Westin St. Francis Marketing WIN

Switching it up a little bit this time. I'm reading 'The Book of Business Awesome / The Book of Business UnAwesome'. It's a two-in-one book, where part one discusses how businesses succeed to create awesome marketing, and the other side (near and dear to this blog) are a bunch of marketing fails.

I've been inspired by the 'awesome' side of author Scott Stratten's book, and decided to share a story of my own from my recent honeymoon to California. 

THE EPIC MARKETING WIN

My wife and I were having a fantastic time on our trip. We spent a week up in Sonoma and Napa and finished our trip with three days in San Francisco. We stayed at the Westin St. Francis in Union Square. One thing that we discovered on our honeymoon, is that most hotels will make your stay extra special when they figure out you're on your honeymoon. The Westin was no exception. They upgraded us to the penthouse floor of the old building, with an awesome room and an even better view of Union Square.

Awesome view - and this isn't even the best part.

We were loving our time in the city. On the Saturday night, we heard that the Giants were playing. Having never been to a game at AT&T Park, we decided this would be a cool experience.

We headed down to the concierge to figure out the best way to get tickets. The concierge gave us kind of a cold greeting, told us the game was sold out and there was essentially no way to get tickets. It was pretty disappointing. I asked if there were any other options to get tickets, even inquired about scalpers, and she just basically just said that we were screwed.

On the elevator back up to our room, I remembered that some of my friends use the website StubHub to get tickets. I never used the site before, but figured it was worth a try. Within 15 minutes, I had bought tickets, printed them in the hotel's business center and we were on our way to the game.

While enjoying garlic fries, looking at the massive StubHub ad in the outfield and seeing Tim Lincecum pitch an almost flawless game, we heard this was the 127th consecutive sellout. I thought about how many other people have been to that concierge, and were told unnecessarily that they simply couldn't go to the game?

Sellouts don't matter with StubHub.

When I got back to Ottawa, I got a customer satisfaction survey from Starwood Hotels. At the end, in an attempt to help them improve, I left a little comment about how the concierge could have been more aware of alternative ticket options. Shortly afterwards, I got a call and an email from the hotel's Guest Services manager. She offered her apologies and said that their concierge's are supposed to know about these options, but they would be giving them a refresher. I was happy to hear that no one else would unnecessarily need to miss the game, and that they were going to do something with my feedback... but it doesn't end there.

The Guest Services Manager asked me for my address, so she could send me 'a Giants baseball momento'. I gave it to her and forgot that I did, until a couple weeks later, I got a package from Fedex. 

Giants momento.

Inside there was a nice handwritten letter from the hotel, a baseball hat AND a shirt. This was above and beyond what they needed to do, but it showed that they really cared.

I am obviously a little biased now, but I've also stayed in a lot of hotels in San Francisco. If you want to stay an an awesome hotel, that could not be in a better location and that cares (a lot) about their guests, then checkout the Westin St. Francis.

Have you guys experienced a similar situation? I would love to hear about it. Please leave a comment in the comment section below.

Using Sex to Sell - Marketing Fail

Yet another Marketing Fail from Facebook. Here we go...

THE EPIC MARKETING FAIL

What does this image have to do with a link building strategy?

Personally, in the B2B space I think it is very risky to use any kind of imagery like the one in the above Facebook ad. First thing that happens in this case, is that your prospects are associating your brand with the image they see.

So RYP Marketing - is this an ad for an escort service? Is it some kind of dating line? Or maybe its for bikinis? I am confused... let me read the copy in your ad.

NOPE, actually its for link building (and... Infographics?!) to increase your website's SEO ranking. Interesting. That is probably the last thing I would have guessed after seeing this picture.

Okay, so some of you will argue that the image will get people to look at the ad. As I'm writing this my wife walks by, sees the ad, and says, 'what the...?' and I explain that I am writing a new entry for Epic Marketing Fails. She later comments 'not very professional'. Well, she just proved my point before I even had to write it down. 

Although ads like this may originally get people's attention, they do so at the expense of everything that comes after that first glance.

THE UN-FAILURE

When it comes to using images for your B2B brand, here are some tips to keep in mind:

1. Keep it professional. Anything you use in your ads wil be associated to your brand, so use the front page of the New York Times scenario. If you wouldn't want to see the image with your company name beside it on the front page, don't use it.
2. Don't use boring corporate stock images. These have been done a million times and if you are going to use the guy sitting at his glass desk looking at his blacked out iMac monitor, please just don't use an image at all.
3. Be different. Sticking out is a good thing, but as long as its done in a professional manner. To be honest, I am guessing that is where RYP Marketing is coming from. They are on Facebook and they are trying to break through the noise. The reality is that there is a lot of noise out there these days and Marketers need to be more creative and intriguing than ever to get people's attention. 
4. Don't spend too much time on graphics. Content is king, and having a great creative around it will simply augment it. When short on cycles, spend more time on your content and less on creative. 
5. Test. Test. Test. Try out different banners, images and layouts. Marketing Automation tools like Marketo make this easier than ever to do effectively. I would also recommend checking out www.whichtestwon.com. It's a site that shows the results of marketers A/B tests on their campaigns. It is truly amazing how seemingly minor changes can lead to massive gains.

That's it for this time guys. Now let's hit the beach!

Why does RIM already hate the Blackberry 10?

[DISCLAIMER]

Hello, my name is Pierce Ujjainwalla, and I am an iPhone user. So despite my bias in phones, let me reassure everyone that my phone preference has nothing to do with the following post. 

THE EPIC MARKETING FAIL

RIM seems to be trying to get in touch with their hipster side with their recent commercials featuring [well known?] artists like Diplo, the Martinez Brothers and most recently Meridith Valiando.

The most recent instalment features the founder of the DigiTour, a company that creates music tours featuring self-made YouTube sensations. The founder, Meridith, says 'I get somewhere around a thousand emails a day... try writing a thousand emails on a touch screen!'. 

"Try writing a thousand emails on a touch screen!"

Although I don't find it hard to write emails on a touch screen, maybe some people do. Fair enough. Blackberry has the keyboard, a main product differentiator. Good - they are positioning themselves in the market for people who write lots of emails, and offer keyboards on the phones to do it. Great strategy... annnnnd let me now present to you RIM's newest phone, coming out later this year... The Blackberry 10:

Where is the keyboard?

Timing is everything.

The commercial taking a shot at touch screens was aired right around the same time as the world was getting the first sneak peaks at the Blackberry 10. And let me just say, the Blackberry 10 has some pretty awesome features like predictive words and a really cool camera feature that allows you to dynamically change elements of the photo on the fly. In any case, their marketing was not supporting the new phone.

I'm sure there is a perfectly good reason for why this happened, however it's unfortunate that they were not airing commercials that generated buzz for their new phone as opposed to bashing the very features it will have.

The good news about all of this is that the phone looks like it can sell itself and hopefully when the phone is released later this year people will have forgotten all about Meridith and how hard it is to type emails on a touch screen.

Landing Page Fail

Digital marketing channels like email and social media are a huge part of the modern day marketing mix. However, this is making some of the 'old school' methods like direct mail more effective. For this reason, I was excited to get this direct mail piece from Symantec. It was all really well done, except the most important piece... the landing page.

THE EPIC MARKETING FAIL

So far so good, very creative/compelling direct mail piece

Upon receiving the letter, I was intrigued by the creative image of broken glass over a Facebook page in the large windowed envelope. The tagline, image and message all sparked my curiosity and made me want to open it. Inside the copy was structured around a new white paper. The twist here, is that they want you to access the white paper by scanning the QR code. Cool, I guess. Even better, the marketers introduced a time constraint: the first 250 people who scan it, win a USB Robot! Awesome.

Clever use of QR code and clear call-to-action with time constraint.

Up to this point I was actually thinking I might have to write a blog on Epic Marketing Wins! And then I saw the landing page...

Enormously long and unecessary form landing page.

Why? Why are you asking me for all of my information when you already have it?! You mailed me a letter, the only possible way I could have got to this landing page is by receiving the letter and scanning the code with my QR reader.

This one is really unfortunate. They almost had a home-run, but instead they struck out by sending a bunch of people to their landing page who will likely abandon it due to an enormous & unnecessary form. Who wants to fill out a huge form on their smartphone? Do they have any idea how hard it is to even click inside those tiny boxes?! [sidenote: it took me almost 4 minutes to fill out all the details. That is a lifetime on a smart phone].

THE UN-FAILURE

I need to give some kudos to Symantec for this campaign. They avoided the clutter of the email inbox and leveraged an under-utilized channel. The creative was compelling and actually creative (unlike a lot of campaigns you see these days), the content was good, and they had a compelling call-to-action.

This campaign demonstrates why marketing is only as strong as its weakest link. You could have the best creative, or the best content, or the best call to action, but if one piece is missing the entire campaign will suffer. In this case it's the landing page. A recent study by Marketo showed that for every field you introduce on your landing pages, your conversion rates decrease by 2%. I would imagine this is multiplied to be even higher on a mobile device.

The thing with this campaign is that it is not even necessary to have a form at all. If the campaign was optimized with a tool like QReate & Track they could have personalized the QR codes for each visitor and therefore automatically have known when each prospect scanned the QR code. Conversion rates would have been much higher, and the experience for the prospects would have been better too.

Ah well, here's to hoping I get my free USB robot in the mail...

Epic Personalization Marketing Fail

Happy new years! Hope everyone had an awesome holiday, found some time to relax, spend time with family and friends, and maybe even let loose a little bit. Usually, I bring you guys Epic Marketing Fails, and that won't stop, but today as a 2012 bonus there is also an epic marketing win!

THE EPIC MARKETING FAIL

Apparently my name is N/A

This might not look like much at first glance, but trust me, it belongs on this blog. This is an email I got from someone who did not have my permission in regards to sponsoring some conferences in cities that are not even in my continent.

Those are all pretty bad, but even worse, is the personalization they use at the very start of the email. It tells me a few things:

• They don't know who I am
• They don't have a good email/marketing automation program
• They don't really know what they're doing

Can you imagine calling someone and as they answer the phone you say 'Hello Not Applicable, how are you doing today?'. I don't think that call is going to go very well, and neither did this email.

THE UN-FAILURE

I'm going to do this one a little differently, here is an example of how to do personalization properly:

Epic Marketing Win

This postcard was sent to me on my birthday this past winter by a guy who sold me my Volkswagen. In fact, he wasn't even the guy who we ended up ultimately buying the car from, but one who helped us along the way. Not only was it the only postcard I got on my birthday (my "friends" all wrote on my Facebook wall okay?!) but it was handwritten, included my finacee and arrived right on my birthday.

Here is a car salesman, who never got my business, who now lives in another city [I know this because he also sent me a separate letter about his whereabouts] and is really leveraging some direct marketing best practices. This kind of stuff blows me away.

It's kind of sad that with all of the technology that some marketers have, they are still missing the boat on how to use it to their advantage.

Here are 5 tips to avoid some common email marketing fails:

1. Use permission based marketing - get people to opt in to your emails. It will make a world of difference for everyone involved.
2. Have a clear and compelling call-to-action - you have a matter of seconds to communicate value and get your prospects to make the next step. 
3. Leverage good content - if you want people to take the next step, there needs to be some value in them doing so. Value for them, not you.
4. Subject lines are key - if your prospects don't open your message it doesn't matter what is inside.
5. Use personalization... properly - personalization can definitely help your email marketing, if used properly.

Radio Commercial Fail

Take a quick listen to the embedded video, and do it with your eyes closed.

Voice made for magazine ads

THE EPIC MARKETING FAIL

Does anything stand out to you? Did you catch the part about 50 fragrances, the exclusivity to the Bay, or the new trailer for the Gucci fragrance? My guess is that you were just focused on the sound of the woman's voice.

The woman in the ad is Bonnie Brooks, and she is the current President and CEO of the Bay. The Bay is Canada's largest merchandise retailer. Mrs. Brooks is an extremely accomplished executive who has worked in many senior positions including in marketing for the world's largest retailers. 

To be honest, I don't have much experience with radio commercials, but I have heard enough of them to know when one stands out. And this one does, but for the wrong reason. Her voice.

Am I the only one who thought her voice was just not made for radio? I decided to go where I always do when I have have a question of critical importance... Twitter. Here is some of what I found:

Needless to say, these people are not very positive, but there were some positive tweets as well, like this one:

You might be thinking to yourself, people are only going to comment on Twitter if it's negative. Well, that's not the case. I looked at ALL the tweets that came up for 'Bonnie Brooks' since the start of November. Here's what I found:

• 11 - Positive
• 13 - Neutral
• 50 - Negative

Out of 74 tweets, 67% of the people commenting on Twitter were negative. What am I trying to say here? These radio ads are having a negative impact on the Bay's overall brand.

THE UN-FAILURE

I can fully appreciate why a company would use their CEO on their ads. Apple built it's brand around Steve Jobs and look how that turned out. A leader of a company can express the company's voice to the market and can appear as a celebrity in their own right.

The problem is, not everyone was made to do TV and Radio commercials. There is something to be said about hiring talent to do voiceovers or acting. These people just have that certain something that makes your advertising to the next level.

One thing could have saved this commercial from ending up on epic marketing fails is testing. With tools like marketing automation and Twitter it's much easier to gauge how your audience is reacting. The Bay commercials with Bonnie Brooks have been going on for years now. A quick search on Twitter could have shown how their market was reacting.

I really respect what Bonnie Brooks has done for the Bay. Making it a more upscale department store and leveraging the great name that the store has earned over 341 years of business! [Sidenote: That is a long time! I knew they have been around forever but I didn't know it was THAT long]. I hope I am half as successful in my career as she is. I also hope that they figure out another, better way, to leverage their CEO, and leave the radio ads to some hired guns.

P.S.

This is too good not to share:

Bonnie Brooks impersonator

QR Code FAIL

I was driving home last week when I saw my inspiration for the first blog post. An epic marketing fail in it's purest form.

QR code on highway on-ramp

THE EPIC MARKETING FAIL

When you first look at this image, hopefully the epic marketing fail hits you like a wrench to the face. If not, if you are sitting there thinking "these QR codes are neat and putting them on the side of the highway on-ramp might be a good use of my marketing dollars", then please read this post in it's entirety - I'd like to save you some money.

QR codes are like bar codes. Once scanned they automatically take you to a pre-defined URL that is programmed into the code. These codes are commonly used in print ads to get people from a static ad to an interactive web experience.

I'm guessing the person who put this sign up has never tried to scan one of these codes. If they did they would know that you need to be within a few inches of the code and keep your phone perfectly still for 5-10 seconds before it recognizes it.

I think I'm a pretty good multitasker and driver, but the idea of trying to scan a QR code while accelerating to 100km/h and merging into another lane of traffic is just inhuman. Even if I decided to try scanning this thing, I'd need my QR reader app opened first and be a navy seal QR code sniper to get the thing scanned at that speed.

The failure of this sign rattled my marketing world so much so that I pulled a U-turn, parked in a nearby parking lot and walked up the on-ramp at 11pm at night with my fiancee. I had to know who thought this would be a good idea.

I located the sign, loaded the QR app on my iPhone, kneeled down, pointed my phone at the sign from 7 inches away and timed myself to see how long it look for it to read the sign. The whole process took 42 seconds and then I got to the homepage of this website: www.tirechangers.ca.

This is why I want to do this blog. I want to help other marketers from making the same mistake. TireChangers is actually a great idea. They come to your house and change your tires (very important here in snowy canadian winters) so that you don't have to go through the hassle of bringing your car into the garage. Brilliant business idea, however the marketing could use some work.

THE UN-FAILURE

Top 5 tips to avoid your QR code from ending up on Epic Marketing Fails:

1. Make them easy to scan

Think about your audience. They are going to have to take out their phone, find their QR reader app amongst their 162 other apps and wait for it to load. Then they will need to position their phone on the code in the perfect position and wait for the app to recognize the code. This takes time and some patience.

2. Provide clear call-to-action

People are too busy these days to just randomly scan your QR code for the fun of it. You need to give them a reason to scan your code. A discount, a recipe, or a piece of information that they cannot get anywhere else are some good starting points.

3. Make your ad stand on it's own

In a perfect marketing world you create a great compelling ad that makes everyone scan your QR code, but the reality is that the majority of your audience will not scan your code. That doesn't mean that the ad is a waste. Use the bulk of the ad to build your brand and educate your audience. 

4. Build on your ad

Don't send people to your homepage from your QR code. The landing page they get sent to should tie into the ad that they got there from and complete the story that you are trying to tell them. Make it feel personal, like you know where they are coming from and create an experience for the prospect.

5. Track your success

In this day in age, marketers should be able to justify how much revenue they are driving from each of their marketing activities. Ads in which QR codes are being used are no different. Technology has made this possible, but it is still challenging to get to that point. If you aren't there yet, you need to start somewhere, whether it's website hits, # of new customers or pipeline - track something that will enable you to determine if it was a good use of your money.

That's it for this one. Let me know what you guys think. Is this an epic marketing fail? Have you seen worse? I want to hear about them! Over-and-out.

Why this blog is not a fail.

I have been thinking about doing a blog for a while now, but since there are millions of blogs out there now about marketing, I thought I would take a slightly different approach.

I would like this to be an educational blog, with a twist. That twist will be that I will post epic marketing fails, outline why they are fails, and what they could have done different to turn those fails into wins.

What I have noticed is that there are several consistencies with fail blogs/videos/pictures:

• Bicycles
• Alcohol
• Rope swings
• Skateboards
• Car accidents
• News reporters
• People falling down

While these things are all entertaining to watch, you rarely walk away learning something that could actually help your life/career/business... okay maybe I did learn you shouldn't try to karate chop coconuts on a hard metal railing:

My hope is that by breaking down where some of our fellow marketers have gone wrong, that we can all have a laugh and maybe even learn something from it.

Let's see how this goes. I have a couple of ideas for my first post, but I will have to think about what I want to start with.