Many small business owners are not marketers. They’ll tell you as much.
People start their own business in order to do what they love and do well. Marketing becomes a necessary evil.
For many, writing is a chore. Or databases are a mystery. Or blogging takes too much time. Social media creates an uncomfortable blend between business and personal. Networking is superficial. Advertising is too expensive and doesn’t work quickly. Public relations is a crapshoot.
It’s altogether too time-consuming, too hard, too expensive. There’s so much marketing work to do that nothing gets done. And it’s easy to justify, because word-of-mouth is the thing that works the best anyway. But word-of-mouth isn’t real marketing; it’s luck. And while I’d rather be lucky the good, the real winners are both.
Aside from being under-capitalized, marketing paralysis may be the most common affliction among small businesses. There is a lot to know about marketing and too many easy reasons not to get started.
But marketing is now more accessible to small businesses than it’s ever been. Marketing rarely comes for free, but it’s possible to start marketing seriously without risking thousands of dollars like you had to do 10 years ago.
So here’s an idea: Try one thing. Instead of getting overwhelmed by all there is to learn about marketing, try choosing one marketing activity and focusing on it until you’re proficient – or at least comfortable.
What should you do first? I’d advise doing the activity that interests you most; you’re more likely to find the joy in mastering it.
But if you insist on being pointed in the right direction, swallow your pride and jump onto Facebook. Why? It’s a tool that can allow you to reach 1 out of 2 people in the United States – for free. If you coughed up $3 million to advertise on the Superbowl you wouldn’t reach that many people. Facebook is, simply, the largest media outlet in the world. And you can get started without spending a nickel.
What do you do on Facebook? Start by building a profile for your company, and then explore and experiment. We can discuss it in more detail another time. What’s important is that you do something. Anything.
Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley made the following presentation at a recent meeting of technology wizards and gurus. (Notably she got the name of the event wrong; it’s the CN Summit.)
There’s a breadth of information here, ranging from adoption of mobile technologies to the potential for mobile advertising to the investment outlook for companies in the business.
The big takeaway for me is how it underscores the increasingly reasonable-sounding claims that mobile computing will change how we think about computing; and, no less, how important it is for media companies of all sizes to recapture their audiences on the small screen.
For those – and there are many – who say the iPad won’t save publishing, here is evidence that the Little Tablet that Could might be more powerful than they expected.
Ordinarily slower than honey from the fridge, the audit bureau’s speed to provide meaningful data across the fast-emerging new-media platforms speaks to the urgency of its customers. The data means media will be able to sell advertising for new online formats almost as fast as they develop. That alone will hasten the already hurried development of unique offerings for smart phones, mobile websites and the iPad (as well as the fleet of act-alike products that others will inevitably produce).
It’s important because it’s a stay of execution for the advertising-based business model on which virtually all media rely but which has so far resisted the digital transition.
Why give the iPad credit for this? Since its introduction just a month ago, the conversation about mobile media has changed dramatically – as have reader habits. Powered by the app, consumers are suddenly willing to buy subscriptions for online content, Google has been declared a declining power in big media’s pursuit of traffic, and at least one of the major audit bureaus has been shaken to innovate. All because iPad provides a different user experience than any previous device.
I’m not ready to declare that the iPad is going to save publishing-as-we-know-it. But I’m pretty sure it will be right in the middle of publishing-as-it-comes-to-be.
According to B2B magazine, ABM, the trade association for the business-to-business trade press, held a series of panel discussions recently in which participants declared that print isn’t dead.
Wouldn’t we expect them to say that? Of the four pro-print souls mentioned in the article, three of them still make their living by running, editing or selling for print magazines.
I’m not arguing their point either; I believe print is a vitally important communications vehicle and somehow will remain so in the future.
What’s notable in this discussion is the reasoning offered by the fourth panelist, Bob Drake, who runs Drake Creative agency. He said that a recent ad campaign that included a print component succeeded. He’s quoted by B2B as saying, “It goes against everything we’re hearing, but we can engage people for a long period of time (in print) and they stay engaged.”
I don’t know Bob Drake, and I don’t mean to pick on him. But if he’s hearing that print doesn’t work, then he’s talking to other marketers and not to marketees.
Marketers are abandoning print because it’s harder to measure as a marketing vehicle than Internet-based technologies. This is undeniably true. But at some point, that legitimate objection got simplified to the assumption that print is broken, which has been simplified even further to the notion that print is dead.
But if you ask readers, that’s not even close to the truth. The same article cited a poll by Roads & Bridges magazine (conducted by Internet, ironically enough) that indicated a strong preference among its audience for getting information via print. This is consistent with every bit of research and opinion I’ve ever seen. People prefer reading words on paper – especially glossy paper with charts and pictures.
The point? Like everyone else, marketers are susceptible to the echo-chamber effect. Print isn’t in trouble because it doesn’t work; it’s in trouble because shorthand communications of marketers obscure the nuance that is the truth.
A new study by the IBM Institute for Business Value concludes that the troubles faced by traditional media aren’t going to go away when the recovery picks up steam.
The study, according to a report by BtoB magazine, concludes that as more and more people move online to get their information, advertisers aren’t willing to pay as much to reach them. Why? Presumably because these prospects become easier for the advertisers to reach – a conclusion that’s hinted at by the study’s other finding: that advertisers are willing to pay some kind of premium based on context and relevance of the audience.
This is nothing new to readers of this blog. But it’s a big stick in the eye for B2B media types who still think their future will be secured simply by providing great content.
In an attempt to increase advertising revenue, media organizations have pretty much declared that they’ll put ads anywhere.
Last year, the New York Times began putting ads on the front page – which raised eyebrows among media purists, but was a non-event when it comes to changing the reader experience one way or the other.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is in-text advertising (click for an example) – contextual links embedded in news articles online, which unleash a pop-up ad when the cursor simply passes over them. The pop-up appears exactly where you happen to be reading, and it doesn’t go away until you click on the ad or on the little X in the top-right corner.
It’s the online equivalent of a squirting flower on the lapel. Or a kick in the groin.
A number of companies offer this, though Vibrant Media seems to be the market leader at dragging advertisers into this very bad place.
I don’t know why websites or advertisers want anything to do with something that is certain to tick off the very people they’re trying to woo.
In any case, somewhere in the middle of the range between the Times’ front page ads and Vibrant Media’s stick in the eye is a new effort from Hearst and Format Dynamics, to impose ads on printouts of online articles.
This isn’t as disruptive as in-text advertising; it doesn’t literally get in your way of seeing the very words you’re trying to read. But consumers won’t say ‘thank you’ when printing out a one-page article requires burning through an extra two or three pages of color ink just for the ads.
OK, I can hear the publishers’ response: People don’t pay for the content and we have to monetize it somehow.
I get that. But let’s face a few realities:
Advertisers aren’t begging for this capability. It’s been developed by a technology vendor, and is being sold to media companies as a means of bolstering declining ad revenue. This capability is being pushed through the market, not pulled from the advertiser.
It’s still the old-fashioned approach of forcing ads in front of a target audience – an approach that is more part of advertising’s past than its future. (If you disagree, just look at the trend in traditional ad spending vs. the trend in spending on social media/inbound marketing/content marketing).
It’s of dubious value. If readers don’t avail themselves of an advertiser’s information online when it’s the most convenient to respond, why are they going to respond offline – especially after being forced to provide the resources to print the ad in the first place?
If publishers keep pushing instrusive advertising to cover the cost of generating content, they’ll never succeed at getting consumers to pay for the content directly. Who would pay for something that is already underwritten through such a visible and somewhat objectionable method?
Eventually, consumers will come to understand that content costs money.
Smart publishers are building revenue from their readers now. They aren’t trying to figure out ways to nurse a few extra shekels out of a declining line of business at the expense of alienating the readers on which their very futures depend.
I call them e-book people; they’re publishing types who see a big future for media distribution – not just books, but also magazines and newspapers – through e-readers and tablet devices.
They include folks I know pretty well, like David Nussbaum of F+W Media (the consumer-special-interest giant that touches people who are into anything from creative writing to geneology to knitting or woodworking), to folks I know only by reputation, like Alan Meckler of WebMediaBrands (events and online communities surrounding media and technology).
They’ve been building excitement for months, maybe longer, over the prospect that Apple will eventually come out with a category-smashing tablet that puts Amazon’s market-leading Kindle e-reader to pasture.
Based on the recent press (like this, from the NJ Star Ledger), it appears as if it’s finally about to happen. And not only should the folks behind the Kindle and other first-generation e-readers be scared, but newspaper and magazine executives should rejoice. This is the vehicle that could finally direct them down a clear path toward the future.
The problem with current e-readers is that they’re good for text and not much else. They don’t handle graphics well, so they aren’t useful for technical books or anything with color pictures. E-readers, as they currently exist, are basically good for best-selling books. They’re a single-application device, and the next-generation unit – whether it comes from Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Google or anyone else – will do to them what the Palm Pilot did for the Apple Newton.
Which is the long way of getting to the real point: When the tablet PCs start to come out, newspapers and magazines will have a great opportunity to try and reinvigorate their existing business model, or to build on the more obvious business model that they simply have to make work.
The old business model is advertising, and the high-touch interactivity that a tablet PC could offer advertisers might be enough to entice them back to the traditional media marketplace. I’m sure it eventually will help to flatten out the downward trend for print advertising revenue. But I don’t believe it will ever halt the juggernuat of advertisers who seek to aggregate their own audiences and produce their own content – which is what the new age of marketing is all about.
But the new business model has more hope. That’s the one in which people actually pay for the content they use. It’s the only obvious next place for media to go. But up to now, there hasn’t been a vehicle that presents print media better than the existing hard-copy formats of magazines and newspapers. Those are so expensive to produce that, without growing advertiser support, there has been no hope of shifting their full cost to consumers.
Can the tablet change that? Not in a hurry. But here’s what it CAN do:
It can give publishers a medium that is powerful enough for them to create something new – something that extends beyond the boundaries of the newspapers and magazines they already produce.
This goes back to the old Marshall McLuhan quote, “The medium is the message.” Up to now, solutions like e-zine interfaces have simply been an attempt to push old messages into a new medium. The mismatch has been underwhelming at best.
But the tablet can create a new message – a new set of boundaries for old print media companies to create electronic-only products that generate real excitement among consumers. The kind of excitement people pay for.
For example, check out this proof-of-concept video from Sports Illustrated:
If products like this really come around, I’d pay three or four times what I do now for a magazine subscription. Would that cover the cost of generating the content? It’s a question for the market to handle. But if it also arrested the decline in advertising revenue, there might actually be a business in this.
This isn’t a short-term solution. Tablet prices will start out too high for any publication to convert a meaningful number of subscribers. And ad revenue won’t follow until that changes.
And it will take years of education before consumers understand why tablet-based publications are the future of media. Just consider some of the comments that people left after viewing SI’s video:
There are probably many kids here that think this is wonderful but i am not sure if they have the capacity to think! What will most likely happen is that the selling price (books, magazines, etc) will not reflect the savings and? they will be able to control what you have on your device and how long you have it for. This is not good for the consumer. It is not a good idea that content providers decide how you have access to information (be they Apple Microsoft or Google).
Do I need another electronic product to add to my cumbersome life?
How? many other things you have to carry around with you 24/7 to keep you up-to-date?
I don’t see the point of this. Nobody is going to buy this thing just to read e-magazines. Why not just load the …damn website? Seems like people are desperate to save print-based magazines. Make this smaller, like the Kindle, and strip away all this excess so it reads books. Then I’ll consider.
OK, so people don’t get it yet. And they aren’t ready to pay for a digital subscription. But as more and more magazines disappear, and more innovators build great content for tablets, the correct path for media will begin to unfold.
E&P was such an institution – it’s been around since 1901, but existed under a different title since 1884 – that it’s hard to imagine a media world in which it doesn’t exist. That’s why it’s closing is so surprising.
On the other hand, The Nielson Co. had been trying to sell its media publications group, including E&P, Adweek, Brandweek, Mediaweek, Backstage, Billboard, Film Journal International and The Hollywood Reporter. Most of the group was just sold; E&P was not included in the deal.
I don’t know anything about E&P’s finances, but you don’t need an MBA to understand what that means.
Trade books that cover the media industry are chronically short on advertisers. They all live a subsistence existence. E&P’s folio has been razor thin since I first saw it in the early ’80s.
If E&P ever made good money (high margins), it never made big money. And in times of recession, small-money magazines do worst in the effort to maintain their margins.
I’m sure E&P is in the red, and that any forecast in which it could become proftable again doesn’t deliver enough earnings to justify the turnaround project.
And with the dire condition of many newspapers, E&P’s expiration is a symbolic event that was probably inevitable.
In that context, that E&P should die broke and alone isn’t a surprise at all.
I’m sorry to see it go, and feel for everyone on the staff. It was a great institution right up until the end.
In a recent article in Media Business magazine, Glenn Hansen, president and CEO of BPA (the dominant auditor of controlled circulation media) said this about his organization’s website auditing service:
“Our numbers are going to be lower than any other numbers that you get from any other source, whether Google or any commercial Web-analytics company.”
Add some coal-tar?
It’s impossible to tell from the article, but I infer that he was proud of this.
Several years ago – the last time I seriously looked into auditing websites – my research told me that I could expect a 50% drop in reportable traffic by doing a BPA web audit. At the time, my company was using an analytics tool that, when implemented, had already cut traffic 33% by weeding out search engine spiders.
In the end, I didn’t need the BPA audit, and I sold around the numbers delivered by our analytics system by focusing on products that gave customers what they were asking for: guaranteed impressions, delivery of clickthroughs, and various levels of leads. When we did these things, the prospects didn’t worry if we had the largest or busiest website.
It’s natural that BPA, like any auditor, would seek to extend its product line by pushing website audits. But boasting about the great difference between BPA’s traffic measurement and those of other analytic systems demonstrates that BPA is as far away as ever from understanding the grim future that it faces.
The problem BPA members are having is that an audit – whether it’s for a print product or a website – addresses advertiser questions that are now obsolete. Not all advertisers have figured this out yet, but the number that has is growing. A recession hastens the education process, as marketers are forced to coax more measurable impact out of a reduced spend.
An audit is testimony to the nature of a media outlet’s audience: it’s size, the sources from which it was recruited, and any additional information that members of the audience themselves volunteer to offer.
That’s not what advertisers want – or ever really wanted. What they really want is a measured response to their marketing activities. The audit always fell short of that goal. Whether any of us knew it, the circulation audit was just a long-term stop-gap – an alternative set of metrics until technology created a way for the desired metrics to be used.
Today that technology exists. It’s called the Internet, and advertisers (if you haven’t heard) are swarming to it.
BPA hopes to secure some kind of future for itself by pushing website audit services. But those services aren’t necessary, because advertisers can get all the measurement they want with intelligent programs that generate clickthroughs and other direct responses. And unlike audits, which provide a snapshot that is 6 to 12 months old, clickthroughs and leads arrive in real time. Within 30 days, an average marketer can tell if he or she is getting an adequate return from a specific program.
Worse, not only is BPA measuring the wrong stuff in its website audits, it’s bragging that the numbers members will be compelled to report are well below the numbers that non-members get to use.
To summarize: It provides undesirable information that people don’t need. I can’t help comparing it to Burger King putting a dollop of coal-tar on it’s bacon triple cheeseburger.
If there is ROI in this for the publisher, will somebody please help me understand?
I don’t know why anyone bothers with a BPA website audit; if I were a buyer, it would be an immediate sign to me that the website’s owners are slow to understand or respond to the customers’ changing needs. The best thing a BPA web audit could tell me is to look elsewhere.
For those – and there are many – who say the iPad won’t save publishing, here is evidence that the Little Tablet that Could might be more powerful than they expected.
Add another surprise that’s not a surprise to the long list of publications that died in 2009: 