What do you do when something strikes you as funny? Probably grin a little bit and continue about your business. Even if it makes you happy or makes you feel good, it rarely makes you stop to be drawn deeper. What about when something angers you, or makes you feel a little sad or guilty?
Most people move away from those stimuli. But when something intrigues you, it draws you closer. You need to see what’s in that red lacquered box.
Mystery in marketing is an easy concept to justify, and yet it’s still fairly rare. We’ve been fascinated by it ever since one dark and stormy night many years ago when one of our clients in charge of marketing Business Intelligence products at Microsoft challenged us to come up with a direct and interactive marketing approach that was really different.
One of our very talented designers and our VP of Strategy (who was an account supervisor at the time) went way out on a limb and proposed a simple card to be inserted into a tiny black and gold envelope (the minimum size the post office will accept). On one side of the black and gold card was the recipient’s name and a URL that included the recipient’s name (what is now called a PURL). On the other side was the message, “This won’t take long.” That’s it.
The only real hint was the return address on the card said Microsoft Business Intelligence—we tipped our hand a little, on purpose.
I know what you’re thinking. With a thrilling product like Business Intelligence, why do you need slick marketing? Anyone would love to curl up with a hefty brochure about performance metrics and expedited decision making. But they asked and we delivered.
You’re a smart marketer, so you’ve guessed before I tell you that the raw response was through the roof. Deep into double digits. What you don’t know is that the leads were extremely well qualified and we were able to engage the respondents, delivering information appropriate to their position in the buying cycle. Here’s how:
1. Intrigue requires creativity and darned good database work
The very first step in building a campaign like this is to make sure you can get good lists. You have to know you are talking to the right people. This is very different from sending something to every carbon-based life-form and trying to get the few people who are interested to respond. A lot of marketing applies a filter in this semi-intentional way. You send a lot of it out there, and the small percentage of people who might actually need or want your stuff will respond.
But what if your creative is so clever that everyone responds? Well, then you’ve got a big database for much less than it would cost to buy it outright. But you’ve got a problem to solve—the respondents have to tell you a lot about themselves for you to gain value from such a campaign. If the whole campaign has a strategy as clever as the initial creative, and the back end treats the respondents well, then eventually you will know the likely value of each respondent, have permission to talk with them, and you know how to make each conversation relevant. Read Lyle’s post on passive profiling for some clues on how we do this.
2. You got me here, now keep me
You need a plan, a good one, for keeping up the mystery, or making the engagement interesting. People came to your place out of curiosity. If all they see is product blather, they’ll bail. You need to start a conversation that’s as interesting, as unique, and as intriguing as the the piece that got them there.
For starters, you know something about them—at least as much as the lists you rented to acquire them contains. You know what company they work for and have a good idea about what they do. So you do the same thing that any wise person on a first date does: You talk about them. Not so much that you look like a stalker, and not in a prying way, just enough to demonstrate a high degree of relevance. You talk about their job challenges, their company’s competitors, and how tough the business environment is for their industry. Sounds impossible? Hardly, we were doing it ten years ago. Sounds hard? Yup, welcome to new millennium marketing—it’s all hard.
But the really tough assignment is yours. You need to get your company to set aside it’s “corporate branding guidelines” to make the campaign look like it needs to, not like yet another brochure. We understand and support the idea of a branding guideline, just don’t apply it to your acquisition marketing—guaranteed boredom for everyone but a very rare few. Say these words to yourself: “I want a really creative campaign—but it needs to adhere to our corporate identity.” If you can do it without gagging then maybe it’s okay—or maybe you’re delusional.
3. Okay, I stuck around, now what?
What are you going to do with these folks? You’ve got a reputation with them that you have to maintain. It’s a good one, but it’s a burden—you need to be constantly cool from now on. They need more information to make a buying decision. We used to use everything we knew initially about them, and everything they told us as they interacted with the site to build them a portfolio of white papers, customer testimonials and product reviews. It was effective but a little bloodless. But we stayed in touch with them for the time it took to move through the sales cycle and turned even the coldest of them into useful leads. Our old demo site
The problem with customer testimonials is that they are completely sanitized, and every reader knows they’ve been edited, polished and buffed to display that consistent corporate shine. You and I and all of your readers are pros at detecting and filtering out this information-free junk. The rough and tumble world of Blogs and forums may provide a more convincing information source, and we’ve developed ways to make that work for you. You don’t want sycophants humming your praises in dull monotone.
You want the balance of comments to be in your favor. This is a topic for another post, but marketers today need to be part of the conversation going on about their product, and make certain that strong but honest voices are making a positive case. Of course if your product really sucks then you may need to stick with traditional methods.
4. Show me the money! When does something get sold?
When the sales force engages. The best part about campaigns like this is that the sales force can engage at will, and you don’t have to worry about them abandoning leads that are not far enough through the sales cycle because YOU are going to stay in touch. If you build a full campaign like this, and keep refreshing the input to the machine with new creative ways to bring people in, the sales force will have all the leads they can handle.
Summary
It may feel that we’ve wandered far afield in talking about mystery and marketing. But we really haven’t. Very high response approaches bring a new set of opportunities that need to be optimized. You need to think about them differently in order to gain their value. The creativity and mystery that sparks the response needs to be continued and guarded throughout the relationship. The most deadly words in any relationship:
“I’m bored with him.”
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