How do people learn about new products?

How do people learn about new products? Guess what? Word of Mouth still reigns supreme!

In a new great chart from Marketing Charts, the reasons why someone would buy a new product come out. A few notes: there are different countries in the mix here and age demographics are not shared. That being said we can learn a lot from these trends. Here are a few notes:

•Word of Mouth is the best way to gain new customers. While listening to ‘experts’ talk about a product dropped 11%, friends and family told me about it it only dropped 4%. A rejection of ‘experts’ is something that is growing strong in our generation due to the flood of facts we deal with everyday. For more issues and products its easy to google something and find an opposing fact (or pseudo-fact). This survey shows a drop in word of mouth but I think they are drawing a line between word of mouth and social media which as I explain in the next paragraph is not really that different.

• Social Media is growing and its really word of mouth for the next generation. Someone once said, “If billboards are fireworks, social media is a bonfire.” Fireworks are short bursts of entertainment and could describe many forms of advertising but social media is designed to allow a conversation to happen about your product or service. Social Media will increasingly be a tool that is used to sway’s peoples minds about a product because it is the word of mouth in the tech world we live in today. [bctt tweet=”Social Media will increasingly be a tool that is used to sway’s people because it is the word of mouth in the tech world. “]

•TV Ads are prominent but faced a huge drop and I suspect this will only continue. Traditional media is going to continue to suffer from a drop in power due to demographic changes and the adoption of technology. TV is going to become less and less powerful unless they do something about it’s viewership and data.  Here are some of my other thoughts about traditional media.
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All of this is great data for us to help improve our sales! Lets put it to use!

People love free shipping emails and other tips!

Marketing Charts recently released a great chart documenting what types of communicates lead to customer purchases. This is extremely helpful if you offer a product. Of course each businesses’s audience is different and will respond to things differently. One restaurant I work with responds well to amazing text deals but email can sometimes be a struggle.

Here is the chart:

Marketing Chart's Research

 

Some interesting notes from this research:

1. Retargeting is at the bottom of the list. I wonder if people artificially lowered this number because it creeps them out. But it is interesting that direct mail ranks higher on the list. I suppose it has a lot to do with the quality of the direct mail list you buy.

2. What is interesting is that the top three items are all emails! I love email marketing.  Email is a great form of permission marketing and its something businesses should always be thinking about, “How do we increase our permission base?”.

3. The Staggering drop off between two and three. Free shipping and discounts reign supreme here. I suspect this tactic will become more and more prominent as we increasingly stop buying things in brick and mortar locations and instead switch to online stores. Free shipping will be the gold standard and is already used by things like Amazon prime to attract consumers.

Facebook’s 20% Rule

Facebook Grid Hate

Facebook’s 20% ad rule is terrible!

Facebook Grid Hate

I know this is nothing new but I have seemingly only recently starting running into this problem. The first time it struck: One of my clients has trivia on Saturday nights at his restaurant. I wanted to promote the trivia night and the logo for the trivia company was almost all text! I couldn’t promote an image with their logo prominently displayed because will it was more than 20%. It was extremely frustrating.

The most annoying part is the grid itself. If Facebook had a true 20% rule determined by text actually taking 20% of the screen, that would be more reasonable. You can work with that.

However if your text crosses into more than 5 squares your image will be rejected regardless of how little text their maybe. For example, some text that takes up 5% of the screen my touch 5 grids and therefore be rejected. (Of course this is assuming that you don’t squeak by somehow, which I have in the past).

In an attempt to preserve the visual aesthetic of Facebook they are in fact making marketers create less attractive images to meet their ridiculous grid system. So for marketers, I have created this Facebook sized image grid for standard timeline images. Just overlay this over the graphic you are designing and make sure that it doesn’t cross over the more than five grids.

I know this is a super low key solution but I am already using it to save time when trying to get an ad approved on Facebook.

Good luck!
Facebook Grid OVerlay

A Lesson from a sidewalk

This week I had an appointment on my alma mater’s campus. It was nice to walk around a place that was so meaningful to my development as a person. While walking across campus I noticed a corner where students walked from sidewalk to sidewalk without taking the path that was originally desired by the planners. This brought to mind two lessons we should take into mind when planning something for customers, attendees, users, etc:

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1.  Plan for customers. This design was an addition to the campus. The way it is designed is almost as if the designers failed to take into account the current structures in place. They also failed to anticipate that humans, not just college students, usually take the path of least resistance. Of course students wouldn’t walk the extra 18ft to merge with the current sidewalk! Take time to study what your customers might do, try to get into their shoes. In the tech world they build customer personas to try and learn this behavior.
2.  Plan to change. There is no way that you will be able to anticipate all the way your users will (mis)use your product. Humans are too unpredictable for that. But be prepared to make changes to better fit the user. This path has been trod for at least 5 years now. Instead of a new sidewalk being poured and fixing the problem an eye sore has developed in the heart of campus. Observe how customers use your product and make changes accordingly to make the experience great!

 

 

Arby’s Twitter Parody

Arby’s is getting some interest twitter traffic recently. While reading one of my favorite blogs last weekend, Another Week Ends by Mockingbird , I followed a link to what they described as a hilarious twitter account called: @nihilist_arbys. Now for the uninformed nihilism is defined: the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless.

To combine Arby’s (the brand that use to use the tag “Its Good Mood Food”) and Nihilism is hilarious to me and apparently to the internet. At the time of writing, Nihilist Arby’s has close to 60,000 followers. This is an example of one of the tweets from the account:

Disclaimer: Not all of the tweets are family friendly. But some of them are pretty funny. Most parody accounts have nothing to do with the company they are mocking and I think this is true of Nihilist Arby’s as well. What turned this into a marketing article is what happened not to long after I followed Nihilist Arby’s. Nihilist Arby's Obtimist Arby's Now @optimist_arbys is an account run by Arby’s Corporate offices. This account tweets things like:


I like how Arby’s is trying to handle this parody account. They are trying to manage the parody account with a parody account of the parody account that meets up with their branding.

They are also being proactive, they were following people who were following the parody account.

Good work Arby’s!

 

 

Improving Efficiency & Not Angering Customers

a smart glass

Frequently when companies improve their efficiency they end up angering customers because they hurt the customer experience. Today’s blog comes from an experience I had this weekend with a small punch cup at a church function that showed me how a company improved efficiency and didn’t ruin my customer experience.

A big business lesson comes from this small cup:

a smart glass

The beautiful part about this cup is that I did not initially notice the change. I simply picked up the cup and filled it with lemonade, like I had done many times at church events. I only noticed this change after I finished the lemonade and was staring at the cup, wishing there was more lemonade!

Can you see the barely visible line around the halfway point of the cup? That line divides the construction of the cup: a strong upper portion  by which 99%* on customers pick up and hold the cup and a thinner bottom half to conserve plastic. The bottom portion is noticeably thinner but I most likely would not have noticed if I hadn’t lost focus on what was happening!

The company may have saved 1-5%* of the plastic from each cup but when you make millions of these cups every year that is a huge savings! The engineer whose idea this was deserves a raise!

This is a brilliant execution of an idea that has lead to things like extremely thin plastic bags at the grocery store that irritate everyone!

So the question is: how can you improve efficiency without compromising the customer experience?

 

*I made these estimates up.

Engaging employees with passion

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Local Factory works don’t have a lot of passion about the mission of their organization. At least according to a recent report from Gallop. This makes some sense. When in an organization in which you end up being a very small cog in a very very large machine its easy to lose sight of the overall mission. To compound that problem millennials care more about purpose then about their paycheck. Factory work might not be classified as fulfilling by some people due to the nature of products or the parts that they make.

I think we can extrapolate this out to even employees in most businesses. Maybe not to the same degree but the low level employees of small businesses probably don’t care a lot about that plate of food they are making or the widget they are selling beyond making sure they receive a paycheck. I would guess there is more concern then what might exist in a large factory situation but I think some of the same problems would still exist.

That article did show that a local mission, like a charity, can help engage employees. I think we can take this principle and start applying to local businesses as well. What if every local business took one or two charities on to be the charity they support. Run contests among the staff to raise funds, give employees time to volunteer at that charity, and have fundraisers with customers as well. These could be be a great thing to help employee engagement.

I have seen this effect in my life. When I worked in nonprofits, I would see the pride in the eyes of factory employees when I would come to a factory to pick up a check or large donation. How can you implement this in your business?