I Am A Marketing Hypocrite

by Johnny Gwin

Hypocrite
1  : a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue or religion    2  : a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings

I am a “Creative Dude” turned “Marketing Guy”. Man, I use to hate the thought of being on the account side of advertising but I have had to become the proverbial “suit” because my company in total is a whopping 3 people. Which is fine, we manage to do quite well doing the job of 20 people. That’s the way we like (but that’s a whole different blog). The business of Marketing, and whatever that entails, is something that I have had to re-look at, re-learn, re-understand  and re-absorb from a non-creative view so that I can talk, prepare and plan campaigns and strategies for our wonderful clients. Gone are the day of only understanding typefaces, breaking the grid, color theory, and cool design. Lately it’s been demographics, frequency, touch-points, consumer cycles, and the everyday changes in the advertising world. With the knowledge that I have acquired thus far I have been relieved to say that we have given some sound and damn good plans to our clients and prospects. We have worked to understand their story, brand, and product. Told the powers that be what they need to do to get the word out. And we, with our client partners, have implemented some very successful campaigns. But in the course of my new studies I have to my horror realized that I haven’t done a damn thing that I have preached to all my clients for my own company.

How many times have I told my our clients “get on Facebook, start a WordPress blog, talk with your customers, spend enough money and time to get your story out, out smart your competition, do whatever it takes to let people know who you are”. More times than I can count. And look at me writing my first blog. Shame on me. Tim, my “smarter than me” business partner, asked me to make a diagram of a COMPLETE MARKETING PLAN(see diagram A). You know I have never actually looked at a COMPLETE MARKETING PLAN. I have written the words, but never actually truly grasped the size and complexity of one until I saw it all together on paper. As I made one box and connection after another I realized HUMMINGBIRD IDEAS hasn’t done 95% of this diagram. 95 Percent! Yeah, some advertising genius I am. Really I wanted to slap myself for not “walking the talk”.

DIAGRAM A

working complete marketing plan

Over a beer with my two partners (Crawford & Tim) I let them in on my revelation and with a resounding “YES” we have decided to jump in head first into this world of advertising and design that we have preached for almost six years. We finally looked at ourselves as a CLIENT.
The view from the client side of the fence is alien, scary, exciting and super serious. We will be starting from the beginning. A self reflection:
Who are we?
What do we actually do?
Does anybody actually know we exist?
What do we want people to think about Hummingbird Ideas?
Can we back up that up?
Do we even know what people really think about us?
How much can we spend every month to get people to know we exist?

Needless to say Hummingbird over the next couple of weeks will have some heated discussions and exchanges. But that’s OK. We can argue and we can cooperate with each other very well. It’s a process. This needs to be exciting and heated. It’s our company, it’s important to us and we are very passionate about it. The learning process and growth has already begun.

Here is what I have gathered from my first days from the client side:
• Marketing is how you talk to your customers, your vendors, your workforce, your competitors.
• Marketing and Advertising are a necessity. They’re really important, hard to do, and always changing.
• Marketing needs to be a full time job, not something that you just fit into your job description or when you can.
• Marketing needs to be an everyday task. One hour a day at least.
• Marketing is a lot harder from the client side than from the agency side.
• Marketing needs a true plan and someone needs to make sure all aspects are implemented, executed, and tracked.
• Self reflection: talking about and understanding yourself is difficult and you (we) will need to get some outside perspective to fully see the BIG
PICTURE, warts and all.

Which leads me to this FIRST POST. I will be doing one hour a day of marketing for my company, Hummingbird Ideas. I will start talking and sharing our story, our successes and our failures to anyone that will listen. Notice I said “talk” not tell. I want to learn to create a conversation with my readers, clients, potential clients, vendors , and even competitors. Nobody wants to be lectured to, most people want a nice exchange. I like my company and think we have a great product. I want to scream this from the rooftops like Howard Beale’s disciples in the movie NETWORK. My hope is that I can reveal a true picture of Hummingbird Ideas. Hopefully some of the things I post informs and entertains. Maybe one of my posts might reassure one of our clients with our current relationship or some new prospect might decide to call us to talk about their company and where they want to go. Either way I going to keep you up-to-date on our marketing progress and if you learn something along the way or disagree with me let me know. I really want to talk.

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To see our work: hummingbirdideas.com

How Sprint Uses Detailed Email Marketing to their Advantage

4 Strategies to Create Customer Dialogs

SUMMARY: Personalizing your email newsletters for an individual customers’ interest can creates a more relevant communication. The more relevant your content, the more likely subscribers are to engage with your messages.

The marketing team at Sprint revamped its customer email newsletter with dynamic features that deliver targeted content based on subscribers’ wireless devices, service plans, locations and preferences. These changes, combined with testing, have achieved double the clicks of the team’s other campaigns, and are generating sales without being overtly promotional.

THE CHALLENGE: Over the past several years, the marketing team at Sprint has gradually shifted its Sprint Connection email newsletter strategy away from promotional content. So, when they planned another revamp of the newsletter in December 2007, they wanted to complete the product’s evolution from a promotional vehicle to a customer-loyalty tool.

The purpose behind the new email structure focuses on new content and features to make the newsletter a benefit for existing customers. And they wanted to offer the most relevant information — personalized content targeting each subscriber’s needs and interests. “We knew there were specific, one-to-one dialogs we wanted to initiate with our customers,” says Pam Messier, Marketing Manager, Email Programs.

THE CAMPAIGN: The team began using dynamic content features that would deliver a customized, highly targeted version of the newsletter to each customer, based on their wireless device, service plan and interest areas from their existing, highly detailed customer database. They also adopted a rigorous testing strategy to optimize layout, content selection and subject lines.

These are four strategies they used to guide the changes:

Strategy #1. Create template for newsletter content: The team organized monthly newsletter content according to a new template. Each newsletter featured:

• A table of contents above the fold
• Customer handset and account details
• A news item
• A monthly tip for customers’ handsets or service plans (with what they owned)
• A customer perk, such as a free offer from Sprint or partners
• Interactive features, such as polls, sweepstakes, online chats and Q&A

Marketing Yourself With YouTube

First off, if you have a company, you need a website. Secondly if you have a message to say then you need YouTube.

YouTube is an excellent annd free way to get your message out to the world. Almost everyone knows about Youtube, which is proven by the roughly 200 million unique visits that the site receives each month. Many do not know that this site is an excellent way to get the word out about yourself, product or service and re-link that video of yourself back to your website. Thus placing your message in 2 places at once and create another link (via Google since they are now the owners of YouTube) to help boost your search engine results.

Making a video is fairly easy – as seen in the above video – and most cameras and cell phone come with a video application to allow for amateur video production. It’s really that easy and just another way to get a message out there and make your own website just a little more dynamic.

The Web – New and Improved

Well, I really learned a lot this week about how un-internet savvy we are down here in good ol’ Mobile. Right now is a very exciting time for the web – it’s is practically a rebirth of what happened in the late 90’s. You see, business is finally grasping what it means to have and use a website, thus starting up the craze and phrase that everyone just loves to use – WEB 2.0.

The days of a whiz-bang website with lots of sound and motion and annoyance is coming to an end. Sure these types of sites will still exist sometimes, but they will be nothing more than a digital online brochure. In our new web world people are thirsty for content – more web-users now use Google to look up a phone number than actually picking up the Yellow Pages.

No people these days want something that they can go to to find information that’s constantly updated. If you have some flash site out there that someone has seen before, chances are they aren’t coming back to the site unless it’s to show a buddy. Look at the most popular sites online – Drudge Report, MySpace, YouTube – these are sites that have users who are constantly updating material all the time.

The First Day Of Our Blog

Hello everyone and welcome to the very first day of the new Hummingbird Ideas blog. We hope that you will find this blog useful for any advertising or marketing needs that you may have. We hope to continue to add useful knowledge on the way marketing works and how to make it work for you.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact us anytime. Our info can be found at www.hbirdideas.com.