I recently wrote an article on B2C digital marketing for B2B magazine (strange, I know).  You can find it here, and the original unedited version (IMO: better?) is included below.  Enjoy :-)

Consumers crave intelligent marketing, and they love it when we get it right.  That coupon arriving just when I was considering my purchase options?  Brilliant!   Your letter to me about how your particular product suits my needs?  Right on target.  But where were you when I was at the mall last week?  And why didn’t you stop me from buying that other product that isn’t as good as yours?

Indeed, consumers don’t simply want to be understood; they want marketers to be at their beck and call: I’m ready to entertain offers—right now.

As marketers, we lament the opportunities lost when we don’t understand consumers’ particular needs or their particular position within the purchase cycle.  If only we could gain direct access to “consumer context”—the when, where, and what of consideration—we could perfectly position our offers, perfectly time our campaigns, and provide the response mechanism most preferred by each consumer.  The result would be higher ROI for brands and more intelligent marketing for consumers—lower costs and greater surpluses for all.

Sounds like a dream, yes?  Well, it’s one that might be right around the corner.  In the digital environment, information about consumer context is increasingly available.  Many consumers are already quite willing to tell us about themselves:  They tag their information on Flickr and Technorati, post personal details to Blogger and Twitter, allow TripAdvisor and Yelp to track their preferences, and let Loopt and Whrrl stalk their physical movements the globe.  Even in the offline world, consumers answer the question “May I help you?” both politely and honestly.

For some brands, gathering consumer context is already easy: American Express, Amazon, Apple, and Wegmans Foods Markets, all have trusted access to my own consumer context nearly every day. These firms benefit from my greater attention and consideration of their offers, and I benefit from their greater relevance to me.  Keeping these brands in the know is easy: they all track my purchases and interactions across all channels.

For most consumers, and most brands, updating consumer context is too hard.   While the social media revolution was sparked by online junkies (like me) who tweet, tag, scrobble, and upload the details of their personal lives online, it’s still simply too difficult or time-consuming for the average consumer to make this type of “about me” information available on a daily basis.  And that may be a good thing—for now—because while consumers experiment with how to efficiently provide details of their context, most marketers still have a long way to go when it comes to grokking this information.

Brands need to be available when a consumer’s context puts them in a position to buy, regardless of the time, place, or channel—traveling in a cab, standing in a store, or up late surfing on the couch.  Right now.

Without information about consumer context, ubiquity then quickly becomes the most important attribute for brands: the ability to be everywhere a customer might want them, at the moment they want, with the offer they desire.  Ubiquity used to be easy: ABC, NBC, CBS.  Nowadays, however, it means establishing a presence in thousands of locales throughout the digital landscape.

Marketers need to manage more channels, understand how brands function in each, and manage the whole environment in real time.  Start now, because it’s only getting worse: channels are proliferating fast, and the sooner that marketers understand them, the easier it will be to digest what’s coming next.  Companies and marketers not engaging in the digital marketing landscape—lacking ubiquity to the consumer—do so at their own peril.  And participation in these channels is also the key to understanding how your brand can capture and capitalize consumer context. The race is on.

With ubiquity comes one more marketing imperative: ambiance.  Since brand participation in these new marketing channels is spotty and inconsistent, it’s critical that brands remind their customers of their presence.  Use each channel to inform consumers that your available everywhere: confirm to the customer that you have a mobile website; invite them to participate online; educate them that your call center is still open 24/7.  Consumers do what’s easy and present within their context, so make sure your brand is available in all the new marketing channels (ubiquity)—and that the customer knows it (ambiance).

Search is a strange new animal in marketing landscape. Why? Because it represents the closest alignment ever achieved between the goals of consumers and the goals of marketers.  In no other medium do consumers broadcast their intentions so clearly than in search – intentions to window shop, to buy, to refer, to rate.

And in no other medium are marketers’ intentions so clearly discerned — even from the advertisements themselves.

• Ad placement indicates the relative investment a marketer is willing to make to acquire a customer – which is, in itself, an indication of the advertisement’s relevance to the consumers search request.
• The text of the advertisement makes clear – in 35 words or less — the marketer’s value proposition.
• Landing pages are constructed to provide immediate verification of whether marketers and customers are aligned around the same objectives, and to provide the shortest purchase path for a qualified prospect.
• Even the presence of competition, and the strategies that competition is using to differentiate itself, are more apparent in search than in any other marketing method.

Marketers and consumers have the same goals: they wish to invest as little as possible in search, privacy, and acquisition costs. Because of that, search marketing becomes a virtual utopia within the marketing landscape.  It’s quite possible that search-based marketing costs approach the theoretical minimum cost required to acquire the target audience.  Even the consumer’s investment (e.g. search and privacy costs) is as small as it might ever be.

When user and marketer goals are so closely aligned, an interesting side effect results: honesty.  No longer are marketers required to interrupt and deceive their customers into considering their products. No longer are customers forced to hide their desires – which creates added cost for both consumer and marketer.

But this honesty builds efficiencies far beyond the marketing landscape as well. When consumers are honest about their intentions, and when marketers are able to believe what consumers tell them, there’s an opportunity to truly optimize the supply chain as well as the marketing channel. And where does an optimized supply chain lead to? Lower costs.

To the extent that direct marketers – indeed all marketers – embrace this concept and focus on the efficiency within their campaigns, customers will be increasingly motivated to share accurate information across the entirety of their consumption profile. That will lead to lower costs for marketing campaigns, lower costs for manufacturing, and lower costs for service delivery. Everybody wins: consumer surplus rises in the cost of doing business goes down.

Search still represents a tiny portion of the overall marketing spend, but it has a great deal to teach us with regard to user intentions and marketer goals.  If we could develop that sort of honest conversations that characterize search marketing within other marketing channels,marketers and customers would benefit, and operations managers and CFOs would see results as well.

This sort of “aligned intention marketing” (AIM)–where customer and marketer goals are in synchronicity — is the most important lens through which new marketing channels should be viewed.   Search marketing is merely the tip of the spear; it’s the best current example of how these new marketing tools might be used.

Mobile marketing (cell phones, not cars with billboards attached :-) is probably the most exciting new frontier in direct marketing. With the cell phone being the most personal, the most context sensitive, and the most attended-to communications channel in the media landscape, it clearly represents a big opportunity to reach customers effectively.

Mobile marketing is about immediacy, intimacy, and context. Messages must be important enough to interrupt audiences’ social lives (the center of which is often a cell phone), and must be relevant enough (timing, subject, response method) to call the user to act — immediately (do YOU reread TXT messages a second time?).

Whatever your political affiliation, you should appreciate Obama’s latest foray into mobile marketing. As highlighted in the Mobile Industry Review, Obama has announced that he’ll send his VP pick out by mobile phone first–before a press release, before the media finds out. Obama’s strategy here is brilliant: he’s building a permission marketing asset which may plan a major role on election day.

I know a little bit about political campaigns, and one of the most important parts is the “Get Out The Vote” (GOTV) effort on election day. Democrats in particular focus on GOTV efforts as a major push–and they dread it when election day showers dampen voter turnout. (Republican voter turnouts are, strangely, less affected by the weather.) Obviously, reaching voters via cell phone on election day would be ideal.

Since mobile phone directories don’t exist, Obama’s campaign had to build its own; using the VP pick as an opt-in lure. With these mobile phone numbers, Obama is actually building the ultimate GOTV machine: the mobile phone numbers of his supporters allow him to contact them immediately, on the day of the election day, and ask them to vote, bring friends to vote, and make a call or two on his behalf. Since marketers like Obama can depend on users ALWAYS carrying their cell phones, it’s a sure bet that they can be reached before the polls close.

Election day is a Tuesday, and it just might rain. Imagine if you could reach out to all YOUR customers on a rainy Tuesday and tell them that your bays are open, there are open tables, that hard to find items are in stock, or that something’s on sale. The immediacy of mobile brings an entirely new perspective to the marketing landscape: watch Obama use it, and then use it for yourself.

Found this excellent review of mobile trends in the US and UK.   Visit Mobile Life 2008 and download the full report (pdf).

You may have read recently that the notion of “the Long Tail” (which is a guiding principle in interactive marketing) had been debunked by an article in the Harvard Business Review.  I had been struggling with how to explain to my colleagues why the HBR article was, in my opinion, off base (it was, essentially, discussing a different point entirely).  Anyway, Seth Godin has saved me the trouble with his post:  There it is again.

I’ve written before (on my other blog, etailology) about the power of “service communications” in the etail and direct marketing landscape. To put it simply, people pay more attention to shipping confirmations, bills, and other administrative communications than they do “marketing messages.”  So… the real trick is ensuring that service communications do all of the following:

• communicate critical service information
• demonstrate your value proposition and your latest offers
• show your desire to continue and expand the customer relationship
• embody and express your brand difference

These opportunities are routinely overlooked.  We haven’t all gotten 300-page phone bills, but most of us have faced over-complex, poorly organized, and often-wrong billing statements.  (I once got a letter from Citibank telling me that my HELOC application had been turned down because I was a foreign-national, even as my all-American self received a box of checks for the same account!)   Colleen Jones at the UXMatters blog has an excellent overview of dos and don’ts for billing statement design.   It’s worth a look.

If billing statements don’t excite you, what about shipping notifications?  Nothing gets me more excited than a UPS tracking number.  I read those emails!  And even post-purchase follow-ups and surveys get my attention far quicker than a standard “acquisition” communication.  (My Saab dealer sends three post-service messages asking for feedback… and the next order.)

The point is this: direct marketing is the process of translating a moment of consumer attention into a lifetime of Brand Membership.  Service communications represent moments where consumer attention is extremely focused on your brand.  Do more than get it right … make it exceptional!

Donna DeClemente has a nice summary of a recent webinar: Forrester’s Five Year Interactive Marketing Forecast.

A taste:

• Search Marketing is expected to triple in 5 years to over $25 billion.
• Online Display ads will reach almost $14 billion. The ability to create rich media ads will help this growth.
• Email marketing spend will shift to integration which means that email will start to be more integrated with other mediums.
• Online video has the steepest growth curve of any of these channels because it has a very low adaption of around $450 million today. It’s an easy medium for marketers to understand and something that they’re familiar with. Interactive videos will also help see this medium grow.
• Emerging Media which Forrester defined as social media, mobile marketing and in-game advertising and states that social media is poised to have the most significant growth of these three elements. Social media is providing many marketers with a way to help get them interactive.

The Railroads Did It
The need for brands was initially spawned by national companies who wished to compete with local manufacturers — an opportunity brought on by mass production and Rail’s ability to distribute products more widely. Brands have since evolved from a “logo and mark” to complete personalities which capture the essence of how businesses wish to relate to their customers.

Brands became handles for consumers – through which they could not only engage with the personality of a company but also get reasonable expectations of quality and consistency. “Brand” was invented as a standin for a real person — making the same assurances a local maker or shopkeeper had traditionally made.  And, over the last 100 years or so, brands became product “personality” itself.

TV Put it Together
Along comes TV.  With a brand infrastructure in place, manufacturers could now broadcast awareness of their products across the entirety of their distribution area.   In this world (broad reach, broad distribution, and little branded competition) national brands grew and prospered.

And the Internet Broke it Apart
With the broad adoption of the Web and rapid penetration of even the most personal of services being offered online (e.g. banking), we can declare the broadcast era officially dead.

Suddenly, consumers can experience brands directly: through online events, interaction with products, or by visiting the online environments of brands; or they can experience them vicariously: through an eBay Seller’s feedback, a compelling blogger, or a reviewer on Amazon who seems to share their likes and dislikes.

As the online channel becomes the primary delivery point for brand experiences, it’s critical that marketers take advantage of the enormous growth opportunity this trend presents. If your company will participate in this new branding paradigm, it needs to be ready for the voyage. Changing your mindset from a broadcast mentality to a narrowcast mentality is the first step.

Imagine: “brand marketing” that is focused on customer acquisition and conversion and which drives real value in the business in a measurable way.

The challenge, of course, is that brand marketers and direct marketers speak very different languages. Bridging the gap between these disciplines will take real investment from both kinds of marketers — learning the skills, talents, and approaches of the other — and it will take a bit of gumption as well.

Tim Leberecht at iPlot has an excellent post which points at some of the ideas in Direct Marketing 2.0. Included is a distillation of some thoughts from Seth Godin and and a few excellent links.  Blogroll material for sure.  Enjoy: The End of the End of Marketing?

Time and again, general advertising and marketing communications agencies have invested, purchased, persuaded, cajoled their way into Web work – without ever really understanding it.

I remember one such example vividly: an agency director muscled his way into a meeting about a Web platform redesign and commandeered the first twenty minutes to highlight the many faults and problems with the client’s existing site. We sat patiently. At the end, the agency bigwig posed the killer question: “Who built this for you anyway? It’s horrible!” To which the client replied: “You did.”To be fair, that general agency exec was setup for a fall. After all, the birth of brands was in the late 1800s, and the birth of the agency came coincidentally with wider distribution of broadcast technologies such as print, radio, and television. It was a “setup” because the Internet is a narrowcast technology—not a broadcast one. While the birth of marketing came in broadcast form, the future clearly lies in new “narrow” ways of reaching customers.

Narrow markets demand narrow marketing

Concepts like the endless aisle, the long tail, the sudden and dramatic line extensions in even our oldest and most revered brands, and the general success of niche marketing on the Web, all tacitly suggest that a narrower approach to marketing will be more successful in this “more narrow” brand and product landscape.

Over the last 30 years or so, only one marketing discipline has been increasing focused on technologies that capture the power of narrowcasting: direct marketing. And while DM agencies have long focused on print/mail, telephone, and television, the rules they apply to their work are a strangely appropriate launching point for Internet success. They get it. They narrowcast. Auragen’s 12 years of experience confirm the best Web applications are built by …

• … matching customer information (e.g., Mary likes apples)
• … with the right content (…so we’ll show her apple recipes first…)
• … in the right display format (… in a format that fits her iPhone).

It’s the knowledge of Mary that helps us tune the offer appropriately and deliver the proper creative execution. You will immediately see how this approach echoes the most basic of rules in direct marketing:

1. focus first on the right list of prospects
2. ensure that you have the right offer for them and…
3. deliver it in a creative package that breaks through the clutter.

The approaches are the same, but for a long time we’ve worked on separate projects for separate objectives, with separate corporate clients.

No longer.

Direct marketing replaces general advertising

The promise of DM 2.0 is the promise of narrowcasting, for sure. But it’s also the promise of true and final integration of Internet initiatives into the marketing mix. But instead of waiting for general advertising to accept new media and direct into their fold, we realize now that the general advertising is an old approach with waning utility and reach. Instead, the promise of truly integrated direct marketing initiatives—spanning and leveraging all media types and formats—is the big opportunity for smart marketers.

Traditional direct marketing has finally merged with interactive services and the Internet. Expect to see integrated approaches and models that result in dramatically more targeted and more effective campaigns. Expect to see brands take on a far more personal and direct relationship with their prospects, members, and evangelists. Expect the brand experience to literally be delivered to customers on an individual basis. And expect this approach to define marketing communications for the next 50 years.