Kodak's German Sacristan

Cross Channel Marketing: Just As Face To Face As We Can Get

  

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How many times do you have to talk to a customer before you get your sale? I don’t mean “talk”, like sending a personalized email. I mean talk – really talk, face to face. If you’re in business, you know how many times you or your sales people have to get in front of a potential customer and talk to them before the sale happens. And the answer won’t often be once.

People take time to focus on what they need and on what you are selling. They take time to think about your offer. They may take more time, after that, to warm up to the idea of spending money, to discuss it with their colleagues, to rationalize their choice, and to take the final decision.

Real, non-digital, life teaches us that buying is a process, not an action. And all we’re doing, with all our fancy digital channels, is trying to mimic what we would do if we had the time and energy and resources to go round the world and talk to every one of our potential customers face to face. How many calls can a person make face to face? That is the problem. It is relevant, but it’s just not productive enough. That is why we use all these channels today.

Digital marketing is just marketing, done digitally. That’s all. We’ve been doing this kind of marketing for the last 300 years or so, visiting our customers, doing it face to face.

So that’s a good starting point. I always ask marketers to ask themselves three questions. What do you need to know to sell your product? How many calls would you have to make to sell it face to face?  What would be the objectives of each of your calls? Because why should we assume that an approach that would not work face to face will work in a digital context? If it does, it will be the exception. You need to start with the basics..

If people I don’t know come up to me and start off “Hi German…”, my immediate reaction isn’t “Oh, how nice. This guy is addressing me personally.” It’s more along the lines of wondering why this person thinks he can buttonhole me so directly. And if he gets the name the wrong way round, as we have all managed to do so often in the past, my reaction to “Hi Sacristan…” is going to be even more negative.  And if you get my name right and capture my attention, but then fail to be relevant with your messaging and creativity, the negative impact will be much greater than if you did not call me by my name in the first place. If you don’t call me by my name and you say something irrelevant to me, I will think “Well, he wasn’t talking to me anyway.”  But if you call me by my name you are talking to me, so make sure what you’re saying is correct. No mistakes!

In the same way, if the sales pitch I use in a digital context is not one that would work face to face, it’s really not likely to work like this either.

I know we’re all supposed to be talking about cross channel, multi-media, multi-touch marketing at the moment. But I prefer to just call it digital marketing, or even just marketing. Because all the new tools and channels are only enablers. The new InSite Campaign Manager gives people the most fantastic toolkit. The data specialists Kodak has on call to advise about data enrichment and predictive modeling are incredibly knowledgeable. But it’s all there for just one thing – to help us get as close as we can to the reality and impact of a face-to-face call. And if we can keep that in mind at every stage, that’s how we’ll get the most out of cross channel communication.