5 part headline  template to write killer headlines that always attracts attention.

5 part headline  template to write killer headlines that always attracts attention.

Jan 18, 2016 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media

The ability of a headline to attract attention, then lead the reader deeper into the content is the make or break skill of copywriting, and even in this world of video, the ability to write a headline remains the single most important skill in effective communication.

No matter how good the body-copy, without a great headline, it will not get read.

So here is a headline template that always works.

Use combinations of these elements:

·         Number

·         Trigger word

·         Adjective

·         Keyword

·         Promise

Let’s say the subject is a training seminar about managing cash flow.

Pretty dry stuff but of vital importance to any business,  and make or break for small business.

The easy and obvious headlines may be:

‘How to manage your cash flow’ or

‘Cash flow basics for beginners’

However, if you apply the headline template you might come up with something like:

‘7 simple techniques to apply cash flow to your business to make more profit’

Let’s break it down.

Number: 7. For reasons I do  not fully understand, but rooted in psychology, odd numbers  work best, and lists in headlines work as they promise to deliver instant gratification.

Trigger words: Simple. Words like Free, Secret, Undiscovered, Expert, all offer incentive to open

Adjective: Manage. Adjectives are ‘action ‘ words, they reflect and prompt activity.

Keyword: Cash Flow. Cash flow is the guts of the post, and is the word that will deliver the search engine enquiries that ere relevant to the post.

Promise: ‘Make more profit’ well, who in business does not want more profit?

Alternatively, your  headline might be:

‘Join us to learn the 7 secrets to greater profits through managing cash flow’

I do not know which would be the better headline, I am not a professional copywriter, but I am pretty sure both would work well.

An option if you were about to make an investment, such as in a public a seminar series, and generating a lot of interest rather than just capturing eyeballs on a blog post was financially critical, you could set about testing them by applying an  A/B test which is pretty easy on social media platforms. Then you could use the better one, or perhaps do some more ‘wordsmithing’ to improve one or both for further testing.

As evidence of how the template works, the headline that caught you in the first place is the third iteration of the first one I scratched down, which was :’Killer headline template that always works’. Having written the post to articulate for you a template that really works, I realised I had better take my own advice.

You tell me if it worked.

3 stage elevator pitch that works

3 stage elevator pitch that works

Jan 7, 2016 | Customers, Marketing, Small business

 

Opportunities to deliver our elevator pitch often happen in social and unplanned situations, you just meet someone, and the automatic question is ‘what do you do?’

That is the opportunity for an elevator  pitch, rather than just a polite response.

You might deliver hundreds to those who are unmoved, but now and again, you can get lucky.

I have heard many delivered, and mostly they are a recitation of what someone does.

Not unreasonable given the question, but ineffective as a marketing tool.

For example, in my case, the typical elevator pitch would be:

“I am a marketing and strategy consultant with wide general management experience domestically and internationally. My background is largely in the food industry. Businesses with whom I have worked range from FMCG manufacturers, to those supplying into the FMCG supply chain with everything from produce, to raw materials, specialised ingredients and packaging, to services. The sorts of projects have ranged from  creating marketing strategy and programs, coaching sales staff on key account management, optimising  marketing effectiveness,  building collaborative farmer supply groups, optimising factory operations, contract general management, and everything in between. ”

This does describe me, but is pretty dull, and fails to get much traction.

To make an elevator pitch worth listening to, you have to successfully do three things:

  1. Get the attention and interest of the one you are speaking to. Best way to do that, perhaps  counter intuitively to most, is to ask a question.
  2. Having gained their attention, deliver the nature of  the service so that you  both know whether or not it may be of interest to them, or someone they may know.
  3. Finally, deliver the benefit that comes from working with you.

 

So, in summary it is a three part process:

Question: “Do you know that ….”

Description: “What I do is….”

Benefit: “So that…..”

 

Taking your own advice is sometimes hard, nevertheless, here it goes.

“Do you know that of the 250,000 businesses started every year in Australia,  70% fail in the first year, and only 10% survive 5 years?

What I do, is bring a depth of experience from across industries and functions with a focus on marketing, sales  and strategy, to small and medium sized businesses that they cannot afford and usually do not need on a full time basis.

That depth and breadth of experience radically increases their chances they are one of the 10% that survive, but more importantly, that they are one of the few truly successful businesses”

 

Try it for yourself, it does work.

7 trends driving business in 2016.

7 trends driving business in 2016.

Jan 4, 2016 | Branding, Governance, Management, Marketing, Strategy

Like everyone else who sees themselves as having a useful view of the train coming at us, I have again tried to articulate the things I see as important to businesses, particularly the smaller ones that make up my client base.

Following are the outcomes of my assorted observations and crystal ball scratching.

 

The density of digital content is becoming overwhelming.

Businesses have always generated and distributed ‘content’, but it was called ‘advertising’ or ‘collateral material’. Since we all became publishers, and the marginal  costs of access to markets approached zero, there has been a content explosion, and we are now being overwhelmed. It has become pretty clear that video will take over as the primary vehicle of messaging, and I expect that trend to consolidate over the coming year, and see a bunfight for eyeballs between social media platforms and search tools and platforms. Ad blockers will change the way the so called pay walls work, as well as ensuring that the density of content is replaced by less but better stuff, ‘tailored’ to our habits and preferences.

Ad blockers may become discriminatory, allowing through stuff that the algorithms know you have been searching for. The focus on content will be on the sales funnel and conversion metrics, much more than just pumping the stuff out, which will be a huge improvement on the mish mash currently assaulting our inboxes.

Existing digital platforms will extend themselves competitively. 

Attracting new users will become secondary to increasing the usage and ‘stickiness’ of their platforms. Linkedin’s successful extension of their blogging platform and purchase of Slideshare are one, Facebook is aggressively setting out to attract new users by making themselves attractive to developers and others, with the launch of FB techwire in an attempt to attract the really technically oriented including those writing about tech, Twitter appears to be trying to find ways of monetising their users and will probably apply controls to the currently uncontrolled stream in your feed, but there again, I thought that last year and they did not do it. Also, platforms will recognise the huge potential of the B2B advertising market, and find ways to exploit it. Many B2B businesses are reluctant to use social advertising as they see the platforms as essentially B2C and therefore  not appropriate for their products and services. This is a huge potential market for digital advertising businesses, and the social platforms will be cashing it in.

 

Rate of Technology adoption will continue to increase.

Ray Kurzweil’s 2005 TED talk on the rate of technology adoption is resonating louder now than a decade ago. Some of his observations such as the rate of cost decline of solar technology and battery technology efficiency are coming to pass. However, it is his basic thesis of the logarithmic rate of technology adoption that will engulf us over the coming short term. Think about the confluence of big data and machine learning. When you wipe away all the tech-talk and hyperbole, it comes down to a simple notion: the “friction” of information that has always existed is being removed at logarithmic rates, progressively revealing more stuff to see, and to do with the stuff we have. As we go online, and use technology throughout  the value and marketing chain, technology is reducing costs, speeding cycle time, and opening opportunities for innovation.

 

Evolution of the “marketing technology stack”.

For most small businesses this can be as simple as a good website with a series of resources available to collect email addresses, and an autoresponder series on the back. For large businesses it can be a hugely complicated stack of software running CRM, customer service and scheduling, marketing messages, integration of social channels et al.

Mar

 

 

 

 

 

Big data to little data.

The opportunities presented by big data are mindboggling, but even the big companies are having trouble hooking their data together in meaningful ways let alone introducing the third dimension of big data. Small companies will have to start to use little data better, or die. Data already available to them is becoming easier to use every day, to turn into insights about their niche, local market,  and competitive claims. Simple things like pivot tables in excel will be used, and tools like Tableau which brings a structure to  data from differing sources including big data, will  become more widely recognised by small business for the value they can deliver. Big data will have machine learning applied, and the data revolution will get another shove along. From a non technologists perspective, industrial strength  data systems such as IBM’s “Watson” must drive some sort of further revolution, but my crystal ball is too cloudy for me to have much of an idea of the impact beyond making what we currently see as advanced systems look a bit like a pencil and paper look to us today.

 

Technology hardware explosion becomes over-hyped but undervalued.

The volume and type of hardware that has become available is as overwhelming as the access to and availability of information. Driverless, wearables, AI, 3D, blah, Each of the developments has its place, and may change our lives at some point, but there is just so much of it that we are becoming immune to the hype. Who needs a tweeting washing machine anyway?

So, what is next?

Seems to me that we are on the cusp of an energy disruption driven by the combination of hardware and advanced materials science . The technology surrounding renewables is in the early stages of an explosion that will change the face of everything. Highly regulated and costly infrastructure distributing energy will start to be replaced with decentralised renewable power generation, much the same as when PC’s replaced mainframe computers 30 years ago. The catalyst to this metamorphous will be the combination of governments that are broke and no longer able to fund the institutionalised and regulated energy systems and the development of a reliable “battery” system. Elon Musk has made a huge bet on his “Powerwall” battery system and manufacturing plant currently under construction, and it would be a brave person that bet against him. However, looking well ahead, it seems probable that it is the beginning of the logarithmic adoption curve of renewable power following the path of Ray Kurzweil and Gordon Moore. The politicised and subjective debate about carbon and its impact on  the environment will become irrelevant as science delivers cheaper and more accessible renewable energy. All that will remain are the problems of the carbon clean-up. (I suspect this prediction is due to be a repeating one for some time)

 

Marketing has always been about stories.

However, somehow ‘content’ got in the way of those stories, and marketing became a different beast in the last 10 years. We will go back to marketing, and start to tell stories that resonate with individual targets. Storytelling will become again the core, and we will be looking for storytellers in all mediums, written, pictorial, video, as we all absorb and recount stories in different ways.

All the good journos displaced by the disruption of traditional publishing can find great places in this new world of marketing storytelling, if they are any good. The competition is strong, and the results immediate and transparent so no longer can you get away with rubbish. Organisations will change to accommodate the fact that everyone is in marketing

We will become more aware of the permanent nature of the internet, and the manner in which our brand properties need to be managed.

In a commoditised world, where the transparency of price makes competition really aggressive, the value of a brand is increasingly important, and fragile.

These 5 extraordinarily stupid examples of how not to do it  should be a wake-up to the CEO’s who leave marketing to the junior  marketers, often a transient bunch who have no investment in the business or brand, they are just there for a good time, and usually a short time.

One day I will do a study that compares the realisable value of the tangible assets of businesses compared to their value as calculated by the market. My instinct tells me that in many stock market categories  the biggest item as calculated  by the difference between those two numbers represented as  goodwill and a realistic assessment of the realisable values, will be the biggest item on  the asset side of the balance sheet. In short, the current and future value of their brands and customer relationships expressed in dollars. Managers and boards need to deeply consider the nature of the people that have managing their brands, or risk losing them, often before breakfast, as the speed of disruption and change continues to increase.

 

As we go into 2016, the 3 questions every board and management should be asking themselves are:

  1.  “If  I was starting in this business today, what would I be doing to deliver value?”,
  2. “If a leveraged buyout happened, what would the new management be doing to unlock the value in the business?”
  3. “What do I need to do to implement the answers to the two above, today?”

 

Have a great 2016, and thanks for engaging with me.

How did I do in 2015?

How did I do in 2015?

Jan 1, 2016 | Change, Marketing, Small business, Strategy

So, it is again New Years Day. January 1, 2016.

Another year gone, but where?

I hope 2015 was a good one for you, and that 2016 is better.

For my part, I will keep on offering up my musings on the challenges facing small businesses in the hope that along the way some of them serve to help some way to make the path easier.

A fundamental part of the way I believe things  should be done is that we learn from our mistakes, so as not to repeat them. To do that we must be able to see the effects of our choices, while understanding the reasons and motivations underlying them at the time, and reflect with clarity and objectivity.

Therefore, it is only fair that my predictions made at this time last year come under scrutiny, before I venture into rubbing my crystal balls for 2016.

Following is my “predictions” post in January 2015, with some commentary added this morning.

You be the judge, score me, comment and point out what I missed, and what I may have called right.

 

Small business is at a crossroads as we move into 2015.

Either they embrace the opportunities and tools presented by the disruption of the “old ways” by digital technology, or they slowly, and in some cases, quickly, become irrelevant, obsolete and broke as customers move elsewhere.

Your choice, as much of the technology can now be relatively  easily outsourced,  and at a very reasonable cost, certainly less than most would expect. The two major challenges in outsourcing, snake oil salesmen and not knowing what you want and need,  are little different to any other category of purchased service.

So, to the trends that will influence your business in 2015 that you need to be at the very least aware of, and in most cases take some sort of pre-emptive action.

      • Marketing technology will continue its rise and rise. The thousands of small marketing technology players who are currently emerging will be forcibly integrated, as the big guys buy “Martec” real estate. Adobe, Microsoft, et al will spend money, and the little guys will be swallowed as the gorillas fill the holes in their offerings, and new segments emerge. At the other end of the scale, there will remain plenty of options for smaller businesses to step into the automated marketing space. The current rash of innovations to make life easier for small businesses   will continue and as those smaller single purpose tools gain traction, and more are launched to fill the niches that exist to service small businesses.

Comment January 2016.  Martec, has become more of a board table topic over the year as investment increases, more options open up, and the “make or break” of marketing has become increasingly recognised.  There has been some takeover and merger activity, and it will only increase in number and scale as the thousands of services merge, Bruce Henderson’s classic  rule of three and Four will continue to apply itself. IBM has also entered the fray launching “Watson”  as an integrated Martec product package.However, despite the inevitable move towards scale,  Martech  will remain a fertile field for innovation as technologists and marketers collaborate on the best ways to identify, engage and lead to a transaction the individual customer.

 

      • Peer to peer marketing  will continue to grow at “Moores law” type rates. Jerry Owyangs honeycombdiagram and data tells it all. Almost any service I can think of has the potential to be disrupted in some way by the peer to peer capabilities being delivered by technology.

Comment January 2016. Absolutely right. In December the NSW government legislated to enable ride sharing services like Uber to compete without legislative interference beyond some basic passenger safety directed rules. This is in despite of the entrenched political position of the Taxi industry and an aggressive campaign including civil actions brought against Uber drivers.  During the latter part of the year, a technically challenged mate of mine spend 3 months in Europe with his wife. Nothing pre-booked, but they easily found accommodation every night using Airbnb and several similar services. When the over 60’s whose device until a few moths ago ‘was just a phone’, is hooked, the hook is set deep and permanent across demographics. Anecdotal but powerful evidence of the penetration of the power of peer to peer markets. 

 

      • Content creation as a process. The next evolution in marketing, the move that I think “content” will start to make from being individual pieces of information produced in an ad hoc manner to being a process that is highly individualised, responsive to the specific context, and informed by the behaviour of the individual recipient scraped from the digital ecosystem. It means that content creation needs to be come an integrated  process, more than a “campaign” . The term “content” will become redundant, it is just “marketing”, focussing on the individual customer.

Comment January 2016. The evolution continues, evidenced by the number of blog posts and templates for “content calendars” that have appeared in the last few months.Over the course of the year I have instituted editorial calendars of one sort or another with several clients, and all are now seeing returns from the efforts that ensure continuation. I am sure I am  not the only consultant from the one man operations as I am to the ‘brand’ consulting services seeing this happening around them, and this trend will certainly (in my mind) continue in 2016

 

      • Marketing will evolve even more strongly as the path to the top corporate job. Functional expertise is becoming less important, what is important is the ability to connect the dots in flattened organisations that work on collaborative projects rather than to a functional tune. This trend is as true for small businesses as it is for major corporations. There will still be challenges as many marketers are really just mothers of clichés, but those relying on the cliché and appearances for credibility are becoming more obvious as the marketing expertise in the boardroom increases, and the availability of analytics quickly uncovers the charlatans. This will make the marketing landscape increasingly competitive on bases other than price.

Comment January 2016 . Anecdotally from what I have seen, this appears to be correct, but I do not have the data to be sure. It certainly makes sense as a way of putting the customer at the ‘pointy end’ of a businesses activities and priorities.As an aside, I have commented repeatedly on the qualities required for success, the primary one these days beyond the necessary functional experience and education being curiosity. Good marketing people are curious, they tend to be less likely than many others to accept the status quo, so make good all round leaders. Pity there are so few good marketing people around, ‘doing marketing’ at university these days is often a choice made in the absence of options. 

 

      • Recognition that marketing is the driving force of any successful enterprise will become accepted, even by the “beanies”. Seth Godin has been banging on for years about the end of the industrial/advertising model, the old school of interruption, but many enterprises have continued to deploy the old model, but  I sense that the time has come.  2015 will be the year that sees marketing finally  takes over.

Comment January 2016. I am still waiting.

 

      • Video will become bigger part of marketing, particularly advantaging the small businesses that have the drive to deploy it and the capability to manage the outsourcing of the bits that they either cannot do, or cannot do economically. The old adage of a picture telling a thousand words is coming to life in twitter streams, instagram shares, and all social media platforms. The video trend will be supported by increasing use of graphics in all forms, but particularly data visualisations as a means to communicate meaning from the mountains of data that we can now generate. The density of data on the web is now such that new ways to cut though, communicate and engage need to be found, and I suspect those will all employ visuals in some form, perhaps interactive?

Comment January 2016. It seems the big marketers poured money into made for the web video over 2015, spending not just on the creative and production, but on the marketing of the material. While video might be a  it of the newest shiny thing, we are visual animals, and there is little doubt the growth will continue.Many of the SME’s I deal with are recognising the opportunities and building their video capabilities either in house or more usually by finding someone outside with the skills, and tit is paying off. 

 

      • Pay to go ad free is a trend that will evolve suddenly, to some degree it is an evolution of subscription marketing. Free to date platforms will charge to be ad free,  whilst new platforms and models such as the Dollar Shave Club will probably evolve.

Comment January 2016. Advertising has been the engine of growth for media companies over 100 years, then came the web, and the indiscriminate bombarding of any mouse click with ads, many of them malicious, so evolved ad blockers. Ironically, looking for data to support this contention, I googled the phrase and up came an article on Forbes magazine, but since I went there last, they have put in a requirement that you disable your  adblocker to get to the article. It may not be with money, but we all recognise the value of an email address these days. Rest my case.

 

      • The death of mass and the power of triibes will become more evident. The “cat pictures ” nature of  content of social media platforms will reduce as marketers discover smart ways to package and deliver messages that resonate and motivate action. The agility of digitally capable small businesses will open up opportunities for them their bigger rivals will not see, or not be compatible with their existing business models.

Comment January 2016. There still seems to me as much if not more of the cat photo rubbish floating around, but mixed in is the increasingly targeted messages that resonate with customers and consumers in some pretty obscure niches. A small client of mine was persuaded to really “niche-down’ in 2015, and reaped significant benefits as a result. Niche marketing will continue to grow.

 

      • Local,  provenance, and  “real”. Marketing is about stories, so here is a trend made for  marketers, and you do not have too be a multinational, just have a good story, rooted in truth and humanity. ‘Hyper-local” will become a significant force. Marketing aimed at small geographies, such as is possible by estate agents, and “local” produce, such as the increasing success of “Hawkesbury Harvest” in Sydney, and the “Sydney Harvest” value chain initiative.

Comment January 2016. Little doubt this trend is alive and well. Following on from the examples from last year, the local farmers markets around Sydney have continued to grow both in number and visitors, and you cannot move at Flemington on a Friday or Saturday for the retail produce sales. The major retailers have both introduced programs that deliver produce to their shelves that just a year ago would have been scrapped because it failed the visual test. Now however, following the success of the “ugli fruit”  campaign in the US being ugly is a marketing benefit. (perhaps there is hope for me yet)

 

      • Paid social media will evolve more quickly than any of us anticipate, or would be forecast by a simple extrapolation. Twitter will go paid, travelling the route Facebook took to commercialize their vast reach. Some will hate it as it filters their feeds, others  will welcome the reduction of the stream coming at them from which they try and drink. Anyway, twitter et al will set out to make money by capitalising on their reach.

Comment January 2016. This had better remain a forecast as I have seen no evidence that it has evolved much from a year ago beyond the continuing  squeeze being exerted on organic reach by Facebook and others. Twitter remains an uncurated torrent of posts, where use of the management tools is in the hands of the user.

 

      • Social will grab more of the market  in 2015 than it has had, even though the growth has been huge over the last few years. Small businesses will either embrace social and content marketing, in which case their agility and flexibility will put them in a competitively strong position, or if they fail to do so, they will fall further behind, and become casualties.

Comment January 2016. Again, plenty of anecdotal evidence, but little objective evidence I have seen, although plenty of the sort published by those with an interest in the success of social media trumpeting their own success.

 

      • The customer should always be the focal point of any organisation, but often they fail to get a mention. It is becoming more important than ever that you have a “360 degree” view of your customers, as the rapid evolution of social media and data generation and mining is enabling an ever more detailed understanding of the behaviour drivers of consumers. The density of highly targeted marketing, both organic and paid is increasing almost exponentially, so if you do not have this 360 degree view, your marketing will miss the mark.

Comment 2016. Wise thoughts from a year ago,  but hardly original. There would not be a management book anywhere that did not somewhere suggest that customers are what keep you in business, not the beauty of your product, and not  the efficiency of your processes, but the value you deliver.

 

      • Treat with caution all the predictions you read, keep an absolutely open mind, as the only thing we know for sure about them is that they will be wrong, as with this ripper from Bloomberg who predicted the failure of the iphone. However, as with statistical models, quoting George E.P. Box who said “Essentially, all models are wrong, it is just that some are useful” perhaps some of the predictions you find around this time of the year will be useful, by adding perspective and an alternative view to your deliberations for 2015.

Comment  January 2016  Still good advice.

As a final thought, if you think your kid may be good at marketing, be sure they learn maths and statistics. “Maths & Stats”  will increasingly be the basis of marketing, and the source of highly paid jobs and service business start-ups.

Have a great 2015.

Comment January 2016. I still think this is a great idea.

 

 

things I learnt, and relearnt, about marketing in 2015

things I learnt, and relearnt, about marketing in 2015

Dec 22, 2015 | Branding, Change, Customers, Management, Marketing

The year has been a blur, they go faster as I get older, something I find disturbing. Rushing headlong towards the daisy bed seems illogical when there is so much left to do.

I will be 64 in a few weeks, must be a song there somewhere, but it seems that the older I get, the more I learn.

How does that work?

Perhaps that  is because I have a wide and deep foundation built up over all those years that offers many places to tuck some added knowledge in, and the connections to other parts of the foundation are that more visible.

Anyway, here are the headline  things that struck me during the year.

All that is old is new again.

The king of Mad Men, David Ogilvy said it best, something like 50 years ago.  “It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea.”  Never before has this been so relevant, as we drown in a sea of mediocre so called ‘content”. What is an old fashioned ad if it is not content? What is an informative film made to show users how to build something, or adjust the points on my old Dodge, if not content. Just because the rules of engagement have changed, i.e., those on the other end of a communication can now tell us if it sucks, either by writing to us, responding on a site that scored whatever it s we flog, or ignoring it. The challenge remains the same. Find your market and build an emotional connection with them.

Scale is not everything.

In the pre internet days, a young academic named Michael Porter wrote the definitive book on competition. One of his 5 forces was all about scale. If you had it, you carried the hammer others could only aspire to, volume sales, negotiating power in your supply chains, power to advertise and promote, it was a huge barrier to either scale or hide behind.

No longer.

The net has destroyed much of the competitive power of scale. One of the greatest wielders of power I see every day are the two FMCG retail gorillas in Australia, who between them hold 75% of FMCG (CPG to my US friends) market share. Yesterday I went into woollies to buy the Xmas ham. My job for  years. In about 30 linear feet of chiller shelf, with many SKU’s of ham on the bone, not one was a proprietary brand. Every single SKU was Woolworths in some guise or another. Clearly buying scale at work for woollies, but I walked out hamless, and went to a small supplier who has a retail outlet about 15 k from my home and bought a ham there. Good price, good service, and probably a better ham because the margins had not been screwed to the bone by Woolies exercising their power of scale. (poor pun, sorry)

The tool relies on the tradesman.

There are so many tools around, to do just about everything, but by themselves they do nothing. All still require a skilled person to get the most out of them.

I have laid many bricks in the course of renovating two old houses, paid my way through Uni all those years ago on building sites, so I know how to do it, but look in my backyard, and you can tell the brinks I have laid, and those laid by a tradesman. If you want something done properly, only do it yourself it is what you do, not what some webinar on YouTube tells you can do.

Do not be seduced by the newest shiny thing.

Simplicity is really hard.

‘The ultimate sophistication is simplicity’.

Steve jobs said those words, and others before and after have said similar things that have been proven time and time again over the years. In todays world it holds more true than ever when it is operationally now so easy to add features few want, sacrificing simplicity and elegance in the process.

We tend to fall in love with our products, forgetting people do not care about them, only what they will do for them, what problems they solve, what value they deliver.

Dunbar’s number still rules.

We might have hundreds, even thousands of “friends” and connections, but we can only manage a limited number. We have been again seduced to believe that there is value in the breadth of many  connections, sacrificing the depth with a lesser number. I would rather have a list of 100 people who knew me well, would take a phone call from me, recognise the value I can bring to them, and are prepared to recommend me to others  based on that value, than a million friends on Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other of the other houses of digital one night stands.

Customers are people.

Customers and potential customers are not “targets” or ‘target audiences’, or ‘potentials’ or ‘rusted-on’ or any of the other expressions I hear regularly. They are people , they control their pockets in ways unimaginable just a few short years ago. Treating them with distain, or even a hint of condescension, tan they are able and willing to pack up and go elsewhere.  The power is very much in their hands  now, not those of the marketer, so make your communication as personal and specific as you can. I get lots of emails with the salutation “Dear Friend”. If I was so effing dear, why not use mu name. They never get opened, and a rule gets put in my email package to dump them into the Spam file never to be seen again. Dear friend indeed, give me a break!

Trust is the make or break metric.

Trust is a word that gets bandied around like a novelty game at  the Easter show. Everyone agrees that trust is a key, but so few recognise that Trust comes from consistent, transparent and generous behaviour, it is hard earned and easily lost, and never given without deep consideration. Don’t let this important word pass your lips unless you really mean it, and back it up with behaviour over a long period.

The nature of assets.

Almost forever, corporate assets in enterprises of any size from micro of MNC have been one of three in some sort of ratio: people, technology, and capital.

Now there is a fourth.

Data.

The integration of data cross functionally, through the value chain, and increasingly with outside “big data” is becoming rapidly more important than the traditional three as the world digitises and competition is increasingly dependent on the availability and accuracy of data from a range of sources.

One of my mates runs a small freight business. He recently added GPS, and a simple program to route his small fleet in real time, that integrates with public traffic info. Now he is wondering if he can  do with less trucks, and maybe make a bit of a return on his investment for a change.

Recall the furore when the email addresses of Ashley Madison subscribers  were hacked and made available for download. The asset value of data has rarely been more publicly demonstrated.

Beware the seductive hiss.

Snake oil salesman have found a new well of clichés and poisonous  bullshit to throw at you.

Beware.

Next time you hear the word ‘awesome’ (my current greatest hate cliché)  run like hell, and save yourself the time and potentially money these sophisticated purveyors of snake oil will try and winkle out of you.

The ‘3rd leg’ of commercial sustainability

The ‘3rd leg’ of commercial sustainability

Nov 19, 2015 | Branding, Customers, Marketing

The “third leg” of commercial sustainability.

Most are used to looking at Revenues and Profits as the measures of commercial sustainability. However, there is a third and often overlooked leg, that is to my mind more important as it drives both revenues and margins resulting in profits.

Your brands.

The objective of every marketer is to have users that are apostles for their brand, those users who will go out and employ for you that most powerful of marketing tools, word of mouth.

There is nothing as powerful as someone you trust telling you that in situation X, use brand Y, it will never let you down.

In 40 years of observing how the best of the best do it, and being engaged in building some powerful brands for my clients and employers, there are a number of common  practices I have observed in the most successful.

Love your greatest fans.

Every successful brand has a core of users who just love the brand, and will not use anything else. This hold true from soap powder to cars, just go to Bathurst in October and try and persuade a “Ford” man that “Holden” is a better car. Identifying this small group of apostles and feeding their love will be the best investment you can make. Your ‘apostles’ will only be a very small percentage of users, but will have an inordinate influence on your success.

 

Create brand stories.

Humans relate to stories,  we remember them and the lessons contained in them. A brand story that resonates with your target audience has the potential to generate way more engagement and ultimately loyalty than a bland recitation of facts and figures.

 

Encourage customer feedback

Successful companies treat customer feedback, particularly negative feedback as an opportunity to both gather information on how to make their products better, and by addressing a problem turn a product sceptic into an apostle.

Positive feedback enables collection of data that identifies the roles your product fills in peoples lives, often uncovering factors that feed into the users emotional connections not otherwise easily discovered. My often repeated cottage cheese story is a prime example of this.

 

Anticipate needs

Market research is an enormously powerful tool, it can tell you everything you need to know about what customers are doing currently.

However, asking customers what they might want or need in the future is not a good use of market research resources.

Henry Fords quip that if he asked his potential customers  what they wanted, they would answer ‘a faster horse’ remains true. Steve Jobs did  not ask if we wanted a music player, and camera incorporated into our phones. Clearly we did not see the need, as the technical capability was there, the then dominant market leader Nokia spent fortunes on market research,  and there was no demand for it, but he just went ahead did it, and changed the market forever.

 

Books are judged by their covers.

Despite being told from a young age that we should  ‘never judge a book by its cover’, we all do, in hundreds of ways every day. People will make almost instantaneous judgements about your products by the way they look, the colours, layout, name, how it impacts their sense of order and design. For example, a predominately yellow design for a Chinese audience could be problematic, unless your service is pornographic.

 

Relationships are becoming virtual

In person, we can hold a maximum of about 150 relationships at any one time, Dunbar’s number. However,   many of us have way more digital connections than 150, and those  who have figured out how to create an online metaphor  for personal relationships, like Amazon with their  recommendation algorithms are cleaning up. Your customers are building their own versions of digital relationships, and you should be where your customers are.

 

Defenders may not lose, but they rarely win.

Brand defence is a necessary component of any successful brand, but it is not enough. To win you need to be on the offensive, take risks, big steps, shake up the status quo with innovation and remapping of markets. Apple over the last decade has had no peer at employing offensive brand building  tactics and is now the largest, most profitable company ever seen, from a basket case 20 years ago.

 

Love your employees and stakeholders.

Just like apostle customers, those with an intimate knowledge of your business because of some level of commercial engagement, have an enormous capacity to influence others.   If you knew someone who supplied a component into the Acme computer company, and you were considering a new computer, would you still consider Acme if your mate told you they were rubbish? The converse is equally true. Working with stakeholders will deliver great returns, and can be a source of great value as most businesses fail to recognise the potential so close to home.

 

Become ‘organic’ and highly adaptable.

Just as organic systems adapt to what is in front of them to maximise their chances of survival, so should your brand development activities and priorities.  Adapt, adapt, and continue to adapt.