“When will the truth come into season? I have a feeling it will be a long time.”
It is far too often accepted to “fudge”, “stretch”, or “embellish” in advertising. These aren’t always negative and in some cases can be part of a creative license. Marketers have a strong opportunity to stand out and impress their customers with truth and honesty in their ads.
There are still millions of companies that fail to understand a basic premise about their own environment – customer service matters. These companies occupy a space in which they no longer have control over their brand. They can still buy ads, media coverage, and politicians, but the people -customers- are empowered with tools never before seen in the history of commerce.
It is easy to spot a company that still relies on disappointing sales tactics such as incentive deadlines, playing on a sense of fear, or blatant lies. Internally, the sales staff is constantly under pressure to meet a high quota or log their every interaction for managerial oversight. They prioritize landing the next sale over earning the next 10 sales. I recently had two experiences in the same Friday that reinforced the basic principles behind the necessity of good customer service.
The first involved Sears. My wife scheduled a repair for our refrigerator and while making the appointment, she was solicited to receive a free estimate on the same day on any home repair. We had been considering new windows and there was “no obligation” so she booked the estimator simultaneously. Near the end of the estimation process, she called my office to share the price and other details. I work close to home and decided to talk to the guy in person. I came home and Steve (the estimator) immediately began telling me about all of the pricing and rebate incentives if I purchased windows today. I explained that I wouldn’t be making such an important investment in my home after a brief conversation and no other estimates or research on the subject.
“Okay man. I understand. Thank you for your time.”
He was packed and out the front door in under 60 seconds. Literally. No effort to answer my remaining questions, no information about alternative window options, scheduling, warranties…nothing. I didn’t buy so he didn’t care.
It may go without saying that while it took him less than 60 seconds to leave my house, it also took me less than 60 seconds to decide against using Sears for this project.
I have the pleasure of connecting with Ted Rubin, Chief Social Marketing Officer at Collective Bias, on various social media and I posed this encounter to him. He is a champion of educating companies on the benefits of truly great customer service and how to position themselves for healthier business by investing in a Return on Relationship™. In his words,
“The Sears salesperson had an amazing opportunity staring him in the face. If nothing else you would have most probably shared with others the way he added value to the process.”
And right he is!
Customers today are equipped to dramatically impact a company with a comment on Facebook, screen capture of a Twitter feed, or an experience shared on Yelp. This shortsighted salesman was ready to pressure my wife with incentives and deadlines but unprepared to build a relationship with a customer. If he had done things the right way and not stormed off like a child, he may have earned a customer in the near future. Now he has no chance of doing that.
Once I got back in my car and headed back to work, the second bad customer service experience began. I got a call from someone at my office that a person was there to see me. We didn’t have a meeting scheduled but if he was willing to wait 15 minutes for me to return, I could give him a few minutes to meet. It was my sales rep from a company called Search Options, whom I had spoken with earlier in the year and explained that I couldn’t move forward with them because I was under contract with my current vendor and happy with the relationship. But he dropped by anyway to tell me that one of his corporate officers was flying into the area next week and he would love to setup a meeting with me so I could learn more about their services and hopefully capture our business immediately. I again explained that I am already contracted with another vendor and it doesn’t come up for review until the end of the year. He actually said, “I remember you mentioned that but if you meet with him I think you’ll like what you hear.”
Clearly he had no respect for my current relationship but wanted me to start one with him. I started picturing a mistress who wanted me to cheat on my wife but then stay loyal to the mistress.
Again, I presented the situation to Ted Rubin and got his opinion:
“[He] could have set himself up as first in line when your other contract was coming to a close simply by leveraging the visit by his corporate officer as a relationship building tool, rather than a sales opportunity. Let you know the time and effort they were willing to put in, even while being aware that it would be 6-8 months before you could seriously consider.”
Similar to the Sears instance, instead of being disrespectful and pressuring for a quick sale today, the salesman could have laid a strong foundation and “set himself up as first in line”.
As companies navigate the still-new waters of social media, they need to realize that the way they treat people in their stores is the way they will be portrayed online. It is impossible to cover it up, gloss over it, or pretend it didn’t happen. A chorus of negative feedback will expose your behavior as it truly is. And never forget that people are three times more likely to complain than they are to praise. This is how brands get hijacked by empowered customers and -for good or bad- it is usually accurate.
My thanks to Ted Rubin for giving his insight. Please share your good or bad customer service experience that impacted your decisions with a comment below.
Facebook has been receiving a lot of criticism lately for their lack of a cohesive mobile advertising strategy. I’ve been a voice in that chorus. Before their IPO, they lost General Motors – one of their largest advertisers and arguably their largest automotive client. But at least 50% of their traffic comes from desktop computer users, so for that and a variety of other reasons, I continued the modest Facebook advertising campaigns Moss Bros. Auto Group was running each month.
The results of those campaigns never seemed to add up. We had tried cost-per-click (CPC) campaigns, cost-per-thousand (CPM) campaigns, various geographies, and used broad as well as specific category/keyword targeting. Results were usually disappointing regardless of our parameters, generating click-through rates of less than 0.1%. Bust most importantly, Facebook’s metrics never matched the traffic we received on our website according to Dealer.com (our website provider) or Google Analytics. Here are figures from one particular campaign:
Time frame: 8/29/12 to 9/3/12
Facebook click claim: 85
Dealer.com inbound traffic count from Facebook: 30
Google Analytics inbound traffic count from Facebook: 24
Even the best case comparison has a massive discrepancy of 65%! Keep in mind, I was paying an average of $1.18 per click. That means I could have seen more than double my actual traffic if Facebook wasn’t misrepresenting its figures. It was that discrepancy -that misrepresentation- that lead me to run a test.
I had been wanting to explore the benefits of Facebook advertising for my personal blog. Could it help me capture a new audience? Could it garner some additional attention to this new online endeavor I had been working so hard to grow? This seemed like an ideal moment to test it while simultaneously learning for my employer.
The setup was simple enough and I hoped to learn a few things.
Here’s how I setup the test:
I must humbly admit that the campaigns were failures at generating new repeat traffic for my blog. You’ll see in the screen captures below that I generated traffic and maxed out my budgets on both campaigns, but they weren’t engaged readers. Bounce rate was high and traffic has remained flat since the campaigns. Sure, that could be my fault. After all – its my blog. But let’s look at the campaigns themselves.
The image to the left (click to expand) shows the results of the campaigns as well as their setup.
Obviously, Facebook did a great job prioritizing the CPC campaign over the CPM. They showed it to fewer people, fewer times, and reached the budget cap. In short – more profit for less work.
And that’s my issue. The ads were identical and so was the targeting. The results should have been the same. The ONLY thing Facebook could have done to skew the results was misrepresent the actual delivery of the ads. There is no way they were shown to the same audience, despite my instruction to do exactly that.
And that is something I want to be very clear about. I had a contract with Facebook. Specific terms were agreed upon. Furthermore, the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and Advertising Guidelines don’t disclose that they may adjust your targeting based on payment method. In today’s digital world, advertisers have become conditioned to simply accept the “secret sauce”. We take for granted that we don’t know exactly how our results are generated, but we expect them nonetheless. This is a huge mistake for our industry and will only weaken our ability to accurately measure ROI, select the best media for our products, and hold that media accountable for a mutually beneficial relationship.
Since this test, I have stopped all advertising on Facebook. The ads they run on the right side of the site are obviously rigged for Facebook’s benefit. That said, I have a second test planned: sponsored stories. These ads appear on desktop and mobile devices so I think its worth another foray.
I really wanted an answer from Facebook and two weeks ago I got it. A fortuitous event occurred when I attended Digital Dealer 13 and one of the keynote speakers was from…you guessed it…Facebook! He was a Client Partner for the automotive industry. In addition to the keynote speaker, another Client Partner was hosting a breakout session about Facebook advertising. After the session, I introduced myself and presented my problem. He was a very nice guy and honest in his response. It came down to two things: “priority” and “assumption”.
You see, Facebook assumes your intention by how you pay for your ads. If you want clicks, they assume you will select CPC billing. If you want to brand something, they assume you will select CPM billing. They prioritize the delivery of CPC ads because the goal is to generate clicks and they aim to provide them. I believe this is a faulty assumption. Logically, because all of their ads must include a link to something (Facebook Page, website, whatever), they should assume ALL campaigns want clicks. If I just wanted to “brand something”, I wouldn’t include a link. My ad would consist of a pretty picture and impactful text. Done.
Toward the end of his explanation, his colleague (who would later deliver the keynote) joined the conversation and concurred with the explanation I just received. Both said that Facebook is constantly tweaking its ad platform and new products will soon be introduced that I may want to look at in addition to the current “True View” system they have for measuring ad metrics. I intend to look into them all.
Facebook is gaming the system. I knew as much after the test. I haven’t advertised since. But is that a good idea? Along with Google, Facebook is an 800lb. gorilla. They have 1 billion users worldwide. Is that an audience that -as General Motors did- I can simply create a Page for and hope they find it? The alternative is that I now know how the Facebook advertising system works and I can probably work more effectively within it.
My jury is still out on whether or not I will use Facebook advertising again for a campaign. Thanksgiving is coming up and we always do a substantial amount of advertising for the holiday season. Facebook may not be included. Either way, I promise to keep you posted.
What has been your experience with Facebook advertising? Will you reconsider running ads there? Do you think I’m nuts and the test proves nothing? Okay. Tell me why in the comments below. I respond to all.
Most of us know that digital advertising and the social media space are evolving with incredible speed and it can be difficult to stay abreast of the latest marketing opportunities. This is especially true in automotive – a vertical overwhelmed with vendors, each offering the “latest” and “most effective” way to generate more leads and improve sales. I was fortunate to travel to Digital Dealer 13 in Las Vegas to learn about new strategies and gather insights from industry leaders.
I traveled to the conference with Casey Moss, a colleague who happened to be seven months pregnant. Despite the obvious limitation this placed on her Vegas-standard activities (sitting in smokey casinos, imbibing large quantities of alcohol, etc.) we both enjoyed the trip and her pregnancy spawned some great conversations.
Unfortunately, we missed the first conference activity I wanted to attend: the Peer Networking Roundtables. But we took a less frantic pace as a result and had some time to unwind from our early morning travels aboard Southwest Airlines. We were staying at the hotel in which the conference was being held –The Mirage Hotel and Casino– and that was very convenient.
In my opinion, Digital Dealer was fortunate to kick off with Tori Morandi from AutoTrader.com. She’s an experienced public speaker who offered excellent information to a temporarily standing-room-only crowd. (The back wall had to be removed to fit everyone!)
From there, Casey and I separated and mostly enjoyed the remaining sessions of the day. In the evening, I ventured to the penthouse suites and had a meeting with the great team at String Automotive. I’ve known their Regional Vice President, Steve Botello, for a few years. We had some great discussions along with the company CEO about their product offerings, future development, and the unique competitive advantages they have in a saturated automotive marketplace. The guys were great hosts. On a related note, if you’re ever in Vegas looking for a spectacular steak or seafood meal, enjoy kokomo’s inside The Mirage. Far from inexpensive but it served one of the best steaks I’ve ever had.
I spoke with many of my fellow attendees at various lunches and after breakout sessions. One thing we all seemed to agree on was that most of the speakers seemed incredibly rushed. The quality presentations from experienced speakers could have easily stretched beyond an hour but many speakers seemed to be cramming material into the allotted 50 minutes. One example was Ali Amirrezvani, CEO of DealerOn. He was supposed to get into “Advanced SEO for Dealers” but he must have earned frequent flyer miles because he flew through his presentation. Honestly, I don’t see how he could have done anything else in 50 minutes. Google’s recent algorithmic changes alone could fill an hour and this was intended to be an “advanced” discussion of such things.
Another example was Vickie Gibbs, General Manager of Albright Digital. Her session topic was “The Metrics That Matter”. She began with blatant honesty: Her full presentation was substantially larger but she had to cut it down to fit in 50-minute time limit. Thanks for the warning. She was kind enough to offer the full presentation deck to anyone who asked after the session.
Sadly, there were more than a couple of presenters who were so poorly prepared that 50 minutes were impossible to fill. One such session I attended actually ended in 15 minutes. He was done. No one had questions. No one cared.
I may have been too optimistic. Perhaps I was just plain jaded. Ultimately, I think I was hoping for more than they actually promised and I was misleading myself.
The first keynote presentation was from Google and given by Peter Leto and Marianna Kerppola. The topic was “Fine-Tuning Your Online Marketing” and it did offer some useful tips as well as resources to assist. When it was all said and done, I didn’t walk away feeling like I got my deepest questions answered. As I discovered through most of the conference, I would leave with a few helpful nuggets of information, but no major breakthroughs. I’m okay with that. If I leave with actionable ideas, the conference is a success in my eyes.
Wednesday evening offered the Facebook keynote from Patrick Workman. Patrick and I had met briefly earlier in the day while one of his colleagues was attempting to answer some questions I had about a recent advertising experiment I conducted on Facebook. I’ll be doing a separate blog post about this experiment and why I’m still not comfortable with Facebook’s advertising assumptions and metrics. (This is separate from my recent “unlike” of their Chairs commercial.) Like Google’s, the Facebook keynote didn’t go as deep as I would have liked, but the presentation was helpful and I formulated some new ideas for our dealerships as a result.
One of the most surprising aspects to the entire conference was a low usage of social media. I’m speaking of both attendees and speakers. Something in the area of 90% of the speakers I saw failed to promote their own social media channels at the conclusion of their presentations. Only one showed a Twitter handle. No one (including the Google keynote speakers) showed a Google+ URL. (Hey Google – maybe you ought to roll out those vanity URLs a little faster!) A couple had their Facebook profiles. I was one of a small handful of attendees who were live Tweeting throughout the days using the #DD13 hashtag. QR codes were moderately used but only by exhibitors. I expected a heck of a lot more from an event called DIGITAL DEALER. C’mon team – there are some basics!
Overall, the conference was well done and I would like to attend next year if the classes are a bit more in-depth and covering a new set of topics. Because they break sessions into levels of experience (fundamental, intermediate, and advanced) I think they should offer longer amounts of time for those intermediate and advanced sessions that warrant it. The catered food during the day was okay and the vendors who threw evening parties did a great job. I especially enjoyed the more intimate setting of the Albright Digital Scotch Tasting. They had a nice stream of guests with varied backgrounds and the Albright team were great hosts.
To see more of my day-to-day activities during the conference, check out my posts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I enjoyed my trip and hope to attend next year. If you have any questions about Digital Dealer or want to share your own stories, please do so in the comments.
A dying medium? Hardly! Despite being well over 11 decades old, the communication opportunities available via radio have never been more vibrant, diverse, or dynamic. For brands, radio advertising is probably a great fit for your efforts if you have the determination to research your options and execute a successful campaign.
The options are vast and you (or your ad agency) need to ensure you are choosing the correct stations and geographies to get the most bang for your buck. If you seek an endorsement, make sure the personality is a good fit for your product/service and your audience. Choosing a station or personality just because you like them is a huge mistake.
Radio is a time-tested media in this country. Music is a part of our popular culture and news is vital to our daily lives. It is the second-most used media platform in the nation, reaching more than 242 million listeners over the age of 12 every single week. But don’t be misled by this massive statistic. Radio offers the ability to target your message to the geographic areas you want most. If you need your backyard or the entire West Coast, radio can provide the customers you need.
Do you listen to your favorite DJ, reporter, or political pundit on the way to work? You’re not alone. Almost 90% of in-car audio listening is done with a radio station. Driving to work, from work, going to school, running errands, road trips…all of it is done in a car. These things are done on a daily basis. Every single day, people are in a routine and their loyalty builds to their favorite political pundit or morning show DJ. Connect with their favorites and you can build a loyal customer base.
Because America is a nation of drivers, radio is usually the last media to reach a shopper before they make a decision to buy or make the actual purchase. When they drive to and from work, they’re listening and could be listening to your competition. Did you know that 40% of adults are reached by radio before the peak shopping time of 1pm-2pm? They don’t read a newspaper just before walking into a store. They can’t watch live TV as they choose which fast-food restaurant to eat at or new sweater to buy. The radio is the last thing they’ve heard and it can reinforce your brand or challenge your competition’s marketshare.
“Music soothes even the savage beast.” Its true. People love music. Ever have someone sing your newspaper ad? I doubt it. But don’t think talk radio carries less impact. In many markets around the country, talk radio is the top format. People are dedicated to radio because it offers what they are looking for. Whether its a charismatic host with a great sounding voice or a station that plays their favorite music all day, there are consistent elements that draw listeners every single day. People are loyal to their media.
You already know that flexibility is important. Locking your brand into a rigid and unwavering advertising media is usually unsuccessful because markets, customers, your brand, and products change. Radio is nearly limitless in its opportunities to reach people. It begins with the radio format you choose. If you’re going on talk radio, you may want to use an endorsement from one of the hosts. If choosing music, try a jingle for your company. Does the station drive a lot of traffic to its website? Support your on-air commercials with website banners and page sponsorships. Maybe you only need 15 seconds to mention a great sale and your website address – don’t buy a full 60 second commercial. Or you could buy a 60 second ad and run two 30 second commercials back-to-back. Run 60 seconds of user testimonials to show the audience how loyal your customers are once they try your product. The options are out there. Make sure your ad agency is giving you robust advice on how to spend your radio dollars effectively.
Choosing the right stations, the right times, the right creative, and the right message can help you conquer radio and reach your market effectively. It can also help you build customer loyalty because your customers are dedicated listeners and you will be part of their daily routine. These are uniquely offered opportunities via radio advertising.
Let’s start a conversation about how radio has impacted your business or why you are currently considering radio. Share your thoughts with a comment below.
