David Meerman Scott , author of ‘The New Marketing and PR ’ often begins his talks with a question:
In the last 1-2 months, privately or professionally, in order to research a product or service you might want to buy, raise your hand if you have:
- Answered a direct mail advertisement?
- Consulted mainstream media – radio, television, magazines or newspapers?
- Looked in the print yellow pages?
- Gone on Google or another search engine?
- Have you tapped your peer-to-peer network, (Friends colleagues family members) through some kind of electronic network – Facebook, email, Twitter, Linkedin, Instant Messaging, where the answer that came back from a friend colleague or family member was a URL to a website you visited?
David tells the story that it doesn’t matter where he presents around the world, he gets the exact same ratios. It doesn’t seem to matter what age, the job function of his audience, it doesn’t matter who the people are; the responses he gets are the same. Here they are, with the approximate results I got when I put the same question to the construction marketer audience at the CIMCIG seminar on the Changing Face of Specification and Selection:
David then says to his audience, “Oh my God! Why are we continuing to market using those same old traditional methods?”
Hi Su,
To put my view across regarding the closing question, I personally think that it depends on what your customer profiles/segments look like and what you are researching/buying.
I have no doubts that Google is the first place people go to when looking for product/business info…..but do they find the information they need? If not, where do they turn to next? Direct Mail? Newspaper? Social Network? And what type of person turns to what medium?
I am currently following a series of blog posts (http://blog.minethatdata.com/2012/01/dear-catalog-ceos-new-direction-for.html) where the author is profiling 3 customers – a traditionalist who is old school, won’t use the web but this segment makes up a large % of annual sales and the average age of this type of customer is mid-50’s, a transitionalist who went from old school to new school but is influenced by print material but also now depends on the internet and makes up 20% of his sales and the average age of this type of customer is early 40’s. Finally the transformationals who buy and communicate only online, they hate face to face conversations and phone calls and the average of this segment is mid-20’s to early 30’s.
If your database is full of traditionalists then what should your marketing strategy be? Do the 20-30’s age group have enough responsibility to buy or are they merely influencers in the construction industry?
Can Architects be split into Traditionalists, Transitionalists and Transformationals? You know, the Architect who still has a library through to the Architect who stores everything in the cloud (Dropbox) and hates being sent hard copy brochures and phone calls from pesky salesmen but prefers the odd twitter conversation now and again.
I really enjoyed Pritesh’s comments on splitting architects into three categories.
There are without a doubt a lot more materials, products and information accessible online than through traditional methods.
However, while I like the sound of being a Transformational Architect, this end of the spectrum may have its downsides as well.
If you store everything in the cloud (dropbox), unless you go searching for something because you remember that it’s there, would you really browse the GB’s of data that you have collected and saved to find inspiration or a product you’d forgotten about?
I think the Transitionalists will probably last the longest. Combining mediums will invariably encourage creativity and provides a much wider data base to tap into.
Hi Kirsty, thanks for the reply.
Its a good point you make about being able to find things once you’ve saved them somewhere.
Ideally all the websites of content would be so well indexed by Google that we’d just be able to go back to them whenever we wanted… now wouldn’t that be good?
Hi Pritesh,
Thanks for posting your comment up on the blog.
I’d be interested to hear other people’s experiences, but I think it is likely that there are a mixture of profiles within architects practices at the moment, and will be for some time. I certainly recognise the three that Kevin Hillstrom describes in his articles – one of them is also rather like my mum!
It is also important not to generalise too much, because I’ve also meet very tech savvy seniors and very tech averse young people once in a while, my PhD tutor was bonkers about Apple, had a Newton and was well into his sixties at the time, for example.
Nevertheless it is essential to understand your audience in as much detail as possible. So far whenever I ask construction people the questions I have always got at or near 100 per cent for Googling, and high rates for ‘following links my peers send me’. What concerns me is how poorly many companies who want to sell to specifiers understand these channels (but I don’t have to tell you that!)
Really enjoyed reading this thread. Interestingly a lot of our clients are in the 50-70 age bracket for high spec resi and although they do search on the internet they also read the papers a lot and things like parish magazines, local papers and lifestyle mags. I agree with Su that it is Important to know your client (or the clients you would like to have!), and true there are also a lot of tech savy seniors…. I think we need to make sure we are keeping track of who our clients are, where they come from but also how profitable the jobs are they bring to us. When we used to advertise in the yellow pages all we got from it was small extensions for people that didn’t want to spend much money on fees – things are different now as most people don’t touch the yellow pages, but in times of desperation we have still been known to print off a non-targetted mail drop which gets us nowhere!
Very interesting article and I guess as an architect the truth is I can be put into more than one category or box. Whilst I prefer to have everything on hard copy, do drawings by hand and maintain a 7000 book product library, my colleagues at Lapworth Architects are far less keen. Over the last two years Mike Kalam a new director at our practise has totally transformed our practise starting with the disposition of our library and shortly after annexing all yellow page/ Thomas local/ city listing subscriptions. Whilst he feels we have not lost any real business we both remain un-certain on how to best capture our target market?
Hello Mike,
Thanks very much for commenting here.
It would be interesting to know if you had any evidence of getting business from Yellow Pages direct. I know about 18 months ago Yell.com (the online version) had a big campaign to sign up firms, including ours, with the promise of evidence of call numbers through a dedicated phone number. We did get several dozen calls but none of them could be specifically identified as leading to a commission. As a result we (and many other consulting firms) had the ammunition we needed to cancel much our campaigns with them last year, though the RIBA box is still there. Whilst having an ad in Yellow Pages demonstrates to some extent that ‘we’re still here’ – a sentiment many of us have been making sure we stress regularly in recent years – generating regular business from Yellow Pages or Yell.com is somewhat difficult unless you are purely doing domestic work.
How you capture your target market very much depends on who they are and where you might come into contact with them, whether it be online or offline. A good starting point is to begin with your current clients and review how they came to know you, and what might be changing in how that would happen today. Happy to discuss this with you further offline, of course.
Yellow pages, direct mail and other “Thud” marketing channels’ (“Thud, as in the noise they make when they hit your porch…and the trash bin) days are numbered. Their business models hang on by a thread, and that thread is their wide distribution networks. Those networks exist because we consumers receive them by default unless we make the effort to opt-out of their network. As soon as laws change to require us to opt-in to receive these resource-intensive media, the Thud channels will go away in a New York Minute.
Until that day comes, architects, contractors or other building-related firms who spend their marketing dollars on black hole channels with no measurable analytics would be better served spending that money on a nice sign for the front of their office. At least that will give them daily feedback.
So true and definitely true that the elder generation are getting far more savvy technology wise. Even if you do utilise the traditional media you enevitably lead them to your website for further information and from there they are likely to pick up on your social feeds for reviews and the like.
But it’s the cost that just doesn’t make sense. For the price of a decent printed advert you can get an awful lot of traffic from Adwords or Facebook and both have very advanced targeting options. Yes you need to get a bit more in depth tech wise yourself to do it right and it helps to be able to create appealing media such as annotated images, or better, videos but the results are worth it. And importantly measurable.
And then there is the future to think about – advertising is only going one way and that’s online. Getting familiar with it now will pay big dividends.