Why this blog? Because I'm your customer's advocate, reminding businesses that they must talk to customers, not at them, to get heard. This blog is my means of putting helpful advice, tips and reminders out into the world so your marketing will be more relevant, more targeted...and more likely to get noticed. Happy Marketing!
--Sharon Long Baerny
Friday morning I was in Denver conducting a copywriting workshop with the copywriters, creative directors, Web site managers and content editors for a national company. I was brought in by the director of marketing to address the messaging in their email marketing specifically, but after reviewing their email examples, it seemed a broader approach was needed.
So the workshop consisted of reviewing what it means to talk to your customer, not at them, to write customer-centric copy that’s about the customer, not about you. The original plan was to critique one email promotion as a group, then have everyone rewrite four more on their own and compare notes. We ran short on time, so instead I put up a few of their emails on the screen and ripped them apart, nicely. I didn’t say anything that surprised or offended.
It seems the copywriters and creative’s hands are tied. They’re up against corporate, up against legal, up against people who don’t understand marketing or copywriting or—most importantly—email marketing. These poor folks end up going the safe route, using clichés like “don’t miss” and vague words like “great pricing” or “exceptional pricing.” They end up with meaningless email subject lines. They have to work around the images they’re assigned rather choose an image that fits the message.
Yuck.
What breaks my heart is that this company is perfectly positioned for messaging that’s emotional and empathetic. Their copywriters and creatives could kick ass if allowed to craft email marketing copy appropriate to the audience, and not to corporate’s preferences and tastes. Lesson here? Let your marketing team do their job! Trust them to know their stuff. They don’t question how the CFO handles the financials or how the CEO handles the board of directors. Why are they hindered?
But this company isn’t stuck, they see where they can improve. In the future, they’ll be segmenting their email marketing into targeted demographics, and they’ll be able to do more specific and therefore effective messaging, talking directly to the pain points and concerns of a particular market. I got the sense that their copywriters are chomping at the bit for that day to come!! Then all we discussed that day will come to fruition and their email marketing will work that much harder for them.
Despite their challenges and frustrations, running that workshop was a blast. I’m lucky. I love what I do, I love talking about copywriting and messaging, and I love being with people hungry to learn more and improve. And they all loved what I had to say. It sparked much-needed dialog among them, it got them inspired to strive harder for more compelling copy and to stand up to the powers that be that want to water down their copy. What more could this Seattle copywriter ask for?
Jeffrey Rohrs, VP of Marketing at ExactTarget, spoke at an ExactTarget conference in Seattle yesterday with a fabulous presentation called “Subscribers Rule!” He made many great points, above all, that email marketing is different from everything else we do as marketers. Again and again he emphasized that email is a long-term tactic, a marathon not a sprint. Amen to that. Search engine optimization and pay-per-click and blogging are going to get people to your site. Email marketing is how you nurture your relationship with them over time.
So how does all of this relate to my world as a Seattle copywriter, and yours as a marketer? The word that popped into my head as he spoke was “respect.” And one way we respect our email subscribers is by giving them the content they want. That doesn’t mean that we offer a newsletter, but bombard them with promos. That means we carefully and slowly build our in-house list, not buy a list and blast a bunch of strangers. It means our email subject lines are carefully crafted to help the customer know what our email offers.
It also means having something of real value to offer them in the first place. Which is why I continue to promote email newsletters as an “indirect” marketing tool. Even for small business email marketing, email newsletters make sense.
Jeffrey recommended we celebrate, love and protect our subscribers. Investing the time and energy into developing content that is truly useful to them, not us, is key. Think of a subscriber like a friend or a colleague: You’d want it to be a mutually beneficial relationship, right? You wouldn’t constantly be asking your friend or coworker for something, it would be give and take. Same with your subscribers.
Are you going to get an immediate payback on taking this long-term, carefully thought out approach to your email marketing program? Probably not. Are you going to cultivate stronger, deeper, longer term relationships with your customers? Probably yes.
Which will you choose?
Great post this morning from Email Insider on small business marketing with email . In it, blogger David Baker reviews just how simple and easy email marketing can be for the small business, with a few “how to” reminders.
It warms my heart to see this post, and I hope it’s read by loads of small business owners, because really, email can be such a cost-effective way to market. But, as with so many marketing tools, email is easy to do wrong.
I’ll add a couple of tips to what David suggested:
Have a plan—I see small business owners (heck, bigger businesses too!) start out with email marketing and then flounder because they didn’t have a plan. How often will we email? What is the point of our email? How will we track our results and know whether or not it’s working? (How often as a consumer have you signed up with your email address at the cash register of a small business—then never heard from them? No plan.)
Think like an editor—As part of your plan, create an editorial calendar. He mentions tying in to local events. Great idea! Know what events are coming up, know what your seasons are and what you might want to promote.
Have a theme—I use theme for lack of a better word, but I hope it resonates with you. I mean, knowing what your email marketing is supposed to be and be doing. Is it informal with tips for doing something better? Is it more of an event calendar? Is it written with humor, from the standpoint of the business owner’s dog perhaps? Whatever it is, determine the theme from the start, then be consistent.
Speaking of consistent—Be consistent with length, types of content, frequency…you want to train your recipients to know what to expect and, we hope, look forward to your email.
OK, that’s enough of an add-on to the original post. But hope it gets you thinking about email marketing if you’re not doing it already, or reviewing your email marketing if you are!
Okay, not really narrow minded. But narrow…
Yesterday at the PSAMA lunch in Seattle, Alan Brown from DNA talked about how you market as a challenger, as opposed to front runner. With great local examples from the MS Society, Boeing Employee Credit Union and Pemco Insurance, he again and again reiterated the importance in having a narrow focus. He didn’t call it that, “narrow” is my word. He pointed out the advantage of taking a position, even though positioning can mean sacrifice.
But positioning can get people to listen. If you narrow your marketing scope, your marketing message, your marketing method, you might be heard by fewer people, but you are more likely to be heard.
Then later on the phone, a mom friend wanted to talk about her husband’s business and the direction they want to take it. (Yes, I’m the queen of free marketing advice, I swear. The downside of being so nice: even your neighbors hit you up for advice!) So, great—no, brilliant—focus. I loved hearing about it. Then she went on to say “but we also want to offer this service and that service” and she talked about lumping it all under one umbrella with a generic term that no one would know the meaning of.
Ugh.
I did my best to persuade her otherwise, to go with the one targeted niche idea and market that one narrow business only. We’ll see if they listen. The idea of offering fewer services rather than more does seem to challenge people, whether they have a small business or a big one.
If you have a niche, put your resources there. If you can speak more narrowly to a smaller audience, do. Sure, you are sacrificing the “masses,” but guess what? The masses aren’t listening!
Last week MarketingSherpa had a great article on email design tips, but what I most enjoyed reading, as a copywriter, was the section on subject lines.
When you’re a freelance copywriter, you don’t always get to be as involved with email marketing as you want to be. For me, that means we don’t usually get to play a role in testing. The We Know Words team provides the copywriting then the client moves forward with the email marketing campaign without our involvement. That makes copywriting subject lines a real challenge. And since subject lines are key to getting people to open your email, it’s even more of a challenge.
The problem is, there’s no right answer on subject lines. I’ve seen one study that seemed to prove boring subject lines to work better than compelling ones. Yet as a copywriter that’s really hard to believe! Subject line length is another challenge. This MarketingSherpa article proves there’s no right answer, as different lengths have worked for different marketers. The only thing marketers can really do is test, test, test.
My takeaway from this? To encourage clients to test. Seriously, I’m going to be more proactive about it, to push them to do it, even though I’m not involved in it. I’m enjoying my current copywriting project, an email marketing campaign, because they were completely willing to test when I suggested it. So for each email I’m copywriting, I’m doing 2 to 3 different subject lines.
Now to remind them to do the testing and share the results with me. J
It’s often my job as copywriter to figure out what the benefits are; clients are too close to their products and services to see clearly.
This week I’ve been working on an email marketing campaign for a series of whitepapers. It’s much easier for me to play the role of customer and distill what the benefits of each whitepaper are. The existing messaging emphasizes the so-called features, what the whitepaper “is.” The outsider (i.e. copywriter or marketing writer) can much more easily figure out the benefits, what I call the “so you can” parts: “Read this whitepaper so you can…” What is the end result of downloading and reading a whitepaper? That’s what the customer wants to know, not the content of the whitepaper, but what she’ll be able to do if she reads it.
And it makes me laugh how often I walk into a situation where the marketing team is just scratching their heads, trying to come up with the real benefit, and I can sum it up right away. That’s because I have the outsider’s view.
Too many companies pay too little attention to their copy. They keep it in-house, they trust the marketing people to do the copywriting. They end up with me-too Web sites and ineffective marketing campaigns. Then they wonder why their marketing does such a poor job of generating leads! Hint: It’s probably talking at customers, not to them, because it’s too subjective.
Maybe that’s why I’m becoming such an advocate for blogging as a marketing tool? Blogging by its very nature is more focused (or should be) on information that’s useful to the customer. It can unintentionally sell just by being real and authentic and objective.
I really do love small businesses and small business owners, but they can make me crazy…
My best example right now is the small business owner who is pissed at me because they put up their new Web site and aren’t getting any hits. This is apparently my fault because my copywriting agency did the writing for the Web site. Never mind that their Web developer neglected to use the title tags and other meta tags we’d written. Never mind that it’s poorly coded and designed. Never mind that they chose not to do all of the pages we’d suggested for more content. Never mind that it only went up three weeks ago. Never mind that no sites link to it yet. Never mind that they have no content management strategy for updating the site. Never mind that I had explained all of this to him months ago when we first started on the project.
Just because someone is running and marketing a small business doesn’t excuse them from educating themselves about marketing. I’m not saying they should be an expert. (I joke that I don’t want to know about taxes, that’s why I have an accountant. But I still know what taxes get paid and when, I just don’t have to know the nitty gritty.) But they should know something.
Not all are like the client described above. I’ve worked with plenty of small business owners who took the initiative and learned enough to have a dialog about their marketing, whether it’s an email newsletter, web marketing, blogging or direct mail.
And thank goodness for those clients! Copywriters and marketers can’t do their jobs with clients who don’t know anything and aren’t willing to learn is the lesson I’m learning this week. Sadly, it’s usually the small business that falls into that category.
And for any small business owners who now feel compelled to know it bit more about web marketing and SEO based on this gripe, start here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769.
This morning as I put on my copywriter hat and started on a project for a new client, I first reviewed their brand guidelines…and have been itching to blog about it ever since. In my opinion, your brand is more than your logo. Your brand--your marketing--is everything you say, do, wear. It’s how your employees act, how well your product delivers on your marketing promise…everything.
And as a copywriter, I firmly believe that your words are part of your brand, in all your marketing communications: your email marketing, your web writing, your print collateral. Yet in all the brand guidelines I’ve reviewed in my eight years as a copywriter, only once was voice addressed.
This particular brand guideline even says in there “Our Brand, Our Voice” yet there’s no mention of voice. It offers up 9 pages on the logo, typeface and colors, showing exactly how to use, not to use, going into details of file formats and more. But no examples of messaging or voice other than describing the brand personality with words like “agile” and “synergy” but without any examples of how to do copywriting that fits the brand. Which is akin to telling someone how to bake a cake and telling them to use eggs, flour and sugar…with no more direction than that.
Your logo alone won’t tell your story. You need words that work.
Earlier this week, I attended a stellar WTIA event on Web 2.0. The panelists were entertaining and informative, and the whole dialog around monetizing Web 2.0 fascinating.
But the message that most resonated with me as a copywriter was that content still matters. I don’t mean the user generated content (UGC) that people typically think of when they think Web 2.0. I mean the content that your company and marketing team puts out into the world.
And that’s good news to me, because it means copywriters have a place in making Web 2.0 marketing work!
Done right, the content you generate as email marketing, email newsletters, and blogging can be viral, can start a dialog and engage your customers. So you still need great copywriters, relevant content, and even a strategy.
The best news is that small business marketing can involve Web 2.0 because all of these tools and mediums can be used by small businesses to engage their customers.
Yeah, rest easy, copywriters. Content is still queen. :-)
Maybe this is sacrilege coming from a copywriter, but it’s not what you say that matters, it’s what your customers say that matters.
From clean uniforms to a usable Web site, from friendly service to great product…what your marketing promises better be delivered in the actual experience, start to finish, or your marketing is lying.
Check out the “Trusted Sources of Information” table at http://www.bridgeratings.com/press_08.01.067.Influentials.htm. Note that family, friends and acquaintances are the most trusted but a close second is strangers with experience. This group rates second overall as a trusted source. Strangers are trusted over religious leaders and teachers even. That’s how important your customer’s experience is. All the marketing in the world won’t replace a bad experience because people will talk, or blog, or post a review online.
OK, then, why do you even need marketing? Why do you need a copywriter? Because marketing gets people in the door, to the Web site, or on the phone in the first place. Then the experience either seals the deal or kills it.
Speaking of the customer experience, I want to share a nice email I received recently about this blog:
“I definitely enjoy your blog. I can only assume that this type of thing comes naturally for you in your line of work, but yours is one of the few blogs I always look forward to reading.”
Tim Oten
Chukar Cherries
Thank you, Tim! If you find this blog helpful or not, speak up and let me know! I write it to share my opinions and musings, but want it to do some good in the marketing world too, hoping to change how marketers look at messaging!
I’m a big fan of small businesses. After all, I’m one! But I also prefer spending my money with a small business over a big one. I’d rather walk into the Kona Kai coffee shop in downtown Kent and get a hug from Michael the owner than go to a Starbucks any day, no matter how cheerful the baristas. Same for Pat’s Bar and Grill, and the Peridot Nail Salon, and City Frame, and the Balanced Athlete, and all my other favorite small businesses in downtown Kent.
Yet as much as I adore them all, I see them all making the same mistake: not enough (or zero) marketing. They tell me they don’t have the time or money for marketing, but really, like with exercising, it’s about choosing how and where you’re going to spend that time and money.
For example, one business is currently adding all kinds of services in the hopes that they’ll bring in more people…but they’re not marketing their old services or their new ones. They collect email addresses, but don’t know what to do with them. They buy ads in the local paper, but don’t know if those ads are doing any good. They talk about putting up a Web site, but still don’t have one.
Adding all these services took an investment of time and money that could have been spent on email marketing and blogging instead, two extremely cost-effective ways for small businesses to market. (Especially when a blog can take the place of a Web site for some businesses.) But I guess their mindset is just that marketing is hard, so they’ll stick with what they do know (getting a liquor license, for example) than find out what they don’t.
How do we shift that small business mindset? Let me know what you think... leave a comment or email sharon@weknowwords.com.
Last night I was skimming through a marketing research magazine while waiting for my kids. I joke that if reincarnated I’d like to come back as a market researcher (or gospel singer!) because as a copywriter and consultant, I don’t get to work with numbers. In the marketing world, people like me are usually brought in when the researchers are done. But I wanted to see the articles on name research because as I’m sometimes asked to help come up with company or product names.
It was interesting to read about all of the research that can go into a naming project, but what most struck me was one author’s assertion that the name should to specific to the customer that it sells the product.
What he was saying about customers tied in exactly with my mantra about talking to customers not at them. That applies to naming too! I hadn’t considered that before, but reading his comment gave me a flashback to a few years ago, and it’s such a great example of this, I have to share.
We were asked to help rename a company that copied and delivered legal documents (or something like that, my memory is a little fuzzy). The pain points we were addressing were accuracy and speed, an also a specialization in the legal field. So the name ideas we were coming up with were all meant to tell this story (plus we were doing domain name research at the same time to make sure the URL would be available).
In the end, the graphic design firm that had hired us to do the naming decided to do it themselves. As part of the rebranding of this company, they had come up with a certain color box that all documents would be delivered in. That box would be the company’s brand.
So they decided to rename the company ColorBox. (Not “color,” a specific color, but I don’t want to say.)
Now, if I’m a potential customer and I’m shopping around for someone to do legal document reproduction, how in the heck am I going to know that ColorBox can meet my needs?
It’s a classic example of talking at the customer. “We’re going to have this really hip, cool name, but you won’t be able to figure out what we do based on the name, so you’ll never know that we can meet your needs.”
I guess as a copywriter and marketer I should be glad, because decisions like that simply scream for great copy because at some point someone is going to have to explain what that company provides.
But wouldn’t it have been easier to have a customer friendly name to begin with?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately on email marketing and Web 2.0 marketing for small businesses. By small, I mean a wide range from hyper small, like mom-and-pop shops, up to mid-size companies. The reason I’ve been (let’s use a more accurate word here) dwelling on the topic is two-fold:
First off, I see far too many small- to mid-size businesses doing a poor job at email marketing.
Second, I see far too many of these same businesses not taking advantage of Web 2.0 marketing.
In the first case, I blame the ease of email. Email marketing is easy to do, and therefore easy to do wrong. Despite all the talk about segmentation and relevance and one-to-one marketing, most of the calls I get as a copywriter and marketing consultant are from businesses doing batch and blast email. Or they’re not using email at all. Not sure yet which is worse…
Regarding Web 2.0, there’s one incredibly easy way for these businesses to take advantage of Web 2.0 marketing that has nothing to do with podcasting or Facebook or Twitter. And even though it’s easy to do, unlike email marketing, it’s easy to get it right.
I’m talking about blogging for small business. Blogging is one Web 2.0 marketing tool that business owners can put to work right now, today. Seriously, if you’re a small business owner reading this blog, you could be writing your own blog within the next 30 minutes depending on which platform you choose. Ditto for the marketer for the mid-size company reading this blog: your company should be jumping on the blogging bandwagon too.
That said, the whole idea of blogging for business stymies most clients I mention it to. OK, it stymies all of them, I admit it. That’s why I started making up a guide for getting going. It’s still pretty rough right now, although I’ve given it out to a few people, but if you’re thinking about blogging as a marketing tool and you’d like to see it, email me at sharon@weknowwords.com.
If you’re not thinking about blogging as a marketing tool, definitely email me at sharon@weknowwords.combecause we need to talk!
Delight them. Repeatedly…
I was commiserating with a client shackled by management, prevented from implementing certain marketing initiatives because of an emphasis on direct, measurable ROI. I’m a proponent of indirect marketing (maybe the only proponent) by which I mean marketing efforts that have an impact that can’t be directly measured…which led to a story a client told a story about a great Mexican restaurant by his work.
He had been telling coworkers about the place because it’s clean, the staff is friendly, they remember your favorites, and the food is good. In essence, he is marketing on behalf of the restaurant by telling people about it, what we call word-of-mouth or viral marketing.
But this viral marketing isn’t the result of some concerted effort on the part of a marketing department to incent people to talk about them. It’s incidental.
The restaurant didn’t manipulate my client or entice him in any way to say great things. They simply provided a superior, consistent customer experience and a tasty meal.
No marketing budget has a category for “delight” and I’d probably get nowhere trying to convince a director of marketing that cleanliness, quality and friendliness should be part of her marketing plan, because she wouldn’t be able to track the ROI of a smile.
But would a carefully crafted ad generate the same kind of incidental marketing that the restaurant is now benefitting from?
My corporate and personal taxes are finally done, yay! Thanks, Rick!! And I now have two bills to pay, one for each. Rick is a doll and keeps his costs down for me, but still his rate is $200/hour and he’s worth every penny because I know my taxes will be done right. I’m paying for his time and knowledge, but also his experience…which is hard to price at all!
As I work through my divorce, I am paying my lawyer $175/hour. (Don’t tell the lawyer what the accountant is charging or else his rate will go up to match it!) As my “ex” and I navigate the complications of a “dissolution of marriage” in the county we live in, where people with kids jump through lots of hoops to get divorced, I know my lawyer’s also worth his hourly rate. He knows the system, and he knows how to work with couples who have lots of difficult discussions to work through. Again, I’m paying for time and knowledge, but also 20+ years of experience as a family law attorney.
And that’s what copywriters sell: their time and their knowledge, but ultimately their experience. In a word, their expertise. And the more experienced and knowledgeable the copywriter, the higher the hourly rate should be, whether you’re paying her for email marketing or Web writing, a case study or an online press release.
About half the time we are asked for a copywriting estimate, we don’t get the job because the prospect doesn’t want to pay the price. (Note: We’d prefer to know the budget upfront so we can just tell the prospect what we can do within that budget, but somewhere it is written that budgets are to be guessed at, not disclosed! Silly people.) For me, it’s a filter. If someone doesn’t recognize the value in what we’re selling, I don’t want to do business with them anyway. Every freelance copywriter I’ve ever talked to agrees it’s the clients spending the least money who take up the most time!!
For those businesses who choose to scrimp on the copywriter, and plenty do, the results are typically less than stellar: email newsletters that don’t deliver, Web sites that don’t convert, direct mail goes directly into the recycle bin. That’s because you get what you pay for.
Just like my accountant, lawyer and saddle are all worth the money they cost, so is a great copywriter.
Earlier this week while in a Tully’s coffee shop, I saw a display for a drawing that is both clever in how it engages with customers and clever in helping to grow Tully’s in-house email marketing list.
The entry forms ask you to enter your “super-long” coffee order. You know, like the ones you overhear the pretentious people say while you’re waiting in line: “I’ll have a Venti skinny mocha with half soy, one packet of sweet ‘n low, at 170 degrees, with 2 tablespoons of whip.”
You make up a long order (and there’s plenty of room to go all out with it!), and Pemco Insurance donates a dollar to Children’s Hospital for each entry. That’s neat! That’s a feel good! You’re also entered into a weekly drawing for a Tully’s gift card. So it’s self-serving too. You get to help a charity and help yourself. Plus you have fun making up the absurd order.
Then at the bottom you enter your email and below that is a check box to sign up for Tully’s email club, to “receive the latest Tully’s news and coupons.”
By the time you get to the bottom of that form, you’re feeling pretty good about this whole deal. And besides, you’ve just given them your email address so you can be notified if you win. Why wouldn’t you just go ahead and check that little box to sign up?
Compare that to just a “sign up for specials” box on a Web site. I bet this converts much better. And I’m pretty sure growing their in-house email marketing list is the point of this contest! Although it’s so subtle, the customer doesn’t see that.
Very well done. I love it.
Thanks to my annoying friend Chris Baggott of Compendium Blogware, I finally saw the light about blogging back in July. He had been after me for two years to blog, but it wasn’t until I got the whole search engine optimization part of it that it made sense to me to do so. I stopped writing my email newsletter and started blogging instead. (Side note: I have recently decided to do both because they are different mediums and I like delivery my copywriting message both ways. Email me at sharon@weknowwords.com if you want to get the newsletter, I’m aiming for a June start.)
Once I started blogging though, I found myself going back and forth between blogging for SEO and blogging as a means of putting useful, relevant information out into the world. The latter is always my primary goal, to further my cause of convincing marketers to talk to customers not at them, but then I want people to find the blog too, so they get the message which leads me back to keywords and SEO and…can you see where I’m going with this?
It has been like a flip flop, until I finally realized that it was no different than writing Web copy for a client. When the copywriters at We Know Words take on a Web writing project, we first write the copy regardless of the keywords so we can master the tone, message, voice, length, etc. Then after the client and the copywriter are both happy, we go back and optimize the text using keywords. (We also get more natural sounding Web writing that way. I can usually tell when a Web page was written with keywords and SEO top of mind.
Since I’ve started blogging, I’ve definitely seen how it can help one win search wars. (See other blog posts on “soap is dumb.”) But to really create a win win for all, the blogger’s challenge is to find the balance between the search and the reader.
My daughter’s class will be taking a field trip to JA Biztown next month, a facility sponsored by Junior Achievement that gives kids the chance to work, earn, spend and save as part of a mini community for half a day. It’s an amazing setup. They’ll have checking accounts and paychecks. They’re assigned jobs like CEO, CFO, sales manager, and mayor. One team puts together a newspaper that day, another runs the TV station where kids broadcast commercials for their micro businesses. Each little business (i.e. group of kids) has to start the day with a business loan, then determine how they’re pricing their products to make sure they’ll earn a profit by the end of the day. They buy insurance and lease their storefronts; they pay utility bills and buy supplies. It’s incredible.
I’ll be one of the volunteers helping out with management of about 150 kids that day. When I went to the volunteer training, I got a sneak peek at the place. Wow.
It’s amazing to walk into this huge room that is the tiny city, with miniaturized versions of Washington Mutual, Home Depot, Ikea, and other big companies. As a parent, I was touched that all of these businesses are part of this unique educational effort, donating money and resources with no immediate return on investment.
As a marketer, I was struck with the brilliance of these businesses that donated something else too: their brand. But here’s where they see the long-term benefit of their participation. By being part of JA Biztown, Washington Mutual, for example, is planting the idea of WaMu as bank into kids’ minds. When they’re older and opening that first checking account, they’ll think of Washington Mutual without even knowing why.
I was telling another mother about this and she said in a slightly disgusted voice, “But isn’t that brainwashing?” Probably yes. Maybe all marketing is at some level an attempt to brainwash.
But more important is foresight, cultivating future customers, making a short-term investment now for a payoff down the road. Companies often don’t want to invest in indirect marketing like email newsletters, blogs, and other activities that aren’t immediately measurable but ultimately impactful. Too bad. Maybe those marketers should spend a day at JA Biztown for insight into what these other companies are doing. Hey, with 150 kids, at the very least we might need a few more volunteers.
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