you had me at hello

This line (title) from Jerry Maguire is the holy grail of marketing. Seth Godin's blog about attention surplus made me ask myself: marketing tries to create awareness and consideration; but if people are exposed to increasing more messages, how do you break through - how do you get them at hello?

As Seth points out, there are a ton of free content channels out there, and bad marketers flood these outlets with generic "spray-marketing" content that likely yields much lower returns than traditional direct mail or advertising. People do it because it's perceived to be free, so what the hell. But, it's not free - it costs money to produce, it costs money to support and it costs money to respond to potentially spurious customers in the hopes of finding the real spenders. But there's an even higher cost - if you do it badly, there is a risk that your poor execution will be visible to millions, just like all those videos of dumb things people or companies do.

Treating your public "face" casually is never a good thing, and speaks volumes about your organization, its attitudes, and its commitment to its customers.

Seth talked about the attention drought. In the old days, there were very few channels to reach the individual consumer; if you had a successful one (really popular TV show, magazine, etc.), you were able to command a premium for advertising because people couldn't avoid the ads (Tivo + no remote controls), and you were much more likely (with a good ad) to create broad awareness. The market was hungry for it and would pay attention. Creativity trumped insight.

Today three things work against you - profusion of content, proliferation of channels, and easy tools to avoid consuming advertising. Add search engines to refine surfing and (if you're like me) the ability to ignore web ads, and most "traditional" marketing campaigns will struggle.

If in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, then in the land of the sighted, the one-eyed marketer is lost.

To get me at hello is to give me what I want when I want it and how I want it. Google and other search engines have tried this, and initially I think it worked really well because it was new, there weren't that many advertisers, people devoted a little (not a lot) space to it on their pages, and it was a novelty (just like TV ads in the 50s). But now there's too many ads, it's obvious where they are on the page, and they're easy to ignore.

Great marketing is about really (really) understanding your audience, what they need and care about, and then providing them what they want with ideas, words, and images that mean something to them. A very smart communications consultant told me that more often than not, people communicate in ways that are meaningful to them but not their audiences. He said that great communicators care not at all about how it looks to the speaker, but rather whether the listener/reader/watcher got what they wanted out of it.

The Internet and search engines have made the Long Tail real; they've led to people being able to very precisely state their need and find what they want. I fear that marketers are still mistakenly led by traditional approaches and metrics that applied in the old days when BIG reach was key. They ignore the real hard work of precisely identifying, segmenting and understanding your target audience, being able to craft a message and offer in a way that implicitly resonates with that audience, and then finding the ideal medium with which to reach them.

Find them, know them, care about them, and they will care about you. That's how you get them at hello.