In January, Coca Cola and Unilever announced that they would be shunning campaign media sites in favour of social media based marketing. A bold move, and one many others have followed since. However, I’m not sure it’s right to ditch one method of marketing in favour of another without fully understanding the consequences of doing so.
Let’s look back a few years. The Internet is the next big thing. Paper would disappear. People would communicate not by picking up the phone, but by email and IM (anyone remember ICQ?). Email marketing became the next big thing, and very quickly, businesses realised they needed somewhere to send the people who were getting their emails. Those places: campaign media sites. I’m not suggested that these mini sites are a good or a bad idea, but they exist, and to a greater or lesser extent, they work. So why break what works? Would you consider that offline (print, radio, TV amongst other formats) advertising had had its day now? Wrong.
What the industry has comprehensively failed to remember is that different businesses and different audiences communicate and consume the world in which we live in drastically different ways. If you ditched all advertising in newspapers and magazines because you decided that the next big thing was the back of your car because more people you knew saw the back of your car… well you just wouldn’t.
Offline marketing is just as important as online. Sometimes more so. Yep. We’re a digital production company, and I just said that. The Internet enables a new form of communication, not a better one. Because we live in a digital age doesn’t preclude the possibility for some amazing trans-format campaigns that truly encompass our social sphere, whomever we are, and however we choose to consume it. Because you have a Facebook account, does that mean that word-of-mouth advertising is now irrelevant because you can reach everyone’s friends through an application, or by looking at where people have checked in? Not likely. More, Facebook as a marketing platform should be used to augment and enable a more engaging experience than is currently being offered by the vast majority of brands. This is return on investment. Investment doesn’t mean cheap, and cheap doesn’t mean higher returns.
We’ve spent some time over the 10 months intrigued by just how many applications for social networks we’ve been asked to build, for some pretty high profile brands. That’s not to blow our own trumpet, but it is to serve as a warning thus: not one of those applications had the response expected of the people involved in creating the strategy. And again, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be done, but they should be created as part of a larger strategy. The only time these social media campaigns do work is when they truly engage the user in something that user is actually interested in. If you are a brand manager and you are asking how your brand might engage in these environments, I urge you to think carefully about the bigger picture – how does social media fit into the overall ethos of the business, and how does that ethos portray itself externally? Does the brand in question already have a loyal following? If not, why not, and could it realistically build one in an intangible world? If it does, how does that following consume the brand presently, and how would you engage these people to become your advocates? By the way, social media doesn’t automatically mean digital. Take the example of the neighbour’s lost cat. Muddles’ photo is plastered on every tree in the neighbourhood, and not a single email or Facebook group has been created. Turns out, Doris at number 83 had taken pity on Muddles and given her some milk. She saw the poster one day and came and knocked at the door, but you were out, so she knocked next door and next door again until she found someone who answered the door in the middle of the day. So starts the Chinese whisper of social media.
I’ve gone off on a tangent a little, but the point is clear (in my mind at least). Advertising today seems a little too “follow-the-leader” in its approach. What happened to the truly creative campaigns that took you from radio to TV to something in a shop window to the Internet and back again before realising you were deeply involved and so were all your friends? And why does a campaign need to have a use-by date? Surely a good campaign (and the brands that get this truly get it) is one that stands the test of time. And just as importantly, a good campaign isn’t one decided on by someone saying “we need more social media”, but by someone coming up with an amazing idea, whatever the medium. You need to reach your customers, not mess around with what everyone else is doing.
Being in business, and having clients to service, we’re often asked to quote for work, and not every quote turns into an order. That’s to be expected. Some are new or potential clients going out to multiple potential suppliers, of which we are just one. Others are existing clients and have a duty to tender their work for any number of reasons. The end result is that we get some orders, and lose out on some others. That’s a fact of life when you’re in business, and in my eyes is nothing bad. You can’t please all the people all of the time.
What I’ve found in the last nearly 3 years in business is what I can only call a correlation between clients’ sizes, the level of detail required in cost estimates, and the likelihood of that quote turning into an order. This is an exploratory article and I welcome comment; I’m interested to know how others in similar situations deal with this issue as I’m sure it’s not uncommon.
There is an amount of work involved in putting together a proposal or quote for work. We usually do this for free and we feel this is the right thing to do – for those that don’t turn into orders, the quality and attention to detail that we put into all our projects are visible, and we’re often asked to quote on further work, more often than not winning that work. However – there’s always a however – it’s not always like this. We’ve got a couple of clients, and I’m sure everyone does, that we spend a lot more time servicing than we do others, without the financial benefit that this should bring.
For the most part, I’ve found that this additional servicing happens during the quoting process – how much we’re asked to do, and how much turns into real work, and therefore money. I’ve talked to a number of clients about this, both large and small, because it’s something that I feel is a waste of everyone’s time. Why spend forever quoting for work if no-one’s actually going to pay for it to be done, and why keep asking for it if the money isn’t there to do it? There are answers to this, some of which I have, and some of which I hope you can enlighten me with. This is a learning exercise as much as it is an expulsion of hot air.
Trust
I’d like to think all our clients trust us to give them the best possible service and the best possible product that we can, and at a price that they feel is good value. I won’t use the word “cheap” because we’re not, and nor do I want us to be, as that would then reflect in the quality of our work too. Smaller clients often need to have more trust because they’re much closer to their own business and they don’t want someone else’s to jeopardise it. That’s completely understandable. I pick my own suppliers extremely carefully for exactly that reason. Larger businesses still need a level of trust, but because they’re dealing in big numbers all the time, they put less emphasis on the detail at the quote phase. Having said that, we have several small clients that are happy for a simple cost and time for the work they want done. If it feels right, they place an order. They trust us to be accurate.
Experience
Large businesses are experienced in dealing with external contractors, and therefore confident when a quote comes in that it feels correct. Smaller businesses may not be so experienced. This isn’t a complete truth, as many small businesses are started by people who’ve worked for large ones, but it does hold some value. Those with less experience though may well ask for more detail than is really necessary. Again understandable if you’re someone not experienced in a given field of work – we’re web developers, but don’t know how much it would cost to build an exhibition stand for instance, or why one exhibition stand in one centre would be more than another similar stand in a different centre.
Money
Clients don’t always have the money to do the work now. Just like I might ask my estate agent for a valuation of my property, even though I have no intention of selling it yet. However, my estate agent knows my property, and I trust him, so when I ask him for a ballpark, I’m happy with a top-of-the-head figure. What concerns me is the level of detail asked of us when we know the money isn’t available to complete the work.
So what do we do about the clients that we spend a lot of time servicing, but we either make very little money from, or even make a loss on. Do we drop them? Do we approach them about the problems? If so, how? What have you done in your business experience where issues like this have arisen?
I’ve no problem putting out detailed quotes, but I’d like to be more confident that these will turn into orders. For one client, we’ve put forward six or seven sets of detailed quotes this calendar year, and none of these have turned into orders. In the meantime we’ve continued to service them as valued clients, just as we do with all our others. Is this the right thing to do? In the hope that at some point soon, the work will actually come in? Do we charge for quotes – I know others have though I’m not sure whether it has proven successful or not.
Could we be more transparent? Maybe the solution is actually to offer a very high level ballpark estimate without the detail, followed by a more detailed quote if the client in question feels this is feasible with currently available funds. Although this doesn’t solve the problem that these clients want the detailed quote up front. I’m keen to try and reduce the amount of wasted work we do, without reducing the level and quality of service that we offer to our clients. Typically, I’d make a decision and run with it, but this feels a little more contentious and prone to serious consequence if we get wrong. I know I’m being very open in this article, but I feel this is the right approach. If you think you’re a client we’re not servicing properly, please tell me. I’d love the opportunity to discuss over a coffee what we can do in our business to better both the strong relationships we already have, and to bolster the weaker ones and turn them into strong ones.
I’m going to wrap up here, and ask for advice and experiences you’ve had and the solutions to the issues in this article.
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