January 12, 2006

I was fortunate enough to have an opportunity to listen to these two gentlemen present at an AMA luncheon this week on "Building Brand, Buzz and Business with Direct Marketing." In case you aren't familiar with these guys, Chris is the CMO and Co-Founder of Exact Target (the big e-mail solutions provider) and Richard Rosen is the CEO of AlloyRed (the award-winning interactive agency).

A large portion of the conversation focused on how the various disciplines of marketing are starting to converge. Chris and Richard both strongly believe that marketers need to stop viewing everything in silos and start leveraging all activities in a more unified manner.

Some other highlights of the conversation:

• Richard made an excellent point about the importance of empathizing with a target audience. He says many marketers think they are doing this by simply rattling off a list of pain points, but that in most cases they really aren't building any sort of emotional connection with their audience.
• The word "respect" also came up quite a bit in the discussion, with Richard and Chris urging marketers to really think through their programs and make sure they were relevant. Chris also reminded companies to "talk" in a more authentic voice, saying "People like to buy from other people."
• Both Chris and Richard believe that e-mail marketing is best used for relationship-building, NOT acquisition.
• On a somewhat similar note, Chris loathes the use of the word "campaign" and believes marketers must stop thinking in terms of campaigns and more in terms of "relationships."
• Chris also provided some interesting insight into his budget at Exact Target. He says his budget is completely dynamic and that he has tasked his third-party agencies with simply generating as many quality leads as possible, using the tactics they think are most appropriate. Agencies are then paid based on how many leads they can deliver, the quality of those leads and how many actually convert to deals. This model is likely to make a lot of companies squeal, but Chris predicts that in the very near future "dynamic budgets" will be the only way to go. 

If you get a chance, you might also want to check out Chris's blog on e-mail marketing. He has a lot of good stuff in there -- in fact, it was named one of the 10 best blogs of 2005 by Marketing Sherpa.

Posted by at January 12, 2006

Comments

Cindy email - www.bctia.org

I thought the event was great too! Thanks for the recap.

Sherri email - bumpesc.prblogs.org

Although I was not fortunate enough to hear Chris Baggot and Richard Rosen speak, I feel your recap provided me with a clear idea of what the meeting was about.

I agree with Richard when they mentions empathizing with the audience. I recently took a course, Promotions Strategies, and this issue was the first question on the exam.

It's important to understand what's going on in someone's head. You don't have to agree with them or be apart of their demographic group, you just have to put yourself in their shoes. If you are able to invision issues through your target audience's eyes, you will do a better job at targeting and reaching these people.

When Richard mentions respect, I think it is quite obvious that you can't keep or gain clients by disrespecting them. However, knowing what disrespects someone relates back to empathizing.

Chris notes that one should talk in an "authentic" manner. I believe this was important to mention in this blog. Many organizations use terms that go over the client's head. If people are uncertain of what you're talking about, then the mission is not accomplished. And it has been proven that people trust people more like themselves before they trust a CEO using many technical terms.

What concerns me in this blog is the idea of "dynamic budget." You don't really mention what views you do and do not support, which allows me to assume that you support all points in which you mentioned. However, if the focus is on productivity, exactly how much quality can be expected? Good research equals quality and good research takes time. Chris mentions that people will be paid on the amount of leads, and quality of leads, however, i feel this will encourage most agencies to just throw out as many leads as possible despite quality. I believe these agencies will be risking quality in attemp to create as many leads as possible/taking a chance that the lack of quality will be overlooked. In turn, this will weaken the quality of all leads and clients will be forced to settle for less.

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