In today’s fast-paced world, the idea of slowing down might seem unusual, especially in marketing. But after more than 20 years in B2B technology services, I’ve learned that rushing through campaigns often leads to mediocre results.

What Is Slow Marketing?

Slow marketing isn’t about moving slowly.

It’s about being thoughtful, strategic, and focused on creating a lasting impact.

Like I mentioned in my previous blog, in our urge to hustle, often the intent is lost & focus is only on action.

But there is lot more to slow marketing.

The Art of Being Intentional

Slow marketing is the opposite of the hustle culture that many marketers have come to accept. Instead of rushing, it’s about taking your time to craft campaigns with care.

This means deeply understanding your audience and clearly defining your brand’s unique message. When you take the time to be intentional, you can create campaigns that know what clicks with your audience, what drives them to take notice of your brand and helps you to truly stand out.

Building Lasting Relationships

Quick wins, immediate conversions can be tempting, but they often lead to short-lived success. Slow marketing focuses on building long-term relationships instead of just chasing short-term gains.

Think of it as doing paid marketing, which immediately gives you results but is it helping you build a brand recall?

When you consistently deliver high-quality content and engage genuinely with your audience, you build trust. This trust forms the foundation of loyal, lasting relationships that support your brand’s growth.

And that helps you lower your cost per conversion, even when you are doing paid marketing.

Innovation Through Reflection

Constantly chasing the latest trends can stifle real innovation. Slow marketing gives you the space to reflect and think deeply.

This reflection often leads to breakthrough ideas and strategies that set your brand apart. By stepping back from the rush, you can discover opportunities that others might miss.

Let’s take the example of flavor of the season, GenAI. Are you using the new-age tools like ChatGPT, others just to write superficial content or are you leveraging the tools to understand your audience deeper and thereby creating content that aligns according to their stage in the funnel.

Sustainable Growth

While immediate results can be tempting, slow marketing often leads to more sustainable and measurable growth. By focusing on quality over quantity, you create campaigns that are both effective and long-lasting.

This approach also helps prevent burnout, both for your team and your audience. Slow marketing ensures that your efforts are impactful and rewarding over a longer period of time.

In a world that values speed, slow marketing offers a refreshing alternative. It’s not just a strategy; it’s a mindset.

For senior marketing professionals, whether in startups or enterprises, this is a powerful reminder: sometimes, less is more—if done well.

Your Thoughts

When would you choose slow marketing over the other? Let me know!

A famous social media personality many years back exclaimed ‘Hustle’. He made it a rallying cry that if you want to succeed in life, the only way to do it, is work tirelessly.

And then what we saw was, almost every digital marketer (including me) saying – Hustle to succeed. Posts on social media, even today talk about the hustle culture.

I remember in one of the organization I worked with, we welcomed a bunch of fresh grads. As I took the stage to address them, the only slide on the huge screen behind me said – HUSTLE.

But over the years, I looked at my own function of work and started questioning the belief – Do Marketers Need To Hustle?

The Hustle Myth

Even today, I agree to that personality’s message on the need to hustle.

As you start your career, it is important to grab as many opportunities as you can. The more you take, the more you learn which can most likely help you in building a good career.

Many of us have grown in similar way, so nothing to take away from that message.

But then, is that the only way!!?? Maybe no, there will always be few who got lucky and could make good in their life even without ‘hustling’.

What Has Marketing To Do With It?

Marketing is most often viewed as a – right brain activity. The one that needs a person to be lot more creative than just being analytical.

Marketers are looked upon as people who are more imaginative, bringing forth ideas that can package any brand’s messaging in an easy to understand format which is difficult for a logical, linear thinking person.

And that’s where I feel the large gap lies, marketers with their creative, non-linear thinking need time for building upon an idea. But when brands want quick deliveries – more social post, more performance campaign, more..more…more…the marketer is left without a choice.

What happens next – an exhausted marketer delivering mediocre work. And we are seeing that around us. Irrespective of the type of brand, the stage of their target audience, most marketers follow a cookie-cutter approach as they try to deliver MORE.

Marketers Don’t Hustle

At the core of this message lies – plan better.

In today’s age, a marketer cannot just survive being a right-brained person. They need to learn some analytical skills.

The best marketers, I have worked with, stood out not just by working hard aka hustling, but they focused on working smartly. They planned large brand transformation campaigns and delivered them successfully.

What did they do differently?

1. Breaking the Work
   • Most of them broke the problem statement/campaigns into multiple tangible pieces of work. That way, at any point, they were able to track progress and do course correction, if needed
2. Used Technology
   • The best marketers I worked with, didn’t shy away from adopting technology. They used it as a means to an end by leveraging to not replace humans but in a way they can make them more productive. The latest AI tools are kind of extension to that
3. Investing in People
   • ‘Fail Fast’, all of us have heard that to the point of death but what needs to be said is – Fail fast but recover faster. That’s where investing in the right team makes a difference, because you are only as fast as the slowest member in your team
4. Quality > Quantity
   • I have a strong opinion on this, a good marketer never delivers sub-standard work. Marketers should never sacrifice quality at the altar of quantity. If quantity is the need of the hour, go back, find a tech that can help but never at the cost of quality

Well this is not another rant post & like I mentioned, hustle is good but it still needs some brains to it.

Don’t rush the marketer to deliver but instead give them freedom to ideate well and then deliver. There is indeed some power in slow marketing (that should be my next post)

Linkedin has over 800m users & over 300m are daily active users. It is one of the most frequented professional social network & every day folks are trying to master the Linkedin Algorithm.

Not easy though, with tons of content being produced by many users, we often face difficulties in finding the right content. And then we also hear – ‘Oh this is not Facebook, what are you folks posting’

Many have also seen the platform becoming a place for virtue signalling, not that those stories should not be shared but how many of them are real. Most often such stories are to generate engagement.

Why the authors look for engagement, that would be a story for the next post but what is worthwhile to note is, these authors have cracked the Linkedin Algorithm.

But at the same time, we also have plethora of Linkedin ‘gurus’, who keep on preaching that they know ‘growth hacks’ which will help your content gain engagement and such folks keep on peddling certain myths.

Good folks at Linkedin have caught on this misinformation & if you have not seen yet, released few posts titled ‘Mythbusting the Feed’.

The series is being narrated by their VP of Engineering, Sabry Tozin & covers:

1. Mythbusting the Feed: Helping our members better understand LinkedIn
2. Mythbusting the Feed: How the Algorithm Works and Personalizing the Feed
3. Mythbusting the Feed: Content Distribution and How We Work to Address Bias (yet to be released)

Explaining Linkedin Algorithm

Each of the posts have series of videos that are explaining how the system works in the background.

The videos cover variety of common questions like –

• What shows up in the feed & why
• How algorithm works
• How we can control what we see on the feed

and more..

Most of the answer are pretty much of common-sense I would say because as many of us would know, it is important to only connect with folks which are similar to our persona. Once that is done, you engage with their content with either a like, comment or share.

In my experience though, if we have to weigh each engagement then the value of share would be greater than a comment & a comment would be greater than a ‘like’. And that’s a thumbhole I follow when evaluating the success of my social media campaigns.

What I found interesting in this series (this was covered in the second post), was the mention of Linkedin Groups. Personally, I believe Linkedin Groups are dead, almost all groups that I know of have hardly any activity. Do let me know if you feel so too.

Also there was something that I disliked, while explaining how the algorithm works, the first point mentioned how the platform suggests you jobs. Here, I would like to see the USP of Linkedin to become a ‘jobs’ related social network, it could be one of the ‘useful’ feature, rather the focus should have been on how the algorithm can help users become better ‘professionals’

Do check out the series, should help you bust some myths

Blogging is dead.

No one reads blogs now.

You should invest in Vlog instead.

Don’t we hear these all the times? Do you think blogging in 2021 will still be relevant? Will it survive?

YES.

It’s more than a decade that I have been writing blogs and almost every year I keep hearing about demise of blog.

The doomsday prediction never seem to cease but here we are, in 2021 and I can still say, blogs will be relevant.

Then what changes for blogging in 2021?

The reader.

The way you write.

The way you represent.

The reader? What has changed?

What about it? The demography is changing. No more is the reader just someone who is in a tier-1 city but they are much beyond that.

We are truly catering to global citizens and they could be sitting anywhere in the world.

They are also consuming in various different devices, so it not just the desktop you are serving into.

And they want to read but the content has to be ‘snackable’.

What is ‘snackable’ content?

Quick to consume.

Easily readable.

Easily understandable.

Listicles ruled the content world. We were inundated with content that started with – ‘Top 5’, ‘x ways’ and so on…

I was also guilty of putting content that way and it succeeded as well. So much that we also had a nice website called List.ly where many of us crowdsourced lists. Fun way to do it, eh!!

The advantage of ‘Snackable’ content is that it breaks even a large blog into simple, understandable piece which readers find it easy to consume.

So how do you write it?

Listicles are passe or so to say.

Instead, content writers can look into breaking information into multiple pieces.

“Stop writing long paragraphs”

Exactly, write shorter sentences. Divide them into multiple lines so that its easy for readers to consume.

Also, avoid jargons. While jargons can make you feel smart, the average reader will appreciate simple language.

Other than that, write in a style that answers readers question.

How can content be understandable?

This goes back to the basics of SEO, understanding how people are searching for content.

Because you want that in not only understandable by people but also search engines.

As most often, that is where the reader’s journey might start.

There are quite a lot of tools available now that will help you analyse reader’s intent and how they search – simplest one is the Google search suggestions.

eg. below show what and how people are searching

So write content that starts with a question and try to answer the question with your content.

Cover the basics of the problem and then move towards a solution.

Wherever possible, offer in-depth solution to the problem statement.

What is true now is – there is no place for crappy content.

Individuals and brands alike should invest time and resources on having good content, it should not be an afterthought.

Blogging just like in yesteryears will enable you to –

1. position you as thoughtleader
2. make you think better (it helps to structure my thoughts)
3. enables to improve your search engine rankings (SEO is still the game you need to play)

2021 may not be a gamechanging year for blogging but as content creator, we all will have to change the way we blog.

It will survive, yet another year…

Happy New Year and happy blogging!!

If Instagram can have Stories, Twitter can have Fleets why should Google be left behind. So here we have, Google’s own version – Web Stories.

From creative perspective, it is not different from any other platforms like Snapchat, Instagram or Twitter (am waiting when Linkedin will announce it).

So what we have is a nice vertical, full-screen experience. Brands leveraging Web Stories have option to create visual narration which visitors can tap and scroll through.

According to John Mueller in the recently released video, it will allow users to create bite-sized informational content directly on the website.

Let’s try to dig a little deeper.

What is Google Web Stories?

Web Stories are not actually new, they were previously AMP Stories.

Indeed, they are built on AMP framework of Google so each of them are in HTML form (for the techies) and give visitors a full-screen experience on mobile devices.

According to Google –

Web Stories immerse your readers in fast-loading full-screen experiences. Easily create visual narratives, with engaging animations and tappable interactions. The Web Story format (formerly known as AMP Stories) is free and part of the open web and are available for everyone to try on their websites. They can be shared and embedded across the web without being confined to a closed ecosystem or platform.

Web Stories provide content publishers with a mobile-focused format for delivering news and information as visually rich, tap-through stories. Web Stories offers a robust set of advertising opportunities for advertisers and publishers to reach a unique audience on the web with immersive experiences.

As a content marketer, it would be a good addition to your content marketing strategy and going forward it could play an important part in ranking on SERP.

Other Advantages of Web Stories

Apart from the advantages of better ranking (which is yet to be seen), you will also have an early mover advantage. There are few other business benefits –

1. Visually rich content on SERP, Google Images, Discovery, Google Ads
2. Ability to integrate Google Ads
3. Linkable Stories and thus you can have affiliate links
4. Faster loading as they are built on AMP

How can you create Web Stories

There are couple of ways that you can create stories for your site –

1. WordPress Plugin
2. amp-stories Object

If you have a WordPress website, it is quite easy as you can just install the web stories plugin.

Once installed, you can use it to create stories on your own using the images, text & link features of the plugin.

Sneak peek at the plugin –

And the output –

NOTE: The plugin is still in beta, so you might experience some challenges at times.

Though if you’re technically inclined, Google has created the ‘Getting Started‘ guide.

You will need local implementation (on your system) of –

• Web Server
• Local Python Server
• Apache
• nginx

They have also provided various examples & templates that you can use to create your first web stories.

Your Thoughts

1. Do you think web stories is a good addition to the Google ecosystem?
2. Is the ‘Stories’ ecosystem already crowded?
3. Will Web Stories affect Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat growth?

Earlier this year, Google announced that it is working on a privacy sandbox that will make 3rd party data or in layman’s term ‘cookies’ obsolete in next 2 years.

Apple then went a notch higher and announced that Safari browser is now fully blocking 3rd party data.

Over the years, marketers of all hues have relied on these cookies for various activities including but not limited to – showing contextual ads, retargeting and targeting, understanding user behaviour and more.

According to the post released earlier by Google – 

“Users are demanding greater privacy–including transparency, choice and control over how their data is used–and it’s clear the web ecosystem needs to evolve to meet these increasing demands. Some browsers have reacted to these concerns by blocking third-party cookies, but we believe this has unintended consequences that can negatively impact both users and the web ecosystem.”

To understand the implications, let’s first see what 3rd Party Data is.

Understanding 3rd Party Data

It is a piece of data that is created by domain other than the ones you’re visiting. Most often these innocuous looking cookies collect the browser usage patterns.

The data thus collected is shared with ad providers for targeting/retargeting of ads or content.

The best example to explain this is – imagine you’re visiting an ecommerce site and clicked on a certain product. You might have been just researching about the product and didn’t buy it.

Now you move to any other site and voila, you see the same or similar product ad is shown to you.

That is 3rd party cookies/data at work.

While visiting the first site, another domain collected your data of the page that was seen and now when you move between to other site, the same has relied on those cookies to share related content to you.

What is happening now?

In the battle between browsers, the vendors have realized the importance of privacy. Many users were often deleting cookies for better experience (read they were afraid of being spied on).

At the same time, with the onset of GDPR and CCPA, there has been close scrutiny on cookie usage.

So browsers have no choice but to comply with some the rulings of these bodies.

What we now is browsers trying to offer users best privacy measures. Safari & Mozilla announced that they are already blocking the 3rd party cookies but on other hand we are also seeing Google Chrome taking a phased approach.

I believe there’s a lot at stake for Google compared to the other two browsers. With its ad platform, Google over the years has relied on data for serving ads that are relevant to the readers by leveraging 3rd party data.

Completely stopping would make it tough for them and over next two years, they will try to create a viable alternative to still be able to serve contextual ads. 

What can marketers do?

Without sounding too technical these platforms are relooking at classifying the users for better targeting.

Marketers will have to look at how each browsers will be treating user data and align future targeting strategies. But in the meantime, they can start working on –

1. Creating keyword-based content – It won’t be back to keyword stuffing but marketers would have to create content using context keywords for effective consumption
2. Intelligent automation – How can you pass on data between your marketing automation tools and orchestrate relevant campaigns

Remember, everyone is grappling with the changes so I believe that at some point each of the vendors will arrive at a common ground on how to treat 3rd party data but in the meantime, we need to start finding ways to make marketing work better.

Your thoughts?

1. Have you used 3rd Party data?
2. What workaround are you trying to build?
3. Is this a good move from the browsers?

Is Facebook entering the search engine game?? Last week, we saw discussions around Facebook introducing knowledge panel as part of it’s the search function.

But before we go there, for the non-SEO folks let’s understand knowledge panels a bit.

What are Knowledge Panels

They are the small boxes that you have seen while you do a search on Google.

They are created automatically and Google pulls out information from various sources to show information on the side panel or the knowledge panel.

It will also have links from popular places like Youtube, Websites, etc which will give more information to readers.

Google Knowledge Panel is usually displayed for brands, personalities, place, things, etc.

How It Helps Users

The only way knowledge panels help user is that it provides a quick snapshot of the person, place or other similar entity.

The reader does not have to click further to gather information but can have a quick glance. If they are more interested, then there are links to various sites.

What Is Facebook Knowledge Panel

Just like Google, a recent search on Facebook showed us a panel on the right. The panel contained more information of the entity.

Though there was one major difference, the information on Facebook Knowledge panel was sourced from Wikipedia and no other links were present apart from Instagram.

Why Does Facebook Need Knowledge Panel

For this I have 2 theories –

1. Increase time on site

Like every platform, time on the site is one of the most important factors for profitability.

More time on site will allow platforms to know more about the user preference and enable them to show relevant ads. It will also allow platforms to serve content appropriately.

Also it will allow all the entities that are being searched, one more avenue to position their brand

2. Building Facebook’s Authority

We all know what Cambridge Analytica did to Facebook and since then it was also forced to discontinue the Graph Search.

Adding knowledge panel will also them to gain the trust back on the platform’s ability to serve as a good search tool.

Also, by having information from Wikipedia, there are less chances that users will dispute the information and there by increasing authority of Facebook’s search function.

Your Thoughts?

Do you think having knowledge panel on Facebook search will help users to search more?

Will it help improve time on the site?

Any other reason you think Facebook has introduced knowledge panel, do share with us on the #SEOTalk Facebook Group.

Every brand that we know of is trying to break the clutter and come up with a content marketing strategy in the Covid as well as post-Covid world.

Is it easy??

Of course not! Remember, we were already staring at too-much content world and suddenly the current situation was hurled at us. Most of us marketers had created plans for the next 6 months, if not a year and much of that has hit a pause.

The challenge now is, all of us have gone back to the drawing board and are rewriting our content strategy to align with the “new normal” (we have heard that enough, haven’t we).

Do we know what will work? Yes, Maybe, No…Very few will say ‘yes’ though.

Based on what I have learnt so far, here are the top 4 ways you can work out your content marketing strategies.

4 Content Marketing Tactics for Covid

Communicate Clearly

It is more important than ever to choose your words carefully.

Brands have to clearly share their purpose and steps they are taking to tackle the current situation.

Readers are not keen to hear about big promises, they are looking for action and how you are co-creating for a larger good.

The recent ad by Nike was a good example of how clear communication. The message stands out with a clear call to action – Play For The World.

If you notice, the entire ad has no sales message but it’s about the larger cause about how they sympathise with people across the globe.

Build Empathy

Empathy is the key to success of any brand, irrespective of your business being B2C or B2B. The end-user is still a human!!

How are you building empathy with your users?? And not just them, what about your own employees too?

The best example I came across in recent time was of Starbucks. The CEO, Kevin Johnson last month wrote to their 200,000+ employees across the globe.

He start right sharing some of the impacts of current situations with the statement – “the loss of life, feelings of isolation and loneliness, concerns about health and fears of economic uncertainty”

What stood out on ’empathy’ factor was –

Not all decisions are financial, and in a crisis like this, they must be secondary to the health and well-being of our partners and customers.

~Kevin Johnson

In just couple of lines, he stated that employee and customer well-being was his priority.

Innovate

As marketers, we love EVENTS!!

The grandeur, the synchronization of various teams and all things around, it is every marketers dream to be part of.

Physical events were an integral part of awareness and lead-generation campaigns, especially for B2B brands.

But with Covid situation, the physical events have taken a long pause and most of us are scratching our heads on what would be the best way to keep our audience, partners, prospects and customers engaged.

And so the need to innovate!

Folks are already inundated with virtual events and so innovation on your approach and content strategy will be the key.

Virtual meetings is just not about having speakers join on Zoom, Webex, Teams or similar platform. Marketers have to start leveraging technology and explore platforms to drive more interactions.

Content has to be planned in a way that it shouldn’t become a monologue but have polls, Q&A and other gamification strategies.

Measure KPIs

Make KPIs your friend!!

We are in a period that marketing dollars are hard to come by, so you need to make every spend count.

Equally important is to ask, will measuring the same KPIs that you previously had work?

I believe that at this point, instead of looking at quantitative KPIs the focus should be on qualitative KPIs.

So it’s is important to measure –

• Reach
• Engagement
• Customer/Employee satisfaction

Some of the best examples of these are your customer or employee testimonials. Just getting a little selfish there, here’s a great testimonial we received at my organization Tech Mahindra

Your thoughts?

What according to you are the best content strategies during the current times. What works and what should brands NOT DO.

Instagram has recently announced that it is testing a new interface across few more countries where it will be hiding likes.

What that actually means is that the number of likes on your feed will go away but you will still have access to know who have liked it. So if one has patience, they can still count the number of people on that list.

The announcement though has caught the attention of brands and influencers who relied on public ‘like’ count to showcase their strength on the platform.

How Hiding Likes On Instagram Affects Influencers?

Many of the brands would always have at least a customary look at followers and the number of likes on posts of influencers.

With this move, influencers will lose one of the key metrics of validation of their clout.

Few of them, as we in marketing would know, have invested in creating a farm of ‘likes’ (group of individuals who will like each others post). And now that entire effort would go in vain.

On the other hand, many of them would start investing in creating good content, which actually is the objective of this move by Instagram.

Additionally, they will start investing in Ads, to ensure that their content appears in front of the right audience and that is advantage Instagram.

If we have to recap, hiding likes on Instagram for influencers would mean –

• Loss of one key metric
• More focus on creating quality content
• Spending in ads to reach & engage with the right audience

How Hiding Likes On Instagram Affects Brands

Even from a brand’s perspective, it was one of the easiest metrics to know the ‘influence’ of the individuals apart from the follower count (while I have my own reservation on like & followers)

But now brands and agencies will have to look beyond the vanity metrics and focus more on the engagement they are getting. So we will see more focus on engagement the posts are getting rather than just the number of likes.

Brands will also start to focus on other important metrics like impression vs engagement, impression vs save, etc

The conversation among marketers would be more aligned to ‘how do we get more engagement’ compared to ‘how do we get more likes’.

And just like ‘influencers’, brands will also start to invest more in ads to ensure they catch the attention of the target audience.

Summing up, hiding likes on new interface for brands would mean –

• Focus on other key metrics
• More creative ways of organic reach
• Investment in Ads

But in the new world order where the focus should be more on quality of content and not the follower or likes, would the number of likes really matter?

What is your take?