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Get Back to Basics (Direct Mail) and Come Together on Brands and Titles, Event Marketers Say

by Media

Paul McCartney just turned 80 on June 18. Ringo Starr just rang up 82 on July 7. Both still tour which is quite heart-stirring. While they don’t need too much marketing to boost their events, the rest of us certainly do. So with a little help from my friends, let’s see if we can work it out to offer a few event marketing tips.

Do you want to know a secret? With that, Jeff Lenard, vice president of industry advocacy for NACS (National Association of Convenience Stores), looked at the big audience before him at our recent AMPLIFY conference. “We all urge our speakers to send information about our event or podcast or webinar that they will be appearing on or at to their followers,” he said. “But that’s probably more of how a parent might encourage a child—and not always with the best results.” So when a podcast episode with Stephanie Stuckey, CEO of Stuckeys Corp., recently passed Mike Rowe to go into their top 10 for downloads, Lenard emailed to congratulate Stuckey. She wrote back: “You made my day—I’m going to post this on LinkedIn and Facebook.” “Find a way to celebrate something with your speakers,” Lenard advised, instead of just asking them to do something.

We can work it out. Lenard also discovered that changing the titles to their podcasts increased downloads significantly. Plain titles were turned into ones in question form or the proven mode of starting with “how.”: Is an Electric Vehicle Future Possible? How Retailers Support Local Heroes Around the Clock; How Stuckey’s Is Bringing Back the Road Trip; Is the Great Resignation Over? What’s the Tipping Point for Gas Prices? The more dedicated efforts at snappier, more descriptive titles have tripled downloads. “It wasn’t a huge content shift,” Lenard said. But moderator Blake Althen, co-owner and producer of Human Factor, who works with NACS on the podcast, said “It was everything around it [that changed].” The takeaway: little things matter.

I’ve just seen a face. “It’s time to stop thinking about your event or service as inanimate and start thinking about it as a persona, a character that would be a part of your desired community,” writes MCI in their Event Marketing Guide. “…Your brand’s voice is this character and should be strategically incorporated into every written aspect of your event’s brand across website, social media, graphics, ads, and even onsite signage. Personality and branding are everything for today’s consumers and will help create a vivid image and understanding of what your event is and who it’s for. This also adds humanization, which many brands strive for to better connect to an audience and draw them in, inspiring a community centered around your event.”

Got to get you into my life. Speaking of humanization, a recent subject line—“Catch up next month?”—from Ragan Communications CEO Diane Schwartz for their upcoming event caught my eye: “Hi – I noticed you are not yet registered for Ragan’s Workplace Wellness Conference on Aug. 16-17 in Chicago, and I’m writing to see if you’ll be attending. I’d love to catch up with you there.” The code for a discount is even Diane-centric. She’s sincere—“Send me an email if you’d like to set up a time to chat while in Chicago.”

Please Mr. Postman. “What were the last five things someone sent you in the mail?” Lauren Alt-Kishpaugh, VP of marketing at offline marketing automation platform Postal, asked in a recent Marketing Brew post. “I could name the last five brands that have sent me something in the mail. I can’t do it with people who email me.” While email inboxes are overflowing, a USPS study found that 62% of millennials tend to read through the advertising mail they receive, rather than discarding it without reading. “The younger marketing generation is now saying, ‘Oh, shoot, this is something kind of new,’ even though it’s not new,” Alt-Kishpaugh said. Like Schwartz’s warm and fuzzy email greeting, getting a handwritten note has become inviting and has helped to drive the success of recent campaigns, she said. Many of Postal’s clients choose to use an AI handwriting tool to approximate the look of an actual letter. Yesterday returns.

In an era dominated by overflowing email inboxes, the tactile and personal touch of direct mail has reemerged as a powerful tool in the marketing arsenal. For businesses seeking to leverage the impact of direct mail, exploring Cactus Mailing Company services can be a strategic move. With a reputation for providing comprehensive and effective direct mailing services, Cactus Mailing Company brings a tangible and personalized approach to marketing, aligning seamlessly with the evolving preferences of a generation that finds warmth and appeal in the tactile experience of receiving a handwritten note.

Twist and shout. In the middle of a long, hot summer and in the midst of two-plus years of Covid, plus rising inflation and climate craziness, some added enthusiasm in our marketing certainly can’t hurt.

I have more ideas but we’ll let it be for today.

 

Professional business teleworkers connecting online and working from home for their corporate company, remote working and networks concept

‘Take an Intentional Approach’; Creating Collaboration in a Remote Workforce

by Media

In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said that, while “the office as we know it is over,” he still believes very strongly in getting staff together for “immersive, intentional gatherings.” He said they’re trying to be “super intentional, so we expect every employee to be together for one week a quarter.”

Chesky added that the one week of staff togetherness “is not going to be random meetings. It’s going to be meaningful experiences that we’re going to design to build trust, connection and do important collaborative work.

“Ultimately, I don’t believe that CEOs can dictate how people work. The market will. The employees will. Flexibility will be the most important benefit after compensation,” Chesky said in the interview. Another benefit can be increased diversity. “If you limit yourself to hiring people only in San Francisco [for example] then you’re limited to the diversity of people that can afford to live [there]… true diversity [comes] from a diverse set of communities.”

Taskrabbit closed its corporate offices, turning instead to monthly get-togethers, and is providing corporate employees with two “wellness weeks” a year, during which workers will get paid time off. “We held our first team week [a four-day, voluntary in-person week for planning and meetings], and generally speaking, it was a big success,” said CEO Ania Smith in another Post interview.

As remote work has become more the norm than the outlier, here are more ways to support your staff and facilitate more collaboration:

Be intentional. “Organizations need to take an intentional approach to address this issue,” wrote Post tech at work writer Danielle Abril, echoing Chesky. “That means creating onboarding processes that offer several points of connection and give new employees the chance to meet both their co-workers and other people across the organization. And when employees join, managers should make sure new hires feel like they have some ownership in the company’s culture.”

Convey a greater sense of worth. “An inspired employee comes to work lit up about what they’re doing because they feel they matter, their work matters, and the impact they’re having matters. What burns people out is when they don’t have a sense of the impact or contribution and that it matters,” says Stephen M.R. Covey, author of Trust & Inspire: How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others, in a recent Fast Company article. Can you crisply provide your company’s reason for being in 30 seconds or less, the article’s author, Anne Marie Squeo, asks. “Times of major change make it easier to evolve and progress, because people are already feeling uncomfortable.”

Consider structuring unstructured time, said Tsedal Neeley, a Harvard Business School professor and author of Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere. Perhaps “starting every meeting with some personal connection time, versus jumping right into the subject matter at hand.” He suggested that 10-15% of meeting time could be allowed for the group to chat freely. This is where the random subdividing into smaller groups could pay dividends. “Starting in a personal way increases group cohesion and group performance. You have to build in the informal to get to know one another.”

Think out of the box. “In essence, we need to stop designing work around location and start designing work around human behavior,” Alexia Cambon, a research director of the human resources practice at research firm Gartner, wrote in The Guardian last year. “Employees will work better, stay at their organization longer and keep healthier if they are placed at the center of work design—trust me, we have the data that proves it. This is what we should be asking ourselves: if 9-5 had never been invented; if ‘office’ were a foreign term; if the concept of a meeting sounded like gibberish—in short, if today were day one of the history of work—how would you design how you work?”

Create virtual “connection points” for employees. “Is there a platform in which employees are encouraged to chat with each other?” Abril asked. “Are there regular calls? Are there opportunities to team up with employees from different teams for something that might resemble a virtual water cooler?”

Encourage two-way conversations. U.S. CEO of Edelman public relations, Lisa Osborne Ross, spoke of the importance of “two-way conversation” during the pandemic. “I think managers had to change. Managers had to realize they were not managing for work, but you’re managing for people, which again, is something we should have been doing all along. And I think this two-way conversation is asking people, what you think. We do a thing called ‘P-Can’ [phonetic]. We’re doing it every three months during the pandemic, and then we started doing it generally. It was six months. But it was asking people, what are your needs? What are your tech needs? What are your emotional needs?” A recent study by Deloitte found that one in three employees and executives are constantly struggling with fatigue and poor mental health, with an enormous dichotomy between perception and reality.

 

Democracy Affirming Technology Restoring Trust Online (Instagram Post) (1)

SIIA Statement on the American Data Protection and Privacy Act (ADPPA)

by PolicyPress Release

Today the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) issued this statement on the American Data Protection and Privacy Act (ADPPA). This statement can be attributed to SIIA President Jeff Joseph:

In advancing the American Data Protection and Privacy Act (ADPPA), the House Energy & Commerce Committee has taken a critical step forward towards comprehensive, uniform federal privacy legislation. This legislation will have enormous implications for individuals, U.S. commerce, the values underlying U.S. democracy, and U.S. global competitiveness. 

As the bill moves to the House floor, we encourage members to carefully consider the implications of key provisions of this legislation. The bill has moved swiftly and changed considerably during the markup process. We have concerns that the version that came out of Committee yesterday moves away from compromise positions in ways that would undermine consumer protection and lead to increased costs or reduced quality services for consumers and open the door to a greater, unworkable patchwork of U.S. privacy laws. A federal data privacy law must not replicate the mistakes we have seen states make in passing consumer privacy laws that are unclear and exacerbate, rather than mitigate, confusion about consumer protections and data rights. Therefore, key stakeholders across the business, civil society, consumer advocacy, and government and nonprofit communities need additional time to provide feedback and work with Committee members to get the bill to the right place.

We urge Congress to carefully consider additional feedback and a more robust approach, which will likely require more time before the bill goes to the House floor for consideration.

SEanGriffey

CEO Sean Griffey: ‘The Sky’s the Limit’; Industry Dive to Be Acquired by Informa for $525 Million

by Media

“The best days continue to be ahead of us, but today is a milestone for Industry Dive. I’m grateful for the team both past and present that built this amazing company and for our new partners at Informa who share our ambitious vision for the future.”

—Industry Dive CEO Sean Griffey on Twitter this morning, after it was announced that Informa had acquired the media company for an enterprise value of $525 million

At BIMS 2019—the last in-person BIMS we held before this fall’s event (to be announced in coming days!)—Griffey fireside chatted with Meg Hargreaves, now the company’s COO (pictured here), about the then seven-year-old company’s tremendous growth and its commitment to superior journalism.

One of those content reaffirmations “actually came from this conference a couple years ago,” he said. “I was struck that no one said the words ‘journalism’ and ‘content’ in a two-day period. Breakout panels talked about lead generation in buyer periods.” Every article needed to be infused with someone’s purchase intent, Griffey was told. So he just thought that believing “every story should tell something about people’s buying habits is a mistake. As an industry we can swing too far and become something we’re not. Eight years ago you couldn’t come to a conference and not talk about content journalism. I think we have to look at that.

“A lot of people in media try to run from the term ‘media,'” Griffey added. “They try to be something else… So we’re a media company, and were going to run to it.”

That run has culminated in a signed agreement, initially reported by Axios, for Industry Dive to be acquired by Informa for an enterprise value of $525 million. Both are members of our AM&P Network.

“It’s a great outcome for Industry Dive, which has grown its business to over $100 million in annual revenue over the past 10 years,” Axios wrote, putting Industry Dive at a cash value of $389 million. But that number that doesn’t include potential earn-outs based on revenue growth or equity that’s being rolled over into the new company.

In an email to my colleague Tony Silber today, Griffey wrote: “From a valuation standpoint, I think price reflects the value of the audiences we have built, the content we create, the data sets that we collect, and the scalability of the model. We are a large, scaled, and highly profitable media company that crosses numerous verticals.

“In terms of the deal timing, it was just the right time. The business has been accelerating and deserved a larger partner with more resources. We found that with Informa.”

Griffey sees multiple benefits in the new arrangement. “We are incredibly bullish on not just our standalone prospects but what we can do with Informa in particular. Informa has a vast number of untapped business audiences that we can use as the foundation for new or future Dive publications. We both are building significant first-party datasets and see the value of tying online and offline activity to truly understand audience behavior and needs. There are a number of products we can launch both online and offline with our combined resources. The sky’s the limit when it comes to possibilities.”

On Informa’s side, Group Chief Executive Stephen A. Carter said this (in Industry Dive’s release): “Like Informa, Industry Dive champions the specialist. Its high quality, targeted business insights have built an enviable following across a range of B2B markets which, when combined with our own portfolio of specialist B2B brands, will create more opportunities to grow B2B audiences, expand into new B2B markets and create value for customers.”

A winner of 10 Neal Awards earlier this year, Industry Dive now counts their audience close to 13 million, through 27 web-based publications and more than 70 daily and weekly email newsletters. Their employees number about 380, with 115 working in editorial roles. All will remain. Industry Dive will continue to operate as an independent brand with the same management team, within the Informa Tech division.

Look for more Dive publications to be launched from this acquisition, as well as new in-person events, an area Industry Dive had not previously ventured into.

Gary Nugent, CEO of Informa Tech, said, “Industry Dive is highly successful at building B2B audiences through world-class specialist content. We are very excited to bring its expertise, reach and colleagues onboard, as part of our expanding focus on B2B digital services and building known, engaged and marketable audience communities around our leading specialist brands.”

Informa actually acquires Industry Dive from Falfurrias Capital Partners, a Charlotte-based private equity firm that took a majority equity interest in the company in 2019. “Over the past three years, the Falfurrias team has helped realize Industry Dive’s potential for continuing to scale our business into new markets, products, and services,” Griffey said. “We have enjoyed tremendous success and growth with the Falfurrias team and thank them for setting us up for our next chapter with Informa.”

As for any take-home lessons, Griffey again emphasized value. “Our initial premise was always that there is incredible value in niche markets. This is just a validation of that idea. Overall, media can be fairly simple and is an execution game. If you create something valuable for a valuable target audience, you’ll have opportunities to monetize it.”