Beyond the Bell: 5 Marketing Musts
Panelists at NYSE Euronext’s executive summit say companies should blog, tweet and share in ways that stay true to their messages.
Courtesy NYSE Euronext
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Put 100 marketing heavyweights in a room — as NYSE Euronext did recently at the Executive Marketing Summit co-sponsored by The Wall Street Journal — and you’ll see a surprising amount of consensus. Panelists such as John Compton, CEO of PepsiCo Americas Foods, an arm of PepsiCo Inc. (PEP), and Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, agreed that corporate life and advertising have been forever altered by the still-evolving digital age. The daylong event, titled “Innovation and Information: Cultivating Marketing Success,” suggested at least five behaviors that successful marketers are now putting into play. In no particular order, they include the following:
Courtesy NYSE Euronext
1. Give Up Control
Digital users are “friends” or “fans,” and as such they expect to interact with brands and share that information with their inner circle. That means talking with rather than at customers, as most advertisers have done until now. Says Christopher Baccus, executive director of digital and social media at AT&T Inc. (T): “The best advertising involves getting the right message to the right person at the right time, and letting them run with it.”
This lesson is going viral in more traditional forms of advertising, says Compton, who points to customer-generated Doritos ads that Pepsi launched at the 2007 Super Bowl. “Some people said we were crazy — booking $2 million or $3 million worth of commercial time for ads submitted by teenagers with no idea what the content would be.” Still, he says, the first ad was such a hit that the company continues the tradition and intends to run six customer-generated ads during the 2011 Super Bowl.
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2. Tailor Your Message...
...to the medium. “Content providers have designed their messages for Google and other search engines,” points out Tim Armstrong, chairman and CEO of AOL Inc. (AOL). “Many are just now realizing that they need a different message for LinkedIn and another for Twitter.” (To learn how AOL is creating customized local news through its new Patch platform, click here.)
Courtesy NYSE Euronext
Tory Burch, CEO of clothing designer Tory Burch LLC, says, “When we began tweeting, I delegated that task to someone on staff. But I realized that it needed to be my voice. So I’ve become a voracious tweeter.” Although a product Website is legitimate, don’t try to sell too hard on social media sites. Pepsi, for example, is more likely to post information on social sites about events it sponsors than to try to sell chips or soft drinks on those sites, Compton says.
3. Go Local
Paradoxically, digital media is open to everyone but is far more intimate than more traditional formats. Ben Edwards, vice president for digital strategy and development at IBM Corp. (IBM), points to IBM’s launch of Creek Watch, an iPhone application that enables users to snap a picture of their local waterway, then annotate the image and upload it to CreekWatch.org, where users can track environmental data. He says IBM also encourages staff and community involvement through its People for a Smarter Planet site, featured on Facebook, which provides opportunities for employees and others to sign on to projects taking place in their own backyards.
4. Don’t Overuse Metrics
Because digital media is capable of measuring so much information, Edwards worries that advertisers sometimes succumb to “the tyranny of numbers,” adding that most transactions still take place offline and may occur months after a customer has visited a site. That said, the robust data mining that is possible through the Internet has encouraged customer targeting, again playing into the “go local” theme of delivering what specific communities or customer bases want. And as applications such as Foursquare begin connecting advertisers with customer credit cards, Crowley says to look for a whole new level of metrics.
Courtesy NYSE Euronext
5. Guard Your Brand
As customers are tasered by the sheer numbers of content providers, “brands are increasingly significant,” Armstrong says. “Consumers zero in on those they trust.” In addition to delivering on their promises, companies increasingly partner with trusted sites, including social network sites, as a way to achieve credibility.
Armstrong also suggests that brand advertising (as opposed to specific product ads) hasn’t worked on the Web because of page clutter. Noting that most Websites resemble the designs first implemented 15 or more years ago, Armstrong says AOL is rethinking its basic format. “With six to eight ads crowded on a page, we found the average page contained only 18 percent content,” he says. The redesign will restrict each page to one advertiser. Not only will that approach allow significantly more content, he says, it will also help advertisers set themselves apart from competitors.