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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Reaching the Right People

Goals, strategy, and tactics

A brief aside before we get into more tactics.

Tactics are easy to understand because we can list them. You use a tactic or you don’t.

Strategy is more amorphous. It’s the umbrella over your tactics, the work the tactics seek to support.

And your goal is the thing you’ll be betting will happen if your strategy works.

If you tell your competition your tactics, they’ll steal them and it will cost you.

But if you tell them your strategy, it won’t matter. Because they don’t have the guts or the persistence to turn your strategy into their strategy.

Your goal is the change you seek to make in the world. It could be the self-focused goal of earning money, but it’s more likely to be the change you seek to make in those you serve.

The goal is your shining light, the unwavering destination of your work.

Your strategy is the long-lasting way you’re investing in reaching that goal. Your strategy sits above the tactics. A strategy might be to earn trust and attention. A strategy might be to be seen as the best and maybe only alternative. A strategy might be to have alliances and partnerships that enable you and your message to reach exactly the right people.

The way you use stories, status, and connection to create tension and forward motion is a strategy.

A strategy, if successful, gets you closer to your goal. You might need to change your strategy if it fails, but you don’t want to do it often.

And the tactics? The tactics are the dozens or hundreds of steps you’ll take on behalf of your strategy. If a tactic fails, that’s okay, because another one can take its place and support the strategy you have in mind.

You can change tactics the moment you decide that they’re not helping you achieve your strategy any longer.

For generations, Coca-Cola had a simple goal: get more people to drink more Coke. Their strategy was to run an enormous number of ads to persuade the mass market that Coke was part of the culture that made them happy—and that everyone else was drinking it too. And the ads kept changing, because the content of the ad was a tactic.

Patagonia’s goal is to get a tiny group of outdoor enthusiasts to care about the environment and to express that care by wearing Patagonia apparel. In their words, “These are all silent sports. None require a motor; none deliver the cheers of a crowd. In each sport, reward comes in the form of hard-won grace and moments of connection between us and nature.” Their strategy is to redefine the way some people think about environmental impact as well as clothing quality. To give that small group a label and a tool they can use to evangelize their vision to their friends. To create insiders and outsiders.

And their tactics range from finding new ways to recycle clothes, to placing stores in brick buildings, to choices about materials, selection, and price. When a tactic fails, they don’t abandon their strategy, the same one they’ve had for more than thirty years.

Advertising is a special case, an optional engine for growth

Media companies, telecommunication firms, and delivery services all make money doing the same thing: selling the attention of those they ostensibly serve.

You can buy an ad in a magazine, in an online network, or with a stamp. In all three cases, you’ll be able to reach/interrupt/educate/engage with all the people the intermediary promised. Anyone with a stamp can send a letter.

You don’t have to earn this attention, since you can buy it.

You’re no longer the outsider; now you’re the customer. You have cash and you can use it to buy attention, whenever you want, in as much quantity as you can afford.

Here’s the good news: when you find an ad approach that works, you can scale it. You can scale it quickly and precisely.

And you’ve probably guessed the bad news: it’s not easy to find an ad approach that works.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, but you need to be clear about what you’re doing and why.

An ad, unnoticed, doesn’t exist.

A noticed ad is noticed by some people, not everyone. And, if it’s noticed by the right people, it creates tension. The tension of not knowing and needing to know more. The tension of being left behind. The tension that things might get better (or worse).

Almost all TV advertising is simply semiotic noise. Reassuring the viewer (“As seen on TV”) that this is a safe brand, a brand you and your peers know, a brand that can afford to be on this box.

That’s a tax that major companies in competitive markets have to pay. But it’s not the sort of marketing that’s realistic to consider for anyone else.

More than ever, but less than ever

More organizations run ads today than at any other time in history. If you’ve ever hit the “boost” button on Facebook, you’re paying to be part of the ad business.

It’s never been easier or cheaper to spend money to get the word out. You can pay LinkedIn for the privilege of sending an email to a bigshot, you can start by running free online ads for your nonprofit, and you can easily promote your conference or your bake sale.

There are three elements to the magic of online advertising:

You can reach people more precisely online than in any other medium. Not just the demographics of what they look like, but the psychographics of what they believe and what they’re looking for.

You can reach people instantly. You can decide to run an ad at 10 a.m. and have it reach people beginning at 10:01 a.m.

You can measure everything.

Since advertising is faster, cheaper, and more measurable than ever before, why isn’t this the focus of all our marketing? Why isn’t this the beginning and end of the discussion?

Because online advertising is also the most ignored advertising ever created.

It’s not unusual to run an ad in front of a hundred thousand people and get not a single click. It’s not unusual for an entire ad campaign to start, run, and finish without making any impact on the culture.

Advertising is unearned media. It’s bought and paid for. And the people you seek to reach know it. They’re suspicious. They’re inundated. They’re exhausted.

You didn’t pay the recipient to run that ad, but you want the recipient to pay you with their attention.

So you’re ignored.

It’s not that advertising can’t work. It’s simply that it’s not the right answer for everyone, at least in this moment.

What does attention cost? What is it worth?

Please don’t get distracted by the possibility of free attention, a spotlight that magically and generously makes you famous through no effort on your part.

Even “free” publicity costs you in terms of time and effort.

But for now, let’s look at ads, where the equation of cost and attention is clear.

An ad in a fancy magazine will cost you $80 CPM, which means you get in front of 1,000 readers (using the term loosely) for eighty dollars. Or a bit under a dime per person.

An ad on a second-rate website might cost you $80 to be in front of a million people. But of course, these people are scanning, clicking, ignoring, and will neither remember your ad nor take action.

Anyone about to buy an ad needs to ask, “What’s it worth?”

People seeking to make change happen are often in a hurry, and advertising feels like a shortcut. But without persistence and focus, the investment is wasted.

Brand marketing makes magic; direct marketing makes the phone ring

Lester Wunderman was the father of direct marketing. He named it and used it to build American Express, the Columbia Record Club, and a hundred other projects.

In 1995, I asked Lester to be on the board of Yoyodyne, the online direct marketing company I founded before the worldwide web was a thing.

Lester was first in describing the differences between brand and direct marketing, but his ideas have never been more relevant. Thanks to the rise of Google and Facebook, there’s now more direct marketing than ever before in history.

The difference is about what happens after the ad runs:

Direct marketing is action oriented. And it is measured.

Brand marketing is culturally oriented. And it can’t be measured.

If you run an ad on Facebook and count your clicks, and then measure how many of them convert, you’re doing direct marketing.

If you put a billboard by the side of the highway, hoping that people will remember your funeral parlor the next time someone dies, you’re doing brand marketing.

It’s entirely possible that your direct marketing will change the culture (that’s a nice side effect). It may very well be that the ads you run, the catalogs you send out, and the visits to your site add up to a shift in the story that people tell themselves.

And it’s entirely possible that your brand marketing will lead to some orders (that’s another nice side effect). It may very well be that your billboard leads to someone getting off at the next exit and handing you money, or that your sponsorship of a podcast leads to someone hiring your company.

The danger is in being confused.

The extraordinary growth of Google’s and Facebook’s revenue is due to only one thing: many of the ads that are run on these services pay for themselves. A hundred dollars’ worth of online advertising generates $125 in profit for the advertiser. And she knows this, so she buys more. In fact, she keeps buying ads until they stop paying for themselves.

On the other hand, brand advertising (for products like Ford, Absolut Vodka, and Palmolive) shaped our culture for generations. But these brands and countless others can’t possibly build direct marketing campaigns that work. And so the shift to a measured direct marketing environment online has been stressful and riddled with failure.

The approach here is as simple as it is difficult: If you’re buying direct marketing ads, measure everything. Compute how much it costs you to earn attention, to get a click, to turn that attention into an order. Direct marketing is action marketing, and if you’re not able to measure it, it doesn’t count.

If you’re buying brand marketing ads, be patient. Refuse to measure. Engage with the culture. Focus, by all means, but mostly, be consistent and patient. If you can’t afford to be consistent and patient, don’t pay for brand marketing ads.

The two paragraphs above ought to have paid for the time and money you’ve spent on this book. I’m hoping that’s not the only thing that repays your investment, but even the biggest and most successful organizations are failing to see how the shift to online interaction is fundamentally changing their business.

Procter & Gamble spends billions on brand advertising on TV, for Tide and Crest and other brands. When TV brand ads are replaced with digital direct ads, their business model falls apart.

The local pizza place was hooked on Yellow Pages advertising. A big ad paid for itself, and the special phone number hooked up to the ad proved it. Moving to Yelp, on the other hand, is time consuming and feels risky. No control, no proven history.

For many smaller businesses, the move from expensive, slow, and difficult-to-measure brand ads to quick, agile, and measurable direct ads is a positive shift. But it’s not easy to act like a direct marketer when you’re trying to reach people who generally don’t click on ads.

A simple guide to online direct marketing

The ad exists to get a click.

The click exists to either make a sale or earn permission.

The sale exists to lead to another sale, or to word of mouth.

Permission exists to lead to education and to a sale.

That’s it.

Every step in the process has a cost (you paid cash at the first step, but along the way, you will lose some of those people who drop out), and every step also leads you closer to the benefit.

Assign values to each step. If you can’t, don’t run any direct-response ads until you can.

Will some people see your ads without taking action? Definitely. That’s a side effect, a culture-shifting, awareness-building bonus. But if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t count.

A simple guide to brand marketing

Everything you do, from the way you answer the phone to the design of your packaging, from your location to the downstream effects of your work, from the hold music to the behavior of your executives, and even the kind of packing peanuts you use—all of it is a form of marketing your brand.

You can’t measure it. You might not even notice it.

But it still matters.

You’re already spending money on brand marketing. No doubt about it. The question is: What would happen if you spent a bit more? What if you spent it with intention?

If you could patiently invest more time and money in putting the story of your brand in the world, how would you do it?

You could certainly buy full-page ads in the local paper or put a commercial on network TV. There’s a long tradition of this sort of spending. You can make a big statement in very little time. It’s fun. It doesn’t require buy-in from anyone except your boss or someone else with a budget. It’s one and done, and you can move on to tomorrow.

It might be the best way to spend your money. Sponsoring a tennis tournament or a podcast might work wonders as well.

Maybe.

Or perhaps you should overinvest in the way your team interacts with customers. Or perhaps you should spend a few million dollars on research and development or go back to school to improve your craft.

The most important lesson I can share about brand marketing is this: you definitely, certainly, and surely don’t have enough time and money to build a brand for everyone. You can’t. Don’t try.

Be specific.

Be very specific.

And then, with this knowledge, overdo your brand marketing. Every slice of every interaction ought to reflect the whole. Every time we see any of you, we ought to be able to make a smart guess about all of you.

Frequency

People don’t remember what they read, what they hear, or even what they see. If they’re lucky, people remember what they do, but they’re not very good at that either.

We remember what we rehearse.

We remember the things that we see again and again. That we do over and over. We remember our Uncle Fred, who came to Christmas twenty years in a row, but we don’t remember his date Ethyl, who came just that one time.

There are obvious evolutionary reasons we’re optimized for this. We have to prune memories relentlessly, and the easiest memories to prune are the ones that are random noise.

We remember the events we have photos for in our family scrapbook, but don’t remember the events that weren’t photographed. It has nothing to do with the act of taking a picture and everything to do with rehearsing our story, the one we tell every time we see that picture.

Along the way, this has pushed us to associate “trust” with the events and stories that happen again and again. The familiar is normal and the normal is trusted.

Marketers forget this daily.

Because we get bored with our stuff. Our story, our change. We’ve heard it before. We remember it. But we’re bored.

And so we change it.

Jay Levinson famously said, “Don’t change your ads when you’re tired of them. Don’t change them when your employees are tired of them. Don’t even change them when your friends are tired of them. Change them when your accountant is tired of them.” We can expand this well beyond ads.

All the storytelling you do requires frequency. You’ll try something new, issue a statement, explore a new market . . . and when it doesn’t work right away, the instinct is to walk away and try something else.

But frequency teaches us that there’s a very real dip—a gap between when we get bored and when people get the message.

Lots of people start a project. They give a talk a few times, maybe even on the TED stage, and then they go off to do the next thing. They launch a new freelance business, get a few clients, then it sputters and they quit. Or they open a company, raise money and spend it fast, hitting the wall just before the good stuff happens.

The market has been trained to associate frequency with trust (there, I just said it again). If you quit right in the middle of building that frequency, it’s no wonder you never got a chance to earn the trust.

Search engine optimization and the salt mines

The Google ecosystem is based on a myth. The myth is that millions and millions of businesses, all grooming themselves for the search engine, will be found by people who seek them.

Dating sites offer the same promise. As do the social networks.

Simply fit in all the way, follow all the rules, and when we search for “tire store” or “restaurant” or “freelance copy editor” or “fun weekend date,” we will find you.

The math can’t support this.

There are a thousand pages of results. What delusion we must be under to imagine we will be the first match.

The path isn’t to be found when someone types in a generic term.

The path is to have someone care enough about you and what you create that they’ll type in your name. That they’ll be looking for you, not a generic alternative.

Yes, you can find my blog by searching for “blog” in Google.

But I’d rather have you search for “Seth” instead.

SEO is the practice of ranking high in the search results for a generic term. A locksmith or a hotel or a doctor who wins their generic search will earn a huge profit. But everyone else is left to spend money on consultants and trickery to somehow rank higher. The math can’t support this pyramid scheme.

On the other hand, a smart marketer can build a product or service that’s worth searching for. Not the generic term, but to find you, the thing you built, the specific. When you do that, Google’s on your side. They actually want you to be found when someone searches for you.

Step one is to make a product or service that people care enough to search for specifically. You cannot win in a generic search, but you’ll always win if the search is specific enough.

And then step two is easy to understand: to be the one they want to find when they go looking.