Looming over downtown Tempe, AZ, staring in through our windows here at Terralever headquarters, are two towers. Twenty-two and thirty floors high, the two condominium buildings are by far the tallest buildings in town, holding 375 condos ranging from modest studios to sprawling penthouses with major views.
There’s just one problem. Nobody lives in them.
The original lender went bankrupt when the structures were half-finished—there’s exposed wood still visible on the outside—and they’ve been sitting empty ever since. These impressive monoliths, though well-intentioned, are strictly façades: they serve no function, have no substance, and represent millions of dollars of wasted money. They’re monuments to inefficiency.
It’s an all-too-fitting metaphor for a lot of online marketing endeavors. Companies spend an impressive amount of money, but without a real strategy behind it their efforts end up strangely… uninhabited.
Many online marketing tactics have low barriers to entry; social media is free. Anything so accessible is also easily duplicable, and it’s almost impossible to make a mark when your competitors are doing all the same things. Does just having a website set a company apart? Of course not. How about setting up a Facebook page, lost among the millions of other Facebook pages, and inviting a few friends? Or harboring a mostly-dormant Twitter account?
Lack of strategy is appreciably more pronounced in social media than in any other category. A recent survey by Digital Brand Expressions reveals that, while 78% of respondents said their companies are using social media, only 41% were doing so as part of a strategy. Then among those companies that actually have a plan, only 69% were measuring the results (or lack thereof).
If you’re not starting with a strategy and ending with measuring, you’re just wishing. Even if your non-efforts produced results, you’d never know.
The seemingly-effortless runaway success of something like the Old Spice campaign makes it all seem too easy. Make some funny videos, and people will flock to see them on YouTube. They’ll be falling over themselves to interact with your brand on Twitter. Your videos will be seen a million bajillion times, and everyone will go buy your product (Old Spice body wash sales doubled in a month).
The Old Spice campaign worked because they were able to use these online tools, which everybody has, in a new and creative way. It also didn’t hurt to have a sizeable TV budget to get the commercials kicked off with some serious national airtime, nor was it bad to get some superb creative work from the tracksuit-wearing folks at Wieden + Kennedy (the ad agency behind the Old Spice guy). While occasionally someone like the “Will It Blend” folks will stumble backward into online success, it’s best compared to winning the lottery.
Instead, a lot of successful online marketing goes under the radar. Often the most effective online marketing campaign for a client is a bullseye-targeted lead-generation campaign, even if a well-crafted landing page isn’t as saucy as Isaiah Mustafa riding a horse. Money spent turns directly into conversions, and it’s conversions—not views, follows, fans, retweets, likes, or diggs—that measure real success.
Here’s a low-key example. I typically make a point of not following businesses on Twitter, but I make an exception for Mojo Yogurt, a frozen yogurt shop just down the street from our office. Their simple social media strategy revolves around a secret word posted every Tuesday, and saying the word to the cashier in the store nets you 50% off your yogurt for that day. Incentivizing like this requires almost no effort from the advertiser, but it brings people in the door. Including me.
The Internet has brought us to an age where the medium is no longer the message. While local businesses in the past may have thrived simply by existing in the phone book, simply existing online does nothing without a strategy and a message.
A handful of companies, ranging from Old Spice to Mojo, have figured that out. Other companies are jumping into online marketing because they heard about it on the news.
And they may as well have built these towers.
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Roger, it’s a great post! you have brought out the importance of having a strategy so well. i run a co-creation consulting firm and trying to sell social media strategies to companies. i am mentioning about this because, your mojo example is proving the viisa tweeting strategy right. simply put, viisa stands for visibility, incentive, information, socialising, and altruism. viisa tells companies to tweet (or blog) only if it is going to give visibility, incentive…to the customers. i learn from your article that mojo is doing the incentive-tweets that are pulling crowds. hope to continue to read your interesting posts.
Excellent commentary, Roger! It’s amazing how strategy & planning issues don’t just affect online marketing projects – but that they transcend into everyday, business and life. “He who fails to plan, plans to fail.”