Why 'Memory' is the Most Important Marketing KPI

Every marketer should respond to the following questionnaire in the same way:

Favorite Song: Don’t You (Forget about me)

Favorite Flower: Forget-Me-Not

Favorite Movie: Total Recall

The point, perhaps not so gracefully rendered, is that the ultimate objective of any strategic marketing initiative should be cramming your company’s brand into the gray matter of the folks with the pull and the purse to purchase your products.

That’s not rocket science. It’s marketing 101, the reason it was invented.

Unfortunately, a lot of brands forget that fact, believing that top-performing, even differentiated, products or services can sell themselves.

“Engineers and end users love our stuff,” crow the budget hawks. “Why are we wasting money on content, speaking at industry events, courting media and analysts when we’ve got the best products in the industry?”

I asked essentially the same question back when I was a technology journalist. That was when service provider CTOs were routinely being gifted (the cynical would say bribed) with millions in “friends and family” stock to greenlight the purchase of products still in beta.

“What do you need me for,” I asked a particularly aggressive PR rep for a technology supplier. “Why do you care if I cover your product, if it’s so superior to anything else out there and you can just grease the palms of service provider executives?”

I’ll never forget her answer, mostly because it put an end to a deepening career crisis in which I was questioning the relevancy of what I did for a living.

In short, she told me that getting a shoutout in an industry publication or an analyst report was PR gold because the decision makers who read my rag needed to justify their million-dollar (sometimes billion-dollar) purchasing choices to higher ups, many of whom had no clue about technology.

“Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM,” became an industry idiom for that very reason. Blow the budget on a product that doesn’t deliver and a supplier that corporate executives hadn’t heard of? Now that’s a career crisis.

The good news is that brands can pursue several paths into the brains of the people who matter most, without breaking the bank. If you’ve got the cash, of course, paid promotional activities, like advertising, sponsored webinars and other events, when done well and judiciously, can quickly pay for themselves in prospects or thought-leadership points.

But the best bang for your buck, as well as the most effective and long-lasting way to make sure your brand or product is lodged into the memory banks of decision makers, is through thoughtful, timely and compelling content.

It’s a given, of course, that the content be top notch. (See my previous post on ensuring your content is relevant to its intended audience. Does Your Company's Content Pass the Relevancy Text?)

That’s the starting point.

Next, it needs to be persistent. You know how memory works. Your brand will never live in a decision maker’s head longer than a few seconds without repeated encounters — in inboxes, at conference panels, during a webinar, mentioned in an analyst report or news story, or featured in an engaging eBook or case study.

Persistence, of course, isn’t the same as badgering. Most professionals tolerate frequent outreach — as long as the content is valuable. But don’t go filling up inboxes without something new or meaningful to say.

But the best way to be remembered, of course, is to be memorable.

Much marketing content is formulaic. Think of a case study, with its challenge-solution-resolution structure. That’s not a bad thing. That’s what most content consumers have come to expect, and its critical to meet those expectations.

But it’s just as important — more important if your goal is establishing thought-leadership credentials among folks who influence purchases — to spice up your content portfolio by abandoning the conventional from time to time. Challenge your audience and potential customers to view things from a new angle or perspective.

Break the mold. Make a memory.

Some industries, for example, are notorious for thinking in five-year technology cycles. What happens when a brand starts talking about long-term evolution — 25 or 30 years into the future?

If you regularly attend industry conferences, you’ve probably noticed that executives and engineers, even from the same company, occupy opposite sides of what I call the Visionary Spectrum. Executives, not surprisingly, are often talking up the future, delivering elaborate keynotes that foretell future innovations and yet-to-be-realized possibilities.

Engineers and network designers occupy the opposite, or pragmatic, side of the Visionary Spectrum, fixated on the here and now and making sure the technology currently in their labs is suitable for real-world deployment.

It’s not that engineers are at odds with their corporate colleagues. They just have different and distinct strategic mandates.

Technology companies, or any business, for that matter, need to focus on both ends of the Visionary Spectrum.

Make sure you’re supplying target technologists with a pipeline of confidence-building content that gives them peace of mind your products and services will make their networks or infrastructure hum and their jobs easier. But also be sure to work your way into the memory banks of corporate executives.

Deliver content that tells them you’re just as focused on what comes next as they are. Not only will it trigger long-term memory synapses, but citing a mutual mission will imprint the idea that your company is a compatriot, a partner that has their backs long into the future.

Ignore the far end of the Visionary Spectrum and your brand is likely to inspire another song.

Somebody that I used to Know by Gotye or, worse, Taylor Swift’s Invisible, come to mind.