Can Your Brand be Amazoned?

A year-old startup is killing it by selling web cameras on Amazon for 90% less than its competitors, The New York Times reports.

So are other new companies selling things like appliances, tools, clothing and cosmetics.

The piggybacking startups are pioneers in a drive toward "better products for ludicrously low prices," the newspaper says; and pose an existential threat to "big brands."

For a fee, Amazon provides sellers turnkey distribution, marketing and sales; sellers, in turn, can concentrate on product design and manufacturing.

“As this takes off, it really makes you start to question, what is a brand in the Amazon age?” e-commerce consultant Scot Wingo told The Times. 

"In a way, Amazon is providing all this information that replaces what you’d normally get from a brand, like reputation and trust. Amazon is becoming something like the umbrella brand, the only brand that matters.”

How about your brand?

Can it be Amazoned?

Even if it's a service, for a 10-20% fee, Amazon's willing to wager it can.

Right now, Amazon restricts the business services it resells to computer and building maintenance. But how long will it be before Amazon expands into accounting, advertising, coding, consulting, event planning, executive recruiting, lobbying, public relations, tax preparation, and temporary staffing?

Not long, I'd bet.

Ruined Your Relationship with Readers?

Has your relentless pursuit of eyeballs ruined your relationship with readers?

I bet it has.

If all you do is dangle click-bait and recycle sales-talk, you're driving readers away―and wasting your chance for romance on the biggest social network of them all, email.

Only value keeps the relationship alive.

Newsletter publisher Inside proves it. In less than a year, the startup has attracted 300,000 readers. Its newsletters garner 40% open rates, 10% click rates.

The secret sauce? Good content.

"We think news on the internet is broken," the company's website says. "Too much writing is optimized and incentivized for traffic and virality, instead of impact and quality."

By focusing on value instead of hits, Inside keeps readers reading. And a happy reader shares her love―causing your list to grow.

So how does Inside do it?

According to Austin Smith, Inside’s general manager:

• Five full-time staffers and 10 freelancers produce all the content for 28 newsletters. Staffers are generalists with multiple beats.
  
• Each newsletter comprises 70% curated content, 30% original. The content is "deep dive," business-only, and written for an advance audience.
  
• Staffers favor stories readers may have missed because other news outlets have ignored them.

How to Choose the Right Email Marketing Consultant (Infographic)

Been-around blogger Matt Banner contributed today's post. Matt teaches techniques for better blogging at OnBlastBlog.

Email marketing offers an immensely high return on your investment, but in most cases you will need a consultant to help you master today’s top strategies. 

The right email marketing consultant:

• Understands today’s underlying strategies and tools. 

• Understands your brand and of the voice you use when speaking to your users.

• Can build a list of people interested in your product or service.

• Sweats the details, because everything about your emails matters, from the length of the subject line to the content within. 

The latter is where a skilled copywriter comes into play. The copy within your emails must be compelling and properly written to ensure that it grabs readers' attention immediately and keeps them engaged throughout. The ability to write strong sales copy is also a must, as the call-to-action is massively important. 

In order to properly choose a consultant, you will first need a basic knowledge of what makes any email marketing campaign successful.

Take a look at the infographic below to find out more about what defines a strong email marketing strategy. Using this information, you can better choose a consultant.

Junk Content Pushing Europeans to Rebel

Impersonal, junk content is pushing Europeans to rebel against brands, according to new research by Coleman Parkes.

84% of Europeans say their patience with junk has reached its limit; and 18% have taken their business elsewhere, as a result.

Other consequences:

• 65% of Europeans feel less loyal to spammy brands
• 64% think brands aren't doing enough personalization
• 63%  would spend less money with spammy brands
• 57% would stop buying those brands altogether

Compared to Americans' junk-tolerance, Europeans' seems low: they consider just 25% of the content they receive to be junk.

Will Americans soon grow as discerning?

To Gate or Not to Gate, That Is the B2B Content Marketing Question

Customer acquisition and retention expert Ruth P. Stevens contributed today's post. Named one of the "100 Most Influential People in B2B Marketing" by B2B Magazine, Ruth consults to large and small businesses and teaches at business schools around the world. Her latest book, co-authored with Theresa Kushner, is B2B Data-Driven Marketing.

There’s a spirited debate in B2B marketing about whether it’s best to give away information (aka “content,” like white papers and research reports) to all comers, versus requiring web visitors to provide some information in exchange for a content download. In other words, to gate your content or not to gate. The debate involves aspects of both ROI and philosophy. Myself, I lean toward the “gate it” camp, and here’s why.

I know that plenty of very smart and well-respected Internet marketing experts argue that free—unimpeded—distribution of content encourages both trust and, perhaps more importantly, wide dispersal and sharing of information. You’ll get to a much bigger audience, who will be educated on the solutions to their business problems, will be grateful for the free info and, one hopes, will think of you when they’re ready to buy.

The problem is that this model leaves marketers in a serious quandary. We don’t have any way of knowing who is reading our informative, educational and helpful content. We are left sitting on our thumbs, unable to take any proactive steps toward building relationships with these potential prospects. All we can do is wait for them to contact us and, we hope, ask us to participate in an RFP process, or, more likely, give them more info and more answers to their questions. Is that any way to sustain and grow a business relationship—not to mention meet a revenue target? In my view, it leaves too much to chance.

Myself, I grew up as a marketer in the world of measurable direct and database marketing. So it’s no surprise that I favor the gating side of the fence. I like marketing campaigns that provide predictable results. Where I can stand up in court and show a history of my campaign response rates, conversion rates, and cost-per-lead numbers. And most important, where I can reasonably expect to deliver a steady stream of qualified leads to my sales counterparts, who are relying on me to help them meet their quotas.

That’s my argument for gating content in B2B marketing. I understand the logic of the other side. And I see clearly situations where it makes sense to let the information run free—as a teaser, for example, to persuade prospects to come and get the richer information that is so useful that they’ll be falling all over themselves to give me their name, title, company name and email address. But what about you? Where do you sit in this debate? It’s a biggie.

The Coming Content Arms Race

Marketing strategist Mark Schaefer coined the dystopian term "content shock" to describe audiences' adverse reaction to content marketers' handiwork.

If you've felt a little content shock now and then, seek shelter now.

A "content arms race" is about to commence, Schaefer says.

By 2018, we'll be awash in content, as marketers' annual spend on web ads catches up with their $215 billion spend on TV ads.

Besides flooding the web with content, the spending shift will usher in an arms race, whose victors will be deep-pocket companies.

Small-time players, who until now have considered content their secret weapon against major advertisers, will be buried.

"Those with more money generally are in the best position to create more and better content, as well as pay to have it promoted and distributed," Schaefer says. "Will they always win? No. All things be equal, will they usually kill off the smaller guys? Yes. History bears this out."

Schaefer points to Chipotle's content marketing efforts as proof. "That kind of multi-million-dollar quality is not sustainable for most businesses and will hasten the exit of marginal content producers."

Meet the New Marketer

Most content marketers "live in a delusional bubble of branding hype," claims web designer Gerry McGovern.

He's proven his point with his delete key, boosting clients' sales by expunging 90% of the content on their websites.

"Organizations in general publish far too much of ego, vanity content that’s high on hyperbole and low on information," McGovern writes in his blog New Thinking.

Today's marketer crows about his inestimable edge over old-schoolers like Don Draper.

Today's marketer brings a data-driven, likable, personalized, "un-marketing" approach to the craft.

Yet fewer than 10% of B2B executives say they trust web content, according to a study by the CMO Council.

The revolution brought about by todays 's new marketer, so far, reminds me of lyrics by The Who: "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."

The Booming Business of Selling Books

You can take the boy out of Madison Avenue, but not vice versa.

Earlier this year, madman-turned-author James Patterson launched his thriller Private Vegas with a bang, by selling a single advance copy rigged to explode 24 hours after the reader opened it.

Patterson asserted that the reader who started the book would experience a veritable "race against the clock" to finish it.

The novel's price tag: $294,038.

At the same time, Patterson offered 1,000 free copies of Private Vegas on his website, digital versions rigged to "cinematically" self-detonate 24 hours after they were opened.

Patterson's experiential social media campaign racked up 419.8 million impressions, and thrill-seeking readers spent 13,896 hours reading the advance copies of Private Vegas, according to CMO. 

Paul Malmstrom, a creative director with the author's agency, bragged in a news release, “For this launch, we aimed to create the most thrilling reading experience ever. One that takes the suspense of Patterson’s new novel to a crazy, new level."

Yup, crazy… like a fox.

Patterson has sold more than 300 million copies of his novels in the past 25 years.

We're All Water

Streetwise Americans—my spouse among them—used to vie for MBA degrees in international marketing.

Then globalization happened, and there were no international marketers, only marketers.

The value of those MBAs evaporated, and the people holding them had to find new ways to distinguish themselves.

Marketing Week columnist Mark Ritson predicts the same fate's about to befall anyone claiming pedigree in digital marketing.

"Digital has changed the world so much that it has become the world," Ritson writes.

The very word, in fact, is a "dodo," Ritson says—doomed to disappear from business's vocabulary.

There are no international marketers, there are no digital marketers.

There are only marketers.

As Yoko Ono sang, "We're all water in this vast, vast ocean. Someday we'll evaporate together."

Your Content Marketing is Broken

Most marketers treat mobile as a poor cousin, even though 61% of online content gets viewed on mobile devices in the US, according to comScore.

Websites, blogs and ads are still designed by rote, looking swell on desktops and laptops, but broken on mobile devices.

The majority of marketers also ignore the fact that customers often switch throughout the day from mobile phones to tablets, designing content for just one of these devices.

By failing to design "adaptive" content, marketers are merely distracting chronically distracted customers.

Analysts call the right content marketing strategy for today a "mobile-first strategy."

Maybe it's time to get smart about your strategy.

If the shoe fits.

Say It Ain't So, Joe

Warning: 70% of your content contains grammatical errors that could be harmful to your brand.

Software provider Acrolinx analyzed content on the websites of 340 global companies and found that 7 in 10 sentences evidence faulty grammar.

Acrolinx scored the content against "best practices for standard grammar" and determined the percentage of boo-boos per 1,000 words, Amy Gesenhues reports in Marketing Land.

Marketers in the US received the lowest scores worldwide; and, while they may not, some people care.

A survey conducted in 2013 by UK-based Global Lingo reported that 74% of customers spot faulty grammar on company websites; and that 59% wouldn't buy from a company that uses faulty grammar.

Say it ain't so!

Well, it is—and it gets worse.

Search engines, according to Bing's webmaster, won't display pages of content riddled with grammatical errors.

The 120 Commandments

It took Moses four decades to write his laws, so we should be grateful it's taken only half that time for someone to codify the rules of email marketing.

And it was well worth the wait.

Writer, editor and e-mail marketer Chad White's extraordinary handbook, Email Marketing Rules: A Step-by-Step Guide to the Best Practices that Power Email Marketing Success, is by far the most intelligible, comprehensive and practical handbook yet written on the subject.

The 300-page book makes it unassailably clear—and not just from his bio on the back— that White is an accomplished "hands-on" email marketer; that he's not only been to the mountain, but around the block.

White walks you through 120 essential e-mail marketing rules-of-thumb, or in his words "the rules that separate great marketers from good marketers."

And the trip is eye-opening.

Encyclopedic in scope, Email Marketing Rules covers everything you ever wanted to know, and leaves out the hucksterism that normally pollutes books of this sort.

Rules aside, the glossaries larded throughout the book make it worth reading. So does the concluding chapter, "The Future."

 
My sole criticism of White's book: I couldn't read it 20 years ago.

Five stars for Email Marketing Rules. Buy it. Read it. Keep it handy.

The Return of Mad Men?

Once upon a time, people believed corporations weren't crooks.

The Great Recession changed that.

It was Corporate America's Watergate.

In today's Post-Recession period, corporations look no longer to Mad Men to tell their stories, but to brand journalists, who pride themselves on eschewing '60s-style corporate hokum.

"I've been a reporter, and I've also been a marcom writer," says David B. Thomas, posting on LinkedIn. "There's a big difference."

The marcom writer, according to Thomas, produces only "buzzwords and grandiose claims."

The brand journalist tells a story. 

"The people who read [the story] appreciate it because it gives a straightforward, unbiased analysis of the situation," he says.

Above all, the brand journalist strives to be informative. 

"Before she starts writing, she asks, 'What's important here for my audience? How will this help them solve their business problems? How can I make this interesting, informative and fun so that people will remember it and share it?'"

A practitioner myself, I appreciate the difference between a marcom writer and a brand journalist, too.

But then I remember how the Original Mad Man, David Ogilvy, once insisted, "The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be."

Ogilvy also scolded contemporaries who relied too heavily on buzzwords. 

"Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon," Ogilvy wrote.

What's old, it seems, is new again.

Shoddy Content Can Only Fail

Introduced in 1813, shoddy is a cheap woolen cloth made from recycled rags. Victorian-era manufacturers used it to make low-end clothing.

Civil War soldiers—whose shoddy uniforms would disintegrate after only days—are responsible for our use of the word to mean cheap workmanship.

By flocking to shoddy content, today's marketers are trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

But it won't work, says Jeff Rosenblum, a columnist for Ad Age.

A marketing movement is underway to deluge customers with shoddy content—a movement that gives Rosenblum deja vu.

"I'm getting nasty flashbacks to the early days of banner ads," he writes. 

"When banner ads first came out, the marketing industry treated them like rebranded laundry detergent—'new and improved!' So, we shifted a bunch of dollars online and used half-baked data to prove it worked. Until, of course, we realized it didn't."

Banner ads bombed because marketers didn't grasp their value.

"The same will be true of content if we don't apply the lessons we learned. If we simply develop content because we think it's new, improved, quicker and easier than previous tactics, we're doomed to get the same disappointing results that we got from banner ads."

Content works, Rosenblum says, when it's understood:

• Content improves brand perceptions. "Great content shows customers why a brand is different and better than the competition. It creates evangelists that carry the brand message more effectively than paid media ever could," Rosenblum says.

• Content empowers customers. The premise is straightforward: customers give you their time; you give them useful information. "It's easy to create a social post with a cute kitten and generate a bunch of social shares, but that doesn't do anything for the brand in the long run."

• Content is more than clicks. Marketers need to measure more than likes and shares. "You need to understand how well the audience understands what makes the brand different and better. You need to understand what, specifically, shifts them down the sales funnel and generates revenue."

• Content isn't cheap. "Too often, brands spend countless hours talking about the power of social media, but spend an infinitesimal amount of their overall budget creating content."

"Unlike banner ads, content marketing can fundamentally alter the future of a brand. But it won't be quick and it won't be easy," Rosenblum concludes.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald once told a would-be writer, "Nothing any good isn't hard."

Spotlighting the Skeptics

Can you be trusted with customers' data?

The answer depends on who you ask, according to a new study by Royal Mail MarketReach.

The firm asked 7,000 consumers in the UK whether they trusted marketers to use their data ethically, and protect it from thieves and hackers. 

Its findings show:

• Older people worry about potential data abuse more than younger people;

• Women are more reluctant to give marketers data, and want greater reassurance that their data will be safe, than men; and

• High-wage earners trust marketers with their data more than low-wage earners do.

The Snaky Story of Hashtag

The word "hashtag" has roots in the US military. 

Sort of.

It all starts in 1907...

Enlisted men and women begin to nickname the service stripes worn on dress uniforms "hash marks."

Each stripe represents three years of duty—and untold plates of hash eaten.

Now, flash forward to 1962...

Scientists at Bell Labs add a key to the new "touch-tone" phone: the # key.

It lets callers send instructions to the phone's operating system.

They pirate a word used by mapmakers, and proudly dub the # key the "octothorpe."

An octothorpe is the mapmaker's symbol for "village" (eight fields surrounding a town square). 

"Octo," of course, means "eight;" "thorpe" means "field" in Old Norse.

But Americans already know the # key as the "pound key" from typewriters (where # means "number").

"Pound" sticks when touch-tone phones hit the market.

All along, our cousins in the UK—where "pound" refers to the symbol £—are calling # "hash."

As are computer programmers, many of whom are ex-military, and familiar with those hash marks on uniforms.

Now, flash forward to 2007...

A Silicon Valley marketer named Chris Messina sends a Tweet.

He urges everyone to use # to denote Twitter chats. 

Messina names # the “channel tag."

But Twitter's early adopters insist on calling # the "hashtag."

Finally, flash forward to 2013...

The American Dialect Society assembles in Boston to announce its prestigious "Word of the Year."

Can you guess the word?

Hint: It isn't "octothorpe."

Jumping the Shark

Well aware that most customers are "deletists," email marketers will swim any length to catch you.

Sometimes, too far.

A marketing automation provider recently sent me an email with the following subject line:

Don't open this message unless…

The "payoff" (a fairly insipid one) appeared in the body of the email:

You want to automate your marketing woes away!

Obviously, I took the bait.

But I ask: Why would a company that sells, of all things, email marketing services sink to such lows?

So be warned.

Avoid clickbait subject lines. 

Even if they increase opens, they'll take a bite out of your brand.

Machines Will Take over Marketing

Harvard Business School professor Jeffrey F. Rayport predicts that technology will soon take over marketing.

"What Salesforce.com did for sales management and NetSuite did for financial management, software-as-a-service providers will do for marketing, by automating much of what marketers do every day," Rayport says.

As ever greater dollars are shifted to digital from other forms of marketing, marketing technology will rise in importance—and spell doom for activities like planning, budgeting and management.

"Instead of setting advertising budgets on quarterly cycles, marketers will launch ad initiatives whenever opportunities emerge, and they will optimize them for efficiency and effectiveness on the fly," Rayport says. 

"Bidding on ad exchanges already happens in real time; enhancements in media placement and creative execution (for example, what image goes with what copy for a given recipient) will occur with similar speed. The 'budget cycle' is already a quaint idea. It will soon be a thing of the past."

White Noise

Too much content is killing content marketing, says William Yates, an executive with the UK-based digital agency Novacom.

Marketers know full well customers are time-starved, but continue nonetheless to spew "protracted blogs, long, drawn out how-to articles, and over-written so-called white papers."

Most of this content is "textual junk," Yates says; and the oversupply threatens to turn marketing communications into "marketing white noise."

In fact, Yates contends, a transition is already afoot: customers are becoming more discerning.

"Discernment is the other side of the transition coin, and as this side of the coin is flipped and hits the sunlight, and discrimination prevails, so this incessant stream of nonsense will be perceived for what it actually is: valueless."

A Thing of Beauty

What's more important In marketing emails, copy or design?

In a new report on email marketing from the Center for Exhibition Industry Research, digital strategist Jason Falls answers the question—categorically.

It's copy.

"Nothing makes an email more powerful than expertly written copy," Falls writes.

"Catching the recipient’s attention, taking them on a quick journey, and making them believe that more than anything they have to take the action you want them to take and take it right now, is a thing of beauty."

Falls quotes Derek Halpern, a fellow digital guru who "swears by text-only emails."

“I’ve experimented with both simple text and fancy HTML," Halpern says, "and in all my experience, simple text generates the best results."