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4 Ways To Crush Your Growth Marketing Goals

Wed, 27 Jul 2022 19:14:28 GMT

Unlike traditional marketing, there’s some experimentation involved.

The marketing landscape is more dynamic than ever. TV, radio and print are still around, but companies also reach consumers through social media and guerilla marketing tactics. Novel approaches such as native advertising are emerging to target audiences in unexpected ways! MORE:

Perfection is the Enemy of the Very Good

Wed, 05 May 2021 14:49:39 GMT

Is it any wonder then why so many people are so stressed out?

Perfection is what many of us are striving for. Coaches and athletes strive to play the perfect game. Business executives and politicians strive to negotiate the perfect deal. Adults with children strive to be the perfect parents. The list goes on and on.

Striving for perfection is commendable… to a point. We can all get better at everything we do. Continuous self-improvement is one of Stephen Covey’s famous “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.”

But striving for perfection and refusing to accept anything less than that outcome are two totally different things. Few if any of us ever achieve perfection in anything we do. There is no such thing as the perfect boss, employee, parent or child.

Is it any wonder then why so many people are so stressed out?

I would submit to you that “perfection” is the enemy of the “very good” in virtually every facet of business, and even society as a whole.

I have no research to back this up other than my own experience, but I believe strongly that whatever time, effort, energy, and resources needed to get from 0%-95%, that same amount of time, effort, energy, and resources will be required to get from 95% to 100%.

There are very few careers which require a legitimate pursuit of a perfect outcome. If you’re packing parachutes or practicing medicine, you can certainly argue the point that perfection is a worthy goal. Whatever effort and resources are required to guarantee 100% that a parachute will open when it’s supposed to, or that the correct medications and treatment required to achieve a healthy outcome for a patient are delivered 100% of the time makes perfect sense.

The fact is, however, most of us are engaged in careers and activities that don’t involve life or death situations. As an employee at any level in a company, the most common negative outcome to any decision we make is that it will cost the company money. If we make these kinds of decisions often enough, we may be asked to make them at another company.

I’ve been in media sales and management for virtually my entire adult life. Like most everyone, my goal is to do the best job I can for my company, my co-workers and my customers, without whom we have no business. With all that needs to be accomplished, how can it possibly make sense to double the time, energy and resources required to reach that virtually impossible goal of 100%?

I propose that 95% isn’t just “very good,” I believe 95% is “GREAT,” and should be the goal in virtually everything we do unless we determine that a 100% outcome is absolutely necessary. (Maybe if you’re in Accounting you should shoot for 99%). We’ll accomplish potentially TWICE as much as our perfectionist friends, co-workers, and competitors, and we’ll do it at a “very high” level.

Moreover, with increased accomplishment comes reduced stress and increased self-esteem. Our relationships improve because we’re focused on what’s important, i.e. family, faith and continuous self-improvement, instead of constantly worrying about a mistake we made, or a project that wasn’t absolutely perfect.

If we accept that 95% isn’t just “very good,” but “great,” we’ll accomplish a lot more and we’ll all be a lot happier. Sounds good to me.

Being Thankful is Good For Business

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 22:05:06 GMT

“Gratitude means thankfulness, counting your blessings, noticing simple pleasures.."

Thanksgiving has traditionally been one of America’s favorite holidays. Abraham Lincoln receives credit for establishing a national Thanksgiving Holiday in 1863, hoping in part that the establishment would help to heal the wounds of a divided nation. On December 26, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a joint resolution of Congress, for the first time making the date of Thanksgiving a matter of federal law and fixing the day as the fourth Thursday of November.

Most understand the origins of the Thanksgiving meal to have taken place in the Fall of 1621, when the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony famously shared a harvest feast with members of local Native American tribes who had taught the settlers how to grow corn.

In addition to enjoying parades, football and a great meal (and for more and more Americans a chance to get a jump on Black Friday), Thanksgiving is a great time to pause from the frenetic pace of our lives and reflect on all the blessings which have been bestowed upon us such as our families, faith, health, freedom, and life itself. Too often we get caught up in the day-to-day maelstrom of deadlines, activities and the truly trivial, and fail to pause and reflect with gratitude on the wonder that is the gift of life and the universe we inhabit.

To quote from an article on The Change Blog by Marelisa Fabrega titled How Gratitude Can Change Your Life, “Gratitude means thankfulness, counting your blessings, noticing simple pleasures, and acknowledging everything that you receive. It means learning to live your life as if everything were a miracle, and being aware on a continuous basis of how much you’ve been given. Gratitude shifts your focus from what your life lacks to the abundance that is already present.”

But being grateful doesn’t just make you a better person. Two psychologists, Michael McCollough of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and Robert Emmons of the University of California at Davis, wrote an article about an experiment they conducted on gratitude and its impact on well-being. The results of the study indicated that gratitude actually improves the quality of our lives. Those who express gratitude often experience less depression and stress, are more likely to help others and often result in higher levels of alertness, enthusiasm and optimism and achieve more personal goals. As we practice gratitude, we begin to appreciate the little things that we previously took for granted, and look for the good even in unpleasant or uncomfortable situations.

From a business standpoint, practicing gratitude is critical to the success of ourselves and our organizations. Working in a team environment, companies expect staff members to work together to accomplish common goals. Coworkers who know you are grateful for their efforts to help you accomplish a task or complete a project are much more likely to give their best effort.

Saying “Thank You” to clients and customers often and sincerely isn’t just good business, it is critical to our survival. With all of the options available, people and companies have many choices for how and where they commit their resources. Providing quality products and services at competitive prices only allows us to become part of the discussion. Business is all about relationships, and saying “Thank You” often and, most importantly, sincerely helps to remind customers that their best interests are always of primary concern and never taken for granted.

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” – G.K. Chesterton

Why Web Tracking Software is a Double Edged Sword

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 22:05:04 GMT

EVERY site I went to that offered the make and model of gas grill I was looking for..

If you’ve ever shopped online for anything from Amazon, Loews, Macy’s, Target or any other major retail website offering e commerce, you’ve probably noticed that you continue to see ads for that same product for weeks afterward on websites that have nothing to do with shopping.

Several years ago I was in the market for a Weber gas grill. While I found it interesting that EVERY site I went to that offered the make and model of gas grill I was looking for had the exact same price point (another topic for another issue), I ended up purchasing the grill from Loews because they offered to assemble it free for me. What I found enormously irritating was that for months after my search, I was seeing ads for Weber gas grills on CNN.com, FoxNews.com, ESPN.com and pretty much any other commercial website I visited.

Little did I know at the time, but one of the sites (guessing Amazon or possibly Weber because I went to the company’s website to do further research) installed a cookie on my computer that allowed ads for gas grills to follow me across the internet. This technique is called ad re-marketing. The technology is provided by a few companies and typically managed by marketing firms and specialty consultants.

Fast forward to 2016, and in the space of 5 working days I was approached by ad reps at two (2) fairly large circulation daily newspapers with active websites offering me the same capability. By adding special coding to the banner ads I placed with them, our ads would then follow (re-target) their readers across the internet.

Back in my days as an advertising executive in the Cable Television industry, I was excited to have access to qualitative research from companies like Claritas and Scarborough that offered the ability to cross reference consumer spending with media consumption. In the case of Claritas they took it one step further and added a geographic component based on zip codes. When we met with a client or prospect, we could offer them a complete profile of their own shopper (if their company was big enough, or an industry profile if they were a small local retailer) including what television programming their customers were likely to watch, what they did for entertainment, where else they shopped, what credit cards they used, and where they lived down to as small a geography as their zip code. The idea was “birds of a feather flock together” so people of similar education, income and lifestyle preferences were most likely to live in close proximity. In some cases, the research validated our preconceived notions, and in some cases it contradicted them.

As you would expect, this information was extremely valuable to our sales efforts and to the advertisers we partnered with. As their ability to target their best customers and prospects became dramatically more precise, their advertising dollars became that much more effective.

But we never concerned ourselves with issues regarding consumers’ right to privacy, because (a) everyone who participated in the research studies volunteered and I believe were paid to do so, and (b) data was never collected below the zip code level.

What we’re now seeing with online tracking software is the collection of consumer spending, media and entertainment consumption data on an entirely different level. In some cases, the tracking is surreptitious, as software (cookies) is added to consumers’ computers, tablets and smart phones automatically and often without their knowledge. (Does anyone read the terms of usage required to access information on websites?). How many are aware that Google reads all of your incoming and outgoing email if you use a Gmail account? This information is then often aggregated and sold on the open market. In other cases, detailed personal information is freely offered by users of social media in the spirit that the more a site knows about our preferences, the better our experience will be on their website. There are 28 different fields Facebook users can fill out on the site. If you include data collected via their tracking efforts the number of data fields approaches 100.

Before the genie is completely out of the bottle (if it isn’t already), industry, government and consumer advocacy groups need to come together and establish “rules of the road” that can be clearly understood by the average person that will (a) allow tracking software to be used only where and when permitted by the consumer while (b) affording marketers and social media/websites the opportunity to target advertising dollars effectively while protecting the right to privacy we all hold dear.

I would welcome feedback from readers of Bugle Calls who can illuminate this topic further. If industry, government and consumer protection groups are indeed already partnering in this effort, we need to know where they are in the process.