Features
Beyond Facebook
You might have a lot of friends and fans on Facebook but one-track marketing kills profits. Drayton Bird discusses the marketing mix and comments on how all should be used to increase revenue
It is exactly 25 years since I was engaged in the nerve-wracking business of selling my direct marketing agency to Ogilvy & Mather.
It was perhaps the first advertising group to realise the importance of our discipline. That is because its founder, David Ogilvy had a concept he called "orchestration".
With his flair for the telling phrase he talked of "many instruments, one big noise". So it was busy building a complete armoury of marketing weapons: PR, advertising, research, direct marketing.
Personally I never was wedded to a particular discipline. Early in my career I had worked in all those areas, plus telephone and face-to-face selling, at both of which I was spectacularly bad.
Since then, things have become more complex with the arrival of digital, or online marketing, text marketing and experiential marketing, which covers all manner of things from test-drives of new cars to make-up sessions in department stores.
But one problem remains. People tend to use the weapons they like, which are not always the most appropriate, rather than the ones that will give them best results. And few deploy them together, which is usually the best way, but rather hard work.
Before coming onto social media, which is flavour of the month right now, let’s look at the benefits of integration.
2+2=5
The Chinese writer Sun Tse observed in his Art of War: "In battle, there are not more than two methods of attack—the direct and the indirect; yet these two in combination give rise to an endless series of manoeuvres."
Using various weapons together, direct and indirect, is not new at all. And it really does create synergy; you get more bang for your buck if you use them together.
In the 1960s in my first job as a creative director, the agency I worked for had the British Army recruitment account. The press advertising we ran used to tell people to watch the TV commercials. More recently, I saw research that measured the return on investment if you ran a sequence of different media—direct mail followed by e-mail followed by a phone call. You did better than just relying on one medium.
My biggest client today is the only one thriving in their field of home improvements. One of its main competitors has gone broke; another struggles to finance its business, with sales revenue down around 47%.
My client who sends out some 48 million pieces of direct mail and door-drops a year is investing increasing amounts of money on the website and emails, uses telemarketing, press advertising and inserts, door to door canvassing and in the last year has been spending on TV.
It is the totality of these efforts that makes the difference.
What’s working?
Bertrand Russell once remarked that what men seek is not knowledge but certainty. What he really meant was that people don’t want to do the hard work of thinking; they constantly seek the magic silver bullet that will solve everything.
It doesn’t exist. You have to analyse what is appropriate for a particular task at a particular time.
For a while, email was immensely powerful. It was a novel medium, amazingly cheap, and not many people were using or knew how to use it.
I recall a delegate at a conference where I was speaking telling me that he was getting a 10% response to his emails selling to businesses. The other day an expert told me that 0.1% is now the average response when selling to businesses.
But such figures are quite meaningless, because so many other factors intervene. A few weeks ago I got 4- 11% response to a campaign we were running.
Why did I get such a wide variation? Because so many factors affect results. Here are a few, and they apply to most media in different ways:
➊ Was the list any good? In this case I was emailing my own list, who know me. That will increase response hugely.
➋ Was the proposition easy to say "yes" to? In this case I was merely asking people to express interest, not buy.
➌ When was the email sent? For us, after lunch on Friday does nearly three times better than any other time.
âž� What was the format? Text—or what looks like text—normally beats fancy design. But not always. For one of our clients who sells women’s fashion it does about the same.
➎ Was the copy any good? Most is not. I regularly double response by writing better copy. Not that I’m a genius; I just study a little more.
These principles apply broadly to direct mail, which is down at the moment after climbing steadily ever since the second world war, but by no means out.
Roles
Let me tell you about a campaign for a client selling to lawyers. A different market from yours to say the least, but what happened (mistakes and all) and the principles are instructive.
This client is the world’s leading supplier of legal information. It was not at all keen on our proposal, which revolved largely around direct mail, which it saw as junk, and entirely wrong for it. It had to be convinced by its marketing director (it took months) that this could possibly sell highly complex services and products that cost many thousands of pounds.
That alone was hard enough, but even tougher perhaps was convincing the company that the kind of direct mail I proposed had the remotest chance of working. That is because what I suggested—then wrote—was a six page letter, which went to some 2,500 medium-sized law firms.
I don’t think anyone was holding their breath waiting for a smash hit for two good reasons. The first is that their database was about one-third inaccurate, and if you have a bad database, that is a dreadful handicap. The second is that one thing "everyone" knows is that any letter longer than a page will get read.
This is rubbish, as any really professional direct marketer knows. Nevertheless, I was pretty astonished when, at mid-morning, on the day letter hit the doormats, one firm rang up and placed an order worth £50,000.
I used this story to send a follow-up letter that repeated the proposition - also six pages long. This, too, was successful, and the campaign, which involved telephone marketing, e-mails, a website and the client’s sales-force, produced more than £1,500,000 in sales, including another whopping £100,000 order from that letter.
So how did this work? It used each medium appropriately, although it missed a few tricks, like the first, critical one, which is to collect and verify the names and addresses that make up your database. In this case, the salespeople were doing that job but were clearly not well briefed on its importance.
The direct mail converted the easiest prospects, by telling them to go to a website where they could see a demonstration of the product. Here and in the direct mail they were offered a free trial and a discount for ordering quickly.
Prospects harvested on the website were followed up by emails, then phone calls, then personal selling where necessary.
Diversification
It is a huge mistake to fall in love with one medium. Each has its virtues and draw-backs.
The email may be cheap, but response rates are low. You are lucky to get more than 10% of cold prospects to even open your email. Direct mail is expensive, but far harder to ignore. The phone is even more costly, and harder still to ignore. Personal salesmanship is extremely costly but nothing is as powerful.
Pay attention to the new social media. They do get amazing results, but you must beware of selling hard. My blog, http://drayton-bird-droppings.blogspot.com, has—to my utter astonishment—proved a very effective sales tool almost by accident. That is because it is mostly entertainment with not much selling.
The best analysis of Twitter is given by Ken McCarthy, who is something of a legend in the internet world. See http://kenmccarthy.com/blog/2009/11/29/twitter-without-the-bs. One man who has made a lot of money from social marketing is Mark Attwood, and I’m off to see him over Christmas to learn more.
The biggest area where people could do so much better, so easily and cheaply may be in how they use their websites. Your website should demonstrate the benefits of what you offer and collect the names of prospects. If you go to www.draytonbirdlearning.com you can see how it is done (though not perfectly!).
How well you do it is crucial, though. One of my colleagues analysed a sample of websites at random and discovered that every one made five basic, criminal mistakes. They can all be corrected for well under £5,000 and the increase in ROI is staggering. But that is another story.
In 2003 the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton Bird one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing. Drayton Bird runs Drayton Bird Associates, Garden Studio, 32 Newman Street, London W1T 1PU. T: 0845 3700 121; F: 0845 3700 131; E: drayton@draytonbird.com; W: draytonbird.com
