Category: Data Marketing

Using the power of computing to draw a straighter line between a business and its customers, to the benefit of each

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Leaping the chasm to a plugged-in construction site

In the past I’ve had chances to help clients market to the construction trades. These include carpentry, plumbing, masonry and others that send their practitioners home with stiff joints and calloused hands. These occupations account for a surprising amount of spending. So the prospect of segmenting the groups and reaching them online is tantalizing. There’s just one problem. You won’t find them there. Probably not after work, and certainly not while they’re plying their craft. No way.

I was talking about this with my cousin, who at one time made his living as a high-end carpenter and continues to keep his hand in it. My theory is it’s the user interface keeping these craftspeople off-line, and that made sense to him.

Computers and network connections have become easier and faster, but when you’re on a construction site trying to decide how to negotiate an oddly angled room, so you can cut and install crown molding, a keyboard and mouse are not among the tools you reach for. Which is a pity. Although there is little content out there now to assist the construction trades, there could be.

Think of the digital craftspeople. If you develop software, you can find a galaxy of computer expertise online, through user forums and help sites.

The complexity of building in the real world cries out for similar networked knowledge, but for the most part, all this knowledge remains trapped at individual building sites because it’s not easy to contribute, or access the tips when you need them. The rest can be solved by the need for knowledge-sharing. The real chasm to traverse is the last 10 feet leading to the construction site.

What sort of tips can be shared? I mentioned earlier the challenge of cutting crown molding that negotiates tough corners. This requires a skill that most carpenters choose not to master. My cousin explained, “Most carpenters know that to make the angled cuts properly, they need a way to calculate the angle perfectly or they need to guess.”

Most job sites won’t tolerate the waste of guesswork, so the guys who have these angles down cold make a lot of extra money. My cousin is one of those wizards. “I’ve literally earned thousands of dollars more from this one skill,” he said. He learned it online.

He told me that the absence of online carpentry resources struck him every time he went online, which for him was often (he’s an extraordinary person, in this and many other ways). But he did luck out with this skill. His Net search returned a set of calculations that a professor somewhere made available. The formulas allowed my cousin to do the math on-site with a science calculator. It was that easy to become the crown molding go-to guy.

That was proof enough to me that valuable knowledge can be shared digitally. But how to cross the chasm? I told my cousin, probably sounding more confident than I should, that it’s the next generations of cell phones.

I base this on the phenomenon we’re seeing today of large portions of the world that are skipping PCs completely and doing business in fields and other outdoor settings using cell phones. Text messaging to central databases is allowing for the trade of crops and livestock in a virtual auction, all financed with microcredit loans. But this doesn’t eliminate a keyboard. It just shrinks it to the 10 keys of a cell phone. That’s nowhere near an interface a builder can live with on the job.

Calling For Help

I’m imagining a time when the next generations of cell phones will allow for voice-to-text conversions, so online forums of knowledge and advice can be accessed remotely. Insights can be traded like wares in a marketplace similar to today’s developing world swap meets. All by talking into a cell phone.

(The skilled trade that would lead the way in the use of this new user interface would also be the most meticulous. I’m thinking of surgeons. Today surgeons and other physicians are sharing a tremendous amount of data as they consult across geographic and time boundaries. But an interface that allows for accessing this knowledge through speech instead of keystrokes could be a tremendous boon for someone whose hands are otherwise occupied.)

Advances in a cell phone’s camera and display capabilities would also accelerate this type of mobile consulting. When you’re facing a tough construction problem, often a picture really is worth a thousand words.

These are all my own speculations, based on watching the technology evolve and the demands of users. I look forward to seeing how things progress, and invite any reader insights on the matter. One thing I know for sure. It will take a some major changes in technology before we see the most unlikely of working stiffs: The plugged-in plumber and the digital drywaller.

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With Google for Print it’s all about reach

Last year Google tested their ad auction concept in the print advertising space. Bill Wise in MediaPost had a theory for why this pilot wasn’t a huge success. In a word: “scarcity.”

Google AdWords succeeds because there are only so many people searching for a term on any given day, and therefore only so many ad impressions than can run in front of this audience. It’s a finite supply of ads, and one that is perishable from one day to the next. Auctions are a perfect way for Google to optimize ad prices.

But printed publications are different. If a newspaper or magazine sells more ads, they can print more pages to accommodate those ads. (Do you remember how fat Business 2.0 was in the heady months before the Dot Com Bust?)

Google failed last year, but they aren’t giving up. They’ve just announced a deal that will include placement of select Google AdWords participants in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune and many more. Later in this test they plan to expand into weekly news magazines.

It fascinates me that they are looking at getting involved in the very medium whose circulations they are helping to shrink. In the last six months the average circulation figures of daily newspapers have fallen another 2.8 percent, according to Dan Mitchell of the NY Times. True, he tries to put a positive spin on this news, citing a statistic that if you factor in online versions of the publications, readership is actually up significantly. But that actually helps to make my point: Why isn’t Google satisfied with running their ads on the fastest growing portion of the news business?

I can only think it’s reach. And I don’t mean just readers. I’m thinking portability.

Until this county develops a taste for news delivered to a cell phone or PDA, ink on paper is still the most reliable way to follow Americans into the many nooks and crannies of their day.

I’m only half joking when I speculate that Google may have realized that their AdWords were doing wonderfully in the American office and den, but were failing miserably in the bathroom.

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The persuasive power of a map

David Ogilvy called direct marketing, “My first love and secret weapon.” I feel the same way. The power of a handful of direct marketing techniques has turned so-so campaigns into winners for me more times than I can name. One such technique is including maps in direct mail and email marketing messages. I’ll break the marketing power of geomapping into two tips.

#1 Don’t just tell consumers that they should visit you — show them how, as specifically as possible

Social psychologist Howard Levanthal conducted some experiments in the 1960s to see if he could persuade Yale University students to get tetanus inoculations. In his efforts to see if mailed brochures would work better using fear as a motivating factor, he stumbled upon something more persuasive.

He included a change in the booklet that boosted response from 3% to 28%. As reported in “Effects on Fear and Specificity of Recommendations Upon Attitudes and Behavior,” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1965), he and his fellow researchers included a map of the campus, with the Health Department office circled, and the times when inoculations were being offered.

In other words, he made visiting the health department more real to the students by showing them how it fit into their lives and their schedules.

With digital printing, you can do one better: You can produce maps that include two dots: You are here and Here we are. I’ve used this technique, and it’s not easy when you’re mailing to a lot of neighborhoods, but seems to be well worth the effort.

#2 Tell them how close they are to you

People don’t look at maps until they are curious about what you have to sell. But you can help them grasp how easy it is to reach you if you tell them right in the headline. If they are closer than they thought, that’s great news. And to quote Oglivy again, “All advertising is news.” Here’s an example of one such headline:

We had the challenge of informing residents living near a community hospital that they should go there for the vast majority of their healthcare needs. The hospital, which was tucked away in a residential neighborhood and was easily overlooked, had witnessed much of their business being drained away by a neighboring medical center.

Our opportunity to start winning this business back came when we were hired to promote a series of open house events (by we, I’m referring to a team I led in a “former life,” as they say in business). The events were to celebrate a complete redecoration of the public-facing areas of the facility.

The headline of the mailing was blunt: You’re less than 10 minutes away from award-winning healthcare. We could say this honestly because we had done drive-time calculations, and created three versions of the mailing. One stating the above, and two others saying 5 minutes and 15 minutes. The database with drive times told us which mailing to use for each address.

When the first event rolled around, it was fascinating to watch people arrive, with mailing in hand, to claim the promotional item we were giving away. They needed to take a tour and turn in the mailing in order to get their gift. That, of course, meant that we could read their names and addresses off of the cards, and add these prospects to a customer relationship management (CRM) database. From there we could re-mail with other offers and news.

It was definitely a group of pospects worth re-marketing to, for these three reasons: 

  1. They were responsive. The response rate for the group closest the hospital was 3.7%.
  2. They loved us. Many raved about what they saw, saying things like, “It looks more like a hotel lobby than a hospital!”
  3. They were now truly our neighbors. Thanks to the geomapping technique, they all knew exactly how to find us.
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Data mining: Finding an arsenal in a bunch of dry bones

In the classic Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on Arthur C. Clarke’s book of the same name, prehistoric Man has a good day at the office when he realizes how to use an animal femur as a weapon. The implication is that this moment of invention bestowed upon our ancestors a competitive advantage.

What I love most about my job is being a part of a team that has these same “Aha!” moments. Quite often we make newer, better tools that enable us to go out and kill our suppers. How cool is that? 

Even cooler is how the lines between disciplines blur, and we have invention mash-ups. Because we are involved in direct marketing and research as well as interactive projects, we get to invent in those areas as well.

Next week I’ll write about just such an invention involving geomapping. But today it’s analytics, one of the more fertile areas for innovation — and improved ROI — in business today.

I interrupt this story to recommend a free webinar on gaining a competitive advantage through analytics, put on by the American Marketing Association and Aquent (thank you, James Gardner, for the head’s up!). It takes place on October 31 and covers topics every marketer should be familiar with.

3D BarcodeThe analytics “invention” I describe below came from a conversation I was having several years ago with Mike Czerwinski (a co-worker in a prior life), who is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Too bad he squandered all that brainpower by getting a PhD in mathematical physics. I joke of course. His scientific background and ceaseless curiosity help him mine data in ways that are sometimes quite unexpected.

Over a beer, Mike and I were contemplating the barcodes on the back of Wisconsin driver’s licenses. They contain all the written information on the front of the card — far more than name and mailing address. The information contains height, weight — even eye and hair color. As Mike might put it, many data points.

This led to the discussion of nightclubs. It’s a very competitive industry, where your profitability hinges on the caprices of a community’s young and social. Significantly, Mike and I had both just read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.

I can’t speak for Mike, but I certainly know that I was looking with a fresh set of eyes, seeing everywhere the social epidemics that Gladwell describes. More importantly, I was ever-wondering how to find Mavens and Connectors. These, according to Gladwell, are the few who influence the many. They can be found at the head of most consumer stampedes, and are to be courted and coveted by marketers — if they can be identified.

How to identify them in a nightclub? If you could see these vectors of influence, and offer them free stuff (drinks, a party room for a special occasion, etc.), they would reward you by drawing their many friends with them back to your club again and again. And if you owned a number of nightclubs instead of one, you could find Connectors or Mavens who frequent one of your clubs and coax them and their loose posses to another, on a night when that club needs the business.

Most importantly, you watch the frequency of their visits. Your club could be packed, but if these influencers (as they are often called in word-of-mouth advertising) have stopped attending, your business is about to plummet. Their departure can be a leading indicator, which can help you make decisions about advertising, staffing, purchasing — every part of your business.

But how to find these valued customers? The answer, as it occurred to us, was the scanners that nightclubs use to document, upon entry, the legality of their patrons. Because being caught with under-aged drinkers can shut a club down, entrants are often handing over their licenses to an attendant who runs the card through a video scanner. I suspect that the typical scanner just takes a picture. It doesn’t actually capture the data. But it could. Patrons give up this piece of privacy for the privilege of partying at a club, and in so doing hand over an opportunity that Mike and I suspected was being overlooked, like a pile of dry bones.

What if the database of patrons was analyzed daily? We wouldn’t be looking for the most frequent patrons (necessarily), but for those loose groupings of people — those clusters — that show up frequently in the line of ID cards. Each cluster would be like a solar system in a nightly star map of patrons. And each planet in these solar systems would invariably orbit the same recurring Connectors and Mavens.

And guess what? You’d have these people’s mailing addresses. Once you identify these influencers (or suspected influencers — you can afford to be wrong occasionally), you’d mail them offers that really matter. A mailing to a few hundred people could potentially move a thousand or more partiers to your establishment when you need them the most.

If you know of anyone applying this idea, please let me know. It’s a concept that still needs to be tested, but I think it could have tremendous potential. Click to view a larger version of this mapIn the meantime, here is a social map that charts the frequency that bands play at certain nightclubs. The clubs are colored according to type (blue=cover, red=original). Lines between clubs represent the number of bands that played at both clubs over the 18-month time period. The size of the clubs’ dots indicates sharing of bands. To get the full effect, and to read the whole story, check out this report with a time-lapse animation. Although the report suffers from lack of clarity, it does have some interesting observations.

Review the graphic and you’ll notice that the cover clubs don’t book the same bands as each other (the blue nodes are smaller) while the original clubs do share the same talent (the greater sharing of bands over the period increases the size of the red nodes).

I think you can infer from this that cover bands, which tend to play genres of music (e.g., Disco, Grateful Dead / Jam, Modern Country), tend toward a few clubs that fit this style of music, while a greater “genre” is new, original music. This material needs to be played in more of a circuit of clubs, ala vaudeville. Back to Mike’s and my invention, I think it would only work in the red clubs, because sharing of bands also means sharing of patrons, who follow the bands. Or, of course, the idea would work for nightclubs featuring no live music at all.

Like much in academic studies, I see little immediate business value to this Boston College study, which in some ways states the obvious. But it makes for an interesting view of the nightclub scene. And who knows … it might fuel your own beery inventions.

A message to Mike: We really need to go out and get a beer sometime. I miss the shop talk and rambling inventions of the four of us — you, Kevin, me and Guinness. Call me.

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Web navigation for those who want to cut to the chase

A friend sent me this Marketing Sherpa article about a great web design approach: Build in a button for those Type A folks who just want the facts.

Type A screen capture from an ad agency web siteIt’s clever idea. The article has links to the site, which is for an ad agency. I suggest you give it a look.

The idea does bring up a greater point: Are you identifying your target audience precisely enough to match their varying browsing styles and needs? Doing so isn’t all that far-fetched.

I’m a big advocate of persuasion architecture, which is a term coined by Brian and Jeffrey Eisenberg of Future Now. It’s a process by which you segment the universe of customers and prospects visiting your site. Segmentation is by persona — which the brothers define as general personality archetypes. These are stereotypes, if you will, for how specific consumers feel about your site’s products or services. 

It all sounds very squishy, and frankly I do find it a little too high-minded sometimes. I’m more of the behavioral type. Generalizing on anything other than past actions can sometimes lead you in circles.

But I am nonetheless deeply indebted to the Eisenberg brothers for taking this idea and extending it to the practice of building pages that contain navigation and content unique for that persona. In other words, if you sell online home security products, and know that a worried single parent is a key persona type, be sure you address this person’s many questions and fears in a systematic way … and also, offer little other navigation or content along that funnel.

The object of persuasion architecture is to move people in an orderly fashion through their decision-making steps, one click at a time. The prize: To unfailingly lead consumers to a sale.

Persuasion architecture is a much-needed breath of fresh air. For the right site, I can see it rewarding Type A people for identifying themselves. And in doing so, rewarding the site owner with a higher sales conversion rate.