Niche Marketing Lessons, Or If You Love It, Put A Toe Ring On It

And Now For Something Completely Stupid

In my 15 years in online marketing and advertising, I have been fortunate enough to work for several high throughput providers that have also provided creative services.

Some of those clients were among the largest advertising plays in the world, in major consumer categories. These resulted in online ads that you have probably seen at one time or another, for brands that you have definitely heard of.

Others? Not so much.

This is what happens when it comes to new technologies. Sometimes, you get clients that are more bleeding edge than leading edge. If they are willing to spend, you do the business. Preferably by getting the money up front.

Looking back, I think my favorite was an outfit called Timmy Toes. They sold toe rings, and the merchandise was not, shall we say, subtle. So the SKUs ran into thousands of dollars, or tens of thousands of dollars, for stuff that just looked like it made walking or standing impossible.

The site sold just toe rings mind you, nothing else – and this was not a retargeting campaign, it was a broad jewelry placement. To users who were not just shopping for toe rings, since that select would have been a distribution set of next to nothing.

I am quite confident in saying that the team and I made the finest toe ring ads... that you have never seen.

And I am also confident in saying that you will be shocked, shocked, to learn that neither the campaign nor the business turned out to be a long-term success…

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So what do you learn from doing this kind of work? Plenty, actually.

• Niche plays can be big winners, but usually aren't.

Toe rings notwithstanding, there has been a sizable percentage of winners that looked like oddballs at the start of a campaign. New plays to market always are more likely to fail, but as always with marketing, list and offer matter a lot more than creative. And when they get the right mix, it’s magic. Magic, you might know by now, is only magic because it's unexpected.

• Competitive analysis is higher.

In niche markets, the players are all working in a very small space, and are much more aware of what the other players are doing – especially the lead dog. From price points to language and execution, speed to duplicate or enhance is just higher when there are only a handful of players to monitor. It also means that your niche provider might have competition for your interest soon, so make sure you've got your policies on category exclusivity set up ahead of time.

• Your client contact is either a lifer or a transient.

If you have deep knowledge of a niche consumer category, you either love it and want to keep working with it for the rest of your days… or it is just a means to an end, and you will move along as soon as you can to avoid the business equivalent of type casting. (Which means this pro deserves your best service, since they are likely to find you again in some bigger category later. But I digress.)

• Approval to innovate is generally all or nothing.

Legal or brand compliance is usually what is cited for why a new version cannot look or read very different from the control, but the real reasons are probably more idiosyncratic than that. Your best move is to ask for all past work, and see if execution moved off the control before.

• Egos will not match market share.

The smallest fish in my career have had some of the most exact standards and stringent branding needs. Especially if you are dealing with a dominant market leader, you can find yourself with a client that is harder to please than someone with 100X budget. They will also fight you over what should be mentioned in the selling copy, usually in the favor of some deep benefit that’s far more meaningful to the maker than the buyers.

• Their audience may not be as unique as they think.

Data-driven look-alike modeling proves this, but so does just general marketing common sense. Our toe ring vendor back in the day would have been better off compiling a young and affluent list who viewed non-traditional publishing sites. Instead he chose to test his work against people who spent similar amounts on traditional jewelry. (To be fair, when you have the idea of selling really expensive toe rings over the Web, how can you dial down your own genius long enough to listen to someone else's opinion or data?)

Please share your favorite niche client in the comments, and anything you have learned from the work. I would love to hear about something odder than mine!

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Connect with me personally on LinkedIn. I also welcome email at davidlmountain at gmail dot com.

Managing Creative Talent: Horses For Courses

Brainstorm

Horses for courses (British & Australian expression): Choosing suitable people for particular activities, because everyone has different skills. "Ah well, horses for courses. Just because a plumber can mend your washing machine, it doesn't follow that they can mend your car as well."

A small disclaimer before we get into Hurt Feelings. The following is not meant in total seriousness or sincerity, if for no other reason than I have been creative talent myself, and my best friends do this work. I also do not really know all that much about horses, or have any great like, or dislike, for them. Having said that...

If you ever find yourself with the great privilege that is managing a group of copy or design pros, you will find it to be a unique managerial challenge. Personality traits are much more likely to be part of the mix than in any other department, and the product of their professional work is more dependent on their mental state than most. You will also find a great mix of work requests, from template to breakthrough, or tried and true to break the mold. Which means that a good team contains...

1) War horses -- day in, day out workers who are capable of feats of great strength and low glamour.

Advantage: The warhorse stops for nothing. Durable, dogged, able to grind through tedious revisions and multiple executions. If you are running a shop that delivers on deadline and/or does many variations for different markets or seasonality, you might only have these folks on staff. (They also might not be suitable for traditional agencies.)

Disadvantage: A steady diet of tedious tasks will blunt the artistic edge of, well, anyone. Warhorses that are mistreated tend to go into engineering or management. (That is what we call a tell, folks.) In addition, when it comes to pure art or words, the warhorse is at a severe disadvantage against other pros.

How to handle: Do not let your warhorse know that their primary utility is the work ethic, as no one ever got into creative because they dreamed of working crazy hours. Give them low-leverage trick horse or race jobs from time to time to stretch their legs, but do not give them too much slack. Warhorses with time on their hands get excessively nervous about their job security, since it seems like everyone can just soldier on and get through a tough situation. (This is actually Not True At All, especially with creatives. Keep some of the types listed in this article at their desks past 50 hours a week, and all you will get is weak work, worse QA, and fast turnover. Moving on.)

2) Trick horse -- Innovative pros who are only happy when they are overcoming obstacles, through either experiments or moments of genius.

Advantage: Most likely to give you a great idea in a brainstorm, beat a control, or profitably break a template.

Disadvantage: Might need those hurdles to maintain interest in a project, and go off the brief to create the kind of situation where they are most comfortable. Turnover can be quite high if not properly managed.

How to handle: Make it very clear when innovation is, and is not, merited. Make sure to make space in projects to keep them occupied, and also keep a side list of "rainy day" projects (Q4 designs out of season is a good start) to refresh their batteries for when they've had to run in a straight line.

3) Thoroughbred -- high speed, cost and maintenance pros who are part of your biggest wins (and losses). What most people think of as creative.

Advantage: On the right day and track, frankly awesome to watch, and can do the kind of work that breaks down doors and gets people remembered and promoted.

Disadvantage: Can be temperamental, unable or unwilling to adapt to new conditions, and fail to improve the team dynamic and atmosphere. Usually do not do well with a very high workload.

How to handle: With enough deference that shows the talent is recognized, but not so much as to give the rest of the team the sense that they are all secondary players. In my experience, thoroughbreds also react well to light managerial training and responsibilities, as it compliments their method, rather than just their execution.

4) Dressage -- Disciplined high-art / concept folks who bring strict standards and training to their work. Typically bring advanced degrees to the table.

Advantage: Will keep a project on point with a discerning eye that ensures consistent standards. Portfolio level work comes from them routinely.

Disadvantage: Poor flexibility, throughput and speed, and can be a challenge to morale. If v1 never looks different from v2, you are working with dressage.

How to handle: Try to bring their good points to the rest of the team, while limiting the influence that they might have on deadline or low-leverage work. Dressage-style pros tend to gravitate to the same kind of jobs, whether it is branding, public relations releases, or any other single patron position.

So if you find yourself unable to relate to your team, going through a lot of personnel turnover, or on a performance plateau... maybe you just aren’t running them on the right courses.

Oh, and one last thing: do not ever tell them what horse you think they are. Because they will think the whole thing is demeaning, or spend too much time trying to be something they are not…

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Connect with me personally on LinkedIn. You can check out my agency's blog at Marketing and Advertising Direction. The site has a growing number of posts and free content that you can use to improve your campaigns. I am sure that you will find it worth your time.

In addition to copywriting, direction and strategy, we also provide design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. Tell us what you need done, and your budget, and we will work out an RFP. I also welcome email at davidlmountain at gmail dot com.

Frickin' Lasers: A Marketing and Advertising Tale Of Horror

I See Your Darwin Fish And Raise

Part of a continuing series of moments from my career, in which great breakthroughs came from great setbacks. The point, as always, is to work away from fear, and learn from every mistake. Besides, they make for better stories.

In early 2000, I took a gig with a hot start up. My new employers were a pair of college kids who started a Web site for musicians. Their concept was to start with a vibrant community by offering up great content, then expand it to commerce with peer to peer sales and online studio file sharing, then cap it all off by offering direct e-commerce sales. As direct sales to musicians were rife with hard sell abuse from commissioned salespeople and very high profit margins, there was definitely an opportunity to be disruptive. Besides, it was 2000, when you could get funding for the idea of shipping heavy bags of pet food over the Internet, just so long as you offered free shipping and talked about the Long Tail.

The site was beloved by a billionaire who was also a musician. The billionaire gave the kids $15 million in venture capital through his funding company, with the promise of as much as they could feasibly spend later, such was his love for the site and its vision. All we had to do was prove the concept and Get Big Fast. The kids hired some pros, and those pros hired more pros. I took the gig as one of the first dozen employees as a direct marketing manager.  Within three months, we had 60 hires, new offices, and plans to change the world.

My duties included generating a lot of selling copy for the e-commerce play, coming up with ideas for and doing the execution of sweepstakes to grow our house list, and serving as on-air talent at gear shows. My main duty on a week-in, week-out basis was to write e-commerce newsletters. We started from nothing, and through consistent effort, effective promotions, and appealing price points, quickly drummed up a six-figure house list.

The newsletters had some viral pass-along and good metrics on response and unsubscribe, and directly generated over 10% of all sales… but it started to plateau. I noticed that more and more of our competitors had better looking emails than we did. Ours were text only, with long URLs, and no images of the gear we were trying to sell. (Remember, it was 2000.) Theirs had images of the gear, and call to action buttons.

I asked our CTO, one of the two kids who started the enterprise, for help to bring us up to the new standard… and got pushed off, then pushed off some more. There were other priorities that we needed to take care of first. The newsletter ROI was doing just fine as is. Our core demo had low bandwidth (remember, 2000) and did not need rich media. We needed to wait for the second round of funding. And so on, and so on. Recognizing a wall for a wall, I worked on other stuff and waited for the second round of funding before I asked again.

Then one day, I came into the office and caught a whiff of something burning. Popping up from my cubicle, I found our founders poised over a conveyor belt with a complicated apparatus and monitor. This turned out to be an industrial engraving machine with lasers. They were using it to test for possible trade show use. The idea was that instead of buying stuff and paying to have our logo put on it, we’d burn our logo into goods. Well, OK then. I went back to my desk… and spent the rest of the week wondering when these kids were going to get tired of their new toy, as they pretty much turned into Beavis and Butthead in setting the laser on literally hundreds of objects, because hey, LASERS.

Within a month, the billionaire pulled out from the second round of funding. No one else in the industry stepped in to buy the company, since we hadn’t drummed up enough sales to prove the concept. (Also, well, they liked their old margins.) Nearly everyone lost their jobs. I still can’t see a scene in a movie with lasers in it without thinking of the experience.

Lessons learned?

1) In direct marketing, design is more important than copy.

Yes, this one hurts. I’m a writer, after all. Nevertheless, if your work cannot compete on a level playing field, there is only so much that you can do to overcome that. For the most part, it does not matter how good your copy is; imagery trumps.

2) Your competition is (always) watching.

Especially in email marketing, where signing up with a personal email address is beyond easy. If your work is not being looked at, your work is either too weak or compromised to be of interest, or your competition is criminally negligent. Our sweepstakes were copied quickly by the competition, and our pricing made life better for consumers in the category… but only for as long as we were around.

This also means that, in the event of company blowup, you might discover you have some fans. I wound up doing consulting work for another player in the space for many years.

3) The wrong venture capital or money will get you killed.

After this experience, I have ran into any number of people who have similar horror stories about the billionaire in question. He is infamous for it, really, though in fairness, the track record was not as pronounced back in 2000. Had we known the second round was shaky, there is no way we would have been as aggressive with our burn rate.

4) The wrong engineering will get you killed faster than the wrong money.

Why did my old CTO spend more time on lasers (frickin’ lasers!) than, well, something that might actually make money? Maybe because he already knew the jig was up, and selling more gear was not going to change anything. Maybe because he was in his ‘20s and really liked lasers. Maybe because he really believed that musicians in our world did not care about pictures. Maybe it was all an Andy Kaufman-esque performance art piece, or that we were secretly filming my reaction for a “Punk’d” style show.

In the end, the reasons do not matter. Either engineering gives you the tools you need to succeed, or they do not. And if they do not, you’ve got a massive problem.

5) Sometimes, it is better to ask for forgiveness, instead of permission.

If I had this situation now, I probably would not sit back and wait for the CTO to change his priorities to match mine. Instead, I would hire for the necessary skill, either on a contract basis or with a free-lance project, and run the test as soon as possible. If the test won, the CTO might have been annoyed with me for running an end around, but probably not aloud, since he would be on such poor political footing. If the test failed, I would give my blocking agent the good news that his future roadmap was now more open, and moved to testing other parts of the program, while learning something profound about our customer base. In any event, I would not have been sitting on my hands for the last month of employment.

6) Never sit on your hands.

Some sharks, even if they have lasers (frickin’ lasers!), have to keep moving to breathe… and so does direct marketing. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you are told to just engage in a holding pattern and wait for some outside force to act, it’s time to start looking for your next hunting ground. 

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You've read this far, so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I also welcome email to davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or you can use the top right form on this page. All quotes are free of sharks, lasers, and cost.