Tag: marketing

Really targeting your target audience

Do you think you can create one ad campaign and run it on every medium? Think again.

While there may be some crossover, each medium is different and even if you’re always reaching the “same” audience, the truth is you’re most likely reaching very different segments of that audience– people who choose to receive their information in very different ways.

Some advertisers use their regular TV spots as the commercials in the ABC.com episode player. There’s a pause button on the ads (while the 30 seconds of show break continues to advance). Who watches these ads? No one. The smart advertisers, like NesQuik, put interactive ads in place–during one break you play a branded ConnectFour against the NesQuick bunny. This obviously takes longer than 30 seconds, and I’m willing to bet most people will finish the game before clicking to continue their show. The more time spent with your brand = the more the customer will remember.

On Hulu, the ad spots are also 30 seconds but you can’t pause them; and you don’t have to click to return to your movie (it happens automatically because the ads are in the same player). I watched several hours of Hulu shows and movies over the weekend. The only ad I remember? The one for FedEx, which is only 10 seconds long and shows a fast-forwarded version of their commercial while a voiceover says “Go ahead and get back to your movie; we know your time is valuable.” The FedEx logo is clearly visible on a package during most of the fast-forwarded part, and the logo appears by itself for about 2 seconds at the end. Then the show resumes, 20 seconds faster than it does on others’ ads. Excellent use of the medium. (If you’re really reaching your audience, they will remember you because of how little time they spent with your brand!)

TV advertising, especially if your audience is very broad (which it should be if you’re paying for TV ads), should take the network and the air time into account for commercials. It’s very doubtful you will have an effective campaign by showing the same ad on Spike and Lifetime, or on NBC at 12noon and 2am.

Think about the purpose of your advertising. Is advertising just ‘throwaway’ money? Then by all means create one commercial and paste it everywhere. If, however, you wish to see the highest ROI for each marketing dollar, you should invest a little more upfront in order to see real effectiveness.

Raving Fans: Ted’s Montana Grill

Ted’s Montana Grill is Ted Turner’s eco-friendly restaurant chain most famous for their bison burgers. They currently have a solid online presence and a very vocal raving fanbase. Here’s how they’ve done it:

  1. They knew raving fans existed and they wanted to leverage them to build more raving fans.
  2. They started email marketing, gathering email addresses from an easy-to-use signup box on their homepage. Emails are generally about specials or special events, not at set intervals. 
  3. They started a Facebook Fan page, and began offering a few special deals just for Facebook fans.
  4. Later they did a month-long trivia contest using the Fan Page Updates and the Wall where the first person to post the correct answers to three trivia questions each Friday won a gift certificate.
  5. Finally they launched a huge contest where fans had to create content (art, sound or video) about what made them the biggest fan of Ted’s bison burgers. The winner would get a new Prius and free food at Ted’s for a year.
    After a submission period (marketed by a few emails, but mostly on their Facebook page) Ted’s picked the top three submissions for the final round of the contest, and asked their fans to pick the fourth (out of ten selected entries). They have a YouTube channel for this purpose, as well as having the options easily accessible on their website (with voting highlighted on their homepage). Just a few hours after announcing this turn of events the contest had well over 6,000 votes.

The fans in these videos talk of flying to Ted’s locations (currently the chain is only in a few states) just to have a burger, taking their four burger-loving toddlers, going faithfully every week after church, knowing the names of every waiter at their local restaurant, the health benefits of bison over beef and the huge variety of burger toppings, among other things. Let me tell you, these fans are evangelists–and there are thousands of them.

Ted’s online marketing strategy is pretty simple. They started with a solid, easy-to-navigate website; added email, then Facebook. It is not an inordinately expensive campaign, nor do the Ted’s staff have much direct interaction with fans (such as Twitter or back-and-forth on Facebook). They’ve just set up a forum for people to share good things, and given away a few (in the long run, also fairly inexpensive) incentives along the way to get more people involved.

How can your business replicate their success? Where are you raving fans, and how can you reach them so they can reach others for you?

[Edit: Alexa Scordato shared this great SlideShare presentation in the comments: The Fan Economy.)

Building a Community

If you’re considering building an online community from scratch (rather than leveraging one of the thousands that already exist), you’ll need to either find a passionate, socially-inclined niche or create a forum for people to share what they can’t share elsewhere.

ClosetCouture.com has done the latter. They know how women deal with clothes in person– they go shopping together, talk about clothes over lunch, flip through each other’s closets, and come over before dates to scrutinize. The next step is to move this interaction online.

Each user on the site uploads a photo of each piece of her wardrobe against a white background. She can then put together and save outfits, which can be sent to friends for a rating of 1-5. Friends can also suggest outfits for each other, or users can pay professional stylists to put together outfits and suggest new pieces (with links to those suggestions on retail partners’ sites).

The site was recently featured in Vogue magazine, where Jane Herman demonstrates why this is a profitable concept:

Forget Facebook. Give me an interactive Web site that lets me post pictures of my clothes in a virtual closet that other style-minded users can access to create looks they think will look great on me. My idea of a useful social networking site is one that involves a continual dialogue about clothes.

Jane doesn’t just want to socialize. She wants to socialize about clothes, like she does when she’s physically with her friends. She’s certainly not alone; the site was growing by approximately 150 users a day before being featured in the publication that reaches more women passionate about clothes than any other medium. (To recap: these women are so passionate about fashion they didn’t balk at taking the time to individually photograph every item in their wardrobe.)

Girls have liked dolls, paper dolls and fashion plates for centuries; and now this concept has not only gone digital but become a way to connect with friends (both real-world and new online acquainstances). Partnerships with designers, stylists and retailers shows the site is having no trouble monetizing (a problem the non-niche Twitter, MySpace and even Facebook are having).

In short, the same advice applies to building an online community as it does to any marketing venture: know your audience, and give them what they want before they even know they’re looking for it.