What your dinner can teach you about marketing methods
Salty.
Sour.
Sweet.
Bitter.
Flavorful.
What’s similar about all of these?
They’re all powerful tastes we are biologically wired to respond to. We love foods with these different flavors. A seared steak with cracked peppercorns and salt. A warm apple pie with vanilla ice cream on the side. A plate of buttery salmon sushi with wasabi on the side. Whatever the food, whatever the cuisine, there’s something that makes you happy.
Now ask yourself this: when was the last time you put a spoonful of salt in your mouth? When was the last time you ate straight sugar? When was the last time you served your dinner guests a small bowl of MSG and nothing else? I’d wager never, certainly not for dining purposes unless you wanted to make sure those guests never came by the house again. We don’t like pure flavors very much. Flavors need to intermingle, flavors need the complexities of foods that have lots of secondary and subtle interactions.
So why, in the world of marketing, do we pursue purity so much? “We need an SEO strategy!” “We are going to market just with social media, it’s the future!” “We don’t advertise anywhere except pay per click!” Why do we insist on pure flavors when the customer we work with every day enjoy and demand complex meals of content, interaction, engagement, brand, and persuasion?
Part of the answer lies in metrics. In our quest to measure everything, the faster we can get to pure flavors, the faster and easier we can get to measuring our work. If you served nothing but a bowl of salt to dinner guests, it would be trivial to measure how much sodium was in the meal, doubly so after everyone left without eating. Measuring how much sodium is in a Thanksgiving dinner is much more difficult, isn’t it? Yet few would argue that a delicious full dinner is more satisfying than a bowl of salt.
Just as we don’t serve pure flavors at a meal, neither should we serve our customers and prospective customers with an insistence on marketing purity. Measure what you can, sure, but serve them with the best and most practical integrated marketing strategy that you can. Have content out there. Have social media interaction. Go to trade shows, speak at conferences, make interesting videos, do your SEO, send plenty of email, maybe even consider billboards or flyers if you’re a local business.
At the heart of this is acknowledging the complexity of an integrated marketing strategy and understanding that you can’t measure all of the interactions in a customer’s mind. A prospect might become a customer because they first met you at a trade show but a blog post reinforced to them that you knew your stuff. A prospect might become a customer because they first saw a YouTube video, then chatted with you, then read your eBook, then followed you on Twitter, and finally was convinced by an unsolicited testimonial of a friend of a friend on Facebook.
To the best of your ability, to the practical limits of your budget, serve a multi-course dinner as often as you can instead of bowls of single flavors. Your metrics will suffer to some degree, but you and your guests will be much more satisfied with you after it’s all over, won’t they?
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It Gets Better: Marketing
There’s a very inspiring project created by Dan Savage called It Gets Better, in which people lend their voices to LGBT teens to encourage them in the face of bullying and harassment. I added my own perspective and encourage you to add yours.
Hi. My name is Christopher Penn, Vice President of Strategy and Innovation at Blue Sky Factory, one of the Inc. 5000′s fastest growing companies in America. I have this message for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender kids. It gets better. It gets a lot better.
Here’s why: it gets better because after you leave the little fishbowl of school, there’s an entire world out there that needs your differences. Now, I have no experience of what it’s like to be gay or bisexual, but I do know what it’s like to be different, growing up as a minority in an overwhelming majority. The things that set you apart as different in school are in many cases the things that employers are desperately going to need when you’re out of school.
I work in marketing, and one of the hardest things in the world is to figure out what’s called a unique selling proposition, the thing that makes your product or service different. If you’re a member of the majority that’s never been different or experienced different, this is an incredibly difficult thing to do and it’s why the ads for so many products and services really suck.
If, on the other hand, you can see different, you can create different, you can think different, then you can be incredibly successful in business. Doing what everyone else is doing, trying to be what everyone else is will get you to second place at best. Only those folks who are different, who are willing to step outside the status quo and go where others are afraid to will succeed.
You feel different now and may feel like that’s a negative. It won’t be. Stay with us. Keep going. Keep persevering through other people’s shortsightedness, because in the real world, all of us need your differences on our team to succeed.
It gets better.
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Who to follow: serendipity or segmentation?
One of the most hotly contested discussion topics at PodCamp NH this past weekend was the question of who to follow on social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter. As has been discussed many times before, some people believed in casting a wide net and following many, while others believed in being highly selective and following just a few. By the end of the discussion, I’m not convinced folks were any more clear as to which strategy to pursue.
Here’s a different way to look at the question: what are your goals? Broadly, there are two different goals you could be pursuing with your social networking strategy, segmentation and serendipity.
If you have a goal of creating a tight, highly valuable network where the only interactions you have are with people you know and trust, you’re effectively pursuing a segmentation strategy. You’re looking to get maximum value out of the content that comes from the network, at the cost of not having as much reach. This is especially effective when you want to target a very specific niche as a marketer.
If you have a goal of creating a broad, diverse network where you’re interacting with many people across many different industries and backgrounds, you’re pursuing a serendipity strategy. You’re looking to get maximum value out of the network itself, creating fruitful grounds for interconnections in your network and connections through you as its hub. This comes at the cost of a lack of focus in the content of the network. A serendipity strategy is especially effective when you’re looking to reach people in different pockets, pools, or verticals, as well as when you’re looking for new and different ideas.
Neither strategy is “right”. Neither strategy is inherently better than the other. One focuses on value through content, the other focuses on value through the network. Which strategy you choose depends on what kind of value you want. It’s also worth pointing out that neither strategy is black and white or as clear cut. You can still create some opportunities for serendipity while having a focus on content, and you can still create some opportunities to find content while having a focus on the network. It’s just a question of which value you’ll get more of.
Do you know which kind of value you want?
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What Eye of the Storm can teach us about strategy and execution
What Eye of the Storm can teach us about strategy and execution
Over the past weekend, the weekly battleground in World of Warcraft was Eye of the Storm. For those who don’t play, Eye of the Storm is a lot like capture the flag games from your childhood. Your team, which is randomly assembled from all the people who want to play, has to capture up to 4 bases and then bring a flag from the center of the battlefield to a friendly base. Imagine a baseball diamond with a flag on the pitcher’s mound and you get the general idea. You do this until your team reaches a certain number of points, then you win.
As with all other battlegrounds in World of Warcraft, there are no guides, hints, or clues as to what you’re supposed to do once you’re on the playing field. The battle starts and the game is on. What happens next is entirely up to the players.
One of the things I’ve noticed about Eye of the Storm more than other battlegrounds is that very often, there’s no clear agreement even among veteran players as to what strategy the team should use. Should you capture as many bases as possible first to start accruing points? Should you capture just one and go after the flag right away?
What ends up happening in successful games is that someone shouts out a very clear, detailed strategy from the very beginning, reiterates it, and as soon as the game starts, the team (who have largely never met each other before) goes out and does it with frequent reminders. Here’s the thing: the strategy very often isn’t a good one. It’s a mediocre strategy at best if you read all of the theorycrafting blogs about Eye of the Storm on the Web.
Here’s why mediocre strategy tends to win: the first couple of minutes in a battleground set the momentum, tone, and rhythm of the battle. For the most part, both teams on the field have been assembled randomly. Having a strategy as soon as the game starts, even a deeply imperfect one, gets everyone organized and quickly working towards goals while the other team figures out what they want to do.
Does this sound familiar? It should. In marketing, in business, in competition we are often faced with situations exactly like this, over and over again. A new niche in an industry opens up, and the winner more often than not is one that can take a strategy of moderate quality and execute on it early and flawlessly while everyone else tries to figure out what to do. It takes significant resources and effort to overcome that early advantage, to change momentum in a different direction.
Take this lesson away if nothing else: your strategy doesn’t ever have to be perfect, only your relentless execution of it. Do this as much as you can and not only will your team win Eye of the Storm more often, but your business may flourish because of it, too.
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The easiest social media strategy in the world
Which is more important, building new business or keeping the business you have?
Which is more efficient? More cost effective?
If the answer isn’t obvious, it’s because you, like me, work in marketing and have worked in marketing for probably too long. The allure of inbound marketing is compelling, the allure of winning new business and being a hero to your company’s sales and marketing teams is heady.
When you dig in past new website visitors, new goal conversions in Google Analytics, new opportunities in your sales pipeline, when you go past the surface details that keep us as marketers occupied and happy, the stark truth is that not much of it matters. Not much of it moves the needle in comparison to the greatest and most powerful marketing weapon you should have at your disposal:
Existing customers who are so deliriously happy with you that they are evangelizing on your behalf harder than any Sunday morning preacher.
Think about all the truths we give lip service to, especially in social media: it’s all about being human. It’s all about relationships. It’s all about being there before the sale. Then think about how much of your time, energy, and budget you expend as a marketer or a CEO on anything but strengthening the relationships you’ve already got.
You want an easy social media strategy that requires little investment, little research, and very little cleverness or technical skill to execute? Set up relationships, friendships, and/or followerships with every one of your customers who is willing to do so and then spend your time listening to them. Every time a customer tweets or posts to their wall about something that’s having a serious impact on them, personally or professionally, touch base, even if it’s just in sympathy. Every time a customer has a problem with your product or service, be there before anyone else can get a chance to respond and ask sincerely how you can help, then fix their problem.
In relatively short order, as long as you’re sincere and dedicated in your efforts to help strengthen the relationships you’ve already got, new business will start to increase. Word of mouth will make your sales cycle shorten dramatically because your existing customers will do all the browbeating for you. Profits will go up from happy customers ready to spend their money on whatever you’ve got next, to the point where they’ll nag you for more things they can buy. Ask any successful musician about how loud that can get from rabid fans for the next album, the next single, the next t-shirt, anything.
This is one of the few times where there’s no catch, where you truly can have massive leverage with relatively few resources, where you can move the needle dramatically and quickly with just hard work and no bag of tricks or arcane technologies. Put your heart and soul into loving the customers you’ve already got, and watch how they’ll open doors for you to customers you’d never reach otherwise. Show honest gratitude to them for their support and work your ass off to keep earning it, day after day.
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