One hour. 60 minutes. 3600 seconds. That’s one session at the gym. That is one TV show (with loads of ads). That’s one massage session – and not nearly enough! You can’t really do that much in an hour. Do you sell your time? Whether as a consultant, trainer, masseuse, teacher or whatever. Does it all work out? Do you buy an hour from someone? How much do you get out of that hour?
Blah blah bla bites, blah RAM, blah blah MHz blah… – Talk Like A Human!
What do you mean you don’t get it? Really?! There are actually a lot of people out there who think a lot of other people get it and can’t understand why there are not lots of people lining up to buy from them! :)
A few local IT companies have approached me about their marketing. These are smaller players in the market, offer various IT services and often also sell hardware. Most of these don’t sell a lot to IT specialists. Their main customers are individuals and small and medium sized businesses who don’t have an IT person, or if they have one, they are general IT managers who have a good overview of things, rather than specialists in anything.
The thing about these IT companies is that they are all pretty much the same – well, at least the ones I have checked out. They don’t set themselves apart in any way, and none of them talk like humans about what they can do for their customers. They all seem to get lost in techie jargon. Because they are all the same, and because they all speak tech jibberish, people don’t really care where they buy things. They will buy based on price and the whole market therefore competes on prices – and if people buy because of good service, it is more often than not because they were lucky enough to be serviced by Steve or Johnny or someone who is naturally good at customer service, rather than it being because of the company’s focus on customer service.
There are huge opportunities for differentiation in this market. Speaking [Read more…]
Content Marketing: Creativity and Organisation
I want to talk a bit about the practical stuff around content marketing. Our biggest headache is often how we are going to produce our own content and find what other stuff we can share, for example on social media, which demand quite a lot of activity and can be challenging to keep alive and active.
If you have been following me for some time, whether you have been reading the blog, subscribing to emails or following on social media, you can see that I use content marketing a lot.
The content can take various form, can be presented in various ways and the purpose of the content can be varied. You can have blogs, videos, social media, ebooks, webinars to name a few of the most common. Knowing how best to put the content forward and where best to distribute it is somewhat of an art – but mostly a skill that can be learned. Another thing, which has nothing to do with art and everything to do with being organised, is to set things up in a way that makes it easy to constantly churn out content and keep your visibility without working 24-hours-a-day.
In my company, I am the whole marketing department. Granted, I am on more social media than I would recommend, but that’s simply because I am in the marketing biz and need to know the most common ones and have some experience in using them. However, I recommend that you find the outlet most suited to your business and you yourself, stick to that, and don’t spread yourself too thin. Many people don’t understand how active I can be on social media, producing, finding and sharing content. They stare at me open-mouthed when I tell them I spend about one morning a month and 10 minutes a day maintaining that social media presence, and on the whole I spend perhaps 2-3 hours a week blogging and putting together my weekly emails, which include my blog, but also lots of other goodies for those who have signed up – hey, you should get more for signing up than if you have just spent a little like on Facebook ;)
Want to know the magic formula?
Content Marketing: Don‘t Build Things On Sand
Content marketing can be a very very strong marketing tactic for smaller businesses. It does require time and effort, but not necessarily that much cold hard cash – sometimes no cash at all. What it does require however is that you have already laid a solid foundation.
If you don’t know who you want to appeal to and if you don’t know your viewers or readers, how are you going to make content that appeals to them? How will you know where best to share it with them? How will you know what kind of content they want to see? – do they like text, video, images etc?
Also, you don’t want to only talk about what it is you do, you need to have room to talk about other things that your target group is interested in – otherwise you are just like that annoying guy at the party who can never talk about anything but himself and what he is interested in.
Therefore it is extremely important that you know your target group or groups and know and understand them very well. Oh, and if you have a number of target groups, you need to know what different things appeal to each of them, and how best to deliver the content so that it is effective, but also to make sure that content meant for one group does not negatively affect another group should they come across it. You need to be clear on all of these things for your content to be effective.
You also need to know who you want to be, what you want them to think of you, what feelings you want to evoke with them through your content. Your content is an extremely strong brand builder – but if you don’t know what you want your brand to be then your content can not be effective in building that brand. It can even do more harm than good by muddling your image and causing people to be confused about who you are and what you do. That will never work.
If your content is not consistent, if it does not convey the same overall message and brand, it will never be very effective – and we don’t have the time or the resources to be doing things that are not working as hard for us as we are doing ourselves.
Content Marketing: Give, Give and Give Some More!
My previous blog post on content marketing got a really good reaction. Most people seem to prefer the idea of attracting people than pushing things on to them. Personally, I love this development, because this is what marketing is really about. Anticipating and satisfying people’s needs in such a way that is profitable to you.
Content marketing is also something most of us are already doing, whether we realise it or not. Most of us actually do a lot of it. Do you have a Facebook page? Are you on Twitter? And perhaps on other social media? Do you blog? Have a mailing list? Etc. etc. These are all part of content marketing and I bet you would like to get even more out of your efforts and in a more focused way.