Habit Marketing- How Smart Brands Leverage Big Moments

As I sit at home, socially distancing myself from the world, I can’t help but constantly check stock prices, both to see the sad status of my own investments and to try to understand how the world is reacting to the Coronavirus. As I watch prices of various companies go up and down, I’m particularly fascinated to watch the trends of stay-at-home-friendly businesses like Peloton, GrubHub, Blue Apron, and Netflix.  And as some of these stocks rise while others fall, I realize that smart investors are embracing the same concept that smart marketers have long embraced. Namely that behavior is driven by habit. And perhaps equally important, smart investors and smart marketers can recognize the occasions when consumers are most likely to form a new habit and take advantage of those unique times. I think we’re living in one of those unique times.

When we advertise to consumers, in almost all businesses, we are eventually hoping to drive a sale. But it’s abundantly clear that not all sales are created equal. Your goal (depending on your business of course) should not be to drive one sale, but to drive a sale that turns into regular, consistent, repeated sales. In other words, I don’t want to sell you an egg, I want to sell you an egg that leads to you eating eggs every day for the rest of your life. I don’t want to sell you a one month subscription to my program, I want to sell you a monthly subscription that you renew forever. We want habits.

Aiding in the creation of a habit is equal parts “what can I do as a brand?” and “what is my customer already doing?” Here are the four things I’d focus on when trying to advertise toward habit creation:

1. Sell a good thing- Let’s not kid ourselves. The greatest tool in any marketers bag of tricks is to have a good product to sell. This is where immediate opportunity and long term habit diverge. If you sell some sort of weird toilet paper substitute right now, guess what, your sales are going up for the next month while no one can find toilet paper. But if your product kinda sucks, we’re all rushing back to Charmin post-Covid-19, and your weird toilet paper substitute company is not where I want to invest big bucks long term.

2. Study the calendar- When a brand looks at their annual calendar and attempts to align media and assign strategies, they should really start with an attempt to understand the annual calendar of their consumers. There are key times of the year when consumers are more likely to form habits because they are embarking on new routines. On January 1st we commit to our new workout routines or diets. At the end of May our children are out of school for three months and in late August, they go back to school for nine. Let’s go back to the idea of selling an egg. I’d love to sell you an egg at any time of the year, but if you’ve got school age children at home, its infinitely more valuable for me to sell you eggs in late August. Why? Because if you make eggs for your kids’ breakfast the first week of school, I may have just become part of a 5 day a week, 9 month a year routine. I may have just infiltrated your habits.

3. Understand consumer moments- Calendar based habits are incredibly important and prevalent, but today’s consumers don’t all live on the same schedule. And while calendar events like back-to-school are important, an individual’s life events can shape consumer routines even more. When we go off to college we start a whole new life worth of habits (what we eat, what we wear, what we do for fun). Same story when we get a job, move, get married, buy a house, have children. Luckily for advertisers, modern digital marketing platforms now give us the ability to isolate these so called “Life Events” and market to consumers in these times of major habit formation. 

4. Help with use- Let’s face it- consumers are stubborn. And first impressions can most certainly be permanent. If you want your product or service to become part of someone’s habit, a repeated purchase, you have to make sure the experience lives up to and exceeds their expectation. Obviously if you’ve got a good thing to sell (see strategy 1), you’re off to a good start, but it’s still possible for consumers to misuse your product and end up with a bad experience. Our sales and marketing journey cannot end at the point-of-sale. We must be willing to put significant time, thought, and investment into understanding how our consumer will engage with our products, where they might go wrong, and how to mitigate that risk. One bad experience with your product, even if it's the consumers own fault, and they may very well form the habit of never buying from you again.

So as I scroll through my LinkedIn for the 18th time today (again, I’m social-distancing and I’m bored), and I see the 15th article or blog post written by a friend or former colleague loosely titled “How to do Marketing/Social Media/Communication During the Corona Virus,” I realize that the “how” might not be the most important thing. The important thing for marketers right now might simply be THAT YOU ARE marketing. If you’ve got the inventory available, you should have your foot to the floor on your marketing campaigns. You may even want to steal budgets from the latter part of the year so you can maximize your impact right now. Life will undoubtedly go back to normal (or mostly normal) at some point. But for many consumers, the things we’re trying, the new stores we’re visiting, the new restaurants we’re getting takeout from, the new foods we’re cooking, the new games we’re playing, will become habits that last forever. Make sure you’re one of those things.

Interested in more stories like this? Check out SteveLerch.com to learn more about Steve’s keynote speeches and contact Steve about working with your team, company, or event.

Reactive Marketing- From Pepsi Milk to Peloton

This is Badlands Booker. A former professional eater (think 4th of July Nathan’s Hot Dog Competition) turned YouTuber. His YouTube channel, “Badlands Chugs,” has 1.27M subscribers and consists of videos of Booker “chugging” large amounts of various liquids, very quickly. Isn’t the internet a weird place?

In late 2018, Badlands Booker noticed one of those sudden, weird internet trends that generates massive buzz. The trend was people talking, drinking, and posting about Pepsi mixed with Milk. The trend correlated with actress Penny Marshall passing away, because apparently her character on Laverne & Shirley drank this concoction on the show. Within three days of Penny’s passing, Booker had a Pepsi Milk video up on his YouTube channel. 

Booker’s three previous YouTube posts averaged 200,000 views. The Pepsi Milk video has 1.6 million. If you watched the video, you’ll notice that it is very simple, low budget, and probably not very time consuming for Mr. Booker. In other words, with minimal effort, by paying attention and reacting to a trend, Badlands Chugs drove more than a million extra sets of eyeballs to his content.

Nothing makes me roll my eyes more than a brand saying that a trend like this is silly, stupid, random or not worth their time. Because Booker just proved it doesn’t take a lot of time to capitalize on this sort of trend. And in case you haven’t realized it yet, most of your consumers like silly, stupid, random things.

As marketers and business leaders, we’ve somehow managed to convince ourselves that being “reactive” is a bad thing, simply because it’s the perceived opposite of one of our favorite buzzwords- “proactive.” 

Of course it would be wonderful to consistently predict the future and launch marketing campaigns based on tomorrow’s top internet memes or next weeks number one trending YouTube videos. But you tell me what data source, what modeling tool, what predictive analytics would have told my business to expect that in 2009, millions of people would start planking? Whether it’s the “I’m gonna tell my kids” meme or “The Dress” controversy, the internet age provides society with a constant stream of moments that are culture-defining.

If you’ve got a crystal ball, great. If not, great marketers should pride themselves on quickly reacting to these trends and riding the wave of interest and attention they create.

Just a few weeks back another weird, buzz-worthy moment took hold of the internet. It started with a commercial from Peloton where actress Monica Ruiz gave a very emotional portrayal of a young woman who was gifted an exercise bike by her husband. 

I thought the commercial was a little strange. Some people thought the commercial was offensive. Some people thought the people who thought the commercial was offensive were just stirring up trouble. Some people thought the people who thought the people were just stirring up trouble, were being insensitive. I’m not here to mediate or diagnose the true meaning of this ad, but what I do know, is that when a lot of people have a lot of opinions, it creates a buzz. 

And within days of this “controversy” driving eyeballs across the web, another brand decided to embrace that ugly-little-world,  “reactionary.” Ryan Reynolds and his gin company, Aviation Gin, immediately hired the actress at the center of the Peloton ad. Now, suddenly, the conversation, the buzz, and the eyeballs shift to a totally unrelated gin company.

And if we’re being honest, not unlike the Badlands Pepsi Milk video, the gin ad isn’t anything special… It’s not big-budget. It’s not especially elaborate, or funny, or buzzworthy. But again, like the Pepsi Milk video, it was on-trend and culturally-relevant, and because of that, it’s driven millions and millions of views. 

Embrace the weird, the strange, the edgy, the controversial, and most importantly, pay attention. Or hire yourself some 18 year old kid who understands the internet better than we ever could. Do you have kids in middle school or high school? Ask them what’s happening on YouTube and Instagram and Tik Tok. Ask them what memes and gifs they’re texting. Find a way to pay attention, because catching a trend, and reacting quickly, can be an easy and cost efficient way to have a massive impact.

Interested in more stories like this? Check out SteveLerch.com to learn more about Steve’s keynote speeches and contact Steve about working with your team, company, or event.

Paradox of Choice- 150 Million Pizzas

Let’s talk about those gosh-darn millennials and their crazy demands...

Millennials do, in fact, demand a lot from companies.  From the products you sell to the causes you represent to the design and functionality of your website. The digital world has unlocked so many options for consumers that they no longer have to settle for anything short of their ideal product in their ideal scenario. 

In other words, if I want to look at the menu for your food truck on my mobile phone at 8am, and I want that menu to include allergy labeling, your website better meet those needs. And it had better meet those needs instantly and in an easy to navigate, mobile friendly way. If not, my cliche millennial lack of patience means I’ll find another food truck.

And with these increasing consumer demands, we expect companies, and more specifically websites, to provide more choices than ever. Marketers are constantly told that millennials want control. That millennials want to customize.

But perhaps that’s not always the case. Take for example the thing I do way too often; order pizza.

Dominoes offers 5 basic styles of pizza on their website. If you pick Hand Tossed, for example, you then select 1 of 4 sizes and then 1 of 3 crust choices. You can also open the drop down for special instructions to choose between two baking styles, 2 crust seasoning styles, and 3 pizza cutting choices. Now we’re on to cheese and sauce. If you want cheese, you can choose one of five options for “cheese volume”, and you can make this choice twice, once for each half of the pizza. For sauce, there are 5 different choices, and for each type of sauce, you can choose light, normal, or extra. And don’t forget toppings. We have 8 meat choices and 16 non-meat choices. Oh, and in case you were wondering. For each individual topping you choose you have four density choices (light, normal, extra, or double), and again, of course, you can make separate choices for each half of the pizza. Allow me to editorialize for a moment here and just say that I love the idea of choosing the “density of pepperoni” on my pizza.

In case you’re wondering, if you plan to order a two-topping pizza from Dominoes, you have roughly 149,040,000 possible combinations… Yup. 149,040,000…

To be honest, Domino’s is one of my all time favorite marketers, and I’ll explain why in another post. And I’m not here to tell you that Domino’s website is poorly constructed. But it is quite easy to understand how someone might visit this website and leave halfway through the purchase funnel feeling overwhelmed and intimidated. 

So how do we give millennials the choice and customization they demand while not overwhelming them?

There is a famous consumer behavior study by a women named Sheena Iyengar that helps us visualize this concept. I’ll give you the high level overview, but here’s an excellent video of the famous researcher explaining her work in a lecture at Columbia. Sheena basically found that when given the choice, most grocery shoppers preferred to shop for jam at a display that contained dozens of jam varieties. However, the shoppers that went to this display were dramatically less likely to make an actual purchase as compared to the shoppers at a display with only a few jam choices.

As consumers, we crave choice. Or at least, we think we do. The idea of 150 million pizza choices sounds appealing. But in the moment, many of us find that we actually need a little tighter guide rails.

The key is to present the illusion of choice or the option of choice to your website visitors. Take this screenshot from St. Jude’s donation page as an example.

In reality, the donor has infinite choices, as indicated by the grey box marked “other.” However, by avoiding the presence of an empty fill-in-the-blank box, we make things easier on the consumer who is intimidated by choice. Similarly, the $100 box is actually pre-selected when you arrive on the page. It couldn’t be easier to select a different amount, but it gives consumers the option of not having to pick an option.

Choice is a powerful and scary weapon that you wield as as a marketer or website designer. Think long and hard about how to leverage it to give consumers both what they want and what they need.

Interested in more stories like this? Check out SteveLerch.com to learn more about Steve’s keynote speeches and contact Steve about working with your team, company, or event.

Helpful-Authority Marketing

This is Elias St. Elmo Lewis. Yes, his name is awesome. And no, you’ve never heard of him, but you have heard of his work.

120 years ago, Mr. Lewis (or Elmo, as I hope his friends called him), drew an upside down triangle and began preaching the AIDA model of marketing and sales. AIDA stood for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. This model has consistently evolved over the last century, and undoubtedly found its way, in some variation, into every college marketing textbook.

In recent years, this funnel has more frequently included post-purchase stages, like Evaluation and Loyalty. But regardless of the presence of these words, post-purchase activity always seems like the after-thought.

In other words, “Here’s my widget. My widget is great. Buy my widget. Hooray you bought my widget. Who else can I tell about my widget?”

Where this strategy fails us, is when the value of our brand is relevant. When we operate in an industry where things like trust and favorability matter. In these situations, brand must strive to achieve a position as the Helpful Authority. Let me give you an example.

For many products, like milk, the most commonly asked questions are from consumers who appear to already own the product. And it’s the same across other industries; How do I use this camera? What’s the best case for this phone? What pants go with my new brown shoes?

The answers to all of these questions are available to consumers at all times. The ubiquitous nature of websites means brands don’t need to invest money answering these questions. Consumers can learn about phone cases, cameras, pants, and even milk on various blogs, YouTube videos, or even directly on Google through their Knowledge Graph panels:

Google Knowledge Graph

So if I’m a milk company, I don’t have to answer this question… But should I?

There is unquestionably a value in being helpful to your consumers. There is undoubtedly a value in showcasing that you are the authority on your industry and your products.

When you’re primary point-of-sales looks as generic and commoditized as the milk section of a grocery store, your brand should take every opportunity possible to build a relationship and a favorability with your customers, both past and present.

It is far too easy to understand and answer your customers’ questions to simply ignore the opportunity. It’s said that consumers will never be as honest with anyone in their life as they will be with their Google search bar. So start there. Use tools like Google Trends and Google Ads to start understanding the questions your customers ask and gear your SEM and SEO efforts to position yourself as the constantly present, Helpful Authority. Don’t ignore social media posts to your brand or even YouTube comments on your video. And in these interactions, strive to be knowledgeable. Strive to be assistive. These are not sales opportunities, these are opportunities to establish long term relationships with your customers.

Don’t take these opportunities lightly.

Interested in more stories like this? Check out SteveLerch.com to learn more about Steve’s keynote speeches and contact Steve about working with your team, company, or event.

Influencer Marketing- You're Late to the Party

The debate is over… marketing campaigns with digital influencers work.

It’s not novel or cute or curious. It’s not on the verge or the horizon. It is here and it matters. If we take nothing else away from the Fyre Festival debacle, we should recognize that influencer marketing can sell just about anything…

Working at Google in 2011, we talked about an approaching inflection point for clients: the specific moment in time when more than half of your website traffic or searches would come from phones and tablets. We spent months telling our clients “it’s not too late to be early on mobile,” as we urged them to build mobile landing pages and mobile optimized campaigns. Eventually, we had to start saying “it’s too late to be early on mobile, and this is your last chance to avoid missing the boat.”

When it comes to influencer marketing, we are quickly approaching the latter. So let’s talk about why influencer marketing works and how your brand can jump on the bandwagon (which is quickly rolling away).

Reasons it works:

• Trust in the Voice

  • According to a study conducted by Google and Ipsos, 40% of millennials say their favorite YouTube creator understands them better than their friends and 60% of millennials are more likely to take purchasing advice from their favorite creator over their favorite TV or movie star. We trust them because we feel like we know them. We’ve watched our favorite creators grow into the stars they are today. In fact with YouTube, we often feel partially responsible for a creator’s success.

• Authentic Delivery

  • At their core, YouTube, Instagram, and FaceBook Video are direct-to-camera platforms, or as is often the case, a direct-to-smartphone platform. Billions of social media users are accustomed to a broken fourth-wall and creators speaking directly to them. Scripted or not, digital content creators do not feel scripted, which means brand integrations feel more genuine.

• Understand the Platform

  • Platforms like YouTube are weird. And I mean that with full admiration. There’s no other way to explain why Charlie Bit My Finger has 866M views or why What Does the Fox Say has 820M views.  You may have the best creative agency in the business, but the creators who grew up on this platform best know how to build appealing, authentic digital content.

How to do it Right:

• Incorporate data

  • The world of YouTube Influencers requires some degree of a leap of faith, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be scientific, strategic, and data-driven. In the past, brands might say, “Dude Perfect are 30-something, white-guys who love sports. Let’s use them to sell footballs to 30-something, white-guys who love sports.” This might work, but challenge these assumptions. New platforms like FameBit, which is now owned by YouTube, allows you to choose creators based on detailed demographic and psychographic profiles of their audience. Your influencer targeting strategy should be every bit as data driven as any other digital media buys.

• Relinquish Control

  • This is the scary one, but it’s often the clearest indicator of why some influencer content feels authentic and some feels staged. Sure, you should develop a creative brief, but you must give creators tons of freedom. Even ultra-brand safe groups like the federal government have found ways to relinquish control. Check out what Rhett and Link created for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration when asked to get teens to stop texting while driving.

• Measure

  • According to a survey of marketing professionals conducted by Tomoson, every dollar spent on influencer marketing leads to $6.50 of revenue. That’s an enormous return, but it’s also something you need to measure for yourself. Vanity metrics like views/impressions/clicks have their place, but they don’t tell a full story. Consider partnering with attribution providers that can measure your campaigns impact on brand metrics, or partner with YouTube to run Brand Lift Studies that measure changes in purchase consideration, brand awareness, etc.

Influencer Marketing may seem intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. I’ve worked with advertisers on influencer campaigns in the seven figures, and seen others experiment for only $2,500. Test it. Measure it. Learn from it. Contact a Multi-Channel Network that manages multiple YouTube stars or do it yourself through a platform like FameBit. Don’t let your brand miss the boat...

If you’re looking for help launching your first creator campaign or have questions about influencer marketing, reach out to StoryArcConsulting@gmail.com at any time!

No Such Thing As Branding

Do you think of your business goals in terms of branding and direct response? Most advertisers do. In fact, I’ve worked with dozens of advertisers who had entirely separate teams, budgets, and KPIs for these two goals. I think it’s time we re-classified these objectives, because the truth is, there is only one goal for the average business, and that’s driving revenue.

Direct response simply means we want to drive sales now and branding means we want to drive sales eventually. The idea of building brand awareness and favorability or achieving optimal reach and frequency are simply viewed as necessary stepping stones before an ultimate purchase.

So why does it matter?

Why is it important to think of branding campaigns as long-term direct response campaigns?

It matters because too many advertisers settle for surface level attribution and measurement when they attach the word “branding” to a campaign. In the last decade, I’ve heard countless companies set goals like “10 million views” or “1 billion impressions.” Not that there is anything wrong with views and impressions, but chasing big, round, impressive vanity numbers like these leaves us ill-informed.

When we start defining branding as long-term direct response, we force ourselves to build attribution models that ladder up to our actual goals. Impressions, Clicks, Time on Site, Reach, and Frequency then become the first step in your attribution journey, not the last.

Here’s what I mean:

Let’s assume all impressions have some non-zero value, however tiny it may be, that helps contribute to an eventual sale. This value may be a fraction of a penny, but it undeniably exists. From that initial ad impression, we then therefor know there is a consumer journey to a sale. A journey with some unknown number of steps and some unknown amount of time. Tools like Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics can help you visualize these funnels, but let’s start even more simply.

Here is our journey:

Impression ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------> Sale

Now we fill in the blanks:

Impression -----------Clicks--------------Site Visits----—----Product Page Views----—-------> Sale

or:

Impression --------Awareness--------Consideration-------—---Store Visits----------—--------> Sale

Now We do some math and make some Estimates:

Most businesses can tell you their average purchase value, so let’s say it’s $100. Now we just need to answer 4 simple questions.

1. How many ad impressions does it take to drive a click and how many impressions does it take to make someone aware of your product? (100 is a nice round number.)

2. What percentage of ad clicks turn into site visitors and what percentage of people aware of your product would consider buying it? (For simplicity's sake, let’s say the answer to both is 75%.)

3. What percentage of site visitors end up viewing a product page, or of all the people considering your product, what percentage of them end up visiting a store? (Let’s estimate that the answer to both these question is 10%.)

4. What’s your conversion rate on Store Visitors or Product Page Viewers? (Let’s say 1%.)

And just like that, I can tell you that each impression, for whichever marketing platform I just analyzed, is worth $0.00075. Now we have an economic valuation model for our “branding” campaign. We can use automation tools to run our digital advertising campaigns around a CPM goal derived from this formula.

Some of the answers to these four questions can be found in your web analytics and digital advertising tools; others will be assumptions, which can make these types of strategies intimidating.

But your best guesses and most educated assumptions are far more valuable than you might think. Use all your available data points, but also trust yourself. You know your business and your customers. Build a model that places a “direct response” value on every piece of data received, even if those data points are “branding” metrics like impressions.

Stop Self-Funding Your Advertising

This is a DELL ad… Right?

Then why does it have such clear Intel branding in the bottom right corner?

To understand this strategy, we journey all the way back to 1991, when Intel worked with IBM and other computer manufacturers to launch what was then called the Intel Inside Co-Op Program. The gist? Intel would take a percentage of their revenue from chip sales and use it to match advertising funds by their computer manufacturing partners. In other words, IBM buys a million dollars worth of Intel chips, Intel takes a percentage of that million dollar sale and adds it to IBM’s marketing dollars (for campaigns that specifically use the Intel logo and tagline).

This is one of the best, longest, and most well known examples of co-op marketing. But if you really stop to think about it, we see this kind of strategy all the time. Verizon will run ads that essentially look like iPhone commercials, just as Target may run ads for Twizzlers.  These partnerships are logical as there is a clear purchasing relationship between these partners.

So what’s the results? Two major brands reap the benefit of an advertisement, even though they’re only footing half the bill. Which leads me to ask, why doesn’t this happen more often? Why does this happen almost exclusively for brands that are partners? Why can’t two random brands, with no business connection, find a way to split the bill for an advertisement that equally supports them both?

Take this example from Geico.

Keep in mind how unique (weird) most Geico ads are. The random characters and stories. All Geico ever seems to want to accomplish is staying top of mind, and perhaps to remind consumers about the idea of saving 15%. In this spot they found a way to carve out a few seconds to promote Helzberg Diamonds. It’s brief. Probably not as valuable to Helzberg as a full 30s spot, but there is undeniably some value to Helzberg in showing up in this video.

The results? Geico runs an ad that is as “Geico” focused or as “insurance focused as any other ad they run (caveman, camel, etc). Helzberg basically gets the brand lift of a mini-commercial, let’s say 15% the value of running a full spot. So we’re basically getting 115% the value of a normal TV ad, but we’re still only paying for one commercial, because Geico and Helzberg can find a way to split the bill.

So why isn’t this more common? No seriously. This is not rhetorical. I do not understand why brands don’t pursue this more aggressively.

Remember how every cereal commercial use to end with the tagline “...is part of this balanced breakfast.”  And they showed this type of image?

What stops that cereal company from highlighting a particular brand of orange juice? Why not reach out to the American Egg Board and get eggs more prominently featured in this “balanced breakfast?” And what kind of coffee is that? We don’t know… and that means a wasted opportunity for this cereal brand.

You’re selling video games? Why not call up Doritos and Mountain Dew? You’ve got sunglasses to sell and your commercial features young men golfing… Why not have them swinging a TaylorMade driver or wearing Nike shoes? It can be subtle. It can still be 90% about your brand or product

In fact, you can make virtually the exact creative you were going to run originally, and only ask for a partner to contribute 5% or 10% of the cost of the ad to get their brand featured. Like I said, this cereal company was going to show orange juice either way.

Maybe it's scary to trust another company. Maybe it’s complicated to figure out exactly how the creative will work or how much each party should pay.  But in a world where every advertiser I’ve ever worked with is constantly trying to negotiate freebies, bonus impressions, and discounts, is it not worth trying to find a way stop paying 100% of your advertising costs on your own? Tell me that’s not worth a little discomfort, a little complication, and a little risk...