I was recently invited by the team at Digital DNA to contribute a guest blog in advance of the upcoming conference in Belfast on 8th June 2016.
The focus for my article was the opportunity for us as marketers to seize the new opportunity that exists for us to not only be content producers but also to be the distribution channel in this new digital world.
I’m about as passionate about all things marketing as is healthy (and maybe just a little more) – but a recent experience has firmed up the importance of context.
Let me explain.
In trying to determine where is the best place to promote your products or services the conversation must extend beyond just where your customers are. It must also ask ‘why are they there?’
I’ve been subjected to an assault recently when on Facebook by a crowd who call themselves ‘Luv for Marketing’.
Firstly, I’ve (almost) forgiven them for their ‘down with the kids’ name and since they’re appearing on my news feed I’m assuming that even as a 40 year old they do think they have something to offer me.
This is not the problem however.
The problem is that when I’m on Facebook that’s not what I’m there for.
I’m there for lots of other reasons – the vast majority of them recreational. Latest sports news, checking the build up to some upcoming events and – let’s be honest – being nosey.
Luv for Marketing appear on the surface to have got everything right – I’m interested in their subject matter and they’ve crafted concise yet descriptive ads which indicate to me that they’d be worth looking into further.
But the fact is that I’ve seen the ad more than 50 times now and haven’t once clicked the ‘learn more’ button.
Why?
Because in that place (Facebook) at that time (downtime after work) I’ve had my fill of marketing for the day.
If, on the other hand, they’d got at me through LinkedIn while I was updating my company page it’s more than likely that I would have acted on their prompts before now.
While this is just my own personal experience with one particular advertiser I think it raises some interesting questions around context and timing when considering our marketing messages.
Disclaimer:
This post is in no way a negative comment on the services that Luv for Marketing offer or their marketing approach. It is simply my own experience of their Facebook marketing which I hope is working fabulously well for them.
If anyone from Luv for Marketing should read this post – get in touch. I’m interested.
If you’d like some help defining the necessary context for your social media advertising then get in touch.
I was talking to a guy recently who told me that booking a conference room in a hotel and delivering a sales presentation worked really well for his business.
So here’s what I’m going to do.
There’s a really nice conference centre in a hotel near our offices so I’m going to book it for next month. We’re going to put together a killer presentation, build a stage, make a video, lay on some nice food. I’d say 100 people should cover it.
That’s it organised – all systems go.
What’s that you say? What about the audience?
Not a problem – sure that guy told me it worked really well for his business.
I hope you’ll agree that this is a completely ludicrous idea. Ill conceived with no consideration for the requirements of my business.
Yet people are doing this day and daily in marketing departments all over the world.
Maybe not with the conference room booking but instead with their choice of the social media channels that they use.
Like magpies people are drawn to the latest shiny new toy in the pursuit of the coolest way to deliver their marketing messages.
People flock to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn with no knowledge of whether their customers are using this media.
Across the board there seems to be a universal reason for this behaviour – because they’re free.
They only way they are free from a direct financial cost is if you are working for nothing (which I’m guessing that the vast majority of you are not).
Even if you are working for free then there is the cost in terms of your time to consider. Time that you would surely prefer to be spending on activities that will add some value to what you are doing.
And then there’s the opportunity cost – what new business are you missing out on by wasting time on marketing tools that will deliver no results?
How much more business could you win by stopping focusing on all the shiny new toys and narrowing the focus to tried and tested channels that you know will bring you results.
You wouldn’t deliver a sales presentation in an empty room so don’t use any marketing tools until you know your customers are there.
Stop using delivery channels for your marketing messages based on how new, how cool they are or based on other trendy, cool people and companies that may be using them.
Do your research. Understand your customers. Select the right channels. Clearly define the message you want to communicate and the customer interactions you are seeking.
Only then will you be extracting maximum value from every penny in your marketing budget and making the most efficient and valuable use of your time.
With so much advice available on how you can maximise the return from your marketing investment it’s nice to find a blog post that pulls a lot of articles together. This post on LinkedIn does just that and deals with a number of interesting topics:
Case Studies showing how Content Marketing Drives ROI
How to improve the tired old content on your website
What content marketers can learn from traditional journalism
A beginners guide to keyword research for SEO
SEO for mobile
Getting the biggest SEO bank for your marketing buck
Advice on structuring your URL’s for the best SEO advantage
17 Visualisation tools to make your data beautiful
It seems that everyone is searching for the silver bullet that will allow them to create viral campaigns at will. I think this is a problem.
The endless focus on viral and how it can be achieved suggests to me that there is a misconception that a viral campaign is the single key performance indicator that matters. The suggestion here is that viral automatically equals success. While there is no doubt that this is the case in some instances I think there are more than enough examples of viral campaigns that simply haven’t worked – they haven’t delivered any significant business result.
I’ll illustrate this by looking at examples of 2 viral campaigns – both of which would have been described as successful if the only measure was whether they achieved the ‘viral’ badge of honour.
One of the best examples of a successful viral campaign is the ongoing campaign run by Blendtec to promote the blenders that they produce. This is one of the most often quoted examples of successful viral campaigns and it’s easy to see why. They didn’t just create one video that went viral – they’ve managed to sustain their success over a reasonably long period of time (digital years, as we all know are like dog years in fast forward).
Their video showing the blending of an iPad using a Blendtec blender has to date had almost 17 ½ million views on their Youtube channel. The iPhone in the blender has had 12 ¼ million views. Other products that have had the Blendtec treatment include golf balls, crowbars, magnets and marbles.
The Blendtec story has so many factors that made it successful – the first video that went viral was simply the delivery mechanism for the campaign.
First of all, they have a great product – the rationale for putting all this weird and wonderful stuff through a blender was to demonstrate the strength of the blender. If it can blend an iPad or a golf ball it’s going to have no problem making your breakfast smoothie. So the campaign had a clear purpose – demonstrate one of the key unique selling points of the product.
Secondly, it’s a mass market product. Achieving almost 30 million views for the iPad and iPhone videos is a step in the right direction for Blendtec in making their product more well known and more desirable. The potential for people to decide to buy a Blendtec blender is almost beyond comprehension – it’s not inconceivable that every home in the world could have a Blendtec blender.
The key thing that determines whether the Blendtec campaign was a success is the difference it made to their sales numbers. The results here are astounding – in 2009 it was reported that after the first 186 videos sales were up 700%.
All of this was possible because the campaign had a clear purpose and a solid business behind it.
This is a viral campaign that worked – not because it went viral but because it delivered a significant business result.
Equally, there are mass market brands that try and run viral campaigns that aren’t as successful. One of the best to illustrate the point that viral alone doesn’t mean success was done by Kodak back in 2007.
Headline from a Adage article on the famous Kodak viral campaign
This video sought to address the perception that Kodak was a tired old brand that had been left behind by the digital photography boom. They had failed to spot the changing demands of their customers and they tackled this issue head on with the launch of a video which was very self deprecating – admitting all the mistakes of the past and recent present but promising that it was all about to change.
Personally, this was one of the best videos that I ever watched online – but despite numerous searches it’s just not available any more. Why? Because in 2009 the company went out of business.
While the campaign achieved the objective of going viral it didn’t make one blind bit of difference to the prospects for the company. Why? Because viral isn’t a healthy objective to have for any campaign.
The Kodak campaign was destined to fail because it had no purpose other than going viral, no substance to back up the claims they made in their video. They may have talked about embracing the digital revolution and to watch out for all the new technology that they were about to unleash on the market. But the fact was that they didn’t have any of this. It was an elaborate cover story to try and buy some time.
I bet when the Kodak video went viral the agency involved and the Kodak marketing team were busy patting themselves on the back about what a wonderful job they had just done. For them, the viral video was evidence of success. The proof that this has no foundation is what happened to Kodak in 2009 when they closed their doors.
I think these two campaigns represent the 2 extremes of viral campaigns.
Blendtec is a great sales, marketing and product development story that demonstrates the value in understanding your customers, understanding your product and having a clear objective for your campaigns.
Kodak is an example of viral for the sake of viral. That’s as much substance as there was. Was it clever? Yes. Was it funny? Yes. Did it reach a massive audience? Yes. Did it work? No.
What this says for me in that in the midst of this technological age success in sales, marketing and business in general is still down to a few good old fashioned things:
A great product, in the right market, at the right price, delivered through the best sales channel with superior customer support and a great sales team.
Get these basics right and your success will be long term and tangible rather than a flash in the pan viral campaign.
There are numerous online image creation tools available but the one I’m using most the minute is Canva.
There are so many templates available for you to use so whether you’re looking for a simple facebook or twitter header profile, business cards, posters or infographics they have made it so easy to use.
Just some of the free image templates available on Canva
The process is really simple – you select from a range of design templates and then customise it with your own text and images. As a starter the free templates offer more than enough scope for you to explore the capability of the system.
There is of course a library of premium themes which you can access – I haven’t found any need to use these yet but they do offer expanded libraries of design templates and more flexibility when it comes to layouts.
As well as all the social media images you can create I also use the tool to help create images for sales presentations to existing and potential clients. The image sizes are designed to fit with Powerpoint / Keynote and are really quick and easy to create.
Presentation image created using Canva
For beginners on the system there is a Canva Design School which contains a library of tutorials on how to use the system.
The Canva design school tutorials
You can also browse the design school by category to find help with the specific project that you’re working on.
Browse by category on the Canva Design School
Once you’ve created your free images you can either keep them private or share them to show others the designs you have created. Even if you want to keep your own images private you can search the Canva Stream to see the most recently published images. This is a great resource for finding out how you could use the system for yourself.
Canva design stream shows the most recently created images
If you’d like any help discovering how you can use Canva to benefit your business then get in touch:
Pinterest ‘failing to add value for brands’ according to a report from Forrester
I came across an interesting post on the Marketing Week website(UK) recently in relation to the ‘Promoted Pins’ feature on social networking site, Pinterest. The article revealed that a report from Forrester indicated that the majority of brands that are using the Pinterest ad platform are struggling to get any value from it.
The Promoted Pins feature is soon to arrive in the UK market and I am sure that agencies up and down the country will be rushing to spend their client’s hard earned cash on this shiny new platform.
The article is – in my humble opinion – an indication of a wider problem with the choice of the best social networks to use for advertising. Rather than take the report from Forrester as an indication that Pinterest is of no value to advertisers I think that the problem actually lies with the advertisers themselves putting the technology first rather than their own individual business requirements.
This is not a phenomenon that is exclusive to Pinterest – I think every social media platform is having millions of pounds / dollars / euros wasted on it every day. It’s not because there is no value to be gained from advertising on these platforms – but because the wrong people are advertising.
As soon as the latest trendy social media platform becomes open for advertisers it seems that companies are flocking to their doors to spend their hard earned cash. The problem is that these decisions to advertise on Pinterest and other platforms seem to be based on the fact that Pinterest is the latest hot social media property rather than any meaningful research that suggests Pinterest will represent a good return on investment.
By asking a few simple questions before jumping on the latest social media platform you can eliminate this problem and make sure that you get the best bang for your buck:
Understand the demographics of the users of the social media network – what is the user profile and what are they looking for when they are there?
Understand whether this demographic matches your target audience – all you’ve done at this stage is identify a potential advertising platform. There is still work to do before you can make an informed decision.
Understand why your customers are using the social media network – if you’re selling in a B2B environment be careful. Just because your customers may use the network doesn’t mean that they are in buying mode when they are there. It may be a social thing where they keep in touch with friends and they may not be open to be sold to.
Do your research – find out some case studies for how other people are successfully using the social media network and use this to inform your decisions about how you can design a campaign that will make you money.
Once you’ve done all of this you can be much more comfortable with your decision to advertise. There is no doubt that this process will mean that on some occasions your decision will be not to advertise on the latest trendy offering that social media world has to offer. And that’s OK. Especially when you’re reporting on the return that your advertising revenue is generating.
Storytelling is still an important part of the marketing mix
I came across a post recently on the Explore B2B blog urging marketers to stop storytelling. On seeing the headline I thought I would disagree with the idea but after reading the article in full I could see where the author was coming from.
The article by Carlos Hidalgo highlighted that storytelling implies a focus on us as the storyteller rather than our customers. It was making the point that in the social media age we should be engaging in conversations (2 way communication) with our potential customers rather than simply telling them our story (one way communication).
While I agree with this principle it’s premature to signal the end of storytelling as a marketing tool of value.
And here’s why:
Before people will fully engage in conversations with us they want to know who they are talking to.
Do we understand their problems and offer a solution?
Do our values match with their own?
Do we have any evidence to support the claims that we are making about how we can help them?
Conversations are given context by the story you tell
A well crafted story will help to answer these questions and provide the context which will give the subsequent conversations some meaning.
Of course the story we tell needs to be carefully considered. Too many of these focus on what we would like to talk about rather than what our potential and existing customers want to know.
If we have a good story to tell its most likely down to our understanding of customer requirements and capability to design a solution to these problems. So make this the story.
For me it’s not a case of storytelling versus conversations. Both are vital parts of the marketing mix.
One of the most significant impacts of social media has been to facilitate conversations between us and our customers – but the reports of the demise of storytelling have been greatly exaggerated.
If you would like some help creating your compelling story that will make your target customers engage with you first, and buy from you second then get in touch.
For me it sums up what marketing is all about. While others may judge us on the impact of an individual event, video etc we should be judged on consistently delivering results that will allow our businesses to achieve their goals.
It is far too often the case that marketing is judged on the tactics employed rather than the overall results – and this is because of a disconnect between the overall business strategy and the marketing activities that we are engaged in.
Rare moments of greatness happen by accident rather than design. They happen because we’re just trying to do a lot of different stuff with the digital channels available to us without proper consideration for what we’re trying to achieve or what success looks like. It’s inevitable that the more we do of this stuff, the more we learn about what works and the better we get at spotting content that is likely to get a good reaction online.
And this is part of the problem – an endless pursuit of Facebook likes does not constitute a strategy. It is merely a tactic to help you deliver something valuable. So what is it that you’re trying to deliver? The problem is that a lot of people just don’t know.
To move from rare moments of greatness to the consistency that will deliver real business value you need to take a step back – ignore all the tools you have available to you and focus on what it is you are trying to achieve.
The first step is to understand what your goals are – this is derived from your overall business strategy. This could be to win a certain amount of new sales / donations within a new sector or market or increase market share to give some examples.
From this we are then able to define what the goals of our marketing efforts are:
Are we trying to drive traffic to our website or blog because we know this generates more leads?
Are we trying to provide resources and information to assist our customers with their buying decision?
Are we trying to build a social following to build our reputation in the industry?
Once you know what it is that you’re trying to achieve you then need to know how you’re going to measure success.
If we’re trying to drive traffic to the website to generate more leads – how much traffic do we need and how many leads should this convert to?
If we’re trying to provide resources and information to assist customers with their buying decision – how many downloads of the whitepapers, brochures and case studies are we looking for?
If we’re trying to build a social following – how many new likes or followers are we trying to win? Or maybe focus on the engagement metrics instead – the conversations that begin because we started them, the number of times our content was shared?
When you have these things in place you can then start thinking about the tactics that you’re going to employ to help you achieve your goals. It’s only now that the channels come into the equation – where do your target audience hang out, what is the best way to connect with them when they are there and what content will they find either useful or interesting? This should include both online and offline channels to deliver the best results.
A well considered digital strategy will yield results for your business – simply because you now know what you are trying to achieve.
This will allow you to quickly and easily report on progress internally and demonstrate to the cynics in your organisation the value you are adding through your digital content marketing activity. This focus on performance is what is all too often missing from the marketing function.
Too many KPI documents for the marketing department are littered full of tactics that shift and change depending on the latest requests from the board or the sales team. All this does is measure activity – and just because you’re busy doesn’t mean you’re adding any value.
By stepping back and considering what it is that we are trying to deliver we can shift the focus from the activity to the value that we are adding and this is when we will achieve consistency.
Because consistency is far better than rare moments of greatness.
If you would like some help either developing your digital marketing strategy or deploying the tactics to ensure success then get in touch.
I came across a great blog post today from @captora with some really powerful stats on the rise of content marketing in recent years.
There is no doubt that the stats are convincing – content marketing is here to stay and I don’t think you’ll get much of an argument from any modern marketers.
So here’s my problem – if my hypothesis is correct and there is an acceptance that content marketing needs to be central to any marketing strategy there must be something else that is stopping people from getting involved.
I think there is a general fear of content marketing – largely driven by the fact that it is often accompanied by the word ‘strategy’. This immediately conjures up visions of 100 page documents and puts people right off.
So, to try and dispel this fear I’ve taken two of the key stats from the @captora post and asked 2 important questions:
What does this mean for your company?
What can you do about it?
Here we go:
Stat #1: There are 27 million pieces of content shared each day online
What does this mean for your company?
This is one hell of a big number – you need to understand how much of this content relates to your industry, to the products you are selling. This will vary hugely depending on whether you’re involved in a mass market consumer product or a niche engineering application for example.
What can you do about it?
Understand what your goal is – what does success look like? Sales, website visitors, video views, increased followers, more enquiries?
Two ears, one mouth – use them in that proportion.
Search online for content relating to your industry (Google Alerts are a great way to do this).
Search Twitter to see who in your industry is doing this stuff well – and understand why.
Once you’ve done this initial research you will better understand what content you can produce that is suitable for sharing, likely to get a response and will ultimately lead to more sales leads (or whatever your overall goal is).
Start recording these ideas in an editorial calendar and hey presto – your content marketing strategy is underway.
Stat #2: The number of web searches for ‘content marketing’ is up 400% since January 2011
What does this mean for your company?
Take comfort in the fact that this suggests to me that there are a lot of people out there who don’t understand how to make the most of this opportunity.
The opening line of the @captora post says “Content marketing has become a buzzword in modern marketing”.
Content Marketing is simply the latest way to describe what marketers have always done – produce good content. It’s nothing particularly revolutionary. Your tone might have to change and adapt to the social media channels that you are using in order to get the best results but otherwise – keep on keeping on.
What can you do about it?
Once you’ve developed the first run at your editorial calendar then select the channels that are right for you and just get started.
I’m reminded of a quote from Thomas Edison that is relevant to this discussion:
“I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”
Hopefully you’ll get the hang of it well before the 10,000 mark – but the only way you’ll really find out what works and what doesn’t is to get started. Set yourself some small objectives at the start that you think will help you achieve your overall goal – increased sales, donations to your charitable cause, views of your Youtube videos.
There are a number of other interesting stats in the @captora post and I’ll return to these at a later date.
Hope you found this post useful – if you did please remember to share with your network.
Petrac Marketing 