Turn Your Knowledge Into Profits

7 Ways To Elevate The Perceived Value Of Your Content

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 04:00:00 -0700

Understand how people learn, think and communicate is the key to create effective marketing. In fact, communication is the core of your marketing and if you know how to leverage it, you will be able to elevate the perceived value of your products and services so people are willing to pay higher price for as soon as they see it.

However; it’s often much more counter intuitive than you think. It all comes down to what you say and then how you say it via your communication.

So what is communication?

According to Wikipedia, “…Communication requires that all parties have an area of communicative commonality. There are auditory means, such as speech, song, and tone of voice, and there are nonverbal means, such as body language, sign language, paralanguage, touch, eye contact, through media, i.e., pictures, graphics and sound, and writing.”

In other words the only way to open up the communication channel is by having a common medium, a means to understand and relate the information that’s being communicated.

The problem is everyone has a different style of communicating and learning thus the goal of marketing communication is to eliminate misunderstanding.

For example, when I say the word “car” what kind of car are you picturing in your head? A big SUV or a small sedan? A red sports coupe or a family minivan? Is it a Cadillac or a Lexus?

This is one of the biggest content marketing challenges in today's attention fighting world especially with barriers such as information overload and attention deficit resulting in loss of concentration and focus on an ongoing basis.

There is a high chance that you're losing your audience as you speak because everything is moving so fast and people can’t help but want instant information gratification.

As it turns out, in marketing you need to create crystal clear communications that are as specific, tangible, measurable and external as possible.

That’s exactly what great copywriters do, they write compelling stories that builds trust and use words that describe real world situations, things you can see, feel, touch and experience. And since most purchase decisions are made by the emotional part of our brain, ineffective communication will never result in a sale so it is up to you to position the purchase in his minds.

Here are seven ways to help you build influence by mastering the basics of high perceived value communication:

1. Communicate Like How You Would Speak

If you want people to like and trust you, start by communicating like a normal person in a one on one plain English. The key is to make your communication frictionless and easy to understand since everyone is not your customer so speak to people about what they want to talk about, in the way that they want to talk about it.

It’s not about being perfect but being authentic and on target to appeal to one market at a time.

2. Create Self-Contained Concept of Your Content

By making your content self-contained, you can reduce complexity while maximizing understandability especially when introducing a new product or a new idea.

This type of content should be modularized, to the point and does not take a lot of time to consume. First introduce it by bringing the concept to the table then explain it in a practical way that conveys the outcome that your prospect want and finally connect the dots for them and wrap it up.

3. Look For Pain And Urgency

When people have unmet needs they become more idealistic about their situation. Not only will they believe that they know what they need to solve the problem but will start to think in simple terms to get to their solution.

Focus on delivering simple action steps that would provide the result they want predictably and consistently with as little risk and hassle as possible. Do you know what thoughts, emotions or pictures pop up in their head when they encounter that exact pain or problem?

Connect on high pain and urgency values will instantly grab their attention.

4. Translate What You Do With What They Value

Realize what motivates your customers is one of the most effective way to get them to take actions. You must be able to communicate the value of what they want and realize the meaning of their desire outcome and its direct impact to their lives.

Translate it in all 3 currencies they want: monetary value, time investment value andlabor/workload value.

5. Use Powerful Reframes To Increase Understandability

Leverage psychologies, histories, insights and stories to frame your content into high perceived value formats. Involve their situation in multiple perspectives will dramatically increase the specificity of your communication.

It will also likely increase the memorability and appeal of your products by structuring and organizing them into alternative frameworks that eliminates misunderstanding. It's saying the same thing in many different ways.

6. Provide The Why, What and How To's

In order to do that you must be on top of your customer’s emotional drivers knowing what benefits they’re looking for and what value meanings to them. Incorporate the why, the what and how into your stories.

Explain to your customer why they should pay attention to you right now then introducewhat it is, the actual product or services they’re going to get, and finally how to get the result they want with what they get, the step by step recipe.

7 Minimize Risk Maximize confidence

Getting customers to take the action to buy is about making everything "believable." It is not simply about taking all the risk out but just enough that it doesn’t seem too good to be true.

It’s leading with the giving hand, earning trust over time and building reputation slowly via social proof. Allowing your prospects to come to their own conclusion that leads to their own decision is a very powerful confident booster. It's both emotional and psychological commitment.

The take away: People want stories, techniques and someone that “gets them.” High perceived-value communication should include all those ideas. Then you roll them up in an easy to digest package full of incentives with the promise of great value.

Give your market what they want and you will be rewards with brand loyalty and market share. At the end of the day it’s ok that you don’t speak to everyone, you only need to resonate with those that get you that you get them.

Effective marketing is not about manipulation, it's about being human, it will multiply your sales.

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The 6 Habits of Highly Effective Marketers

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 01:29:00 -0700

Most business owners, experts and professionals understand the importance of providing non-promotional, educational content during the beginning of the relationship with a customer.

In essence, content marketing is information marketing, and information marketing is the new currency on the Internet. The challenge is how to translate your information into products with high perceived value.

It’s indicative that every business can now be called an information business because we all need some kind of information to make our decisions, learn how to solve our problems or to help us get what we want in life. Simply put we want our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs met in order to take actions.

And getting people to take action through marketing is the most valuable skill anyone can learn and master. (Not to mention it'll also improve your interpersonal relationships and communication skills.)

This is why great marketers focus on communicating the value and translating the utility of the information. Whether the goal is to get the prospect to click on your website link, sign up for your newsletter, join your coaching program or buy your information product, it requires meeting the right balance of Needs versus Wants from the prospect’s perspective.

Done right, you can leverage powerful internet tools to attract pre-interested and pre-motivated prospects that are ready to buy and start a business relationship with you. Not only will you be perceived as an influential authority but you will gain credibility and trust without having to convince people to buy your product.

So what does it take to be an effective marketer today? Here are six traits of highly effective marketers:

1. Effective Marketers Make No Assumptions

People often don’t question their own assumptions about what will work. Majority of the entrepreneurs, experts, marketers like to spill out their solution without asking what exactly their customers “think they want” that can solve their problems.

Imagine a doctor telling you what’s wrong with you by just looking at you from a distance. Even if the doctor has the correct diagnose, would you trust their advice? Great marketers know that they don’t know what they don’t know. They ask questions and dig deeper below the surface to identity the pain, urgency and frustration of their customers.

In addition to finding out what the problems are, it can also serve as your free market research. Start talking to all your prospects and customers everyday and continue asking why until you get to the root cause, you may be surprise what’s going on inside their reality.

Take a look at this recent research insight provided by MarketingSherpa and IDG from surveying buyers and B2B marketers about specific factors that motivate recipients to opt-in, open and engage with vendor email.

Notice the difference between what marketer and buyer values. Buyers actually gave the highest rank to promotional content!

2. Effective Marketers Are Storytellers

Once you have identified your customer’s problems, help them make the logical connection between their needs and your solution (product or services) one step at a time. This way they don’t have to work to figure out how to use your knowledge or expertise to solve their problem; instead you reverse engineer your solution from their problems.

Top marketers know how to connect the dots by using narrative to set the quickly get people’s attention. It’s one of the 3 most effective content marketing techniques you can use.

The idea is to ensure your solution sounds exactly like what’s going to solve their problem when you finally get to introduce it typically “at the end” so it’s easier to digest. Keep in mind that you should never present your solution prematurely, it will only create disconnects which leads to distrust.

Maintaining the communication channel open is critical in facilitating the buying process because people don't care about your products and services, they just care about themselves. So even with storytelling, guest who's perspective and story do customers like to hear? (Hint: read the last sentence again.)

3. Effective Marketers Build Relationships

What is relationship and why important? Everyone talks about relationship but what exactly is relationship? Here is the definition of relationship from Wikipedia: “Relationships usually involve some level of interdependence. People in a relationship tend to influence each other, share their thoughts and feelings, and engage in activities together. Because of this interdependence, most things that change or impact one member of the relationship will have some level of impact on the other member.”

So a relationship can impact one another mentally, physically and emotionally. This is why social media is a great way to relate with each other to see if the other person is like you, identify a common ground to connect via LinkedIn, follow on Twitter and “friend” on Facebook. In fact, a relationship is a process to continue to relate until we feel related, full of emotions and thoughts of the other person.

A critical mistake many struggling experts, marketers and business owners make is thinking of their customers as “its” they can manipulate. Wrong!

Great marketers focus on building relationship to have trust, admiration and credibility that extends beyond business transactions not to mention people will buy more and refer to from those like and trust.

4. Effective Marketers Are Givers

People often forget that trust is earned over time typically on a more intimate level. In order to introduce your great product or services, you need to earn the right to ask for the sell. This is the framework of the “freemium” business model, where you offer so much value to your prospect that their respect for you goes up instantly.

This requires you to supply relevant content or information and ultimately give away your best stuff to show that you’ve got the goods! (Do you?)

This feels counter-intuitive to most experts and business owners because they feel like they’ve earn the right to charge for their expertise or services through years or experience or training. The problem is they, the customers, don’t know and won't believe that you're in their best interest until they get to know you.

Effective marketers aren’t afraid to give away their best stuff because knowing how to drive a car doesn’t mean you’ll win a race even if you start with the fastest car.

Authors like Seth Godin, Yaro Starak, Brian Clark, Michael Steizner and Darren Rowse are great example of over-delivering their value so when it’s time to ask for a sale, readers usually come to expect and respect what they bring to the table.

5. Effective Marketers Know Everything Is A Test

Today, the market moves so fast that it’s important to understand marketing needs to focus on the long-term strategies to get customers.

There is no silver bullet that will bring you sustainable instant results. In fact, it’s vital to have the right mindset knowing that every action you take is to validate your ideas from fact gathering.

Great marketers do not hold their ego to their chest; they look for facts and data that enable them to make incremental improvements.

This is why direct response marketing delivers better results than institutional branding and advertising. They have different appeals with different purpose but direct marketing is more effective in small to medium size business than branding or making logos and websites “look nice.” Your investment in marketing efforts should always be measurable in some ways, think of it as making progress not perfection.

The best marketing ROI is about profiting on all the time and money invested in your tests! You would test the water before you jump into the pool or drink a hot soup right?

6. Effective Marketers Are Laser Focused On A Niche

Successful marketer choose a niche and stick to it. They put all the experience, knowledge, theories and ideas they have and consistently create content around it. Everything is narrowly focused so it speaks to those that are looking for solutions in that topic.

They deliver bite size chunks of information to ensure that their audience learn and take actions. Ultimately it’s about delivering value that’s truly a solution not just suggestions. Since people aren’t good at valuing anything with out learning (more information again), top marketers knows to create techniques or systems that enable the prospects to understand the value of the solution.

Simply put, great niche marketing strips away misunderstand and delivers high value information that pushes the buy button. And to do that, it requires focusing on the needs of the customer without assumptions. (goes back to#1 above)

A great method to do that is to learn Neil Rackham's SPIN Selling technique by focusing on asking the right Situational questions (find out what's going on), Problem questions (challenges happening), Implication questions(what the challenge implies) and the Needs-payoff questions (the price tag on solving the challenge).

The take away: Marketing is a skill that you can learn and should be practiced everyday. In fact, thanks to the internet today there is very little barrier to entry for anyone to do marketing. The information are all out there, you just need to follow some simple steps to start marketing your product, services or your personal brand.

The six traits are the building blocks to form powerful influence which is explained by Robert Cialdini's book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion as ethical persuasion in reciprocity, scarcity, liking, authority, social proof, and commitment/consistency.

What do you think the most important trait of a marketer is? What worked well or not so well for you? Love to hear your comments, share it with everyone!

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The 3 Most Effective Content Marketing Principles

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:41:00 -0700

It will be increasingly difficult to grab attention from anyone on the Internet or in person. You may spend hours writing a great blog article, creating a high-value video or designing your marketing slicks only to find that people just aren’t interested in consuming them. Why? Because we’re being bombarded by messages, alerts, and feeds every second. We’re constantly distracted and interrupted when we invest our time on the Internet. As a result, our brain essentially reconfigures itself.

This is what Nicholas Carr, the author of the book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, found when he studies how the Internet influences the brain and its neural pathways. Basically he discovered that the mental and social transformation created by our new electronic environment makes us shallower, unable to concentrate and strips our ability to do deep creative thinking.

Carr argues that," We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information... And so we ask the Internet to keep interrupting us, in ever more and different ways. We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or at least diverting information we receive. Tuning out is not an option many of us would consider.”

Simply put, greater access to knowledge is not the same as greater knowledge; and breadth of knowledge is not the same as depth of knowledge.

So how does this affect your marketing or how you produce content for your business?

The answer is simple. If you don’t produce content in the way that people want to consume them, you will not be read, remembered or passed on.

Most of us simply don’t read and retain what we consume over the Internet like how we do it with physical books. In fact, I heard one of Carr’s recent interview as he described that most people read over the Internet in a “F” formation, scanning horizontally across at the top, then moves down the left and half way down scans again across.

It’s indicative that in the process of producing compelling content you take consideration in the following mistakes to avoid so you have attractive “looking” content in format, length and appeal.

1 Strong Opening That Gets Straight To The Point

Great copywriting is not different than great public speaking. You must instantly grab people’s attention in a thought provoking way without trying to be fancy. This is why article/book titles, the first 10 seconds of you meeting someone are so critical to set the tone for your audience.

Your audience’s mind wants to see the payoff by giving you the attention and their emotions are driving the need for you to get to the point. This is extremely important as we humans do a lot of consequential thinking to figure out why we’re investing our time in consuming information.

Most experience professional coaches, consultants, marketers, gurus or trainers have a lot of knowledge, but they often forget that they are the expert and their audience are not, so it’s important to open with great title or introduction that immediately gets to the point. The wealth of information usually overwhelms normal people, focus on emotional connections so you can meet them where they’re at and try not to use any of your professional jargon.

2 Use Emotional Keywords And Phrases

Give them what they want then facilitate what they need as the content unfolds. Leverage emotional keywords and phrases that automatically paint a specific picture and are easy to understand. When you use complex, difficult to understand phrases, your audience has to do all the work to figure out what you mean and it interrupts the flow of consuming that piece of information.

Stay away from theoretical, conceptual, abstract and general terms in your communication. Focus on communication that brings concrete, emotional and specific outcomes. This is because we’re wired to respond more with what Paul MacLean discovered as our reptilian brain or what some calls lizard brain.

MacLean’s evolutionary triune brain theory suggests that the human brain was made up of three brains: reptilian (self preservation), limbic (emotions) and neocortex (logic). I won’t go into the details but basically the reptilian brain can hijack the higher levels whenever it wants to do so especially when there is a pain point or urgency to solve a problem.

It can be as simple as obtaining new knowledge (we want to be in control, read this post) or looking for an answer. People don’t go to seminars, watch videos or engage in a conversation with you for no reason; even entertainment and the need to connect or to be heard is something we unconsciously look for.

3 Leverage Powerful Stories That Creates Your Marketing And Conversation

Story develops relationships with people. In order to do that people have to like you, know you and trust you (and yes, you can do that over the Internet). Just having social proof is not enough, just being a likeable person is not enough. Both of those are great foundation to build your relationship on, but ultimately people are more likely to buy what you sell if they trust you.

And trust can be built via powerful stories that motivates and inspires people.

When developing your story think of your story as a movie. There is an opening, a situational challenge and then it goes through a rollercoaster ride that eventually hits a turning point then finally ends.

So how do you position your story?

You need to start your story high where everything is normal then take your audience to a low point where they can relate and connect but don’t make people feel sorry for you. And then through a turning point or a series of events you overcome the lows and that’s where you give your audience hope.

It is NOT about you but your audience. Don’t make it your life long story or biography; focus on a specific area of your story that allows people to quickly learn about who you are.

Your story is a way to show your humanity so people believe what you can do for them.

The take away: Content marketing is about creating information that are meaningful to your audience and engages them emotionally. The real value is when you’re able to meet them where they’re at psychologically and make them highly motivated to take actions. Whether it’s signing up for your newsletter, buy your product, get your coaching or read your book. In fact, it can also be used to get your internal team on board or management buy-in to your proposal.

Everyone is inundated with information, overwhelmed with daily tasks and if you can focus on the 3 principles above, your audience will be drawn to you more because you make it about them and easy for them. How do you approach marketing your information, content or product? Share your thoughts below.

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How Social Will Change Everything In Business

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:38:00 -0700

I saw a video on the State of Social CRM post on Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang in which Paul Greenberg talks about how companies are having difficulties with cultural changes internally to execute against the new bread of customer, the social customer. In case you don’t know what CRM is, it’s Customer Relationship Management as described in Wikipedia as a “technology that allows companies to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service.”

What an ear full!

My version would be just an application that keeps track of customer facing activities so you can find the gaps in your service and make adjustments to be more efficient.

The point both Jeremiah and Paul are making is that businesses are still figuring out how to integrate CRM and Social Media so the combination provides meaningful business value. The shift in how customers use social media is forcing companies to add the social element into their CRM system. They’re both spot on.

It also raises the question that if you’re not in the business of generating value and serving to keep the customer, then what are you in business for?

Social media encourages interaction which leads to generating a new type of intelligence that CRM system were not tracking before. Data such as reactions, activities, sentiments, locations, behavior and preference are converging providing a never seen before clear picture of each customer.

So how does this change the dynamics of your business moving forward?

Well, for one thing you have more leverage as a result of having more available data to target your niche and identify your prospects. In fact, as social CRM matures, I would expect to see companies shift their corporate strategy to ensure that every aspect of customer touch point is aligned with their marketing and sales strategy. And this is the reason why it requires a true “cultural” change, a mindset really, for businesses to not just think from the perspective of their customer but to become their customer, to feel and empathize with them.

Furthermore, this would mean that the employees may have to do the same by constantly thinking and enhancing the customer experience to the fullest. Instead of just using tools to do sentiment analysis by listening in on what customers are saying, companies can anticipate what customers will say and do before they’ve done it.

Checkout how Salesforce is making their CRM social with Twitter.

This would probably be the ideal desire outcome for most businesses: to proactively facilitate prospects and customers toward a market funnel and minimize customer frustration as problems are addressed before they happen.

Imagine a prospect is interested in finding out more about your product before a purchase, not only would you be able to answer questions using social CRM data to anticipate them, but to personalize your communication and create real-time offering to increase the rate of conversion.

By delivering relevant communication crafted with exactly what the customers want at the right place at the right time, this will be the next phase of effective social influence marketing.

The take away: It is important to recognize this emerging trend in CRM and social media. Even though a cultural shake out would be necessary for companies to fully utilize the benefits of social CRM, it would be wise to start making some basic evaluation of how going social may impact your operations and bottom line. What’s needed to make that jump and if you’re already using a CRM system, think how you can rally your staff to start thinking about new marketing processes and research more on how you can streamline social media into your CRM.

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10 Reasons Why You Are Not Getting The Results You Want Out Of Your Marketing

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:25:00 -0700

You spent countless hours crafting your marketing campaign investing money and hiring marketing experts to help guide you through the process. You get ready to push the launch button, waiting for emails and phone calls come pouring in, then…

Nothing happens. But what could go wrong?

You did the things that the marketing “experts” said you should do with your keywords, putting up blog articles day after day, uploading videos and sending out email newsletters.

Why?

Here are 10 reasons why you’re not getting the attention, buzz and most importantly - the sales conversion. Oh, and let’s assume you have an unbelievable product.

Your marketing message is full of “I” and “me” instead of “you.”
You didn’t communicate the “why” (from the “I” perspective)
You didn’t communicate the “what” (again from the “I” perspective)
You didn’t communicate the “how” (need I say more from which perspective?)
You didn’t communicate the “what if” (as in what if “I” was to buy and use the product)
Your marketing talks at people about your own expertise instead of showing them how your solution solves their problem.
You make assumptions about your customers (because you already sold some products before or you just know because you’ve been doing it for 20 years, ok great continue to do that then) instead of focusing on fact gathering (read my last post on listening)
You didn’t do enough testing on your products, services or marketing messages before you launch
You use all your email and social media as a one way push advertising instead of two way conversation (to help you pre-test)
You lack compassion and didn’t empathize with your prospects because you’re too focused on the bottom line – making money

The talk away: Don’t be all things to all people. You’ll have a better opportunity to convert sales (subscription, readership etc.) if you narrow down your target market because you’re a big fish in a small pond so just go after more small ponds! Don’t swim with the sharks in the big ocean because chances are, you’ll become their lunch.

Ask yourself if your marketing message is tangible, external, specific and measurable to your target prospect? And try NOT to use the word “I” or “me” in your message.

Here is one of my all time favorite (and world famous ad) created by the genius David Ogilvy. Notice how many “I” or “me” were used in this ad - none. Focus on the title and you'll learn how this 1959 ad is still the foundation of today's direct response marketing.

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Awareness to Action: 4 Steps to Sell More By Getting Inside the Minds of Your Customers

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 03:32:00 -0700

Over the past months I wrote about how to find your customers in order to improve your customer segmentation and gain better understanding of your niche market. Everything goes back to connecting with your audience so you can craft campaigns utilizing tactics such as email marketing, SEO and social media. Then as more businesses learned the tools of the trade, I brought up the point of adding value on my last post because ultimately knowledge will be commoditized similar to most disruptive technologies. The trick is maximizing the use of your knowledge (when it's still valuable) to help you grow your business and become an authority in your domain expertise.

If there is one thing that technology won’t be able to replace (at least not easily) it would be the content of your communication. Every business and individual are elevating the concept of the freemium model, publishing free valuable content on the social web, competing for clicks, eyeballs and engagement opportunities. It’s what Seth Godin calls “permission marketing”, what Hubspot calls “inbound marketing” and what Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 calls “content marketing.”

However you like to label it, it’s basically creating content that communicates the value in which your target audience values then leveraging it as the bait to attract those in need of your solution (products or services). This is a highly targeted approach like design thinking, social design and service design that truly serves up what’s going to solve a problem rather than just bunch of trivia concepts or random thoughts. It’s also a validation on how your content is really worth on the internet where content is the new currency.

And to stay competitive and survive the ongoing challenges marketers and business owners are presently facing, they need to reassess the way they build and maintain relationships with customers. A product or service is merely a means to an outcome. The real core value lies in the story attached and that is where marketing truly shines.

I don’t want to use a microwave – I want the ability to quickly eat hot food so I can get on with my life. I didn’t go to Home Depot to buy paint – I want a painted wall for my new living room. I don’t want to use Google – I want answers to my questions now.

You see, you may be very good at what you do but your communication may not do you justice and as a result you end up with lame content that just sounds like everyone else. And to make matters worse, if you don’t know how to market your content, your content will just sit on the web with little to no traffic.

Unfortunately this is not going to help you in translating how great your product is or how much value you can bring to the table. In this article, I will explain what to listen for and how to take quantitative measures from listening so you can drill down to the minds of your customers. Then I will show you how to communicate effectively so your solution sounds exactly like what’s going to solve your prospects’ problem.

Step 1: Gather Information by Listening

Many people know the concept of listening and yet few are able to do it well (everyday I continue to practice listening). Listening is a form of information gathering which allows you to take in the data, process and abstract meaning out of the dialogue. In a typical conversation people tend to wait for their turn to talk rather than actually absorbing the meaning of the words. We all have some sort of attention deficit as the by product of all the distractions around us from cell phones to emails, from writing a blog article to meeting with your team, from preparing dinner to picking up your kids, we live in a fast pace society.

The trick is to unlearn your habits of making assumptions and let go of as much preconceived thoughts as possible and simply focus on what’s been said at the moment of the conversation. Think of it as taking a training course and preparing your mind to get into the learning mode so you can pay 100% attention during the interaction.

Listen for key emotional phrases that are connected to a person’s problem. Typically it will sound like this: “my business is xxx” or “I want to xxx but xxx is xxx”, try to dig deeper and get the frustration and emotions out of the conversation. This helps you to identity what that person values and where the connection points can be made. Take notes if you have to but avoid memorizing what you want to say (I know you want to help) because you will be interrupting the other person and stop listening altogether. When you try to do anything but listen, you also break the flow of the other person’s thought and the energy of the dialogue making it harder to identify the key emotional points. Take notes and wait until the other person finishes.

Easy right? It takes practice. Plus if you're good at what you do, you should be able to provide instant feedback by looking at your notes.

Remember, people don’t care what you have to say unless you show how much you care about what they have to say and how they feel. Yes, how they feel is where the connection point can be made. This is why great sales people always listen first and ask questions later allowing their prospects to fully emerge into an emotional output session. This is a skill that takes practice so try it with your friends, colleagues or family as often as possible. You may find that this will help you discover more about them and can also help them to understand you better. It all starts with listening.

Step 2: Pinpoint Signals Avoid The Noise

The key to forging a powerful connection with your audience is to first understand that people simply want to be heard and understood. If you can describe your prospect or customer’s problem better than they can, they will automatically assume that you may have the solution to their problem (most of the time). Even if you don’t have the exactly solution, it’s a great way to establish a common ground for the relationship you’re forging.

And why do we want to connect with others? It’s just how we build trust, the “wow, this person gets me...” or the “OMG, you know exactly what I’m going through!...” emotional connection. Not everyone is good at communicating their problems, thus when someone perceives that you sound and looks like an expert, you may just become the expert that’s going to solve their problem (or maybe you are an expert? But are you just an expert in your own mind?).

Keep in mind that the focus is on validating your assumptions. Ask questions that helps to confirm their pain points, their vision of success or their desired outcome. This requires a lot of critical thinking and again do not formulate conclusions from your assumptions unless you have enough information. Otherwise go back to step 1 and ask more open-ended questions so you can listen again.

This of course, applies to all form of conversations including blogging, social media and email exchanges. The idea is to abstract the emotional triggers from the depth and tonality of the conversation so you can fully understand the opportunities to build meaningful connects. If you ask the wrong questions, it just shows you don't get it and you're eager to sell yourself, your story and your products. You will get your turn but you must be able to distinguish the signals from the noises.

At this stage, you should still be more reactive allowing your customer to freely express themselves. The most valuable information are those that are freely expressed without boundaries from your prospects. This is also the core value of surveying your customers so you can apply what you’ve learned to improve your product and services.

Step 3: Build Connections That Create Convictions

Once you’ve got solid understanding of the problems your customers want to solve, you then must learn to get into the minds of your prospects so you can turn them into customers. This is the “I heard, I know, I understand, I believe and I do,” steps that lead to actions through the use communication.

Most people are good at passing through “I know and I understand” stage, but it’s the “I believe” stage that communication often fails to connect resulting in no action. You buy a product or change an unhealthy habit because you would only take the action after you become convinced of your decision. Most people don’t realize that a desired action is often brought out through the use of specific communications tools from advertising to word-of-mouth testimonial, or via social proof endorsements. Simply put, people don’t just do what we want them to do because we want them to do it; they need to convince themselves first by having the right information.

And how do they know that it’s right for them? Well it’s by moving through each of these communications steps that people will take action. So if the “I heard” part doesn’t resonate, it won’t move into the next step and in most cases it’s your professional jargon or the inability to identify what it is that your customer really values. So your job as someone with the solution should be to help by facilitating them through that discovery process and not forcing your ideas upon them. Again, it's not trying to convince them, but helping them to convince themselves.

A great marketer knows how to unleash the power of communications and seeks to understand their target market needs, perceptions and how they like to receive information.

Is it how expensive (monetary value) your products are? Or how much time you’ve invested creating your solution? Perhaps it’s the work and labor you’ve put into your services. Whatever it is, they must do the job of translating why they should take action to contact your or buy your product.

Step 4: Convert With Meaningful Communication

Once your prospect is convinced of their decision, there usually is no turning back as the human brain will attempt to rationalize that decision from the emotions of wanting to feel good about moving forward and the urgent need to solve their problem.

It’s indicative that most “modern” businesses realize that customers respond more to an emotional connection, thus it’s not about selling but educating. And educating requires providing how you are going to make their lives easier from a more personal perspective. This is the part where traditional business owners have a hard time letting go of what they perceive as high value in their knowledge. It’s true that giving away your knowledge can feel like doing something for free that you usually get paid for, the key is figuring out where to draw the "free line."

However; I’ve found in many instances, people simply won’t do it even if you provide detail step-by-steps. For example, recently I wrote a detailed article on “how to use Goolge and Twitter to find your customers,” and have received many emails from people telling me that I’m stupid for giving out such high value content. As a result not only have I gotten more leads and referrals but I was able to sign up clients while using it to make a case for content marketing, sort of proofing that this stuff works!

You must be able to paint the picture and hit home with what your solution looks like to your prospects, communicate the results they will achieve and the steps they will need to take in order to achieve those results.

Sounds simple but all too often I came across marketing messages full of features and benefits (especially for technology companies or specialty industries) that typically starts with “our innovative products are designed for xxxx,” “our company has xxxx technology that’s xxxx” or the ever popular “xyz company is the leader in xxxx and have xx years of experience...”

So what does it all sound like to the prospect? It’s all about YOU, not them and that's not going to take you far. Businesses are quick to tell people what they have but forget that their prospects are in different stage of the buying cycle. It's important to speak the language that they understand and values which is why you need to focus on their needs. So what if you’re an innovative company or a leader in your space? Who isn't innovative and a leader in their space these days?

The Take Away: The meaning of your communication is the response you get from your audience. If you don’t like the responses you get, you’re not doing a good job of translating your value. If you can do step 1-3 well, you should have good amount of data to start writing great sales copies and headlines that gets inside the heads of your customers.

And by using what Robert Cialdini’s six "weapons of influence" (reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity), you will end up with powerful communications that gets you phone calls and inbound traffics. The worse that can happen is you actually don’t have a solution but you marketed as a solution, or your product sucks and it doesn’t solve any problem. In that case great marketing can only help you fish for a day because the fish will learn that your bait isn’t a real one.

What do you think? Are you communicating the right way? Leave me a comment below or share your most effective marketing copy.

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What is Adding Value and How it Applies to Social Networking

Fri, 28 May 2010 01:15:00 -0700

As a social media advocate I often discuss adding value to the conversations, to the communities or to the relationships. I guess I assumed everyone already knew what the term means and how it applies to them until I started to get questions from people.

So what exactly is adding value and how? Is it just an over-used marketing jargon? An illusion of a feel-good emotion? The more I use the term “value” the more I feel like it’s loosing its soul (I’m guilty as charge at times).

One of my favorite artists, the awesome Hugh MacLeod had a great piece about Adding Value with the quote, “The aim of "adding value" is a hard one to argue with... who doesn't want to add value to their current enterprise? But it's also utterly meaningless...”

Well, obviously there are many ways to look at it but here is how I perceive the meaning of adding value.

Let’s face it, most businesses wants to add value to the bottom line which means making sales and growing profits. In sales, adding value used to mean networking in the best interest of your company or your career which is to sell, sell, sell! Today it means helping people to make informed decisions, finding out their needs first and showing an interest to solve their problems not yours. The one way sales pitch broadcasting simply becomes part of the meaningless noise in a sea of noises.

The Meaning of Knowledge

In sales, either the product sells itself (more of an affirmation and emotional validation) or it’s selling via education (information and data). A Porsche salesman don’t sell the 911 Turbo, they sell the experience of buying a Porsche (great products drives emotions). On the other hand, a Honda salesman sells the features and benefits against competitors like Toyota and Nissan (value proposition, more needs than wants).

In both scenarios, the goal is to ensure that the person feels good about the decisions that they’ve made(or going to make) on the purchase which leads to trust building. And trust is built on relationships from knowledge and actions.

The more knowledge you have, the less fear you have, the less stress you feel and the better you feel about your decision making process. You could think of having knowledge as freedom from limitations and having information is empowerment. The ability to make your own decision is valuable because who wants to be pressured into buying?

Emotion Trumps Logic

Now you know the importance of adding value through knowledge transfer, you then need to know how to take actions with your knowledge. Besides physically helping someone, the action part comes down to communication. And because emotions are the essence of the communication, marketers need to focus on the emotional needs of the customers at the time when feelings are vivid. This mean to empathize with your customers and truly focus on how to make their lives better. You can't make people's lives better if you don't understand their lives.

When you solve someone’s problem, they’ll usually remember it not because of the facts but because of how they felt when it was happening. Simply put, memory is tied to emotions and emotions are more real than thoughts.

Now apply that to marketing and you’ll realize that providing useful and meaningful information does exactly that – it makes people remember you if you satisfy their needs by providing value!

This is why the increasingly Social Web is a great place to find those that are in need of knowledge (also why information product sells). When you need an answer, you want it now, you Google it (you can Yahoo or Bing it too of course). The online conversation across all social networks are as authentic as it gets, besides the offline in-person engagements, because it’s taking place when people are still feeling the emotions dealing with their problems - what is, how-to, why is, who can…you get the point.

The rest of it is about the context of adding value, at the right place at the right time. The optimal time to email your subscribers, the suitable LinkedIn group to contribute knowledge or the people you engage on Twitter – they’re all channels to add your value to the conversation within the communities to forge solid relationships.

Motives and Actions

The last point in adding value is the motives behind such actions. Why are you doing this? Why are businesses embracing the freemium model?

Most of the time the objective is to create brand awareness, build credibility and what I keep pounding the table on: to create social proof around the topics of health, wealth and relationships. However; there is always a trade-off, you get free Gmail with all the awesome features of other Google Apps because Google advertises around your inbox. The same applies to most of the social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. You're exchanging personal information to use their products.

My take is that if you’re honest about your intentions and focus on serving only those that matters to your business, you will attract the customers you want. Like what Seth Godin wrote in his book Purple Cow, “the key to failure is trying to please everyone.” Well, he's right, everyone is NOT your customers.

And the science behind motivation isn't as clear cut as features and benefits or even monetary rewards. Checkout this video by RSA animation adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA on "The surprising truth about what motivates us."

The take away: Identify your customer’s problem is where adding value starts. And listening when they talk is your opportunity to fill the value gaps. Think of it as facilitating the process of buying on their terms not yours. You have to create the right environment that entices people, and if you do it well, then they will show up and join the party. It is only by adding value you will be remembered, reciprocated and passed on (via word-of-mouth).

There are simply too much information and too little time. Marketing messages are everywhere and people have developed ad blindness, seeing doesn’t mean retaining.

Are you adding value?

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How to Integrate Email Marketing, SEO and Social Media

Fri, 21 May 2010 18:58:00 -0700

Social media is changing how businesses find customers and how customers engage with brands. There are many reasons to believe that it will eventually overtake email marketing, but I’m a firm believer that it’s here to stay. In fact, I believe email marketing combine with search (SEO) and social media will the best strategy moving forward.

However; let me get a few things straight. First, email is the original social network. Second, you need email to open social network account and get alerts. And third, search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) will continue to index and aggregate social network data not to mention most social network has their own internal search engine as well.

It sounds like there is a lot of cross-over between the three, so how should you use these three tactics to help you strategize your marketing efforts? It’s hard to realize how these tactics can impact your business without some basic understanding of the big three. Let’s look at how each works and what you can do to get the most bang for your marketing bucks.

The Big Three #1 – Email Marketing

Why email – Today it’s hard to find someone without an email account and majority of account holders have had it for a while (I still check my hotmail from 14 years ago) thus letting it go is not likely for most. Account holders may reduce the time they spent on email but it doesn’t have the abandon rate (Facebook, Twitter) like majority of the social networks.

Almost all basic business communications are done via email not via social networks. The perception is that it’s more secure, private and user friendly (centralized contacts, integrates with calendar, easily accessible via mobile devices). Simply put, people will use what’s easy to achieve the same goal – to get work done and to communicate. Another benefit of email is that it’s a direct private channel of communication to alert customers on new product offerings or promotions. At the same time, customers can use e-mail to provide feedback and ask questions.

Done right, you will be kept away from the spam folder and earn a permanent spot on the white list. This is why great email marketers tend to focus on delivering high value content at the right time, with the proper frequency using attractive subjective lines that encourage clicks and forwards.

Building your email list should still be all marketers’ top priority. Give people a reason to subscribe and to remain subscribed is the ongoing art and science of email marketing.

The Big Three #2 – Search Engine Marketing

Why SEO – This one should be a no brainer. What is the first thing you do when you’re looking to buy a product? If you do your homework you would first Google it. This applies to almost anybody looking to learn more about a company, a product or how to do something. Often times, people don’t even question the search results because it’s just easier to trust Google’s rankings and feel good about the decisions you’ve made based on what was found.

It’s no surprise that 79% of United States hiring managers and job recruiters search online information about job applicants according to a recent research commissioned by Microsoft.

This is why smart businesses (and individuals) are putting more emphasis on content marketing and shifting their mindset to operate more like a media company. They understand search engine is catered to "people" and people want relevant, valuable content that’s going to move them a step closer to identify the information they’re searching for.

The key is to create great content around what your customers are interested in when looking for your product; such as how things work (the outcome of your product or services), step-by-step guides or research reports that reveals product comparisons. Then tie these high quality content with relevant keywords and over time you’ll likely to move higher through the non-paid "organic" rankings. And today you can SEO anything from websites, blog posts, videos, images, podcasts you name it.

SEO is one of the key marketing arsenals especially for retailers, direct marketers and authors. The latest Internet Retailer Survey (some sample data below) clearly shows a growing interest and investment in search to drive more online sales. It's not a matter of why, but how.

There is simply too much information and too little time. Search engine is our instant gratification to today’s ADD (Attention-Deficit Disorder) society.

The Big Three #3 – Social Media

Why Social – If search engine is a way for people to find information, then social media is a way for people to find conversations and be part of them. It adds the credibility fuel to the fire of trust since social media is basically word-of-mouth. Instead of just believing in what you read from company websites or reviews you found online, you can talk to people you trust or listen to experts you follow. Similar to search, you can get people to your site with social media, and it’s a great tool to tell customer stories, demonstrate expertise, and stack up your social proof to win business from competitors.

The goal is to connect with customers on an ongoing basis to further understand their needs, wants and concerns. This will help you to build strong, lasting and engaging relationships with your customers for future business as well as referral opportunities by getting people to share your products on social networks to bring in traffic and find new customers.

And since social media is word-of-mouth, it’s your brand’s reputation on the line. Your digital reputation is your first impression and perception is reality.

How The Big Three Can Work Together

Although you can choose to only do one or two of the three, but to get the most out of your marketing investments, you should consider doing all three.

Here are a few ideas to consider on how to leverage the big three:

1) Create Once, Recycle Many- Focus on content not just promotions and sales, it’s about facilitating people through the sales cycle. People usually don’t buy base on just one piece of data think of it as adding "trust points" to people’s decision to buy. If prospects consumed a great piece of educational content on your landing page, that’s one point. If they read some great reviews about your product from a third party site, that’s another point. If there is more positive comments than negative ones about your brand in social networks, that’s another point. The goal is to accumulate enough trust so prospects feel good about why they’ve made the decision over you than others.

You want to invest your time and money on creating the best blog content, how-to articles, educational videos, whitepapers or anything that will get your audience to bookmark, download and share. Then make sure you optimize the content for search engine with the proper keywords and deliver them to the right people in your target channel via email and social networks.

For example let’s say you have a really good article on how to do something (try not to involve your product first, focus on solving the problem then introduce your product later when appropriate), you can package it in a downloadable PDF put it on a landing page that’s highly optimize for SEO. Then abstract the summary from the content for your email newsletter so you can send your subscribers to that very same landing page, a typical web marketing campaign. But let’s take it a step further by turning that piece of content into a video (using screen capture tools like Camtasia, or with a webcam or FlipVideo) and upload it to YouTube, Ustream or Vimeo to drive traffic back to your landing page. Then post the video on your blog, tweet it out via Twitter, send it to relevant groups on LinkedIn or submitted to social network sites like Technorati, Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon. Continue to produce great content and after 3-6 month you can recycle that piece of content with some updates and do it again.

2) Streamline with Process – Think about how your customers consume information and respond to connections. It’s NOT jamming the information down their throat like traditional one-way push advertising but allowing them to discover and get permission to establish a relationship. Talk to your customers, ask them what they read, who influence them and why? Understand what they don’t care about (don't be surprise if it's a lot of what you do) is just as important as what they care (a lot of what you should know). If you make the wrong assumption it will bring you the false conclusion which will impact on how you strategize your campaign.

For example if you know your customer reads certain blogs regularly, should you advertise on their site or is it better to build a relationship with the blogger? Once you’ve made your decision, focus on identifying the path to your web properties. Take out a piece of paper and map out that path and create a process to streamline every possible step that your customer may take so you can funnel them via your sales pipeline.

Remember, not everyone consumes media the same way, some people like to read while others prefer to watch videos or listen to a podcast. It’s important to have as many media options as possible available to maximize engagement opportunities.

3) Target, Track and Repeat - Without the right data you won’t know where to focus your marketing efforts and no accountability in your actions. What happens after your prospect conducts a search? What actions were taken after consuming your content? Was it shared on Facebook or forwarded to a colleague?

The biggest benefit from tracking your email, search and social media analytics is that you will be able to tie them all together and figure out your ROI. You’ll know where your site visitors are coming from, which email links they clicked on and what gets shared so you can make adjustments to improve conversion rates. Why continue to do something that doesn’t work? You need to know so you can keep doing what works and stop doing what doesn’t. Perhaps Facebook is not the best social network to target your audience or is it because your marketing messages aren’t resonating with them? Marketers must aggregate customer behavior information to build a holistic view of the customer.

This means analyzing quantitative data to measure and monitor customer-related metrics such as customer attrition rate, customer retention rate, number of products purchased, repeat purchases, likelihood to recommend, etc. When you have the right customer insights, you’re in a position to address customer needs, improve processes (to shorten the sales cycle), and to maintain a strong connection for an opportunity to turn customers into fans and fans to brand evangelists.

Do Your Homework, Fish Where Fish is

Before you start, you should learn where your customers are at, the tools they use and why. This allows you to make better informed decisions and build a framework for your assumptions before you jump in. You can find some valuable research data from the internet and here are two examples I’ve found.

First is the Morgan Stanley Internet Trends Analysis, which has a lot of in-depth information about all things internet, mobile, cloud computing, email, social networks and more. (Check out slide 12 on social networking vs email usage).

Morgan Stanley Internet Trends Analysis

The second report is from Edison Research on "Everything You Need To Know About Who's Using Twitter." I found it particularly interesting that people actually go to Twitter to learn about products, far more than they do with other social networks. (51% of active Twitter users follow companies, brands or products on social networks)

The take away: Email marketing, search engine optimization and social media are all great, but it takes a combination of know-how and creativity to get people just to open your e-mail, to click on your search results or to retweet your messages. Business owners and marketers need to have some technical knowledge of what methods produce positive results. Your goal should be to have a mix and balance of the big three utilizing content strategy that is useful and easy to share.

Think like a publisher, not only do you have to figure out ways to engage your subscribers (and to remain subscribed) but also prospects, people on the fence and try to sway influencers your way. Yes, it’s time consuming like what Jay Baer mentioned recently but think of it as investing in your customers, you get what you put in. It’s easy to setup your email newsletter, social network accounts and have SEO gurus optimizing your site, those are executions of tactics NOT strategy.

First, learn before you start, listen before you talk and research before you decide. You’re better off investing your marketing dollars to build your own targeted database (and customer segmentation!) with accurate information.

Questions on email marketing, search engine optimization or social media? Drop me a comment below.

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3 Tips on Marketing Through Online Community Building

Wed, 12 May 2010 21:40:00 -0700

There has been a few interesting development recently on the social web specifically with Facebook replacing the 'become a fan' phrase with a 'Like button' and launching 'Community Pages'; expect all mainstream websites to gradually adopt the like button enabling visitors to see if their friends or family like the content (peer influence) as well as the number of people liking something. The other news is Twitter's new tool that allows tweets to be directly embedded on third-party sites, making it easier to quote and share content .

This growing trend of the web becoming social will continue to encourage people to use it social. The more social the web gets, the more conversations it generates resulting in a permanent record of everything and anything people talk about, including your brand. Even if you're not online or don't have an online business, internet will continue to record down what people say about your brand.

And reputation is word-of-mouth thus it will only benefit your business if you include your community in defining your brand. So how can brands take control of their reputation via the social web?

One solution is through community building, the foundation of your brand's reputation.

What's In A Community?

Think of your community as a single platform where people can all gather to interact with your brand and each other expressing their opinions about your products and services. You don't need thousands or even hundreds of people to start a community, it can be started with just a few people with the same interest and are willing to participate.

When building a community consider the following groups that makes up the community ecosystem:

Prospects - Interested in your product or want to learn more about it
Customers - Made a purchase already
Employees - Individuals that works for you and/or stakeholders
Vendors - You bought from them (suppliers, service providers, operating expenses)
Partners - Companies or individuals that you have business relationship with, a reseller or distributor of your products
Media - Journalist or publications that covers your industry or your product category
Regulators - Authorities or individuals that regulates your industry, could be government or non-government

If you've been in business for a while, you should be familiar with the groups above. The idea of having your own online community is to centralize communication via a single platform where you can empower members of your communities to interact with each other and engage with your brand.

How Communities Benefit Brands

Why would companies want to spend time, resources and money on building their community? The answer is simple, community defines your brand, demonstrates social proof and creates business opportunities.

Defining your brand - So instead of trying to control how you want people to see your brand, the ideal approach is to become part of that process by providing a dedicated community. A platform that allows prospects, customers, peers, colleagues and stakeholders to interact with each other, ask questions about your products, comment on their service experience or simply give praises. This is why brands are uniting their customers and fans online using platforms such as an online discussion forum, a Facebook Fan Page, or a LinkedIn Group as their primary 'homebase' to build their community. It's fast, simple and easy to do.

In addition you can expand the community offline or locally adding tools such as Meetup.com,Amiando or Eventbrite. The goal is to provide easy access across multiple platform for your fans to hangout and express their feelings and ideas about your brand.

Social Proof and influence -The best way to change people's behaviors is through peers that they trust and/or respect. Done right, your community will become one of your most powerful marketing vehicle helping you sell via conversations and defending your brand during crisis. This is also an emerging trend as many brands are leveraging customers and employees as brand advocates to help spread the "brand voice." If prospective customers read some comments on how great your services are and sees many happy customer feedbacks (via your Facebook wall, Yelp, Amazon or blog), you're likely to move them further down the sales cycle not to mention the information can be used for marketing as well as support reference.

Even Toyota is bouncing back from it's PR nightmare because the brand still has a strong following and they've earned their customer's trust over a long time. This is why sports fans are loyal to their teams and often go to the distance to defend their teams/players because they are part of a specific team's fan community.

Opportunities to improve - Another benefit of building an online community is over time your community will accumulate enough information to enable you to abstract valuable insights to improve your products, services and reputation. One of the more popular approach is using crowdsourceddata to help craft marketing campaigns and get the community involve to deepen the trust and create brand awareness.

And with those that are concern about negative word of mouth? My recommendation is to have a plan in place so you can respond in a timely matter with the right social media and crisis management policies. This way, when things go south, you can quickly pinpoint the problem and identify the proper solution to resolve the issue. In fact, it's an opportunity to turn negative buzz to strengthen the relationship with customers.

As for managing the community it really depends on how your organization is structured for customer engagement. For example, during presale you can task your sales team to answer pre-sale questions and have your customer support staff responsible for postsale questions. Then categorize and archive the Q&As to be used future for prospectives and customers. You can important them into your CRM system or publish the as FAQs.

Keep in mind that managing the community should not be limited to the marketing department, in fact, the marketing department should help facilitate the interaction to improve the brand experience by providing insights abstracted from the community to other department. Product engineers can learn how customers are using the product, sales staff can identify the main concerns of prospective customers and marketers can better position and communicate more effectively.

If your organization needs to hire a community manager, I highly recommend following theCommunity Maturity Model by The Community RoundTable, a private peer network for community managers and social media practitioners.

According to The Community RoundTable, "this model does two things. First, it defines the eight competencies we think are required for successful community management. Second, it attempts – at a high level – to articulate how these competencies progress from organizations without community management that are still highly hierarchical to those that have embraced a networked business ecosystem approach to their entire organization."

This is an excellent way of looking at what's necessary to build a serious, large scale community. As for small businesses, I recommend to simply focus on 1 or 2 of the competencies below that aligns with your business objectives and just keep working at it. Use a systematic approach to nurture your community and determine how it impacts your business.

Are you ready to start building your online community? Here is 3 areas to think about:

1) Intent vs Outcome - Know why you’re doing this, what the community is about and be prepared to respond to unexpected outcomes. Create policies and define a clear purpose also helps to motivate members by giving meaning to participation and build collaborative work by providing a common focus. With clarity, members will define the purpose on a common ground to grow the community. Once trust and respect are earned from the community, members will be more incline to be loyal to your brand and what you stand for which should be beyond just a profit-making machine. It’s a commitment between the community and its members. Your reward as a business should be fueled by the appeal you have with the community.This is why a growing number of companies are investing incontent marketing by publishing free resources to influence the perception of brand value and demonstrate expertise.

2) Communicate with Meaning and Authenticity - The key in building a meaningful community is to be authentic and stay true to you brand. If you ask your customers what your brand means and you don’t like the answer, perhaps you need to rethink your brand strategy, marketing communication and your corporate culture. Effective communities develop leadership teams, equip and deploy members for action, understand and engage with their community purpose to achieve impact. Besides, if you already have customers out there, they may be waiting for you to provide a platform to speak.

Companies are humanizing themselves and to be human is to have a personality. You must accept that you will make mistakes and not everyone is going to like your personality. However, you should be able to demonstrate expertise in whatever it is that you provide via free education and resources.

If you say what you mean and mean what you say, your community will be on your side.

3) Serve First, Sell Later - The perception of an expert is not only to have invaluable knowledge but a positive reputation. Focus on the needs of your members by making things as easy and frictionless as possible. It’s a team effort, the community as a whole never just about one person but a collective effort to keep the community going. The bottom line is community builds trust and it’s not related to making money.

Focusing on financial gain leads to short-term decisions based on cost that’s not sustainable for the future. A focus on the community (or the customer), on the other hand, can lead to happy customers, employees, and partners.

I thought this TEDtalk by Derek Silvers on "how to make a movement" was an interesting way to think about building a community for your brand and why leadership may be over glorified. The video is about 3 minutes long.

The Take away: Brands have customers and when these customers have reasons beyond the product and services that they sell, there is a cause. That cause is what motivates people to connect and spread your brand's idea. The greater the commitment to a cause the greater the commitment to the community. Like the great American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed. It is the only thing that ever has."

Whether it's in a social network or a weekly local meeting, ALL brands should consider fostering relationships through community building. For me, I have my blog and Facebook Page to build my community.

Do you have a platform to grow your community? Where should your customer go when they want to be part of what you do and what you believe in?

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What Can Social Media Do to Improve Your Business

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 17:35:00 -0700

After my last post on “How to use Google and Twitter to Find your Customers,” I’m following up on how to abstract value to improve your ideas; whether it’s for your marketing research or product innovation, the intention for gathering these data should NEVER be for spamming but to help integrate your value proposition into what people are truly interested in.

If you can become part of what people are interested in, you will have a better chance of connecting. Therefore it’s best to utilize permission marketing when executing your communication strategy. Getting more data is great, but it’s not intended so you can just add more people to your weekly email blast. Making quantitative analysis can help you create interesting ideas that differentiate your brand and drive actions.

So how can social media create opportunities for you?

Understand The Social Network Ecosystem

First, learn how each social network ecosystem works and the habits of the emerging “social consumers.” Think of each social network as a town and the ecosystem is basically the infrastructure of the town. Knowing how each social network is used is like having the map of the town. Once you have knowledge of the streets around town, the next step is to find and connect with your customers. This is where my last post comes in handy, if you can identify a social consumer online, he or she is more likely to have multiple social networking accounts which can help you to further profile your target audience. This is especially helpful if you use a CRM (Customer Relationships Management) system such as GoldMine, Dynamics CRM or Salesforce.

Let’s look at B2C (business-to-consumers) social consumers; these are people that are willing to share their personal information on social networks engaging in activities such as updating their Facebook status, displaying their locations on Foursquare, leave their product reviews on Amazon or restaurant reviews on Yelp. If you apply the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule, you can expect the power users represent 20% of the users that’s generating 80% of the activities. Accordingly to the latest study by Chadwick Martin Bailey, "consumers who are Facebook fans and Twitter followers of a brand are more likely to not only recommend, but they are also more likely to buy from those brands than they were before becoming fans/followers...The study also uncovered perceptions among consumers that those brands not engaging in social media are out of touch."

The idea is to focus more on the power users that command influence within the social networks. Keep in mind connecting with “medium” and “light” users also helps to earn social proof and trust via the long-tail.

For B2B (business-to-business) the leading examples are LinkedIn, BusinessInsider, StockTwits, OpenForum by AmericanExpress and BusinessWeek’s BusinessExchange to see how businesses building communities that connects and shares information. They represent how social network can be utilize to build a community by providing practical value whether it’s a piece of software, platform, resource center or networking destination, they give back in return to what participants put in.

I recommend doing some in-depth research to get useful data on demographics of your target audience. Then identify the appropriate social network(s) that fits your demographics to go after. The key to success will be your understanding of how your target social consumers think, act and make decisions. What and who influence them? How much research was done prior to the purchase? What was the second or third option?

Implementing Accountability and ROI

Now that you’ve got your customer profiles and social network(s) identified, what’s next? For businesses serious about ROI (return on investment), it’s time to increase accountability of your marketing efforts.

You can do this by using existing data or the customer insights from your research (profiling, surveys, CRM) to create campaign projections, a realistic goal that you aim for. Then create a mix of financial and nonfinancial metrics that you NEED to measure, not what you can measure. This is to help you understand how your marketing activities impact the bottom line and how you can optimize them by doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

Make sure you track your marketing cost as well as where the money is coming from to justify true ROI and conduct performance analysis. How much does it cost to run a local campaign vs. national campaign? What results are you getting targeting moms instead of kids? Can you compare the effectiveness of your marketing investments in direct marketing and affiliate marketing?

Another great use of these valuable customer data is to share the insights with your customer service representatives, sales staffs, product development engineers, design teams, or anyone that will benefit from them. If the sales staff knows what words or questions your target audience used most frequently when talking about your product, they can craft a better sales pitch. If product engineers realize how many different ways people actually use the products they create, they can improve and create better products. If the design team identifies how your customers come to visit your page and where they clicked, perhaps they can increase the conversion rate on your next campaign.

You can also involve them in the insight generation process to help increase the adoption and with regular distribution of these insights, everyone will take part to improve your business incrementally.

Ultimately you want to have a holistic view of your customer data so not only do you know what they’ve purchased, but also what they think about your industry, how they talk about your brand, and why they react to your campaign a certain way.

Simply put, it all comes down to keeping up with the shifts in how people think and act as well as the technologies used. If you're unable to keep up then outsource part of your social media efforts to marketers, consultants or agencies; but make sure you understand the implications.

Here is an short and excellent report on how social media influences paid search by GroupM Research.

The Influenced: Social Media, Search and the Interplay of Consideration and Consumption

The take away: The key to effective marketing communications is to have a solid brand strategy. It’s indicative that social media must work together as an integrated whole of your brand strategy because your brand lives day-to-day in communication platform such as sales presentations, company brochures, product packaging and now the semantic web. Synchronizing these efforts assures consistent communication of your brand’s strategy, helping to create brand awareness and recognition of who you are and why you matter.

Moving forward, there will be an increase demand for marketing ROI as more data becomes available and new measuring tools are developed. As always, focus on the signal instead of the noise, maximize the value of social media to improve your business beyond marketing.

What do you think? Love to hear your thoughts and feel free to share your ROI metrics.

he study also uncovered perceptions among consumers that those brands not engaging in social media are out of touch. When asked the question “What does it say about a brand if they are not involved with sites like Facebook or Twitter?” they said the following:

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How to Use Google and Twitter to Find Your Customers

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 11:50:00 -0700

The three most important elements when starting out with marketing on the internet is to 1) define success and 2) know who your target audience 3) listen to your customers.

Once you form a foundation for your web strategy, the execution becomes easy. The goal is to constantly test and use different campaigns from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to email marketing in an attempt to achieve business objectives.

I often hear business owners talk about wanting to increase sales and generate leads but fail to define what success look like to them. In order to define success, you must first realize your current state of business from an analytical and financial perspective. Do you have any existing data to help you take the pulse of the business? What kind of financial (Return on Investment or ROI) and non-financial (business impact) objectives and metrics are available?

Without real knowledge of your true costs, you run into a potential misconception of what your real ROI is. Understand that ROI includes not just how much you pay for web hosting or your overheads, but also other costs associated with running the entire campaign such as, cost of time working on the campaign (broken down into average hourly wages), amount of labor burden costs (cost consisting of all indirect labor costs incidental to operations), SEO costs (monthly or accordance with your budget), email marketing costs, technology infrastructure costs etc.

Understand Your Costs and Metric

Once you have a true total cost of you running the campaign, you can run those numbers against your traffic and sales conversion rates to identify your ROI. Here is an example of how you can create a simple metric chart:

Assuming I get those numbers, with a quick glance the data shows that by spending 3 times amount of money on this campaign, the result returns 9 times more sales with the cost per sale reduced by more than half. This is a high level overview to help you define your goals for each metrics. Again, watch your real cost of the campaign will bring clarity to your true profitability.

Using Google and Twitter to Identify Your Customers Online

Once you define your goals and know what success looks like, the next step is defining your customer profiles then search for them online. For starters, you should at least know the age demographic, income level or occupation. After you know who your typical customer looks like, you need to find where they are online and what they’re talking about to get a step closer to engage them.

This is where you should be looking at using some free online tools to help you gather useful data.

Let’s look at using a combination of Google and Twitter to find your customers. As an example, I’m going to assume that you own a local retail apparel store and you want to drive traffic to your store.

First you should come up with a list of keywords that people are searching on Google. The simple and fast way to do it is to use Google Keyword Tool and Google Insights for Search.

Google Keyword Tool

Google offers the keyword tool so you can search and find what popular keywords people are searching around your products or services. I’ve used the keyword “evening wear” and as you can see, it returned all relevant keywords and the volume of searches for the past 12 months. Feel free to make adjustments to show the data in different ways (I’ve sorted the list by Local search volume) and how much people are paying for those keywords.

There is no doubt that “evening wear” is the most popular keyword locally. This indicates that most people simply put in the keyword “evening wear” so if you want to target a narrower range like “evening wear tops” you will have less competition for the same keyword. Click on Add and you can create your list (will be displayed on the right) and when you’re done adding, you can export the entire list in text or excel format.

Google Insights for Search

Once you have a basic list of keywords, head over to Google Insights for Search to compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.

Now you can take popular keywords you’ve found and insert them into the search term area, and you’ll find more information about your keywords. Unquestionably the keyword “dress” out paced all other keywords I’ve insert (evening wear, women’s shoes, handbags). And you’ll also find that New York is the place where people search most for dresses.

Play around with the different settings and you can also export the results in excel format.

Google Wonder Wheel

The Google Wonder Wheel was introduced to simplify and arrange search results. It’s basically a pre-defined mind mapper which helps the user get all the related search results in a wheel shaped like display.

Simply go to Google.com and input your search term, click on the “show options” link and find the “Wonder Wheel” link on the bottom left to get your search terms mind-mapped.

Once you get to the Wonder wheel, you can explore around the related keywords and it’ll expand into another wheel.

I went ahead and clicked on the “discount evening wear” and the most popular and relevant keywords associated with discount evening wear shows up. This is another great way to narrow your search term down to what your customers may be looking for in order to personalize the message.

So if I’m running a promotional campaign or sending out newsletters, I could use content such as:

“Discount designer evening gowns perfect for cocktail parties or formal events!”

Or combine with my findings from Google Insights,

“A night out in New York? Checkout our discounted cocktail dresses from BCBG! Available in plus size directly from Macy’s.”

Combining Google with Twitter

Since Google have no problem indexing Twitter’s data, you can now use Twitter’s search engine to find you target customers using keywords as well as conversational phrases.

First go to search.twitter.com and click on advanced search and start looking for conversations phrases around what people would say when they’re looking for clothing. The example below shows a search for people saying “what should I wear” within 100 miles of Los Angeles, CA. You can also leave it blank for broad search to view everything around the world, perhaps you have an online store so tracking both local, geo-targeted search and broad search make sense.

As you can see, the search result would return a stream of conversations with people saying “what should I wear.” You can take a moment to scan over the conversation, perhaps follow those individuals, checkout their profile and “listen” in on their dialogues.

However, you don’t want to spend all day reading people’s conversations, and searching for the same phrases every time. This is where Google Reader comes in handy. Google Reader is a great tool to aggregate all your RSS feeds into one place and it also has some analytical capabilities.

On your Twitter search results page, find the RSS feed icon on the top right hand corner, right click on it and copy the link address of the feed.

Then open your Google Reader and click on “Add a subscriber” and paste the link into your Google Reader to start building a collection of feeds around your target search phrases.

Once you’ve added the feed into your Google Reader, wait for a couple of days for the data to aggregate before you can start analyzing it (ideally you want to have at least 30 days). You can start checking the data by clicking on “show detail” on the top right hand corner.

You’ll see data for the last 30 days, time of day and day of the week. Depending on how you look at it, you can see which day of the month people start talking about your search term. Maybe it’s the end of the month, everyone got paid so a discussion about shopping starts; or perhaps everyone goes out on Thursday evening in LA so on Wednesday people are talking about what to wear for Thursday. The time of the day is a good area to gauge when these people log on to Twitter to talk about your search term.

Another good use of these data is to figure out when to send out your coupons, promotions and newsletters so your message arrives when people’s minds are on your product or service. Remember, personalized messages delivered at the right place at the right time are key ingredients to conversion.

Search Twitter Profile Using Google

Another method to find your target customer on Twitter is to search through people’s Twitter profile using Google. Go to Google.com click on advanced search and put in

intext:”bio*love shopping”

and you’ll find a list of people that indicated they “love shopping” in their bio on Twitter.

Basically intext:”bio*xxxx” tells Google to search for text within the Twitter bio section. So replace xxxx with whatever you like that matches to what your target customer may put in their Twitter bio.

Now that you know from your Google Insights that shoppers in New York have the most interest in searching for dresses, how do we target people who loves to shop and lives in New York?

This is what you put in

intext:bio-*-love shopping intext:location-*-NY

Notice that there is a minor tweak to the search input. You will need to add - in between the * mark. So intext:bio-*-xxxx intext:location-*-xx where the xx is now searches within that state. Give it a try and you’ll find extremely targeted individuals

I don't usually do detailed step by step posts, but I had repeatedly explain this to many business owners and marketers so I thought to share some of my tips to help you find your customers online. I hope you find the above information helpful and it's a very useful way to build your customer segmentation list.

If you’ve got questions or better way to use these tools, feel free to share them here.

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Content Marketing and Product Innovation: Is Your Brand Ready to Grow Up?

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 06:53:00 -0700

Living in southern California I love going to restaurants, cafes and retails stores to experience what companies are doing to attract customers. From merchandising to customer service, I’m gradually seeing three popular marketing trends that everyone is doing to spread their brand voice.

First, almost every company is in on the social media bandwagon specifically leveraging Facebook and Twitter to engage with their fans and broadcast their offerings.

Second, companies are finding ways to collect your contact information to build their email list by offering discounts, coupons or customer loyalty programs.

And third, businesses are aware of their reputation online on places such as Yelp, Consumer Reports, OpenTable, BizRate, Amazon and CNET. Some of using these information as a way to improve products and identify service gaps.

All three marketing tactics are proven to be somewhat cost-effective in terms of managing their reputations online while funneling leads and converting sales. There is enough free information out there that business owners and marketing managers can find to start immediately so I’m not surprise that everyone is doing it. In fact, I always check out the Twitter or Facebook page of where I’ve visited to see what level of engagement and following they have as well as to identify how the platform was utilized.

The result I found is that companies fall into two categories of social media marketing buckets. First are the highly engaged profiles with regular updates and a large following that creates instant social proof. Second are the uninspiring profiles with the lack of updates and little to no interactions.

This is the same observations made by Jeremiah Owyang, who recently posted on his blog that, "many brands are jumping on the social media bandwagon, without giving proper thought about the impacts to their marketing effort. In particular, many brands are putting ’social chicklets’ on their homepage to "Follow us on Twitter" or "Friend us on Facebook" without considering the ramifications."

This is the problem with low barrier to entry tools such as Twitter and Facebook that many brands are using without a real deliberate strategy. I encourage those of you that are serious about your digital marketing efforts to use Jeremiah’s matrix to help make your decisions.

Keep in mind, you must understand not just the rules of the game but also how it applies to your specific industry, your customers and your organization.

There is no doubt that the internet has made it easier to find what you’re looking for while connecting you with like-mined individuals from networking to referrals, relevant information is available in abundance. The questions is where do people get those information and how will these content providers be perceived?

First you need to realize that all of the answers have changed.

Same Questions, Different Answer

Although the internet has forever changed our expectations in media consumption and in communication, one thing remains constant for businesses today: the question of how do we attract more customers to us? How do we get customers to spread our brand? How do we get customers to buy more and buy often?

As a marketer today you must realize that we’ve been asking those same questions for decades and in order to answer them now you must first understand the following 6 fundamental social change in customer perception and behavior:

1. Choice overload: Customers are bombarded with choices; the market is saturated with selection. And people get frustrated when they have to make a decision from tens and thousands of product categories, brands and price points. Everything looks the same, everyone sounded alike and it doesn’t help when people have shorter attention span as we become more distracted everyday.

2. Conflicting information: We’re in a hyper-connected marketplace where people are using social media to discuss new products, do their own research, cross referencing information in the blogosphere and everything goes from frustration to confusion. There is simply too much information and how can an average consumer know who’s right and who’s wrong?

3. Customers know marketing: Over time, customers understood the game of marketing regardless of B2C or B2B. Described by Tom Asacker: We’re no longer passive consumers but active discerners participating in how products are marketed at us. This is why there is an increasing trend in banner blindness and average web users will give you only 8 seconds to decide if they’re going to stay or not.

4. Lack of trust in the marketplace: There is a sense of distrust in the marketplace. People simply don’t trust individuals let alone corporations. We’re conditioned to identify the tactics such as sense of urgency (buy now and save!), risk reversal (money back guaranteed!), or scarcity thinking (for a limited time!). Watch any TV infomercials and you’ll find those tactics in most of them. Simply put, these tactics are losing their effectiveness and even if they worked that led to engagement opportunities, you must meet the customer expectations otherwise it’s hard to fool them twice.

5. People define your brand: Brand messages only sets the initiate expectations of your target audience and ultimately people make meaning out of things themselves. When push comes to shove, people go with what feels right not your product features or service benefits. It’s how you make them feel, not what you tell them how they should feel. If they can relate to your message, it only means they’ll give you a few more seconds to keep going down your path to purchase. Your brand is defined by how you make people feel about the decisions they’ve made not just your messages.

6. The shift towards frugality: This is the simplest concept to grasp as the recession has permanently changed the way consumers behave and perceive value. It goes beyond pricing strategy and product promotions. Whether you’re a retailer, a B2B service provider or a marketer, this means extracting deeper customer insights to build meaningful, differentiated messages that communicates relevancy. This is best described by a recent article "The New Consumer Frugality" in Strategy+Business, by Booz & Company, in which the authors defined six frugal consumer segments.

After a thorough understanding of the above trends, you should also be aware of the fact that brands are becoming publishers creating opportunities that’s leveling the playing field. And in order to be successful moving forward, you either have great content strategy or you have unique customer experience (in product or service innovation).

Content Marketing Creates Relevancy

Recently Joe Pulizzi of Junta42.com, a content strategy evangelist published a post after speaking at the Online Marketing Summit 2010 on how companies focus solely on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and social media that produce without a real content strategy. Specifically he noted that "any online marketing, whether social media, email marketing, search engine optimization, landing page conversion, etc., does not work without first having content strategy."

As a brand strategist that focuses on marketing integration, I couldn’t agree more. I’ve heard business owners and marketing executives realize the need to change their strategy, but it’s often due to the need to "keep up" with the current trend. "We must get into social media because everyone’s doing it," or "We need to engage our customers on Facebook and Twitter." But what does engagement mean to your organization? How will that benefit your bottom line or increase sales?

It’s easy to setup a Wordpress blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook fan page or a LinkedIn Group. The key is what will you be pushing out to generate meaningful conversations? How will you provide value that sparks engagement? Why would people spread your idea or pass on your name? What’s the call-to-action when people get to your website, your blog, or your social media pages?

Product Innovation Creates Loyalty

The other way to win in the marketplace is to deliver awesome products or services that build brand loyalty via innovation. An easy example would be what Apple is doing with their continuous innovation in products from iPod to iPhone to last weekend’s release of iPad. Amazon’s endless pursue to have everything available, fast and easy via their online store regardless what you’re looking for. Zappo’s unmatched customer service in finding and delivering not just the shoes you ordered but what you may also like.

For restaurants, it’s the food you cater, the service you provide, the price tag you put on as the total experience that says “we’re different.” Customers will automatically go on to Yelp and OpenTable to give you reviews and recommendations. Your customer will decide what quality is and what value means to them.

I love what James Surowiecki wrote in an excellent piece in The New Yorker: "the more information people have, the tighter the relationship between quality and price: if you can deliver a product or service that is qualitatively better, you can charge top dollar. But if you can’t deliver the quality you can’t get the price."

You’re going to struggle if you don’t deliver brand experience that’s worth talking about. Everyone have access to the same tools and resources, if you can deliver a mix bag of value using content marketing strategy on your innovative products, you win.

The take away: Brands must adapt to the new realities that everyone is a content producer and we are no longer competing on eyeballs and clicks only, but value that builds long-lasting relationships in a trust-driven era.

It is essential to establish clear, integrated marketing strategies for various media channels in order to deliver personalized messages that properly aligned with your business objectives. If you don’t know your desired outcome, why are you implementing tactics where you can’t see what success means to you?

If you don’t have exceptional products perhaps its time you should rethink your product strategy.

Are you re ready to get actionable to integrate your marketing efforts?

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Reputation Management Using Social Media

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 01:44:00 -0700

Recently I purchased a new vehicle and was excited about the whole experience. I’ve had many cars in the past and the part that always annoys me is feeling the pressure to buy from the sales people on the floor.

But this one is different.

It was like two friends talking about cars and with no initiation about buying. She wasn’t worry about selling.

Obviously I purchased the car and about 3 weeks later I had to go in for some service and again the experience was painless and I even got a loaner car to drive for a few days.

I was so thrilled that I wanted to endorse them by leaving reviews on their social network profile. Then I discovered a string of negative reviews online and what’s worse is that they received an average of 2 out of 5 stars on multiple websites.

So I called the sales person that sold me the car and she said she will help me pass it to her corporate marketing executive. Below is a slightly altered version to keep both the dealership and sales person confidential:

=================================================================

Dear Jenny (not real name)

I’m a happy customer because I had a great experience buying a vehicle from you. It was enjoyable and I felt no pressure or that I wasn't been judged.

When I came in for a service a month later, your service department was superb not to mention I can talk to the technician forever. The car was serviced promptly and the entire process was painless.

With such exceptional service and people, why is it that your dealership only gets

3 out of 5 stars from Google?
2.5 out of 5 stars from Yelp?
3 out of 5 stars from Edmunds?

The reason is simple. No one is managing your company's reputation online.

People typically would only review something when they're either excited, happy, satisfied or vice versa; frustrated, angry or dissatisfied. Looking at some of the reviews you will find YOUR NAME is all over the positive side, which is the reason why not all the reviews are negative.

As you can see the negative reviews out weights the positive reviews. Nobody from your company is defending the dealership brand and it's unfortunate because your car manufacturer makes a product that practically sells itself.

But does your dealership have any loyal fans that would refuse to go to other dealerships because they love you guys so much? Does your dealership have any advocates internally or externally that promotes the positive things about your company?

Does your management care? And what are they doing about it? Is the entire business run on listing cars on websites, classifieds, and print advertising? Then why should I come back to buy my second and third vehicle from you?

There is NOTHING on your website that shows credibility of your great sales people, hardworking service advisers, happy technicians or a sense of strong community. Just bunch of product photos, inventory listing and resources that every other car dealership has on their website.

How can I trust your brand? I only walked in your dealership knowing there is a deal NOT because I know Jenny Smith, the awesome sales person was there. If your dealership competes ONLY on price, then it'll be very difficult to build value in the business because there won't be any long-term customer relationship forged that way. And that's not what your GM wrote to me in his thank you email.

Unless you're selling a commodity such as water, people don't buy what you sell, they buy the experience! And even water brands are working hard to differentiate from the competition, what marketing efforts are you doing to differentiate? What reasons are you giving me to talk about your company and your people?

Now, would I recommend your dealership? Sure but I would tell people to ask for Jenny in sales and Kevin in service.

Sincerely,

Eric Tsai

=================================================================

Reputation Management is Marketing

It should come to no surprise that reputation management is marketing. And crisis management cross over to reputation management as well, thus it should be considered as marketing too.

Take a look at the recent two big crisis for these two brands: Tiger Woods and Toyota. One is a billion dollar personal brand and the other one is a multi-billion dollar consumer products brands.

For Tiger Woods, he opted to go with the silent treatment, laying low to let things wane a bit and the conversation just kept going. Even after his public statement, the damage has already been done, sponsors dropped him and fans still skeptical on his integrity.

With Toyota, it's indicative that there is no magic solution to fix a fundamental problem on a technical issue on the accelerator. The key is to manage the crisis in a way to mitigate negative press going viral as it did on Twitter just check the #Toyota hashtag.

According to AdAge, "on Jan. 22, the day after the recall, buzz within the social web skyrocketed, with the number of posts about the automaker going from less than 100 to over 3,200. With the stop-sale announcement four days later, online chatter shot from about 500 posts that morning to more than 3,000 by that afternoon."

In both cases, the respond time is just as critical as what's been communicated.

As we continue to transition to the social and relationship-focused era, companies will no longer be able to ignore social media and online marketing because the truth of the matter is the more social you are and the more transparency you expose, you're more likely to convert the sales and retain loyalty.

And if you're able to provide a community for your fans, customers, staff or even vendors to interact and engage with each other, they're also more likely to buy repeatedly not to mention providing you with referral business as well.

According to the latest report from Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate, "social friends and followers feel more inclined to purchase from the brands they are fans of... 60% of respondents claimed their Facebook fandom increased the chance they would recommend a brand to a friend. Among Twitter followers, that proportion rose to nearly 8 in 10."

Social Networks Continue to Grow

And it helps that social network giant like Facebook is now just as popular as Google according to Hitwise,"Facebook reached an important milestone for the week ending March 13, 2010 and surpassed Google in the US to become the most visited website for the week... Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week. "

Just look at the chart below and you'll see how Facebook have exploded while Google maintains its steady traffic. Why the exponential? For one, Facebook is a great way to get started with social media since most people will already have a couple of hundred friends that they can talk to about anything.

For businesses in the offline world to reach customers they would have to make hundreds if not thousands of phone calls or send out loads of flyers that would cost lots of money and resource. Now companies can do that a couple of times a day for free through a Facebook page or a Twitter tweet.

The take away: All businesses should start exploring with social media to find their sweet spot. Traditional media channel such as advertising on TV, magazines or billboards can still be expensive with unpredictable results. Social media has a low barrier to entry (yes it's cheap) and allows you to meet people in a fraction of the time that it would take in the real world to start building meaningful relationships.

However; you must factor in the the resources and time spent on social media marketing, because it can get out of hand which can lead to inefficiency and ultimately costing you more.

You don't even need to have a profile on every social network like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Simply focus on one that you're comfortable with, develop a process in which you can implement a systematic approach and see what results you get. If you get the result you like, keep doing it. If you don't, try something else.

Whether you like it or not, people will continue to talk about your brand and you can either choose to ignore it or do something about it.

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Customer Experience: Do You Really Know Your Audience?

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 22:19:00 -0800

It’s no surprise that the increasingly social web have enabled customers to be heard while helping to improve the very products and services they’ve purchased. As millions of people continue to search online for the product they need and the service they want, do you know how the recession has impacted your customer’s value perception? How are you going to improve the customer experience to optimize your products and services?

Your customer may have already shifted their spending in favor of private label brands over name brands or reduce the quantity or frequency of buying altogether. Perhaps the freemium business model has become the new standard to get your customer to try your product. Whichever way you look at it, consumer’s perceptions of an interaction are influenced heavily from their purchasing experience, by how they research to who they trust.

To understand and improve customer experience, companies should first research their customer’s natural behaviors, and then seek opportunities to influence those behaviors through targeted strategies and niche offers.

According to a recent Nielsen analysis revealed generationally shopping habits that reflect diverse lifestyle preferences and economic habits.

Naturally, Boomers have the highest earning of any group, followed by Gen X, then Millennials and finally Greatest Gen. What’s interesting is that according to the study, "Millennial and Gen X shoppers favor mass supercenters and mass merchandisers over more traditional formats like grocery or drug stores which remain a draw for the Greatest Generation and Boomers … Millennials today represent the largest population segment—over 76 million strong—just slightly larger in number than the Boomer segment. The two groups together represent half of the U.S. population."

From these data, marketers should apply behavioral economics to further understand the minds of their customers. Once you understand the patterns contributing to buy and not buy, you can craft highly targeted campaigns and behavioral tracking techniques to connect with customers. Couple that with direct customer research such as surveys or focus groups, you will end up with a customer segmentation metrics that can help you define how changes of an offer can influence the way people react to it.

However, it’s critical that a more systematic approach to behavior targeting is used when defining your customers. This will help to make irrationality more predictable in an attempt to understand the behavioral economics of your customers.

Here are some questions you should consider to help you improve customer interaction:

Where does your customer go when searching for your products and services? Online communities, offline advertising, word-of-mouth, search engine, blogs etc.
How and where did they obtain the knowledge necessary to make a purchase? Do they know how to find what they need?
When and how do customers gain access to your products and services?
What kind of lifestyle and overall financial situation are they in?
What does value mean to them? Where is the line drawn between getting a bargain vs being cheap?
Who and what influence their buying decision? And why?
What conversations are generated around the ‘benefits’ of your product and services?
What are some of the potential barrier to purchase? Lack of knowledge, confusion in the market, price points, product features etc.
Who are your competitors and how are they perceived in the customer’s eyes? What other options do they have if they don’t buy from you or your competitors?
In your vertical, does you customer look at brands first or price first? Is the service or support more important than the product itself?

You may consider paying for research from companies such as ComScore, Ipsos, Harris Interactive, TNS Group or Hitwise just to name a few. If you’re not ready to pay for research, you can always conduct direct customer survey yourself or simply start gathering free data from sites like Consumer Reports, MarketingCharts, Pew Research Center or eMarkter on a regular basis.

Here is an example from the Compete Online Shopper Intelligence study that provides a high-level overview into the complete online shopping experience.

Often times, paid research firms will provide complete free report as well, you just have to keep an eye on it or subscribe to their newsletter. Here is one focusing on eCommerce from ComScore: State of US Online Retail Economy in Q3 09 State of US Online Retail Economy in Q3 09 -

You can also search on sites like Docstoc, Scribd or SlideShare to find more supporting data. Keep in mind most of the data on those sites may be dated but you can still use them to investigate current trends or form your own insights.

The take away: Because of the many factors contributing to consumer’s buying pattern and media habits; there is no silver bullet to improve customer experience. Instead, the goal is to minimize wasteful spending while learning to invest in the drivers of customer satisfaction from desirable customer interaction. Do you know what makes your customer tick?

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How Augmented Reality Affects Marketing

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 22:11:00 -0800

I received some feedback and questions on Augmented Reality (AR) after my last post and thought to provide some additional inspiring ideas with regards to where AR is heading. The best example can be seen from Yelp's Monocle app that allows users to see location-based reviews from their iPhone screens.

The result is crowd sourced commerce with social proof data to enhance purchasing decisions on the spot. It's an integration of social media with physical space to bring relevant information based of our physical behaviors such as the places we've visit or the reviews we've posted online.

This new technology integrates real-time social networks, location-based tracking, and the semantic web to aggregate qualitative data. Information you want will run towards you instead of the other way around, fully customized to your personal taste based on your friends, location, and how you search online. The cultural ramifications represents a step forward towards artificial intelligence.

As for marketers, it's important to monitor how consumers and businesses interact with AR technology that creates deeper and more meaningful engagements which may lead to new marketing opportunities. However, everything does hinges on privacy policy so it'll be highly regulated on what information can be abstracted.

The fact is, consumers are more incline to take action if the ads are what they want to see from providing coupons to what's on sale at the moment on location. From a brand's perspective, it helps to improve data quality to deliver impactful, targeted integrated marketing campaigns enabling a dynamic social commercial connection through multiple touchpoints. It improves the branded experience.

If you haven't look into AR, I suggest you to checkout some of the examples below.

Here is a demo at TED2010, where Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos new augmented-reality mapping technology from Microsoft. This one shows you how far technology can go, very inspiring.

As augmented reality applications get better, and people have the ability to aim their camera at any real world object and get real-time information on the fly, it'll be interesting how consumers will take interest in utilizing this feature. Here is an alternative way to improve online shopping experience using AR.

Augmented reality on print is probably the simplest to start, the idea is to integrate the AR with your offline marketing activities as part of the sequential advertising to tell your story like the examples I've provided in the last post. For brand experience, a great example is the Adidas Augmented Reality Sneaker Experience.

I think it's worth reviewing the cost of integrating such concept on a smaller scale just to keep an eye on it. Ultimately it's another touchpoint marketers can use as part of an advertising campaign but also an added element in abstracting ROI. I welcome any thoughts on this, what do you think?

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5 Tips to Engage Social and Mobile Customers

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:26:00 -0800

If you’ve been keeping up with the current marketing trends, you should be in the process of exploring how to utilize social media to benefit your business. By now, most of the “how to use” social media content is everywhere especially from reputation resources such as Mashable, Social Media Examiner or Twitip to name a few.

While most large organizations such as Fortune 500 companies are slow in adopting social media, many have started pilot programs to experiment with this new tool. Brands such as Dell, Coke Cola, Ford, Starbucks, Zappos, Best Buy and even sports league like NBA and NFL have found rapid growth by allowing fans to engage directly with athletes.

Share content that people find useful and want to share with others is the new mantra for new media marketing. Particularly small businesses have found social media as a way to demonstrate leadership and command influence in niche communities.

The latest data from the Small Business Success Index shows that “Social media adoption by small businesses doubled from 12% in 2008 to 24% in 2009. The biggest expectation small business owners have from social media is expanding external marketing and engagement, including identifying and attracting new customers, building brand awareness and staying engaged with customers.”

The small and medium size businesses (SMBs) get it. They are using this recession as an opportunity to connect and expand their sphere of influence. While social media is still in its early phase, the business benefits of social networks are very real. Every small business is looking to integrate “social” into their eCommerce sites, direct mail campaigns, webinars, blogs and SEO tactics hoping to build top-of-mind brand awareness.

Certainly you’ve heard that it’s about conversation, customer engagement and providing value. However; it’s also quickly becoming a spam destination and experienced users have started to be very selective on who to connect and how to communicate. Sure, you can learn all the tricks and tactics in getting followers on Twitter, ramp up fans from Facebook and connects with hundreds of professionals through Linkedin but the real engagement is when you involve the entire community to take action and interact with your brand.

Understand Social Media Users

Social media is about conversations. It is important to understand why and what kind of conversation users are more incline to engage themselves in. Accordingly to the latest survey of social media users conducted by Crowd Science, "Users want to be heard. Overall, 45% reported liking when others notice them—leading some to stretch the truth or reveal too much personal information… But 36% believed others are simply interested in what they have to say. That shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to marketers, who know many users will tell all their contacts about good (and bad) experiences with products and services."

Detailed Study Results

These new social customers will look up Yelp for reviews and tweet customer service for support. It all boils down to the fact that every single customer from B2B to B2C has increased their influence throughout the buying process, gaining control of your brand’s perceived value, commanding more attention to satisfy their needs.

Lior Arussy wrote an excellent article in CRM magazine describes exactly that: "There’s a significant gap between the transaction as perceived by the employee and the outcome value as perceived by the customer. In short, what you sell is not what they buy."

The truth is, even if you have the most market share in your industry it doesn’t translate to loyalty, and loyalty generates word-of-mouth. This is the reason why customers today are able to demand more for less, a loyal customer is worth more than a passive one and brands are fighting to gain trust. With the space getting crowded, consumers are already flooded with choices not to mention most don’t have the desire to spend in the first place.

In an effort to drive business success, companies must become more customer-centric by focusing on the needs of each individual customer to earn their trust and meet their needs. More social means more conversations and when you add in the increasingly mobile factor, you have a whole new dynamic to reposition your brand to deliver a differentiated value proposition.

Here are 5 quick tips to help you address the increasingly social and mobile customer needs:

1. Start with local – Just because the internet can reach across the world doesn’t mean you need to do an all out global campaign. Often you will find hyperlocal campaigns to be more cost-effective and can benefit from hybrid campaign where you combine online with offline promotions. Find mobile advertising vendors that can help you target your local customers to drive traffic to your local stores or promote an event.

2. Provide free resources – With the emerging trend of the Freemium business model, free is the new standard. In fact, it gives your prospects a reason to give you the time of the day so you have an opportunity to earn their trust. Establish yourself as a resource by sharing your knowledge. Add value to the conversation by offering your thoughts and commenting on blog posts that your audience read, tweet resourceful information from your Twitter account, or by answering a question on LinkedIn Answers. Free resource such as buying guide, e-books, product recommendations from third parties or even free trials on your product are great ways to nurture leads with drip marketing campaigns.

According to the recently released ChoiceStream 2009 Personalization Survey, "65% of m-commerce shoppers indicate that they would buy more products from their mobile devices if it were easier to find products on them from trusted retailers."

3. Mark it easy to pass along – A simple word-of-mouth tactics that’s often overlooked as companies look to pack in all the features and benefits of their products and solutions on their brochures and websites. Go with something that’s easy to pass along without making it difficult for your customers to explain to their social network. Just like Twitter with 140 character limitations, mobile devices have limited viewing real estate so make sure your messages are simple and to the point. Provide a link to your content if you have more content to disclose, but make sure the link is short by using a URL shortener.

4. Use location based advertising (LBA) - Since people almost always have their mobile phone with them, LBA provides highly targeted reach. And because customers are in control on how they receive ads on their mobile devices, customers receive more personalized, relevant information in real-time resulting in greater customer satisfaction to help you build brand awareness, create loyalty, and drive purchase decision. Keep in mind that successful LBA is a permission based so establishing trust will be important and a privacy policy must be in place.

5. Tell a story, create passion – Reporters loves a great story because they know readers love them too. Often times a great story can get viral because well, it’s a great story! The increasingly social web has vastly increased the fragmentation of media. Leverage sequential advertising to tell a story and lead your prospects down a path of related messages with continuity of the call-to-action. Each engagement touch point should evoke a compelling response with fresh information and unique impression.

Don’t forget to keep any eye on the emerging trend of Augmented Reality on the social web and on mobile platforms:

Samsung Home Depot Esquire Magazine

The Take away: The real challenge for company embracing social media is finding the sweet spot that fits their business needs without draining their resources. The key to success is to understand and measure the direct business impact of social media campaigns and identify the gaps between the customer experience and expectations as we continue to become more social and mobile. Ask yourself, what do you want to achieve with social media? Where do you see your brand go in the next 18 months?

What do you think? Are you looking to do any mobile marketing in 2010? I'd love to hear what you're doing to engage social and mobile customers.

UPDATE 1 (2/24/2010)

Business Insider just published an new research from the Federal Communications Commission indicating that 86% of American adults now own cellphones.

Detail FCC Broadband Adoption Study 2010 below:

FCCSurvey -

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The Long Tail of Trust in New Media Marketing

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 02:16:25 -0800

In today’s fragmented media world where we all have some attention deficit in our busy lives, there are simply too many sources of information thus finding a filter that we trust is extremely important. Most people tend to prefer value, look for key opinion leaders and trust one-on-one communication sources.

Accordingly to a recent "Purchaser Influence Survey” by EXPO provided to eMarketer, over 92% of US mom internet users trust peer review more than manufacturer’s brand information. This data should not be a surprise because if you want recommendations for a restaurant or suggestions on buying a new cell phone, you’re pretty much going to first ask your friends. If you’re really serious about the purchase, you will do your “homework” first by reading bunch of online reviews from Yelp to Amazon before accessing your trusted sources.

Thanks to the increasingly social web, everyone can have a voice in their sphere of influence. As a result word-of-mouth has become the ultimate marketing arsenal for marketers to tap into their loyal customers and advocates to help spread their marketing messages through what it’s called earned media.

Earned Media vs Paid Media

As opposed to paid media where publicity are gained through advertising, earned media usually are from real people, not marketers, which explains why consumers tend to trust them more. It’s indicative from the survey conducted by Synovate for word-of-mouth ad network PostRelease, over 50% of the word-of-mouth activity was to help a friend or family member with a purchase decision, as well as sharing information they found on the web offline.

While these finding are insightful, it’s simply a confirmation that earned media is what’s working and will continue to lead the way as we crawl out of this recession. Obviously, there are other factors that contributes to the buying decision that aligns with the “four Ps of marketing” (price, product, promotion and placement), but there is a definite shift in the perception of value that builds on trust.

So how what does trust mean to brands today? According to the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer from PR firm Edelman, transparent and honest practices and trustworthiness are extremely important while financial return have fallen below those factors.

One thing I must point out is that these data can be misleading because financial returns actually increased but have fallen behind other factors so there is merely a shift in value perception.

We’ve gone from push advertising to social influence marketing. Online users have learned to focus on content and ignore online banners (banner blindness) simply because display focus too much on getting attention and have failed to deliver. The concept of getting attention as a way to create brand awareness is being seen as noise which leads to resistance. People have caught on to the fact that more marketers are increasingly behind influential bloggers, social media rock stars and even popular portals by endorsing their content diluting the credibility of peer-to-peer networks.

Long Tail of Trust

In the ear of new media, brands have quickly learned social marketing is build on the idea that people trust their friends more than they trust authorities, but on the other hand, consumers also start to question the intend and authenticity of their social networks.

As I’ve mentioned previous in “7 Keys to Creating Social Media Strategy for Your Brand”, social proof plays a key factor as a weapon of influence, the challenge for marketers is to earn trust as skepticism remains about how long trust will last. When it comes to trust and brand loyalty there is no silver bullet, but knowing what value proposition to focus on and how to make adjustments can help marketers to acquire high level of trust over time.

If you truly want to earn the trust of your audience, don’t get sucked into the numbers game. How many Twitter followers, Facebook fans or Linkedin connections you have on is far less important than how you interact with them. Instead of concentrating on how many social network participants you have, try instead to gauge success on how engage they are with your brand.

The take away: When it comes to trust, it pays to earn it over time via high targeted more personalized channel that drives engagement and loyalty. Mass media may reach a wider audience faster but the conversion rate is low and the experience becomes de-personalize. There is still a place for mass media, but there is growing concerns over the value and ROI in the long run.

Moving forward companies should focus on shifting towards a customer centric strategy that retains long term customer loyalty as a sustainable competitive advantage. Unless your brand connects with the customer, your chance of earning trust will be slim. The role of marketing is only going to become even more important and integrated closely with customer interactions.

Get back to the basics in the context of customer feedback. It should be more about starting the conversation to understand the customer’s point of view in an holistic effort to co-create value that defines your brand strategy.

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What Should You Consider When Integrating Social Media

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 14:07:00 -0800

As we progress into 2010, the rapid growth of social media has allowed more access to information, consumers, communities, and experiences. This new medium has enabled a new way to communicate and share, from B2C to B2B marketers are all trying to figure out an edge. Many brands start to focus on the hybrid approach which I believe will be the next phase of digital and web marketing. The question is what role will it play in the marketing arsenal? Here are 3 steps to consider when integrating social media to your marketing practices:

Brand Strategy Reassessment

Understand the changing habits of your customers should be the focus of your brand. Use the 80/20 rule to segment your customers and identify the difference between your old customers and new customers. The recession has permanently altered the way people think of value and the concept of trust. According to Decitica’s new study, "Marketing to the Post-Recession Consumers,"

The effects of the Great Recession on consumer behavior are so profound that many of the assumptions underpinning consumer segmentation are no longer valid; and
Marketing strategies that do not fully recognize the diversity of consumers’ recession experiences won’t have the desired potency in the post-recession world.

Business owners should reassess existing brand strategy to gauge the shift in their industry ecosystem. Although the above report focuses on B2C, for B2B marketers, you can expect similar shift in behavior from a high level perspective. The key is identifying the new trends in how your customers think, feel and act. Your customers may be part of the fastest growing mobile user groups or have adopted new ways to find and share information before they buy. Every person and their sphere of influence were affected by this recession, reevaluate your existing customer segmentation should be a priority. It’s time to make adjustments as to how you view your customers. Smart companies will always shift their brand strategy to focus on customer retention by maintaining a high level of value perception. Your customers expect you to keep your brand promise and that’s just the beginning, only those that are over delivering will earn the trust over time.

Integrated Marketing and ROI

Social media’s growth is undeniable, it seems like every company has a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account not to mention all the early adopter consumers. For example, according to a report from BabyCenter, "The number of moms who use social media regularly (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, BabyCenter Community) has significantly increased from 11% to 63% since 2006; a change of 46%. 44% use social media for word-of-mouth recommendations on brands and products and 73% feel they find trustworthy information about products and services through online communities focused on their specific interests such as parenting."

So does this mean if you sell to moms, you must get into all the social networks? Should social media marketing be your priority? Not so fast.

According to a study from MomConnection, The Parenting Group's nationally representative research panel of 5,000 moms, "the role of social networks in moms' lives is still largely for entertainment and personal communication; it's not a channel where most moms are receptive to gathering product information. Only 24% of respondents have used Facebook for product information and buying advice, while 5% have used Myspace for product info, and 3% have used Twitter."

Social networks is still growing and evolving because it’s mass media, it’s crowdsourcing and it’s here to stay. However, instead of being hype it’s moving towards ubiquity and part of the everyday mix that works alongside email and search marketing. People will continue to search for answers online and offline regardless of B2B or B2C. Every chance you get to optimize your brand’s search ranking is an opportunity to leave a bread crumb for your prospects.

Moving forward, the challenges will be to monitor, measure and manage a fully integrated campaign due to the amount of resources and time it takes to pull together the overall picture. This is precisely the reason why you don’t need to be on all the social networks or even be on it all the time. Some companies use social media as a platform for effective one on one engagement while others utilize it as a PR tool.

Whatever the role social media plays in your organization, you have to really understand how social media is driving your business. If you’re doing social media, do you know how many sales you got out of your social media app? Are you measuring the actual incremental sales from your e-commerce store? Or is social media primarily a driver for your brand value?

Both print and digital advertising costs have come down dramatically, this presents a new opportunity for a dynamic approach to hybrid marketing. You can simultaneously capture your audience via print and web advertising but the key is to identify which channel they come from to rapidly and accurately aggregate customer and prospect data. Perhaps most of your new customers reside on the internet while your existing customers still favors the traditional channel. Regardless of how you integrate your marketing campaign, remember to benchmark them so you can gauge the ROI to improve your sale funnel and lead generation capabilities.

If you goal is to build a customer engagement program, consider incorporating it with existing and new CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools that can be customized for each individual consumer. This helps to improve the ROI with more measurable data against the deliverable.

Here is "2010 Digital Marketing Outlook," an excellent report from the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA). Two Thousand and Ten Digital Marketing Outlook

Business Alignment

Businesses will emerge from the recession looking to further strengthen engagement and interaction with their customers. But what does “engagement” really mean? How much does it cost? And what will it take to engage a customer? If you have already done the first two steps by reassessing your brand strategy and integrate social media into your marketing campaigns, your next focus should be to develop a social media policy to protect your company and make incremental changes to improve every aspect of your business.

I’m hardly surprise when I read the new consumer poll by CMO Council and InfoPrint, that "consumers today are deluged and overloaded with a plethora of unwanted direct marketing and promotional messages that are blasted out via email, or mass-produced and mailed in vast quantities, ending up choking mail boxes and filling recycling bins. In most cases, recipients ignore, or have become immune, to standardized commercial overtures. And with the advent of the Internet, consumers are seeking product information and affirmation from trusted sources and referral networks online."

That’s the path social media is on right now.

Instead of email and mass-produced mailers, it’s spam tweets and uninvited LinkedIn notifications. Marketers are forgetting that consumers and prospects are real people like you and me. At the end of the day when we go to the grocery store or eat out at a restaurant we want to be treated like a person not a prey. It’s shocking to me that "staying relevant, valued and connected to customers has become the number one challenge for marketers today" according to the report.

The biggest adjustment brands must realize is that in social media you’re no longer in control of the conversation instead you will turn over the brand experience to the community and let them define it. If you want people’s opinion they’ll give it to you the way they want how they want it. Social media will NOT fix a bad product or negative customer experience. What it will do is to force you to reveal your brand’s true persona, allow additional means for your customer to reach you, and capture relevant analytical data for product and service improvements.

If you read my previous post "The 12 Principles of Brand Strategy," you’ll know that principle number 2 states that your brand is your business model. Well, if your customer’s behavior is changing, shouldn’t you adjust your business too?

Checkout these challenges to social marketing effectiveness, and you’ll understand why it’s not so simple to integrate social media into your existing marketing practice. Is it worth to invest in obtaining a large number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers? How do you convert them into sales?

There needs to be a transition and I believe hybrid marketing on a single integrated platform will be the next trend to emerge in an attempt to leveling the playing field across all social networks. I hope you find the information helpful, share your thoughts what do you think? Have you integrated social media into your marketing strategy?

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B2C Social Media Marketing Tips To Kickoff 2010

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 14:35:00 -0800

I’ve been busy with end of the year work and now I’m back on track. For those of you that follow the designdamage blog since the beginning, I want to take this opportunity to thank you for the support and hope I can continue to provide value for your time.

Although no new entries were posted for the past weeks, I continue to follow industry trends and send out useful content via my Twitter account. You can follow me via @designdamage

Now back to work.

After reviewing some important data and content from 2009, I’ve come to these conclusions that in 2010 social media will follow the footsteps of SEO and other forms of digital advertising: on the path to commoditization. As I’ve mentioned in the post “When to Adopt Social Media for Your Business?” that social media is still in the early adopters stage, but it’s heading towards early majority phase as the concept of connecting and sharing information online are gradually accepted.

According to eMarketer’s report supported by research from Cone “More than one-half of new media users (53%) believe brands should have a presence in new media, interacting with consumers as needed or by request only, while a further 36% demand a new media presence with regular interaction.” These type of users wants experience, dialogue and immediacy so if you want in on social media, you must provide a combination of those attributes.

So what can you do that’s different in 2010 that you haven’t try in 2009? Here are some ideas to get you started:

Create New Brands & Co-Branding
The shift in consumer behavior will continue towards “value” even for luxury brands so private label brands and sub-brands will stand to benefit moving forward as we emerge out of the recession slowly. For companies with strong core brand, creating a sub-brand or a new one that targets new customer base has been a popular strategy. For businesses looking for cost-effective and fast-to-market ideas you can try partnering with other companies for a co-branding effort that creates exposure in other markets while extends your brand story.

Develop a Fascinating Story For Your Brand
The word-of-mouth marketing will continue to grow acting as trust agents providing top of mind reference for consumers. Brands will shift advertising strategy to focus more on storytelling rather than push advertising. This means developing a story that demonstrate the personality of the brand in campaigns such as supporting non-profit initiatives (social responsibility, cause marketing), co-branding to create unique content, or collect and promote stories about your customers.

The idea is to implement customer engagement strategies for the company to build a strong human connection that helps build brand loyalty. Incorporating free resources to help educate your audience is another way to develop a story. Another great way to build a rewards program around your social network fans by rewarding their participation. Another great way to ramp up your fans is to offer them something they can't get elsewhere

Collect Valuable Customer Data
It’s time to review your customer data collection process especially if you’re going to use social media with traditional media. Information such as where they are, what they spend money on, what are the key influences, and what content or applications they download can provide you some advantage for tailoring future product/service experiences to the individual. Just knowing their demographic or what they buy will not be enough, leverage social media’s crowdsourcing feature and establish

The take away: It’s indicative from this past holiday shopping data that consumers simply wants more for less. This is where smart companies find ways to cut costs so they can pass on the savings to the consumers. It’s about keeping the customers coming back, allowing word-of-mouth to work in favor of value for money incentives, and maintaining a healthy relationship with your customers. Why would customers come back or past on your name to others when you didn’t provide value beyond what they paid for?

If you’re a small business, think of ways you can leverage technology instead of people and be creative with your marketing dollar. Discounts, promotions, rewards programs are all vehicles to build a relationship with your customers. You may see smaller profits and longer time to get the ROI (return on investment), but that’s all part of investing in your customer for the long haul.

If you want customers to be loyal to your brand, be prepare to deliver a consistent level of value and experience that they can come to expect in 2010. The goal is to build and maintain customer trust, a key to gaining access to more profitable relationships with customers and competitive differentiation.

We’ll be looking at B2B ideas next to help with strategy planning in 2010.

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3 Web Marketing Trends That Will Accelerate in 2010 - Part 2

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:15:16 -0700

It will be increasingly difficult for brands to ignore the web when making marketing decisions. The brands that get ahead will be the ones that harness the web to work in conjunction with their existing offline campaigns while adopting more social marketing strategies to generating new consumer insights. Customers will continue to increase their time spent online and they need to be reach where they prefer to be reached.

Even for companies marketing entirely online or B2B businesses, the question will be how to benefit from blogs, social media and search engine to achieve the marketing goals? How to take their brand message online and into web communities that will create new business opportunities?

Here are 3 web marketing trends to consider:

1) A Shift in Web Properties to Blend Online With Offline Campaigns

There are two parts to this trend. First is the optimization of web properties, specifically efforts in blogs, social media, search engine optimization and email. Second is the strategic usage of those web properties within an overall campaign that may or may not include offline media (ie. direct mail, catalogs, print ads, TV, radio etc.).

Benefits to consider: Both online and offline campaigns have similar concepts in reaching target audience with different processes so define your desire outcome first.
- More touch points (frequency) to reach target audience throughout the buying/researching process
- Lowers marketing costs by shift more campaigns online from offline (plus flexible payment models)
- Faster time-to-benefit in tools and planning
- Find out more about your customers via two way conversation online
- More strategic options with online campaigns (ie. brand awareness campaign, call-to-action campaign, lead-generation campaign)
- Target new customer base across multiple demographic, wider reach.

Ideas for action: For consumer brands - build and drive traffic to your own community, identify and communicate directly with your fans to help close the sales with promotions, coupons or rewards. This is a popular approach to get opt-ins and many consumers actually look for these value-added deals. Aggregate your social media profile on all outbound materials both online and offline to support the decision and buying process of prospects and customers. Own the relationship and be platform agnostic with you network of customers, focus on supporting the needs of the community as a priority before promoting your offerings.

For B2B brands – Leverage content marketing strategy to drive sales leads from search engine ads, email campaigns, social media communities, affiliate blogs or offline media to a highly targeted micro-site for prospects to opt-in for webinars, podcasts or free resources (ie. whitepaper, reports, presentations). The goal is to pre-qualify leads that can filter through the sales cycle to improve the probability to convert the sales efficiently. When you’re able to convert sales efficiently, it saves time and money allowing your operations to more productivity.

2) New Measuring Matrix: Hybrid Measurement

Unlike traditional forms of gathering consumer insight, online tools are often cheaper, based on much larger sample sizes, and are quicker to deliver results. For the past few years the value of search engine marketing (SEM) are measured largely by ad impressions, page views and click through rates. However, as internet users are more willing to input additional data online, companies are now looking to measure key metrics of engagement on a person-level.

According to a recent comScore and Starcom USA’s study on how U.S. Internet users click on display ads, “Only 8% of internet users now account for 85% of all clicks… The results underscore the notion that, for most display ad campaigns, the click-through is not the most appropriate metric for evaluating campaign performance. Rather, advertisers should consider evaluating campaigns based on their view-through impact.”

That’s just one of the examples that web analytics can be misleading. It will continue to be challenging for marketers to abstract reliable data as social media adds another pile of data to the media measurement mix. The future trend to measure more accurately will be to combine technical web analytics (server logs) with a sampling of user surveys (opt-in by visitors) that visits the site. Although there will be sampling errors, it certainly beats making assumptions that doesn’t reflect real user behaviors.

Benefits to consider: - Provides more realistic feedback that extends the meaning of web analytics
- Rich information aggregation from online surveys provide personal data and demographics to better understand your audience
- Keep track of page(s) users frequent and the duration can help you benchmark it against server data to find the delta in errors
- Can be utilized across multiple platforms including mobile, gaming, ad networks and offline campaigns

Ideas for action: Create a web survey on your site, put them on different pages then compare them with your web analytics. Develop your own dashboard in hybrid measurement by choosing one that’s got the API integration with your Google Analytics account (most of them do now). There are a number of online survey tools such SurveyMonkey, Checkbox, SurveyGizmo, Zoomerang, GetResponse, Vovici, QuestionPro, Kampyle, and you can even use Google docs as your survey tool. Reward the visitors that take the survey with coupons, discounts or gifts. Switch out the questions, put them on different pages and try different styles of asking from stealth at the corner feedback button to in-your-face pop ups.

3) Marketing Platform Extends to Mobile, Social, and Local in Real-Time

There is no question with 13 hours of YouTube videos uploaded every minute and over 900,000 blog posts every 24 hour, you can definitely count on the continuation of information overload over the social web. This means content has to be tailored to fit the lifestyle of today’s digerati on smart phones that can accessible the web via faster and more available network. Accordingly to The Niesen Company, “U.S. mobile subscriber base grew 7% to 277 million by the second quarter of 2009, which represented 221 million unique users…. Social networking drove the growth train for mobile Internet, with a 187% increase in audience for the year ending July 2009. The distribution of 18.3 million unique social network users by the top three sites is Facebook (26% reach), MySpace (13% reach) and Twitter (7% reach).”

What does this mean? It’s means that the growth in social networking will accelerate as mobile technology advances to embrace emerging trends in mobile social commerce, on-demand interaction from the real-time web, and fascinating concept of augmented reality.

Brands should leverage mobile marketing strategy to drive sales and cultivate customer engagement. There are a number of ways to do this but ultimately consumer brands will have an easier time in adopting the usage of the mobile platform than B2B companies. The opportunities for B2B companies remain the same – to generate leads and shorten the sales cycle.

Marketers will need to rethink content marketing strategy that aligns with the business objectives to deliver a dynamic mobile consumer experience.

Benefits to consider: - More opportunities to engage with customers (new or existing) means brand building and top-of-mind awareness
- Smartphone owners tend to be affluent with expendable income, making it a prime target for product and service marketing (ready-to-buy candidates)
- Aggregate rich user information (ie. user profile, ratings, recommendations, tags etc.) from location based mobile apps
- There are numerous mobile apps that can push out information across all social networks by authenticating with your Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube account, making it mobile and real-time viral
- Deliver superior experience with augmented reality

Ideas for action: Leverage the mobile platform to provide unique location based experiences (services, games, ads, commerce) for your audience via instant customer support (ie. assist in the buying process like check inventories or availabilities), real-time product information (ie. price check, health labels), or event promotional notifications (ie. cause marketing programs for non-profits, or buy-it-now via SMS or mobile web app/browser).

Another idea is to create downloadable coupons to promote offline activities to drive traffic to local events. According to RetailMeNot, “coupons are now the deciding factor in purchases for nearly one-third of consumers.” In today’s economy, coupon is the call-to-action that can produce rapid, favorable results to drive sales. Offer coupons based on location also helps your customer to discover new retail locations, making marketing as a service via alerts.

The take away: These Web marketing trends will reshape your marketing efforts as more conversations, engagements and experiences are delivered via the internet. In order to stay relevant, brands must transition to become more social on the web and use mobile platforms to gain competitive advantage or risk of loosing opportunities.

Are you thinking about moving your marketing efforts online? If you're already doing the mix and match of online and offline marketing, how are you measuring your ROI? Do you have a mobile marketing strategy?

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