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Sears Turns its Twitter Account Over to Five Dads for Father’s Day

One of the things companies struggle with how to build engagement with their social media accounts. The cold reality is that most people don’t engage with a company on Twitter until there’s a problem. The majority of current or potential customers aren’t following a given brand’s Twitter account on a given day.

So how do you get people to pay attention to you, when they don’t want to? One way that companies have been testing is allowing a customer or fan to have temporary access to their Twitter account. During Alabama basketball’s NCAA tournament run in March, the Tuscaloosa News turned its Twitter account over to Bama super-fan Hunter Johnson. The move was wildly popular, it drove a lot of attention to the @TideSports account, and gave @HunterLJohnson a lot more attention as well.

Last week leading up to Father’s Day, Sears applied a similar strategy:

Sears picked five dads, and let each one have a different day, and a different topic:

One day the topic was favorite tools, another it was travel ideas, another it was cooking. All topics relating back to fathers and ideas for Father’s Day. This is a great example of focusing on customer-centric content. Instead of promoting Father’s Day sales, Sears brings in real dads all week to discuss their fathers and fatherhood. Naturally, shopping for Father’s Day will come up, but it’s not the focus of the strategy. The focus is to bring together five dads and their communities for a vibrant discussion, that Sears hosts.

Overall, I think this is a great idea and I think you’ll see more brands doing this moving forward. Sears can now improve similar efforts moving forward. Maybe bring in cooks to discuss baking for Thanksgiving, or parents to discuss shopping for children around Christmas.

I do have a couple of suggestions for Sears. If I were helping Sears with this effort, I would have stressed the need to leverage the new exposure Sears had to the communities of these five dads that took over the Sears Twitter account. The reality is, a lot of people will check out the Sears account while the dad they are following is running the account, but after that most of them will leave when the dad does. A good way to capitalize would have been for Sears to promote a special discount code for #AskDad participants, maybe give them the code ASKDAD to get a 20% discount.  This would also be a great way to track a lift in sales directly back to the #AskDad Twitter chats.  I would have also encouraged Sears to promote either its newsletter, or maybe a ‘Gift Buying Guide for Dads’, or something similar.

But overall, I thought turning #AskDad over to real dads for a week was a great idea by Sears, and will be interested in seeing how the brand builds on this idea!

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Why is Red Bull Blogging About Video Games?

Red Bull Blogging About Video Games

I was doing some research for a new post (right) and came across this post for tips on how to win at PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS, one of the hottest mobile games right now.

What’s interesting is the post was on RedBull.com.  Red Bull sells energy drinks, they don’t sell video games.

So why is Red Bull blogging about video games? There’s actually a few very good reasons why they would:

  • Red Bull’s core customer base is male millennials. Male millennials like video games, so Red Bull figures if their customers are going to be looking for content about video games anyway, why not give it to them so they can stay on RedBull.com? PUBG Mobile is one of the hottest mobile games right now, so why not create the content that its customers will be looking for?  There’s plenty of content about Fortnite as well, so Red Bull has all the video game bases covered.
  • I’ve blogged about this before, but Red Bull is involved in the events, topics and themes that are important to its customers. Red Bull’s focus on video games could be part of a larger move to develop a greater presence in the eSports space.
  • Not only has eSports seen spectacular growth over the last few years, but there’s a potential sponsorship play to be had. Emerging competitor G-Fuel has made a name for itself by sponsoring top eSports athletes, including top Twitch streamer DrDisRespect (who I blogged about here). Red Bull has been dipping its toes in the eSports space for a while, the next step could be to start sponsoring eSports athletes or streamers, and help facilitate larger events. It’s a formula that worked incredibly well for Red Bull with the X-Games.

The larger content lesson is that Red Bull is focusing on customer-centric content. This is content that really doesn’t promote the product or brand, it promotes the information that its customers want, that can also relate back to the brand. So there needs to be some synergies in place for this approach to work.  For example, Red Bull could also write an article on “What You Need to Know to Get Accepted to College”, and it probably wouldn’t work as well, because while it’s also a topic that’s important to male millennials, the brand synergy isn’t as apparent.

Go back to the 3rd bullet point above.  G-Fuel has started sponsoring eSports athletes and Twitch streamers because they claim that their energy drink keeps you sharp, and mentally focused so you can do better while playing video games. If you’re a Twitch streamer, this has real appeal to you, because if an energy drink can keep you alert and let you play video games better, it literally means more money for you in the form of subs and donations. Red Bull could be making a lot of these same pitches to streamers and perhaps they’ve already started working on securing some sponsorships in this space.

Just remember that some of the best and most effective content you can create often has nothing to do with your brand or its products and services. When you create content that’s focused on your customers and more importantly on how your brand relates to your customers, that’s content that’s top of the sales funnel and does a great job of building brand awareness.

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How Much Money Will You Make From Writing a Book?

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Note from Mack: ‘How much money will I make from writing a book?’ is a question I hear often. This post was written while I was writing my book Think Like a Rock Star. After I had finished the book, I wanted to share what I had learned about the process when it comes to securing advances for your book, royalty payouts after publication, etc. The goal of this post was to provide helpful advice for others, especially my many friends in consulting that were curious about the entire process of writing their own book.

However, I am not in the publishing business, I am not in contact with literary agents, and I really can’t help you secure publication of your book other than what I’ve shared in this post. I work as a digital and content strategist to help companies with their content and digital marketing as well as helping them build programs that better connect my client with their customers. These can include blogger or influencer outreach or brand ambassador programs.  Here’s where you can learn more about what I do and some of the results I’ve achieved for my clients.  Thanks for reading and good luck with your writing! 

I’ve always tried to be brutally honest with y’all when it come to money in this space because:

1 – It helps you trust the content I create here

2 – Being transparent is more comfortable for me than being vague

3 – Too many people in this space have wild misconceptions about how much money is or is not being made here, which leads to gossip and bitterness that’s a complete waste of time

Since I first mentioned that I was writing a book and then more so when it was published, people have been curious about the process.  How long did it take?  How do they get started?  And yes, how much money can they make?

I wanted to address the money part here, because again, I believe there are some big misconceptions.  There are three ways that an author makes money directly from their book(This assumes you go with a traditional publisher, as I did):

1 – The advance

2 – Royalties off book sales

3 – Reselling the book themselves (typically you can buy your book for at least half off cover price, and sell it anywhere your publisher isn’t.  Such as on your website, but not on Amazon)

The Advance  

In most cases, if you are writing your first business book, you can expect to get an advance of $4,000 to $10,000.  The key thing to remember about that advance is that it’s an advance, so you have to pay that money back.  And remember that if it’s your first book, you are largely an unproven commodity to publishers, so they are less likely to give you a bigger advance.

Royalties off books sales

In most cases, publishers will offer you a contract where you get 10-15% royalties off each sale.  Now there is a big qualification to this number.  Some publishers will offer you that rate off list price (Gross royalties), and some will offer you that rate off the amount of profit they make off the book (net royalties).  The net amount is typically 50% of the book’s price.

So for example, if a book as a list price of $25.00, that means that if your contract says you get 10% royalties off list, then you will get $2.50 per book.  If you are getting 10% of net profits, then you’d get around $1.25 per book.  From my experience talking to other authors and receiving multiple contract offers for Think Like A Rock Star, it seems that most publishers in this space prefer to offer net royalties.

Additionally, you will likely get a higher royalty rate for ebooks, plus you may be offered a higher royalty rate as your sales of the book increase.  You should ask the publisher for both.

So let’s do some quick math here:  Let’s say you get a $5,000 advance for your book and you get 10% royalties net profit, and the book’s list price is $25.00.  That means you are making $1.25 per book, and that you will need to sell 4,000 copies of your book just to break even.  Thus the averages say that you will never make a penny from royalties off sales of your book (earn out).  The average US non-fiction book sells about 250 copies a year and around 3,000 copies over its lifetime.

Scared yet?  We haven’t even covered the time commitment involved.

 

So how long does it take to write a book?

Publishers vary in how long they will give you to write a book.  Wiley and Que/Pearson seem to want most authors to spend 3-4 months on the actual writing process, then move to editing, etc (UPDATE:  Make sure you check the comments as QUE’s Katherine Bull chimes in with more information on how the writing process works for them).  One of the reasons I decided to go with McGraw-Hill was because they were willing to give me a bit more time to write TLARS, I actually ended up getting about 6 months to work on the writing until we moved to the editing process.  All told, the editing and writing of Think Like a Rock Star took nine months.

Here’s the big problem: The amount of your advance will not come close to covering the amount of time it will take you to write the book.  Let’s assume that you spend just 10 hours a week on writing your book, and that it takes you a total of 8 months to finish it.  That’s 320 hours you have invested in writing this book.  Assuming you get a $5,000 advance, that means your hourly rate for writing the book was $15.63.  For reference, I spent around 25 hours a week on TLARS, for 9 months.

So this brings up the obvious question: When are you going to find time to write this book?  If you already have a full-time job, then your nights and weekends are probably going to disappear for a few months.  If you work for yourself as I do, then you may have to make the tough decision to turn down some work in order to work on your book.  This is what I did.

Now another option is to bring on a co-author.  This halves the work for you, but of course it also halves the amount of the advance you get, and the amount you make from any royalties in the future.

 

But wait, what about marketing and promoting the book?

Yep, after the writing and editing is done (really it starts months before that), you then have to start marketing and promoting the book.  One thing I wanted to touch on is the quest to hit the bestseller lists that a lot of authors get excited about when writing a book.

The idea is this:  If you can sell enough copies of the book in one week (typically launch week is your best bet), then the book may qualify for bestseller lists.  How many copies you need to sell is a very vague and floating number, and can depend on several factors such as what other books are coming out during the same week. Medical books are generally difficult to sell now because there is a lot of information on the Internet on quality websites. In general it seems that at least 2,000-3,000 copies sold during one week is needed.   Since we’ve already established that the average non-fiction book doesn’t sell 3,000 copies over it’s lifetime, then you can work out the odds of your book hitting the bestsellers list.  IOW, if you don’t have 100,000 people on your mailing list, good luck.

This is where I really screwed up.  Now I started planning out my marketing for TLARS as soon as I started working on it a year ago.  I realized early in the process that this book likely wasn’t going to make any bestseller lists.  Again, I just don’t have a big enough platform to drive the needed sales in a concentrated period.  But, what I thought I would do is sell as many pre-orders as possible in the year leading up to the book’s launch.  Based on my research, I realized that Amazon will count all the pre-orders as ‘new sales’ during the launch week (or when they officially begin offering the book for sale).  So what I started doing last year was speaking and working in exchange for pre-orders!  For example, I might waive my speaking fee for this event, if they agree to pre-order 100 copies of TLARS.

My thinking was this:  Let’s say I sell 500 pre-orders of TLARS, and when the book launches in April, those 500 pre-orders will count as ‘new’ sales of the book, and push TLARS way up the sales rankings.  Unfortunately, it turns out I as dead wrong about how Amazon calculates sales.  The research on all of this seemed to be unclear about a few things, and one of them was how Amazon handles bulk sales.  So after months of accepting pre-orders instead of $$$, I finally found out that Amazon counts bulk orders as one sale.  For example, if you pre-order 100 copies of my book, Amazon will view it as if you only pre-ordered ONE copy, since the order is being placed on ONE credit card.

Which essentially meant in Amazon’s eyes I sold several hundred fewer copies than I actually did.  For reference, the book’s sales rank peaked at 20,600 on April 1st.  If the per-orders had each been counted as individual sales, the sales rank for the book would have likely been around 500 or less on launch.  Which would have driven many additional sales because it would have been featured far more prominently on the site, on the hot new releases lists, etc etc.  But live and learn.  The main reason I wanted to talk about trying to make the bestseller list is that it is really hard to do on your first book unless you have a huge promotional platform.

 

So then why in the world would anyone want to write a book?    

In my mind you don’t write a book to make money, you write a book to start a conversation.  You write a book because you have an idea that you are passionate about, that you want to share with the world.  If others find value in that idea, then you can make money indirectly off your book. I wrote Think Like a Rock Star because I wanted brands to learn how they could better create happy customers by learning how to be better marketers from rock stars. I wanted to give companies a complete blueprint for creating and launching a robust brand ambassador program, because there wasn’t a lot of information available on that topic.

The best way to approach writing a book is that you want to create something of value for others that will enable them to do something positive.  A book that will be a tool for them to help them reach their goals and have greater accomplishments.

If you can do all that, then the money will take care of itself.

UPDATE:  Getting some comments from others pointing out how a book gives you credibility and builds your awareness and how THAT leads to money for you.  All of this is completely correct BUT how you position your book is crucial.  If you are writing your book and at the same time thinking about how it will lead to bigger speaking fees and higher consulting rates for you, then it can easily impact your writing.  As Kathy was telling me when I was working on TLARS, ‘most of the things that authors add to their books to make them sound smart, makes the reader feel stupid’.  The point is if you are writing your book consciously as a tool to make more money, it’s probably going to make the book less valuable to the reader because it won’t be as focused on what’s best and valuable for the reader.

So write the book that helps the reader kick-ass at whatever they are doing, (like creating healthy meals for busy moms, or helping companies create amazing brand ambassador programs) and the money will take care of itself!

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What Gamers on Twitch Taught Me About Building an Online Community

I regularly check Twitter's trending topics, and a few months ago I noticed that the top trending topics were "The DOC" and "Twitch is Down".

Twitch being down grabbed my curiosity, why was it down? Now my sum total knowledge of Twitch at this point was that it was 'that site where people watch other people play video games".  I'd known about the site for years, but had maybe spent 15 mins total on it.  

So I clicked the trending topics, and quickly discovered that Twitch was down because a popular gamer, DrDisRespect had returned to Twitch after a long hiatus.

And his return had crashed the site. This definitely got my attention.

DrDisRespect is one of the most popular gamers on Twitch, and the self-appointed 'Face of Twitch'. He's a very skilled gamer and perhaps an even more accomplished marketer. Brash, flamboyant and over the top, he's a sort of a cross between Seth Godin and Ric Flair. 

And make no mistake, he's popular as hell. Check out this screenshot I took from a recent gaming session. He was playing Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, a 100-person battle royale online game, which is one of the more popular games on Twitch. Think of it as Fortnite's older brother. When I took the screenshot, he'd just won a game of PUB in spectacular fashion. Note in the chatbox that he got 15 comments in one second.  

It's not uncommon for his streams to have 25,000 or more viewers. On the day in February when he crashed Twitch, he had over 300,000 concurrent viewers, a Twitch record that would later be broken by a Ninja/Drake tag-team Fortnite session that would bring over 600,000 concurrent viewers to Twitch. His streams typically last for 6-8 hours a day, Monday-Friday. Twitch users can donate to their favorite streamers, and it's not uncommon for popular gamers to make well into the 6 or even 7 figures a year.  DrDisRespect is rumored to make up to half a million a MONTH off Twitch.  

There are many other streamers that are quite popular and making a lot of money off Twitch. But what I've noticed from watching the streams the last few weeks is that almost all of the gamers on Twitch are very cordial and even helpful to each other. Even the most popular streamers go out of their way to engage their followers. It's not uncommon to see the biggest streamers taking time out from playing to give members of their chat advice on how to build their own gaming community. And I found it interesting that a lot of the advice that Twitch streamers had for building a community apply to blogs and social media communities just as easily. Here's some of the frequent advice I've seen popular Twitch streamers share about building a community:

  • Don't start out streaming with the most popular games as your stream will get lost in the shuffle. Start with a game with a smaller number of views, so your stream can be more easily seen and so you can stand out. This is the same advice new bloggers are always given: Pick a niche and own it!
  • Be consistent. Stream on the same days, at the same times, so your subscribers know when your stream will be up. Again, bloggers are given the same advice: Pick a posting schedule and stick to it. 
  • Engage your followers. Talk to them in chat, acknowledge them when they subscribe or donate. Again, same thing we tell bloggers, reply to comments and THANK people when they do comment!
  • Don't be afraid to be yourself and show some personality. I think this REALLY works for Twitch because it's typically a younger audience, but having a personality and being entertaining counts for a lot. I'll be honest, watching DrDisRespect's stream has been a bit eye-opening in this regard. I've seen several other streamers that are as good as Doc or maybe even better, but Doc goes out of his way to also be ENTERTAINING in his streams, and I think that's a big reason why he's so much more popular than other streamers who may be as good at gaming, but who aren't nearly as entertaining as Doc is. Personality and voice matters, and it really does help your content stand out. 

Another aspect that I noticed with these Twitch users is that most of them, especially the more popular ones, go out of their way to help their followers get better at playing the games they stream. The above screenshot is from Twitch user chocoTaco. He does a great job of helping his followers by taking the time to explain how to play the game, as he is streaming. He will carefully detail why he picked a certain weapon or why he went a certain route or how he beat another player. Plus, streamers like chocoTaco often play 'randoms', where they will invite their followers to play with them, they will pick a follower at random and play a game with them together. This is obviously a big thrill for the Twitch users to get to play alongside their favorite streamers. In fact, during one of DrDisRespect's streams, he mentioned that another Twitch streamer, CourageJD will often play Fortnite with his followers at random to help them get their first win at the game. You can see why this would really be a big deal for the first-time winner! 

This also speaks to a larger point; Don't focus on understanding the tools, focus on how people are USING the tools. To me, seeing how Twitch streamers are using the site and how they build community with their followers is far more valuable and interesting than the site itself. These streamers are creating value for their followers by teaching them how to become better at the games that they love playing. All they are doing is creating useful content. I've always written here that you should strive to create content that teaches your audience a skill, or how to get better at using your product. This is what these Twitch streamers are doing, and it's at the heart of why they are so popular. 

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What You Can Start Doing TODAY to Build Community Like Twitch Streamers Do 

  • Always reply to all comments, most especially positive comments you get on your blog or on other social media sites. This encourages people to continue to comment and engage with you.
  • Pick a schedule and be consistent with it. Post content at the same times, if you create content 'whenever I feel like it', then you're making it doubly hard on yourself to build a following. People need to know when they can expect a new blog post from you, or what times and days you'll be on Twitter or Facebook. 
  • Pick a smaller niche or topic, and own it. The broader your topic, the more content creators you will be competing with for attention. For example, there are millions of 'marketing' blogs out there. I specifically focus on customer engagement, customer loyalty, brand advocacy and brand ambassador programs. As a result, my content typically ranks on the first page of Google results for the term 'brand ambassador program'. By narrowly focusing on that marketing sub-topic, I've gone from competing against millions of other sites, to only a handful, for that top result on Google. 
  • Be entertaining and show your personality. This one is tricky because we've been taught that if we are trying to reach a professional audience, that our content should be professional as well. On the other hand, we're also taught that we need to find a way to make our content stand out from the crowd. Adding some personality to your content makes it different, more appealing, and helps it connect with your audience. This is the one area where I'm going to be focusing on the most in the future. 
  • Have fun! Going along with the above point, look for ways to have fun with your content creation, that's infectious and if you're having fun creating your content, your followers will probably have fun interacting with it, and you!

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Your Content Not Converting Has Nothing to Do With Your Content and Everything to Do With Your Customer

If you want to improve the ability of your blog to grow your business, you need to focus on creating content that converts. In simplest terms, a conversion is an action that the customer takes as a result of interacting with your content. There are many actions the reader can take when interacting with your content, and your content should be tailored so that they take the action (conversion) that you want.

This is where the trouble starts...

Raise Your Hand if Your Company is Blogging to 'Build Awareness'

This is the biggest conversion-killer of all. Think about that strategy; building awareness. Literally, that means you are trying to make people aware of your business, through your blogging efforts. So if you are trying to attract people that don't know who you are and don't know what you sell, what's the one thing your content can NOT do?

Sell to that customer.

Think about it: If I am unaware of who you are and what you do, why would you waste my time and yours selling your product to me? I don't know who you are, I don't know what you do, and I don't know why I should care. So clearly, selling to me is the worst thing you could do. It wastes your time, and mine.

And yet...this is precisely what most companies do that adopt a 'build awareness' content strategy, they create content that sells.

We're Not Like Those Guys, Our Content NEVER Sells!

This is the second biggest reason why your content never converts; Because when the customer actually IS ready to buy, your content doesn't move them closer to a sale! You've been beaten over the head with the 'social media is about relationships, not selling!' club so much that you go too far the other way and NEVER sell with your content. I don't blame you for this as much as I blame the 'social media purists' that push such nonsense. Of course your content can sell. You simply have to understand where the buyer is on their journey, and create the content they need today, with a bridge to the content they will need tomorrow.

This is the Four Stages of the Buyer's Journey. I'll be going into all four in much greater detail in a post later this month. But for now, let's focus on two things; the first and last stage, and the color of each.

First, note that the color of each stage is different. The color gets 'warmer' the further you move to the right, to signify that each stage moves the reader closer to being a buyer. It's also a visual reminder to you that when the reader is Unaware of who you are and what you do, they are also completely cold to your effort to sell to them. So don't even try. 

Second, note the first and last stages. As I said, there are two main reasons why most content doesn't convert. It's because you create content that sells when the customer isn't ready to buy, then when they are ready to buy, you don't sell to them. 

If your blog's goal is to 'build awareness' of your business, then don't blog about your business, blog about the customer you want to do business with! Sounds counter-intuitive, right? It isn't, this approach works because you're creating content that attracts the people you want to do business with! 

Let's say your company sells lawncare products. If you write a post titled "Five Pests That Are Keeping Your Lawn From Being Beautiful", that post would appeal to homeowners that want a beautiful lawn. A homeowner might read that post and think "Hey! My lawn has those brown spots, so THAT'S what causes them, I had no idea!" Then they will start to investigate your site and LEARN more about your products, but it all started by creating content that was focused on the customer, not your brand.

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Note About Content That 'Builds Awareness'

This content should only focus on the customer. Specifically, you focus on your customer's life, without selling your product. A good way to think of this content is creating content that teaches your customer the skills that also compliment your product. In the above example, you create content that helps the customer have a more beautiful lawn. Ultimately, this is the problem that your product solves, so create content that focuses on the problem, and that gives the customer advice on how to solve it. That gains their attention, and can eventually give you a way to promote your product to them! 

In general, the less interested the customer is in buying, the more your content should focus on the customer. The more interested the customer is in buying, the more you should create content that's technical and focused on the product. Just remember to give them a way to actually BUY the product! 

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How to Republish Your Old Posts Like a Rock Star

Republishing old blog posts has become increasingly popular among bloggers over the last few years. I’ve been doing this for about a year now, and I’ve seen spectacular results. I use a specific system for republishing my old blog posts, and I wanted to share that system with you.

I’ve often talked about how you can greatly improve your content creation efforts by thinking like a rock star. In fact, one of the most popular posts I’ve ever written focuses on adopting a rock star’s mindset to your content creation and marketing efforts. So let’s further think like a rock star when it comes to republishing our old blog posts.

Find Your Greatest Hits

Every rock star who has been successful eventually has a ‘greatest hits’ album. Let’s say you are a fan of Soundgarden, and wanted to introduce your friend to the legendary Seattle band. You may decide to give them a greatest hits album from the band.

In much the same way, you as a blogger should have a collection of ‘Greatest Hits’ posts. If someone was new to your blog and wanted to learn what topics you write about and are known for, what 10 blog posts would you show them? These 10 blog posts are your blogging ‘Greatest Hits’. And if you haven’t been blogging very long, you can go with your best 3 posts or best 5 posts. The point is to focus on your BEST work, the posts that you want to be known for, the posts that advance the ideas, thoughts and beliefs that you want to be associated with and known for.

I started doing this last year with this blog. I went through my archives and found several posts that I thought represented my best work. I then whittled that list down to my 10 ‘best’ posts. These are the posts that I want to be known for and the ones that I want to promote and see be more successful.

Your Greatest News, Now Remastered! 

Rock stars don’t just collect their greatest hits and resell them on a new album. They spice them up.  They remaster them to improve the sound quality, they repackage them with additional information on how the songs were writtten, etc. All of this improves the quality of the songs and makes them more interesting and appealing to fans.

In much the same way, you should ‘remaster’ your best blog posts. Here’s the checklist I went through with each of my greatest hits posts:

First, I selected my list of 10 posts that I would republish. Then, I scrubbed the posts for any outdated information. Are there broken links? Old videos from YouTube that are no longer hosted there? Next I see if there’s any outdated information or stats that need to be updated. Basically, I start with making sure that everything in the post as it stands now is still useful. Anything that isn’t, gets stripped out.

Then, I see what I can add. Are there any new studies or research that’s been done on this topic? Has my thinking evolved or have I learned something new that I could add to the post? By combining both these steps, I’m stripping out outdated information that no longer has value, and I’m adding in new information. The end result is that the overall quality of the post is improved.

Finally, I ask what is the ‘bigger idea’ behind this post? What’s it about? What core topic am I wanting to discuss, and am I doing this as well as I can? Remember, these 10 ‘greatest hits’ posts are supposed to represent the core ideas, themes and beliefs that I hold dear. I also look at the post headline, and the post itself to make sure I am targeting the right keywords that are associated with the concepts I want to discuss. For example, if my post is about brand ambassador programs, then the keyword phrase ‘brand ambassador programs’ needs to be in the post headline if at all possible.

But Mack, Can’t I Just Change the Date and Call it a Day?

You can, but I wouldn’t advise it. Remember, these 10 posts are supposed to be examples of your best work. If all you can do is change the date of publication to today, is this really a topic you should be writing about? If I’ve written a post that covers a topic I am actually knowledgeable about, I can always find something new to add and a way to improve the post.

Having said that, changing the date of a post to make the post ‘newer’ will typically improve your search rankings alone. Google wants to serve the most relevant and RECENT content to its users. If I’ve written a post on creating an incredible content strategy from 2010 and you’ve written a similar post from 2015, your post will typically be higher in search results for terms related to ‘content strategy’. So it’s my job to improve and update my post, and make sure it has better content than yours.  Then I can update my post and give it a 2018 date, and guess what? My post will now show up higher in search results than yours. As it should, if my content is better and more recent than yours, it will and should be higher in search results.

And Here’s the Results….

Last year I used this process to update several of my older posts that I wanted to be known as some of my ‘best’ work.

One post I updated last Summer was this post on Red Bull’s content strategy and why it’s so successful. So to see how my efforts are working, let’s compare traffic to this post during 2018 so far, compared to Jan 1st-April 15th of 2017:

It’s a bit hard to see, but the blue lines represent pageviews this year, the orange lines represent pageviews for this same time period in 2017. That’s an increase in Pageviews of almost 400%, mostly from doing one update and refresh of this post, which was originally published in 2013. Not bad, right?

Here’s another example: this post: 10 Things to Remember When Creating a Brand Ambassador Program. Like the Red Bull post, I updated this one last Summer. Here’s the traffic this year compared to the same period last year:

This post has ‘only’ had a 233% increase in pageviews, but notice that the increase was from 1,142 pageviews last year to 3,811 pageviews so far this year. But what I’m most proud about is that fact that this post now typically ranks on the first page of search results for the term ‘brand ambassador program’. For most of last year the post ranked in the Top 20 for that term, now it’s in the Top 10. This is huge for my business as helping companies launch brand ambassador programs is one of the key consulting services I offer.

And even though both these posts are doing great, when I do my next update on my ‘greatest hits’ blog posts, you better believe I am going to again update both these posts. Every time I do, the quality and comprehensiveness of the post is improved, which makes it more valuable to readers, and helps it rank higher in search engines.  Which drives even more traffic to the post.

 

So go through your blog’s archives today, and find your 10 posts that are your greatest hits. These are the 10 blog posts that you want to be known for, the posts that cover the topics you want to be associated with. Update these posts, don’t just give them a new date, scrub the posts, remove any errors, grammatical or fact-based. Then add any new information that you think improves the quality of the post. This can include new studies, new research, etc. Also, consider adding new visual elements, such as updating the pictures used, or adding videos.

The end result should be that you have improved the quality of your content, and that will increase traffic to your blog and to that content.  As a bonus tip: Regularly promote these 10 ‘greatest hits’ posts of yours on social media. I have my 10 greatest hits posts, and I am constantly sharing links to these posts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The reason why is simple: I want to remind people that they should associate me with the topics of these posts.

Finally, check out ProBlogger’s recent post on republishing your old posts and why it’s a good idea.

 

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It’s Time For Your Company to Move on From Facebook and Twitter

This has been a frustratingly difficult post for me to write on multiple levels. For years, I have advised my clients to ‘plant in the gardens that they own’ when it comes to social media. Focus on your blog and newsletter, or the delivery channels that you control versus putting all your eggs in a social media basket. If you’re thinking of your digital strategy as a house, your website and blog should be the foundation, not social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

But now I am advising clients and companies like yours to put even less emphasis on Facebook and Twitter. The reason why is simple; Because if both companies continue on their current paths, neither will be around in five years.

Let’s Start With Facebook 

Facebook has been in the news recently over complaints about how freely user data is shared on the site. Recently, reports came out about how a firm, Cambridge Analytica, had collected Facebook user data from users who had participated in a third party app/quiz, and that user data was then reported made available to the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. This actually isn’t a new practice, the Obama campaign also mined Facebook user data collected from third party apps during the 2012 election. Both instances have raised some very valid points about how Facebook needs to be more transparent with how it uses our data, and also about how Facebook users need to be more responsible with what apps they give access to their accounts. Mark Zuckerberg will be testifying before Congress this week and will no doubt be asked early and often about the site’s plans to better protect and care for user data moving forward.

Companies have also struggled for years to make sense of Facebook’s constantly changing algorithms when it comes to determining organic reach for its content. Increasingly, content for brands has seen its organic reach decrease as Facebook has encouraged companies to move to a paid strategy to maintain or increase reach with its audiences. These moves have especially hit small businesses hard, many of who have basically leveraged a brand page on Facebook as their de facto website. Additionally, it creates frustration for social media managers everywhere because just as they seem to adjust to Facebook’s latest ‘algorithm’ change, a new one is sprung on them that throws their engagement efforts into a new tailspin. The end result for companies from every change by Facebook seems to have one commonality: Less organic reach for your content.

And Then There’s Twitter 

I joined Twitter in March of 2007, and ever since then, I have had a love/hate relationship with the site. I love the site and how it gives me the ability to so easily connect and talk directly with so many interesting people. But I hate how Twitter’s founders (Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey and Ev Williams) have always wanted the site to be a broadcast platform and not a social one. Replies were never intended to be a part of Twitter. Think about that…Twitter was founded without any thought given to incorporating the functionality for users to talk to each other. The feature was later adopted due to pressure from the Twitter community, and as you can tell from Ev’s update in 2008 on how Replies work on Twitter, he’s obviously not a fan of them.

In fact, one of the earliest changes Twitter made to replies signaled how the founders didn’t value users being able to connect with each other organically. Up until around 2008 or so, you saw every reply that anyone you followed made. For instance, if I’m following Jake, and Jake replied to Mary, I saw Jake’s reply. Why was this a big deal? Let’s say I’m not following Mary, I have no idea who she is. But she’s a friend of Jake’s, and she happens to have the same taste in movies that I do. Before Twitter changed how replies work, when Jake and Mary started discussing the movie Memento, I could see Jake’s replies to Mary, and then I would know that Mary loves the movie Memento as much I do! Suddenly, I’ve found a new friend to follow who shares my taste in movies, thanks to seeing her conversation with Jake. But Twitter decided early on that if Jake (who I follow) was talking to Mary (who I don’t follow), then I can’t see their conversation. Which means I may never meet Mary or have any idea who she is or that she loves Memento as much as I do. This move to limit how you see replies seems inconsequential now especially to anyone that joined Twitter after 2008 and has no idea what I am talking about, but trust me, this was a wonderful way to organically meet new and interesting people. And the fact that Twitter didn’t see or appreciate this, was very telling.

And then there’s this recent tweet from Jack Dorsey:

This is Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sharing a tweet from fellow Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, about a radical political article that appeared on Medium. The article on Medium, in short, calls for an end to attempts at bipartisan agreements in politics, and the elimination of one major political party so that the other party can ‘rule’ the country. Putting aside how scary it is for the CEO of a major social media site to so openly promote such incendiary political commentary, such ideas fly in the face of everything that is supposed to make social media so incredible. The great promise of social media was always this: Everyone gets a voice. For the first time in recorded history, the majority of the planet now had the ability to create content and reach the majority of the planet. We can talk to each other, we can learn from each other. And perhaps most importantly, we can talk to people with different viewpoints than our own.

Jack’s enthusiastic sharing of this article suggests to me that we have a very different view of what makes social media so great. And yes, I’ve been doing a slow burn about this tweet for a few days now.

I started blogging in 2005. Back in those days, many of us used a tool called Technorati to check our incoming links. I did as well, and since I was at the time writing for an advertising blog, the links I got were typically from other advertising blogs.

Then one day I saw an incoming link from a blog I’d never heard of. It contained what appeared to be Japanese or Chinese symbols.  I clicked on the link, and discovered it was the personal blog of a 13 year-old girl in China. Suddenly, it hit me what had just happened. I had written a post in Alabama, that I teenager in China had read and enjoyed so much that she had linked to it on her personal blog. A year prior, it would have been all but impossible for me to reach anyone in China, much less a teenager. Now, thanks to social media, I had tool called a ‘blog’ and I could reach her, and she could reach me.

The power of social media has always been about more connections and more conversations, not fewer. Facebook and Twitter are arguably the two most powerful social media sites in the world, but I fear that the founders of both sites have lost sight of what makes social media so incredible.

What Does the Future Hold For Facebook and Twitter. And Should Your Company Be a Part of It?

There is growing distrust among Facebook and Twitter’s users toward both sites. Both sites need to be more open and willing to listen to their users. This has always been a problem for both sites, I remember having conversations as early on as 2009 with other Twitter power users about how the site needed a Community Manager, someone that could be a liaison between the users and the company. Too often, it seemed like users of both sites would advocate for changes, then without warning, the sites would announce changes that seemed to be completely disconnected from the changes that users actually wanted.

In short, if both Facebook and Twitter continue on their current paths, neither site will be around in 5 years, at least not in any form resembling how it looks today. In social media as it is in life, nothing lasts forever. Just ask MySpace.

Having said all this, there is still potential value for your company on both Facebook and Twitter. If you’re already active on either or both sites and seeing results that meet your goals, then stick with it for now. But moving forward, make sure that you depend more on the channels you control, such as your blog, and less on the ones that you don’t, such as social media sites. In fact, if you want to try something new with your digital strategy, launch a newsletter before you get on Instagram or Snapchat. In other words, be more dependent on channels you own, and less dependent on the ones you don’t.

Long-term, you should ask yourself “If Facebook and Twitter went away tomorrow, how would we reach our customers?” Increasingly, your customers are either considering a move away from these sites, or they are actually leaving.  In the last fiscal quarter of 2017, Facebook actually reported a marginal decrease in US users. Twitter also struggled to hold onto users in 2017.

My advice to clients remains the same as it has always been: When it comes to digital content creation, plant in the gardens that you own.

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This is Why Social Media is Making You Scared to Talk to Your Customers

There’s that guy in your office. You know the one, the guy that always wants to talk politics.

You do not like to talk politics. You also don’t like when this guy tries to talk politics with you, because inevitably, it ends up in a loud argument that attracts several of your co-workers that you really want no part of. So you tend to avoid the ‘politics’ guy because you know if you talk to him, an argument that you want no part of is going to be the result.

In many ways, thanks to social media, your customers have become that ‘politics’ guy in your office that always starts loud arguments that you want no part of.

When businesses began experimenting with social media about 10 years ago, many of us saw this as a breakthrough. Thanks to these ‘social’ tools, companies now had the ability to interact on an individual level with customers, and vice versa. The potential implications to customer service, brand loyalty, customer engagement and marketing in general were massive.

 

Customers Control the Interactions Between Most Brands and Their Customers, and It’s Not Pretty

Unfortunately, 10 years later, most customers are far more willing to use social media to interact with brands than most brands are to use social media to interact with customers.

And when most customers want to interact with brands, they typically want to complain to brands.

Check the average brand page on Facebook for example, and the majority of the time you will see the same thing.  You will see updates from the brand trying to promote itself and its products and services, then you will see that customers have taken over the comments to complain about issues and problems they are having with those same products and services.

For many brands, Facebook has become the place where their customers come to complain about them. The irony of ‘social’ media is that customers will complain about brands on social media, because they know that brands will be more likely to respond quickly, because if they don’t, it looks bad for the brand and the other customers notice.

Let me be clear: This is not the customers’ fault, it’s your fault as the brand. You have ceded control of the conversation with your customers, to your customers. As a result, those customers are going to act in their best interests, which means they are only going to talk to you when they want to talk to you.

Which means the only time most of them will talk to you, is when they have to. Like when they have a problem with your product or services.

Last week I spoke to a group of rural telecoms and electric providers in Huntsville. I presented Think Like a Rock Star, and part of that talk revolved around how rock stars proactively seek out interactions with their customers whereas most companies only interact with their customers when they have to. I was talking to a friend of mine who leads Customer Care for a global brand that you’ve all heard of about this, and she agreed that most companies only talk to their customers when the customer is complaining about something. The brand itself has little to no desire to initiate interactions with their customers.

Since rock stars proactively engage directly with their customers, they have a better understanding of who their customers are, and what they want. Rock stars then leverage this knowledge to improve the experience for their customers. This completely changes the conversation that rock stars have with their customers. Rock stars and their fans understand each other, so the conversation is more open and enjoyable for both parties. On the flip-side, most companies don’t understand their customers, and most customers don’t understand the companies they buy from, so it’s no wonder that the conversation between most brands and customers is completely one-sided and difficult!

This is the very simple framework that rock stars use to create fans. Note that every step in this process is deliberate, and applies to BOTH the rock star AND their fans:

1 – Interaction: Rock stars seek out ways to interact directly with their customers, and invite their customers to interact directly with them. These interactions lead to….

2 – Understanding: By interacting with their customers, rock stars begin to UNDERSTAND who their customers are and why they buy the products that the rock star makes. At the same time, the customers begin to understand who the rock star is, what drives them, why they write the music they do, what their stories are. The rock star becomes more relate-able to their fans and the fans become more relate-able to the rock star. And that understanding leads to…..

3 – Trust: When you understand who your customers are, then you can trust them. When your customers know who you are and why you are doing what you do, then they can trust you. And that trust leads to…..

4 – Advocacy: When you know someone and you TRUST them, you will advocate for them. This happens with customers that know and trust your brand, they tell other people about it.

 

Take Control of the Conversation You Have With Your Customers

But this process always starts with interactions. Your brand interacting with its customers and your customers interacting with your brand. This is why I am so passionate about helping companies better connect with their customers. I don’t want the only interactions you have with your customers to be when they complain about you on your Facebook page. I want your company to embrace a culture of curiosity about who your customers are.

Additionally, I want your brand to take control of how you interact with your customers. You’re going to have to interact with your customers anyway, so why not be proactive and engage with them first, and then apply what you learn to improve your business and marketing processes? The end result is that more you proactively engage with your customers on YOUR terms, the less you will have to engage with your customers on their terms. The less time you will spend fielding complains and problems.

So how do you go from only engaging with your customers via complaints on social media or calls and emails…to something more? By giving your customers more opportunities to interact with your brand, but on terms that your brand controls. Here’s some simple starting points:

1 – Surveys. Ask your customers who they are, what they like, what they dislike and more. This can be done via your website or email newsletter or even social media. Frame the survey as a way for you to better learn about your customers so you can offer them a better experience. Then make sure you take what you learn from your surveys and apply it to your ongoing communication efforts.

For instance, look how Marriott Resorts is leveraging #ParadiseChat as a way to better learn about its customers:

Also, note the engagement numbers: They are getting a LOT of comments on these tweets. This type of content is also proven to do the best job for brands in driving engagement. Content that is from the brand but not ABOUT the brand, instead it’s about how customers would interact with the brand and its products and services.

2 – Feedback from Customer Service. Every day your customers are calling/emailing/tweeting your customer service department. Make a point to actually note and catalog what your customers are saying when they contact you. There’s a tendency in customer service to handle as many customers as quickly as possible. But in ‘handling’ your customers, don’t simply discard what prompted their contact to begin with. The source of the contact should be noted so you can identify trends and prioritize how you respond. Make sure you are using a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) package that offers this functionality.

3 – Open Rates on Newsletters. If you’re utilizing email newsletter, pay close attention to each issue’s open rate. Specifically, you want to see which topics resonate with your customers. The topics that drive higher open rates indicate topics that are important to your customers, and you can also use this to better understand what’s important to your customers.

4 – Engagement on Social Media Content. Closely watch what types of content your customers are more likely to engage with. I’ll save you the suspense: Content that’s focused on your customers, who they are and how they would use your products and services, will always always ALWAYS get better engagement than content that directly promotes your products and services. Look at the Marriott Resorts example above; They aren’t promoting their resorts directly, they are creating content focused on how its customers would behave if they were at their resorts. This results in content that’s more interesting to the customers, and it provides Marriott Resorts with better insights into how and why their customers come to their resorts.

5 – Always Thank Customers For Complimenting Your Brand. This is so incredibly easy to do yet I see companies every single day that whiff on this. Whenever a customer compliments your brand, thank them. It doesn’t matter if they compliment you via email, phone call, social media, handwritten note, or carrier pigeon. Thank them. When you thank a customer for complimenting you, it signals to that customer that you APPRECIATE them enough to take a few seconds to thank them. That also ENCOURAGES them to CONTINUE to compliment your brand AND it encourages them to PROMOTE your brand. Yes I am going overboard with the ALL CAPS because this is VERY IMPORTANT! Also, you are signalling to all your other customers that if will respond to them and thank them if they compliment you.

Additionally, you are helping to shape and change the conversation around your brand, and you’re making it more positive. Which is always a good thing!

 

The reason why you don’t like talking to your customers is because the only time you DO talk to your customers is when you have to.  And that’s when they are yelling at you. This is precisely why I work with companies to help them build programs like outreach, loyalty and brand ambassador programs that help companies better connect with their customers.

Because I want your company to take control of the conversation you are having with your customers. If you give up control to your customers and only respond to them, your conversation is doomed to be nothing more than your company constantly fielding complaints from your customers.

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How Much Money Can a Brand Ambassador Program Save Your Company?

How much money will a brand ambassador program save your company?

Too many companies avoid launching a brand ambassador program because they view it as a new expense that will live by itself within your organization. Nothing could be further from the truth. In actuality, a brand ambassador program is an investment that makes your existing business processes more effective and efficient. When your boss asks why your company should launch a brand ambassador program, you say “it takes what we are already doing and it makes it better.”

Earlier this month I wrote a post titled How to Create a World-Class Brand Ambassador Program. In that post, I stated that at a later date I would be writing a more in-depth post describing how your brand can better integrate a brand ambassador program into its existing business structure.  This is that post.

A well-designed brand ambassador program will directly impact and improve several key business and marketing functions, such as; customer service, product design, brand reputation management, sales and promotion.  Let’s look at how a brand ambassador program could save your company money in each area:

Reduction in Customer Service Calls/Interactions

Your brand ambassadors are constantly interacting with current and potential customers both online and offline. Often, they can answer questions and help solve problems that others are having.  Each time they do, it eliminates the need for that person to contact your brand’s customer service reps.

Over time, this can generate a serious cost-savings for your brand. Once you know the internal cost your brand assigns to each customer service call or email or social media question (these numbers can be different based on the channel they originate from), then you can begin to determine the exact amount saved by your brand ambassadors.

For example, let’s say your brand has determined that each call to a customer service rep costs the brand $8.32.  This means that each time a brand ambassador helps a customer and eliminates a call, your brand saves $8.32! Let’s say you have 50 brand ambassadors in your program and they average eliminating 40 calls a year per ambassador. That’s a cost-savings of $16,640 a year for your brand!

 

Customer Feedback Improves Product Design 

So what would this look like in the real-world? At a basic level, it would simply involve training your ambassadors to be better listeners to other customers and to better record their feedback and thoughts so your brand can act on it. Keep in mind, your brand should also be doing this with your customer service teams, routinely asking them to give you reports on what customers are consistently saying, good and bad, about your brand, and its products.

Another option could be creating an online group/forum/community where ambassadors or even other customers could share brand and product feedback. Dell has already been doing this for over a decade with its Ideastorm online customer feedback site. The idea behind Ideastorm is so simple, it’s brilliant. Customers submit ideas for improving existing products, or offering new ones. The community then votes on the ideas it likes, and the most popular ideas get reviewed by Dell, and possibly implemented! With Ideastorm, Dell is basically crowdsourcing its customers for ideas. It’s a great way to get very low-cost market research. Rock stars like Lady Gaga have been doing this for years, creating sites just for fans, then using feedback and ideas generated by those fans to influence tour stops and merchandise selection.

According to Dell, each idea submitted to Ideastorm (over 27k so far) has a value to the brand of $10,000, and the site has generated over $100M in additional revenue for Dell! All because Dell got serious about listening to its customers and implementing their ideas.

 

Proactively Empowering Ambassadors to Engage With Customers Improves and Defends Your Brand’s Reputation

It’s one of the nightmare scenarios for social media managers across the country: Encountering an angry customer complaining about your brand on social media. What’s worse is finding a post on your Facebook brand page criticizing your brand that was left TWO HOURS AGO! Since that time, 5 more people have piled on, and now your Facebook page is filled with complaints about your brand, front and center for all to see.

If you’ve ever had to deal with such an issue on social media, you know what a headache it can be. One way to greatly lessen the chance of having to deal with such a social media firestorm is by empowering your brand ambassadors to defend your brand online. The great thing about your fans is that they act like guard dogs. If someone comes into your yard (or Facebook page) and tries to start trouble, they bark.  Loud. If the person is a troll, the barking will often scare them away. If the person is a customer with a legitimate complaint, your brand ambassadors can often help the customer AND alert your brand so that a representative can reply as well. Your brand ambassadors can alert you to complaints that need to be addressed as well as issues they are seeing other customers mentioning repeatedly. To be clear, your brand should already be aggressively monitoring customer feedback, but having your ambassador alerting you as just means that you can deal with any potential issues quicker, which improves both your brand reputation and your ability to handle customer complaints before they grow into a bigger problem.

For example, one client told me that by aggressively monitoring feedback from customers, it effectively creates a two-week window for the brand to solve a widespread problem and address customer complaints before industry press notices and reports on the issue. This is a function of the brand being proactive in addressing complaints from customers, and a big part of that is getting information from customers as soon as possible. Having your ambassadors interact with customers daily can help your brand identify potential issues and respond in much less time. This improves your brand’s reputation, as well as letting you deal with customer complaints quickly, regardless of whether it’s an individual issue or a systemic one.

 

Your Brand Ambassadors Can Greatly Reduce Promotional Costs, Especially For a Product Launch 

I’ve always told clients that cash should be a last resort when compensating your brand ambassadors. Instead, I challenge clients to think about how they can use access as a form of compensation. The problem with paying ambassadors with cash is that you frame their work as being a ‘job’. If you’ve chosen the right ambassadors, then you’ve chosen special customers that already love and promote your brand. You’re just working with them in a formal way to help them do what they already love doing.

Customers that love your brand want more access to your brand. One easy way to do this is to give your ambassadors early access to products before they are made available to the public. This is a true perk for your ambassadors, plus it also serves multiple benefits to your brand:

  1. It allows your ambassadors to give your brand immediate feedback on the product. This allows you to get a better sense of which features/characteristics of the product they enjoy, and you can highlight these features when you promote the product to your general customer base.
  2. Giving your ambassadors early access to new products allows them to create word of mouth about the products. This drives interest and demand for the products at launch. Think of how you give the press early access to review products so they will write about them. It’s the same idea here, the big difference is, your ambassadors LOVE your brand and will be more likely to enthusiastically promote the new product to others, and passionately so!

So how does this translate into a cost-savings? By letting your ambassadors drive promotion prior to and during launch, you can potentially reduce the amount of money you would normally spend on traditional advertising to support the launch. Ford has done this in the past when launching new vehicles, they would lean on ambassadors to build buzz and interest. Here’s Ford’s EVP Jim Farley detailing how this worked for the automaker during a product launch:

“What happens is, by launching the vehicle early, getting people involved in talking about the new global Focus or the new Fiesta is the US before it goes on sale, we can lower the amount of traditional advertising we do after the vehicle goes on sale.  That’s where the massive cost savings have been.  I’ll give you an example; On the Fiesta Movement, we had higher unaided nameplate awareness than Fit or Yaris, and we spent 10 cents on the dollar, than a traditional tv ad campaign.  So by starting earlier and using social media to spread the word about the new product, we’re really reducing the amount of traditional advertising we have to spend.”

So by empowering its ambassadors to help promote these car models at launch, Ford spent 10% what it would have spent on a television ad campaign to achieve the same level of exposure!  Scott Monty, formerly Ford’s Global Social Media Lead, added:

“We had a higher level of awareness for the subcompact than for vehicles we had in the market for 2-3 years; we collected over 125,000 hand-raisers who indicated they wanted to learn more when the car became available; and the conversion of reservations to sales was 10X higher than our traditional conversion rate.

All before we began any major media efforts toward the launch of the Fiesta.”

Additionally, this speaks to how we tend to trust messages that originate from fellow customers more than those that originate with a brand.  A message coming from a brand is often viewed as being an advertisement, whereas we tend to be more likely to pay attention to and trust a message or recommendation that comes from a fellow customer. Ford tapped into that dynamic with the results it saw with its launch of the Fiesta.

The takeaway? Tapping your brand ambassadors to build awareness for your product can be more cost-effective than using traditional advertising to generate the same levels of exposure!

 

A Well-Designed Brand Ambassador Program Will Improve Your Existing Business Functions and Save You Money

Most companies plan a brand ambassador program to be a stand-alone effort. It shouldn’t be. A well-designed brand ambassador program will positively impact several of your core business functions, resulting in increased sales and lowered costs:

  • Customer service costs are lowered because your brand ambassadors are interacting directly with customers, helping them solve their problems and answer their questions. This eliminates the need to contact your customer service reps, which saves you money.
  • Customer feedback can improve product design and identify issues before they become larger problems. Since your brand ambassadors are interacting directly with your customers, they become aware of potential issues with your products in advance, giving your brand time to address them and improve the designs. This saves you money by improving customer satisfaction and potentially eliminating the need for later product recalls.
  • Your brand ambassadors will help defend your brand online, which reduces the brand’s need to engage and ‘put out fires’, which saves your social media team a lot of time, and perhaps more importantly to them, a lot of headaches.
  • Brand ambassadors are powerful promotional partners, especially when you have a new product launch. Giving your ambassadors early access to new products before they are made available to the public lets them create promotion and buzz for the products before they launch. The increased promotion can potentially reduce or even eliminate the traditional marketing efforts you were planning to support the product at launch.

There will always be costs associated with launching and maintaining a well-run brand ambassador program. But with proper planning, your brand ambassador program should not only generate profits, it should save your brand real money.

Want to learn how much money your company could save with a brand ambassador program? Email me today and let’s discuss the possibilities!

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How to Compensate Brand Ambassadors Without Paying Them Money: A Real-World Example

Poorboys SSR1 + Black Hole + Natty’s Red = Purdy

A post shared by Mack Collier (@mackcollier) on

Want to learn more about how much it will cost to create a Brand Ambassador Program for your company? Check out Mack’s Rate Sheet.

It’s almost Spring (I keep reminding myself of this through a bitterly cold January), and with warmer weather comes the chance to engage in one of my favorite hobbies; detailing my car. I fell into detailing a few years ago when I stumbled upon a forum for detailers and read how they gushed about how their ‘high end’ washes and waxes did such a great job on their vehicles. I was skeptical, I mean wax is wax, right?  Is that stuff that costs $20 really better than the $5 tin I can get at Walmart?

Finally, I decided to take the plunge, and bought one of the waxes that the ‘experts’ were recommending.  I could not believe how much better my car looked.  The paint shined and sparkled more than any new car on any lot.  I was hooked from that point forward.

So every Spring, I start going through my shopping list of items I need to buy to protect and beautify my car’s paint in the Spring and Summer.  For years I’ve been a big fan of the Klasse Twins (AIO & SG), but a couple years ago I started using the Poorboys line and have been thrilled with the results (The picture above is the hood of my car after using three of their products). I thought this would be a good chance to talk to you about the idea of compensating brand ambassadors and how you can do it without paying your ambassadors money.

Let’s use Poorboys as an example. I don’t think Poorboys has a brand ambassador program, but if they did, I’d love to join. But I wouldn’t be interested in being compensated with cash, after all, I’d just spend it on Poorboys’ products!

Whenever I work with clients on crafting brand ambassador programs, I tell them to focus on access more than cash as a form of compensation. If I were a brand ambassador for Poorboys, I wouldn’t want cash as compensation, I’d want access.  Specifically, I’d want access to try new products before they hit the market, but also, I’d want access to expert advice on which Poorboys’ products would be best for my vehicle.  One of the things you learn early on in detailing is that it’s far more complicated than simply washing a car and then waxing it to get the best results.  You have to wash.  Then clay, then polish, then maybe a glaze, then possibly a sealant, then top with a wax. That’s a lot of different products to use, and all can react differently depending on the product used before or after them, or the surface they are going on. For instance, my car has a metallic paint color.  Some waxes are designed to bring out the metallic flakes in the paint, others are designed to make them less noticeable or ‘mute’ them. I want a wax that makes the flakes ‘pop’.

So for me, it would be great if I could have an expert at Poorboys evaluate my car’s paint, take into account the look I want, and give me advice on the products I should use to get the results I want.  So for me, cash isn’t that important as a form of compensation.  Instead, I would rather have custom advice/education on how best to detail my car to get the look I want.

One of the best ways to not only compensate ambassadors but also make the program more attractive to them, is to focus on providing benefits associated with how and why they are using your products. In the Poorboys example, I use their products to protect my car’s paint, and make it look better. So a key benefit I would be interested in from a Poorboys brand ambassador program would be if the brand could provide me custom advice/education on how I can better select detailing products for my vehicle. If they could teach me how to be a better detailer, that would benefit me, and it would also ultimately lead to me buying more Poorboys products.

Here’s another example. Let’s say your company sells lawncare products. If you had a brand ambassador programs, a benefit you could provide those ambassadors could be custom workshops or webinars that would teach the ambassadors how to create a more beautiful lawn. By teaching the homeowners a skill associated with your products, you’re not only providing a benefit to the ambassadors, but you’re also teaching them how to create a more beautiful lawn, which makes them happier, and also makes them a stronger advocate for your products!

So as you can see, by compensating your ambassadors with benefits associated with your products, you not only make them more passionate about your brand and products, but you save money! It’s literally a win-win for both your brand and its ambassadors!