Audience E-Book

Jeffrey K. Rohrs

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

AUDIENCE

Most companies are still taking one step forward and two steps back in their customer relationships because they don’t understand how to build and engage a long-term online audience. The new job every marketer must learn is “Proprietary Audience Development.” AUDIENCE is a manifesto—a “call to arms”—that every marketer can deliver to their C-Suite in order to permanently put an end to “spammy” digital marketing and social media strategies that may gain a few quick sales but lose a long-term audience.

This powerful mandate challenges all companies to treat their email, mobile, and social audiences like the corporate assets they are. In AUDIENCE, author Jeff Rohrs establishes The Audience Imperative for every company: to use your paid, owned, and earned media to not only sell in the short-term but also increase the size, engagement, and value of proprietary audiences over the long-term. To gain a lasting advantage over your competition, look no further than your email, Facebook, Google, Instagram, mobile app, SMS, Twitter, website, and YouTube, where you can start building audiences that last.

Through research data and case studies, this book details how marketers can gain a competitive advantage with proven strategies, including how to:

• Embrace “Hybrid Marketing” to squeeze more value from “Fossil Fuel Marketing” (i.e., paid media)
• Build “renewable energy sources” (owned email, mobile, and social audiences) that provide long-term competitive advantage
• Create your own Proprietary Audience Development strategy
• Market with the Red Velvet Touch: Serve the individual, honor their preferences, deliver relevant content, surprise them with access, and delight them with your company’s humanity
• Test and evolve your efforts on an ongoing basis

Every company needs audiences to survive. They are the source of new customers and more profitable relationships. It’s time to restructure your marketing efforts to serve your most important asset. Master the art and the science of Proprietary Audience Development.

Leseprobe

Contents

Foreword

Introduction: Why AUDIENCE?

Part I: The Audience Imperative

Chapter 1: Audiences as Assets: Think Like The Boss

The Boss Is Worried

The Audience Imperative

The Audience as Asset

Proprietary vs. Owned

Chapter 2: The Audience Imperative: Our Hybrid Source of Business Energy

Marketing’s Fossil Fuel

Renewable Marketing Energy

The Hybrid Marketing Era

Chapter 3: Your Proprietary Audiences: Seekers, Amplifiers & Joiners

SEEKERS

AMPLIFIERS

JOINERS

Chapter 4: The VIP Joiners: Subscribers, Fans & Followers

SUBSCRIBERS

FANS

FOLLOWERS

Chapter 5: Beyond Don Draper: Paid, Owned & Earned Media

Paid Media

Owned Media

Earned Media

Converged Media

Chapter 6: Increase What Matters: Size, Engagement & Value

Size

Value

Chapter 7: A Larger Font: Our Long-Term Responsibilities

Embrace Change Permanently

Ditch The “Not My Job” Atttitude

Retrain Your Agencies

Respond to Results, Not Headlines

Never Stop Learning

Part II: The Audience Channels

Chapter 8: Website: Marketing’s Magnetic Center

Chapter 9: Email: The Bedrock Audience

Email Is a Must-Have

Chapter 10: Facebook: Making It Personal

Chapter 11: Twitter: Real-Time Characters

Serve CUSTOMERS

Engage FOLLOWERS

Celebrate AMPLIFIERS

Chapter 12: Blogs: A Website by Another Name

Chapter 13: Mobile Apps: Audiences on the Go

Answering the Why

Build Mobile App SUBSCRIBERS

Build Email and Push Reengagement Channels

Optimize Your Mobile Audience Experience

Chapter 14: LinkedIn: The Professional Audience

Content and Influence

FOLLOWERS and Amplification

Community

Chapter 15: YouTube: Internet Built the Video Star

SUBSCRIBERS on the Tip of Their Tongue

Ask for the SUBSCRIBE

Chapter 16: Google+: The Great Unknown

Chapter 17: Pinterest: A Collection of Beautiful Followers

Chapter 18: SMS: Cutting through the Clutter

Chapter 19: Instagram: Moving Pictures

Chapter 20: Podcasts: Listen Carefully

Chapter 21: Other Audience Channels: More? You Want More?!?

Part III: The Audience Roadmap

Chapter 22: Map & Align: Strategy and Team

1. Assemble a Team

2. Audit Your Existing Efforts

3. Set Your PAD Goals

4. Articulate Your PAD Strategy

Chapter 23: Build & Engage: Audiences on Demand

Tactic #1: Talk to People

Tactic #2: Websites & BLOGS

Tactic #3: Content Marketing

Tactic #4: Search Engine Optimization

Tactic #5: Organic Growth

Tactic #6: Product Packaging

Tactic #7: Email Opt-In Form

Tactic #8: Social Login

Tactic #9: Social Icons

Tactic #10: Overlays & POP-UPS

Tactic #11: Signage & DOOH Advertising

Tactic #12: Cross-Channel Promotion

Tactic #13: E-Commerce Checkout

Tactic #14: Post-Purchase Confirmation & Communications

Tactic #15: Search Advertising

Tactic #16: Facebook, Twitter, & Other Social Advertising

Tactic #17: In-App Mobile Advertising

Tactic #18: Television, Video, & Radio Advertising

Tactic #19: SMS

Tactic #20: Mobile Apps

Tactic #21: Direct Mail, Print Advertising, & Circulars

Tactic #22: Co-Marketing

Tactic #23: Contests & Giveaways

Tactic #24: Hashtags

Tactic #25: Events

Tactic #26: Social Widgets & Mosaics

Tactic #27: Appending

Looking for More?

Chapter 24: Serve, Honor, Deliver, Surprise & Delight: The Red Velvet Touch

1. Serve (The Red Velvet Glove)

2. Honor (The Red Velvet Throne)

3. Deliver (The Red Velvet Theater)

4. Surprise (The Red Velvet Rope)

5. Delight (The Red Velvet Cupcake)

Chapter 25: Test & Evolve: What Marketers Can Learn from 5,000 Years of Football

Test, Measure, and Assess

Marketing Lessons from 5,000 Years of Football

The Many Ways to Accommodate Your Audience

The Next Big Thing

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Index

Cover image: (top) © iStockphoto/mahout; (bottom) © iStockphoto/momcilog

Cover design: Elizabeth Kjeldsen

Copyright © 2014 by ExactTarget, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

All author proceeds from sales of this book go to support The ExactTarget Foundation and its mission to support innovative approaches to childhood hunger relief, education, and entrepreneurship. For more information, visit: http://www.exacttargetfoundation.org.

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ISBN: 978-1-118-73273-1 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-1-118-82556-3 (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-118-82557-0 (ebk)

To the weird, wonderful, and loving audience that energizes me every single day, Jenny, Declan, & Bailey Kate.

And to the entire ExactTarget family, may you always be Orange.

—j.k.r.

Foreword

I first met Jeff Rohrs back in 2004 when he was president of Optiem, a digital marketing agency in Cleveland, Ohio, and one of ExactTarget’s first reseller partners. His keen eye for business trends, passion for digital marketing, and sense of humor made an immediate impression on me—and it wasn’t long after that I found myself asking Jeff if he’d be interested in joining our team. In 2007 he made the leap, and both of us couldn’t have been happier with the results.

As producer of our award-winning SUBSCRIBERS, FANS & FOLLOWERS Research Series (SFF), Jeff was one of the first to highlight the fragmenting nature of consumer/brand relationships. Whereas many were taking a one-size-fits-all approach to their cross-channel marketing efforts, Jeff and his team were urging companies to better understand and meet the consumer expectations created by each channel. As the SFF research demonstrated, SUBSCRIBERS wanted different things than FANS and FOLLOWERS—and vice versa.

In early 2013, Jeff approached us with a new idea—one that seemed revolutionary at the time but has proven to be true: There’s a hole in our marketing organizations. Advertising, brand, content marketing, demand generation, interactive marketing, product marketing, and sales all have leaders; but no one leader is responsible for building, engaging, and nurturing our proprietary audiences. Sure, there are great folks on the front lines of email, mobile, and social, each developing audiences specific to those channels. However, companies that don’t have a singular voice to speak for the needs of proprietary audiences will be hard-pressed to deliver on the promise of today’s convergent marketing technologies—true one-to-one relationships with consumers across all channels.

AUDIENCE is a wake-up call for every company today. Before you acquire a customer . . . before you can build a relationship . . . there must first be an audience for you to address. Your company may be content simply buying advertising to reach audiences, but Jeff and our entire team see a different future—one in which companies embrace an asset-based approach to marketing and work to constantly improve the size, engagement, and value of their own proprietary audiences. This is not an either/or proposition. Paid, owned, and earned media can and should work together to produce more revenue at lower cost wherever possible. And that’s the simple, powerful message of AUDIENCE: It is within our ability today to leverage data, permission, and technology to better sell to and serve consumers across all channels and devices.

Frankly, I don’t think there’s a more important book that companies can read today. Jeff has laid the groundwork for the responsible, long-term, profitable development of proprietary audiences. The structure you choose to build upon that foundation is up to you. However, if you build wisely, you’ll find yourself with a competitive advantage that will last for years to come.

—Scott Dorsey (@ScottDorsey)

CEO and Cofounder

ExactTarget, a salesforce.com company

Introduction: Why AUDIENCE?

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.1

—Alfred North Whitehead

Welcome to the audience of AUDIENCE, the book! The moment you began flipping through these pages, you became a READER. I’m hoping you’ll soon purchase a copy and graduate to my CUSTOMER audience.a And if the subject matter really strikes a chord with you, perhaps you’ll become a website VISITOR (www.AudiencePro.com), email SUBSCRIBER, or a FAN of the book on Facebook. Who knows, you may even become one of my FOLLOWERS on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google+, where I ponder how to build and engage audiences while masking a lifetime of pain caused by rooting for the Cleveland Browns (@Browns).

Ultimately, the choice is yours because you—the consumer—determine whether or not to become a part of any audience. You are not owned. Your attention, action, and loyalty have to be earned by all those who want it.

That’s how it works today. We like, follow, and subscribe to our favorite brands, companies, and people any time we want. We usually do so when it brings us joy, saves us money, or provides us with timely information. As consumers, we are in control. We decide which audiences to join, leave, or ignore altogether.

Unfortunately, not all businesses appreciate this dynamic. They operate under the false assumption that paid media still rules the roost and provides all of the audiences needed to fuel their business. That may have been the case at one point in time, but no longer. Consider that as you read this, there are the following phenomena:

A cookie (the edible kind) with over 34 million FANS on Facebook

A landscape designer with over 3.5 million Pinterest FOLLOWERS

An actor with 13 times the Twitter FOLLOWERS of his TV show

An oral care startup with 100 times more YouTube SUBSCRIBERS than competitors with over 100 times the revenue

A local restaurant with over 20,000 email SUBSCRIBERS—over 500 of whom have restaurant-inspired tattoos

Each of these entities has a distinct advantage over their competitors who rely on driving business through paid media alone. With a push of the button, they can message their audiences directly in cost-effective ways that drive measurable sales, response, and engagement. In these pages, I’ll share their stories and those of other brands that illustrate the simple fact that:

Proprietary Audience Development is now a core marketing responsibility.

If you embrace this responsibility, you’ll be a part of the team that turns audiences into long-term, profitable assets for your company. However, if you neglect it, you will fall behind competitors with less dependency on paid media thanks to their development of audiences that they—and they alone—can access on demand.

The choice is obvious, but many companies will fail to embrace the tenets of this book because it requires a consistent, long-term effort. Marketing staff turnover, campaign-based mentalities, and siloed objectives all work to undermine your audience development efforts—and this will never change. It will always be far easier to call your media buyer, rattle off some target demographics, and rent audience attention than it will be to command your own.

But we know the truth. Always doing what’s easy is a path to poverty, not prosperity. Just as consumer behaviors are changing thanks to mobile and social technologies, so too must our marketing organizations evolve to reflect our new realities. The time has come to stop treating proprietary audiences as afterthoughts and instead embrace them for what they are—a source of critical business energy in need of investment, leadership, and support.

AUDIENCE is as much a book for CEOs as it is for marketing professionals. Its lessons and advice are as relevant to small businesses as they are to Fortune 500 companies. You should feel free to read it from end to end or jump straight to the parts that interest you most. After all, you’re the audience; you’re in control.

In Part I, we’ll explore The Audience Imperative. Through its mandate, I explain what proprietary audiences are, what they have to offer our companies, and why it is more important now than ever before for your company to build them.

In Part II, I provide a deep dive into the top Audience Channels for Proprietary Audience Development. My goal here is to help you understand how these channels might fit your strategic needs, and how to pursue additional resources to aid in your use of them.

In Part III, I present an Audience Roadmap that you can use to build, engage, and value your proprietary audiences in ways that will deliver measurable results. I conclude with thoughts on what marketers committed to Proprietary Audience Development can learn from 5,000 years of football (yes, football—trust me, you’ll enjoy it).

One quick note—in the spirit of helping all of those whose stories, support, and encouragement have helped me make this book a reality, you will find that any mention of a specific individual or brand is accompanied by their Twitter handle (if they have one). I would encourage you to follow the folks that interest or inspire you. I know they’ll appreciate you joining their audiences as much as I appreciate that you’ve joined one of mine.

So welcome! Grab a seat, settle in, and let’s learn how to build your proprietary audiences for the long haul.

a I use ALL CAPS throughout to refer to specific, proprietary audiences that are detailed in Chapters 3 and 4. My hope is that it will avoid confusion and help you refer back to key audiences of interest.

1. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925).

Part I

The Audience Imperative

Audiences are all around you. They are direct, responsive, and extremely cost-effective. They’re also new, constantly evolving, and quick to anger if you cross them.

Your company needs audiences to survive. If you aren’t building, engaging, and activating proprietary audiences of your own, you’re falling behind.

It’s high time you discovered why.

Chapter 1

Audiences as Assets: Think Like The Boss

[T]he audience is not brought to you or given to you; it’s something that you fight for. You can forget that, especially if you’ve had some success. Getting an audience is HARD. Sustaining an audience is HARD. It demands a consistency of thought, of purpose, and of action over a long period of time.1

—Bruce Springsteen

Quick! What are the most important assets of your business today? Your brand? Intellectual property? Physical facilities? Inventory? Employees?

All of these are likely answers; however, there’s one asset that is constantly missing when I ask companies this very question. Audiences.

Yes, audiences.

This answer tops your list if you’re in the media, sports, or entertainment industries, because you’re in the actual business of putting people in seats. You build audiences for a living and know the competitive advantage to be gained if your audience is bigger, better, and more energetic than the competition’s. Media companies build READERS (print), LISTENERS (radio), and VIEWERS (television). Football teams feed off of FANS. And Lady Gaga . . . well, she loves her “Little Monsters.”

You may think that this equation doesn’t apply to you if you work outside of an audience-centric industry, but it does. Do you pay for advertising? Then audience matters. Do you have a website? Then audience matters. Do you want to grow your business? Then audience matters.

Audience is the bedrock upon which every business is built. After all, what were your customers before they were customers? They were members of some audience that was exposed to your products and services.

Not that long ago, companies were totally dependent on print, radio, and television gatekeepers to reach audiences. Today, however, every company can build its own global audiences via websites, mobile apps, email, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest (just to name a few). The rapid adoption of mobile devices and social media also gives those same audiences the ability to communicate right back to companies—often, in very public fashion.

Ahh . . . that sounds familiar. You’ve got “a young gal” who works on social media, “a guy” who is in charge of email—and you have some videos on YouTube. Your website “kind of” works on smartphones and you’ve got a LinkedIn profile for your company, so you must be building audiences correctly. Right?