Category: Marketing

  • Great storytelling is its own reward

    I’ve made no secret of the fact that a lot of the daily quest routines in World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria are boring. Whenever I hop onto any one of my characters, I look at the lists of reputations I need to grind out and it literally feels like a second job, albeit a very low paid one. The developers have acknowledged that they might have gone a bit overboard on making you grind out so many quests each day just for gear.

    Admiral Taylor

    That said, there has been one reputation that I’ve been eager to do, even without fabulous rewards. It’s the latest reputation, Operation: Shieldwall. Without getting into the gameplay, let me explain why: Shieldwall has phenomenal storytelling and a compelling plot line that makes it worth playing all by itself. It’d certainly be less rewarding not to get any loot while doing it, but the fact that it combines dynamic, engaging storytelling makes all the difference between it and, say, the Golden Lotus reputation grind.

    When you’re doing the Shieldwall dailies (or presumably the Dominance Offensive ones, I’ve no Horde characters), you’re the hero and centerpiece of a well-told story. Every action you take feels significant, feels important, feels as though you’re making a difference in your faction’s campaign to win in Pandaria.

    Why this is important: great storytelling can make the difference between someone paying attention to you and someone just tuning you out. That’s one of the reasons why “how-to” blog posts tend to do so well: you’re giving someone else the tools they need to let them be the heroes of their own stories. Does your brand enable great storytelling? Does your brand have a legitimately good story to tell? Most do, but legions of marketers and sales folks have obscured the story behind fancy corporate jargon that ultimately means nothing.

    Here’s a suggestion: if you can, follow the Shieldwall dailies model. At every action that a customer or prospect takes, find a way to advance the story for them. Give them additional insights or tools to help them tell their own stories a bit better, and clarify yours for them. Add something to your story that entertains, educates, or inspires.

    Imagine this ideal: prospective customers and current customers participating in all of your sales and marketing activities because of the story you’re building with them.

    What if your story was that good?


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  • Searching through 2012’s Digital Marketing Zeitgeist

    Google and YouTube did a wonderful wrap-up of 2012 in their annual Zeitgeist:

    Year in Search 2012: Year In Review

    However, beyond the general pulse of the world, we didn’t get a chance to dig into just the world of marketing. Let’s take a quick tour through Google Trends to see what things gained ascendancy during the year in a zeitgeist of our own (sans classy video). Fair warning: this is a data dredge. First up, let’s talk about social networks. Facebook was crushingly dominant in search for the year:

    Google Trends - Web Search Interest: twitter, facebook, linkedin, pinterest, google+ - Worldwide, 2011-2012

    Once we remove the 800 pound gorilla from the room, we can see a bit more into the other social networks’ search popularity:

    Google Trends - Web Search Interest: twitter, instagram, linkedin, pinterest, google+ - Worldwide, 2011-2012

    Twitter is the distant second to Facebook, with Pinterest popping this year but ultimately losing search interest to Instagram. LinkedIn kept chugging along, and Google+ didn’t even show up to the party. (The graph looks identical whether you use Google+ or Google Plus as the search term).

    In terms of search momentum, if you had to place your bets on where to be in the coming year, Facebook and Twitter are still the kings of the hill. More interesting to me is that Twitter’s search stock is rising. Pinterest’s ability to catch attention appears to have leveled off, while Instagram is ascending now. Both are as popular in search as LinkedIn.

    How about our marketing? What were we looking to do?

    Google Trends - Web Search Interest: mobile marketing, search marketing, content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing - Worldwide, 2011-2012

    This year was content marketing’s year to break out and become a rising star (at least in the number of people searching for information about it). Search marketing declined a bit, and our other forms of marketing more or less stayed the same for the year. Email’s decline in 2011 leveled off in 2012, presumably because marketers realized people are still using an awful lot of email.

    As for what we call ourselves, while inbound marketing has been publicized heavily, it’s not what people go looking for. Want your resume to be found? Be a digital marketing person instead:

    Google Trends - Web Search Interest: internet marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing - Worldwide, 2011-2012

    And what will your boss be knocking on your door about in 2013? You can bet the words big data will be in the conversation:

    Google Trends - Web Search Interest: mobile marketing, big data, content marketing, lead generation, marketing roi - Worldwide, 2011-2012

    What’s on your digital marketing zeitgeist for 2012? What’s on your marketing horoscope for 2013?


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  • Have you tuned into Marketing Over Coffee lately?

    See what you’re missing!

    MoC 12/13

    You can subscribe to Marketing Over Coffee on our website. Enjoy the coffee!


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  • Keeping the fires burning

    Backyard burning

    Ever managed or maintained a fire in a hearth or campfire?

    If you’ve managed to get a fire going, then you know that continually feeding it is the best way to keep it going. The flame never stops, so you never have to relight the fire. This, of course, requires frequent attention and care.

    Somewhat harder is restarting a fire from hot coals or embers. As long as you’ve got tinder, kindling, and fuel, you can get it going again with less effort than starting a fire from scratch. Letting a fire die down to coals and then relighting it lets you take some time off from it to go do other things, but does require you to check in and rebuild it.

    The hardest is restarting a fire that’s gone cold. You’re basically building a brand new fire, with all of the difficulty that entails. When you go to sleep overnight, often you’re faced with a cold fire pit in the morning – when you need the fire most, when its warmth and utility would be most comforting. The chill you feel is the price of negligence.

    Companies and marketers are no different.

    If you take great care of your customers, giving them frequent attention and service, then you never have to worry about the fire dying out.

    If you only take good care of your customers, then you have to relight from the embers, which requires more marketing resources to get the flames burning again.

    If you take poor care of your customers, then you’re starting from scratch – and the chill you feel won’t just be your customers, but the emptiness of your coffers when your company needs the profits most.

    How cold does your company let its fires get?


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  • Should you have a 52 week content strategy?

    Michelle Quillin asked in the comments:

    “I’m a big advocate of editorial calendars for planning, strategy, and a source of inspiration. I really need to do long-term planning myself. Some time ago, Laura Roeder recommended a 52-week strategy. What do you think of planning out that far ahead, with a marketing strategy in place?”

    I think a framework is a generally good idea; that’s what I do with my stuff. I also think that it needs to be a framework, a scaffolding, onto which you can hang other stuff, and in which there’s enough space that you can be incredibly flexible.

    For example, I think you’d have a very hard time staying fresh and relevant if you had a content calendar that looked like this:

    August 3, 2011: 22 Reasons Why Instagram Is Awesome For Selling My Little Pony Toys

    That’s far too confining and limiting to me. Look at this Google Trends chart.

    Google Trends - Web Search Interest: pinterest, instagram - Worldwide, Jan 2011 - Jan 2012

    What happened around then? Pinterest became the new darling of the image world.

    If you had a framework that looked like:

    August Blog Posts
    Week 1 – Image-based selling blog posts
    Week 2 – Photography tips for image-based selling
    Week 3 – Sharing images
    Week 4 – Driving traffic with images

    Then I think you’d be talking about something a lot more useful. It’s more flexible, and it lets you adapt to rapidly changing conditions.

    Here’s my final suggestion with a long term strategy: be prepared at any moment to throw it out. I can’t emphasize that enough, because whenever we as individuals or as companies develop these long range plans, they have a habit of calcifying until they’re immutable laws written in stone tablets that the VP of Marketing brought down from the mountain. That’s dangerous on a couple of fronts. First, it’s predictable, and predictable isn’t necessarily good in an environment where your competitors are looking for any advantage. A predictable content strategy can inadvertently let them scoop you on nearly any topic. Second, a written-in-stone attitude means you can’t pivot. You can’t adapt. When something major happens, you can’t change or newsjack or anything.

    If you approach the content strategy with the feeling of, “let’s be ready to toss this if it’s not working out”, and you can maintain that attitude, then you’re going to be much more successful and adaptable when it’s called for.


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  • Identify your marketing bargains

    In every company, there are going to be marketing bargains – programs that offer incredible ROI. The problem we often have as marketers is that we’re focused on paying attention to the biggest and loudest – the programs that bring in the largest number of leads, even if they’re woefully inefficient.

    With the advent of Google’s Cost Data tools, you can now upload custom click data from other programs and the cost of those clicks into Google Analytics. Run a press release? As long as you’ve used campaign tracking, you can upload your costs to those analytics campaigns. Running ads on a different PPC network (like Facebook ads)? Grab your campaign spend and upload it into Google Analytics.

    If you want to simplify things even further, make yourself a spreadsheet and start lining up your programs very simply. Here’s an example using SEO and email in a Google Doc.

    The Really Simple ROI Sheet

    It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to look down a list of ROI percentages and identify which programs are performing at their peak. The big question is, can the bargains scale up? In the example above, if you put 1 into SEO, you get it back plus5.94 more. If you put 10 into the machine,59.44 comes back. That’s a prime candidate to see if 20 returns118.88. Keep adding money into that box until the ROI diminishes below your next most efficient program.

    As you wrap up for the year, look at a comprehensive list of your marketing programs and identify the bargains, the programs with the highest ROI, even if they don’t necessarily have the highest lead generation numbers. You might find that some programs are worth investing far more in than you’re currently doing, and some programs that you might be able to afford to throttle back on if their lead volumes can be replaced by more efficient sources.

    Bonus: download a copy of this spreadsheet for your own use by clicking here.


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  • The vital importance of marketing baselining

    When it comes to measuring the impact of social media or any form of digital marketing, one of the most complicated problems you’ll face is the indirect influence. For example, let’s say you run a Facebook campaign. Let’s say that the campaign seems to do reasonably well in terms of likes, shares, and comments, but when you look in your analytics, you see only a modest bump in visits, conversions, and sales from Facebook:

    Chart 1

    Oh well, looks like social media was a waste, huh? Not so fast. By measuring just the Facebook channel, we’re pretending that people don’t speak to each other, don’t share news outside of Facebook, don’t tell friends and family in real life at the water cooler or dinner table. We’re pretending that sharing on Facebook happens only on Facebook, and that’s simply not true.

    That said, how would you know what the impact of your Faceobok campaign was outside of Facebook? There’s no such thing as click tracking across the dinner table. To answer that question, you’d need to know what your web analytics looked like before and after your campaign.

    Suppose you had looked at and measured the overall traffic, conversions, and customers to your website for the last 30 days and gotten a reliable baseline of activity, a comprehensive look at everything happening in your digital world:

    Chart 2

    This is the process of baselining, of getting a reliable sample of what’s already happening on your website and digital properties so that you can tell the difference between normal activities and your campaign.

    What if, in the absence of anything else simultaneously new, your web analytics suddenly looked like this after your Facebook campaign?

    Chart 3

    That delta, that change, is the effect of your Facebook campaign outside of Facebook. Multichannel funnels can account for some of it, but the other aspect that multichannel funnels can’t track is the online to offline (and back again) sharing, which is very real. In the absence of high quality surveying and primary research, baselining is the next best alternative for figuring out what really happened.

    There are two important caveats for baselining:

    1. Ideally, don’t start anything new during the baselining period. If you’ve got campaigns already running, keep them running, but try not to kick off anything new during the baselining period.

    2. Vitally important, don’t start anything else new during the campaign test period. If you launched a Facebook campaign at the same time you kicked off a PPC campaign and an outbound cold calling campaign, how would you know which campaign to attribute the growth to? Isolate one and only one new thing to test in order to get an accurate measurement.

    If you’re struggling to account for the impact of any of your marketing campaigns, look at baselining as a way to assess their overall impact to your marketing.


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  • Shift happens

    Shift happens

    Shift happens.

    After 3 years in the email marketing industry, I’m departing WhatCounts as Director of Inbound Marketing and moving over to SHIFT Communications as Vice President, Marketing Technology.

    Why the change? For almost a decade, I have been focused on the bottom half of the sales and marketing funnel. From the moment someone comes into the audience – via search, newsletter subscription, PPC, etc. – I’ve developed ways of converting them into prospects, leads, customers, and evangelists. I’ve got a fairly good handle on the process and have now replicated it for 3 different companies with good results.

    The question that has been nagging me in the past few years, however, is this: how do people figure out you exist in the first place? In the past, I’ve viewed things like awareness, brand building, and PR as unquantifiable wastes of time, but I now view that as ignorance on my part, rather than being inherently flawed marketing mechanisms. How do people find out about you? Sure, you can buy lists and spam the daylights out of folks, but that has relatively little ROI. I realized that for all of the bad pitches I’ve received (and there have been so, so many) there must still be some value to brand building, PR, and awareness or that entire industry would have ceased to exist a long time ago.

    My mission, my quest if you will, is to figure out the top half of the marketing funnel. What effect does brand advertising have? What effect does PR have? What effect does brand building have? Most important how do you quantify it? How do you assess it objectively, intelligently, and efficiently so that you can pick the mechanisms that will work best for your company and grow the audience so that you can then use lead generation, demand generation, conversion, and all of the marketing tools that I’m comfortable with.

    To the PR world, I’ll be helping SHIFT offer my services to existing and future clients. If you’ve ever wanted to have me look at your marketing funnel or your marketing strategy, audit it, and give you a plan of action to fix things up, I’ll be offering that through SHIFT now. If you’ve ever wondered if your analytics are telling you the right information and delivering real value to you, I’ll be offering that through SHIFT now, too. Ever wanted a social media marketing agency? SHIFT can do that and you get me as a bonus. Everything you’ve come to know me for isn’t going away – rather, it’s being connected with the top half of the funnel as I learn and become proficient in it, in my quest to learn the totality of the marketing profession.

    I invite you to join me as the quest continues! Want to work with me at SHIFT? Click here to let me know!


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  • How to fix the sad state of content marketing

    Content marketing. It was the darling of the marketing world in years past, but it’s fallen on hard times lately. Why? Mostly because marketers are struggling with it, and as a result generating terrible content, which in turn is making people unhappy:

    Content marketing…

    The problem that marketers are running into is one of resource constraints. Most of us have a certain number of really good ideas in us, a decent supply of pretty good ideas, and a metric ton of bad ideas. As we create content, we tend to use them up in that order – we begin creating content and knock it out of the park for a short while, keep people interested with pretty good stuff, and eventually, without replenishment, that well runs dry and we create garbage.

    The aforementioned Tom Webster correctly cites the issue of content production schedules as being the primary cause for this – if you commit to blogging a certain number of times per week, personally or organizationally, then you have to find content to fill those commitments. The easiest choice, as Tom points out in a recent blog post, is to abolish the content production schedule entirely and only share content when you have really great ideas to share, but for many businesses, that’s not a step that’s viewed as realistic.

    So how do you scale your content production to meet a rigorous schedule? First and foremost, you have to acknowledge that you as a content creator have limits. There is a nearly literal well of ideas in your head around your product, service, or industry. That well refills over time; the rate of replenishment depends on how immersed you are in other ideas and how differently you can think about your industry.

    Down a big hole

    How do you know when you’ve reached a point of depletion? When the ideas stop flowing. When you’re sitting in front of your keyboard wondering, “what the heck am I going to write today?” When the voice in your head says, “ah, just write anything, no one will care anyway”. When you reach those points, your well has run dry.

    To meet a production schedule without losing quality, then, you have to do one of two things. You can either change the rate of replenishment or you can add content creators. Adding content creators is the most rational choice, especially for an organization, because it means instead of waiting for one well of great ideas to refill (and possibly creating garbage in the meantime), you have several that you can go to. The more content creators you add to your team (who have talent and intelligence), the better your content will be, because you’ll deplete your wells of good ideas at a slower rate and allow them to replenish more fully in between uses.

    If you’re in a position where you’re blogging for yourself or in an organization where adding more content creators isn’t possible, then the other option is to change the rate of replenishment of ideas. Get smarter. Get more creative. How? First and foremost, if you’re a content creator for business, you absolutely must be out in the world talking to customers on a regular, frequent basis. Your best ideas will almost always come from seeing people at work with your products or services and observing the challenges they face. You can do that by going to conferences, visiting customers, helping out with customer service, and being a customer yourself of your company.

    Dayton Quest Center Hombu Dojo

    Second, you need to draw on multiple disciplines in order to get your well of ideas to replenish more quickly. If you’re a marketer, reading marketing books and blogs will provide only limited benefit, and the better you get as a marketer, the less helpful other marketing blogs will be. At some point, they’ll actually become a hindrance to you. Look to other disciplines for their assortment of best ideas, especially in the fields of the liberal arts. For example, I look to the many inspirations, ideas, strategies, and philosophies of the martial arts for many of my ideas. If you are experienced in the martial art I practice, there are some blog posts which are nearly literal translations of kata strategies, but applied to marketing.

    If you study music, what ideas from music come to mind that inform your marketing? There are things like tempo, chord progressions, and harmony that can be translated into other forms of content with relative ease. If you study photography, what can you translate? There are ideas like contrast, lines, lighting, and bokeh that you can translate to your content.

    Improving your rate of replenishment comes with a warning: there are rapidly diminishing returns on it that are dictated by time and your level of talent. At a certain point, you either have to throttle back on the schedule or add more human beings.

    If the year behind us was about the power of content marketing, then the year ahead has to be about making content that doesn’t suck if we want content marketing to remain a viable method of reaching and acquiring new customers. Like a restaurant, you only need to serve up one plate of garbage instead of a good meal to lose someone forever.


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  • December Rewind: How To Get Your Top Content Seen

    At the end of the year, lots of people and companies make their top 5/10/25 lists of top posts, top this, top that, and so forth. The problem, especially for B2B marketers, is that during the last couple of weeks in December when most of those lists are being shared, far fewer people are reading them. They’re out celebrating the holidays and doing stuff other than reading your marketing content.

    To mitigate that effect and still do some year-end top stuff, I’m going to try something a little different, and I’d encourage you to give this a shot as well. Take some time over the next couple of days to look at your web analytics and find the top posts for the year. For reference, there are 20 working days in December (assuming that people work Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve), so if you can put together the top 20 posts for the year, you’ll have enough to re-share for the month.

    Here’s how using Google Analytics. Go into Content > Site Content > All Pages, select the year to date as your time frame, show the top 50 pages, apply a filter to restrict to content created this year (assuming you use a URL structure that contains the date) and export as CSV.

    Pages - Google Analytics

    Put it all together in a basic spreadsheet. If you’re using Google Docs, just import the CSV file straight in. Make sure it’s sorted by Pageviews in descending order. Now, to get a useful URL for social sites, you’ll need to concatenate your root domain to the spreadsheet. Delete the columns after unique page views and create 2 columns, the first with your root domain in it:

    December Rewind

    Then concatenate the page in column 1 with the root URL in column 4 and populate column 5:

    December Rewind

    Take this list and have it ready for the content scheduler of your choice, like Buffer or Hootsuite, and you’ll be sharing your top content of the year all month long.

    Here’s the most important part. By doing a month-long content rewind with a post a day, you’re front-loading your most popular content at the beginning of the month, when people are still at work. By the time people start taking off for the holidays, you’re down near the end of the list, and the most popular content will have been re-seen by the most number of people. At the end of the month, you can always wrap up with a single post recapping the top 20, but by doing this, you make sure your best content is in front of the audience earlier rather than later.

    You’ll see this in my own news feed using the hashtag #decrw, for December Rewind.


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