Jan 20, 2015 | Branding, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Interactive content adds greater value
The mantra “Content is King” is now about three years old, geriatric in web years.
Now almost everybody is doing it, certainly almost everyone small businesses need to compete successfully against to survive.
Content is rapidly becoming a commodity, something to be “sourced” as you would a new printer cartridge, or replacement part for a bit of machinery, the only real challenges left are to know where to look, how to sort through the options, and how much to pay.
Given this is the case, how should forward thinking marketers, particularly those on small budgets set about differentiating themselves amongst the welter of competing attention grabbing options available?
The answer is pretty easy to say, but not so easy to execute.
Find ways to actively engage the individuals in your market with your content . Just getting them to read a post, or even download a white paper is no longer good enough, you have to find the means to put their brains into gear, rather than just letting them operate on autopilot.
Turn a white paper into an interactive performance measurement tool,
Build a quizzes and games into your infographics,
Create questionnaires to complement your best practise databases,
Throw out the product brochure, and let customers design their own product and add the extras.
There are a few services evolving to assist the process, several tailored for specific social media platforms, but the hardest bit is to find the creativity, imagination, and market insight that will allow you to understand the interactions with your product and its competitors sufficiently well to know what sort of activity will engage them.
Get it right, and you will also get to gather an extraordinary array of customer behavioural data that can be leveraged, delivering value to your business and your customers.
Jan 19, 2015 | Collaboration, Communication, Small business
Great communication is a two way street!
Working with a colleague over Christmas to assist in the development of a presentation that was a really important opportunity to build her personal brand with the audience. Creating presentations that work is a process, and hard work, so to start, we broke the task of building the presentation down into three components.
- Twitter Pitch. Twitter has its detractors, but the huge unintended benefit for those communicating ideas as distinct from the minutiae of their lives is that it forcse us to distill ideas into 140 characters, what I call the” twitter pitch“. Applying this discipline to the preparation of a presentation is usually the same sort of challenge as presented by developing the elevator pitch for your business. In this case, the challenge was to articulate in one sentence the central idea that was to be conveyed. Not easy.
- Know what you want to happen. Clarifying this really has three parts:
- Define what it is that you want the audience to know as a result of the presentation
- Know what you want the audience to feel during and after the presentation
- Know exactly what it is you want them to do with the information you provide, and deliver them the means to do it. A “call to action” if you like.
- Create a structure for the presentation that delivers on the points above. Again, there are three factors at work:
- Have a logical, sequential structure of some sort for the presentation.
- Gain the trust of the audience, listening but not believing is a waste of everyone’s time.
- Do it with feeling. People rarely remember facts, but they do clearly remember the emotions they felt while the facts were being recited. I do not remember the date of the assassination of JFK, but I do remember (yes, I am that bloody old) exactly what I was doing at the time, and how I and those around me reacted to the news.
Delivering a presentation is a difficult to obtain opportunity to sell. An idea, a product, your skills, the reason your business exists, it varies, but the common point is that those in the room have given you their time and attention, their most valuable resource, don’t waste it for them, and miss the opportunity for you.
On a final note, you may also notice that all of the above is in “threes”. For some reason I do not understand, the human brain is very efficient at remembering things in threes. If you organise your presentation into blocks of threes, you will be better able to manage the flow, remember the sequences and words, and deliver.
None of this is easy, and rarely is a great presentation prepared alone, and it is never done at the last moment and without practise and a critical eye.
Need a critical eye, and sounding board? I can help.
Jan 16, 2015 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business
http://www.markstewart.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/women_chatting.jpg
Most would acknowledge that word of mouth is the most effective marketing channel there is, then promptly forget that fact as they set about preparing and implementing their programs.
Discounts, bundles, making ads, facebook likes, social media mentions, retweets and shares, and many other activities all get a guernsey, but when was the last time you explicitly set about creating word of mouth, real life endorsements, Margie from Marrickville telling her neighbor over the fence that your product is the best thing since sliced bread?
How much of your marketing budget has as its specific aim to create personal endorsements?
We all know that “WOM” is the original marketing channel, so I was surprised to see this research that reflected that only 28% of small businesses when asked to identify their best marketing channel noted Word of mouth in its proper place.
Have we just forgotten the basics, been seduced by the the welter of choices available?
Perhaps it is just the sample, choices, or that it is from the US, but I asked a small group last week a similar question, albeit open-ended, and word of mouth came in at about the same level.
We can now target messages to specific behaviors practiced by very discrete subgroups, why would we not seek to ensure we deliver outstanding value to them, then encourage them to spread the word amongst those they know who are similarly interested?
Word of mouth, the original and still the best social media platform.
Jan 12, 2015 | Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Courtesy www.groovehq.com
Writing a blog is hard work, great to do as it forces you to think critically, read widely, seek to question your own preconceptions, and expand your own expertise, so it can be intellectually rewarding. It is nevertheless time consuming hard work.
As such, it can be seen either as a hobby, or an investment, and if it is the latter, there should be a return on the time and energy expended.
For most small businesses, it can easily become a chore, which is why so many fall back on some formulaic way, just to pump out words and fill a schedule, and end up doing nobody, themselves particularly, any good.
There have been many posts about the “10 smart ways to write more blog posts” lots of advice that suggest a process is the way to make blogging both easy and commercially productive, this one from GrooveHQ being one of the better ones (and I borrowed their header photo) but like most others, misses the essential point.
Blogging is now so common, has become such a generic activity that most material out there is “average”. The task of filtering the really good stuff out for comment and further consideration is becoming increasingly automated, adding to the “average” tendency, as the really good stuff always happens on the fringes, and it usually elusive and challenging, just like any other sort of useful innovation.
To me there is really only three ways to be genuinely useful, to attract and keep readers.
- Display really deep domain knowledge, and be generous with it. Mitch Joel, Mark Schaefer, Avanish Kaushik and Ian Cleary are a few that spring to mind that do this consistently and well, and GrooveHQ is rapidly becoming one of my core reading list, listed down the side.
- Be genuinely interested, concerned curious, and yes, passionate, in your domain, and have that communicated simply by demonstrating an independence of mind, generosity of ideas, willingness to kick the sacred cows, and make the elephants visible.
- Be original, prepared to be challenging, and persistent.
My clients, small businesses in the most part, are being increasingly left behind as is the case in most arenas of competitive activity, they lack a depth of resources, so they just have to be smarter, more agile, and personally committed than their larger competitors.
Those that do it well will flourish.
Jan 9, 2015 | Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Courtesy www.searchengineland.com
“Content Marketing” is the new buzzword, something I consider to be a tarted-up label stuck on a set of activities we have always done, in the hope of adding a few more mirrors to the disappearing hall, so quick talkers can extract a premium for what they are supposed to be doing anyway.
Cynical perhaps, but what is copy in a newspaper column if not content, what about the promotion run by the local car dealer, or the ad on TV?
Leaving that grumble aside, the huge change that has occurred is that content no longer lasts as long as it used to, but has the chance of resurrection, for the real thing!
There is some great stuff being produced, truly inspirational material, but as usual there is a lot of crap, and the volume of crap is increasing as the appetite of the new e-mediums increases, and everyone becomes a publisher.
There has always been a 1/2 life for content, but the nature of it has changed radically.
The half life of a daily newspaper used to be a day, after which it became rubbish, of a women’s magazine, it was a bit longer, a week or two as the articles were read (are they really?) and as the copy got handed around a bit, a radio ad was about 30 seconds at best.
Material published digitally has a much longer half life, but much less chance of being seen on being published. The volumes of publishing on Social media platforms limit both the opportunity to be seen on publishing, and usually the reach of a post (facebook is now less than 5% organic reach) 
but do offer the opportunity for a second, and third chance, as it does not become fish wrapper tonight.
The most viewed post on this blog was written several years ago, and just keeps on attracting readers, but on the day it was published, well, suffice to say I did not need to take my shoes off to count the numbers. In addition, good posts can be linked, shared, republished with ease, again increasing the 1/2 life, and occasionally there is the remote possibility of a digital lottery win, the viral post.
Digital phenomena like the video condemning Kony, the African nut job laying waste to swathes of central Africa using children as soldiers swept the world, breaking all records, and Psi, that whacky Korean “singer” who became an internet sensation for reasons I simply do not understand, can happen. The 1/2 life of those two may be short, but the reach was huge, and there is always the chance of a rebirth.
Particularly for small businesses with limited resources, considering the nature of their content, and crafting it to extend and expand the 1/2 life, offers great opportunities for marketing and communication leverage they never had before.
Jan 5, 2015 | Branding, Change, Customers, Governance, Innovation, Marketing
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.
- Peer to peer marketing will continue to grow at “Moores law” type rates. Jerry Owyangs honeycomb diagram and data tells it all. Almost any service I can think of has the potential too be disrupted in some way by the peer to peer capabilities being delivered by technology.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 caitalising on their reach.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
Allen
