful of those in the research and data industry - many have a self-interest in talking up the value of data and research, but without providing tools to give genuine insight.
2. Qualitative research around marketing and digital is good for reaffirming common sense where simply re-stating the common sense view is not enough to sway the decision.
3. research can be valuable as a circuit breaker when two views are dominant and their is a stale mate re the best way forward.
4. Trialing on your live market - note all the tech giants do this FB, Google etc they often roll out a feature to select users before rolling it out to all.
5. Maybe rather than invest in research perhaps invest in leadership and empower your leaders to to take 'leading' ideas to the market. Basically back your judgement.
6. One benefit of research is the process of conducting research itself, the process of defining the problem so it can be breifed into a research firm, teh process of getting everyone in the room to see a research presentation, these things are of value in and of itself.

Time in Market: the hidden factor

We've all been there. You are working on a marketing campaign and you are up to your elbows in the things that you can see in front of you; debating subjectively about the creative execution, agonizing about the words, trying to get the 'messaging' right (on a side note why is this not just 'the message'?) or we might have been debating the media mix; digital, social, press, radio etc and the various merits of each.

All the while the one unseen variable and perhaps the most crucial variable slips silently by... time.

When I worked in the arts we had time-in-market down to a T, for all but the most exciting of performances, if you were not in market for a minimum of four weeks, ideally six, you simply did not have enough time in market for the public to find out about it, talk to friends and family about going, ruminate, waste time and then finally purchase tickets. If it was four weeks you needed to spend way more money than you did over six too for the same effect.

Now at the University my time frames are much longer but time-in-market is no less critical.

One of the best gigs I worked on, in terms of understanding this, was Yes Prime Minister, the stage show. We were in market nearly somewhere between 10-12 months out. We went on soft sale, did a groups launch but otherwise we just generally left it there, sitting on the website, postered up in the foyer, flyers on racks. And you know what, it just ticked away selling in dribs and drabs and when it finally came to planning and mounting a campaign we had a solid pool of tickets already sold. 

Another element of timing is to put work into what is called 'flighting' its when you think about your peaks and through in your marketing spend. No one can afford to shout at the same volume 100% of the time, you get hoarse and your audience tunes out. Better to think about when you want to be loud, when you want to be quiet. Just like a good Pixies/Nirvana song quiet/loud/quiet/loud done artfully.

The things that eat into time-in-market are, 

• lack of awareness as to when time is slipping away and a subsequent lack or urgency.
• lack of pre-planning, thinking ahead of time how much time you need to get sorted with your campaign in order to be in market for the ideal time. (DId I say the word 'time' enough just then? Here it is again TIME!)
• the 'perfect being the enemy of the good' thing. When you prioritise going for that fifth or sixth creative concept because the others had 'not quite nailed it'. I'm here to tell you, better to be in the market for the perfect amount of time with a 70% creative, than have perfect creative but for too short amount of time.

Anyway something to think about and consider when planning your campaigns. Maybe you can study your own past campaigns and see if there's a pattern or optimal time-in-market. One benefit is that in an increasingly digital world you can get out into market faster than ever before in some mediums. I have often begun campaigns on Facebook and other social and digital mediums simply because I could get that out quickly and then buy the breathing space to work on other executions.

If you do have some 'perfect is the enemy of the good' stakeholders, you need to work with them to get them to understand the importance of time-in-market, although admittedly some will never get it and happily fiddle while Rome burns down.

Alright that's enough from me, sorry it's been a while since my last post, hopefully I'll get my blogging mojo back and it won;'t take me so much TIME to blog again!

Playing with your brand: a quick DO's and DON'T's list

We've all been there, the temptation is irresistible. 

St Patrick's Day is approaching and the Boss thinks we should 'Do something'. Maybe something on social media perhaps?

Before anyone goes any further your mind flashes forward to changing the colour of your logo to a bright emerald green, perhaps it gets a jaunty Leprechaun's hat, tipped just so, maybe there's some clip art of the tipsy little fella that you can lean up against your logo like a drunk against a lamp post.

 To a traditional trained marketer these ideas sound TERRIBLE. And by and large they are.

I mean look at this.



But when you try and explain the Marketing 101 reasons why this is terrible - brands require consistency etc you just come off like a wet blanket.

Also the days when you could say "Well Coke or Telstra don't change their colours?" doesn't work as more and more big brands are willing to play with their brands and logos albeit in structured methodical ways.

So when should you change your logo for St Pats, Day, Gay Pride week or whatever?

Here are my tips:

• Does the event/situation fit with your brand personality or values? I currently work at a Uni, I would say a big NO to St Pats day, linking oneself to public drunkenness is a bad look for concerned parents. But a big yes to Gay Pride week. It fits our values and personality.
  
• Is there something in your brand armory that you alter without it looking terrible/unprofessional? For instance my Uni's logo is simply too fine to carry off being made gay-pride rainbow (which would also look terrible), but there is a lot of real estate on our website and social media pages that we could professionally and tastefully use to show our support. We could find a same sex couple kissing and use that in keeping with our current photography driven house style.
  
• Is there a way to connect yourself to this event etc without looking like a dodgy corporate? My Uni has an Indigenous Action Plan among other things, we can totally align ourselves with Sorry Day or NAIDOC Week with this a proof point of our support. However we don't really have much of a connection with Rugby League so we can't really do anything to leverage State of Origin. It's all about behaving authentically. 

And that's really it. I don't think it should be a blanket or a wet-blanket NO to ideas to modify one's brand to fit an event, but it needs to be done tastefully, authentically and be in keeping with your brand personality.

Tertiary Education Marketing: Know the fight

Back in my time in the Arts I wrote a blog about how simply thinking about the true terms of your product can be instructive as to how to market yourself and in setting priorities.

The same is true for Universities too although with some distinctions.

'Know the fight', its a phrase learnt from Captain America of all things but its so true, when you re in the middle of a battle it helps to now what kind of battle you are in, is this the main game? Is this a distraction? What is the purpose of this fight?

Back in the days when University places were capped there wasn't really much pressure at all to market yourself, demand outstripped supply for many courses so those that didn't get into Nursing at University A flowed into University B. 

The effect of this seemed to lead a lot of Universities into focusing n the rand, it was enough that you got your brand out there and you didn't need to focus on Return on Investment much (ROI).

In an uncapped environment all of a sudden you needed to actually attract students, they had choices finally.

So 'know the fight'. Firstly and most obviously Universities provide a service not a product and we know that the customer experience is everything when it comes to providing a service, having  quality call centre, having smooth application processes, having online learning tools that work and your class schedules don't clash too much and finally the experience is fruitful and positive. When you are a service, word of mouth is king and you fail to invest in these things at your peril. 

But what other kinds of 'fight' is tertiary marketing? Well most of the sector markets itself like a premium product. For the post part I disagree, in fact I would argue universities actually sit at the other end of the scale, its a mandatory purchase for many, like insurance, whilst for others its a commodity, people just want a degree where that degree comes from and how its delivered is of little concern.

Luckily the process of selling a premium product is similar to that of a mandatory purchase, you need a constant market presence so that when people reach the time of their or their children's life that Uni is needed, your brand is on the shopping list and is well thought of, it sounds crazy but this is how funeral homes market themselves.

Fighting against commodification is harder, commodities such as flour and salt really sell on price and pricing is not a factor in a Uni under the current system. Th fight here is to convince people that they can't just do their degree anywhere but you NEED to do it with us. Which means you have to look for things that you can do better, do those things better and then adequately communicate this.

What's great about both of these above challenges is that content marketing and market automation are ideally suited to these tasks. The Uni I work for is smaller and therefore is not betraying trade secrets to say that our marketing budgets are therefore smaller than many competitors too. So the idea of maintaining a constant market presence in the old mainstream advertising manner is just not feasible. But with marketing automation we can target our markets precisely and ensure that we are engaging with them regularly to maintain a brand presence and via content marketing you can engage those people with exactly the sort of 'stories' that reduce the commodity effect.

We are only at the beginning of these processes, so it is too early to tell what the results will be but the theory is incredibly sound and it will be exciting to find out if it works.