Rewrite the marketing dictionary. There are no more 4Ps in marketing. Just to refresh your memory: 4Ps stand for Product, Price, Placement and Promotion. With the advent of Twitter, Facebook and other social media distribution channels, Marketing has become just centered around the 1st P: Product. Build a great product and customers will follow. Google had it right – users are GOD. Price is no more important, especially in consumer software, primarily due to the advertising business model. Placement and Promotion may aid in direct marketing but the age of direct marketing is over – It is more about mass marketing. In Seth Godin’s word, be “Good at Doing vs Good at Talking”.
Some critics might say it is applicable to software, but we see more and more trends in hardware products as well. Look at Apple – yes they spend a zillion dollars in advertisement but customers buy their product because they love it – not because some salesperson makes a cold call, drop in a 10% discount and voila: closes the deal. The same trend is somewhat applicable even to products sold in the enterprise sphere – most of the tech nerds in the enterprise companies go “ga ga” (yes you guessed it right, that’s how Lady Gaga got her name) over a switch or a storage product or an on-demand software and the product takes off.
I am not diminishing the other 3 Ps. (Though, I am kind of in a denial mode being a tech marketer myself). In some regions and some areas it might be still important.For example, retail or emerging markets.
But, Technology Marketing profs need to rewrite some of the marketing text books in this new era. The first “P” is becoming more and more important.
Marketing = Product
You probably have heard about Twitter’s new ad platform by now. Jeremiah Owyang has done a great analysis on his blog.
But this is not rocket science. I was expecting something really out of the box from Twitter. Not only I, but also hundred others have predicted the same. This is what I wrote in August 2009:
“Whereas Twitter is a whole different story. They just launched their Twitter search. So what?
Let me give you an example. I want to buy kindle. I do a search on “Google”. I get the usual websites trying to market the product. I don’t know what customers are talking about. I go to Twitter – I do a search on “kindle” and voila:
And now I want to buy the product. I see the ads on the right – I click on it (Engagement Rate from Twitter will be high so you can charge more CPC) and there you go – a new revenue stream for Twitter.
Even if Twitter gets a 10% market share of the search ad spend – that’s a $2B cash flow growing at 17%. Not bad? There is your $20B valuation.”
But, instead of CPC, the model is based on CPM. I am kind of wondering how they are going to come up with CPM pricing (probably use industry standard cost per impression). CPC should have been more interesting. If my theory were right, we would see higher bids for keywords on Twitter than on Google. Because of 2 main reasons:
1> You value real time information more than old stale information
2> You value information from real people more than inanimate pages.
Secondly, I am wondering what the market size is. Is there any data on how many searches are looking for real time information? If it is 10% that means Twitter grabs 10% of Google’s market share. I don’t think Twitter will increase the online advertising TAM but would rather take it from Google (Marketing budget is the same) – so this is a threat to Google for sure. I don’t think we can put this in the category of social media advertising.
It will be interesting to see how Google reacts.
Write it down!! I foresee a Google Acquisition soon and I predict a billion dollar acquisition.
Have you noticed the strange Facebook Status Updates lately? “Show your support for breast cancer…” or “If you know someone who suffers from prostrate cancer… “ or “Do you care about cancer?” or “Read the first sentence in page 5 and put it in your status message..” Mostly it was status updates about raising awareness around a social issue or people having fun with their pictures (80s week or Doppelganger week).
Last week I noticed another viral status update spreading through Facebook like fire. Some of my friends posted: “Go to urbandictionary.com, type in your first name, copy and paste this as your status, and put the first entry for your name under comments.” And then there were funny banter around what each of their first names meant.
I am confident it was a product of a brilliant marketer, probably someone at urbandictionary.com. I started poking into Alexa and Compete just to see the effect on web traffic to urbandictionary.com. Alexa says traffic has gone up by 25% in the last 3 months starting in November. In November, compete says there were 3.7M unique visitors; that makes it 4.6M unique visitors in February. A whopping increase of a million in the last month itself.
This is the power of viral/social-media marketing. It is no more true that you need to spend a million dollars in order to get your name out there. Another very good case study is mancrunch.com. It is rumored that the company didn’t have the money ($2.5M to $3.0M for a 30 second CBS spot during super bowl) to run the ad but they applied anyway betting that CBS will reject the ad. As a result, they got tons of free press and media coverage without spending a single dime.
In the last post I talked about how viral marketing is unpredictable. You never know how a video becomes viral. Most of it is dependent on the following factors:
• Title: Search-ability? Most searched words?
• Snapshot: Attention grabber?
• Description: Sounds Interesting?
• Tags: Search-ability?
• Music: Catchy?
• Related: Will it show up in related videos?
• Payoff: What’s the payoff in the end?
Now look at this video:
We launched this video 10 months back when we launched a new product called the Cisco Spam & Virus Blocker. The video didn’t get much traction. We expected it to get more hits because we thought that the theme was interesting and the video was well executed.
We re-launched the video few days backs:
We changed the title from “Weird things happen in office” to “Strange things happen at the office”. We changed the music. We edited to highlight the product better. And most importantly, the payoff was much better than the previous video.
Suddenly this video has become viral. We are scratching our heads to understand what might have triggered it. The theme is more or less the same. Was it the music? The payoff? Did we touch an influential node (famous blogger, celebrity like Kawasaki) in the social graph? Was it just the timing? What do you think?
Viral Marketing is no easy feat. It’s very hard to predict what’s going to become viral. Actually naming anything “viral” even before it becomes viral is an oxymoron. So, if anyone tells you – I am working on a viral marketing project, do this for me, roll your eyes. “Viral” cannot be created, it happens.
But it’s not just art; it’s science as well. Most importantly, if you are working on a “viral” project, make sure you can track the metrics from the top of the funnel to the bottom so that you can show success or failure. Many marketers forget that and focus too much on the creativity part. Remember, even if you are not successful, it is important that you have some key learning from the campaign or else how will you objectify the investment.
Also, most of the time, marketers don’t think about the end-result. What’s the goal of the viral marketing campaign? Do you want to raise awareness? Generate Leads? Based on your goal, the vehicles you use and the tactics you implement will be different.
Let me walk you through a very successful campaign we did here at Cisco to illustrate that. The power of networking and communications solutions is not necessarily well known among small business (5 – 250 employees) decision makers. They know Cisco, but may not know what we do, and specifically, what we can do for them. The idea of the campaign was to raise awareness among small business customers around Cisco small business solutions and pique their interest to provide contact information so that we can nurture them and entice them to buy our solution in the future.
Our objectives were straightforward:
1. Educate small business decision makers on the power of networking technologies to enable their businesses to succeed using humor
2. Demonstrate that these robust capabilities are well within reach of a small business’ budget and resources
3. Build a scalable marketing program that would enable us and our partners to drive demand, close sales opportunities, and create broader awareness for Cisco as a solution provider for small business.
4. Generate interest and excitement in Cisco’s solutions where you find small businesses—not at conferences once or twice a year, but on-demand, on the web.
We posted the “Peace of Mind” viral video on multiple video syndication sites across the web like MetaCafe and YouTube. It was also posted on internal Cisco sites, Cisco.com and partner sites. The concept of the video was to relay using humor how the Cisco small business portfolio provides peace of mind with reliable and trustworthy networking solutions.
Small Businesses who watched the video were enticed to come to the “Peace of Mind” landing page to watch more such videos. We also used banner ads with the theme “Peace of Mind” and Google paid search to direct traffic to the landing page. In the landing page, we had two offers – one for customers interested to buy the networking solution and one who were still not ready to buy.The customers who were ready to buy Cisco solutions were qualified by a third party telemarketing firm and passed on to partners to be followed up. The customers who were not ready to buy subscribed to our monthly Innovators newsletters to be further nurtured.
The end-results were phenomenal:
500,000 video hits on metacafe.com; digged 113 times; 58 comments
More than 200,000 video hits on Youtube; 33 comments
More than a million video hits on the internet; syndicated in more than 100 sites and 25 languages
More than 5000 additional visitors on Cisco.com in 3 months and 88% new traffic
5000 new “Innovators” Subscribers
More than 200 networking solution leads in the US
Featured on UK and France small business Web sites
64% more traffic on Latin America Web site and 27% more online leads
Some key takeaways from this campaign:
It is very important that you think through the objective of the campaign
You measure every single touch point with your audience
The audience has a pay-off at the end of the video as well as the landing page
The landing page has compelling offers to engage the audience
You deliver on your promise and experience throughout the customer journey
Raj Sarkar
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