Marketing starts with audience
I was talking recently with Jon Merz, author of the Kensei (if you dig vampires, definitely grab a copy) about how some authors can move much more inventory than others with the power of the email list a little while back. He was wondering how it was that some authors are able to throw out a newsletter and clock in thousands of dollars in sales in a few days, while other authors who are equally or more talented don’t manage that.
Unquestionably, having a good product is where you start in the big picture. If your writing is terrible, then no matter how good a marketer you are, you will not create a sustainable following that will buy everything you publish, from Tolstoyesque masterpieces to random scrawlings on a napkin.
That said, once you have a solid product, you have to start marketing it, and marketing is all about building the audience that wants your product. As much as some folks like to say that numbers don’t matter, the unfortunate truth is that numbers do matter a great deal.
I like to make the analogy that starting a marketing program is a lot like starting a fire. In the beginning, there’s a lot of smoke, heat, and light as you ignite the tinder and get the kindling burning. Once you’ve got a few coals, the heart of your fire – the heavy logs – can go on and make a sustainable, warming fire. It won’t be as flashy as those first few moments, but you need those first few moments of ignition to get everything rolling.
In the case of the author, you absolutely want to put some large numbers of eyeballs on your various properties to start. While you’re writing, spend time building your audience. Grow your database as quickly as time and budget will allow. Gain permission from as many people as possible to communicate with them about your upcoming project. Identify hubs of influence in the audience you’re targeting and get them involved as soon as possible so that they’re able to communicate to their audiences at launch. Use as many audience capture methods as you can get away with to build your initial base.
In Jon’s case, he’s got a relatively rich niche to start from. Go check Twitter search for the number of people tweeting about vampires. Yes, a decent number of them are the Twilight/Vampire Diaries crowd that might not stick around, but a subset of them will. Follow the heck out of them. Get them to visit the web site, hit them with ye olde popup, and get sending to them with stuff they want.
Over time, you’ll see that initial audience wear down, like the tinder of a fire. You’ll replace your initial flashes of light and heat with the heart of your audience that still wants to hear from you and participate in your work. These are the coals, and what throws more wood on the fire are word of mouth programs. All other things being equal, like interests attract like people, so having a strong word of mouth program will build that audience base. Give rewards to those who share more prolifically. Create a sense of exclusivity for your base with stuff that they get first.
Can you start with a word of mouth program and purely organic audience growth? Yes, if you like frustration, in the same way that you can start a fire eventually by taking your largest log and repeatedly holding matches to it. Eventually, it’ll burn as long as you have enough time and matches. Most people, however, don’t have an unlimited supply of either, just as you don’t have an unlimited supply of time and budget to wait for a marketing program to slowly catch fire.
Should you worry about things like conversion rate, calls to action, design, metrics, analytics, page layout, etc.? Absolutely. They’re critical pieces of your marketing infrastructure. However, none of them matter if you don’t cross the first hurdle of finding people to join your audience. The richest hickory Yule log is nothing more than a decoration if you don’t get it to catch fire.
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All borrowing is gambling
I once overheard my wife’s co-worker complain that her credit card was shut down because she had failed to pay any of the bills. When she found out about this, she shouted, “They can’t take away my money!”
What’s wrong with this picture? To the financially literate, it’s immediately obvious that the line of credit is the bank’s money, not hers, but she didn’t understand that at all, which is why she was in default on pretty much everything she had.
The ability to borrow is not wealth. The availability of credit is not wealth. This seems like such an obvious thing to say, but it’s so frequently misunderstood. When you pull out plastic at the shopping mall or grocery store, you are paying with someone else’s money. You must in turn pay back that money, or suffer the financial consequences.
In a way, all borrowing is gambling.
When you use a credit card, you are gambling on having the money at the end of the month to repay to the credit card company. As long as you have exactly the amount of cash (plus fees, if applicable) in your bank account as you do on your credit card, that’s a safe bet. If you have less cash than you borrow, it’s no longer a safe bet.
When you take out a loan for college, you are funding your education on a bet: you are borrowing against future earnings. You are gambling that that someday you’ll earn more than you owe and can make good on the bet. Sometimes that’s a good bet. More frequently than you might guess, it’s not a good bet at all. There are plenty of graduates out there with an art degree, $200,000 of debt, and a job at Starbucks.
When you sign the dotted line on a mortgage for a house for the purposes of investment, you are gambling that the price of the house when you sell it will be higher than the price of the house when you buy it. Obviously, if you live in the house during that period, you gain the use of it and the value of sleeping in that house versus, say, a cardboard box, but if you buy the house for the purpose of investing in real estate, you are gambling.
Every debt is gambling on your ability to repay. How much risk you take – how unsafe your bets are – is highly dependent on your ability to repay. If you borrow more than you are able to repay, you lose 100% of the time. If you live on the edge of being able to sometimes make your monthly payments and sometimes not, that’s a pretty awful state to live in, full of stress and worry.
Place your bets carefully. Know what you’re capable of earning. To paraphrase the famous quote from Top Gun, don’t let your ego (or attraction to status, shiny objects, etc.) write checks that your body can’t cash.
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Marketing White Belt |
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I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Momentum, mechanics, and marketing
In classical mechanics and physics, momentum is the product of mass times velocity:
p=m*v
- Want more momentum? Add more mass.
- Want more momentum? Add more velocity.
- Want to be unstoppable? Pile on mass and velocity.
We talk about momentum in marketing. A campaign has momentum, a meme has momentum, a project needs momentum. How do you get more momentum for your marketing campaigns? Add mass (content and people) or add velocity (direction and speed).
If your content strategy isn’t gaining any momentum, it’s probably because you have mass but no velocity. Boulders don’t move themselves, and content doesn’t market itself. Get out there and share it. Give it a push.
If your social strategy isn’t gaining any momentum, it’s probably because you have velocity but no mass. Try saying something worth listening to. A speck of dust is easy to move quickly, but no one notices it. Try pushing something more substantial.
If you’re deficient in either mass or velocity, you’re not capturing the momentum you’re capable of. Fix them to be in balance, grow them both, and watch your marketing take off.
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Statistical normalization opposes innovation
If you’re the sort that enjoys analytics (or your job makes you ”enjoy” it), you’ve probably encountered statistical normalization many times, even if you don’t know it. What is it? The short description is removing outliers so that you can see statistically valid trends. Remove outliers, remove bad data, and smooth over data points so that you get cleaner data to compare.
Here’s an overly simple example, averaging stuff together. Let’s say you have a month’s worth of website traffic data. If you want to see whether January’s web traffic this year was better than last year, your simplest bet (not necessarily the best) for a reasonable apples to apples comparison is to average all the visits together and see what the daily average was. If the daily average in January of this year is better than last year, things are good.
Here’s another example: look at these three charts in Google Analytics. All three are the same information. Which is the easiest to discern whether this month was better than last month? Which will your average corporate executive want to see?
Daily View
Weekly View
Monthly View
Your average executive dashboard, PowerPoint, or rollup report will use the last example as the preferred data source. It’s clean, it’s obvious, and it’s easy.
Here’s the danger with smoothing things over: when you do so, you lose view of anomalies. You lose view of outliers. Look again at the daily view above. There are a few points where you have significant spikes of traffic, along with the normal, average traffic days. What happened on those days to bring in that much new audience? What did you do differently, and was it serendipity (Chris Brogan retweeted me!) or was it something under your control (paid traffic campaign kickoff)?
If you smooth out all your data in a hurry to get your reporting done and make things neat and clean for a bullet point on a slide, you lose the opportunity to dig into the anomalies. Inside those anomalies will be things that can signal opportunities for innovation. If a social media luminary retweeted your content without your asking them to, maybe it’s a signal that you need to develop a social media marketing plan. If you got some earned media coverage of a feature of your product or service, maybe that’s an area where you want to invest some more development dollars. Whatever the case may be, if the anomalies in your data are caused by something under your control, you have the potential to transform that anomaly into an innovation that will power your business, possibly in new, different, and more profitable directions.
It makes total sense to take a “high level view” if you have no responsibility for finding new ways to make your business grow. If you find the expression “getting lost in the weeds” or “getting down in the dirt” being bantered about in your marketing organization and you do have a responsibility for growth, you might have a perspective problem. Getting lost in the weeds isn’t a bad thing if you know there’s a diamond ring in there somewhere.
Be very careful about rolling up your reporting too quickly to satisfy myopic, attention-deficit reporting requirements, whether for yourself or for a company/client. You might be missing some massive innovation opportunities!
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Marketing White Belt |
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I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Selective Welcome Popups
As a follow up to my previous post on welcome popups, some folks mentioned a few concerns and questions.
- I don’t want to be a douchebag and slap people with a popup all the time.
- I don’t want to be a douchebag and put popups everywhere on my blog.
- I hate popups.
- What popup software are you using?
Let’s address these four areas.
1. I don’t want to be a douchebag and slap people with a popup all the time.
Don’t. Most popup software lets you specify intervals. For example, with the software I use, I can specify not to show it for another 30 days as long as your browser allows me to set a cookie. No cookies permitted? You’re getting popups.
Depending on the software you choose, you can pick options like show the popup just for the first X visits. You can also set the timing so that someone doesn’t see the popup for X seconds. If you look in your Google Analytics for average time on page and set the popup to 75% of that, you’ll hit someone just before they’re ready to leave, thus ensuring they enjoy your content first:
2. I don’t want to be a douchebag and put popups everywhere on my blog.
Don’t. Depending on the software you choose, you can select which pages of your site you want to selectively show the popup on. For example, if you suspect that some of your traffic from social media is a little more ADHD than the average organic SEO visitor, you can identify in Google Analytics which pages that traffic hits the most, then program your popup just to show on those pages.
If you realize that Twitter traffic isn’t converting at all but Facebook traffic is on your site without the assistance of a popup, then just identify the Twitter-specific pages and grab Twitter people with an attention-getting popup while leaving Facebook people alone to convert in peace and quiet.
3. I hate popups.
So don’t use them. Just don’t ask for the results they deliver. Make sure you subscribe to my blog via RSS, too, so you never see them.
4. What popup software are you using?
I paid for and use WP Super Popup. I’m also an affiliate of it because I love its flexibility. Granted, I don’t use many of the options because I want my popups to be shown as much as possible within reason, but the software supports everything I discussed above.
Like any marketing tool, popups can be very effective if you use them well. If you use them poorly, they’ll perform like any other poorly-used marketing tool. Test out different things and see what works for you.
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I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
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