Jul 27, 2014 | Change, Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
The single biggest stumbling block I see to successful digital marketing is not the technology, or the money, desire, or need, it is simply the unwillingness or inability to create relevant, engaging content of value that suits the context in which it is seen.
Usually it reflects a lack of a solid understanding of why they are in the business, other than to pay the bills. As Simon Sinek would say, the “Why” of the business.
Interestingly, the same stumbling block exists with bigger enterprises, they may have websites stuffed with words and pictures, but often that is all they are: words and pictures without value.
The same reasons exist for the failure in both categories.
- Lack of marketing leadership. Where marketing is seen as an expense, and customers are all those out there from whom we need to extract money. In these cases, creating content is always a barrier, and where it exists, it is usually a steaming pile of crap. Irrelevant, hard to navigate, bland, talking about themselves, yada, yada. Almost always the content improves when the customer is put as the focus of the content generation activity, answering the question “how can we better inform our market” When everybody in a business recognises that they have a marketing responsibility, you get the environment where content can be improved, and this is a leadership function, to drive the culture.
- Content is not recognised as an asset to be leveraged. Knowledge is the new currency of success, in almost every business. Those who know more, and can leverage that knowledge, find success. Knowledge management is therefore crucial and where does it reside? Between the ears of employees, stakeholders, suppliers, and often customers. When that simple fact is recognised, steps can be taken to extract the knowledge, and organise it in some way to become information of value to customers. Intellectual Capital, is knowledge that can be used, and unlike physical capital, the more it is used, the better it gets.
- No process to record and organise ideas. Content is everybody’s responsibility, but there needs to be processes in place that make it easy, and encourage the contribution of ideas and information that can be massaged into content of value. The best i have seen are a bit like the traditional sales funnel, everything that comes in , and coming in is everybody’s job, is recorded, then the ideas and information progressively filtered and organised in a process that creates value for recipients at the end. You really need an idea bank into which everyone makes deposits, and deposits are rewarded, and used to create valuable content.
- No focus on content. The old adage, what gets measured gets done, is true, if it is important, and is treated as such, it will get done. One business I work with is led by a lady who sees content as important, so she devotes a part of her considerable energy to creating it, and by that simple example has tuned the place into a content generation machine over a relatively short period, and they are getting the sales to prove it works.
- Content is marketing’s job. NO. It is everybody’s job in an enterprise to assist the customer.
- You think you know it all, and why would you tell your competitors?. When this syndrome becomes obvious it is time to leave. Most commonly I see it in other wise sophisticated technical businesses, where the history tells them that keeping information to themselves, and dolling it out to customers like a drunk offering a swig at his bottle when they ask nicely is the way to gain and keep customers. Rubbish!
- Content for contents sake. Putting up any old stuff on digital platforms is counter productive. Our digital world has given all the power to the customer, if you post rubbish, it will be seen as a reflection of the business, and who would want to do business with you?
There has been a lot written by all sorts of people on the subject of “content” and there is a lot more coming. However, there are a few simple rules that should be followed:
- Make sure whatever content you put out there is a reflection of the business, its priorities, strategies, and value proposition.
- Know who your primary customer group is, and what they are looking for in a supplier in your space
- Always look at your content with the eyes of your customer, and in the context of the competitive landscape in which you are competing for your customers attention, engagement, and ultimately, money. If your digital face is not up to scratch, why should customers trust that your products and services are any better?
I would be very happy to talk more about all this over a coffee.
Jul 18, 2014 | Customers, Marketing, Small business
As a young marketing graduate in the 70’s I was given a scholarship to attend an intensive marketing management program in Boston, run by Harvard professor Jim Hagler.
He changed my life.
One of the many things he rumbled to me (he spoke, but it came out as a rumble) was:
“Son, find out how they intend to stay in front of the curve”
Sage advice.
Marketing is all about staying in front of the curve, the challenge most businesses have is defining the curve.
Most businesses have a choice of curves, but you cannot be all things to all people, so choices are made.
The price curve
The cost curve
The innovation curve
The Value curve.
It is just this last one that really matters to customers worth keeping. They want value, however they choose to define it.
Whatever else you do, for your chosen group, niche, cohort, or however you choose to define your ideal target customers, stay in front of the value curve.
Look around you, there is no successful enterprise that is behind the curve.
Jul 15, 2014 | Leadership, Small business, Strategy
The complexity of the world these days demands an approach to strategy that is counter intuitive, perhaps even a contrarian approach to the accepted best practice.
For decades managers have sweated and planned, and set out to execute, just to see the planning go to crap at the first hurdle, as things rarely happen as planned.
In the “MBA model”, you push on regardless, because it is planned, the resources gathered, prioritised and allocated, a “push” model of strategy development and deployment.
If the opposite were to happen with strategy, as it does with agile software development, how would it differ?
A continuous process of combining strategic hypothesis generation and A/B testing, going hand in hand with incremental resource allocation from a diverse pool of experts, rather than a from pool of available bodies? Seems to be a sensible alternative, so why don’t we do it?
Generally we people like certainty, clarity, and a minimum of ambiguity, and that comes with a detailed plan. Problem is, plans are only as good as our ability to read the future, which is generally pretty ordinary. The better way is to know the end point, and if we can manage the ambiguity and uncertainty, make our own away there based on the obstacles we encounter.
In this uncertain world, we need a compass, not a roadmap.
Maps tell us to move forward a defined distance, take a left, followed by a right, and so on, whereas a compass tells us the direction, not necessarily the detail of how to navigate the immediate terrain.
This counter intuitive approach to strategy is often what SME’s do, without really recognising it as such. They react to what is in front of them, rather than what they may have planned to do, often the plans do not even exist in a formal sense. Their challenge is to apply some focus on the longer term, not just the burning bridge they are standing on.
Jul 14, 2014 | Communication, Marketing, Small business
kmjantz.wordpress.com
“Content marketing ” is no more than a new buzzword to try and build interest in the stuff we marketers have always been doing, telling stories, and creating a context in which the stories we tell will be meaningful, and be a catalyst to an action we want.
It is also fundamentally important that the bag of stuff called content is understood, well organised and communicated.
Cave paintings were perhaps the first, they told stories about the lives of those living in those days, passing on messages to those that followed, next week, month, millennium.
I have argued previously that Martins Luthers church door was just facebook in beta form, but perhaps the first recognised piece of content marketing as we now know it emerged in 1895 with the first publication of the John Deere farm machinery magazine “The Furrow“, still going strong.
The Michelin brothers first published the “Guide Michelin” a motoring guide in 1900, with the objective of telling the few motorists then around where they could find petrol, accommodation, meals and repairs in France.
In what may have been the first modern cookbook, Frank Woodward saved his $350 investment in the rights to “Jello” at the last moment by publishing a recipe book, the first step in creating a dessert tradition that still exists in the US, and perhaps taking the first step towards our obsession with cookbooks, or “Cooking Content Books”.
Burns & McDonnell engineering first published their “Benchmark” magazine in 1913, and Procter & gamble did more than bring us our daily cleansing products, they gave the name “soap opera” to the daily dose of what we still call “soaps” on TV, by sponsoring radio programs in the ’30’s.
Lego has been the king, with their magazine, and now the Lego movie, how great is that, to have Hollywood make a movie about your product? Wonder where the funding came from?
The examples of so called “Content Marketing” exploded after 2000, any scan of the web will give hundreds of thousands of examples, opinions, and infographics. Curata’s list of content marketing e-books is a great assembly of information, and more evidence, if any more is needed of the interest in the area.
Point is, “Content” is not new, neither is the notion of engaging by communicating stories offering advice, and managing context, it is just that we now have some pretty potent additions to the toolbox.
PS. August 2014. This article on “The Furrow” magazine appeared on the Contently website in August, and offers added insight into this venerable, and far-sighted publication.
Jul 9, 2014 | Change, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Last weekend the local tennis club of which I am a member had an open day. We marketed the day pretty heavily to the local community over the course of a couple of weeks, and got a great turnout. In order to ensure we could follow up, we collected the email addresses of visitors by offering entry to a raffle for a new racquet.
I have just completed transcribing the emails into our system, and considering how we may have done it better. A number of factors were absolutely obvious, and whilst they should not have been a surprise, the extent of the change evident in our collective behaviour was indeed a surprise.
- We asked for phone numbers, but did not specify mobile or landline. Every single number we got, which was every visitor except one, gave us a mobile number, not one landline.
- With one exception, every person, irrespective of age, gave us an email address.
- A quick look at the analytics on the website over the past few weeks shows that just over 76% of the hits have come from mobile devices. Whilst the numbers involved are not huge, the dominance of mobile surprised me.
I read, and talk about the switch to mobile every day, but it has been to date a theoretical fact, something I was aware of, understood, but had not brushed against directly to the extend that the general numbers indicated. Now however, the understanding of the numbers has a very personal dimension, and I have absorbed the lesson rather than just understood it.
Unusually for me I have been at home for the last few weeks, and I have been answering the home phone while my wife is away. In the two weeks, there have been quite a number of calls, every single one a telemarketer.
Why am I paying line rental? It seems it is to give telemarketers access. I think I will cancel the landline, the boss will never notice when she gets home, unless she really likes the sales calls.
Jul 8, 2014 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Success does not happen by accident, it comes from hard work, knowledge, insight and experimentation. In the case of websites there are almost a billion websites live (866k) in July 2014, the billion mark will probably be reached by the 4nd of 2014. This is from the first site, being put up by Tim Berners-Lee in August 1991.
This is a pretty useful universe from which to draw lessons, and we have learnt a lot about what works and what does not.
What works:
- Content that is Interesting and engaging and targeted for a specific group of people will attract their attention, rather than content that is more general in nature .
- Attractive, eye-catching design is essential. Humans are visual animals, design is fundamental to attracting and keeping attention. The more research we do in this area, the more we understand the basic rules, and they are rules that have applied from the dawn of human development. Disregard them at your peril.
- Simplicity. Also essential is a design that enables visitors to find the stuff they are looking for simply and quickly.
- Speed. Low loading speed is penalised by search engines, but more importantly, is penalised by casual viewers, who simply move on.
- SEO. At least basic search engine optimisation is both easy and essential, if you have a great site that cannot be found, nobody wins.
- Competitive. With almost a billion sites, the web is a competitive environment, and you need to be distinctive amongst your competitors. If you are selling machine tools, you need to look like you are the expert in machine tools, not real estate or life insurance, and the relative merits of your site to those of your competitors are important.
- Be there to help, rather than overtly flogging something. Your website is the front door to your business, make sure it invites people in, rather acting like a tout in a sideshow, and alienating almost all who pass.
What does not work, in a word, lots. Complicated, messy, poorly targeted, overtly sales driven sites that lack humanity. Just trawl through the sites of most of our federal governments agencies and departments to see some great examples of what not to do, while trying to be all things to all people. The easiest way to construct a list of “no no’s” is to do the opposite of the list above.
If you follow these simple guides, at least you will be on the right road.
