Know, Like, Trust: Know

One of the most basic concepts of marketing is getting people to know, like, and trust you. Over the next few weeks we will be looking at each step in this process.

Know.

To get people to know you, you have to make people aware of you. This looks wildly different depending on what your business sells. If you are a business to business company you have the advantage of having a very narrow group of people to speak to. If you are a business to consumer brand you have the challenge of having a much larger customer base to speak to.

If you are an online business, you have a huge population to reach out too, but you get the advantage of being able to use extremely trackable marketing. If you are a local business you have to a put a lot more legwork in.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when working on the Know portion:

  1. Who is my audience? Work through narrowing your group down to as small of a group of potential customers as possible. This will allow you to focus your time and money on that smaller group of people. Why talk to everyone when you need to talk to males 25-35 in 20 miles of your location.
  2. What is the most affordable way to communicate with that target audience? I default to social media. But for my business, which is business to business, it is largely through word of mouth. So the follow-up question is, who do you build word of mouth? Become valuable to people. This will quickly lead you through becoming liked and trusted.
  3. How many times do you need to reach these people to make them familiar with your name? Old school marketers have suggests 7 times. This can be completed through very technical means of retargeting to make sure that your digital visitors have an opportunity to remember you! If you need to have boots on the ground commit to going to a set of networking events for a long period of time. This will help you get known.

Getting know is probably the most expensive portion of this process. Loading people into the funnel is intensive but you can’t create new business without loading the funnel. Next week we will look at getting people to “like” you!

Client Spotlight: Don Polley and Associates

I recently finished a project for a startup Don Polley and Associates. The elements of the project were:

Branding, Website, Print Materials, Headshots, Videography, And a book!

I really enjoyed this project because I was able to use the width of my skillset to deliver for this client!

Don Polley was starting a business that needed to communicate professionalism to Human Resource managers and their leadership across industries. We started off with a brand that would help convey that Don was there to build bridges across the generational divide.

 

We followed that up with printed material to help distribute to a potentially older demographic and something he could leave with potential customers. See the flyer (front and back) and the business card (front and back).

Don needed some professional photography to help make sure he looked professional to his potential clients.

We also wanted to make sure the brand was up to snuff with the digital age because Don works with Millenials. We created a responsive website that featured a blog where Don can demonstrate his knowledge.

Don also saw video as an important part of marketing in 2017. So we created a short video of him explaining what the business was all about:

We also published an autobiography of Don’s and got it placed on Amazon. 

This was a great project and Don was an exceptional client. I have worked with few clients that defer to expertise as quickly and graciously. If you need help building a relationship with Millenials in your workplace, Don is the guy to talk to!

My favorite Gmail Things for Business

I was asked the other day about what are some of my favorite Gmail things for business. Many of these are enabled in the Labs settings of Gmail. Here is a list:

  1. Undo Send: Here there even been a better email tool? Probably two times a day, I need to hit “undo send” at the top of my Gmail. This feature from Labs allows me to prevent an email from sending for a few seconds after I hit send. This helps calm my nerves when sending an important email or quickly fix something that flashes through my brain as I hit send.
  2. Hubspot Email Tracker: This is not a Google Product, but HubSpot has a great sales tool that acts like a modern read receipt. I use this when I am sending important email or email to people who I am not sure that open them. This ends up giving you date, time, frequency, and even location of the opening of the emails. Check it out here.  PROTIP: Only send these tracked email to one person at a time or the tracking gets difficult to interpret.
  3. Send Later: This is another product from a third party. Boomerang allows me to schedule emails to go, which I tend to use a few times a week. Maybe its reminders for a meeting or an email I type out super late in the evening or on the weekend and I want to be recieved in normal business hours. I occasionly even use it for emails that I don’t want ot deal with the consequences of at the time but am reminded to write it.
  4. Canned Responses: These allow me to generate form emails and load them with two clicks. I use this for requests to come on my podcast or if I am doing some sort of repetitve emailing. It takes a few times to get use to the method of how it works so practice with it first.
  5. Mark as Read Button: I am a digital horder, so I do not usually delete emails. But I love the mark as read button because it allows me to group remove email from my inbox. My inbox also acts as a to do list in someways to this helps keep it clean.
  6. Unread message icon: Many times I have two many tabs open in my browser and I am unable to see the new email count in the page description. This feature ads a small counter to the Gmail Icon in the browser. Helps me stay on top of things!
  7. Filters and Labels: I use these for various things but one particular use is in client work. I use several tools to generate leads for my customers that I want to keep a record of but I do not want to read them. So I am cc’ed on all the emails coming in from those sources. I use filters and labels to mark them as read and move them to a specific inbox. This saves me lots of time!
  8. Grammarly: This is another third party program that helps me with spelling and even grammar. They have a free service and a paid version. I am currently on the free version but I am super impressed with its ability to improve my writing!

What are some of your favorite Gmail hacks?

Social Media Win: Is this thing live?

My social media win at the Super Bowl this year was an ad that appeared to be live! Not, snickers, it didn’t really deliver as much as I was hoping for but A for effort.


Tide, of all brands came up with the most brilliant play on Super Bowl Sunday! Tide had an intricate plan that involved a ridiculous amount of conspiracy between the production company, fox, and the NFL.


The team created a fake set and pretend to have Terry and Curt talking as if Fox had accidently cut to them during the game. During this shot, Terry had a giant stain on his shirt. They did this so it blended just right with the actual production so people thought Terry was just doing a segment with a stain on his shirt. Which is completely believable with Terry Bradshaw.

They followed the ‘accidental’ setup with a full commercial above capitalizing on it.

Here is a great breakdown by AdAge.

What a genius plan and execution!

Social Media Win: Heinz

Smunday.

It is a new thing hopefully coming to a work-place near you! This idea is coming from Heinz Ketchup as an ad strategy for the Super Bowl. Instead of telling you about their latest product, they are associating themselves with a fun idea, like not having to work on the day after the Super Bowl.

Here are reasons I like this:

  1. They are putting their money where there mouth is. Heinz reportedly gave their employees the day off on Smunday, which is really taking their ad campaign to the next level. This also helped them win the day on social as well, giving them the credibility and probably introducing a new word into our social vocabulary.
  2. They got people to act. They funneled interest in this campaign to a Change.org petition where, at time of writing, they garnered 64k signatures.
  3. It was a soft sell with humor. The video has gained more than half a million view on Youtube (it was also embedded on their change.org page) and several hundred thousand on Facebook as well. The video features a family(?) of Heinz products celebrating Smunday together.

Click here to sign the petition.