Letting Go of Marketing’s Biggest Lies - Samuel Scott
Feeling good about the way your direct marketing campaigns are driving leads? You should. But don’t forget about the big picture - creating a long lasting image in the minds of consumers. That was the message of Sam Scott, Global Marketing Speaker and Columnist for The Drum at the 14th Annual Apartment Innovation and Marketing Conference (AIM 2019), which took place at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach on May 5-8, 2019. Sharing the stage with Scott were two savvy multifamily marketers
- Ben Burns, Vice President of Digital Strategy, The Bozzuto Group
- Chantelle Berger, Marketing Manager, The Bainbridge Companies
who had a few questions for Scott about growing reach while maximizing budget.
According to Scott, the six biggest myths about marketing are
- That consumers want personalized targeted ads
- That mediums themselves do not matter
- That targeting solves the problem of waste
- That short-term results are the most important
- That adtech saves money and
- That brand building can be ignored.
Introducing his presentation with a blast from the past (the three members of Bananarama singing the praises of Gillette Venus Razors), Scott challenged, “I don’t remember any online ads from yesterday, but I remember the Venus razor ad from 30 years ago. Why is that?”
Maybe it’s because personalized targeting, which is what direct marketing offers, is becoming undesirable to consumers. “They don’t want ‘tailored marketing,’” continued Scott. In fact, “two hundred-plus million people are blocking Google Analytics. Fourteen percent of U.S. Millennials use ad blockers on multiple devices.” So many blocked ads, noted Scott, creates a mountain of waste. Or worse: In some cases, consumers are offended by surrounding stories and associate the ads with same. So then the idea of adtech saving money goes out the door.
But if consumers don’t want targeted ads, asked Bainbridge’s Berger, where do marketers find the balance between a customized experience and “just being creepy? ” Today’s consumers like personalization,” noted Scott, “but what they want “are personalized products, not personalized ads.” But as Bozzuto’s Burns observed, the marketing tide is moving toward some form of personalization. “It is indeed a balancing act,” he concluded.
As an industry, noted Berger, multifamily is typically two-to-five years behind in marketing. “So how quickly should we jump on the ‘new technology’ bandwagon?” she asked. “Bandwagons are bad,” answered Scott. “Great marcom has always been the same. As long as you have a good strategy that you’ve researched, you know which channels your target market uses and which channels will be effective, you shouldn’t just throw that in the bin the moment some new channel or new tech product comes along.”
Earlier, Scott described brand building’s long tail as expensive and unpredictable, but having the deeper profit potential. Scott concluded, “Create a great strategy, execute it well and repeat.”
Burns concurred. “We often forget the why and the how. I think for us as marketers, as we go from a marketer to a ‘martechter’ (which IBM coined in 2019), we need to understand technology more deeply in order to unpack these huge momentum strategies.” Burns’ example? Crafting, as the Bozzuto Group has done, a tech-enhanced rental tour: “You schedule an apartment tour. You receive a text reminder along with a scheduled Uber or Lyft ride, which brings you to the tour. Our staff is great. You leave with the opportunity to take an online walking tour of your new neighborhood - which for us, knowing that 30 percent of our clients are from out of town - is a great experience.”
Conclusion: Scott: “ROI is a short-term, bottom-of-the-funnel metric. For direct response you can use ROI, but most other tactics used in marcom should not be measured by ROI. You can’t use that kind of metric for long-term campaigns that are at the top of the funnel. ”
Marcom takeaways from Scott:
- You do product market fit.
- You do the customer-facing research
- You do your media mix and your tactical mix
- You execute, you measure, you adjust.
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