MackCollier.com

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The One Thing I Hate About Content Creation

Content CreationThe one thing I hate about content creation is writing about the same topic over and over again.

I hate doing this. When I do, it always feels like I am being lazy or repeating myself. I mean, I covered this same topic back in 2011, why revisit it?

As it turns out, there’s actually several good reasons to create content around the same topic, more than once. So if you are like me, and it gives you the willies to create content about the same topic over and over again, strap in and let’s talk about why this is actually a good idea.

Why you should be creating content about the same topics over and over again

1 – Your audience changes. I’ve been blogging since 2005, across three different sites. The audience I wrote for at each site was vastly different. I’ve now been blogging here for over 12 years.  The people I am writing for today are vastly different than the readers I wrote for back in 2009. It makes complete sense to cover the same topics repeatedly because there are constantly new eyeballs on your content.

2 – Your expertise changes. I look back at a lot of the content I created back in 2005-2007 and realize now that I had no earthly idea what I was talking about. I certainly thought I did, but over the years I got to work with many companies and clients and put what was theory, into practice. My skills improved and grew, and as such the point of view I had for the work changed as well. I could go from presenting other people’s case studies to illustrate a point, to referencing the work I had personally done with clients. My knowledge and understanding of the topics greatly improved, and as a result it makes sense to revisit those topics to add what I have learned.

3 – You have better examples. Tying in with the previous point, as your expertise grows, your ability to illustrate concepts and ideas does as well. You become aware of better examples either through your own growing experience, or simply by being exposed to new case studies.

For instance, when I first started blogging, I often wrote about the value of using influencers on-site to drive interest in a conference or event. After a few years of experience working with companies such as Adobe as an influencer to promote their events, I could then point readers toward the results from that work. This resulted in my being able to create better content, and back up the concepts with real-world results.

4 – It helps your SEO. Yes, writing for search engines still matters. Depending on your blog, anywhere from 30-80% of your traffic comes from search engines. Those are numbers that are simply too big to ignore. By consistently creating content around certain topics, you are telling those search engines what the focus of your blog is. That makes it more likely that the content you create for those topics will place higher in search results, leading to more traffic from search engines.

The plugin I use for my blog to help me rank higher in search results is Yoast SEO. I cannot recommend it enough.

5 – It helps readers understand what the focus of your content is. It’s important to write for search engines, but it’s even more important to write for your readers. Consistently writing about the same topics helps readers understand where your focus is. Once they know what topics you write about, they can help tell their friends and colleagues about you as well.

So it’s vital to think about, from a strategic standpoint, the key topics you want to focus on. This will be the 3-5 topics that you want to be known for. I call these Topic Buckets. I pick 3-5 Topic Buckets that will be the main focus of the content I create here. This helps me focus my content. Additionally, this makes it easier for others to understand what the main topics are that I cover here.

 

There’s five reasons why it pays to focus your content creation efforts on the same topics, over and over again. Pick 3-5 Topic Buckets, then consistently create content that fits into one of those Topic Buckets. This will not only help drive more search traffic to your blog, but it will drive more direct and referral traffic as your readers better understand the focus of your writing.

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How Do You Create a Content Strategy For a B2C Company?

I am an introvert, and introverts tend to want order and structure in their lives. So it shouldn’t surprise you that I love helping companies develop content strategies.

A strategy is simply a plan of action for achieving a desired outcome. Strategies are important, because they help you focus your time and attention. In business, time is money. So the more time spent on executing your strategy, the more productive and profitable your business will be.

What is a content strategy?

Let’s back up and make sure everyone understands what we mean by strategy, because it can get confusing. As I said earlier, a strategy is simply a plan of action for achieving a desired outcome.

What’s the strategy for a football team? The desired outcome is to win the game. So the strategy would be to create a plan that would allow the team to win the game. Makes sense, right?

So the head coach, would work with his offensive, defensive and special teams coordinators to come up with a strategy for winning the game. This would be similar to how a CEO might work with his CMO, CIO, CTO and CFO to create a business strategy. There will be a strategy for the offense, another for the defense, and one for the special teams. But these three strategies will all support the larger strategy for the team; Winning the football game. Each different area of the team will play its part in supporting that larger strategy and achieving the desired outcome of winning the game.

A content strategy is a plan that uses the creation, development and management of content as a tactic to support your larger business goals. Notice I used the word ‘tactic’ to describe content. Many people get confused about the terms strategy and tactics. Tactics are what you use to execute a strategy.

Going back to the football example above, our strategy is to win the game. Running the ball could be a tactic we use to execute that strategy. We could also have a running strategy. Maybe our strategy is to run between the tackles to avoid the speed rush of the ends on defense. Likewise, content can be a tactic we use to execute a larger business strategy, but we can still have a content strategy that guides how we use that tactic.

Why have a content strategy?

Confession time, I stole a lot of Andy Crestodina’s ideas for structuring and writing this blog post from this article of his. I used his ideas while writing this post, and it greatly helped me clarify my thinking and bring order to the chaos of creating this post.

Why did it make writing this post easier? Because Andy’s advice helped me better organize the writing of the post. It made the process more efficient because it helped me focus on the desired outcome from the post.

This is why strategies are so important, they focus your actions on the desired outcome. When you have a strategy in place guiding your efforts, you accomplish more, in less time.

By creating a content strategy, you focus your content efforts only on the areas that are relevant to your desired outcomes. Think of all the places where you could create content. Your blog, Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, Facebook, Clubhouse. So many other options, it can be incredibly overwhelming!

A content strategy helps you narrow your content creation focus to only the tools and channels necessary to achieve your business’ desired outcomes. This saves your business time, money, and it saves your content team an awful lot of stress!

How do you create a B2C content strategy?

The first consideration when creating a content strategy for your B2C company is figuring out your desired outcomes. There are two considerations you want to address with your content strategy:

1 – Who are you trying to reach with your content?

2 – What action do you want them to take?

 

Before we dig into answering those two questions, let’s back up for a minute and talk about content, especially digital content. Digital content has strengths and weaknesses when it comes to helping a business reach its goals.

In general, digital content can do a wonderful job of helping your company build awareness. On the other hand, digital content doesn’t perform as well at closing sales.

Considering both of these factors, you want to focus on creating a content strategy for your B2C company that enters potential customers into the top of your sales funnel, and pushes them to the middle. Let’s think about this in terms of the Buyer’s Journey:

Content Strategy

As mentioned earlier, digital content does a great job of building awareness. So your content strategy should focus on building awareness and making your target audience slightly aware of who your company is, and how your products and services can fit into their lives. If your B2C sells relatively inexpensive items, then once your content has moved a customer to the slightly aware stage, they can usually complete the purchase on their own. If your products are relatively inexpensive, that leads to little or no time spend on the research stage (Interested) and the customer can typically go close the sale themselves.

For more expensive items, let’s say a new car, your customer will want to do further research before completing the sale, in most cases. So for more expensive products, a good content strategy could target customers who are Unaware, move them to Slightly Aware, then when they become Interested, they could move to your website or interact directly with your company to get more detailed information on the products you sell.

Either way, a successful content strategy for most B2C companies focuses on building awareness with new customers, and helping them understand how the products and services your company sells can fit into their daily lives.

How is a B2C content strategy different?

Since most B2C content strategies focus on building awareness, that means creating content that focuses on the customer. In fact, when you are creating content to gain the awareness of customers, that content should focus almost entirely on the customer. Content that focuses on the customer is interesting and more relatable to the customer. This helps gain the customer’s attention, and that encourages them to learn more about your company.

It’s important to note that when you are creating content to build awareness, do NOT sell to the customer. Selling to a customer who is unaware of what your company sells, is a complete disconnect for the customer. So the content strategy is to gain the awareness of the customer, help them understand how your products fit into their lives, then once they are interested, you can create content that sells. Most companies want to create content that sells to the customer as soon as they enter the sales funnel, instead of selling to them at the bottom of the funnel, when the customer is interested in buying.

Another element of your content strategy that’s particularly important for a B2C company is to focus on storytelling. You want to create content that paints a story for the customer, where the customer can either see themselves as the main character, or they can see themselves playing a key role in the story’s development.

A classic example of creating compelling storytelling with content came from B2C brand Whole Foods in 2018. Whole Foods deleted all its Instagram posts, unfollowed everyone it was following, then posted a blank image. This immediately led to speculation over what had happened to Whole Foods’ Instagram feed. People believed that Whole Foods’ IG account had been hacked. Then, slowly, the brand began to follow a few celebrities who in some way had an attachment to the letter ‘B’ or the word Bee.

Finally, Whole Foods posted this update on Instagram:

The brand was using storytelling in its content to raise awareness of what would happen if there were no more honey bees. Whole Foods showed us some of the delicious foods we all love, that would no longer be available without pollination from honey bees. It was compelling storytelling that raised awareness of an issue that was relevant to the Whole Foods brand. In the process, it helped people understand how all parts of nature are related, and to also appreciate the quality of the foods that Whole Foods sells.

What if my content strategy isn’t working?

There will come a time in the life of every content strategy when you ask ‘What’s going on here?” For whatever reason, you aren’t seeing the results you want or need from your content strategy.

At this point, you need to back up and reassess. There’s some basic questions you should ask:

  • Have we set realistic goals for our content strategy? For instance, expecting a 50% increase in sales attributable to your content strategy after 3 months may not be realistic.
  • Have we adequately defined who our target audience is? Saying you are targeting adults age 18-55 is probably too broad. Creating a buyer persona for your content can help focus your efforts. More on this in a minute.
  • Have we set the proper KPIs for our content strategy? There’s an old business saying ‘What gets measured, gets managed”. You want to measure metrics associated with the desired outcomes for your content. For instance, if you are using content to drive awareness, then measure metrics that would signal an increase in awareness. Such as traffic to your content channels, engagement with your content, and an increase in UGC.

It’s a good idea to audit your content strategy at least once every 12 months. Review the previous year’s content performance, and see how well you met your content goals. If necessary, you can adjust your strategy and implement new goals and desired outcomes. You should always think of your content strategy as something that’s malleable, there’s nothing wrong with changing or adapting your content strategy. This is to be expected, as your customers and how they interact and consume content changes.

The value of a buyer persona

One of the most overlooked areas of content creation are buyer personas. A buyer persona is an abstract representation of your ideal customer. Why is a buyer persona so important? Think of buyer personas as a snapshot of the daily life of your ideal customer. Buyer personas help your content teams get a better sense of the person they are creating content for.

Here’s a sample buyer persona I created for a customer called ‘Sarah’:

Buyer Persona
If you need more help, I’ve written a detailed article on how to create buyer personas for your content strategy.

 

So there’s your framework for creating, developing and managing a content strategy for your B2C company. If you have more questions about creating a content strategy, please fill out the form below!

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Introducing The Edge: SME Accelerator Program For Your Company

The Edge - SME Accelerator Program
One of the biggest challenges mid to large-size companies face is engaging and activating its Subject Matter Experts or SMEs. SMEs are typically not content creators, so the process of sharing their knowledge with the world can sometimes be difficult. Both for the SME, and the company. Companies that cannot engage its SMEs in the content creation process are missing a huge opportunity to help not only its employees internally, but to better communicate your company’s core mission and product benefits to customers externally.

This is why I have created The Edge. The Edge is a SME Accelerator Program, designed to engage your SMEs in the content creation process, and to help them build their own visibility and personal brand. Additionally, The Edge works with employees to help cultivate future SMEs, and to increase the content creation, engagement and visibility of all your employees who are active on social media.

 

Here are the key features and benefits of The Edge:

Features:

  • Optimization of employee social media accounts to increase engagement and visibility. This will also ensure that social content created by your employees is consistent in brand voice and tone.
  • Social media training and mentorship for your SMEs. In addition to working with your SMEs to improve their content creation efforts, my team will also work with your SMEs to increase their engagement and visibility online. Additionally, we will work with your SMEs to help secure media appearances and speaking appearances, such as guesting on podcasts and speaking at industry conferences and events. I will also work with your SMEs to coach them on how to improve both their interviewing and speaking skills. I will also work with your SMEs on the content and structure of their presentations, ensuring their speaking is a success for themselves, and as a representative of your company.
  • Digital and content training for all your employees. This will greatly increase your employees’ ability to generate content that drives engagement for your company. In this process, I will also identify SMEs that are good candidates for additional training and mentoring.

 

Benefits:

  • The Edge helps you retain current employees longer, and it makes it easier to hire new ones. Let’s be honest, SMEs are always in high demand. The Edge gives you all the tools to ensure that your SMEs are successful in their professional careers, which increases their loyalty to your company. The loss of SMEs creates a huge loss of skills for your employees. The Edge gives you a way to not only retain your current SMEs longer, but it can also be used to hire additional SMEs. When jobseekers discover that your have a program like The Edge, which is dedicated to their professional growth, it becomes a massive competitive advantage for your company. It communicates to SMEs that your company values their skills and knowledge, and wants to help them reach their full potential.
  • Training your employees on how to properly use social media and create content, ensures that your employees engage customers with a consistent brand voice. This has a very positive impact on your company’s reputation, and increases engagement and visibility for your company, and all your digitally-active employees.
  • Additional content from your SMEs and employees greatly improves the effectiveness of your company’s entire content strategy.

 

The Edge not only accelerates the progress and growth of your SMEs, but it helps establish them as thought leaders in their space. Why is this important? Not only is your company facing stiff competition for the best SMEs from other companies in your industry, but now it’s facing competition from social media platforms as well. All major social media platforms either have or are about to roll out monetization options for its content creators. The Edge gives your company a way to proactively help your SMEs develop and monetize their personal brands.

In the last 15 years, I’ve seen many smart employees and companies of all shapes and sizes become though leaders and build strong personal brands for themselves. I’ve become friends with many of those thought leaders, and they often tell me that would have loved to stay with their company, but they felt that they could better grow on their own. Typically, they didn’t feel like their employee gave them the support they needed to keep growing.

The Edge gives your employees and SMEs the support they need to keep growing their personal and professional brands, and to keep growing your company’s brand as well.

The Edge requires a minimum 6-month commitment. Only a limited number of clients for The Edge SME Accelerator Program will be accepted in 2021.  If you want to discuss availability and to see if The Edge is a good fit for your company, please use the contact form below, and myself or a member of my team will be in touch with you ASAP.

Give your company The Edge against the competition and unleash the power of your SMEs today!

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Alabama Football Launches ‘The Advantage’ Personal Branding Program For its Student-Athletes

Last month I wrote about how important it is to give your employees the skills they need to succeed. One of the examples I used to illustrate that point was how Alabama football gives both its coaches and players the tools and teaching they need to advance.

Alabama football has just launched another initiative in its effort to equip its players with the skills they need to succeed.  The program is called ‘The Advantage’ and it is being billed as a ‘personal brand’ development program. The Advantage will work with players to develop their communication skills, giving them instruction on how to handle interviews, and how to conduct themselves on social media channels. For those players who pursue a professional career in football, The Advantage will assist with financial literacy, marketing, and agent selection.

This is such a smart initiative on so many levels:

  • It becomes yet another recruiting tool for Alabama, providing real benefits to recruits that they can instantly see the value in
  • It helps players manage their social media accounts, which also helps the University with its image and branding as well
  • By helping players with interview coaching, that provides another benefit to both the player, as well as the University, and it enhances the brand of both parties
  • As players become more proficient in using social media, that just means more exposure for them, and for the Alabama football brand as well

I’m honestly surprised more universities haven’t done something similar, and I’m sure we’ll see a lot of schools copy this now that Alabama has unveiled The Advantage.

Think about how you could do something similar at your company or organization. And just as Alabama will use The Advantage as a recruiting tool, so can your company. Your company could offer a program that coaches your current employees on how to better leverage their social media accounts to promote their personal brand, as well as yours. Additionally, you could leverage such a program to help your internal subject matter experts become more comfortable creating content and sharing their expertise. Getting internal subject matter experts to share what they know is often a struggle for companies. So this would be a real benefit that your company could enjoy.

Once such a program is in place, then its existence becomes a recruiting tool for new employees. Your company would get better employees, more content from your subject matter experts, and the social media content created by your employees would be more on brand. A win-win!

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Monster Energy is the Red Bull That You’ve Never Heard Of

If you’ve attended a marketing, business or content conference in the last decade, you know how successfully Red Bull uses content marketing. They are experts at content marketing, in fact I used the brand as one of the key case studies in my book Think Like a Rock Star. Red Bull also invests heavily in extreme sporting events, as well as mainstream sports like NASCAR, and even in the thriving E-Sports industry.

Red Bull doesn’t market its product, it markets what happens after you drink it. The brand sets the standard for successful content marketing, and its focus on sponsoring and helping to grow the sporting events that its customers love is absolutely brilliant.

Red Bull does everything right when it comes to marketing, and it’s no surprise that they dominate the energy drink space.

Except…they don’t. In fact, Red Bull may not even be the market leader in the energy drink industry by the end of 2021.

monster energy

Meet Monster Energy, the Red Bull That You’ve Never Heard Of

What makes the energy drink industry so fascinating is that it doesn’t have one brand doing exceptional marketing, it has two. And this exceptional marketing has helped catapult both brands to own the energy drink industry.

Heading into 2021, Red Bull was the energy drink market leader, with just over 40% of the market. Monster Energy was right behind them with just under 40% of the market. However, Coca-Cola acquired a 17% stake in Monster Energy in 2014, and Monster Energy will be benefiting from Coca-Cola’s distribution channels as part of that relationship. This has led to speculation that Monster Energy could actually pass Red Bull to become the energy drink market leader in 2021 or 2022.

But the purpose of this post isn’t to prop up Monster Energy or really Red Bull either. What I wanted to focus on is how both brands have created incredibly effective marketing strategies. And in some ways those strategies are very similar, and in others, they are quite different. I want to examine those strategies in detail here because there are some key lessons that you can take from both brands to improve your own company’s marketing and give you a competitive advantage in your space.

 

Red Bull and Monster Energy Both Market Sporting Events, But in Very Different Ways

Both Red Bull and Monster Energy invest in sponsoring athletes and teams at sporting, extreme and esports events. This is very smart marketing, and it helps both brands show customers that they have ‘skin in the game’. It also communicates to customers that these brands are committed to seeing these events grow.

While both brands are active in these events via sponsorships, their marketing efforts are slightly different. Red Bull works to associate itself with the athletes. Their marketing message is that they help fuel these amazing athletes and help them accomplish these amazing feats. Red Bull sponsors the athletes and then leverages their accomplishments via content marketing. These athletes give Red Bill access to thousands of hours of amazing content, which is a big reason why Red Bull’s content marketing is viewed as some of the best work by any global brand. But make no mistake, the underlying message from Red Bull’s marketing is that these amazing athletes doing amazing things, are doing it because they drink Red Bull.

Monster Energy takes a slightly different approach. The brand does sponsor teams and athletes at events. But while Red Bull’s branding is more about the athletes and how Red Bull helps fuel them, Monster Energy is wanting to position itself more as a lifestyle brand. Monster not only sponsors events, teams and athletes, but the brand also has a major presence at these events. The brand will offer product sampling at events, goes out of its way to connect directly with fans, and also has the famous (infamous?) Monster Girls at their events. While Red Bull is positioning itself to align more with the athletes, Monster Energy positions itself more to interact directly with their customers via events.

 

Red Bull is All-In on Traditional Marketing, Monster All But Ignores It 

‘Red Bull gives you wiiiiings!’ You’ve probably heard that tagline from Red Bull’s commercials many times over the years. The brand heavily invests in broadcast commercials, and it has created some stunners.

When’s the last time you saw a commercial for Monster Energy?  Have you ever seen one?

Both Red Bull and Monster Energy are attempting to connect with the 18-30 year-old demographic, especially males. This group has a highly tuned bullshit detector when it comes to traditional advertising and marketing. So both brands are mindful of that in their marketing efforts.

Red Bull works with and associates itself with extreme athletes, and then uses them as sort of ‘influencers’ to connect with the end customer. Red Bull’s broadcast and print marketing efforts focus on the athletes and their amazing accomplishments moreso than the brand itself. This approach of letting the athletes lead the marketing and Red Bull takes a backseat has resonated with customers, who don’t see it as marketing, but rather as awesome content.

Monster Energy focuses more on connecting with customers directly. As you might guess, the brand all but avoids traditional marketing in trying to connect with the 18-30 age group it covets.

Marianne Radley, Monster’s Senior VP of Marketing, explains: “We’re very hesitant about doing interviews for no other reason than focusing on building the brand one can at a time with intimate consumer connections. Our marketing has always been very below the line. We’re mindful of that, so we try to keep our time with the press minimal just so it doesn’t look like we’re pushing so much in your face. Everything we do is genuine and sincere, and we try to keep that for all points of communication.”

Notice Ms. Radley’s comment about how Monster doesn’t want to appear to be ‘in your face’ with its marketing. She’s speaking to her customer base. She knows young males hate promotion, so the second one of her customers thinks ‘this smells like marketing’, they will tune out, and Monster has lost a chance to connect with that customer. As you can see from her quote, the brand is very mindful of how it connects with its customers.

red bull

 

Red Bull and Monster Energy Market Differently, But the Result is the Same

While the two brands market and position themselves in slightly different way, there’s one key element that’s the same. Both brands invest in supporting the athletes and events that are important to their customers.

At the end of the day, both brands are courting the coveted 18-30 year-old male category. This age group is very resistant to traditional marketing efforts, as mentioned earlier. So both brands use different tactics to reach their customers. Red Bull does traditional marketing, but it’s not traditional in how it’s structured. The focus isn’t on Red Bull’s products, but on the athletes and celebrities that use those products. That makes the marketing more interesting and palatable to millennials.

Monster Energy all but ignores traditional marketing. Instead, the brand focuses on connecting with their customers personally at events and through non-traditional marketing efforts.

The results speak for themselves. Both brands command roughly 40% of the energy drink market, and they control over 80% of the market space combined.

 

What’s the Key Takeaway For Your Brand?

Focus your marketing efforts on what’s important to your customers. Years ago, Fiskars was looking for a way to revitalize interest in a centuries old brand that made a very boring product; scissors. Fiskars started by doing market research into who its customers were, and how they used its product. What the brand found surprised them; Their customers were actually much younger than they assumed, and Fiskars scissors were quite popular among scrapbookers. Fiskars took what it had learned, and applied that to its marketing. They built a community for scrapbookers, and let some of Fiskars most avid scrapbooking customers, run the community.

The community, which was dubbed The Fiskateers, ended up being quite successful for Fiskars in building sales and brand awareness. The lead members of the Fiskateers community were highly sought after by crafting stores across the country. Crafting stores always enjoyed a boost in sales when a Fiskateer appeared and spoke to the customers. Fiskars’ success with The Fiskateers was because the brand invested in the activities and communities that are important to its customers. Just as Red Bull and Monster Energy invest in sporting events, Fiskars invested in growing the scrapbooking community. In doing so, the brand created something of value for its customers, which in turn, created value for the brand.

Think about how your customers use your products, and for what reasons. How can you incorporate your customers’ behavior into your marketing efforts? What are your customers passionate about and how can you sponsor those passions and help them grow?

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How to Be a Better Marketer

Marketers, as a profession, are one of the least-trusted groups around. They are the guy at the party that everyone dreads seeing. You are with your friends having a perfectly delightful conversation, then here comes the marketer. He steers the conversation to himself, and brags incessantly about his accomplishments. When someone in your group attempts to change the subject to something more interesting, he immediately dismisses the introduced topic, and moves the focus back where it belongs. On him.

This is how most people view the average marketer. And often, this illustration isn’t that absurd. Yet, most marketers aren’t bad people, they simply fall prey to human nature far too easily.

The reality is, we all act in our own best interests. Period. Yet, good marketers understand how to make human nature work for them, and not against them. They understand that in order to reach their desired goals, they have to also provide equal or greater value to someone else.

 

TLDR: How to Be a Better Marketer

  • Respect your customers, market to them as you would your friends and family.
  • Your marketing communications should focus on and create value for your customers.
  • If your marketing isn’t relevant to your audience, then it will be ignored.
  • Understand who your customer is before you market to them.
  • Don’t sell your product, sell what your product allows the customer to do.

 

Why are marketers so distrusted?

Let’s back up for a minute and talk about how one brand figured out how to be better marketers. As with most good stories, alcohol is involved.

Bill Samuels Sr founded Maker’s Mark in 1953. Senior was the epitome of a craftsman. He loved crafting bourbon and prided himself on his ability to do so. His son, Bill Samuels Jr, took over as President of Maker’s Mark in the 1970s with one clear directive from his dad: “Don’t screw up the whisky.”

Father and son were diametrically opposed when it came to the topic of marketing. Junior was a showman. He loved marketing and appreciated the power of promotion and sales.

His father absolutely hated marketing and distrusted most marketers just as much as the rest of us do. Senior hated marketing so much so that often when junior would attempt to have a marketing discussion with his father, Bill Samuels Sr would simply stand up and walk out of the meeting.

So Bill Samuels Jr was at an impasse. He knew that Maker’s Mark needed to do SOME marketing in order to grow, but he also knew that his father would simply continue to shoot down any attempts the son made at adding marketing communications to the mix.

Finally, Bill Samuels Jr decided that it would probably be a good idea to better understand why his father was so opposed to marketing. The son figured that if he understood why his father didn’t want to invest in marketing, then maybe he could come up with a compromise that would be palatable to his father. Bascially, Bill Samuels Jr was marketing the idea of investing in marketing, to his father. So his father was his customer, and the son was learning how to better understand his objections to marketing, so he could factor that into his efforts. Which is what all good marketers do.

Bill Samuels Sr didn’t view the people who bought his bourbon as being customers, he viewed them as being friends and family. And he viewed marketing as selling, and in his mind, you didn’t sell to your friends and family.

So this prompted Bill Samuels Jr to completely shift his mindset toward who the Maker’s Mark customer was, and in turn, how to communicate with them. Samuels Jr went back to his father and said they would define the Maker’s Mark customer as being someone who they would like to invite over to their house for drinks. Bill Samuels Sr signed off on this, and Jr got to work on building a marketing strategy based on communicating with friends and family, instead of selling to strangers.

As an aside, this shift in marketing strategy opened the door for Maker’s Mark to launch one of the most successful brand ambassador programs of all time. In the early 1980s, Maker’s Mark was the recipient of some wonderful exposure in national publications like The Wall Street Journal. That surge of PR catapulted demand for the brand’s products, which actually created a massive distribution problem for Maker’s Mark. Prior to this, Maker’s Mark was essentially a regional, Kentucky brand, and its distribution channels were regional as well. But thanks to the exposure in the WSJ and other publications, there was suddenly national demand for a brand that not only didn’t have the distribution channels to handle a national supply, but the product itself took years to make.

While the brand didn’t have a national distribution channel, it did have customers across the United States. More than that, it had customers that loved the brand. So Bill Samuels Jr. decided to embrace those happy customers, and empower them to market for the brand. Maker’s Mark began to mobilize its customers across the country to demand Maker’s Mark be shipped to their corner of the country. The efforts of its customers slowly expanded Maker’s Mark’s distribution from coast to coast. These efforts by Maker’s Mark to empower its customers to market for the brand would eventually be folded into an official brand ambassador program, which still lives on to this day. You can learn more about the program here.

Bill Samuels Sr. distrusted marketers for the same reason most of you do; He found the very idea offensive, as he felt that marketing was selling, and you don’t sell to friends and family. So Maker’s Mark focused on treating its customers as friends and family, and adjusted its marketing strategy accordingly. Bill Samuels Jr would later call it ‘marketing without fingerprints’.

The key takeaway? If you respect your customers, that changes how you sell to them.

 

The power of being second

Let’s go back to human nature for a minute. It is human nature to want to take care of ourselves first, and everyone else later. For instance, if there’s a shortage of a particular product, say gas, do you let everyone else fill up their tank first, then you go get your gas a week later?  Of course not, you will try to fill up your tank of gas today, and you assume everyone else will do the same. That doesn’t make you a bad person, it just makes you human. We all think of our wants and needs first, before others. Not all the time, but in general.

It’s no different for most marketers. Most marketers focus first on getting the sale, and pleasing the customer can come later. But smart marketers understand the power of pleasing the customer first, and how that will LEAD to sales.

In 2004, Sarah McLachlan released the single World on Fire. Her record label gave her $150,000 to create a music video to support the song. Just as she was preparing to begin filming the video, she came across a letter written by a volunteer with the group Engineers Without Borders. This letter detailed the work that the group was doing to help impoverished people around the world. Sarah was so moved by the work Engineers Without Borders was doing, that she decided to take all but $15 of the $150,000 her record label had given her to create a music video, and she instead donated it to 11 charitable organizations, including Engineers Without Borders.

Now, this was a very generous act on Sarah’s behalf, but her record label still wanted her to create a music video. So Sarah took the last $15 from her budget, and bought a video tape. She then, working with a few friends, created a very low-tech video for World on Fire.

But the video told an incredibly compelling story. What Sarah did with her video was explain to the viewer all the normal expenses associated with creating a music video, and how much each item normally costs. Then, Sarah detailed what the money was actually spend on, via her charitable donations. What resulted was, and absolutely amazing music video, created for just $15:

This video received a Grammy nomination for best music video, the only such nomination of Sarah’s 34-year career as a recording artist.

So let’s break this down: Sarah received $150k to record a music video for World on Fire. Instead, she donated almost all of that money to 11 charitable organizations around the world, impacting the lives of millions of people. And she still got to create a music video for World on Fire, which received a Grammy nomination.

All because Sarah didn’t use her video as a way to ‘sell’ her song, but instead she used it as a tool to help others, to advance causes she is passionate about, and to tell a compelling story. She got the sales she (and her label) wanted, but she got so much more than that.

The key takeaway? Good marketing isn’t about the person sending the message, it’s about the person who hears it. If you create a compelling marketing message, the sales will take care of itself.

 

The best marketing is invisible. The worst marketing BECOMES invisible. 


This is Times Square, in NYC. Look at this picture, but really it’s the same with any picture you see of Times Square.

You always see marketing and advertising messages everywhere. Flashing billboards, and blinking lights as far as the eye can see.

So. Much. Marketing.

Now look at the people. Every single person in this image has one thing in common. Can you spot it?

Every single person is totally ignoring every marketing message.

Everyone in this picture is completely ignoring these hundreds of marketing messages that are all around them. The reason why is because these messages lack relevance. If a marketing message is irrelevant to you, then it is worthless to you.

It becomes invisible to you.

Now let’s go back to the Maker’s Mark brand ambassador program for a minute. We’ve already talked about how long-running it is, and how successful it has been. In order to join the brand ambassador program, you have to apply. In other words, you have to raise your hand and offer to perform the duties that Maker’s Mark asks from its ambassadors. So when Maker’s Mark delivers marketing messages to you, those are marketing messages that you asked to receive. Those messages have relevance for you, so you don’t perceive them as being marketing.

Let’s be clear: If a marketing message has relevance for you, you don’t view it as being marketing.

On the other hand, if a marketing message has NO relevance for you, you ignore it.

The best marketing is invisible. Meaning you don’t SEE it as marketing. You see it as something that has relevance for you.

The worst marketing BECOMES invisible. Meaning, if the marketing message is totally irrelevant to you. then you totally ignore it. It BECOMES invisible to you.

We’ve trained ourselves to view marketing as something bad, as a distraction, an irritant. Actually, that’s not fair, we have simply been exposed to so much BAD marketing, that we tend to view ALL marketing as bad.

Good marketing is relevant to us. It creates value for us, and respects us. As a result, we don’t view it as marketing.

What happens when we don’t view a marketing message as being marketing? We open ourselves to LISTENING TO THAT MESSAGE.

Once a marketer has gained our attention, then they have a chance to convert us into a customer.

The key takeaway? If your marketing message is relevant to your audience, then that audience will listen to your message. If your marketing message is irrelevant to your audience, then that audience will ignore it.

 

The best marketing is spoken in the voice of your customer

Let’s say you are a diehard fan of the movie Inception. Your friend Tom hates the movie, and thinks it is completely overblown.

You are trying to convince Jim, who you don’t know, to watch Inception. But at the same time, Tom is going to give the argument for why Jim should NOT watch Inception. And it just so happens that Tom is also Jim’s cousin.

So who do you think will be able to persuade Jim to watch or not watch the movie Inception? You may say that Jim will listen to Tom, because Tom is his cousin and he trusts his opinion. You would  probably be correct. But at the same time, Tom knows and understands what types of movies Jim likes. Tom would explain to Jim that he doesn’t like movies like Inception, why he doesn’t like them, and Jim would probably ultimately agree and not see the movie.

In the end, the fact that Tom and Jim were cousins wasn’t the deciding factor for Jim.  It was the fact that Tom understands what type of movie Jim likes to watch. You don’t know what type of movie that Jim likes, so in explaining what you liked about the movie Inception, you were actually making the case to Jim for why he should NOT watch it.

Think of marketing as a tax that your brand has to pay because it doesn’t understand your customer.  If you know precisely who your customer is, and you understand them completely, then you know how to create marketing that appeals to them at every stage of the process from awareness to sale, and beyond. Your marketing costs are significantly lower because you are crafting perfect marketing communications that are relevant to your customers, that create value for them, and which resonate with them.

When you don’t know who your customer is, when you don’t understand your customer, then your marketing costs increase at an exorbitant rate.

The key takeaway? When you understand your customer, you can speak to their wants, needs and desires. You don’t market to them, you talk to them. And they listen.

 

The best marketing doesn’t focus on your product, it focuses on your customer

The most effective marketing doesn’t sell your product, it sells how your product fits into my life.

Watch this Red Bull commercial, and as you do, notice how much time is spent focused on the Red Bull energy drink:

The Red Bull can isn’t shown till the last 2 seconds of the commercial. The logo is shown a few times throughout, but the star of this commercial is clearly the extreme athletes that Red Bull sponsors and supports. Red Bull doesn’t market its product, it markets what happens after you drink it.

Don’t sell your product, sell the change that happens to your customer as a result of your product.

This is one of the most powerful marketing lessons you can learn. When someone isn’t familiar with your product, you sell the benefits of owning it. You sell the changes that owning this product will create for the owner.

Don’t sell me the product, sell what the product allows me to do.

Look at Nike’s iconic marketing campaigns. Just do it. The shoes and clothing is an afterthought, the focus is on the athletes and their accomplishments. Think of Apple’s marketing for the iPhone in recent years. The focus is more on what the iPhone allows you to do, the content it helps you create, moreso than the actual tool itself.

Notice how these examples of how to improve your marketing are focused on understanding your customer and marketing from the customer’s point of view. Customers don’t buy products, they buy solutions to problems, or improvements to their lives. If a particular product can consistently meet or exceed their expectations, then the customer will become loyal to that brand.

 

Your job as a marketer is to create fans.

In 2010 I attended the FIRE Sessions in Greenville, South Carolina. One of the speakers was Steve Knox, who at the time was the CEO of Proctor and Gamble’s Word of Mouth unit, Tremor. He said something that stopped me in my tracks:

“Victory in marketing doesn’t happen when you sell something, but when you cultivate advocates for your brand.”

Think about that quote and what it means. Who are advocates for your brand? They are the customers that LOVE your brand and who are advocating on its behalf. So they are not only buying your products, they are actively selling your brand to other customers.

How would your marketing change, if your goal was to cultivate advocates? To create customers that love you and who will advocate for you.

The amazing part is…you will still be creating sales. But you’ll also be creating so much more.

 

If you want to be a better marketer:

  • Respect your customers
  • Create value for your customers
  • Your marketing MUST be relevant to your customers, or it will be ignored
  • Understand your customers
  • Don’t market your product, market the positive changes in my life that your product will create for me
  • Don’t focus on sales with your marketing, focus on delighting your customers. If you create happy customers, the sales take care of themselves.

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#ContentCircus 2-2-21 Recap: How to Create Buyer Personas For Your Content Marketing Strategy

Last night, we had another great conversation at #ContentCircus on Twitter, this time discussing How to Create Buyer Personas For Your Content Strategy. Let’s jump into some of the key takeaways:

When you start creating buyer personas, you want to define who the persona is. For that, you need customer data. If you work for a business, your sales, marketing and customer service teams should be able to help you define your ideal customer. If you have a retail business, you and your employees that are in regular contact with your customers can give this information. If you are still uncertain who your ideal customer is, you can create a persona for who you would want this customer to be.

 

After collecting demographic data about your persona (age, gender, occupation, income, education), you want to move on to addressing the personas pain points. What are the issues and problems they face every day, that you can address via the content you create? Giving customers the solutions to their problems is a wonderful way to create content that drives sales, and loyalty.

 

When creating content for your personas, you want to be aware of where the persona is currently getting information, and which sources it trusts. You also want to know what type of content they prefer. Do they want to read long blog posts on their desktop, or do they want to see short videos on their smartphone? By understanding what type of content they want and from what sources, it helps you tailor content to meet the expectations of your customers.

 

Finally, when you are creating your personas, you want to define where the persona is in the Buyer’s Journey. We discussed creating content for each stage of the Buyer’s Journey back in December at #ContentCircus, here’s the recap post for our conversation. Additionally, you want to define the persona’s role in making purchasing decisions within their organization or household. Can they authorize purchases independently, or will they need approval from their boss or spouse?

 

So that was our discussion last night at #ContentCircus of How to Create Buyer Personas For Your Content Strategy. If you want to join the next #ContentCircus, it happens every Tuesday night at 7pm Central. Just follow the #ContentCircus hashtag. Next week’s topic will be Winning Strategies For Content Creation on Twitter! See you then!

 

Bonus: I wrote about How to Create Buyer Personas For Your Content Marketing Strategy here yesterday. In that post I also added the persona for Sarah, to give you an idea of what a persona looks like so you can better understand how it can help your content creation efforts.  Here it is again:

 

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How to Create a Buyer Persona For Your Content Marketing Strategy

If you want to take your content strategy to the next level, one of the smartest moves you can make is to create a buyer persona(s) for the content you create.

 

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is an abstract representation of your ideal customer/client/donor/partner. Ideally, your sales and marketing department will already have existing buyer personas that you can work off of. If not, you’ll need to coordinate with these departments to create new personas.

What the big deal about a buyer persona? Think of personas as a ‘day in the life’ snapshot of your ideal customer. Personas help the content creator quickly and easily understand the person it is creating the content for, as well as the type of content that can best meet the needs of that person. Personas help give your content creators structure and direction on the type of content they should be creating. In fact, if your personas are developed correctly, you even set your content calendar with your personas instead of topics. For instance, on Monday you write a post for Sarah, on Wednesday you write one for Isaac, and Friday is for Jennifer.

 

Where do you get the information to create your buyer persona?

In other words, how do you determine who your ‘ideal’ customer is? A good starting point is to talk to your sales team. This group typically has the most hands-on experience working with and connecting directly with your customers. Also check with your marketing team, and see if they have done any customer surveys. Your ecommerce team can also help with information about who your customers are. Finally, talk to your customer service team, they can give you a different set of customer insights, which we will talk about in a minute.

These are all in-house sources of information. You can also look at market research, especially research done about customers in your industry and vertical. Also, study your competitors and try to get a sense for who they are targeting with their sales and marketing efforts, this will give you a sense of who their ideal customer is.

 

What does a buyer persona include?

There’s multiple areas of information that you want to focus on to help define each buyer persona that you create. For each of these areas, you want to be as specific as possible, while still being accurate. For instance, you don’t want to say your ideal customer is a male aged 18-34, because that’s a pretty big age range. You want to shorten that age range as a much as possible, while still being as accurate as possible.

Demographics

This is the first area of information you want to focus on. You want to include basic information such as gender, age, martial status, income level and educational history. If your company is a B2C, then you want to also make sure that your buyer persona clearly defines that person’s role within the family. You want to know how your persona relates to the other members of the family, and whether or not this person has direct control over purchases or not.

For a B2B, you want to clearly define the person’s role within their company. You want to clearly define their responsibilities within their company, as well as where their position fits within the company hierarchy. As with a B2C persona, you want to clearly define if this persona has direct control over purchases, or if they must work with someone else within the company to secure that purchases are made. In both scenarios, you basically want to know who has the ability to authorize a purchase; is it the persona, or someone else.

The persona’s pain points and worries

Here, you identify and detail what ‘keeps them up at night’. You detail what problems the persona faces in their home and/or business life. This is done to help the content creator understand the problems that your products and services help solve. You can also detail what worries them, and also what excites them about being in their position, whether it be in a personal or professional setting. For instance, if your persona works for Company ABC, detail what they like about their job, and dislike. Talk about the issues the persona faces on a daily basis that the persona feels is holding them back. These are problems that the persona faces, but they also can give you a sense of what type of content you should be creating to address those problems, or at least communicate how your products or services can address those problems.

What type of content does the persona prefer, and from what sources?

Here, you want to gain insights into the type of content your persona is looking for, and why. Do they want video content that can demonstrate how your products and services work? Do they prefer posts or articles that can explain how they work? Also, where do they get their content from? Do they consult blogs, or do they prefer to more ‘mainstream’ sites? You basically want to know what sources does the persona trust for information, and in what form does that information exist?

Where is the persona on the buyer’s journey?

At this point, let’s quickly review the buyer’s journey:

Buyer's Journey, Creating Better Content

You want to establish where your persona is on the above buyer’s journey. This will give you insights not only into the type of content the persona needs based on their location on the buyer’s journey, but it will also show you how to craft the content in order to move the buyer to the next stage. This is also a good place to review if the persona has direct control over purchasing decisions, or if they must convince some other person or party to approve purchases.

 

Meet Sarah, your new persona! 

This is a very basic persona I created in roughly a half hour using the format outlined in this post. You can go far more in depth than this, I’ve worked with clients that had about four times as much information in their personas. I just wanted to give you an idea of what this would look like.

Note that just from this simple persona, you can get a much better idea of who your ideal customer Sarah is, and how to create content that’s useful to her. You can see she needs content that helps her with her time management issues. So any products or services you sell that can help her save time as either a business owner OR a mom, will resonate with Sarah. You can also see where she is on the Buyer’s Journey, plus you get a sense of her income. Smaller purchases that can benefit her in either role as a mom or business owner, Sarah can likely make by herself. A major purchase would likely require she and her spouse to consult first. Additionally, her age tells you that she is likely more comfortable with emerging digital technologies and how she prefers to consume and interact with content.

 

So that shows you how personas can truly take the effectiveness of your content strategy to the next level. What I love about personas is they help bring clarity to your content creation efforts. Anything that helps clarify who you are creating content for, and what type of content you should be creating for them, helps you create better content, in less time. I’m all about doing more in less time, and personas can definitely boost your productivity when it comes to creating content.

Need help creating buyer personas for your content strategy? Use the form below and my team and I will be happy to assist you!

 

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How Do You Create Content When Your Business is Closed Due to Covid

Many retail businesses across the country and world have had to abruptly adjust its sales strategies over the last year due to concerns over covid. Local and state restrictions in most areas have impacted capacity and in many areas businesses aren’t allowed to have customers in store other than to pick up an order.

This has also impacted businesses’ content creation efforts. What happens when your content strategy was to highlight the in-store experience, and suddenly your store isn’t open to the public?

The answer is you adjust. In this post I’ll give you some ideas you can use to boost your content creation efforts even if your business isn’t open to customers. Additionally, this will be the topic of tonight’s #ContentCircus on Twitter, starting at 7pm Central. So this post will give you plenty of tactics to get you started, then you can join #ContentCircus tonight and get even more ideas.

Bring the Backstage to the Front of the Stage

Whenever I work with clients on developing advocacy programs, such as a Voice of the Customer, Loyalty or Brand Ambassador Program, one of the discussions we have is what type of content they should create to support these initiatives. I always explain to the client that your ‘fans’ want content that goes ‘behind the scenes’ or that gives them ‘special access’. This content is a great way for the brand to develop deeper ties to the customer, and customers who are your fans, want this type of connection and content.

For the purposes of this post, let’s assume our business is a bakery called Sally’s Sweet Tooth. Sally’s content has been mostly focused on pictures of her cakes, pies and pastries, maybe a mention of new creations or sales. She posts the pictures on Instagram and Facebook, and has some pictures up of all her offerings on her website, but she isn’t updating the content there as often as she should be. Sally likes to also highlight her store in her photos, as well as the happy customers. But she’s at a loss now as to how to keep creating content at the same pace since her bakery is closed to the public and can only accept pickup orders. Without customers in the store, Sally can’t figure out how to create content at the same clip as she has been and her engagement on social is starting to fall.

The key for Sally is to take her content backstage. Before, Sally’s content focused completely on the store itself and the products being sold in the store. But there’s so many more sources of content that Sally could showcase:

  • The history of Sally’s Sweet Tooth
  • The baking process
  • The bakers who work for Sally
  • Sally’s customers

 

The History of Sally’s Sweet Tooth. Sally can create content create content that shows how and why she got into baking, why she wanted to make a career out of it. If her bakery has been in business for a long time, she can show pictures of the bakery in current and previous locations, if applicable. This is very effective if the business has a long history, because it helps speak to the success of the business. Plus, we all love nostalgia, we all love ‘origin stories’. Any content Sally can create about herself and her business and its history simply helps to humanize the business and it makes it easier for customers to connect with her.

The Baking Process. Here, Sally can go inside her kitchen and show how she and her bakers make the delicious sweets and pastries that her customers love. This would also be a wonderful opportunity for Sally to create content that educates her customers on the precautions she and her bakers take to ensure a clean and safe environment. Sally can help put her customers’ worries over covid at ease by demonstrating the precautions Sally’s Sweet Tooth is taking to ensure that her customer’s health and well-being is protected. Plus, customers love this type of content, it helps establish the baker’s expertise and makes the customer more comfortable buying the product being created.

The Bakers Who Work For Sally. Sally should regularly create content that gives customers an idea of who her bakers are as people. Let the bakers talk about why they love baking, what makes them want to create food for other people. Have them talk about their favorite cake or pastry to make, and what it means to them. Also, don’t be afraid to let your employees talk about how they are dealing with covid and the change its made in their lives. For many employees, this can actually be helpful for them to share their stories, and for your customers, it gives them a better understanding of the people behind the name badge. When we better understand the people we do business with, it makes us more likely to want to continue to buy from them.

Sally’s Customers. Finally, Sally would be smart to create content that focuses on her customers. She can talk about long-time customers who have stuck by her for years.  She can talk about creating a special cake for Megan’s wedding and what it meant to create it. And don’t be afraid to create content that promotes your customers. We are all facing hardships right now, feel free to create content that champions your customers and promotes them as the rock stars that they are.  They will appreciate it, and you will feel good about putting the spotlight on the people that keep you in business.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: NBC Universal’s Marketing Bet on The Office, How Morning Brew Got a Million Readers

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope everyone had an amazing weekend. Last week was my birthday, so I decided to take Monday off, then on Tuesday I got a bit sick and decided to rest for a couple days and before I knew it, it was Friday and I’d lost the whole week here!  So sorry, I will try to make it up to you this week, starting today!

 

So NBC Universal is doing something interesting with its new streaming service and its hit series The Office. I found this story in The Hustle newsletter and unfortunately they didn’t tweet a link to it. NBC Universal is actually building out the service around one show; The Office.  They have a freemium plan that gives you access to the first two seasons of The Office. If you want more, you pay for it, and get all the seasons as well as additional ‘superfan’ content. It will be interesting to see if more streaming services move toward packages built around individual programs. I could see certain very popular shows having enough of a fanbase to add in bonus content, maybe access to Zoom calls with actors from the show, etc, and that being a standalone product. If this was done around shows that are in the catalog, this could really work well.  A package for Cheers fans, or Friends fans that includes Zoom ‘reunion’ calls with the actors, or something similar.  For your business, think about your more profitable product or service, and how that could potentially be a draw to attract new customers.

 

This tweet is a few months old, but I’m just now seeing it and it had such good lessons that I wanted to share. The Morning Brew is a wildly popular business newsletter that last August reached a milestone of having one million people open a single newsletter.  If I have 500 people open mine, I’m thrilled! There were many key takeaways from the article, but the two I noted were that they didn’t focus on number of subscribers, they focused on levels of engagement. Their goal was to get each subscriber to open that first email, with the thinking being that when they do, that greatly increases the chances of them being an engaged reader.  One thing they do that I think is genius (but really won’t work unless you have a huge list) is they send out 4 different subject lines for each newsletter to a small subsection of the list.  Then, they see which subject line led to the most opens, and pick that one to send out to the remainder of the list. Another smart thing is they promote the newsletter via other newsletters! The thinking was that people that like newsletters, will read multiple ones, so advertise where their attention already is, on reading another newsletter!  Check out the article for some great insights on building your own newsletter audience.  This is definitely a priority for me in 2021!

 

Finally, let’s wrap up with a share from the fantabulous Kelly Hungerford. You can never go wrong with Kelly! She points to a CoSchedule study that found that 32% of customers would leave a brand they claim to love after just one bad customer experience. Showing empathy for your customers via your content and interactions can go a long way toward keeping unhappy customers!

 

Thank you so much for reading, I will be back tomorrow with another post, and remember that tomorrow night on Twitter we will have #ContentCircus, starting at 7pm Central! Be safe and be careful this week!