target market Archives by Mark Murnahan

5 Spam Tactics Good People Use to Kill Business Efforts

I am being pretty generous by using “spam” and “good people” in the same line, but I am trying to be forgiving. As surprising as it may seem, there are instances where otherwise good people will do spammy things which tarnish their business hopes. I don’t mean the canned meat, SPAM®, either. I mean the spam that happens when people try anything to get your attention.

I view spam as a desperate attempt to be productive while using counterproductive means.

When I say that it is an otherwise good person, it is often simply because they don’t know any better. They get confused by so much hype about the Internet, and end up doing spammy things that tarnish their business hopes, and hurt their chances for successful business communication.

Spam Tactic Number One: Company Names

It may seem innocuous to use a company name instead of a human name, but there is a time and a place for each. You may think this is subjective, but the numbers have come in, and if you are making this mistake, you are very likely hurting your odds.

Regardless what some flunky want-to-be “expert” may have told you, if you are not communicating explicitly on behalf of a company entity, it is best to use your human name. Even in those cases when it is “all business”, if you will be accepting any feedback, you should include your name. You know … the one your parents gave you.

An instance of this spam offense which has come back to hurt thousands of unwitting businesses is creating a Facebook Profile under the company name, but then having it deleted for a Facebook terms of service violation. Why would Facebook delete a profile with a business name? The answer is easy … because they should have been using a Facebook Page. If you don’t know the difference, or just how much it matters, you would be wise to read “Facebook Profiles Are Not For Business … Facebook Pages Are!”

You may argue the perceived benefit of using a company name in place of a personal name all you like, but before you get too set on your opinions, you may want to read an article titled “Social Media Profiles: Keywords, Company Names, and Humans“. It will explain how some of the best researched companies in the world are handling the matter. If you think that using your company name as a replacement for your given name is a good idea, think again!

There are many instances when the brand of a person is far more important than the brand of a company. Sometimes the company name adds authority to the person, but it is even more common that a person adds authority to the company. Heck, in my instance, only a small percentage of people I communicate with are aware that I am CEO of a successful decade-old wholesale Internet services corporation. The ones who need to know (customers and potential customers) are very aware. It shows up on their bill.

A real person with a human name will win the hearts and minds of people over companies every time. Many successful corporations know this, and prove it to be true.

Spam Tactic Number Two: Being False

Claiming to be something or somebody else is just asking for trouble, but it happens all the time. It is more common in personal communications than in business, but it happens in business more than you may like to imagine. This is done in many forms, but I will classify it as “Hot Chick Spam”.

I recall a specific instance of a beautiful lady (or “hot chick” if you prefer) whom I quickly realized was not what she claimed. It was a man who used a name and photograph of a beautiful woman instead of his own, because he was sure that more people would listen to and buy from a good looking woman.

There are certain word patterns, even in short Twitter messages which can give away even the best lies, as well as other obvious discovery tools. In the instance of my “hot chick” example, it only took a moment to figure out that it was a man, so I looked up the website owner with a WHOIS lookup and made a phone call. As I expected, when I asked to speak with the woman from Twitter, the truth came out really quick!

He got over this absurd plan for success once I pointed out how easily he could be exposed. His company also ended up hiring me to handle the search engine optimization for a highly competitive million+ page website. No, will not tell you who he/she was … under any circumstances! What I can tell you is that their business communications are far more legitimate and far more effective now that the company is represented by real people.

Spam Tactic Three: Spammy Blog Comments

If you have a blog, you surely get spam comments, but did you know that some people actually think it is a good strategy? This spam offense aligns with the previous two, but it goes further, and it can become a very destructive tactic for the spammer and the blog owner alike.

This is What Blog Comment Spam Looks Like to a Blog Owner

This spam tactic is generally executed by using industry keywords (or a company name) in place of a proper name when posting comments to a blog. Since those keywords will then be the link text pointing to the spammer’s website, it is assumed that it will be great for search engine ranking. It makes sense, right? If it could only be so easy, don’t you think everybody would do it? Then it would just be a battle to see who could produce the largest amount of spam. Actually, that does pretty well sum up this kind of spammer’s mentality, but they are so wrong, and they kill their chances of success like you may never believe! Search engines are simply not this stupid.

Ironically, this particular tactic was also previously implemented by the company I mentioned in “Spam Tactic Two.” In their case, they had paid some guys in India to write thousands of pithy blog comments including their website links. They got some extra website visitors out of it, but not the paying kind. When their website was brutally punished by Google and other search engines, they were ready to jump out of a third story window. You know … not really committed to death, but definitely upset enough for a jump.

If you think that something may be spammy, it probably is. I recently replied to this kind of spammer, and he actually answered back saying that he was not a spammer. My answer to that was as follows:

I am glad you responded. I just figured it was pretty unlikely that Mother Business Card and Father Brochure actually came together and decided to name their little beloved one “Logo Designer”.
REF: SPAM or Not SPAM? The First Test is Your Name!

Many people agree with my view of blog spammers, but apparently some people still don’t grasp the downsides.

Spam Tactic Four: Follow Me!

There are many obvious examples of this spam tactic found every minute of the day on Facebook and Twitter. It is commonly expected that having a lot of people “follow” what you have to say will matter. But guess what?! Those people who are quick to follow you without a good reason are also likely following about a squillion others just like you. They aren’t paying close attention and just waiting for the right time to send you a wallet full of money. They are usually just following you so that you will follow them back. You know, because that way you will both gain some amazing authority.

The truth that is hard to drive home is that more is not always better. I have given examples of this more times than I can count, but people usually have to make their own mistakes before they learn.

It stunned me how many people thought it was a useful action-list when I wrote a completely smart assed article titled “How To Become Popular on Twitter Without Actually Being Useful“. Apparently a whole lot of people missed my disclaimer that stated as follows:

“If you follow this list without deviation, you are sure to become massively popular. Just remember that if anybody says “I hate you and hope you die a miserable death” or “You deserve a really bad case of herpes” … those people are just jealous because they will probably never be as popular as you.”

It does not always have to be an extreme overstatement or effort to be spam-like. If you want people to follow you just to feel better, try buying a feather … they tickle, too!

This obese woman selling weight loss has offered to help me build a huge following on Twitter. — Obese Woman Selling Weight Loss

When the “Twitter Follower Frenzy” or “Facebook Please Like Me” epidemic gets to be so desperate as this obese woman selling weight loss and trying to tell me how to grow a huge Twitter following, it is a clear failure (click the image to enlarge). Note: She has six people following her. Perhaps she meant something else when she said “huge”.

If tweeting and facebooking to a large number of people who do not care about what you have to say is really so useful, how are you measuring that success? Is it in the bank?

People who fall into this addictive need to spam more disinterested people will be better off measuring the cost of their missed opportunities from all that wasted time and energy. If you have fallen prey to the disease, it is time to regroup and get some help to develop a better strategy.

Spam Tactic Five: Shooting at Innocent Bystanders

Trying to reach everybody, instead of a targeted audience is really the widest use of spam. Do you remember how I defined spam as a desperate attempt to be productive while using counterproductive means? Trying to reach everybody is about the worst conceivable spam of all. It not only wastes the time and resources of the spammer, but can create a lot of other possible business communication side-effects.

A Lot of Ammunition is Good, But Sharper Aim is Better!

Before trying to market something, it is important to remember that “everybody” does not want what you offer for sale. “Everybody” is not a target. Lack of focus is the most costly mistake any company can make in marketing, and is often the biggest missing piece in a failed campaign.

The task of targeted marketing using customer modeling based on demographics, psychographics, and propensity analysis really does make the difference. You can count on it!

If you target the right people, and stop shooting blindly, you will no longer need to reach all of the people. The right ones will do the “heavy lifting” for you. When others are promoting your virtues on your behalf, it is no longer spam … it is marketing.

Spam Tactics and the Ignorant

Sure, anybody can be guilty from time to time, and sometimes a small degree of spamminess is just an accident. Ignorance does not mean a person is stupid, but simply that they don’t know any better.

I know that some people will try until their last breath to defend these atrocities. That would be easier than admitting to making huge errors. Maybe they believed a bad pitch from an ignorant marketing agency, or they believed the fairy dust that so many people are promoting each day about Internet marketing.

Sometimes it is the company itself that is the perpetrator of the spamminess, but even more often it is because they trusted the wrong people to handle it for them. I have encountered many companies that believed a crooked marketing consultant, without ever caring to understand whether their tactics were sustainable, and an overall strategy was never even a consideration.

Once the pain sets in, it is too late, and they end up paying somebody like me a whole lot more money to fix their mistakes. That is, to fix the mistake of their prior ignorance.

An even more tragic result is that many companies will keep trying to do the things which do not work, just because they refuse to listen to good advice. When their marketing isn’t working for them, they assume the whole thing just doesn’t work.

These are the people I call the willingly confused. I generally try to be forgiving and patient with them, but those are not my strongest traits. The reason my patience often fails is not because of ignorance, alone, but rather the apathy which so often comes along with it. When you throw a dose of apathy on top of ignorance, the ignorance is sustained because they don’t care enough to overcome it.

Without apathy, ignorance is much easier to fix. When people care to do better, and to know more, ignorance fades with each thing they learn. If you know somebody going down this path, you will be kind to warn them.

Photo Credits:
No Pooping by johannal via Flickr
World Cup Babes Australia by gnews pics via Flickr

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Internet is a Body and Your Website is an Organ Transplant

I have an uncommon analogy for you to consider today. I sometimes feel a bit like a mad scientist slinking into my secret laboratory, just a little bit like Dr. Frankenstein. It seems especially real on days when I sit at this computer for sixteen hours, nap for three hours, and then return with my crazy mad scientist hairdo and coffee breath. Creepy? Perhaps, but it is always fun to exclaim “It’s Alive!” after it all comes together just right.

I realize that some people are squeamish about biology, but don’t worry, we are just imagining this for a few minutes. Think of it like a science fiction movie scene.

Try to picture the Internet as a sci-fi creature with living tissue, nerves, and blood vessels growing every day. It is alive and growing, and it has defense mechanisms just like most organic life forms. If you introduce a foreign object, it will either accept it, or it will reject it.

Now try to picture a surgical introduction of an organ transplant of a man-made synthetic tissue. Your website, along with the rest of your online branding assets, make up that donor organ. In the beginning, it is laid on the surface of the huge Internet organism, and surgically connected by way of new social networking efforts and a micro-web of hyperlinks to and from other websites. This is the toughest time for the transplant, and requires a lot of nurturing.

The donor organ is nourished with the textual content of the website, but it cannot live on its own for very long. It will need to connect with and become a part of the larger organism. The surgical team (web developers, SEO, owners, management, and etcetera) will need to work diligently if the donor organ is to be accepted to live and grow as a healthy addition to that larger organism.

Like any organ transplant, if the organ is not well-matched, it will not grow, and it will be rejected. To improve its odds of acceptance, the website medical staff needs to introduce antibodies to the larger Internet organism, and connect the nerves (the people) carefully. Think of the antibodies as the useful things the website has to offer, and the nerves as the people. The delivery method is social media and appropriate business networking with existing parts of the larger organism. You know, instead of hypodermic needles and pills.

The useful “antibodies” help to keep the nerves (the people), and other defenses of the large creature soothed, and even bring it to embrace the new donor organ (website). It is critically important that the surgical team connects the right nerves in the right places in order to make it a healthy transplant.

Why the Organ Transplant Analogy?

This concept came to mind as a prospective client asked me to help her launch a new surgical center website and social media campaign. She did not seem to grasp all that really goes into developing a successful online presence, just as I don’t fully understand how to perform surgery. She mostly just wanted to believe that a good website with a little search engine optimization fairy dust and social media chattiness was all it took. That is kind of like if I assumed surgery just takes some sharp knives and clean towels.

Things such as targeted marketing using customer modeling based on demographics, psychographics, and propensity analysis held no importance to her. She didn’t understand or want to accept those concepts in the beginning, just as I don’t understand why they can’t easily replace my blackened smoky lungs with a new pair.

While visiting with her, I decided that I needed an analogy, so I used the example of the online marketing work I do for myself. That is easy, because I never have to worry about treading on a client’s non-disclosure agreement (and most of my clients require them). It also shows that I have faith in what I was telling her … after all, I performed the same surgery on myself.

So, I explained that there are over 157,000 links pointing to my blog articles, according to Google Webmaster Tools, and that indicates a healthy transplant.

They each add up to connect my blog to the rest of the Internet organism. They are like the nerves and the blood vessels that have adopted my blog as a part of the larger organ which is the Internet. Now my blog helps to nourish the larger organ, and the Internet nourishes my blog as an accepted donor organ.

Then she was concerned about how much it would cost to do it the right way, but without any apparent concern about the cost of doing it the wrong way. Of course, everybody wants to know the cost, but as I’ve explained before, simply asking “How Much Does SEO Cost?” is the wrong question … for many reasons.

The cost of good marketing is kind of like paying taxes. If somebody asks me about taxes, I will tell them I’d prefer to pay a billion per year in taxes, because that means I earned a lot more than that! Similarly, if you spend a lot of money on marketing … the right marketing … it pays you many times whatever you pay for it.

She eventually steered away from her cost concerns, and she began to recognize that she was doing this to increase profit … and not to waste profit. Then she was concerned about how long it would take. Of course, we all want things fast … especially when it comes to money. The more important and seemingly obvious consideration is not only in how long it takes, but whether you implement the skill, the time, and the effort to make it possible at all. If you are doing it well, the time frame is shortened accordingly.

The conversation was very familiar. She was terrified of making good business decisions. I don’t blame her for that. It is a challenging process, and the world of online marketing has tried to overlook good business principles of “pay now, play later“.

Do Surgeons Have All the Answers?

I told her that I could create the tissue in my lab, surgically implant the tissue into the Internet body, help her with the antibodies, and nourish its growth. Then, in her wisdom, she decided that she just wanted me to create the tissue, but that she would handle the surgery and the after-surgery care.

This was because she thought it would save her some money. Yes, the surgeon decided to be a marketer … or to assign it to somebody she could pay the least possible amount of money to. The truth that she does not want to face is that she would be wiser to create a novice website but hire a great surgeon. The even more astonishing truth is that she would be a lot better to count on professionals to carry out the surgery from beginning to end, just the way her patients do.

Can you believe that even somebody so intelligent as a skilled surgeon does not understand the much higher value in allowing the professionals to do the work they are trained to do? Seriously, when people are so absurd to believe that they should add another profession to their resume to save a few bucks, just imagine the dollars they leave behind with their even more expensive and time consuming trial and error learning.

I have written my ideas on this topic, but it still leaves me to wonder why everybody wants to become an SEO and social media expert.

In summary: The next time you, or a loved one goes into surgery, be sure to ask the doctor if she does her own marketing. If so, she is probably not the smartest surgeon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Target Your Marketing and Love Your Customers Again

Do you sell something that has a potential market of “everyone”? Maybe you sell widgets, doodads, or gadgets that everybody in their right mind should own. If you treat your marketing that way, you are probably pretty frustrated.

I learned this the hard way, many years ago, by thinking that “everybody” was my target market. I remember when I sought out my market with thoughts like “Who wouldn’t buy my stuff? They must be crazy if they don’t buy!” Then I parked my bicycle and quit my paper route.

I learned what it meant to target my marketing. I stopped wasting time and money trying to reach everybody with a good reason to buy my stuff. The result was that I sold a lot more stuff.

When I stopped viewing everybody as a potential customer, I also stopped seeing them all as the “deadbeats” who wore me down and just wouldn’t buy. I started loving them more each day, and it turned out that my business grew massively.

Carefully conceived targeted marketing is a huge factor of success in a business. I don’t just mean targeting your market for every customer who will buy, either. I mean targeting your market for the customers you want, and who will help your business to grow.

I want to help you to avoid this common oversight, because it is in the top five most costly business errors. It runs close behind killing a hooker (and getting caught), or naming your child Bernie Madoff.

If you try to market something by believing your ideal target market is “everybody”, it is like hunting elephants in a termite mound. You will find a lot of termites there, but very few elephants. Many people only believe this after a “less-than-ideal” profit and loss statement proves it to them.

Marketing to Morons, Idiots, and Fools

Sure, I still think that most people are just totally insane if they don’t write me a check, give me their credit card, or provide me the passwords to their massive offshore bank account. They should at least send me a box of cigars and a bottle of Bourbon to butter me up. I mean, after all, I know it is mathematically factual that I sell something which returns more money than its cost. What kind of moron can’t see that?

Let me tell you something you you probably already know. There are a whole bunch of crazy, “idiots, morons, and fools” out there who will not buy what you sell. Even if you are selling the cure for cancer, free money, or a magical 24 hour orgasm, it will not sell itself. It will also not sell to “everybody”. Marketing to “everybody” as a prospective buyer would not even be a wise marketing approach if Coca Cola, McDonald’s, and Microsoft merged.

When you consider it closely, maybe they are not all such idiots, morons and fools. Instead, maybe it is your lack of targeted marketing, using data-driven customer modeling and calculated market segmentation.

Targeted marketing is exactly why I don’t write this blog for idiots, morons, and fools. I write it for people like you, who will appreciate good marketing ideas, pass them along to others, and add to the conversation with your comments. Actually, I don’t rely on the blog comments so much, because my target audience is pretty shy, but they do share a lot.

Target Market Segmentation Challenge

My challenge to you is to take the time and effort to segment your market more carefully. Start thinking in terms of demographics, psychographics, geographics, and who your best customers really are. What spins their fan, and what can you do to make your brand more like sex, bacon, and other things they love? Where will you reach them, and what will inspire them? Use what you know, expand what you know, and get creative with your marketing.

Targeted marketing seems very foreign to many people, but the good news is that this includes your competition. Just like everybody is not a customer, everybody is not a marketing genius either. Understanding a market requires marketing talent, which comes with practice, accurate data, and the right set of marketing tools. Unless you are willing to hire a professional, you will need to practice, and practice a lot.

I think of it like a trip to the gun range. Sure, I like to bring a lot of ammunition, but it is even more important to use the right gun, and learn how to aim it well. A sniper rifle is best, but many people fear that level of commitment to their marketing. So it is best to at least learn how to aim what you have.

Practice Targeting Your Market

Maybe you believed that optimizing your marketing reach would be easy in the beginning, but you surely know better by now. Look at your market penetration and consider these questions:

Are getting all you can (or at least all you want)?
Are you getting huge buyout offers?
Are you expanding your company at astonishing rates that would make Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg blush?

If your answers are “no”, then you need more practice to hone your skills. It will not kill you, and in the off chance it does, it was nice knowing you. If you are not afraid of dying, keep reading for thoughtful encouragement.

Practice your creative thinking. Practice your analytical thinking. Figure out who wants what you have, and what they will respond to favorably. Don’t try to reach them all. I know that it is hard to overlook all of those potential customers, but you will reach a whole lot more of them if your marketing is targeted appropriately.

If growing your business really matters to you, be ready to lose some sleep for it. Perfect customer modeling takes a lot of marketing talent and creativity. These are things you can improve, with enough effort.

Back to the gun analogy: You can make a lot of noise and scatter a lot of lead with a 12 gauge shotgun. It is particularly good for scaring your customers away, but not very good for hitting them in the heart, where you want your brand to penetrate. When you hit your market in the heart, you will find a lot more love flowing in both directions.

Shotgun Marketing Scares More Birds Away

If you don’t have the time or skill to become a true marksman, it is best to either rework your schedule to develop your abilities, or find a good hired gun.

I will part with some articles related to targeted marketing. There are more in my blog archive, and more yet to come. Check them out and subscribe for more bits of marketing brain food coming soon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download