emarketing
Stories and lies about emarketing
20/10/11 16:37 Filed in: Gareth Lloyd
I’ve just attended a seminar entitled ‘Email, social marketing and the art of storytelling’. The central tenet was that ever since we lived in caves we have communicated through storytelling – so this should be how we communicate brand messages through email and social media.
Meh.
OK, so I buy into the argument that getting customers to share their own stories about your brand can help you build a social media community and a sort of ‘fan base’. But to also suggest that story-telling is the panacea for emarketing is, to my mind, absurd.
As a writer, I love to use storytelling to communicate messages. But I’ll only do it when I believe this approach is the best way to achieve an objective. For example, this email (the fourth one down!) uses storytelling smartly to explain the value of the product being promoted. The one below it doesn’t. It simply rewards immediate response – and it was just as effective in meeting the client’s goals.
What worries me is that we are reading too much into the psychology of the social media revolution when it comes to commerce. Emarketing is advertising. It’s not sharing pictures, funny stories and reminiscences with friends. It just doesn’t have that emotional pull. It needs to make its point fast so the reader can get back to Facebook and Twitter and what they really use these platforms for. Arguing otherwise isn’t just spinning a story. It’s telling a lie.
Emarketing and the rebirth of client creative
20/05/10 14:04 Filed in: Gareth Lloyd
As Bill Bernach (founder of DDB and one of the true greats of advertising) once said, “It is one thing to have a selling proposition and quite another to sell it.”
I wonder then what Mr Bernbach would have made of today’s emarketing solutions providers that have given clients the tools to do their own online campaigns? For while the software these companies provide is good, they seem to be missing the point that they are facilitating ‘client creative’. And this simply won’t sell as well as ‘creative creative’.
Effective communication requires far more than adapting an email template to your corporate guidleines, pasting in some copy and uploading the result to a server for digital dissemination. If you need to convey a marketing message in a way that will engage your recipient, you need to have the skills to tell your story well. Key thoughts have to be communicated clearly, key needs identified and answered. Visuals have to be chosen well and used in the right way.
These are the skills clients choose agencies to provide. Which is why you don’t see many clients picking up a digital camera to make their own TV ads. Or a microphone to make their own radio ads. Clients know their product and their markets, but it is creative people who bring the two together. So while Emarketing software is a great new tool for companies, you don’t have to be a Bill Bernach-like genius to understand that client creative will undermine its effectiveness.
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