116: Where Are Our Marketing Jet Packs?
On March 6 at 8:36pm, one of my auctioneer friends posted on Facebook, “Anyone got anything new to share? Any new marketing ideas this week? Any good success to share? What’s working, what’s not?”
Two of his words grabbed my attention: “this week.”
In the age of Moore’s law, there’s this belief by marketers that eventually we’ll find some advertising silver bullet, that some new media will make all others obsolete. In a competitive marketplace, the hungry and aggressive are hoping to find it first—to dominate it after early adoption.
Someone’s got to tell all of the companies sending me email that social media replaced it in 2008. I guess it’s good that email hasn’t been replaced because, twenty years into it, we’re all still waiting for it to make direct mail obsolete. Eighty years into TV, commercial radio is still selling hours of advertising a day—despite it’s other heralded replacements (satellite radio, streaming services, and MP3’s) offering commercial-free music. Sure, we have fewer newspapers; but we actually have more specialty magazines.
We don’t have the Jetsons’ food machine yet, and we definitely don’t have our own jet packs. What we do have is an evolving media landscape that keeps adding more ways to do the same thing. Whether you’re using Google AdWords or outdoor signage, the marketing strategy is the same:
- Determine the people who might want what you’re selling.
- Go to where they are—their preferred media and/or geographic locations.
- Show them what they want to see—first and only (not what you want to show).
- Tell them how to get what they want.
- Analyze the results and interactions to tweak for next time.
Let me drill down one more layer to the auction community for which I’ve worked the past 14 years. After developing more than 15 hours of seminars, I’m annually asked to write and design new ones on new topics. For the last couple of years, I’ve debated turning that request down; but those seminars are the primary way that I introduce potential clients to my value as a vendor.
Candidly, I don’t think there’s a lot more out there that I’m comfortable teaching. With hundreds of auctioneers ignoring what I’ve taught in the past, I wonder what’s the point of creating more content to be ignored. I’m not talking about artistic, subjective suggestions; I’m talking about hard and fast rules to guide advertising, regardless of industry.
As an industry, we struggle to get the basics right.
To the public, we’re still selling events instead of assets. To sellers, we’re still selling auctions instead of marketing; and we’re talking about our method rather than our asset analysis and customized plan. (I know, because I read the proposals.) We are still crowding advertising with tertiary or redundant information that should wait online. We don’t put information in order of audience needs or wants. Readability looks like an afterthought. We’re still treating social media like broadcast outlets instead of conversation environments. We don’t segment our in-house mailing lists by asset category—let alone spend levels or time since last bid registration. We’re still not recording polling data from every auction to determine which media worked best for us in each asset and geographic market. We still don’t understand that the best branding is more consistent than it is creative—and that our brand is more than our colors or logo.
I say “we,” because I’m preaching to myself, the choir, and whoever’s still in the pews this far into this post.
I don’t know a lot of people—me included—who are ready for the next thing, because we’re not doing the things we should already know. “This week” or any week.
[tip]
As a preacher’s son who attended four church services a week and then a Bible college that required an average of 12 Bible-teaching environments (and four prayer circles) per week, I’ve heard my fair share of Bible verses and applications. I know a lot of Jesus’ instructions, and I still disobey them somewhere between hourly and daily. From what I hear, that’s not exclusive to me.
So, it’s interesting to me that so many of us, me included, “want to hear something fresh from God.” I like what my pastors say about this: “Why would God give us new instructions, when we aren’t saying ‘Yes’ to the ones he already gave us?”
That doesn’t mean that we withdraw ourselves from teaching or that we stop trying to grow in new environments. It just means that we can’t always expect to get our dessert before we finish our vegetables.
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