Tag: business

Powerful lessons that will help you craft your brand

Branding is powerful.

It associates an array of associations with a commodity. Successful messaging and branding makes it about you, the customer.

An excellent and not-so-excellent example of branding happened during this past year.

Donald Trump understands its power.

Hillary Clinton did not.

The reason.

Trump’s brand messaging was focused solely on “Make America Great make-america-great-againAgain!” a take action phrase first used by the Reagan campaign in 1980. It was simple, memorable and understandable. He messaged his brand in terms folks could easily repeat, remember, take ownership of and lets_make_america_great_againtake pride in. His brand message was of an outsider that was doing it for YOU, America, the country, the underdogs. He branded himself as “for the people.”

Hillary’s overall message? “I’m With Her.”

“Stronger Together and “Love Trumps Hate” were out there as well, but the first message became the focus – and ultimately the brand message.

im-with-herUnless you’re a well-read policy wonk, the benefit of standing with the candidate is unclear. I understand what strategists were thinking. It would be great to brand this as a historic, progressive time and that America is ready for a battle-tested female president. I’m sure it spoke to her base, but it didn’t seem to contribute to growing her audience – to which good branding should aspire.

The problem.

Clinton’s campaign message didn’t appear to be about the people – it seemed to be about the candidate. Branding cannot afford to be myopic.

When brands connect, such as: Nike’s “Just do it,” “Inspiration and Innovation for Every Athlete in the World.”; Coca Cola’s “Taste the feeling!” “Red, White and You.” “I’d like to buy the world a coke…”; and even benefit branding served with humor “Save 15%…” by Geico, they make it about you, the customer, taking you into account, making you the center of the message.

Clinton’s campaign brand wasn’t about you, the country or people, instead placing the candidate at the center of attention. A much better branding approach for Clinton would have been (if we still needed to remind folks she was female), “She Stands for You” or a more generic “A Vote for Her is a Vote for America” style of branding and messaging. The list could go on – just anything but “I’m With Her.” Could you imagine a brand trying to define itself with, “I’m With Brand X” while still in the difficult process of convincing you that they are looking out for your best interests, and therefore your best choice? It’s a tad presumptuous.

The solution.

If you want to get people behind you, you need to make it about them, their choices, their ideologies, and their voice. It’s not about you.

Trump understood that and took it to the finish line. Will your brand?

Want to know more about that website? Use these free tools.

For Free Insights on Digital Market Intelligence

 SimilarWeb is a fantastic digital market intelligence tool. Get an idea of how other websites are doing with a quick traffic overview and similarweb-logosnapshot of any website’s referrals. The free version also inlcudes search, social, display, content, audience, similar sites and mobile apps.

Now, thanks to a heads-up from the folks over at Meltwater, here’s another great tool to discover impressions/reach on a site. It’s called Hypestat. Plug in the website and it pulls the daily/monthly breakdown of Unique visitors, pageviews, Alexa ratings and the value of the site in ad revenue dollars.

Pro tip: For a quick average of reach you might get by placing content on the site. Simply take the number of unique visitors and multiply by 30.

Here’s to numbers!

Social media: Is it time to quit?

Writer and blogger —Cal Newport, an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World— opines in the NY Times that social media can be harmful to your career. What do you think?

Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It.

Graphic by nytimes.com
David Saracino – nytimes.com

 

I’m a millennial computer scientist who also writes books and runs a blog. Demographically speaking I should be a heavy social user, but that is not the case. I’ve never had a social account.

[See also Social Media: Boost Your Career ]

At the moment, this makes me an outlier, but I think many more people should follow my lead and quit these services. There are many issues with social media, from its corrosion of civic life to its cultural shallowness, but the argument I want to make here is more pragmatic: You should quit social media because it can hurt your career.

This claim, of course, runs counter to our current understanding of social media’s role in the professional sphere. We’ve been told that it’s important to tend to your so-called social brand, as this provides you access to opportunities you might otherwise miss and supports the diverse contact network you need to get ahead. Many people in my generation fear that without a social presence, they would be invisible to the job market.

Read the rest of the article here.

For folks wondering about B2B social selling

B2B Social Selling

More and more folks prefer to get information online than engage a salesperson. They search out more objective information from internet recommendations. Three out of four B2B buyers rely on social media to engage with peers about buying decisions. In a recent B2B buyers survey, 53% of the respondents reported that social media plays a role in assessing tools and technologies. AND when making a final selection.

Good time to read up on how B2B social selling works in today’s environment.

How B2B Sales Can Benefit from Social Selling

Outbound B2B sales are becoming less and less effective. In fact, a recent survey found that connecting with a prospect now takes 18 or more phone calls. Callback rates are below 1%, and only 24% of outbound sales emails are ever opened. Meanwhile, 84% of B2B buyers are now starting the purchasing process with a referral. Peer recommendations are now influencing more than 90% of all B2B buying decisions.

[Also read: Business Growth Ideas: Grow Your Business]

Why are more and more buyers avoiding salespeople during the buying process? Sales reps, according to Forrester, tend to prioritize a sales agenda over solving a customer’s problem. If organizations don’t change their outdated thinking and create effective sales models for today’s digital era, Forrester warns that 1 million B2B salespeople will lose their jobs to self-service e-commerce by 2020.

Read the rest of How B2B Sales Can Benefit from Social Selling

Marketing: How to step outside the ‘bubble’

Countless times in marketing strategy meetings, I have heard sentences beginning with and/or containing “I” or “my.”

“I wouldn’t respond to/click on that.”

“My friends and I thought the idea was great.”

“That’s how I would do it/buy/respond.”

Not wanting to invalidate a personal POV, especially from a boss or executive, many stay silent. And then carry out marketing plans according to the leader’s —sometimes personal— experience and wishes. [The ‘marketing’ department is then basically relegated to the role of a Kinko’s store – taking orders and creating collateral].

You can see the problem here.

We’re not marketing and selling to our (I’ll borrow Kissmetrics’ term here) “HiPPOs” (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion), we are attempting to message our customers. They are sometimes two very different things.

[Or Avinash Kaushik coined the term. See also: Digital Marketing Analytics: Avinash Kaushik]

Jamie Oliver’s story about trying to change eating behavior outside his cultural norm is a perfect example. It took some time to get to know the customer. And, of course, so should you.

SO the next time you hear an “I” or “My” in a marketing meeting, try to see if you can’t change the subject to the customer, based on objective research.

Referenced article is Eat Your Peas: A Recipe for Culture Change via Strategy+Business

Photo: First Time Bubble by Serge Melki