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Getting started with content marketing
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Tag Archives: content marketing
Using Instagram to Promote your Business (summary)
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How can content marketing help your business?
Content marketing is a digital strategy that consists of creating and publishing a range of alluring pieces of content and distributing them freely on the Internet to get the participation of your target audience in a conversation with you. Its objective is multidimensional: to entice your clients and goad them into interacting with you (maybe by signing up to a newsletter or blog); to build your image as a thought leader, that is, to get them to trust you as a genuine expert and problem-solver in your industry; to bring your audience closer and closer to you by raising their interest and engagement; and to finally do business with them.
These steps are generally referred to as the sales funnel: leading a number of people through progressive stages towards your business goal, which is hopefully a sell that represents a win-win situation for both parties involved. Content marketing is a form of inbound marketing, therefore, which means that, instead of interrupting your prospect through broadcasting, you start a conversation using a topic they like to talk about, and then attract them to you for more content that will hopefully inform, entertain or teach them something useful. The best metaphor is meeting guests at a cocktail party and then inviting them to a more serious conversation in your office at a later date.
The Luncheon of the Boating Party by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste
Most of the readers of this blog are in the language business. They are either school owners and teachers, or publishers and consultants. You are, therefore, in the best position to exercise this form of strategy we call content marketing, as you deal with language itself: a vehicle to convey and discuss all forms of different content, as long as they are of interest to your audience. We are all working more and more towards niches, the market is fragmented and we are all discussing how to best make use of the so-called long tail, reaching very specific audiences by catering to their needs.
Another interesting characteristic of these times is that the lines between sales, marketing and customer service are blurring, as most businesses are directing their customers towards the internet for promotion, sales and help. Salespeople and Customer Service professionals are becoming high-level consultants, and it will soon become a privilege for a client to receive a real salesperson at their office to do business with.
So, in all departments of our companies, we should be producing digital content to communicate with the clients about our respective areas of expertise and skills. How do you produce content that can be used to build a relationship with your audience, solidify your position as a thought leader, gain their trust and finally SELL your goods and services to them?
I will outline a number of steps that will help you get started:
Define your buying persona: who is your typical client? How old is she? Where does she work? What kind of content would she be interested in? How does she use the Internet? Remember: the tendency is to sell to a niche, so try creating a realistic persona for each specific niche you want to reach.
Decide where you targeting audience is: this question was partially answered in the definition of your buying persona, but now let’s dig deeper. What is the best social media channel to find the people you are trying to sell to? This will be best done through testing and measuring. It will be hard to know beforehand what channels will provide the most response, conversion and sales rates, as the clients go down the sales funnel we mentioned before. Start with the major ones: Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram. Then follow the metrics and start refining your strategy.
Create a content strategy and a calendar: breakdown your content output in the following way: 40% of it should be general interest content loosely linked to the product or service you sell. If you are a language school, for example, write or post images about interesting places, different cultures, national festivals, etc. Then the next 30% of your content should be directly connected to your product or service, although you are not selling it in a hard way yet (still using the example of a language school: give tips on learning strategies, good books to read, meaning of slang used in TV shows and films, interesting facts and figures about languages, quizzes, etc). Another 20% should consist of direct offers to sign up to specific communications, take advantage of promotions, give away coupons, etc., aimed at those who are already at the stage of making a firmer commitment to you. Finally, get your customer service team to use the remaining 10% to help your customer deal with post-sales problems and issues, by harnessing a frequently asked question page or producing how-to videos.
Assign different people in your marketing, sales and customer service teams to produce the content they can: ask your team what skills they have and what kind of content they would feel comfortable producing. Are they good writers? Do they make videos in their spare time? Are they weekend photographers? Illustrators? Would they like to use their beautiful voices to read a scripted podcast? Of course, if you are lucky, you may count on a professional design department, but these are becoming harder to budget for. Fortunately, the apps available on the Internet are making this facet of the job accessible to many of us who lack sophisticated designer skills. Everybody should be expected to contribute.
Measure, measure, measure: and adapt your content strategy accordingly. Don’t obsess about absolute metrics in your measuring process, as different platforms will give you different figures for a number of reasons: focus on trends over time and try to improve your KPIs (key performance indicators, as discussed and approved by your senior management) over time.
There is a lot more to say about content marketing. We will continue the conversation in future posts. For now, please share your ideas and comments with us in the blog.
Au revoir
Jorge Sette.
Salespeople need to become marketers
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.
Exciting times to be a marketer: you are in show business!
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
4 Elements to Consider to Strengthen your Brand
In a scene of MAD MEN (6th season), Don Draper (the protagonist) and his business partners are sitting around a dinner table socializing with clients from General Motors. Libations and jokes are going around, drunken laughter and merry faces are all we see. Then, Don, unexpectedly, brings up the story of the son of one of his friends (whose wife he has been sleeping with, in typical Draper fashion) who has been drafted to Vietnam. Don is hoping GM will volunteer to help get the boy off the hook, through one of the many contacts the huge corporation must have in Washington. The mood at the table changes immediately to gloom and doom. Don’s partners look at him in disbelief: how dare he introduce a note of sadness and discomfort, when the only goal of this meeting is to entertain the clients and keep them happy? Is he trying to jeopardize the future of the account?
Don Draper, Mad Men
This is how business was done in the late 1960s. And today. In a previous post, I mentioned that the campaigns conducted by Madison Avenue marketers as shown in this brilliant TV series would not have much change of succeeding in today’s digital environment. However, one thing remains the same and is not likely to change any time soon: clients are emotional beings and their choices rely much more on feeling and intuition than on reason. Of course, after the choice is made, they will work hard to rationalize it and will possibly come up with a lot of “objective” reasons to justify their decisions. So, the lesson is let’s keep the customer happy.
With this in mind, clever marketers will never stray away from the emotional channel to reach and start a conversation with their prospects, or keep a solid relationship with their loyal base going smoothly. And what are the main tools available to aid marketers reach clients on an emotional level?
1. Storytelling: this is the biggest umbrella word that encompasses the whole tool kit to engage the client, as it resonates strongly with humans on different emotional levels. Your brand needs to describe itself to the customer in a very simple and yet effective way. By using the typical elements of storytelling (which we have discussed in previous posts: http://wp.me/p4gEKJ-F2, and http://wp.me/p4gEKJ-UK), make sure it’s easy for the customers to understand where you are coming from, your journey and quest. If they eventually become advocates of your brand (which is ultimately every marketer’s dream) make it easy for them be able to share your story with everyone in their network.
2. Coherence: this is fundamental to the success of your marketing strategy. The story needs to be coherent in every touch-point with the client. Every contact of the client with your brand should add or reinforce a piece to the bigger picture. Your story should make a solid promise, set up a strong positioning and create a relatable personality that needs to permeate all your communication with customers. This story is supposed to make the customers associate your brand with positive feelings and traits: family values (Disney), coolness (Apple), sophistication (Tiffany), efficiency and innovation (Amazon), usefulness and reliability (Google), high self-esteem and style (Rolex), vigor and energy (Nike), etc. Pick the emotion you want to emphasize through the use of your product/service and stick with it.
3. Colors: these are very important in communicating and generating the right emotion. There are many articles on the Internet that make suggestions and describe how different colors create and stress different moods. Based on the kind of story you choose to tell your customers, be careful matching the colors of your logo, for example, to the positive emotion you are willing to generate. Blue, for example, stands for depth and stability; red for excitement and passion; yellow for happiness and warmth; green for environment-friendly brands, peacefulness and health; black communicates tradition and sophistication.
4. Design: most products are becoming commodities in terms of their functionality and performance. Today it does not really matter, for example, what kind of TV set you buy, they are basically all the same, and equally reliable. That’s where look and feel play an essential part. Your brand needs to integrate the design that fitfully tells your story. This involves your logo, the format of your communication, the choice of your business card and the product itself. Of course, Apple is everyone’s benchmark in this department. Also, keep consistency throughout your collateral, display banners, the layout of your office, your blog and website appearance.
I hope the reader understands that we are not endorsing ways of cheaply manipulating the customers by pressing their buttons. As long as your brand delivers on the promise made, marketers don’t need to feel guilty about trying to entice the client. That’s obviously their job. Besides, just like in a good movie or book – and in storytelling in general – the more subtly emotions are played out, the more effective they are in satisfying today’s increasingly sophisticated audience. Tell a powerful and genuine story, and deliver on your contract: that’s all.
Au revoir
Jorge Sette.
Jorge Sette "Linguagem" 