MarketingSherpa Blog

When I was growing up, I remember a phrase my dad would use as a delay tactic on making big ticket purchase decisions that often frustrated my mother.

“I’ll ask the boys at work,“ he would reply.

My dad’s insistence on consulting people he perceived as experts before making a purchase is telling of human behavior – customers prefer to make decisions based on information, not persuasion.

I mention this because a shift to information over persuasion is coming to social media, driven by Facebook’s new Graph Search tool.

The way Graph Search works is simple … it filters our search results by what our friends and neighbors have previously liked and shared with us.

From a business intelligence perspective, the implications of this new function could be far reaching, given Graph Search allows users to formulate their perceptions of goods and services based on reviews from people they know and trust, potentially sidestepping most marketing efforts.

Here’s an example of Graph Search in action using the surroundings of our office here in Jacksonville Beach to put this into further perspective …

With Graph Search, relevance is king

Imagine you’ve just bought a beach cruiser and you’re searching Facebook to find the best spots for fun and entertainment in Jacksonville Beach.

Now, let’s say you search for “fun places to bike in Jacksonville Beach.”

Graph Search will present options your friends or other bicycle enthusiasts in a given geographical proximity have liked and shared.

From a customer’s perspective, this makes total sense.

Would you prefer to sift through a laundry list of options presented at random, or evaluate choices your friends and other biking enthusiasts are recommending?

Read more…

When I was a kid fresh out of high school, I was a little socially awkward. I didn’t exactly understand the various types of social gatherings to which I was invited to, and I consequentially always showed up dressed incorrectly, saying the wrong things and bearing the wrong gifts. We all know the guy who shows up to the baby shower with a bottle of tequila, right?

Unfortunately, a similar situation exists in marketing circles when advertisers crash the proverbial wedding of social media platforms wearing board shorts and flip flops. That metaphor may be a little dense, so follow me…

For all of the analysis currently existing about how to best leverage social networks for marketing success, we actually understand comparatively little about how the various platforms work. Frequently, despite best efforts to the contrary, marketers end up looking like the odd man out simply by taking the wrong platform-specific tones with their campaigns.

Companies simply can’t expect to behave the same at different social functions and receive an overwhelmingly good response. Since we’re on the analogy train today, I’ll try to keep the theme going.

Facebook is a pub crawl

People spend most of their Facebook time interacting with their “friends.” In truth, most of the “friends” with whom we interact with on Facebook are merely acquaintances.

Nevertheless, the environment yields similarities to the dynamics of a pub crawl. Surrounded by acquaintances and, yes, a few old friends, we dive into topics of various levels of seriousness ranging from the patently absurd, to the politically charged before wandering aimlessly from topic to topic for a spell.

We do so without expecting to be inundated with marketing messaging, much the same as we would expect to not be rudely interrupted by an insurance salesman while we were in the middle of telling our best frat house story from college at the local bar.

In order to market effectively on Facebook, you first have to win a seat at the table, or be interesting enough to be the topic of our slightly buzzed conversation.

Twitter is a speed date

You’ve got 140 characters to impress me, so you’d better make it work for you.

I might spend a few extra minutes after the last round of speed dating with a particularly interesting person (company, product, etc.), but if I do, it will be because you have done or said something particularly compelling in your allotted time slot.  Equally as fun as interviewing potential dates, I can wander sneakily around the room to see what other people are saying about me …

“That guy has impeccable taste in clothing,” says one. “He’s stunningly good looking,” says another.

Brands can do the same with Twitter, getting a better idea of how the market is responding to their product offerings. In order to market on Twitter, you have to learn how to answer the question of what you’re into right now, and answer it in a compelling enough fashion for me to care when you’re done talking.

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Game on! There are 120 million people enrolled in travel rewards programs and more than 200 million play reward-based online games, according to Bunchball.

To help you get started with your own gamification app, here are three tips. Since gamification apps are such a new and emerging tactic, we would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section of this MarketingSherpa blog post, as well.

Tip #1: Provide value in game form

For a gamification app to help your content marketing, it should tie into the value your paid products or services offer. All paid products or services do one of two things:

• Help a customer alleviate a pain point
• Help a customer achieve a goal

In content marketing, you translate the value your products have in these two areas into some form of content, like a video or blog post.

With a gamification app, you take that value one step further by making pain point removal or customer goal achievement fun, and add a reward.

There may be many obvious ways to do this if you have a consumer brand. However, B2B marketers often tell me they find it challenging to produce engaging, or dare I say, fun, content.

Let’s take an example. Imagine if you sold manufacturing solutions. To engineers and plant managers. Sounds boring, right?

Well, Siemens turned that combination into an engaging game called Plantville. To learn more about it, and get ideas for your own games, read “Gamification: How Siemens got 23,000 engineers to learn about its brand.”

Read more…

Blogging can be a very effective element of your marketing mix. For example, an online retailer realized a 172% ROI from its blog.

Of course, as with any marketing tactic, just having a blog is not enough. So, if your blog is underperforming, or you haven’t yet begun to invest in this content channel, perhaps it’s time for a tune-up.

Inspired by the come-ons from the local oil and lube joints for “160-point winter readiness car inspections,” here is an eight-point analysis you can conduct to identify areas for improvement – and we all have them, the MarketingSherpa blog is no exception – on your blog.

Point #1: Posting frequency

On many blogs, the frequency and cadence of the blog posts is sporadic. You might see a blog post on Wednesday, then one on Friday, then no posts for a week, then two on Thursday.

An element of effective content is consistency. Let the journalists of the world be your guide here. For example, I have a weekend subscription to my local newspaper, The Florida Times-Union. Every Saturday and Sunday, a newspaper waits for me on my driveway.

If I were to stumble out of my house one Sunday morning – Tony Soprano-style – to find no newspaper waiting, well, I’d start to question the quality of the newspaper. If it just happened once, I would probably not think too big a deal of it. But, if the newspaper was no longer reliably on my driveway on the weekend, I would start to question the reliability of the information in it.

The same goes for your blog.

That said, you have a tough challenge to face as a content marketer, because you can’t sacrifice the quality of your content for a reliable cadence.

To serve both masters – content quality and reliability – you need to set up an editorial calendar you know you can consistently over-deliver on and build up a queue of content. In other words, if you’re writing your blog posts the same day they are posted, then you have a problem. For example, I’m writing this post on February 15.

That queue will wax and wane in size as you become busy with other duties, but it is your insurance and buffer against missing a scheduled deadline. You can still add some real-time posts to take advantage of general news or changes in your industry. Just make sure you have plenty of high-quality, evergreen posts in your queue to comfortably meet every date you are promising to your readers.

Point #2: Content value

“We know you have a choice of airlines when you fly, and we want to thank you for flying with us.”

While this has become less true of the airline industry after the American Airlines and US Airways merger, it is more true every day in the blogosphere, especially in hyper-competitive industries that have a lot of quality content marketing such as information technology and marketing.

Sure, you could publish only self-promotional posts. But why would anyone read them? Or share them?

When writing every post, you must ask yourself the central value proposition question – If I am a [particular prospect, e.g., IT manager], why should I [read this blog post] rather than [get information from any other source, anything from an industry magazine to a competitor’s blog]?

The end results of every blog post must be to serve your audience. So, focus on value as your top objective – it is more important than length, promotions or frequency.

  Read more…

When your customer uses your product to sell a service, helping that customer sell their service provides both a co-marketing opportunity and a way to offer an additional level of customer service.

Toshiba America Medical Systems’ customers are medical imaging centers buying large medical devices such as MRI, CT and ultrasound scanners, and use those products to provide medical services.

Toshiba combines a co-marketing opportunity with a customer service element through Image Maker, an online portal. With this program, the team provides Toshiba Medical customers with some basic marketing advice along with a wide range of marketing materials – brochures, press releases, videos and more – for each of the company’s main product areas:

• Cardiovascular x-ray
• Computed tomography
• Magnetic resonance
• Ultrasound
• X-ray

These products are expensive, ranging from $50,000 for an ultrasound system to more than $1 million for a MR scanner.

I had the opportunity to interview Catherine Wolfe, Senior Director of Corporate and Strategic Communications, Toshiba America Medical Systems, for more details about the Image Maker portal.

Why create this online resource for marketing materials?

Catherine said Image Maker was created for two basic reasons – increase customer satisfaction, and brand building as a co-marketing program.

“The issue for our customers is how can they get information that helps them differentiate themselves in their particular market about the equipment and the benefits that it provides,” Catherine explained.

She added, “The other issue for us is how can we build our brand to the greatest extent possible, and by providing this added support to our customers, we are able to get our message out there to a much greater extent than we would otherwise be able to.”

Who is the marketing material for?

The marketing material found on the Image Maker is extensive enough a Toshiba Medical customer with limited staff or time could easily pull the creative pieces,  review some marketing advice and execute campaigns.

At the same time, Catherine said many of Toshiba Medical’s customers do have marketing staff and the material helps those marketers with ready-made art and messaging.

The online resource also alleviates a particular pain point for marketers in the healthcare industry.

Catherine explained, “The healthcare industry overall— it’s more difficult. Costs are being constrained more and more. Marketing tends to be one of those budgets that gets cut, so we are able to step in and help folks that may have experienced that.”

Beyond the actual materials and other online resources, the marketing team at Toshiba Medical has a dedicated staff member who provides support directly to its customers with marketing recommendations based on other customer’s experiences on meeting various marketing challenges.

What is in the resource center?

Catherine outlined some of different types of marketing content in the Image Maker portal:

• The most basic includes press releases or letters for referring physicians to help with local marketing
• Radio spots
• Videos for embedding on websites or even for broadcast advertising
• Brochures and promotional material

She added the brochures have areas where the marketer can customize the material by adding their own branding and information.

Read more…

In the MarketingSherpa Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, we asked marketers about their challenges …

Q: Which barriers exist to overcoming your organization’s top challenges?

The MarketingSherpa community members shared their insights based on this data, which I hope you find helpful …

Challenge #1: Mobile site or mobile app?

“Strategy and staffing are (not surprising) linked. The resources required to fund a well-researched and well-structured mobile marketing strategy – or even a mobile strategy at large to address the primary question: mobile site or mobile app – are the very same resources necessary to staff such an initiative,” said Aaron Orendorff, Copywriter, Content Strategist & Project Manager, CREO Agency.

Read more…

In the MarketingSherpa Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, we asked marketers about their local mobile marketing efforts …

Q: What percentage of customers/prospects interact with your organization’s LOCAL mobile marketing tactics?

While marketers who do track these numbers saw some very impressive results (about a quarter of marketers finding that more than half of their customers engage with social check-in, opt in to geo-fencing communications, and redeem mobile coupons), the biggest surprise is the number of marketers who simply don’t know.

“The fact that the research suggests 50% don’t know how effective they are is evidence that although mobile consumption is increasing and marketers are increasingly adopting it as a marketing channel, analytics and measurement have still yet to catch up,” said Grant Osborne, head of agency, FIRST. “I believe tracking and analysis of mobile (both mobile Web and apps) will be a great source of gaining competitive advantage in this space this year.”

  Read more…

Content marketing, at its essence, is really just a connection. It’s linking those who know something (subject matter experts) with those who want to know it.

This can be a struggle for some marketers who are trying to generate content, especially in complex fields like healthcare IT or power engineering.

That’s why the subject matter expert is so valuable. The vaunted SME (pronounced “Smee.”) Much more knowledgeable than Captain Hook’s right-hand man, but sometimes as ornery as the ol’ captain himself.

To win him or her over, it helps to immerse yourself in the industry to a level that you have their respect.

But to create quality content, it helps to ask the right questions to get that subject matter expert going. Once you tap the keg of passion in a SME, the party about topics important to the egg industry or Sarbanes-Oxley just never ends.

So, to help you generate content for your blogs, videos, email newsletters, podcasts, whitepapers, and the like, here are five general questions that have helped me throughout my career, as I’ve interviewed SMEs to create content.

  Read more…

“Should we have a blog? What about YouTube videos? Pinterest? Instagram?”

When engaging in content marketing, the question of “where?” always comes up. If you’re just getting started, you want to know on which channels you should focus your content.

If you’re already deeply engaged in content marketing, you likely want to reevaluate the channels you’ve been using at regular intervals as shiny new channels emerge and old channels diminish. (Social networks, like old soldiers, never die; they just fade away.)

To that end, here is a process for evaluating content channels. I’d love to hear your input, as well.

  Read more…

It’s always fascinating to dig into research on the world of marketing. While recently looking over the MarketingSherpa 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, I found this chart:

Fast loading mobile pages should certainly be a priority, but one finding in this chart disappointed me. Look way down, close to the bottom, and see where only 11% of surveyed B2B marketers reported planning on using dynamically personalized mobile content to improve relevance and engagement.

I think this is a great oversight on the part of marketers active in the mobile marketing channel.

When someone interacts with your mobile website — or your regular website — on a mobile device, that engagement is almost certainly going to be a more intimate experience than someone viewing on a laptop or ultrabook, and certainly more so than on a desktop.

And, that person is very possibly interacting with your content in a more personal space than a dedicated work area or desk.

For B2B marketers, that means you are potentially reaching that person away from a traditional business setting.

Additionally, consumer marketers must consider the possibility that the mobile customer might even be actively shopping and engaging in showrooming, where they are in a brick-and-mortar store and looking at price or feature comparisons.

  Read more…