Laurel Black Communications + Design

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Marketing Return on Investment: Why Numbers Don’t Tell the Whole Story

Marketing Return on Investment:
Why Numbers Don’t Tell the Whole Story

As social media marketing has grown, so has an emphasis on quantitative metrics to measure marketing effectiveness has grown, too. Because online marketing gathers statistics so easily and so exhaustively, it has become common to define campaign success according to the number of Shares, Likes, Follows and such. Agencies cite these metrics as a meaningful indication that the marketing they created is working.

I disagree. The only true metric of marketing success is your bottom line. Did the person who Liked, Followed and Shared actually buy anything? Did they even click on the link to your site? Can you make a clear connection between a lot of Likes and a jump in sales?

The job of marketing is to inspire purchasing choices in its audiences, and that requires more than statistics – it requires an understanding of human behavior. Even children know that marketing depends on timing, presentation and the ability to be persuasive in order to be successful. (“Mom, can I stay up till ten tonight? Pleeeeze?”) When you have to rely on human choices to meet your goals, you are entering the realm of emotion. Tying success solely to logic and numbers won’t tell you the whole story.

This is evident when reading marketing how-to books. They say that in order to close a sale, you have to connect with or “touch” the prospect anywhere from 5 to 27 times through various media. This is because each prospect needs a unique number of encounters with your product or service to feel comfortable making a purchase.

So since everyone is different, how can you know exactly at which of the 5-27 points of contact any given prospect decided to pull the trigger? Unless you are targeting individuals one by one, you can’t. You can track some of your sales through tools such as coupons, discounts and time limits, but these aren’t appropriate for all businesses, especially services. You could try surveys, but often people don’t remember the exact moment they decided to buy or what the trigger was.

Marketing Return on Investment

So we are back to the pre-social media mode of serial testing. How it works: you develop a clear understanding of your target market, including their general preferences for getting information, and then you choose several means of communicating your offer to this group based on that understanding. Since different people look at different media at different times in different emotional modes, you will choose a range of marketing media, not one, and deploy them in a systematic way over time, not once, so you can plot general sales results against them.

As you continue your marketing program, you will hone your sense of what works best through looking at your sales, in addition to the numbers that show how well your social media are doing.

Taking the time to create and execute a marketing program based on thoughtful consideration of your market has a much greater chance of success.

 

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What Graphic Designers REALLY Do (and it’s not art)

What Graphic Designers REALLY Do
(and it’s not art)

Clients new to buying graphic design are often confused about what they should expect from the work they’re buying. Sometimes all they have is a vague notion that they’re going to get little pictures about what they sell, and that these pictures should be attractive so people will look at them. They tend to associate this process with art, and may think that design and art are the same thing.

This is understandable since both art and design are visual. But their functions are completely different.

When asked some years ago what the difference was, Milton Glaser (an icon of contemporary design) said something like this: the function of art is to intensify one’s perception of reality and create new languages of meaning. But the function of design is to communicate, and for that we must use known symbols.

Coming from a fine art academic background, I had been trying to figure out how art and design are related. I now had my answer. It has helped me understand the difference between artistic goals and design goals, and that I will be both a better artist and a better designer by staying clear about which is which and not confusing them.

This understanding has also kept me from becoming one of those dreaded stereotypes of the commercial art world: prima donna designers who disregard their clients’ ideas, insist they know best, and work in the vacuum of their own ego. To them I say: Listening to your client is not a sell-out. It’s the only way you can create effective work. Work that is not effective is a failure, no matter how cool it is.

Art is not design.

Here’s my take: it is the job of graphic design to combine words and pictures to create an image that will inspire a particular behavior. Specifically, I am supposed to create communications that will motivate people to behave in ways that benefits my clients. Usually that means “Buy my stuff.” It can also mean “Donate to my social cause” or “Vote for me.” What designers REALLY do is nothing more nor less than behavior modification. (Designers are all closet Skinnerian psychologists.)

I have found that this viewpoint helps clients understand what they are really buying, and gives them a benchmark for evaluating its usefulness. This in turn helps me do better work because they are able to give me better direction.

So the difference is: Design puts aesthetic expression at the service of the client, not the creator.

And when good communication exists between clients and designers, the communication between clients and their markets will be much more successful.

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One Way to Do Branding Badly

One Way to Do Branding Badly

Time for more about branding, one of my favorite subjects. This time we’re hearing from the Pet Peeve Department.

As I tell my clients, branding is the sum of all contacts and impressions an audience has with a company or organization.

A brand embodies the promises that a company makes to its market in terms of what to expect from it. These promises are communicated symbolically in the brand’s visual identity. If purposeful decisions are not made in creating and managing a brand, a vacuum forms which the company’s audience will fill with whatever assumptions come to mind. These haphazard perceptions are rarely to the company’s benefit.

An amateurish, poorly conceived brand identity presents its owner as unprofessional and does not inspire confidence. In fact, it creates the opposite, to the detriment of its owner.

One way to ensure that your brand identity will be at best ineffective, and at worst negative marketing, is to hold a logo contest.

Logo contests are to brands as FSBOs (For Sale By Owner) are to home sales. Like representing yourself in court, they are always a bad idea. Logo contests are usually undertaken to save money and to “get the community involved.” That makes as much sense as having a contest to see who gets to do your taxes or take out your tonsils. Design is a profession, not an artsy hobby.

Logos are strategic tools that support business and organizational goals. A cute little graphic cannot perform the functions of a thoughtfully developed symbol in communicating the promise of what your market wants from you. Here are three reasons why logo contests are a sure fail:

One way to do branding badly

1. Developing an effective logo requires a lot of effort from of the client as well as the designer. Without a fully engaged client, the designer is working in a vacuum. Since there is little or no designer-client interaction in a logo contest, results are doomed.That’s because the best work happens when a trained designer and a thoughtful, engaged client function together as a team, and that doesn’t happen in a logo contest.

2. Contests attract non-professionals who have no clue about the function of logos, their role in branding or the process by which visual branding is developed.

3. Contests are also exploitative. They ask a lot of people to work for nothing on the chance of maybe winning a prize. This disrespects everyone involved.

In the long run, contests are more expensive than a professional process because the results are rarely useable or applicable across all media. Entries are often thinly disguised rip-offs of others’ work, especially in on-line contests. This can raise unpleasant copyright issues.

Cost is not the highest measure of effectiveness or worth. Logo contests may seem cheap, but the most expensive logo is the one that doesn’t do its job.

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Features & Benefits: What Are You REALLY Offering Your Customers?

Features & Benefits:
What Are You REALLY Offering Your Customers?

Features and Benefits: What are you REALLY offering your customers?Whenever the economy goes through bumps and down periods, its progress will be paralleled by fluctuations in competition. Product/service differentiation is key to holding your own in the marketplace, so it’s time to get crystal clear on what your business really offers.

A useful way to do that is to use the Features/Benefits Filter. Buying decisions are based far more often on benefits, which are perceived emotionally, than features, which are perceived rationally.

Example: I am buying some shoes. Features: made of brown suede, 3” heels, non-slip soles and they lace up. Benefits: really stylish oxfords that make me feel competent AND attractive. The features (and price) are important, but what’s really selling me are the benefits. Without them, the features don’t move me and I probably won’t buy.

This exercise applies to services as well. Example: I need a will, and therefore a lawyer. Features: someone current on estate law, with a convenient location and a reasonable hourly fee. Benefits: peace of mind knowing that my affairs will be handled per my wishes, and I will not be leaving a big mess for my family. The benefits of doing my will are far more engaging than the mechanics of the process, so I will actually do it.

To sum up: Features describe the product. Benefits describe what’s in it for the customer. For your marketing to be customer-centric, and therefore effective, benefits need the emphasis.Try applying the filter to your own offering from your customers’ viewpoint – looking at it through their eyes will tell you a lot about how to adjust your marketing and better position your business.

A laundry list of product or service features is a big ho-hum; clarity about the benefits you offer will strike an immediate note. Lead with those and you will reap major benefits for your business.

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Getting It Right: Why Brand Strategy Always Precedes Logo Design

Getting It Right:
Why Brand Strategy Always Precedes Logo Design

Here’s an often overlooked point in communications design: The function of a logo is to represent your brand in a visual way, but is not the brand itself, just as a map is not the actual terrain it depicts.

In order to create a successful logo, it is important to have a workable brand definition in hand at the onset of the project, or develop one. In the last several years, branding has become a signature service offered by many design firms. Since the function of design is to inspire desired behaviors in the client’s audience, an experienced designer should be well positioned to assist in brand development.

This is a strategic process with specific outcomes. It is not the same thing as design development, which should always be driven by brand strategy. James McNamara, a noted arts branding expert, lists the following as the basics:

1. Identification of, and recommendations to resolve, an organization’s major communications issues (e.g. misperceptions to correct, new ideas to communicate, organizational issues that need to be rectified to ensure effective communications).

2. Identification and analysis of the audiences with whom you want to communicate.

3. A Position Statement focusing people internally on how to think about your organization that is used to inform critical organization messages and visual identity.

Brand before logo

4. Key Image Attributes, almost personality traits, for your organization that need to be communicated via messages or visuals. These often suggest graphic identity development.

5. Primary and supplementary Organization Messages that must be communicated consistently about your organization.

McNamara thinks that brand strategy and design strategy are both important, but that design should stem from branding. Your brand strategy should be a guide to how you want your business or organization to be perceived, and how to make basic decisions about how you convey your value, how you address your audience, and how you craft your messages to that audience.

After this thoughtful deliberation, you will be much better able to make productive decisions about your design and communications strategies. As a result, your choices will be more effective, and therefore truly support your business goals. Understanding what the job requires makes all the difference in choosing the right tools.

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Urban Refugee Syndrome

Urban Refugee Syndrome
The Bane of Rural Professionals

I have lived and worked on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State for many years. It’s a great place to be for many reasons. But the challenges for professionals are a bit different than in the city because of an odd malady I call:

Urban Refugee Syndrome

This affliction came to my attention shortly after establishing my design practice. Although I didn’t contract URS myself, I soon noticed symptoms in others.

It begins when business or professional people move from the city to the country. If they have URS, they will unconsciously assume two things: 1) that they are one of the few people ever to have had the brilliant foresight to flee urban blight, and 2) that it will be impossible to get support services of the same quality they were used to getting in the city.

URS will also keep sufferers from finding business services locally because they won’t look. This will continue until a newcomer has been in the country long enough to be on the receiving end of URS. At that point, the dots may connect and the formerly new person will be able to recognize that there are other competent professionals in the community besides themselves.

My first client with URS came to me for a logo. As I was reviewing my portfolio with him, he pointed to one of my examples and said, “I couldn’t possibly get work like that here. I would have to go to Seattle.”

I was dumbfounded. Whose portfolio did he think I was showing? I had just left a design position in Seattle, but apparently when you move to the Olympic Peninsula, all your abilities fall off the ferry into Puget Sound.

Forestalling URS

Rural professionals must be hyper-aware of how they present right from the get-go. How you dress, what your online presence and office are like, your business materials, how you answer the phone: everything has to be top-notch because everything sends a message. When it comes to establishing professional credibility, perception is absolutely crucial.

By managing how you present (we’re talking about your branding here), you torpedo those unconscious assumptions before they even gain a toehold. And you are also telling clients to expect to pay you what you’re worth.

One of the worst URS assumptions is that since services in the country must be of less value than those in the city, they should be cheaper.

Do not reinforce this stereotype by assuming that because you live in a small town, you can show up in a sweatshirt and jeans. If you look like you only need $10 an hour to live on, that’s all you’ll get.

The take-away for all professionals no matter where they live: Don’t assume that people will automatically know how great you and your business are. You have to tell them by showcasing your worth in every possible way.