To Social media or not, that is the question.

To Social media or not, that is the question.

May 25, 2016 | Communication, Customers, Social Media

Many of the small and medium sized businesses I interact with still struggle with the notion that they should be investing in social media as a marketing strategy. Creating and sharing content of value to their customers, potential customers, and competitors runs against their grain .

In addition, the operational challenges are technically confronting to many, and the notion of having to write and produce the content necessary is normally a hill too far.

B2B, B2C,  it makes little difference.

The immediate reaction of my B2B clients is that this social media stuff is for consumers, not serious businesses. However, it is the reality that those in businesses who make the purchase decisions  are usually engaging, anonymously at first with potential suppliers during the early phases of the purchase cycle, and coming to the supplier only for the transaction. Not being in on the ‘conversation’ early is clearly a mistake.

vanity metricsIt is becoming pretty clear that social media well used is a remarkably potent marketing tool, but challenging for those with modest resources, as this stuff is time consuming, technically challenging to measure properly as distinct from just measuring what is becoming known as ‘vanity measures’ just thinking they are measuring something useful.

 

 

There are a small number of very sensible strategies you can use.

Use it as a tool.

Social media is a marketing tool,  and like any tool, the effectiveness is best measured by the outcomes rather than the use, so set out to measure the effectiveness by identifying the cause and effect links between the SM and your corporate objectives.

Understand the tool.

When you have a nail to be driven, a screwdriver is of little use. Same with social media, they are tools that can be used very effectively in the right circumstances, but are useless in the wrong place. Understanding how the tool works, and where it’s characteristics are best deployed is a fundamental part of the game.

Identify your key customers, and what they want out of it.

You simply have to  be able to put yourself in the customers shoes, understand the value you can deliver from their perspective, and be prepared to be patient. My favourite  metaphor for social media is to humanise it in a way everyone understands. You walk into a bar, and spot someone who just overwhelms you. If you just walk up and ask them to marry you, your chances are pretty slim. By contrast, introduce yourself, find shared interests, spend some time together, and you never know where it can lead. Social media is no different. To have a chance of the desired outcome, you need to do the spadework up front.

Measure, test & improve.

Be creative but deeply interrogative about the measures. (is interrogative even a word?) continuously test options, so you can continuously improve. Social media and digital generally have absolutely changed the practise of marketing. It has made it measurable and accountable, but there are limits.  ‘Vanity measures’ such as number of friends, and likes  are very poor measures. They are superficial and misleading offering no clue as to which activity is likely to generate a commercial outcome, they just look good on a piece of paper to a boss who does not understand. Understanding the difference between cause and effect and correlation is critical, observing correlation is terrific, but do not make the mistake of thinking it is always cause and effect and therefore measurable. A metaphor used by Gary Vaynerchuk is particularly potent here. He observes that everyone understand the value of good parenting, over time it has great outcomes for both, but trying to measure it in a month  by month basis is stupid, it is a cumulative effect of many small things over a long period. There are some aspects of measuring digitally the return on SM that can really stuff us up.

 

Success with digital marketing, including the leveraging of the potential of social media is not easy, despite all the nonsense and get rich quick promises to the contrary.

Hopefully now you are at least a part way to answering the question.

Anatomy  of a successful email

Anatomy  of a successful email

May 23, 2016 | Communication, Marketing

Email is still the most widely used marketing tool out there, and that is for a good reason.

It works.

Like most, I receive many emails, and having subscribed to all sorts of sites over the years, to see what works and what doesn’t, as well as to get my hands on their stuff.

Every email whose purpose is marketing has, or should have a pretty common structure.

Subject line.

The subject line makes or breaks the opening rate of your email. It does not matter how great the content of the email, if it does not get opened, it will not be seen. Spending time on the subject line will be a great investment.

Good subject lines have at least one of c couple of common characteristics. They grab attention by appealing to our deep instincts for survival, they create an interruption of some sort, appeals to our curiosity, or promises to deliver a relevant benefit.

Opening sentence.

Having conjured an open, the first sentence of the email must reinforce whatever grabbed the attention of the reader and motivated them to open it. It is like a sub headline of a sensational headline you click on a news site, it delivers a bit more information, and draws you into the body of the email

Email body

As implied, this is where the message is delivered, where you are drawn into the description of the problem that got you this far, and then given the solution.

The Pitch.

Every email should have a pitch, it is the reason the email was written, it is the delivery vehicle for the pitch. In effect, ‘I have outlined the problem, here is the solution”.

Call to Action.

The CTA answers the question “what do I do now”, it may be buy here, or sign up to this webinar, or just go to this  site, whatever it is, the email must be clear on what they how the reader to do now, as a result of reading.

The power of the CTA is considerably enhanced by the use of some sort of ultimatum. ‘There are only 7 left in stock’ or ‘this price lasts only until Saturday’. Just directing someone to ‘click here for more information’ these days is pretty lame, there is insufficient motivation of FOMO (fear of missing out) as it implies they can come back at any time, and they rarely do.

The key to successful communication

The key to successful communication

May 9, 2016 | Communication, Innovation, Strategy

Actually it is three keys, which taken together make for a potent mix.

It should be easy, but it seems to be hard, judging by all the rubbish I see around.

There is just so much messaging out there that fails to deliver any useful message, despite the money, time and supposed talent thrown at it. Somehow we have lost sight of the simple rules to apply. If you want a message to be seen and acted on, you had better make it clear, and articulate what you now want the receiver to do with the information.

So, three simple rules:

  1. Make it relevant
  2. Make it simple
  3. Make it repeatable.

As I watch the beginnings of what I expect to be a truly appalling tsunami of complicated, irrelevant and forgettable  babblings from politicians on both sides over the next weeks, I cannot help wondering what would happen if one side or the other told the truth. What if they, acknowledged the shortcomings and uncertainties of their economic and social models, and of the resulting ‘policy settings’, acknowledged  that you cannot please all of the people all of the time, and recognised the value of at least some part of the other sides positions.

Little hope of any of that.

Martin Luther King’s great ‘I have a dream’ speech delivered on August 28 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln memorial in Washington would probably not be as well remembered if it was the “I have a 10 point plan” speech.

A 10 point plan to end the racial discrimination prevalent at the time would not have resonated, the way “I have a dream” does. That message has not been heard by the opposition leader who I heard this morning spruiking his ‘Plan to make Australia great” followed later in the day by a long menu of things he will be “fighting for in this election”.

Yawn. Unfortunately the Prime Minister is little better, being unprepared to answer simple questions, even with a caveat that forecasting 10 years is challenging when nobody really knows what will happen tomorrow.

What if one of the protagonists in our political system actually articulated the dreams, the things we can all relate to, then backed it up with the truth. The truth, with all its  power to engage, build a following, and be held accountable.  In the 1990 film  “Crazy People”  Dudley Moore as an over-stressed advertising man proposed that greatest of evils, truth in advertising, and became wildly popular while kicking the accepted wisdom of obscuration, selective delivery of any facts, wild and unrealistic claims, and outright bullshit, squarely in the teeth.

Perhaps a bit of that medicine should be dolled out this morning as this 44th Parliament is wound up.

 

 

What can marketers learn from comics?

What can marketers learn from comics?

Mar 18, 2016 | Communication, Marketing

For no particular reason I was watching some comedy on YouTube recently, top comedians plying their trade.

Great fun, but it struck me that there was a lot that we marketers can learn from the techniques that permeated all the routines I watched.

Comedians may be funny, but at heart they are storytellers.

We have all seen really funny jokes hit the floor in the hands of a poor storyteller. It is not  the fault of the story, it is the teller.

There was a clear pattern to the stories told by these comedians, irrespective it appears of the type of story they were telling. Jimmy Carr’s potty mouth stories had a similar  structure to  Jerry Seinfelds mother in law appropriate ones.

Some time ago I attended a corporate event that featured comedienne Fiona O’Loughlin as the after dinner speaker. She told her own story, her personal battles with alcohol,  an upbringing in Alice Springs,  early marrriage and a pile of kids. There was some pretty black stuff, but she had the room in stiches, and left a powerful message about personal responsibility.

Back to the structure of a successful story.

First,  every story has to grab your attention, so there is an opener of some sort, 5-45 seconds, that poses a question, makes a contestable statement, or paints some picture in the mind of the listener. An exemplar if you need another one is that almost every TED talk starts this way, with a device of some sort that grabs and holds attention.

Second, the story opens up, the comedian  weaves a narrative using all the tools of their voice and body, the dimensions of the stage. They create then relieve tension, ‘draw’ a series of pictures in the minds of the audience, only to pull them down to  show how ridiculous they are, almost mini- punchlines, and they are almost always personal, human, showing the foibles and idiosyncrasies of people. They reveal themselves and their emotions  to the audience, seeking to engage by having the audience relate to the story they are telling, winning the hearts of the audience with the struggles they are describing, reeling you in the with authenticity and ‘this could have been you’ narrative.

Finally there is the punch line, always something unexpected, providing contrast that evolves out of the story, but is not something that is obvious, it is this contrast that delivers the humour.

In telling the story, the comedian has allowed the audience to get to know them in an intimate way, you know how they think and feel, they have won your liking and respect with the authenticity of the story, and you trust them, because they have trusted you.

Marketing is no different, we have to tell stories about the products, how they fit into our lives to make them better, and they ways the audience can benefit.

Do that and your communication will work, fail to tell a good story, and it will hit the floor like a dirty wet  mop, and probably splash you in the process.

 

 

The secret sauce of marketing.

The secret sauce of marketing.

Mar 16, 2016 | Branding, Communication, Customers

 

The currency of marketing success starts these days with a simple word:

Attention.

How to get it, keep it and leverage it.

In the crowded world we are in, it is the secret sauce of marketing.

Every day we are assaulted by messages, millions of them, yet we actually ‘see’ just a tiny fraction.

In a world where our brains give us comprehensive and automatic filters, where even those that get through have a split second to make an impression and gain some of our attention, it pays to understand the means by which this process happens.

Automatic sensory cues.

When was the last time you completely ignored a gorgeous bird (if you are a bloke) wearing a short skirt and blazing red shirt?

Never happens right? That is because our brain is on automatic, it sifts the information coming at it in an unconscious manner. However, when something triggers one of the basic responses in our ‘reptile’ brain, the deepest most ancient part of the grey matter that controls just a few things, we notice. This automatic response was vital to the survival of a weak mammal being hunted by sabre tooth tigers, and thankfully survives to ensure we see the red shirt.

Reputation.

We often almost automatically trust things and people based on reputation. Tom Clancy brings out a new novel, and fans of the genre will buy it based on the experience and reputation of his previous books. In the past we also tended to trust authority, police and doctors for example, but the transparency of the last 25 years has almost seen that gone, we now make judgements on a wider base. Taking that one step further, we now put some weight on crowd sourced reviews as Amazon does with their rating and referral systems.

Recognition.

When we recognise something or someone, it grabs our attention. Walking through Sydney’s CBD a few weeks ago, paying no particular attention to anything, I unexpectedly recognised someone I had not seen for many years, walking the opposite way on the opposite side of Pitt Street. The sudden and unexpected recognition riveted my attention, I had to race across the road and accost him. (luckily my recognition was accurate or it would have been embarrassing). This also works inside businesses, the recognition of the familiar, weather it be people, processes or existing patterns of behaviour are powerful motivators of future behaviour.

Think like a customer.

It often surprises how little marketers actually look at their output from the perspective of those they are trying to influence. Stepping across and putting yourself into the shoes of the receiver in a way that enables you to see the material you are producing through their eyes, recognise and respond to the emotional hooks, feel urge to ‘connect’ that you are trying to build, recognise the  relevance and power of the offer or call to action. To some this capacity to jump into your customers persona comes as naturally as breathing, to others it remains a bridge too far no matter how hard they try, how much research they read. Finding someone in your team who has this capacity can mean a quantum step in the effectiveness of your efforts.   Thinking like a customer makes gathering attention much easier as you can see the cues your customer will respond to, and deliver them in a manner that creates and drives the attention.

This task, the drive to gather and leverage attention is one of the foundations of marketing success, understanding the triggers is essential.

Three by four marketing equation for success.

Three by four marketing equation for success.

Mar 2, 2016 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Strategy

How do you win business in a competitive world?

I know for sure it is not  getting any easier, but the advice on how to do, and stories of how to be rich in 15 minutes a day seem to abound.

Perhaps I don’t take advice well?

It is pretty clear to me, after 40 years of working with this stuff that the more we complicate things, the more difficult seeing the wood for the trees becomes, so here is a really simple tool that you can use today.

To get business, any business, although the context and circumstances vary enormously, the potential customer needs to:

  • Know you
  • Like you
  • Trust that you can solve their problem/add value to their lives.

Pretty simple really.

The other side of the equation of course is the challenge of creating the circumstances where a potential customer has the opportunity to get to know, like and trust you.

Marketers can spend huge amounts of money, much of it wasted, on chasing this outcome, often failing simply because they complicate the hell out of it and confuse themselves.

I like to think of it in human terms. The building of a marketing relationship is no different to any other type of human relationship, it evolves in stages that are pretty simple:

  • You need to be where they are. This is so blindingly obvious it is often missed.
  • You need to get their attention.
  • You need to make a connection
  • You need them to take action.

marketing matrix for successBreak all the complicated cliché ridden & expensive recommendations  you get from those with a pig in the race into this simple matrix and reap the benefits.

Beware though, as Steve Jobs said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” so this stuff is deceptively hard, but now you have a tool to make it easier.