Category Archives: Good Business

The Secret to Good Marketing…

The end goal of marketing is to help a company make more sales. Each company must determine the best intermediary goals their marketing should accomplish in order to reach that point. But to be successful, marketing must aid in creating a more profitable business.

Nonetheless, marketing serves a different role than sales does.  Sales is about getting a person to cross that final line of making a purchase or signing a contract. Marketing is about getting them to the line to begin with.  If you meet a new guy at a party and he spends a lot of time talking about how awesome he is, you probably won’t walk away from the conversation convinced. If you hear from your good friend Joe how awesome this guy is, or if he impresses everyone at the party with great jokes and stories, he’s a lot more likely to win you over as someone worth knowing.

In the same way, a business offering up a sales pitch about how great they are won’t gain much traction without a reputation to back that up.

Marketing (alongside the equally important customer service) is an important tool in building that reputation. You have to:

a)    Make sure people know your company exists (and what you do), and

b)   Build up enough trust that you’re the first place they’ll turn when they need what you offer.

To do so, you have to focus less on yourself and how great what you have to offer is, and think more about what the customer needs and how you can help.

…It’s About Giving

Content Marketing Means GivingThe secret is that you have to set ego to the side and focus on providing something of value. You should already be doing this for current customers, whose testimonials and positive word of mouth are some of the best marketing tools in your arsenal. To attract new customers and gain their trust, you need to think about what you’re willing to offer them for free that will demonstrate your knowledge and integrity.

In many cases, this means content. Turn the expertise and good ideas you have into blog posts, articles, videos and other forms of informational tools that answer questions your prospective customers are likely to have.

It could also mean a free version of your product with lighter features than the paid version.  If you’re a service provider, this could take the form of a free consultation that gives potential clients a taste of your expertise tailored to their needs.

None of these forms of giving are selfless. They’re designed to help you gain attention for your business and build a reputation around your expertise. Even so, isn’t it nice to embrace a business approach that doubles as doing something good for people?

Know Where to Draw the Line

Ok, so giving plays an important role in good marketing, but you’re still running a business. You have to approach your giving with a strategy in mind.

If you’re providing a free version of your product, decide just how much functionality you’re comfortable giving away before users have to upgrade to the paid version.

If your focus is more on content, most of what you produce should be focused on value for the consumer, but some of it can be about you. MacKenzie Fogelson recommends the 80/20 rule when it comes to social sharing. The same can be reasonably applied to the content you produce.

If 80% of your content is all about helping your target audience, 20% can be about product updates, special deals, and other forms of promotion. If you do enough preliminary work to gain the customer’s trust, those pitches will only be getting to an audience already interested in what you do.  By that point, you’ll be the guy at the party with Joe’s recommendation and the stream of jokes that have already made everybody laugh, and people won’t be as inclined to doubt you’re as awesome as you say you are.

3 Steps to Prioritize Your Small Business Social Media Strategy

If you’re a small business owner, you’ve likely been hearing left and right that you should be using social media for business. Although it’s been a ubiquitous marketing buzzword for some time now, if you’re new to using social media for business, it looks like an intimidating, time consuming undertaking.

There are so many social media platforms that it’s hard to know where to be and what to do once you’re there.

If you’re thinking about taking the plunge to get started with a social media strategy for your business, you should start by accepting that it will take some time. By thinking strategically and determining where to prioritize your social media efforts, you can make sure that time is spent effectively.

Step 1: Consider your goals.

What do you want to get out of the time you spend on social media? Some possibilities to consider are:

  1. Greater engagement with current customers
  2. Establishing authority in your industry
  3. Increasing brand awareness
  4. Developing new leads and increasing sales
  5. Improving SEO

These are far from the only goals achievable with social media, but can offer a sense of some of objectives to be thinking about.

Step 2: Understand the difference between the main platforms.

Facebook – A dominant force in social media, largely because it’s where the most people are. Most people use it primarily to stay connected to friends and family members. The upside to a presence on Facebook is that it might be the best of the bunch for attracting eyeballs. The downside: people don’t log on to facebook to buy things, some are annoyed to see marketing items show up in their feeds and are unlikely to engage with your business that way.

Nevertheless, it might be a good fit for your business based on the goods and services you provide and your target audience. If you’re B2C, especially if you’re offering something that falls in the realm of entertainment, Facebook may be the perfect fit.

Google + – Until recently, Google + wasn’t a key player, in spite of its owner’s online pedigree. Now, Google’s tying its ever important search algorithm to Google + usage, meaning a presence there can play an important role in improving site SEO. If your business is producing content as part of your marketing strategy (and you should be) , Google + is a very useful platform for sharing your content and interacting with others in your industry.

Twitter – Everything on Twitter is short and fast. Unlike Facebook, most users are quick to connect with a large number of people and businesses, and are less inclined to care if something that shows up in their feed is promotional – it’s just one of a steady stream of messages of varying level of interest.

LinkedIn – Designed for professional networking, LinkedIn allows businesses to create pages and share business news. Individuals can also share the company’s content in order to help give it a larger reach.

YouTube – Specifically for videos. If you have created any video ads, tutorials, webinars, or any other form of video content, it’s good to have a YouTube page to share it on. (Vimeo is another network to consider for this purpose)

Foursqaure – While not serving as large of an audience as most of the platforms on this list, Foursquare can be a great tool for local businesses. If you’re business primarily serves a local audience, especially if you offer the kind of service that people value geographic convenience for (e.g. restaurants, retail shopping, entertainment venues), this is a good place to be listed.

Pinterest – This is an extremely visual platform, based on people sharing cool images or visual ideas they come across. There are some type of businesses this is a perfect fit for: photographers, graphic designers, artists, florists, etc.

 

That’s a long list. Maintaining an active presence on all of the above platforms is a daunting task, and not social media strategynecessary for the vast majority of businesses. Based on your goals and industry, think about which of the list is likely to be the most useful for your business. Where is your target audience most likely to be? How are they most likely to interact with your business?

For all of these, it’s important to engage. You can’t effectively use social media if all you do there is promote yourself. You need to interact with others: reply, share others’ content, like, re-tweet, etc. Mix in your interactions with your own promotional updates and content shares and people will be more likely to follow and pay attention to you.

Step 3: Develop a social media plan and content strategy.

Determine how much time each day you intend to devote to social media. Developing a content strategy ensures you regularly have something to share (and comes with a whole host of other benefits). Research and make use of social media tools like HootSuite to make managing your accounts and scheduling your updates easier.

Now, get started!

If it seems overwhelming and you need help, there’s a whole industry of social media and content specialists you can bring in to take over some of the more time consuming parts of the work.

The Danger of Going “Too Broad”

I thought I had a pretty good idea of how to communicate my services, when I found myself fumbling recently over the question of my specialty. When you’re talking to people who work in different fields, an elevator pitch that offers a fairly general description of the work you do is usually good enough. But, in a room full of people who do similar work, it becomes important to know how to identify and articulate just where your strengths fit in.

The lesson reminded me of a conversation I had with a professor in college. I was trying to pick out a subject to focus a paper about Absalom, Absalom on and as I kept listing off topics, she kept saying “too broad.” After a fair amount of listing, I finally came up with a focused enough subject for her approval. I ended up writing over 15 pages on one particularly notable scene in the book. She was right, anything more broad would have made for a behemoth of a paper.

I started off freelancing thinking I had to be good at a long list of specialties to make it work, and spent the first few months learning what my professor had taught me years earlier: the importance of having a focus.

You can either be mediocre at a lot of things, or really good at a few.

Having a specialty or niche has a number of benefits:

  • It gives you the room you need to become an expert at something. No one person has the time to be an expert at a long list of skills and subjects, but any one of us can get a lot closer to that title a lot faster by honing in on a particular specialty.
  • It makes it easier to find your target audience. Whether you’re a freelancer or a business, looking for customers and clients from a massive audience is more challenging than being able to focus on a target group. A writer with experience working with oil and gas clients knows who to target, and can make a more persuasive pitch for why she’s the right pick than one casting a wide berth for any client at all.
  • You can become a part of a community. In any field, who you know is important. There’s a wide world of people out there and if you can focus your efforts on making connections with people in a few select industries, you can get more out of the relationships you have.

If you can pinpoint a focus that best fits your skills, you can approach your marketing with much greater efficiency and get more out of the time you spend on the work you do.

What Popular Podcasts Can Teach Us About Content Marketing

A little over a year ago when I purchased Carbonite, a program that creates an automatic, online backup of your computer, I made sure to use the Nerdist promo code. Not only did it earn me some kind of discount (I don’t remember the particulars), but I knew it was a way for a free podcast I like to get a little extra monetary support.

People appreciate free content. That’s not exactly a controversial statement. In fact, many have determined that members of my generation, and especially those a few years younger than me, don’t appreciate the value of content and just won’t pay for it. Period.

I don’t think that’s true. I know I’m not the only who’s made a point of thinking of a piece of free content I like when making an associated purchase. Popular podcasts like the Nerdist, WTF with Marc Maron, and Doug Loves Movies all thrive in part due to sponsors, and their listeners’ willingness to support those sponsors – with a nod to the podcast’s help in sending them there.

Notably, the comedians at the center of each of the podcasts mentioned have also seen their careers blow up due to the popularity of their free podcasts.

What still sounds counter-intuitive to some now feels like old news to many: providing something people value for free can be a good way to make money.

That’s pretty much the definition of content marketing, and there are a number of wildly popular podcasts out there that do a good job of demonstrating just how well content marketing can work.

I wrote this post not as a way to encourage businesses to make podcasts as a form of content marketing, although that may be a good move for your business, but rather to point out these two notable lessons that businesses can learn from popular podcasts:

1) People appreciate free content and, by extension, the businesses and brands that help make it free.

If you’re in the camp that thinks young people won’t pay for content they like – just look at the Veronica Mars kickstarter campaign. I’m betting the popular show about high schoolers didn’t raise all that dough exclusively from people in their 30’s and up. I don’t think people have lost their understanding that it takes money to produce the content they like. I think instead, they’ve become pickier about what content they feel is worth paying for and have different ideas of what paying for content looks like.

Many people, myself amongst them, have “cut the cord” when it comes to cable, and trust the internet to bring us all the tv that we think is worth our time. Most cord cutters are tolerant, perhaps more so than our cable-subscribing brethren, of the commercials that play during shows made available online. We recognize that this is the cost of free content – a few minutes of ads per episode. On the other hand, the cost of a monthly cable subscription, which would buy us more shows and channels than we care to watch, seems wasteful.

What does this have to do with your business and content marketing?

It speaks to the psychology behind how people view the things they liked. Not too many people will go out of their way to buy something just because they see it in association with content they find valuable — but if it’s something they already need (or might need sometime down the line), that product gains a serious edge against competitors. By associating your business with a brand they already like, or becoming that brand via quality content that you develop, you become the Carbonite that someone is happy to choose because it not only gains them a good product, but helps fuel the content they value.

2) Good, free content is a powerful tool to build up your reputation.

As previously mentioned, most of the comics behind popular podcasts have credited the podcast with career resurgences – from more people at their live shows to tv hosting gigs to sitcom and movie offers – much of which likely would have never happened without investing time in offering something entertaining for free. The podcasts made them more recognizable and built up a fan base that has ensured them revenue from a number of other means, besides the podcast sponsorships themselves.

By the same token, Copyblogger‘s extremely successful business model was to become the leading authority on creating valuable content…as a way to sell software.  The connection between point A and point B isn’t a simple, direct line, and building a reputation like the one they have takes a lot of time and a large investment in good writers. Nonetheless, they’ve built a fabulously successful business off a foundation of content that people love.

The moral of these various stories is: don’t be stingy! It can be hard to wrap your head around profiting off of giving something valuable away for free, but there are plenty of models out there that show, if done well, it works.

On Writing and Getting Paid

writing and getting paidThere’s been a lot of conversation online recently about the typical practices surrounding how for-profit publications pay writers, or whether they do at all. Prompted by the correspondence Nate Thayer published between him and an Atlantic editor, after he was asked to let them publish his work for free, many writers and editors have spoken up to weigh in on the subject, including Ta-Nehisi Coates over at the Atlantic, and a large group of writers and editors at the Awl.

As a freelance writer, I’ve followed the conversation with fascination. Sometimes to the slight detriment of my own productivity (did you see the length of that Awl discussion?). It’s not a new discussion, but as with many heated topics, all that was required was the catalyst of one angry writer making a stink, and many others followed to weigh in with their opinion.

So, because I’m sure the internet is clamoring for one more voice on the subject, here’s mine.

Whether or not writers should be paid for their work depends on the intent of the work.

Work

Obviously I need to get paid for my time and work, or I can’t make a living and would need to go back to working for someone else. I very much prefer freelance work to the alternative, so this is an important consideration. If I’m writing for a business or a for-profit publication, there shouldn’t be a question of payment. The content provided is valuable and serves a profitable purpose.

Almost any work I do that will help to promote another company or publication, I expect to get paid for.

Marketing

Here’s where the almost comes in: in order to be successful as a freelance writer, marketing myself plays an important role in the equation. Many freelance writers produce content for self-promotion for free, whether that content is published on a personal blog, their own website, or as a guest post or article in an industry publication that will bring it to a larger audience.

This is the tricky line of exposure. How do you measure whether the publication of your work is doing more to promote the publication in question (in which case you should be paid) and when it does more to promote your own brand (in which case it serves as marketing and might be worth doing for free, or a lower rate than usual).

Love

There’s an amazing series on the Hairpin called Scandals of Classic Hollywood. As I understand it, these stories, which are often lengthy and always include a number of photographs that surely take some time to gather, are written for free. They are also wildly popular on the site.

Why would someone put that much time into something without the promise of a profit? It’s clear that the writer, Anne Helen Peterson, loves the subject matter she writers about. It’s worth noting, she also recently published a book on the subject that many of her Hairpin readers rushed to buy, but my hunch is that she didn’t start the series a couple of years ago as a long-term marketing project for a book that hadn’t been written yet (although if she did, that’s brilliant marketing).

If a writer chooses to do some writing to help a non-profit she cares about with fundraising, or to raise awareness of an issue that’s of special importance to her, or for the fun of analyzing a good tv show – then there’s a drive to do the work that has little to do with profit.

 

So, that’s it. If you ask a professional writer to write for free, unless doing so achieves them a specific marketing goal, or it’s a piece about something they love and would likely write about anyways, don’t be surprised if you get an offended response like Thayer’s.

Unless you’re quick to offer whatever you do for a living for free to any asker, you should be sympathetic to their position.