The Ebb and Flow of Storm, Seasons and Time

This post was initially inspired in part by the passing by of #HurricaneDorian (passing by Florida; our thoughts and concerns are now focused on the Carolinas and other states up the coast, I hope they pull through fine).

When a major disruption like a hurricane arrives, or even seasonal interruptions like vacations and back-to-school, many of my clients lament the ebb in their business flow, as if they were helpless observers of the business cycle. That perspective is indeed the problem.

Like the proverbial squirrel storing nuts away for the winter, there are plenty of things you can do to counteract the effects of the business cycle, seasonality and unexpected events like the approach of a major tropical storm. They include:

• Work your customer base. This is the most important tactic. It's always much easier to get repeat business out of an existing customer than acquiring a new one. Think of the approach of the real estate industry, that encourages several touches of a prospect a year. Keep in touch with your past customers, offer them updates and specials. Actively encourage them to do business with you again and regularly. 
• Budget for the slow times. When times are good, you may feel no urgency to spend money on marketing, and those funds may wind up spent elsewhere. But just like the proverbial squirrel, you should be stocking up for those lean times, so you can bring marketing and promotional firepower to bear when times get tough. 
• Cut against the grain. What I mean here is to run promotions when no one else is. Everybody tends to promote during the obvious times like the Holidays and back-to-school. Try running your promotions during those seemingly slow times when no one else is. 
• Advertise and market consistently. Too many of my clients scramble during a slump to get out there and they're essentially playing catch-up. Budget to get your message out consistently throughout the year so people are always aware of what you have to offer. 

If you need help with any of the above, give us a call at 904-744-8877. If you're a small business with a local trading area, visit my site jacksonvillelocalmarketing.com for more local marketing ideas. 

Silence in the Storm

We've touched upon this in earlier posts when a hurricane or tropical storm rumbles through the Southeast, which let's face it seems to be all too often every summer these days. But it's worth revisiting again.

Many businesses large and small feel compelled to say something when a once-in-a-lifetime storm like Dorian approaches (of course it seems counterintuitive that we could have once-in-lifetime storms every year but that's another matter entirely). From a messaging point of view, you'll usually find yourself between a storm surge and a hard place.

If you don't offer products or services that can directly help people in the path of the storm, then you're reduced to messaging that includes some variation of thoughts and prayers, which can come across as vacuous. If you do have a product or service that can help and you heavily promote it, it can come off as mercenary. You just can' t win.

The best bet, if you do contribute to an organization that helps in the relief effort such as the Red Cross, is to highlight that support while encouraging others to do the same. Other than that, it may be best to hunker down, as we say down here in the Southeast every summer.

Stay safe (although that's another phrase that comes perilously close to thoughts and prayers).

It's the End of SEO as We Know it (and I feel fine).

Recently on my Twitter feed (@lbconsultincinc) and on my company's Facebook page (www.facebook.com/LarryBassaniConsulting) I shared this article on the 10 most common SEO myths.

There's probably a lot more than 10 but the article is good place to start. It talks about those long-held hoary precepts like age of site, social signals, using Google Apps, the h1 tag, shared hosting and so on. The issue beyond those ten, however, is how the myth of search engine optimization has eclipsed what can be gained from the effort (and full disclosure, SEO is a significant part of the services that I provide).

The reality is, for whatever the query is, only the top five positions will see any significant clicks. Even with very specific or so-called long-tail queries, there's likely to be hundreds if not thousands of sites competing for the same result (you do the math). So many businesses put an inordinate amount of effort (or fall prey to companies offering to do it for them) toward a quixotic quest to get organic transaction.

Now local search is a little different (and my website www.jacksonvillelocalmarketing.com helps people tackle that) but whether you're a small business, local shop or a big corporation, the place to start is having a coherent message that crystallizes what you do, knowing the people who are out there that are most likely to engage with you and going out and getting them. In marketing, as in life, there are no free rides, and the myth of a free buzz is where a lot of the SEO and social marketing frenzy got started.

Look for tips on building and marketing your brand in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, give me a call for a free consultation.

On Tribalism, Alternative Facts, Fake News, Facebook and Marketing

I’ve been mulling over this post for nearly three months now (you do the math) but I’ve been consciously trying to distance myself from a visceral reaction to what’s gone down while giving me time to see how people -- and advertisers -- reacted.

First let’s get the backstory out of the way: the 2016 election spotlighted a behavioral and social dynamic that was baked in many years before the campaigns started. People tend to group themselves with like-minded people who look, act, think and share the same interests they do. Social media -- and Facebook in particular -- amplifies this by design. You’re shown things in your feed from people who are your friends or relatives (and who presumably have a shared affinity) and on topics that you’re interested in. They don’t call it Like for nothing. So, the companies’ protestations to the contrary, social media is not a place where you discover anything new, it’s to give you more of whatever is familiar.

Then it's not at all surprising that the social media revolution merely reinforced our tendency to group ourselves into tribes, and our outlook and values are driven by that tribe. In that kind of environment, any claim, however outlandish it may appear to those outside of the tribe, carries the weight of truth -- like if you leave the rainforest you’ll be swallowed up by a fire-breathing volcano god. In the end, this is what gives fake news such credibility.

A long, long time ago (the early 1990s) in a country that now seems so very far away, I conducted sales training classes for financial services. These were the kinder, gentler, times of read my lips, thousand points of light, SCUD missiles and alleged pubic hair on coke cans (perhaps a quainter version of today’s discourse). What I taught was that each individual’s or group’s experiences, values, perspectives, feelings and goals can be put into a circle. And where the circles of different groups intersect is where communication occurs, in other words, in the universal. That intersection is where you communicate as a marketer or a sales person.

It may seem that in today’s polarized environment that intersection no longer exists, but it always does. There are things we all share -- like a desire to be happy, secure, fulfilled and maybe not get swallowed up by a volcano tomorrow. You would think that marketers or advertisers would be aiming for that intersection, but so far that hasn’t been the case.

Advertising instead has tried to a) delve into escapism (see the plethora of “most magical time of the year” holiday ads) appeal to one segment or another or in the case of the current Cadillac campaign, try to preach to people on how we need to come on people, smile on your brother, everybody get together and love one another and by a Cadillac.

My advice, in brand or marketing communications, is try and find that spot inside the intersecting circles that strikes a nerve with everyone. Ironically, Trump himself did a better job at articulating this in his State of the Union address, whether action will back the words or not.

Someone in the White House was paying attention.

Your Hip Grandma

What am I: An internet property that organizes and filters Web content for its users. A place where people can keep in contact and share things with family and friends. A service you can find like-minded people with similar interests in groups. And it includes a messaging application where you can instantly chat with anyone with whom you chose to connect.

Of course I'm describing Facebook, right? Wrong. I'm talking about AOL. Yes your grandma's AOL.

It's not that much of a secret that the idea of a "behind the fence" or "gated" internet community was first manifested by that old dinosaur AOL, and is what in part inspired Mark Zuckerberg to do the same. It's also apparent that the old AOL "away" message is the antecedent of the Facebook status update.

But there are important behavioral differences and these are critical to marketers. In addition to providing access to the Web, AOL was a place where people sorted through the internet for solutions to their problems, conduct research, access services and to buy things. So in many ways it was closer to Google than Facebook.

And hence there's the rub with Facebook. Facebook is not the place where people go for information, to research solutions or to buy stuff.  They go to keep up with their friends, for amusement and, let's face it, to be diverted. Someone who's looking for diversion may not exactly be in the buying mode. Even when it comes to news, I know very few people who use Facebook as their primary news source, and if they do, I fear how they might vote in the coming election.

So yes, there are millions and millions and millions of users that spend hours a day on Facebook. But just because they are there, it doesn't make them ripe for the picking. There used to be the same numbers of people watching Friends on TV in the 1990s, but,

except for the most big-bucks marketers, were they looking to buy what businesses had to sell?

On Labor Day (and other hollowed holidays)

No, that's not a typo. I did mean "hollowed" rather than "hallowed". It seems that as more years go by, these three-day holiday weekends are further and further removed from the origins and intent of the events that spawned them, so they have been sort of hollowed out. Now they seem to be uniformly about beer (nothing wrong with that) barbeques and much-needed time off for the beleaguered American worker, who works longer and harder than anyone in the industrialized world (if they get any time off at all in this service economy). And mattress sales. I don't know what it is about three-day weekends and mattress sales, but you could realistically change Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day to Mattress Sale Day One, Two and Three to avoid confusion.

Labor Day in particular has been hollowed out by the fog of time. It was originally proposed by an American machinist in 1882 to celebrate workers and promoted by the American union movement. It was formally adopted as a Federal holiday in 1894. International Workers Day, celebrated pretty much by the rest of the world on May 1, actually has is its origins in an American event -- the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886, when police fired on workers protesting for an eight hour workday, killing four. Still most Americans are unaware of the union and socialist origins of Labor Day, and a Republican lawmaker even went so far as to say that Labor Day is a chance to express appreciation for all those business owners that create jobs. Now I'm a business owner but even I went -- huh?

So what does all this mean to your communications? Well, usually people in business feel compelled to say something about a holiday that sounds wholesome and appropriate, like one client who on Memorial Day insisted on using that occasion to thank the brave men and women around the world who are protecting our freedom. Well Memorial Day is about remembering men and women in our armed forces who have made the ultimate sacrifice in the past and hopefully the service men and women they were referring to will never have to make that sacrifice. Or on Veteran's Day, where it's more appropriate, thanking men and women for their service on your website or Facebook page becomes like wallpaper because everyone is saying it. So here are some tips for making the most out of acknowledging a holiday:

• Make it specific to the original meaning of the holiday
• Tie the origin of the holiday to how we live today
• Put some meat behind it: If it's Labor Day talk about what you're doing for your employees, if it's Veterans Day, talk about the support you give to veteran organizations and so on. 

If you do this, your message will resonate with more depth, will more likely get noticed on the Web and in social media and you just might educate a few people too.

Getting Saturated (And Not Just by the Rain)

As Hurricane Hermine was preparing to strike the Florida Panhandle last week, here in Northeast Florida I was deluged by a torrent of another kind -- wall-to-wall "storm coverage" by both local and national news outlets.

Now although the storm did create some serious havoc along its direct path, we along the fringes were subject to breathless speculation about wind speeds, rainfall levels, storm path possibilities -- all widely varying and as it turns put completely wrong. On top of that you had local politicians posturing to be somber and leader-like, intoning on how prepared they were and why we should take this threat seriously.

This scenario has played out several times over the last few years as we've been lucky enough to escape major storms here in the hurricane capital of the U.S. (Hermine was the first hurricane to strike Florida since 2005). And you get the sense (justified or not) that the media weather departments can't wait to put their crack storm watch teams into some live action, sort of like invading a country because you want to do something with all that gear and training.

The problem with all this of course is that people start to tune the information out -- sure, whatever you say, heard it all before -- and then when there's a real need to, they won't be listening. But Larry, you might ask, beyond your usual grousing, what does this have to do with marketing since this is a marketing blog? Well I'm getting to that.

I've run across so many companies who think that more is necessarily better. Flood the Facebook page with posts. Send out those email blasts every other day. I actually ran across a prospect who placed the same print ad every day in the same position in the paper.

This is obviously counter-productive from a communications standpoint. You become like wallpaper and people start to tune you out. What's more, with email marketing, open and click-through rates diminish with increased frequency and with Facebook, the more posts you throw out there with no engagement, the less likely you are to get in anyone's feed.

So pick your spots carefully. Make sure you have engaging content with something that will hook your audience. And don't feel the need to beat them over the head with it. Take your cue from David Byrne and the Talking Heads' Psycho Killer:

"When I have nothing to say my lips are sealed
Say something once, why say it again?"