Category: Blog

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!

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?

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!

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.

 

Empower your team to be creative on social media.While in some situations a centralized social media creator is a good idea, more and more the idea of having members of your team be empowered create seems like a better idea.

While you should have a gate keeper to ensure that all content is appropriate and on message, that does not mean you can’t allow other’s good ideas to surface. One of the things I see when working with different organizations with social media is that a lot of non-marketing employees have really good content ideas. It is a very old school business model to keep people siloed in how they contribute to the business. If a production employee has a good marketing idea they should be allowed to be shared with marketing and given the time of day.

Silos prevent collaboration and collaboration creates amazing results! Communicate to your team that their ideas are valuable and try them every once in a while.

It could be a lot of fun to work with a big brand. In this spot, Budweiser capitalized on a long-suffering franchise winning the world series. They released this video, before sunrise on the morning after the Cubs won.

Let’s just pause and think about that: They took video during the game and had the footage up in a fabulous spot the late late late the same night. This took a lot of planning and execution. This Google case study is a great breakdown of how Vayner Media was prepared to execute on this video.

The video garnered a lot of attention and unless you are a Cardinals or Indians fan, it will warm your heart! What a great brand association! Winning and warm feelings are great things to associate your brand with! Check out the video below and the case study here.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nApTGkLd2hs

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/case-studies/budweiser-world-series-campaign.html?utm_medium=email-d&utm_source=weekly-insight&utm_team=twg-us&utm_campaign=20170116-twg-us-think-letter-weekly-insight-a2-OT-GM-CS&utm_content=Video-img&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTnpVME9EYzBaamhqWlRnMyIsInQiOiJ1ZjZqXC9cL3dvRjRWeUY1czlzcUtYaFhOdmtMWkVkZVdieXFBaHpGRzlqd3VhQjVlSDF3bVhVajVcL3E3K2I4aHgxQmljMmMzNnQ2M0UzKzZFcFRydElLTmFVNWc5eCtkaVlqa3k2QlBCbmdtRXRsR1J2SmdvSEhuOFpSc0xMVUtmOCJ9

This is one great way to create content in our digital age. This video is every bit of a right hook that Gary Vee talks about. This T-Shirt brand creates videos of communities showing support for memebers of their community. The kind of videos that go viral and bring up all the feels. Like this one:

 

What a super cool thing. But Dude Be Nice takes it to the next level and uses it to sell t-shirts! Connecting your brand with these types of feelings is a great move to help the brand grow. What amazing advertising! This video had over 6 million views on Youtube and almost 4 on Facebook.

Additionally you help your purchasers feel like they are apart of a movement. Good feels and a movement? That is a great recipe for a strong brand and strong sales!

What kind of good feelings can you associate your brand with?

 

2017 is getting into full swing and it’s a great time of year to start looking at how we can do things better! One of them is on our social media. Social Media is no longer just for young people or the next big thing, it is the big thing and is the best form of marketing and has been for a few years.

But it does require that you put in the time or hire someone to do it for you (I know a guy). Creating content takes a lot of time so I wanted to share three quick tips that I gleaned from GaryVee.

1. Document and create. Creating is crafting this blog post or filming a new video. Documenting is taking a picture of meetings that are happening or showing what the day to day is like in your business. Documenting doesn’t have to be super polished to have an effect. Gary uses both to build his platform. Documenting on social and with the DailyVee show and creating with his team of creators to pump out fresh content.
2. Repurpose. Creating content takes a lot of effort, so make the best of it. Turn a comment in a video into a blog post, into quote pictures, into a podcast. Ask the question, how can I get every ounce of life out of this content while providing value to my listeners.
3. Just do it. Start now and build it into your schedule. When running your own business, it can be hard to make time to work on the business instead of just in the business. In the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar, “it’s a trap!”.
   via GIPHY

   This will stifle your long-term growth. Investing in creating content is a long term play, but long term plays always pay off more!

   Here are two super valuable articles from Gary on this topic: Content on Content on Content and Document V. Create

 

Burnout is a real thing. It affects people in all walks of life and in all different industries. If you are anything like me, the holidays are such a busy time, I can increase your stress levels and make burnout more likely. I am a big fan of Planet Money and recently they had an episode on burnout and what one call center was doing to curb it. 

If you are an entrepreneur or a leader in your business, you need to be proactive about preventing burnout. How can you do that?

There are some great lessons from the Planet Money podcast but I would lay some out like this:

1. Take breaks. Especially as an entrepreneur it’s hard to take breaks. If you lead a team, make sure they have the opportunity to take breaks without guilt or punishment. I take one day off a week. For me this is Sundays, Sundays I do not do any work (unless it is an emergency). My wife and I take one vacation that does not involve staying at families houses. During that time, I plan ahead to do as little as possible.

   This also means not checking your email all the time! Try and make a good clear distinction between being at work and not at work.

2. Reward Sucess: If you or your team has a win, ie: new contract, big press win, customer loves your work, celebrate it! Go for a nice lunch or dinner, take an afternoon off, or even a bonus/gift. We need to all celebrate success! It will help stave off burnout.
3. Realize failure is real and can destroy morale. Think about ways to help people who have failed. Give them a light load or some easy wins to help them get back on the right track mentally. Take an afternoon off to take focus off the business for a while.

If you get burned out it could spell the end of your business. If your employees get burned out, it could spell the end of customers! Be proactive.

 

Here is a little heartwarming social media win for the holidays. (Hat tip to Lanie Sewell for sharing this with me.)

OskKosh B’gosh hired an agency to get talent for their holiday ad sets. Seems pretty innocuous, right? The Nash family went to audition their child for the part. One of the unique things about the Nash family is that their son, Asher, has down syndrome.

The Nash family found out later that Asher was not selected for the shoot and reportedly was told that the agency was not told to look specifically for children with special needs. Ouch.

A facebook group called, Kids with Down Syndrome, caught wind of this and shared a post talking about Asher’s rejection and it went viral. 120k shares and 104k reactions on Facebook.

Now to be clear and the Nash family pointed this out as well, it was not OshKosh rejecting the child it was the modeling agency. But OshKosh was still probably going to take the brunt of this as well because they are the big name associated with the story.

This shows the power of social media to connect people. In years passed a family would have just had to deal with the rejection and possibly have a small pool of support in their immediate family and community. In the social media era, 120 thousand people who are about this can get together and work for change

What was headed to be a social media loss for OskKosh turned into a win. OskKosh reached out to the Nash family and worked out a deal to feature Asher in their holiday campaigns. How great! They got a second round of press attention for featuring Asher and their post with him on facebook has been at least 5 times as popular as the average post on their page.

 

This is also a win for humanity. Featuring children with conditions like Asher in media like this can help to show the world that Asher is just another kid with a big smile and hopes and dreams. I hope we can see more of his smiling face in future OskKosh campaigns!