This post is by Michael Pollock, the original owner of Small Business Branding. Yaro Starak now owns and produces the latest content for this blog.
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We are becoming increasingly resistant to marketing messages being pushed at us, even those that come in the form of friendly reminders that we’ve already agreed to receive. Case in point: Denise Wakeman asks "What’s too much marketing?" Take note of Denise’s dilemma:
"How much is too much? Today I received an email from a disgruntled
subscriber who told me I send too many email reminders and marketing
messages.
Denise is a smart cookie, and if you read her full post, you’ll see she makes a strong argument for frequent contact with your network. Especially when you’re making an offer that’s time-sensitive, like her upcoming Conversations With Experts. By the way, I receive those same offers from Denise, and they don’t bother me. But I’m tad biased in this case.
The fact is the more "just-in-case" messages you send, the greater your risk of losing people’s attention. Or worse, pissing them off altogether. Just-in-case messages:
- Just in case you need this product/service right now, here it is.
- Just in case you forgot my initial offer, here it is again.
- Just in case you weren’t ready to buy the last time, here’s the offer again.
- Just in case someone else is offering a similar product/service, here’s my offer again.
Despite my satirical graphic above, people are not sitting at their computer impatiently waiting for the next marketing message – the next just in case message – to arrive in their email box. In fact, think back over the last 10 email messages you received and read. How many of them made you say, "you know, this is just what I needed to read right now." Anything that doesn’t make you say that, eliminate it – unsubcribe or block the sender. Okay, maybe not everything, but the point is we’re inundated with just-in-case information. So are the people in your network.
What people really need is just-in-time information. What makes Google so great? What makes Amazon so great? What makes eBay so great? Easily accessible, just-in-time information whenever I choose to go get it. If you’re peddling some sort of knowledge/information product nowadays – and most of us are – this is the standard you must meet.
Does that mean you can’t push out marketing messages to people any longer without pissing them off or losing credibility. Not necessarily. The key is your marketing message itself has to provide real value to the receiver. An example of such a message is this one from Marcia Yudkin (a great resource, by the way). I received it via email a few days ago. All her Marketing Minute messages are like this one – relevant, timely, brief, valuable – and I look forward to receiving and reading them (a key characteristic of a strong small business brand).
An alternative strategy involves incorporating your marketing messages into a blog. One big advantage of blogs and RSS, in general, is they are pull-based rather than push-based. As a consumer, I can pull the information to me rather than having it pushed at me. Control. I like that. Using this strategy, your marketing message should be set in the background rather than out front, in your reader’s face. After all, who would voluntarily visit a blog simply to be marketed to?
Denise uses this strategy well on her blog. As do B.L. Ochman and Debbie Weil. Even Hugh "branding is dead" Macleod incorporates a couple of marketing messages into the margin of his blog. But we don’t mind the marketing messages because the value of the information these folks provide via their blogs is well worth it.