Pushing Your Luck With Automated Marketing

Every business has to do marketing of one sort or another. Reaching out to prospects, keeping in touch with existing customers. Pitching products and services to keep the flow of revenue going.

The mass of work naturally leaves people thinking about how to undertake it more efficiently. Many software packages, including multiple ones for commercial real estate, offer ways to set up campaigns, automatically send series of marketing messages either with precise timing or in response to recipient responses and actions, gather information, and feed it back into the marketing campaign.

It sounds good until you find yourself on the receiving end and get annoyed. The regular contacts that can become overwhelming in their cheery neediness, whether asking you to post a review of a purchase, respond to someone’s request to connect, nudge to get the next sale, and often without an option to unsubscribe from the barrage (the lack, by the way, being illegal).

Marketing is necessary and, when done well, good. When done badly, it is injurious to a business because it makes people you’re trying to reach wish you didn’t exist.

Part of the problem is a fundamental mistake marketers make in understanding data, wrote Sinan Aral, an MIT professor of marketing and director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy.

He wrote in the Harvard Business Review several years ago that digital technology “can potentially allow marketers to measure media effects precisely and to know which messages work and which don’t.” However, overly aggressive digital marketing can trip your efforts.

“In 2017, Marc Pritchard, P&G’s Chief Brand Officer, cut the company’s digital advertising budget by $200 million or 6%,” Aral wrote. “In 2018, Unilever went even further, cutting its digital advertising by nearly 30%. The result? A 7.5% increase in organic sales growth for P&G in 2019 and a 3.8% gain for Unilever.”

How could that be? Both the companies had been focusing on frequency of contact. Instead, they changed to considering breadth of reach. “Data had shown that they were previously hitting some of their customers with social media ads ten to twenty times a month,” he wrote. “This level of bombardment resulted in diminishing returns, and probably even annoyed some loyal customers. So, they reduced their frequency by 10% and shifted those ad dollars to reach new and infrequent customers who were not seeing ads.”

The frequent buyers would have seen a reduction in their irritation and frustration, which would seem a positive change. As importantly, they used resources that were wasted — because they would have created a negative impact — and redirected them in ways that expanded the business.

CRE isn’t the same as consumer product goods, but there are lessons to learn.