Four Ms of Marketing Mastery

Megaphones”, “Magnets”, “Magnifiers”, and “Microscopes”.

By: Larry Goldberg

Although I did not originate the concepts of Megaphones and Magnets, I have long felt that these metaphors for outbound and inbound media channels do not go far enough in helping marketers evaluate and plan for the customer journey from brand awareness, to brand purchase, to brand loyalty. So I added my own elements to the process: Magnifiers and Microscopes. These elements are equally critical to the consumer journey and help marketers to keep current and new customers satisfied and away from competing brands.

“Megaphones”, “Magnets”, "Magnifiers", and “Microscopes”?are metaphors to help marketers classify different media and measurement tools in today's fast-paced media environment where new platforms seem to be popping up on a daily basis. If the goal of advertising is to help a customer to learn something or to do something, it is equally important to keep a brand close and relevant to current and potential consumers during the important decision process cycle.?

Marketers, then, use each to help assess their brand's marketing performance in relation to each of the following:

• “Megaphones”: Outbound Media used to acquire and maintain consumer engagement
• “Magnets”: Inbound Media that helps consumers have a seamless and satisfying experience when attempting to interact with the brand
• "Magnifiers": Utilizing the?metrics?and?analytic tools?available to assess results and make strategic changes
• “Microscopes”: Understanding in real-time (from the consumer's point of view) when interaction channels are working properly and conversely when execution is poor and sends potential customers in search of alternatives.

“Megaphones”?– This refers to?Outbound Media?(examples are radio, TV, or social ads on Facebook) that are used by advertisers to create awareness about a brand (company, concept, or product).?Specifically, this type of media is referred to as?ACTIVE MEDIA targeting a passive consumer.?For example, a passive consumer is someone whose media usage does not directly correlate with?actively?seeking information about the product or service the marketer is selling. The marketer uses an outbound medium to create familiarity and build desire at some point before a likely prospect is ready to buy. Megaphones may be designed to reach a mass population, or narrowly targeted to just one consumer. They are a multitude of ways to utilize Megaphones, but here are two that sufficiently illustrate the example.

• Mass Targeting: For example, consider a car dealer who wants to be one of the 2.2* dealerships a consumer actually visits after she has done her online homework. Although he or she may not yet be ready to purchase a car today, the dealer wants to be thought of as an acceptable alternative on the day the target consumer’s car dies and he or she suddenly needs to buy a replacement.?The Car Dealer chooses a high-indexing target audience, (demographic, geographic, lifestyle, etc.) and proceeds to use one or more Outbound media (exp: television, radio, social ads, etc.) to build brand awareness, familiarity, and open-mindedness. The goal of using these “Megaphones” is to image the brand before the consumer’s need to buy is imminent and urgent.
• Narrow Targeting: Consider the consumer who actually is actively in the market to buy a car and has searched a dealer website. The next day, he goes onto social media to do something that is not related to a car purchase but notices an ad for that dealership. This is often because of a mechanism known as retargeting.??The dealer might even give an exclusive offer on one of the cars he or she had clicked on the day before.

?“Magnets”?– This refers to?Inbound Media?or?passive media for an active consumer.??Magnets describe the information seeking that an interested consumer will do before making a purchase.?In today’s high-tech marketplace, a marketer must have the right Magnets in place to help guide consumers to the places and information that the consumer needs to know about to make a choice that includes the marketer’s products or services.?This includes the specific info that makes a product, service, brand, etc. attractive to a “prospect”.??There are many different kinds of Magnets that a marketer can employ. It is important to note that new technology, consumer behavior, and consumer demand keeps marketers looking for and finding or creating new inbound channels.?Here are a couple of examples that should sufficiently illustrate how Magnets work.

• Keywords: For example, a college is looking to target students who are interested in getting a nursing degree. The school might purchase a keyword program that might include words like?Medical, Nursing School, Nursing Degree, etc.?As interested prospects are searching for information, these “Magnets” have been strategically placed to attract a much more qualified prospect.?Theoretically, the better the placement, the more qualified the prospect should be.
• ?Aggregator and Information Websites?(like Google):?The Internet has all but replaced the Yellow pages as the place people go to find businesses to meet their wants and needs.?Here are a few examples.
• Historically, the Yellow Pages was one of the largest and most widely used books in the household.?Today, for many business categories, the book itself is all but irrelevant.?Many households no longer even have physical books in the home and the books themselves are painfully small and thin.?The Yellow Page companies have tried to transform themselves into Internet Advertising companies.?The harsh reality is that they have gone from a marketplace where they were all but a monopoly, to one that is overcrowded.
• ?In their place, some strong,?category-specific aggregator sites?like “Yelp”, “Trivago”, “Autotrader”, and so many more have become important resources that many consumers use today.?For example, if a consumer is traveling from Washington to Baltimore and wants to find a good pizza restaurant there, he or she might “Google It” and find a listing on Yelp. They can then compare everything from?Reputation to Price Range to Directions to a Menu to Reservations.?
• To make their Magnets more powerful, savvy marketers will focus on a?Five Star Google reputation strategy.?This entails creating conditions whereby satisfied customers will recommend the business online.?The process can be complex to set up, but thankfully, there are vendors who specialize in this and can simplify the process.
• ?Click-Throughs:?Let’s say an ad started out on social media as a Megaphone.?That means the marketer has identified the target by demographic, lifestyle, geography, etc.?In this scenario, the target sees the ad and clicks through.?As soon as the person clicks on the link, the ad becomes a Magnet…and it had better get them to where they want to go, or they are “out of there.” At the same time, until the target clicks through, the ad remains a Megaphone.?It may take multiple exposures before the target acts, if ever.???????

?“Magnifiers”?– This is the metaphor for an imperative for a marketer to gather whatever analytics are available that measure consumer interactions with their brands.?There are many tools available and more increasing every day with the widespread use of AI (artificial intelligence.)

Here is the important thing about magnifiers.

·??????Focus should be on the things that customers find important.?

·??????They should be about engagement: For example:

o??Time on site/pages

o??Links that draw customers into the purchase funnel.

o??Days/time of day/time of month when engagement is highest and lowest

o??Consumer activities during engagement that move the sale forward

While this article won’t cover these in detail, here are a few of the most basic ways that marketers can begin to analyze the metrics they need to magnify.

• Google Analytics
• Dashboards
• Cookies
• Tracking Pixels
• Industry specific tracking reports.

So much information is available today that never before existed.?It provides a tremendous opportunity to better understand the things that customers find to be important.?Remember. Regardless of whether you as a marketer are examining these magnifiers, you can bet your competition is.?And their goal is to grow at the everyone else’s expense.

“Microscopes”?– Microscopes address?consumers' internal perceptions?as they interact/react to the brand's messaging and channels. It does not matter what you say about yourself, but rather what people believe.?As consumers, we are constantly filtering, categorizing, accepting, and eliminating based on a whole set of paradigms and experiences.?As a marketer, all you can do is try to create a seamless journey for the consumer from the point they are exposed to your brand to the time they try to interact and learn more.?

• Positive consumer perceptions?(about a brand, product, or idea)?are either reinforced or?destroyed by actual customer experience.?A consumer turns on the internal Microscope the moment he or she tries to interact with a brand.?
• As an example of this process in action, let’s say an advertised message (“Megaphone”) appeals to a potential customer’s want or need, and he or she begins the process of seeking out more information about the brand.?When strategically placed, Magnets are used to draw the consumer into the purchase funnel. The consumer has now turned on the Microscope to decide whether or not the brand lives up to the promises that have been made through advertising.
• At any point that the brand fails to deliver upon these expectations, the consumer may leave the purchase funnel.?The marketer may never even know about their interest.?Or if they are measuring web hits (Magnifiers), would want to know where the “breakdown” occurred.?
• As an example, consider an advertiser who sends out 100,000 emails looking to recruit highly technical workers. Through AI, the advertiser is targeting people who have been online searching for employment in the kinds of jobs the advertiser is recruiting for.?The emails are highly creative and feature exceptional opportunities. As a result, of the 100,000 people who received the emails, as many as 13,000 people actually open the email.?This is what many would consider an excellent R.O.I. on advertising.?Of the 13,000, nearly 2,000 people clicked through to the advertiser’s website to actually look at a job.?Again, a great result.?The advertising worked.

And yet, the advertiser ends up interviewing zero candidates. Were these the right people??The answer is maybe. Let’s say they were qualified consumers. But the emails had links that took candidates to pages where there were:?

• No job descriptions
• No place to apply for a position
• Links that took candidates to unsecured pages
• Dead links that took the prospect nowhere at all?
• An advertiser website that was not fully optimized for mobile devices

Today's consumer has a short attention span and often does not want to work that hard to create a relationship with the marketer.?Unless the consumer really wants something, he or she might leave an advertised site at the first “failure to meet expectations.

• Think about it in terms of a department store that advertises a big sale.?There are great deals here and people should be interested.?But when the consumer checks out the store’s website, there is no mention of the sale on the home page. How many clicks is the prospect likely to take to find what they are looking for?
• Let’s say there is a great ad on the website, but the consumer has a question and calls customer service.?The phone rings and rings but without being answered.?Or the consumer gets put into telephone purgatory and is unable to connect with a real person and gets asked to leave a message.?Or, the consumer gets right through, but the person who answers is rude or just plain unhelpful.?In each of these cases, is the prospect likely to stay engaged?

?Why is all this important?

Technology has changed the world at breakneck speed. These changes have had both positive and negative impacts on marketing. Many of the advertising rules have changed and marketers today, need to change with them. The fact is that consumers have many more tools available to them today to evaluate brands and brand messages. Marketers have to be far more vigilant in order to maintain brand equity, value, and loyalty as consumers’ filtering processes become ever more refined. Here are a few things that must be considered:

• Megaphones (Outbound Media) alone have limited power unless combined with Magnets and Magnifiers.
• Conversely, advertisers that discard their Megaphones and rely exclusively on Magnets (Inbound Media) and Magnifiers (Analytics Tools,) can perhaps coast for about a year. Eventually, however, they will likely start to lose market share. This is because Megaphones are still the best way to create brand awareness and draw consumers at scale to your Magnets. As soon as a brand discontinues its outbound, brand-building, messages, people may forget about them during a search opting for what is currently top-of-mind.
• The do-it-yourself days of advertising are long gone.?There are just too many moving parts that need to be coordinated. CEOs and business owners should accept the difficulties of running a business and handling marketing and advertising at the same time. The old military analogy still applies:?It is impossible to manage the beach and the hill overseeing the beach at the same time.

Final Thoughts

Consumers have many more tools available to them today to evaluate brands. Marketers have to be far more vigilant in order to maintain brand equity, value, and loyalty as consumers’ Microscopes become ever more refined. Finding the right consulting resources, both internal and external, has become more important than ever.?Dedicated marketing directors who can manage a marketing plan for all four of these pillars are essential.?When choosing media partners, look for holistic people who understand Megaphones, Magnets, Magnifiers, and Microscopes and can provide solutions that encompass a minimum of three out of four of them, a critical standard in today's complex media environment.?