cityread london marketing presentation thinking like your audience

Thinking like your Audience

How to ensure what you do is really engaging

Julia Kingsford, Kingsford Campbell @juliakingsford

For the purpose of this presentation I’m going to pretty much

conflate all aspects of marketing, advertising, promotion, PR into a

single concept. If this is your business it gets pretty nitty gritty

between them but if it’s not then they all do the same thing, which

is communicate what you want to say to people who aren’t

listening, and of course the ultimate purpose of all marketing is to

sell things, whether products, experiences or ideas and concepts.

There’s a huge gulf between what marketers want and what their

audiences want.

Marketers want people to buy, attend or engage with the product,

experience or concept they’re selling.

People just want to get on with their lives.

There is very little we actually need to do. We need food and

water and to keep warm and dry. Not much difference to our

ancestors in terms of what we need, so almost all our decisions

are driven by desire, by what we want.

Marketers have many tricks up their sleeves to persuade you that

what they want is what you want, but they’ve also got a very big

problem which is the obscene quantity of messages that are being

constantly hurled at you.




Its 11.15, you’ve probably been awake for four or so hours, about

a quarter of your waking day. Now think about how much you’ve

been marketed to already and you see something of the

marketers’ predicament.

When you woke up you may have turned on the radio or TV or

read the papers or gone online to check social media. You may

have checked your email and had loads of direct marketing arrive

in your inbox. Then you had to get here, whether by bus or tube or

train or bike or foot. You’d have seen lots of actual ads – in fact in

the average 45 minute commute Londoners are exposed to 130

adverts for more than 80 different products.

This video is just of the minute journey up the escalators at

Leicester Square. See how many ads there are and then see how

many you remember after a few minutes...

In an entire day you’re likely to see 3,500-5000 ‘ads’. And you’d

have also received lots of soft marketing messages – plenty of

‘news’ stories are driven by promotional messages whether

they’re surveys commissioned by brands or coverage of events.

Can you remember any of the ads you’ve seen today let alone had

the sort of ‘I want that’ response that the people who paid for and

created them wanted you to have?

https://vimeo.com/112265147

https://vimeo.com/112265147




So the first challenge a marketer has is getting people to even

notice their ads above the hubub. Because an ad’s first job is to

inform people that what it’s advertising exists because until you

know that you can’t possibly engage with it.

You’re most likely to remember ads for things you’re pre-disposed

to be interested in which is good all round, to an extent. Most

make-up companies don’t care if men remember their ads or not.

But if you’re trying to sell something with quite a mass potential

audience and you want to reach beyond regular boundaries it’s

harder.

Of course the medium you’re advertising in has a lot to do with

how you can catch people’s attention. Huge amounts of it has to

do with dwell time – the amount of time people will devote to

paying attention to your ads. TV or radio or print or tube or

outdoor or shop window or digital or social media or direct email

all demand different responses from us and some are more

invasive than others. Then there are budgetary issues, what you

can afford in terms of ad buy as well as the production of the ad

and the fee to the brilliant creative who thinks it up.

But regardless of all of this your marketing is most powerful if

you’re engaging and I’m going to dwell here for a moment

because it’s really the key. Because it’s easy to say: be engaging,

it’s much harder to demonstrate it. How do you engage?




And this is also where it comes back to being directly relevant to

Cityread. Because of course we’re not expecting you to run huge

ads for Cityread, but whether you’re thinking about a super

expensive TV ad or the wording of a tweet, thinking about how to

engage your audience is where it starts and ends.

I’m not going to show you bad ads. You can open any paper and

see them for yourself. They’re not necessarily ineffective, they can

often communicate lots of information but they equally don’t

necessarily truly engage people in a way that these ads do.

These ads say the most amazing amount without using any words.

These big budget TV ads are all showing you products that the

companies sell but what they’re actually selling you are dreams.

Nike

John Lewis

Kindle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XviR7esUvo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYOsWWKHZVw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCChiNT14KY




So how on earth is any of this expensive, shiny advertising relevant

to libraries and Cityread?

Well. Good question. And there are two parts of the answer.

The first is because reading is quite complicated to sell. People

have some very set views about it. Those who don’t read can be

extremely difficult to convert and no one will know this more than

you as you are at the frontline of trying to get people who use

your other services to use your reading services too. Or those who

come in to get books for their kids but aren’t interested for

themselves. And even amongst those who read there can be a lot

of complicated feelings. I don’t want to put you on the spot by

asking if you’ve read Rivers of London but I’m willing to bet quite a

few of you haven’t. And for whatever reason that is – doesn’t

seem like the sort of book you’d enjoy, you don’t have a copy,

there are loads of other books ahead of it on your to read pile –

you can bet you’ll find the same reasons amongst even your most

avid readers. So looking to learn something from some of the best

ads around, the ads that have really touched people, have been

noticed, have created an emotional response has value.

And to underline this I’m going to show you one last ad. And it’s

one I’m personally responsible for from my time at Foyles. It’s not

the most high tech, well designed ad but it did see an 18% like for

like sales increase across the business because it really, really

spoke to the people we wanted to engage.




And it gives me a chance to talk about being sure you know what

your aim is before you set out to do any marketing. You aim can

literally be whatever you want it to be: getting people to join the

library, getting them to read Rivers of London, getting more books

borrowed in April than March or the previous April, getting

reading group attendance up, getting people to a talk with Ben,

anything. But then focus your message around that and only judge

the success or not of what you’re trying to do against it.




And secondly I’m going to introduce you to the marketing funnel.

This essentially describes the journey that everyone takes when

engaging with a product and the reason it’s a funnel is because

you inevitably lose people at every stage.




Stage 1 is Awareness, getting to the point where people are aware

of what’s happening. I used to run World Book Night and you

wouldn’t believe the amount of times people would be

disappointed at me because they met someone who’d never

heard of it. Apparently it took the government £15m in ad spend

and 7 years to get to the point where they believed they had full

saturation of the 5 a day message. So if anyone thinks a couple of

tweets will get your message out then think again. Think back to

how many messages you’ve already been exposed to today that

you don’t remember. The truth of this funnel is that all that white

space above it should be much, much bigger to represent all the

people who never make it to awareness. So once you’ve got the

opportunity to engage people beyond that, really grab on to it.

So how do you make people aware? Well you think carefully about

how you’re going to reach them. What combination of

communication methods are available to you and aren’t going to

annoy people at the same time as making them aware? Because if

you annoy them you’re never going to get to...

Stage 2 which is Interest. They know what’s going on and they like

the idea of it. You’ve got their attention with your poster or flyer

or your tweet or facebook post or your email but their attention

will lapse and they won’t engage unless you get your messaging

right. Each media needs to be treated slightly differently but you

always need to think about who your prospective audience is and




what will actually draw them in to be interested in what you are

promoting to them.

After interest are Stage 3, Evaluation and stage 4, Trial. These

stages are moved through at different speeds depending on what

you’re buying. If it’s a really expensive car then it may take you a

while to evaluate your options, if it’s what book to read next then

it’s a less expensive decision but not necessarily any less

emotionally involved. This is all about laying the foundations of

information and providing breadcrumbs to it to give people the

opportunity to learn more for themselves or try something out

(and there’ll be more on that this afternoon).

All being well you take people through to Stage 5, Adoption where

they are fully signed up to what you want them to do, reading the

book, attending the event, joining the library, whatever your initial

aim was.

Finally stage 6 is the holy grail because it means you don’t have to

do as much work anymore. Because it’s about people becoming

advocates on your behalf and then using word of mouth to drive

more people to the start of the funnel.

And finally, if there’s nothing else you remember, the key take

aways should be




1. Think about your audience and what your aim is

2. How do you make them notice what you have to say without

annoying or alienating them?

3. Once they’ve paid attention, why should they care? Is what

you’re saying as interesting and relevant as it can be? Is it lost

in lots of other stuff you think you should be saying or is it

clear and succinct?

cityread london marketing presentation thinking like your audience

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