I’m getting awfully confused with all these BuzzFeed quizzes I’ve been taking: it looks like I’m an Audrey Hepburn version of a unicorn, living in New York, commuting everyday (or should I say galloping) to Barcelona, while honing my Shakesperean skills as a writer to be read as a self-published $ 0.99 e-book on Amazon. I need more from life.
Au revoir
Jorge Sette
Click on the image for the full text.
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Ernest Hemingway
As we all bloggers know, Hemingway did nail the writing process in his quote above. Yes, it’s hard; yes, it’s time-consuming; no, it’s never right the first time around. Writing is rewriting. For a 1000-word blog post, I would say the average blogger would write at least 10 drafts before he is reasonably satisfied with the result. He is lucky if he has an editor to help with the polishing, but that is not usually the case.
However, in this day and age of content marketing, you would be crazy as a marketer if you did not sit down at least once a week to create or repurpose some written content to post on the Internet. Let me highlight in this post the features of good blog posts and how your business could benefit from them.
Figure Writing Reflected in a Mirror by Bacon, Francis, 1976
1. Search engine optimization: provided you offer useful and original content, employing the relevant key words, blogging will help your business show up on the SERPs (search engine results pages) of your prospective clients. I don’t know many people today who will not go to Google at some point during the buying cycle to do a search before actually purchasing a product or service. So, to be available, to show up, it will help to have a carefully SEOed (search engine optimized) blog to pop up on the first page.
2. Answer your customers questions: the buying process – the cycle your prospects go through before committing to a purchase – consists of the the following phases: first, the prospect needs to identify a need or problem; second, they will try to learn about possible solutions; third, they will start shopping for the ideal solution; afterwards, when they are ready, they will look for directions to actually buy it (online or offline); finally, when they start using the product, they might have problems or questions about it, so you need to offer them prompt customer service. Your blog needs to account for each one of these phases and provide the appropriate answers to help them at the stage they are, moving them along the sales funnel. It takes close communication between Marketing, Sales and Customer Service to identify the customers most frequently asked questions and issues, and try to solve them through your blog content. So it’s time to cooperate (there’s no need to tell me how hard this can be, but it’s worth trying): salespeople and customer service professionals need to develop their marketing skills, while marketers should learn more about the customers from sales and customer service so they can provide qualified leads.
3. Thought leadership: by covering content that speaks to the different needs of your customers at the different stages of the buying process you will soon develop a reputation of an expert in the field. Even if you don’t get conversions in terms of sales at the first moment, your customers will grow to trust your opinions and respect your points of view. When the time comes for them to make a buying decision, who do you think they will turn to?
4. Style: your blog is not supposed to be a work of art if you are a marketer. So write as simply and elegantly as possible, as if you were actually “talking” to the prospect. A marketer’s blog is not a piece of literature, so tone down your message, and be objective and direct. Of course it would help to be aware of the reading level of your audience, but “according to many reports (including the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics’ 1992 Adult Literacy survey), the average reading level is the 7th or 8th grade. Combine that with reports of increasingly low-attention spans of Internet users who require even milder language and you’re looking at a reading level of the 6th or 7th grade” (http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2013/10/ezinearticles-asks-what-reading-level-should-you-target.html) . If you really wish to fine tune your text’s level of difficulty, there are some tools on the Internet (try the Readability Test Tool, for example, http://read-able.com) that will allow you to measure it.
5. The title: the importance of a catchy title to crown your blog post cannot be underestimated. This is the first impression you will make on the reader, and you only have a couple of seconds to entice them. So think carefully about it. Putting yourself in the shoes of a journalist may help, after all, this is your headline. Research says that questions are a good way to go, as they tease the reader into looking for the answer in the text.
6. Promoting and Repurposing: to make the most of all the effort you put into writing your piece, promoting your blog is a must. Use your social media channels with this objective. Putting links to your blog post repeatedly, however, may not be the solution (although you’ll have to do it occasionally). Be careful not to make your audience feel spammed. Another solution is to repurpose your content and distribute it in different formats to suit the different social media channels: write a summary of the content as an image (for Instagram); use the photos you put in your blog post with a link to it (Instagram, Facebook); write a headline for your blog with a link to it (Twitter); turn it into an infographics poster (Pinterest); use the main points for a slide presentation (slideshare), etc.
As with most things in life, practice makes perfect. Some people say they blog everyday so they can improve. Research indicates that to be excellent at a skill you need to have spent at least 10,000 hours at it (read Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” for a deeper explanation on this). Maybe you don’t have that amount of time available anymore, but I would say it’s never too late to get started. What you can’t afford to do as a marketer is NOT to have a blog. How about starting today?
Au revoir
Jorge Sette
Living in São Paulo is an advantage for those who love what is usually called High Art, as we have a fair number of museums in the city. Of course, we lack the spoiling infinite choices of those who live in places like London, Paris and New York, but things could be worse.
However, going to a famous exhibition in Sampa is not without its frustrations and annoyances, as there are usually long lines on the weekend and the facilities are far from excellent. Besides, I’m quite addicted to audio tours, which, unfortunately, are not very common in Brazilian museums. I can’t stand guided tours, so I never join those little groups of people who follow a uniformed museum employee listening in awe whenever the guide decides to stop in front of a painting of her choice to spill out all the memorized knowledge in artificial intonation. I tend to run in the opposite direction.
So it’s not surprising that my best experiences in art viewing will have taken place abroad. The objective of this post is to share and discuss with my audience four of the great masterpieces I’ve already had the chance to see in person. I don’t think there is anything wrong in admiring pieces of art through apps, books or video, but I’m sure we all agree that the experience of standing only a couple of centimeters away from a great sculpture or painting in a beautiful museum can not be beaten.
The pieces I chose to write about here are not necessarily listed in any special order. They represent some of the art I feel most moved by – either because of their sheer beauty, or because they may be related to a special moment in my life. Two of them are based on stories I may have read or heard: I love pictorial representations of mythology. They are among my favorites. Also I did not have to think long and hard before selecting the pieces for the post. They are the ones that first came to my mind:
1. Samson and Delilah, by Peter Paul Rubens: I first saw this painting while roaming through the rooms of the National Gallery in London last time I was there. My eyes were immediately drawn to it for its vibrant colors, strong subject matter and unique distribution of lighting. You can see Samson, of biblical fame, sound asleep on Delilah’s lap while his hair, source of huge strength, is being treacherously cut off. The Philistines are already waiting there on the doorstep to take him away and blind him. The painting by Rubens is highly sensual and yet poignant, and, to me, its relevance can also be traced to my childhood, when I first heard the story and was deeply impressed by it.
Samson and Delilhah, 1609, by Peter Paul Rubens. National Gallery
2. The Lady of Shallot, by Waterhouse: I have a funny personal anecdote about this painting. I had discovered it on an app about art and fallen in love with its bright colors and hippie-like atmosphere (although it was painted almost 100 years before the “flower power” movement). I have always been a fan of the romantic sixties and its music. Pre-Raphaelites, therefore, with their drama and romance, feature among my favorite painters. Well, a couple of years ago, I was in London for work and had an afternoon off. I decided to invest the time visiting the Tate Gallery, with the sole purpose of seeing this particular painting. My surprise was that, as I entered the museum, for some reason, I marched straight up to the room where the picture was hanging, without ever having been there before. I had passed other rooms on my way into the museum, but somehow this was the first room I got into, after making a left off the main passageway. I could only interpret this, of course, as fate. The Lady of Shallot, just like a magnet, had dragged me to the place. She probably was as eager to meet me as I was. The painting itself is a bit too high on the wall and the colors are somewhat faded in comparison to the copy I had on the app. But still it’s impressive, and remains one of my favorites of all time.
The Lady of Shallot, 1888, by John William Waterhouse, Tate Gallery.
3. The Thinker, by Rodin: In my teenage years in Recife my mother used to introduce me to her friends who came to our house as “the thinker”, the son who would spend hours either reading or staring into the void in front of our backyard garden with his mind going places she could not fathom. When I was still in high school, she gave me a little marble figurine in the shape of Rodin’s The Thinker, which she had acquired as a souvenir in Europe. This little gift is one of my most treasured objects and I keep it in my living room to this day (see picture below). Therefore, years later, I teared up with emotion when I first laid eyes on one of the versions of The Thinker, brought to the Pinacoteca in Sao Paulo as part of a huge Rodin exhibition in the mid-nineties (we had to stand in line for hours, and, once inside, needed to rush through the pieces as if in a car race, so many people attended the event everyday). A couple of years later, however, I could indulge in as much Rodin as I wanted too, roaming freely around the rooms and gardens of his Museum during a sunny summer day in Paris.
My little version of THE THINKER by Rodin. My living room.
4. Mars, the God of War, by Velázquez: The pressures against growing old – or really, the prejudice one confronts after reaching 30 – are mounting in today’s infantilized society, and it’s hard not to feel progressively inadequate and afraid. Obviously one keeps postponing – for himself – the cutting off date after which you should be considered old: it’s usually at least 10 years ahead of your current age. Therefore it was with a warm feeling of relief and reassurance that I came across this riveting Velázquez’s painting at Museo del Prado in Madrid: it dares to show the god of war, Mars, as an emaciated and tired middle-aged man, with his stunning shield lying on his feet. My conclusion was that, if even the gods need to confront the aging process, it should be OK for the rest of us.
Mars, God of War, 1640, by Velázquez. Museo del Prado.
There are many more pieces I’d love to write about. I promise my loyal readers to get back to the subject in future posts. For now, I believe this will give you a preview of my taste in Art.
What about you? What are your favorite pieces of art? Share them with us.
NOTE: You might want to check out our language and art eBooks available from AMAZON.COM. Click here for further info: http://wp.me/p4gEKJ-1lS
Teaching English with Art
Au revoir
Jorge Sette.
After meeting Colonel Kurtz in the powerful portrayal given by Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now”, when the movie first launched, I always wanted to get to know the original character he was based on: the mysterious Englishman lost in the jungles of Africa created by Joseph Conrad in his novella “Heart of Darkness”. If you, like me, are into dark themes and water (be it sea or river), this is the book for you.
For many years I hesitated to start the book. The language on the first page looked obscure, and I was not sure I had the energy to go through it. I even downloaded it in different versions (I believe they were free). The copies lay on my iPad for a couple of years now. Then I came across it in the beautiful voice of Kenneth Branagh, as an audiobook, but, for some reason, I kept losing my concentration whenever I reached Parque Villa Lobos – a nice recreational area in Sao Paulo – on my bike, and could not follow the story from then on. Well, the audiobook at least showed me that if I got past the first couple of pages, with their detailed description of ships coming and going on the Thames at dusk, things would get more interesting. So I resumed the book. And did not regret it.
Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.
Although the novella is written in prose, as you embark in the story within the story, which tells of seaman Marlow’s time as a captain of a French steamboat working in the business of ivory trade somewhere in Central Africa, going up the Congo river, “a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land”, it turns into a somber and gripping poem which becomes hard to put down. Although the book is short, the reader’s experience is very deep and lasting.
Marlow is in search of a tradesman named Kurtz, who seems to have lost contact with the ivory trading company they both work for. He was famous for having been an excellent employee, sending tons and tons of ivory down the river back to the headquarters. But for now, rumor has it something may have happened to him, as all communication seems to have ceased. Is he dead? Could he be ill? After all not many white men remained healthy, physically or mentally, after a couple of months in those desolate and warm latitudes.
Of course, as with all great works of art, the book lends itself to many interpretations and can be read on many levels. I believe that, at some point, Conrad was even accused of racism for the use of the word nigger many times, and also for treating the natives as an indiscriminate living mass, not considering them as human individuals in the story. For today’s ears, it is certainly uncomfortable to read the word nigger inserted without any qualification or explanation within a passage, but let’s not forget the story is told from the point of view of Marlow, the seaman we don’t know much about. We know, however, that Marlow is aware that even London, “the biggest and greatest town in the world”, started off as a dark and uncivilized place, and that the Romans must have gone through something similar to what he is going through right now, floating on that snake of a river, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by looming trees and sighing vegetation, under a scorching sun.
The book explores this fascinating encounter of a civilized man with the primitive world, which seems to exert a powerful pull over him, making him reconsider the values White Europe stands for. Therefore, it’s a harsh criticism of the barbaric colonialism in Africa, which, under the guise of a civilizatory mission, invaded and exploited those virgin regions of the world for pure material profit, causing a lot of destruction and pain along the way. The book questions what really is civilization and what terrible energies get unleashed when Paris and London clash with the Congo in the figure of Kurtz: “the horror, the horror”.
Others say that the book is about the battle between good and evil (stay in the boat and be safe or go on land like Kurtz and lose your soul to corruption due to lack of restraint). Whatever interpretation you lend to the story, the fact is that Heart of Darkness is one of the most poetic books I have ever read. Its account of a boat trip along that methaforically muddy river in the primitive jungle that pulsates like an alien heart will stay with me for years. It also made me appreciate the boldness and creativity of director Francis Ford Coppola, who transported the story to a totally different context (the Vietnam war in the late sixties and early seventies), managing to make the themes and topics of the book even more relevant in a new era of barbarism.
Have you read the book? What did you think of it? Share your opinion with us.
Au revoir
Jorge Settte.
Maleficent, the new Disney movie that tells the story of Sleeping Beauty from the point-of-view of its original Nemesis – the evil fairy godmother – had all the potential to awe audiences, going way beyond its stunning visuals, if they had decided to work on more complex and original levels, paying closer attention to how mythology and its archetypes (typical characters) sustain great storytelling.
One can’t help but think of Wicked, that, first as novel, and then as a successful Broadway musical, also narrated the backstory of an evil character, the Wicked Witch of the West, of The Wizard of Oz fame, from the difficulties she had as a (literally) green child all the way to her adulthood, when she gets to meet Dorothy and her shoes. Although both Maleficent and Wicked chose to tell the story from the point of view of the alleged villain, the latter accomplished a lot more artistically.
Maleficent as a character is carefully construed to represent a strong role model for girls. Angelina Jolie looks stunning in the role, and will visually fascinate girls and boys alike. Boys, however, will surely be more entertained by the great number of superhero-like action scenes and predictable visual effects. It’s unfortunate, however, that the story is too weak to replace the original in children’s imagination, as it’s a lot less dark and scary in its connotations. Fairy tales are not supposed to be watered-down versions of their originals, and it’s a shame that Disney progressively goes in this direction with every new version they produce.
These are some of the problems that weaken Maleficent (Spoiler alert: you may want to watch the movie before reading the following):
Angelina Jolie as Maleficent
1. The hero/heroine archetype of the story keeps shifting (is it Prince Phillip? Aurora? Or Maleficent herself?) Stories need a well-defined hero with a clear objective. The hero can and should be flawed (so there’s nothing wrong with Maleficent’s rage and wish for revenge from a dramatic stance). However, the whole story should be about her journey, and the transformation she goes through along what is commonly called the dramatic arc. Maleficent the movie does not really have any of its characters growing or changing through experience in its almost two hours of storyline. In this version, Maleficent has always been a strong and benevolent fairy, protective or the moor and its creatures. Then she makes one mistake led my revenge or jealousy, and spends the rest of the movie trying to fix it. This does not a good story maketh.
2. I’m sure that, for young moviegoers, the three little “good fairy-godmothers” are visually enchanting and can even be funny at times (especially the one played by Imelda Staunton), and they dutifully fill the role of tricksters, an important kind of archetype, providing the comic relief every story needs. However, adults will miss the irony and wit usually delivered by such characters in more sophisticated versions of kids’ movies.
3. Diaval, the raven, is too weak as a mentor, another essential archetype in effective stories. Maleficent, both as a movie and as a character, would have benefited a lot more if she had a more intriguing, wiser, and possibly older tutor to rely on. It would have given the movie a much stronger structure.
4. King Stefan, who starts off as Maleficent’s first love, does not have a clear archetypal role in the story. He’s too lame as a shadow/nemesis, and not very convincing as a shapeshifter (archetype usually filled by the heroine’s romantic interest). Similarly, young prince Phillip fails to awaken the sleeping princess with his cold teenage kiss: I don’t think we need to say anything more about his role in the story after this flop. Therefore, the movie really relegates male figures to totally secondary and pathetic roles.
5. Aurora’s role also does not fit in within the mythological structure of effective storytelling, being neither a hero nor a shadow, or any other essential archetype. She roams around the moors, beautiful and wide-eyed, without any specific dramatic function. The couple of scenes in which both Aurora and Prince Phillip, at different moments, unconsciously float in the air in the wake of Maleficent clearly indicate that these characters lack what is fundamental in archetypes of more importance: agency. Frankly, these levitation scenes boarder the ridicule.
6. The movie climax, packed with action and pyrotechnics, does not look any different from the last superhero movie you may have watched. The grand finale depicts lots of deus-ex machina solutions ( “Into a dragon”, orders Maleficent, before her loyal raven becomes a fire-spitting monster. Well, that is an easy way out, right? Worse: he fails! Maleficent will need to get her creepy dead wings back to succeed.
Speaking of those wings: at first, the scene in which they are cut off looked like this was going to be one of darkest and best moments of the movie, and could easily stand for all the feminist and environmentalist metaphors the movie repeatedly uses. However, the fact that they fly back and reattach themselves to their owner in a climactic scene at the end spoils all the dark beauty and menacing effect of the former scene. Now the wings are just another deus ex-machina-kind of solution employed by poorly-creative scritpwriters. Besides, one wonders why the wings did not decide to do this years before.
Now it’s your turn. Share with us your opinion on Maleficent.
For more on storytelling I would suggest you read two other posts in this blog: “The Power of Storytelling – The Mythological Structure ” (http://wp.me/p4gEKJ-F2) and “More Storytelling Tips for Marketers” (http://wp.me/p4gEKJ-UK).
Au revoir
Jorge Sette.
What does Earth look like through the eyes of an alien? If you ever wondered about it, now you have a plausible answer: it looks like Scotland! The language is weird, humanity is mostly friendly and naive, and the views are breathtaking. It’s a cold and lonely place in general, but you will have plenty of opportunity to be on the receiving end of much warmth: especially if you look like a dark-haired and full-lipped Scarlet Johansson. However, the place can have its dangers.
After using only her sexy voice to play an operating system with which Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls deeply in love in the academy award-nominated movie Her, the actress takes on another risky role in director Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. Now she’s nothing less than a predator alien in the shape of a beautiful woman, who spends most of her time driving along desert streets on the hunt for lonely men – who cannot believe their luck! Only, contrary to the preys’s idea, the plan is not sex, but to turn them into ET food.
Under the Skin, the movie
Under the Skin is not a movie for the masses. It’s slow at times and there’s hardly any dialogue. Just like 2001 a Space Odissey in its day, it does not explain everything you want to know: I guess you would need to read the novel it’s based on to find out all the details. However, Scarlet Johansson has enough star quality to carry the movie on her spotless shoulders. And the viewer will see a lot more than her shoulders, as the movie features a great number of explicit nude scenes.
The plot is also not without flaws, as, in my opinion, the change of the main character from alien predator to traveler open to new experiences and excited about discovering a new world is too sudden. However, the movie lasts the right amount of time, it does not drag and finishes exactly when it should.
It’s worth pointing out, as well, that it portrays one of the most poignant scenes in movie history: an abandoned toddler crying on an amazingly beautiful and desolate beach, waiting for its parents to come back from the sea. In addition to this, the underwater scene which shows men being turned into alien food is also very original.
Kudos to Ms Johansson, who does not play safe or shies away from challenging endeavours. I wonder what her next role will be.
Au revoir
Jorge Sette
I’ve had the chance to be directly involved in sales, and, eventually, train salespeople at different stages of my long career as a marketer. I was a consultant/rep for many years at Pearson at the beginning of my publishing days, so I experienced firsthand what it’s like to spend the whole day visiting clients and presenting products. I covered the whole country. At McGraw-Hill, years later, I was lucky to work alongside reps (salespeople) in many countries of Latin America and the Middle East. Not only did I train them on the sales methodology of the company, but also learned a lot from good, intuitive reps, or natural salespeople, as we like to call them. These are very charismatic people that build close relationships with their customers, and, therefore, would be the ones that most benefited from formal training, as they already had the right kind of personality.
The Young Apple Salesman by Brown, John George
Formal sales training
Of course you can train anyone to be a rep as far as techniques go, even if they lack the natural charisma typical of great salespeople. The sales process methodology used by different companies may vary in terminology, but they are basically the same: asking the customer the right questions; selecting which features of the product to present, based on their answers; giving a skillful presentation with emphasis on benefits; and closing the deal. It all comes down to structuring a sales call, finding out what the customers’ problems are, and finally offering a solution that fixes it. However, if one can do without layers of natural charm, not many people have what it takes to soldier on in this hard line of work, where you get NO for an answer as the norm when you try to close a deal, despite all the work you put in following carefully the phases of the sales process.
Salespeople need to have a very high level of self-esteem to be able to manage all this rejection, understand that it’s not personal (in most cases), and start the process all over again the following day. For those who have the drive and persistency to carry on and keep honing their skills through (self-)training and practice, the rewards to reap can be more than worth it.
Marketing skills
However, in these days of inbound marketing and social media, where we expect the client to come looking for the product as they need it, it takes more than excelling at the sales process for reps to succeed. The client is in control more than ever and that changes everything. Reps need to learn to emulate the charisma some people naturally have by building an online relationship with prospects and clients. They need to incorporate marketing skills to their sales tool kit and start promoting their own personal brand.
The marketing department of the company they work for should be able to provide them with the necessary leads. But we all know that is not enough. Successful salespeople will never rely solely on the leads provided by Marketing to do their job. They must create a professional persona and promote it heavily, using the same tactics available to Marketing. The objective is to get closer to a client, initiate and keep the conversation with them, before finally closing the deal.
Salespeople as marketers of their own personal brand
Salespeople can replicate the proven tactics of content marketing and the use of social media channels to promote themselves as a brand to reach customers they may not have the chance to meet otherwise. Therefore, salespeople had better start thinking and acting like marketers. Get closer to the marketing team in your company and, with their authorization, start personalizing the content already made available to generate leads (one simple way to do this would be just to share this kind of communication on the real state of your own Facebook profile, for example, rather than the company’s). Salespeople will also need to begin building their own community and fans on the Internet. Remember, though, that content marketing needs to be subtle. You will need to genuinely engage with your audience by providing a lot of useful free content (invitation to webinars, how-to videos, explanations about the product, relevant articles to their business, ebooks etc.) and dutifully interact with them (by answering their queries, for example) before you gain the right to sell anything.
Building a community and working on promoting your personal brand is the best guarantee that you will keep your a job in these unstable and changing times.
Au revoir
Jorge Sette.
According to the site http://www.oxforddictionaries.com, Art is “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power”. Marketing, on the other hand, is responding to people’s needs and desires with a unique offer that will sweep them off their feet. Is it only me or is there a parallel here? How is marketing close to art? Let me give you four reasons.
The King’s Sadness, Matisse.1952
1. Visual: today’s promotion relies on images more than anything else. Text is powerful, but images are processed much faster by the human brain. So to grab the client’s attention and really engage with them at the deep level marketers need to do to break through the clutter, only compelling images and the right combination of colors and shapes will do the job. The marketing tools for reaching the client today are basically what can be channeled through social media, and social media is mainly about visual communication: Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, to name just the most popular. It may not be long before Pinterest Search, for example, beats Google, as sometimes you might not even know how to express in words what you are looking for. SEO and keywords will need to readapt to the new reality.
2. Design: Both the product and its promotion will rely heavily on design. Shape, colors, texture, coordination: products need to look and feel awesome, especially if they are to be worn by clients. Very soon fashion trends will dictate how wearables are supposed to look for the right season, I would imagine. Marketers should be ready for the catwalk. Dazzling is what we are all looking for.
3. Emotions: it’s hard to explain how some paintings and sculptures resonate so deeply with us. They just strike the right chord. Human beings will prioritize and choose based on emotion and then rationalize their choices. Marketers need to work based on this premise. Just like artists, their communication must draw people to them. Marketers need to churn out compelling content that will get customers to come for more again and again.
4. Skill: good art may seem spontaneous and natural, but I’m sure you know the amount of technique that needs to be put into it. You can only break academic norms and achieve effective and revolutionary results in Art after understanding deeply how the traditional rules work. In the same way, marketers need a lot of training to get to the top of their craft. And they need to test and measure the effectiveness of their communication endlessly to be able to keep refining it. Again, all this science is art.
As a marketer, it feels very exciting to know that more art and technique will be expected from me in the near future. Creativity and craft make us even more human, which, in a way, allows us to communicate with customers in a truly genuine voice.
NOTE: If you are into art, you may consider checking out our eBook series TEACHING ENGLISH WITH ART:
Click on the links below to go to AMAZON.COM and buy your ebooks:
1. Teaching English with Art: Matisse http://wp.me/p4gEKJ-1kP
(30 speaking and writing activities based on famous works by Henri Matisse)
2. Teaching English with Art: Picasso http://wp.me/p4gEKJ-1lA
(30 speaking and writing activities based on famous works by Pablo Picasso)
3. Teaching English with Art: Caravaggio http://wp.me/p4gEKJ-1mL
(30 speaking and writing activities based on famous works by Caravaggio)
Au revoir
Jorge Sette
You may have heard this before: everyone is in marketing nowadays. To make a living, you need to promote and sell something: your image as an ideal employee; your qualifications as the perfect fit for an advertised professional position; the product or service the company you already work for specializes in; or your own business. Everything is a brand, from products and ideas to people and causes. Non-profits, as you know, need as much promotion as any other business.
Moreover, marketing has changed radically in the last ten years or so. It has become a lot more exciting. As a marketer, you are not allowed to interrupt your audience with a loud selling message or by yelling a silly slogan at them any longer. You may even try, but it will not be very effective. Now things got a lot more complex, genuine, interactive, and, I dare say, even more artistic. Marketing needs to excel at beauty, creativity, usefulness, and the ability to keep a conversation going with the customer for as long as necessary. After all, we are aiming to keep them for life.
Content marketing
As a consequence, we all need to turn our marketing departments into media companies or publishers to be able to promote effectively in this new landscape: whether your are selling language learning courses, ebooks or cars. Gone are the days of the proverbial pushy second-hand car salesmen we still see in movies. To turn our marketing team into a media company, we must become content creation machines, spilling out entertainment, compelling stories, clear explanations and timely info about your product or service to build a loyal audience on and off line. Only then are we allowed to sell to this community we worked so hard to attract and shape. Build the community first, gain its trust, give away lots of free and relevant content, and afterwards, you will own the right to offer them your “purple cow” (borrowing the expression from marketing guru Seth Godin): the very compelling product they can’t wait to buy from you.
Take for example the need to create a personality and specify the values your brand stands for. Storytelling is the keyword here. Every time you get in touch with your audience you have an opportunity to add a new piece of your corporate narrative by reinforcing the values and personality of your brand. This must be done through different social media channels, using the right tone of voice. Companies that invest in marketing will assign different people to manage distinct social media channels and the kind of content feeding they require. Besides, they need a marketing coordinator/manager to oversee the whole operation, analyze the metrics, and make sure the conversation with the client remains consistent.
Marketing in the business of language learning – my speciality
What I find really exciting as a marketer in the language learning line of business is how easy it is to produce content that will captivate your target audience, turning them into leads and then customers. If you sell LANGUAGE, which is a vehicle, you have a lot more elbow room to play with content. Language can be used to talk about anything. So there can be a lot of variety in your communication. And what can be more exhilarating than the possibility of creating blogs, podcasts, videos, PowerPoint presentations, ebooks, webinars, etc. to express your passion for language teaching/learning through a wealth of rich content? Marketers are given a unique chance to become writers, video makers, newsreaders and designers: we’ve been given the opportunity to be in show business after all! Few people would turn this opportunity down.
Show business
Start now!
Of course, you may not feel excited about every piece of content you will have to create to attract customers, especially because it needs to cater for the community’s needs and interests, not yours. The more you get to know your prospects, the easier it will be to publish the right kind of content for them. But assuming you like or identify with the product your are selling, there will always be room to express your passion.
Hubspot, the inbound marketing software company, is the benchmark for content creation, attracting clients to their community by giving tonnes of excellent content away for free. Well, there is obviously no need to get to their level of sophistication and productivity, but if you do not start creating compelling content right now, you will not be in business for very long. Believe me, creating content is key. And it can be a lot of fun.
Au revoir
Jorge Sette
Jorge Sette "Linguagem" 