Digital Marketing That Works with Krista Neher

Welcome to Brainfluence, where author and international keynote speaker Roger Dooley has weekly conversations with thought leaders and world class experts. Every episode shows you how to improve your business with advice based on science or data.

Roger’s new book, Friction, is published by McGraw Hill and is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and bookstores everywhere. Dr. Robert Cialdini described the book as, “Blinding insight,” and Nobel winner Dr. Richard Claimer said, “Reading Friction will arm any manager with a mental can of WD40.”

To learn more, go to RogerDooley.com/Friction, or just visit the book seller of your choice.

Now, here’s Roger.

Roger Dooley:     Welcome to the Brainfluence podcast, I’m Roger Dooley. Today’s guest is an old friend. I keep running into Krista Neher at conferences, and the most recent time was at South by Southwest just a few days ago. She was kind enough to sign her latest book for me, which had just come out at the same time at South by. Krista is the CEO of Bootcamp Digital and the author of six books, including this one, her newest, Digital Marketing that Actually Works. She’s worked with clients like Google, Procter & Gamble, Nike, and even the United States Senate. Despite our long history, this is Krista’s first appearance on the podcast. Welcome to the show, Krista.

Krista Neher:       Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Roger Dooley:     Krista, you were a leader in the Cincinnati digital marketing community, and then you uprooted yourself to go to Amsterdam. What’s up with that, how did that happen?

Krista Neher:       It’s really funny, you never know where this world will take you. But I had a client who I had worked with here for a number of years, and believe it or not, they found my company on YouTube. It’s not that we had a deliberate strategy there per se, it was just videos of me sharing things really, but they found me on YouTube a number of years ago and I did some projects for them here and there. And when they got funded for a digital transformation, they asked if I would come on board and help with that. So I’ve been living in the Netherlands for two and a half years now.

Roger Dooley:     That’s great, I love Amsterdam. Sometimes in Europe I have difficulty finding craft beers, but in Amsterdam I found a great place pretty close to Central Station that has artisan beers from all around the world. So I highly recommend that, Krista, if you’re into beer.

Krista Neher:       I’m going have to check it out because actually craft beer here is generally hard to find. So I wrote that down.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah, it’s great. They even … An American beer company itself, Flying Dog or somebody, created a beer by that same name in their honor. So they have pretty good visibility I guess. But as much as I like Holland and the Dutch people who are great, in my new book Friction, I use some of the bizarre aspects of Dutch bureaucracy to show the pernicious effects of red tape and rules that are applied without thought. I’m curious, have you run into any weird bureaucratic issues since you’ve moved to Amsterdam?

Krista Neher:       Yeah, good question. I’ll tell you a story, but before that, one of my favorite phrases here is “that is not possible”, which just means “I’m not going to do it right”. Impossible, in theory, means it could not be done, but Dutch people, they always say, “This is not possible.” Even my washing machine for my clothes, if I try to do something in the wrong order, it literally says, “This is not possible.”

Roger Dooley:     You must be getting used to that.

Krista Neher:       Yeah, exactly. But yeah, most recently, what’s really amazing is we wanted to get a car to travel around, and you’d think okay, no big deal, you’re living in this country. But actually, in order … The problem in theory isn’t buying a car, right? You just need money to buy a car. The problem is getting insurance and getting a car registered. So when we started looking into getting a car, it seemed like it wouldn’t be such a big deal. But the problem ultimately is you have to start at the very beginning on a Dutch driver’s test. And some people I know apparently have had to take 100 hours of driving classes.

Roger Dooley:     They’re serious about their driving there apparently.

Krista Neher:       Yeah, apparently, right? It’s crazy. So there’s all this bureaucracy around it where, even if we could buy a car … In theory, we could drive with our US licenses here at the moment, it’s legal to drive with a US license, it’s legal to buy a car, but we wouldn’t be able to insure or register it.

Roger Dooley:     That makes sense. Unfortunately, that sounds typical of a few of the examples in the book. One is a story about a woman whose husband died overseas, they were on vacation in the Dominican Republic and he unfortunately died. They had the body transported back, but they could not get a permit to bury her husband’s body. It went for months with him in cold storage because they were unable to produce, apparently, persuasive documentation from the Dominican Republic that the gentleman was actually deceased. Which seems strange.

The way they finally resolved it is kind of bizarre as well. Some bureaucrat finally took pity on her and issued a temporary permission for cremation. So they acted on that quickly, and if there was any question about the gentleman’s demise, it pretty much sealed it. But it’s so bizarre, because nobody really felt that this should be a problem, it’s just that everybody wants to follow the rules and act within those rules, and cannot see that it’s not possible to do it because the rules say X, even though it makes zero sense in some cases.

Krista Neher:       Yeah. They just don’t think around … If you think of a rule being made, it’s made for 90% of the time, right? And so when it’s that 10%, where something just hasn’t happened right, or in the correct order, it makes it really difficult. And we experience that a lot living here.

My daughter actually was born here, and when we got her birth certificate, under citizenship it said none, because being born here didn’t make her a Dutch citizen. And so she had no citizenship until we ended up getting her American citizenship. But even that, the paperwork we needed was unbelievable, we had a stack, probably three inches, of paperwork. And we were lucky because they don’t have to approve it, so she could have gone who knows how long with no passport and no citizenship living in this country.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah. Well hey, apparently it’s not difficult for a lot of people, but yeah, that’s fascinating. And I’ve got a contact for you of an ombudsman in Amsterdam. His job is to help normal people fight their way through the bureaucracy. And believe it or not, that is a job in Amsterdam. He’s the co-founder of something called the Kafka Brigade, which was founded as a way to fight past Kafka-esque rules and restrictions and regulations. So there is a sort of anti-bureaucracy counterculture alive and well in Holland.

But anyway, I want to talk about your book, and the name of it is Digital Marketing That Actually Works. That’s probably a better title than Digital Marketing That Doesn’t Work, but it sort of implies that maybe a lot of digital marketing that people are doing doesn’t work. Is that true?

Krista Neher:       Well, I’ll tell you in my experience it is. It’s really interesting to me because, in a way, a lot of digital marketing is not in its infancy anymore. We’re not at this point where people just can’t figure it out, right? But I think what’s interesting a little bit is we’re at a point where people think they have it figured out when they actually don’t.

A great example is a business that I was working with that spends millions a year on Facebook Ads. You ask anyone in the company, “How good’s your Facebook content that you’re spending millions of dollars to put in front of you?” “Great, we would rate it an 8 out of 10, it’s excellent.” Everyone thinks it’s excellent. Well, it’s not up to my opinion how good it is. I can look at data and numbers and see how good it is. And actually it’s performing terribly. I mean, it’s literally bottom of the scorecard of content.

So what I think is interesting is that we’re kind of used to this “set it and forget it” a little bit. Like, “Oh, check we have our posts for Facebook for the year. Okay, that’s ready to go, now let’s move on to the next thing.” But we’re missing doing the part of it that actually works, which is making sure the content is any good that you’re spending millions of dollars for people to see.

Roger Dooley:     Like I said, it sort of goes along with the need to instrument just about every judgment call. Because I know there’s talk about how people rate their content versus how it performs, or how their potential customers are seeing it. I think you get that same exact kind of disconnect when you ask people, “Are you a customer-centric company?” And the executives say, “Oh, customers come first, we’re very, very customer oriented,” and you ask their customers and 13% say they’re customer oriented. So I think in just about every area of endeavor, if you aren’t measuring it in some tangible way, then your assumptions are probably wrong about it.

Krista Neher:       Yeah, and I think we need to also move from a mindset, especially with like big companies and big marketers, it’s a bit of a shift from a mindset of activity. We view an activity as being done, right? So if you think about TV ad campaigns, once you’ve shot the commercial and edited it, that’s done, and you move to the next thing. And even if you can measure your TV commercial, it’s measured after the fact, so you can’t go back and change it because you’ve spent all this money on it.

So the mindset that we’re used to using also doesn’t really lend itself well, even to what I would consider the basic blocking and tackling, where once you get it out the door, that’s only the beginning. You need to look at how it’s performing, and be open to making adjustments as you go based on how things are doing. And I think still a lot of marketers and companies aren’t used to that.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah, and it’s too bad really, because the tools today for measuring all kinds of things, every aspect of performance, are so powerful. I remember a previous business running newspaper ads for a retail store that we owned, and the metrics that we had were horrible. We knew how many copies they printed, but we had no idea how many people actually saw the newspaper ad, we had no idea how many people spent any time reading it. We knew how much traffic the store had and what the sales were like, but if we had a busy weekend, was because the ad performed well, or was it for some totally unrelated reason?

But today, we can put content out there, we can put ads out there, and get a really good idea of how people are interacting with that, whether they’re seeing it, whether they’re spending any time with it. Why is this such a leap, do you think, Krista?

Krista Neher:       Well, if I look at it, when we talk about KPIs and measurements, you want three KPIs for anything you’re doing: quantity, quality and cost. And we’re used to really just quantity and cost. Quality isn’t something that has been easy to measure in the past, or it was backwards looking. If you did print, you couldn’t really measure the quality, and even if you could guesstimate based on store traffic, that’s only after you’ve spent all your money.

So I think what it is is the struggle with quality metrics, especially … It’s pretty easy for more conversion oriented businesses, you’re trying to get that click and trying to get that sell. But even in conversion oriented businesses, if you’re in it for the long haul, you need to be thinking about branding, you need to be thinking about brand equity, you need to be thinking about some of these broader marketing concepts that are more challenging to measure.

And I think what you’ll find is that most marketers, even more sophisticated conversion and performance marketers, really struggle to value and measure those things because it’s a little more challenging. But there are metrics out there that will give you an indication as to whether or not you’re generating brand lift, whether or not you’re changing minds with your digital advertising.

But it’s a little more complex, and we’re not used to being able to measure it or value it, so we typically stick with, on those instances, just the quantity and cost and say, “If we get our stuff out there, that’s good enough.” But now we have so many more things to look at, so we can be smarter with looking at more metrics to get a better picture of how things are doing.

Roger Dooley:     I can see how conversion optimizers would be reluctant to adopt other metrics, because what they’re working with is pretty straightforward. “Okay, we’re going to have X number of visitors, and we’re going to convert Y percent of those visitors. And if we can make that a Y + 1, we’re doing well, if we can make it Y + 2, we’re doing even better.” But if you start throwing in, “We’ve got these other people who don’t convert, but now they like our company,” that seems kind of nebulous.

It’s sort of like the story about a guy looking for his car keys under the street lamp because that’s where the light was. It was easy to look there, not under the car because it was dark, but where they actually were.

Krista Neher:       Yeah, it reminds me … My background is brand marketing, I started at Procter & Gamble working on Tide laundry detergent and these big consumer brands. When I got into digital marketing, and especially started attending search and paper click events, it was a total mind shift for me. Because these people literally would say, “I don’t care about branding. I don’t believe in awareness.”

And these are proven concepts, it’s not that different from, “I don’t believe in the sun.” We know awareness leads to sales over time. Sure, you need some other stuff in order but it was super interesting because you looked at these businesses that were able to grow just by the clicks and the search engine optimization and all this kind of stuff, so they didn’t need to think about it.

My favorite example of this is Zappos. Actually, when they had first launched, I saw them at South by Southwest, and what was so amazing to me is when I figured out what they did … Because when you asked Zappos, “What do you do,” they’d be like, “We deliver happy experiences to people.” And I’m like, “But literally what do you do?” And then you find out they’re selling shoes. And I remember thinking, “I don’t think there’s a bigger commodity on the internet that a pair of shoes.”

Roger Dooley:     Well, I guess maybe you’re not as emotionally attached to your shoes as some people are, but yeah, I think you’re right.

Krista Neher:       Right, whether I buy them from Zappos or Amazon, I mean now they’re owned by Amazon … But regardless of where you’re buying your Nikes, they’re Nikes, right? So it’s super commoditized. And I was thinking, “These people must be crazy, how could they build a business on selling a commodity on the Internet? It seems nuts.”

And fast forward, huge company, but the reason is if you look at what they did differently, yes, they did all the performance marketing stuff extraordinarily well and they got in early on it, but they built a brand for themselves, right? They were known for outstanding customer service. That’s branding. That’s not “click on this button here”.

And so if you can think more broadly, you see all these great examples of the value of branding and awareness, especially if you’re aspiring to be a leader in your industry. But definitely it’s harder for some people to buy into that concept.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah, I’ve been speaking at conversion conferences for years now, and you can sort of get jaded. It seems like everybody knows about conversion optimization and pretty much everybody does it, and now they’re sort of fine tweaking. What’s your take on that? Is everybody doing conversion optimization, or are there still a bunch of people out there who haven’t found that particular tool yet, and are plodding along wondering why they aren’t selling as much?

Krista Neher:       I think in some industries, yeah. B2B is super late to adopt that type of mindset. And if you look at marketing in general, anything where you’re not selling a physical thing on the Internet, it’s just more difficult to track, so those industries are later adopters to the whole idea of funnels and conversion planning.

And that’s why, if you look at HubSpot and Marketo, look at the growth of those types of companies, even SalesForce, a lot of that is because a lot of industries still don’t get that basic blocking and tackling. I mean, look at dentists. These are maybe smaller types of businesses, but there’s still so much opportunity. I think the people selling stuff online, where the real money’s at, credit cards, E-comm, all that stuff, they’ve got it, and it’s hard to win in that space.

But if you look at B2B, any kind of technical industry selling machinery, there’s big money in these places and they’re really slow to adopt. And I think that’s where the next big wave is, with especially some of the more performance marketing where you have a funnel and you’re looking at conversions and all that kind of stuff.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah, every time I think, “Well, everybody’s doing it,” then I end up on a website that has an absolutely confusing, difficult checkout process. And I say, “Okay, apparently the gospel has not reached all corners of the world yet, because this is awful.”

So you mentioned SEO briefly. I think since the beginning of SEO, and that was really how I got my start in digital marketing back in the earliest days, every few months there’s an article that comes out and says SEO is dead, typically because search engines revise the way they do things and it seems to be designed to disadvantage whatever SEO techniques were working before, and partly just to generate some clicks and visits because it’s controversial.

But how would you describe the state of SEO today, Krista? It’s certainly not dead, but I would say it’s quite a bit more difficult these days. Would you agree with that, or not really?

Krista Neher:       Yeah, the days of tricking Google are over, and if you look at a lot of early SEO, it was focused on tricking Google, whether you were tricking them by how you set up your site, whether you were tricking them by paying someone to link to you, whatever you were doing to trick them. All of these tricks Google has figured out, and they don’t work anymore.

But what I feel like with digital marketing in general, what I find so amazing … My mantra has come back to “focus on foundations” a little bit with almost any business I’ve looked at. Because what I find remarkable is that, whether you look at social media, SEO, a lot of these areas that have been around for a long time, the number one question people ask is, “Well, it changes all the time, how do you stay on top of it?” Or, “Isn’t SEO dead?” All this kind of hoopla.

And you know what? If you’re playing the tactics, if you’re playing the short game, your success will also be short lived. But if you have a solid strategy in place, and you are a little more focused on sustainable, longterm value, that’s not going to really change much.

If I think about Twitter that launched in 2006 or something, the way Twitter works hasn’t really changed. The way you grow a following on Twitter literally has not changed at all. The way you drive engagement on Twitter has not changed at all. Sure, you have lists, sure, there’s all these little tactical things you can do, but the basis of the platform is almost the same. And I think the same is true with SEO.

I got into the SEO industry probably after you did. If you think about what is it all about, it’s about creating content online and showing that your business matters for the topics that your business is about. It’s about creating good content and all of that kind of stuff.

If you had approached SEO 10 years ago with a more longterm view, you weren’t keyword stuffing, crappy blog posts that no one wanted to read, if you were saying, “Okay look, I’m going to write great blog posts that people love,” now you’d be in a great place. But if you spent your time playing the games and the tactics, you’re going to have a bigger problem.

So some things do change. Not to say it’s exactly the same, but I feel like all of this “SEO is dead”, all this kind of stuff, if you’re an SEO practitioner, yeah, there’s big challenges for you because your job used to be tricking Google and that doesn’t work anymore.

But if you are a marketer, you should still be thinking the same stuff, “I need good content that people like and are interested in because that signals to Google that people like and are interested in my website.” These foundational ideas are pretty long lasting, at least in my opinion.

Roger Dooley:     So really I think today SEO is less about SEO, and it’s more about content marketing, which is another interesting topic in your book. How do you know if you should use content marketing to try and drive organic traffic, or maybe apply those funds just paying for Google Ads or Facebook Ads or something?

Krista Neher:       Well I think when it comes to content anywhere, whether it’s on your website, but even in ads, especially Facebook Ads for example, content is just a more competitive space. What’s interesting now is I’ll work with these food brands that are huge, established brands, and they’re like, “We’re going to launch a recipes section.”

And I’m like, “Dude, 10 years ago that would have been a fabulous idea. There’s already a million great websites. And, by the way, you’re a mediocre executer of recipes. There are people who, literally, this is all they do for a living. There are millions of these food bloggers. There’s Tasty, which is run by Buzzfeed. Oh, by the way, Kraft launched their recipes eight years ago.”

So I think the challenge with content is that you used to be able to do well with mediocre content. Not even just get by, but you could do well with very mediocre content. Now, there’s so many people creating great stuff that you need really good stuff to break through. You need an angle, you need a point of view. A great example is this cheese brand that wanted to put recipes on their website. It was pizza recipe, and there’s gotta be literally millions of pizza recipes on the Internet.

Roger Dooley:     The odds of you getting a lot of organic traffic for pizza recipes at this point would be slim to none, unless you really had some kind of a hook.

Krista Neher:       Yeah, this is the point, right? Also, who needs a recipe to make a pizza? The whole thing is just kind of like, “Okay, 10 years ago, yes, but now I don’t get it.” But to me it’s like, “Okay, but what if you made a 20 cheese pizza?” That’s a way to take a pizza recipe and make it somewhat remarkable. You throw that on a cute little video, throw it on social media.

And I think that’s what it is. Okay stuff, like a pizza recipe, it just doesn’t fly anymore, you need to be really good. So one of the shifts we’ve seen in content is quality over quantity. And if I think about where we were talking about content even four or five years ago, it was all about schedules and content calendars.

And now, with everything being algorithm driven, and with so much more really great stuff out there, it’s more you see brands thinking, “I’m going to write one blog post a month, but it’s going to be amazing, and I’m going to put way more research into it and way more resources behind it to try to break through.”

So I think there still is a big opportunity for content, but it’s harder, and you need to be more imaginative, and you need to find real problems to solve. Just creating okay stuff and throwing it out there, those days are for sure long gone.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah, I think the other content error I see is writing all your content in a way that it is promoting your own product. You have a 20/60/20 rule in the book, explain your thoughts on that, Krista.

Krista Neher:       Yeah. Basically what we say for any content platform, your blog, your website, anything, your content can be 20% totally self promotional. “Hey, we have a new product launching,” promoting a book, whatever it is, 20% of your content can be interesting to the audience, but maybe doesn’t directly tie back to your product in a obvious way. Maybe that’s something holiday themed, or about a personal passion of the CEO of the company, the stuff that really doesn’t link to your business.

But the bulk of what you’re posting, 60%, should be stuff that is both of interest to a consumer and also valuable for the business. When we teach content now, we talk about brand value and user value, which are ideally not competing forces, but if you think of my content needs to have brand value, but it also needs to have user value. And what you really want to try to do is to be pushing all of your content as close to the overlap as possible.

So, even if I’m promoting a new product, I want to figure out, “How do I make this as interesting to a consumer as possible? How do I get them say, ‘Wow, that’s a real pain point,’ versus just, ‘Hey, we have this new product.’ How do I push that to have more user value?” And the same thing with these more user value type of posts. If I’m going to make a post about Easter … I cannot tell you how sick I am, on Facebook, of every brand, “Happy Halloween, merry Christmas, happy Easter from us.” What does that have to do with anything? Who wants to see this? It’s about finding-

Roger Dooley:     Yeah, it’s not a personalized message that you’re going to appreciate saying, “Wow, hey, this big company actually wished me merry Christmas.” It’s going to look like an ad.

Krista Neher:       And everyone does. I mean, not everyone, many people do this. But what you need to do is to find the tension point of those two things. A great example is with these back to school posts. I just spoke to a business recently, and the problem with a lot of their content is that the depth of the idea is, “Oh, people use our product around back to school time, so just show our product with pencils and stuff in the background.”

Well, that’s not really an idea. What’s the idea, what’s the pain point? Are you making back to school easier? Are you making it more fun? What is your role in this experience? I think we’re just used to a lot of lazy content marketing because it used to work pretty well, and I think that’s one of the biggest areas where we need to be sharper.

I work a lot with Facebook here, and Facebook will, at least I’ve heard anecdotally from my Facebook reps, the biggest problem is not the technical aspect of the ad platform, or all this stuff that everyone wants to focus on. It’s that the ads themselves are not of interest to people. They don’t have gum stopping power, and it’s because it’s, “Merry Christmas from brand.” There’s no point to a lot of it.

So I think actually content is one of the big things that almost every single business can benefit from doing better. And with things like relevance score on Facebook and other metrics, you can get a pretty good feel for how your content is performing.

Roger Dooley:     And I guess there’s also the question of, if you are promoting something on Facebook, do you promote your product or do you promote interesting content? Which of course is not directly going to convert in most cases, but it might have a more lasting impact. But I would guess, from an engagement standpoint, promoting really good content that relates to your product is going to be much better.

Krista Neher:       Well, I think it all links back to strategy. This is the tension point between social media people and marketing people that has existed for many years, where the social media people will say, “Oh, but this will get a lot of engagement, some people love it, and that’s why we want to post it.” And the marketing people will say, “Well, slap my brand all over it, or why am I paying money for this?”

Roger Dooley:     Right, engagement doesn’t pay the bills.

Krista Neher:       Right. But, like almost everything in life, the truth is in the middle. And so part of it is having clarity on the purpose of a post. Let’s say I’m an IT consulting firm. If my objective is to position my brand as an expert, then yeah, posting an interesting industry article that I didn’t create myself, that serves the purpose of positioning me as an industry expert, so it should be pretty easy to backwards justify that. If I’m a consumer goods company, if I’m selling toothpaste, sharing an article about who knows what, celebrity gossip, sure, celebrities have teeth, but it probably doesn’t link back to a marketing objective.

So, to me this is all about pushing your content toward that center of brand value and user value and finding those overlaps. Because if you’re posting stuff that truly has no … I talked to a brand recently that made these cute videos for social media, and I was like, “These are interesting, but I don’t see your brand anywhere. You just slap a logo in the end.” And they said, “Yeah, well we couldn’t really integrate our brand into it.”

And if you can’t integrate your brand into the video, maybe the video is not about the right topic then. If it’s worth it for you to produce your content, your brand should be a part of the story. And an easy way to think about it is the Doritos Super Bowl commercials. The product is the hero of everything all the time. Doritos are … There’s throwing nunchucks stars made out of Doritos. The product is the hero, and that’s one of the best examples we can all aspire to. Not everyone will get there.

The commercial isn’t about Doritos per se, it’s about whatever storyline, but the product is the hero and the product is the center of the storyline. And I think that’s where brands that struggle to integrate their brand, the main point is … Again, it’s like saying, “Merry Christmas from our brand.” What does the content have to do with your brand, and how does that link to your marketing objectives? And if you can tighten your strategic thinking, it all comes together better. But it’s tough, it’s not easy.

Roger Dooley:     We’ve all seen those ads, even on Super Bowl ads that people pay millions of dollars for, where you have no idea what the amusing commercial is about until the last few frames, where you see the logo, and maybe if it was entertaining enough you say, “Well, that was nice of them to do that,” or, “Oh, now I see how it relates.” But in a lot of cases it’s just not enough exposure where you’re going to remember what the ad was for you. You’ll remember, “Oh, that ad with the dinosaur was really hilarious. What was that for again?”

Krista Neher:       Yeah, the best example of this ever … You remember Taco Bell ran that campaign forever ago with the dog, the Chihuahua? That ad was so popular Taco Bell started selling stuffed dogs, and sales of Chihuahuas went through the roof. So it was great at marketing Chihuahuas. What it didn’t do was actually sell more Taco Bell, because while the dog was cute, it didn’t make you say, “Oh my gosh, yeah, I really want Taco Bell.”

When they went back to product centric marketing, you know their ads now, it’s like, “Oh my God, the Crunchwrap Supreme with 80 layers of cheese and the Dorito thing,” it’s just super indulgent food, their sales go up when they talk about their product. And they have to talk about it in a fun, interesting way. But to me, that’s always one of the best examples of this because one of the most famous ad campaigns that everyone remembers, even 15 years later, however long it is, didn’t actually sell any of the product it was intended to sell.

Roger Dooley:     Right. Memorability and performance aren’t the same. So let me ask you one last question, Krista. You see a lot of marketing, what do you think is the most common mistake that companies make in their digital marketing?

Krista Neher:       The biggest thing that I’ve been seeing, if I think of the last couple years especially, is brands and marketers jumping into some of this flashy new stuff with no clear purpose of how it serves a consumer. What I mean by this … Chatbots are currently my favorite example of something I love to hate. Look, I’ll be the first person to say I think chat is the future, I agree with Mark Zuckerberg on this. I think chat is the future, I think chatbots are totally the future.

Right now, many of them don’t solve a consumer problem and they provide atrocious experiences. A chat bot is worse than navigating a website in most experiences, because we don’t have a clear purpose for them. People are making them for fun. And so what we see a lot of is technology ahead of consumer pain points. It reminds me of QR codes. If you remember when QR codes became popular … You’re laughing because they were so stupid. QR codes-

Roger Dooley:     Some of the applications certainly were.

Krista Neher:       Well that was the point, right? It’s this FOMO that marketers have, this fear of missing out. Something becomes popular and everyone jumps on it. And I think it stems from, in the early days of social media especially, you could get this first mover advantage just by being somewhere first, you’d get a huge following and become more famous. So that’s what I think it’s rooted in, but it’s probably deeper than that psychologically.

But anyways, it’s this weird FOMO. So when QR codes came out, everyone had to put them on everything, whether there was really a need for them or not. And there were no good consumer experiences behind most of them, people didn’t even know how to use them, and eventually they just kind of disappeared. And the problem wasn’t QR codes themselves, they actually can be a useful tool.

The problem was no one had any point or purpose to using them, but they wanted to put them on everything. And so, as a result, people hated QR codes in general. When you bring them up, most people laugh. And I think we’re going that same way. I look at chatbots, I look at some of this AR/VR stuff … At South by Southwest, some of the things that brands were spending many millions of dollars on, okay, it’s cool VR, but would a human really want to do this? Is this solving a pain point for somebody? Is this creating a better experience for them?

I think it’s important to experiment, I think it’s important that we continue to try new things, and I think it’s important that brands aren’t left behind. But I think we have the other problem right now. I think we see technology ahead of consumer experience, and as a result, the technology adoption actually suffers. Because I think with chatbots, nobody’s going to initiate a chatbot anymore because 80% of the ones you try to talk to are stupid and annoying.

Roger Dooley:     Right. Well, I’ll see your chatbots and QR codes and raise you blockchain. That’s one of those things, if they refilm The Graduate today, probably the guy would whisper to an elderly Dustin Hoffman, “Blockchain, blockchain.” Got one word for you. But unfortunately, again, people don’t know what to do with it yet, and the applications so far from a consumer viewpoint, and even from a business productivity viewpoint, aren’t really persuasive. It’ll probably get there, but everybody’s jumping on the bandwagon.

Krista Neher:       Yeah, and I work with companies, I tell you they spend millions of dollars with a lot of these big consultancies and stuff, they create things that don’t even need blockchain. It’s a single source database. I don’t know, it’s so crazy.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah. Well hey, that’s probably a good place to wrap up, Krista. We are speaking today with Krista Neher, CEO of Bootcamp Digital, and author of the new book Digital Marketing That Actually Works. Krista, where can people find you and your ideas online?

Krista Neher:       You can connect with me on any social network. I’m Krista Neher, K-R-I-S-T-A N-E-H-E-R. You can learn more about me at kristaneher.com. My company that does training on digital marketing is Bootcamp Digital, we will get you into shape. And my book can of course be found on Amazon. It’s Digital Marketing That Actually Works.

Roger Dooley:     Yes, and since this is an audio show, people cannot see that on the cover “actually” is actually inserted with a little proofreader insertion point. Anyway, we will link to those places and to any other resources we spoke about on the show notes page at rogerdooley.com/podcast, and there will be a text version of our conversation there too. Krista, thanks for being on the show, and safe travels.

Krista Neher:       Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Thank you for tuning into this episode of Brainfluence. To find more episodes like this one, and to access all of Roger’s online writing and resources, the best starting point is RogerDooley.com.

And remember, Roger’s new book Friction is now available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and book sellers everywhere. Bestselling author Dan Pink calls it, “An important read,” and Wharton Professor Dr. Joana Berger said, “You’ll understand Friction’s power and how to harness it.”

For more information or for links to Amazon and other sellers, go to rogerdooley.com/friction.