Direct Marketing using Facebook and how it works
Many marketing campaigns these days end in a cul-de-sac.
There is the example of the company who spent a fortune on a QR code campaign to advertise on the London Underground. You can read more about it here.
Obviously, a QR code response mechanism needs to be designed for a mobile. Not sure about you, but I haven’t seen many people holding their laptop up in mid-air, switching it on, downloading a QR reader, scanning it…you get the picture.
Starting with the assumption that you need to use a smartphone, the obvious next step is that in order to scan the QR code, you need some software.
If we have to get the software, we need to be able to download it – on the Tube, many of the stations are underground, so they have no signal. Result – dead end for the customer journey and a lost opportunity.
We have a signal…
If we are above ground, it will also be using up our valuable data allowance, so again, we might not bother. Result – dead end for the customer journey and a lost opportunity.
If we already have the software, away we go, and we can now scan the QR code.
But…we need a signal in order to visit the website it links to. Final Result – dead end for the customer journey and a lost opportunity.
Ok, finally, we get a signal, because the poster is at an above ground station, we have the software, we scan the code and up pops the website.
But…the site that the QR code leads us to, is the client’s main website and it isn’t responsive – it doesn’t adjust automatically for different screen sizes. Result: dead end for the customer journey and a lost opportunity.
If we used a marketing agency to do the campaign, why did this happen?
The simple answer is that most marketing agencies actually don’t understand customer journeys, because that is not their background. Most agencies have tried to diversify away from their individual skill. They may have been direct marketing, advertising, PR, or something else. Often, they have been used to designing a message to be ‘pushed’ to the prospect, not designed to ‘pull’ the prospect into a customer journey. They definitely haven’t been designing customer journeys and using complex technology to complete those journeys. But that is the way it works today.
The new marketing is not about what we tell people, it is about how we engage them, to bring them back to us to enquire and covert. We need to make the return path easy, and quick.
Do yourself a favour, next time you want to do some marketing, start at the end of the journey and work back to the campaign. If you work with us, that is how we will approach it.
We are starting a new thread on this basis and will be demonstrating some of the cul-de-sacs to avoid from current marketing campaigns, so subscribe to keep up with the latest examples!
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