Edge Craft

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I just finished reading, Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin. One of the best thoughts in the book was something along these lines:

[bctt tweet=”If you are going to build a car, don’t build a faster car, build the fastest car.”] If your restaurant is going to use their attractive waitstaff as a marketing tool, get super models or twins. Find the edge of what can be done and that makes you unique.

-Seth Godin

My edge craft is providing all the marketing services a small business needs in one place and at an affordable rate.

What is the edge you are crafting on?

 

 

#freemarketingidea

From the Clinton Presidential Library when Renae and I visited in Summer 15.
From the Clinton Presidential Library when Renae and I visited in Summer 15.

 

Do you give anything away for free?

Maybe it’s a free upgrade to an order, maybe it’s a free white paper, maybe its a free consultation.

Why would you do that?

Free is the opportunity to create a reciprocal relationship. Free could be the chance to prove yourself.

So what could you give away for free? Probably something you have in abundance. The reason a lot of restaurants give away free drinks, is because they have a huge amount of syrup on hand and it costs them very little. But at the same time their profit margins on the drinks are huge. But if it leads to a purchase of a burger or pizza, they come out ahead. It also gives them a chance to make you a fan!

I have an over abundance of ideas. While in the gym the other day, I saw a commercial for CopperFit Compression products. It had Brett Farve playing flag football with the compression product. My brain immediately thought, what an amazing campaign idea: take submissions of people using CopperFit products to win a chance to play flag football with Brett Farve! So I tweeted it to them.

No one responded. I didnt expect them to. It didn’t cost me anything to tweet it and I didn’t lose anything by sharing that idea. But the upside could be huge. What if someone from Copper fit saw it and thought, “Hey, I like that idea!” and gave me a call. What if someone else say that idea and thought, “That guy has a great idea, I wonder what he could do for my brand.”.

It could lead to future business. Ideas are worthless if you do nothing with them. I am going to start sharing more of mine with #freemarketingidea.

Social Media Win or Fail: Lagavulin Scotch

This month on Social Media Win or Fail: Lagavulin Scotch

This was a huge win for Lagavulin Scotch:

Why was this a win?

  1. It was a low budget ad that has easily garnered 2 million views in the first week of it being posted online.
  2. I counted well over 15 major news outlets that did a story on the video. (FREE PRESS!)
  3. It capitalizes on Nick Offerman’s character from Parks and Rec Ron Swanson’s love for this brand of Whiskey. This brings in two audiences: Nick Offerman fans, and Parks and Rec fans. Brilliant cross reach.
  4. People will probably play this in their homes, on their computers and tvs, during the holiday season. People will willing play this AD in their homes for fun this holiday.
  5. Because of the way its shared, there is no cost in hosting. Only production costs here. Zero cost in distribution.

What an amazing win for this smaller brand of scotch!

Are you making videos yet?

If not, why not?

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Video is the hottest thing in marketing right now! This chart from Marketing Charts shows that most marketers put video at the top of the most effective content types!

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Video is the new standard of content for engagement. Don’t have a sweet video setup? Start with your smart phone. Smart phones these days take great video! One of the most important things is to just start!

Video is here to stay, so the question is: Are you making plans to make the best of it?

 

Good Experiences spread!

We have all heard it said that the best marketing is word of mouth. From a marketing perspective, it is the absolute best way to do marketing. But how do you create good word of mouth?

The best way is to deliver great customer experiences every time someone comes in. Some of the biggest setbacks in restaurants I have seen is when the staff had an off night. The effects of that can be felt for weeks. Bad word of mouth spreads.

In this new chart from MarketingCharts, we see what people want to do when they have a good experience. Most everyone will tell friends and family. That is why I put an emphasis on working on the entire organization, holistic marketing, rather than just buying a billboard! Lets work towards making start raving fans!

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Social Media #Win or #Fail: Gillette

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This month in social media #win or #fail: Gillette Razors. I am classifying it is as a #FAIL (But Gillette if you are reading this and would like to discuss why its not, please send me a tweet @k_adelsberger)

(Also full disclosure, I have a beard and very rarely use my Schick razor to trim up my beard.)

It all started one October morning, I opened up twitter and saw a promoted tweet from Gillette Razors. But it was not Gillette’s tweet it is was someone else’s: IMG_2595

 

The tweet from @jlkirbee was a really interesting. It read like ad copy but seemed to be posted from a real person. Here are a few quick take aways from this attempt at capitalizing on someones social media comments:

 

  1. Not written like a real person. It looks as if @jlkirbee is a real person. Active on Twitter, Medium and Facebook. Although Bas Collective does not have an online presence(I did send a request to interview him for this post but he did not respond). I am a big fan of testimonials for marketing. However, the tweet above is written like it was copy from a marketing person for a print ad.
    I think where the ad went astray was the shot at Harry’s and the “#power in #research”. These two lines cross over from customer preference to marketing effort. Now of course, @jlkirbee could have written this himself, but it looks like something written by Gillette. This make it appear to cross a line that the internet holds dear: honesty. Because of the way this tweet was worded and subsequently promoted by Gillette makes it appear to be fake. The internet responded in kind.
  2. IMG_2598 Gillette took it to far. Gillette reached out thanked @jilkirbee for the tweet. This was good social media marketing, respond and endorsing your customers. But when the tweet started to be sponsored on 10/9, the push back was palpable. People started taking shots at @jilkirbee and Gillette:
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3. Gillette opened itself up to competition. In fact Gillette exposed one of its customers up to a competitor because they promoted a tweet that featured them.

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Gillette took a sound idea for a strategy and failed on the execution. The strategy: find customers who like us enough to talk about us on social media and then leverage social media to promote that post. I think they took a misstep with the post that they promoted. I think the real winner here was Harry’s. The Harry’s customers came out and supported the brand and ultimately used the attack in their favor.

Harry’s was listening and replied to at least one of the tweets. Harry’s is doing smart online marketing with sponsoring podcasts and providing a product that is bringing real disruption to the market.

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A pound of cure in a bad customer experience (Pt. 2)

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In a pervious post I looked at what an Ounce of Prevention might look like in preventing a bad customer experience. (You can read it here).

Now lets talk about what to do when a bad customer experience happens.

  1. Do Not Take It Personally:
    I know a few small business owners who take a customer responding badly to their product or service after a failure really personally. When someone takes personally a bad review or a customer expressing their bad experience it can interrupt their logical thought process in trying to make amends.
    It is vital to remain emotionally distant from the situation so that you can respond in the proper way. Responding from an emotional position can end up escalating the situations and it will end up being more damaging to the brand. This also involves giving the customer the benefit of the doubt and not assuming they are just out to try and damage your business.
  2. Listen:
    Listen to what the customer is saying when they have a complaint to share. This is an opportunity to 1. Show empathy and 2. make a customer into a stark raving fan!
    Think about it! You have a customer who cares enough about their experience to tell you about how to make it better. There are those who are just out to try and get something for free but we should use this as a chance to become better.
  3. Finally customer may be entitled to some renumeration. If someone’s order was messed up, your product failed, or your service fell well below expectations you may need to reimburse the customer in someway. This is one step that can really make the client feel valued and could prevent you from losing a customer to getting at least one more chance to prove yourself to them.

If they comment on social media and the comment is legitimate, do not delete their post! Respond with kindness and an offer to rectify the situation. People will notice the response and generally reward you for it.

 

If you take this fail and do your best to turn it into a win a customer might end up having a great experience and you know what happens when a customer has a great experience? They tell people!

 

Everyday we have a chance to win and make stark raving fans. Make it count with every customer!

 

How we got 7k organic reach…over night.

Great content is the king of the internet. But by defining it as great means that it is rare. Do not expect to make great content everyday but be ready to take advantage when you do.

Making great content is hard to do and it can be even more difficult depending on your industry. This video started with an amazing story and we put the time into make it a professional production to create a huge PR coup for a small non-profit. Madison County CASA is a charity that I support and I was recently hired through a grant to create a new website and video for them.

Lets take a look at a breakdown of the stats:

The video did really well initially on its own. The organic reach was great! People were sharing, liking, and commenting organically. The key was amazing content that gets people emotionally invested. Screen Shot 2015-10-19 at 11.03.26 AMIn the first 24 hours the organic reach went up to 7,721! What amazing reach for a Facebook page with only 647 fans(before the video was posted). When I felt like the organic reach was starting to come off its highest point, I activated a $25 boost to fans and friends of fans of the CASA page.  As you can see below, as the organic reach dropped I used the boost to help increase its reach to the community.

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The result were 16,838 total reach with 6,753 of those being paid. Thats amazing! The difference: amazing content people wanted to see! Screen Shot 2015-10-19 at 11.00.29 AM

Now lets dig into the video statistics. Of that 16,838 people who saw the post there were 7,052 people who watched the video. 17% of those reached with the post watched some of the video. Now we can see through the audience retention panel that very few made it very far into the video. But the vast majority that made it 45 seconds in, made it to the end of the video. 7.15% of the 7,052 people who watched it at all is: 504. 504 people watched the entire video!

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Now in our context, the video was nearly 6 minutes long. It was a time investment for our audience to watch. This video was designed more for presentations than social media viewing. The story was too long to fit into an ideal :30-1:30 video. I feel like the 504 is a great number for completing the video.

We can also learn from the Facebook stats that the average watch time was 42 seconds. I also know that that if they made it 1 minute in, almost all of those watchers made it the rest of the way through the video.

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What other measurable things did we get? The page gained 32 new likes and the post had 418 likes in total. 101 on the pages post and 317 on the shares of the original post. This is an impressive number. There were also 63 shares. People loved the content. The content is king!

All of these measurable point to a marketing win for a small nonprofit that just had the chance to get in front of 16,800 people for a very small amount of money!

 

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An ounce of prevention in customer experience!

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(This blog post is predicated on the understanding that you or your business will fail at delivering a product or customer service occasionally. If you do not think this statement is applicable to your business, then this post will not be helpful! Here is a link that will help.).

[bctt tweet=”Let’s start by saying that sometimes you cant recover from a bad customer experience.”] Sometimes people will not like you enough to give you a second chance. That is their right and you probably shouldn’t hold it against them.

With that in mind we have two areas of work in dealing with a bad customer expereince. Preventative Care and the Aftermath. This blog post is about the preventative steps to take to help prevent a bad customer experience. Next week we will look at dealing with the aftermath of a bad customer experience.

The wise Benjamin Franklin once said, ” An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” This is absolutely true in the case of customer experience. What does that ounce of prevention look like for customer experiences?

Culture:

Culture is the way of life in your organization. How you should handle customers is part of the culture. It is something observed by employees everyday and it is up to the leaders in the organization to set the tone and the expectations. If the owner has the habit of taking criticism personally it will pour over into the other employees and hurt their customer service.

The culture of your organization needs to value the customer. I am reminded of a small family owned grocery I used to work at in Illinois. Customer service was one of the primary values of the store even though it was not on the wall. Everyone know that it was important to the organization because the owner exhibited it daily. What example are you setting for your organization?

Are you reward those who take care of their customers well? Are you encouraging good customer service behavior?

Training:

Are you setting up your employees to win with the right training? If you are having regular customer service failings or bad quality products then probably not. Evaluate your training regularly. Think about the goals you have for an employee and then consider how your training can bring out those qualities. Training is more than knowing how to put the widget in the box! Training should help us to know why we put the widget in the box and how to treat the person buying the widget.

Do not assume that your employees know how to treat the customers. Spell it out explicitly so there is not miscommunication. A Failure to Communicate helps no one. It is your responsibility as the owner to communicate clearly to the employees.

Expectations:

Think through the expectations you are setting as the business, not for your employees but for the customer. What tone are you setting when they come in? Are you accurately portraying your business in your marketing? Setting the tone for a expensive steakhouse when you serve cheap fried chicken is setting your customer up to have a bad experience.

Are you properly branding yourself?

Have your customers been confused on a regular basis about your pricing or where to go when they enter the business? Do not expect the public to learn over time! Remove as many roadblocks to a great customer experience as possible! Put in new signage, re-due the pricing structure, move the customer check-in to make their experience easier. Failure to change is not their fault but yours!

 

Let us all work to give our customers the best experience. A small cost in time and money now will pay off huge in the long run!

 

Social Media Fail: Facebook Privacy Hoax

This months social media fail comes from a hoax that circulated recently. A rash of posts starting coming across my news feed last week. The posts people were sharing were pretty much a copy of this:

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There were also a few variations with different news entities mentioned and different dates. But regardless of what you post, it would not over ride the Terms and Agreements we all click on when we sign up for social media. Your information is used to help make Facebook Money. That is why you are able to use Facebook for free!

While you retain rights to own your content Facebook retains the right to use it. This is usually show in things like your profile picture being used in advertisements, “Like this page because John Doe does” with a profile picture.

John Oliver did a great piece on this on his show last week. (*Just as a warning there is some language*)