Inference Marketing – is it the ultimate marketing technique?

Inference marketing is a totally new way to look at marketing via the web. The Internet has offered marketeers both new
and innovative ways to reach potential customers since the day Al Gore invented it (or not).

What's a guy or gal to do then? Cancel the tv ads, pull the high-end print campaigns and spend all day Tweeting instead. No way!

As the saying goes, “from chaos comes opportunity.” There has never been a better time to be involved in marketing. With a few simple and inexpensive tools you can revolutionize your approach to Social Media and deliver measurable and effective campaigns with ease.

The secret sauce here is a concept called inference marketing. It's based on the idea that if you create a marketing event or action and are able to measure the audience responses (either negative or positive) and assuming that you know who they are – then you can tailor a reaction to their response that greatly enhances the chances of your campaign being successful.

How about a concrete example? For instance you need to reach out to several hundred customers and tell them about an exciting (to you) new program that your company is running. You look at and then dismiss conventional or passive marketing such as direct mail and instead opt for an on-line email based approach.

You create a short 90 second video about your marketing program (from Real Cool TV of course). Video, when done right can make anything look and sound exciting. Web-video can convey complex ideas in a simple and understandable way, that would take pages of written text and illustrations. Not to mention the special place video has among Millenniums.

You build a web page, that plays the video hosted on YouTube and craft a powerful call to action that meshes with the conclusion of the video. That's it for the content – onto distributing and inferring.

Using an email campaign manager such as Constant Contact (note: there are several very viable alternatives and companies that specialize in particular industry verticals) create a short succinct email that invites the reader to view the video to learn more (nothing else, just an invitation to view). The email should include an image of the video to click on and have a compelling subject line. It is also important to run the email through a SPAM test to make sure you don't look like a spammer by mistake.

Now here comes the good bit. Out goes your email and you prep your follow-up team to make calls.

From your Constant Contact reports you will get three forms of response. Firstly a group who opens the email, clicks on the link and watches the video. Secondly a group who opens the email, but doesn't click over to the video and a final group who do nothing.

You can now call the first group knowing that you have someone who is basically aware of the program and was interested enough to invest some time. They should be easy to reach and if you did a good job with the video, easy to engage in the sales process.

The second group didn't take up your invitation to view the video. So you can call them knowing that they opened the email, but didn't click through. Rather than explain the whole deal, your sales team can ask them if they would give your company a couple of minutes and watch the video to hear about an exciting program. It's a very gentle, almost baby step, toward engaging with the customer.

The third group basically ignored you. However instead of calling and asking them if they got your email – almost guaranteed to elicit a “No.” The salesperson can start from a fact. “We emailed you a link to a very short video about our new program. I know you are very busy, but as we have done business before can I ask you to invest just 2 minutes of your time to see if this is something for you?”

Obviously some of these non-responders will have moved on or changed roles. However you can attempt to reach them all and in the process update your mailing list.

Conclusion

This all may seem very subtle. It's actually very different indeed from the conventional approach of blanket calling everyone and seeing if they got your direct mail or whatever. You are following up with the first group that you know have seen you pitch. Our experience is that closure rates in this group are impressively high - provided you get to them quickly. Your second group are half way there and can be seen as warm rather than cold (however a small percentage are just people who open anything that comes by email). The third group can be treated as either too busy or not interested and your approach to them can be more direct and aimed at qualifying them in or out.

At the end of your campaign you will have statistics about viewing rates, sales processes that were started, closures and an improved list. This will then enable you to hone your approach. Need more folks in the first group? Work on the subject line and email body. Getting too many questions that can indicate lack of understanding? Look at the video and consider a re-edit. Can't get the second group to watch the video? Work on the “reason why” script.

Now you are tuning, not flailing. Real Cool TV produces high quality, yet affordable content for these kinds of campaigns. You can afford to do a lot of inference marketing for a very small part of your budget. Oh and before you ask – this is also available in video form :-)