Archives for 2010

How are you influenced? By adverts? Marketing campaigns? Email blasts? Word-of-mouth? A little bit of each?

How about personal marketing?

Would you be more inclined to shop with someone that actively takes the time to know who you are, what your needs are and what your shopping pattern might be? I know I would.

Case in point ? pet health nutritionists Canadian Pet Connection (disclosure – client).

If you live near their stores in Oakville, Ontario, and you go in to buy something for your pet, father and son owners Lorne and Brandon Forder treat you as if you’re old friends.

They chat warmly; they ask after your pet (which they remember by name); they’ll talk to you for as long as you want about what could be wrong with your pet, and offer solutions without being pushy salespeople; and they’ll remember your preferences every time.

They take that same family-friendliness online, where the Canadian Pet Connection blog is full of great pet advice as well as featured people and local businesses; their Facebook Page is a fun mix of advice, questions and best Christmas films for pets(!); and their Twitter stream is a constant of chat, tips and facts.

Brandon even monitors for people mentioning their pet’s birthday, and often sends out a surprise package for the pet to make that extra year all the more fun. And with a new e-commerce store about to launch, that could mean pets further afield getting the birthday treatment too.

Simply put, Canadian Pet Connection are successful because they genuinely care.

So how can you reflect this personal approach online?

From a business point of view, you could offer similar. Offer an email list for your customers to sign up to, and ask certain questions that allow you to personalize your message.

Customers in Canada? Set up an email message wishing them a Happy Canada Day. The same goes for the UK (four different celebrations for Saint days), the US (send an Independence Day message) or anywhere that has a specific celebration. It might take a little work on your behalf, but isn?t the end result worth it?

You can use the same ideas even on a personal level. New follower on Twitter? Either reply with a response to their last tweet or send a personal DM that references their last tweet or their bio. Leave some advice on someone?s Facebook status and if you have a solution (if it?s answering a question) let them know that you can help in the future.

These are just two examples of two of the most popular social networks. The same principles will work anywhere.

Social media allows us to connect with people and offer solutions to those same people like never before.

Is there any part that says these solutions can?t be personal? Canadian Pet Connection don’t seem to think so.

How about you?

I read an interesting piece over at Marketing Magazine the other day. It discusses cable company Cogeco and their move into “addressable advertising” next year in a pilot scheme throughout limited households.

If you’re not familiar with addressable advertising, it’s the method of using far more targeted ads based on location and demographics. So, certain areas may be more affluent while other areas may be more working class.

What Cogeco’s aiming to do, via their pilot on local cable channel CHCH, is to test out targeted advertising and send out ads that are geared to someone’s specific address.

So, for example, someone living in an affluent are of the Golden Horseshoe – the area of south Ontario, Canada, where the scheme will be piloted – will see ads for luxury cars. Those living in a less affluent area will see ads for minivans or compact cars.

The goal is clear – if people are to buy something, they’re more likely to buy what’s in their cash range.

Targeted or Taking Aim?

It’s a great idea – although I’m not too sure if closing your potential customers off by ignoring them due to current financial status is a great idea. Everyone has aspirations, right? And what better way to aim for a goal than seeing something to aim toward (like a more luxurious car, or nicer home, or bigger vacation)?

There’s also the problem of the demographics. Just because someone lives in an affluent area doesn’t necessarily mean they are affluent. They could be working their asses off to pay the higher mortgage, and have little-to-no fluid cash.

Additionally, is the affluent neighbourhood made up primarily of younger people, or the “reward year boomers”? The latter category are people that have worked their lives to become affluent and now have time to relax and enjoy their savings. So they’d be perfect – but if that’s just a small part of the audience, will addressable advertising be successful?

Without seeing exactly how the company putting the plan together for Cogeco has come up with their information, it’s hard to say. Using Invidi’s Advatar system, it may be that they have all the information they need for the pilot to be a success. While the system looks perfect for showing when a TV is on and what’s being watched, it’s less clear how demographics and spend power is determined.

Of course, one of the ways Cogeco (and others like them) could really target an audience (along with the addressable advertising platform) is to combine the project with social media.

People, People, and More People

Because social media is such a perfect tool for not only messaging your target audience, but actually finding out if they’re in your sights to begin with, it makes perfect sense to combine the offline cable advertising with online and social network promotion and focus.

Facebook

For example, using something as simple as Facebook Advertising can allow Cogeco and their partners to gauge how many people in their target audiences (affluent and otherwise) will be in the Golden Horseshoe area.

If you base an ad on the cities that will be targeted (from Marketing Magazine’s article), then you have just over 917,000 people living in the Golden Horseshoe between 18-64 years of age (both sexes). But not a lot of 18-year olds will be affluent, so change that age to 30-64 and the audience drops to just over 600,000.

Let’s say it’s a sports car – that’s going to appeal primarily to men (sorry ladies!). Making the age between 30-50, and male demographics only, shows a return of just under 217,000 (quite the drop).

However, it shows that there’s the potential for a Facebook ad campaign to highlight what’s coming via CHCH (and at a far lesser cost than say, a print ad campaign or TV one). So, use a Facebook ad to drive traffic to a landing site that explains what the project is about, and get people to sign up there as well with more detailed information (including available spend power and likelihood of spending through targeted ads).

Twitter

While the audience on Twitter is a lot less than Facebook (particularly in the demographics and locale that Cogeco is piloting), there are still 5,500 registered users on Twellow (the Twitter Yellow Pages).

But this is just for registered users. Go to Twitter Search and start using it for highlighting the areas of interest and what’s being said about ads over there, and it begins to give you a very focused look at the likelihood of certain ads working while others, not so much.

For instance, this tweet from Hassan Al-Ghareib popped up from a search I did on some terms that the addressable advertising audience might be interested in.

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/Hassan_AG/statuses/11477534243819520″]

It complains about a new de-icing solution that obviously isn’t working (Canadian winters aren’t very car-friendly). So, if I’m an auto parts store, I know I may have an in there with Hassan and others like him. I find out where Hassan lives (Toronto area), do some more searches to see if others are having similar issues, and then make sure my ad runs in that locale. The fact that Hassan’s in marketing at Samsung helps, too, from a word-of-mouth viewpoint…

Oh, and using Twitter advertising to direct people like Hassan to the CHCH channel is just a simple addition to complement the addressable advertising.

And don’t forget you have the likes of YouTube (visual ads) and BlogTalk Radio (audio ads), as well as mobile advertising (a whole other topic of discussion and the perfect partner for social media). Add these guys into the mix and you really begin to get full-on addressable advertising.

It’ll be interesting to see how the pilot scheme from Cogeco works, and if the statistics – cost versus return for advertisers and awareness of consumers – will be shared. Hopefully they will – it’s a brave new path and one that deserves to work.

And with a little help from social media, it could have an even bigger return… Stay tuned!

image: Dreamer7112