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NIL Laws Are Now In Effect In Multiple States

And just like that, the worlds of branding, marketing and amateur athletics are completely changed.

Starting today in multiple states, college athletes can make money off their Name, Image and Likeness. These NIL laws that go into effect in states across the country today will forever change college athletics, as well as branding and marketing.

Very soon, every college athlete will be a potential influencer that brands can work with. Think about that for a minute, I saw an interview with a sports marketing firm that said overnight the number of marketable athletes who can earn endorsement dollars will go from 5,000 to 500,000.

To say this is a massive sea-change in the worlds of branding and influencer marketing is a massive understatement.

I got an email from the University of Alabama yesterday that gives some guidance on what these new NIL laws mean for fans.  Here’s a portion of that email:

May a booster or fan enter into an agreement with a University of Alabama (“UA”) student-athlete (“SA”) for the use of the SA’s name, image, or likeness (“NIL”) in exchange for money, goods or services? Yes, subject to the restrictions imposed by Alabama law (PDF). Before entering such a contract, the SA is required to disclose any proposed contract for use of their NIL to UA. It is possible, and likely, that federal laws and NCAA legislation will ultimately provide a nationwide, uniform approach to NIL governance, at which point restrictions on these agreements are subject to change.

Alabama has a page set up with more information on NIL here. In short, athletes can make money off their name, image and likeness. But any agreement cannot be dependent on athletic performance (such as you earn X number of dollars for every touchdown you score) and the school cannot work with the SA to help facilitate deals.  The school can educate SAs on the process.  The student athlete cannot tie deals to their involvement in university events and can’t wear the logos of their school without permission.

My friend Kristi Dosh has been all over this story for months. She has a great post on how most student athletes will now be facing many of the same compensation questions that bloggers and content creators have wrestled with for years now.

What Will Change as a Result of NIL Laws?

Now you suddenly have up to a million new influencers on the market, and they will be doing a lot of experimenting with monetizing their images. It’s honestly going to be a fun time for marketing geeks, as we get to see the creative ways in which these student athletes monetize their images and brands. As for those of us who will be lucky enough to guide and work with these student athletes and help them with their efforts.

But make no mistake, the world of college athletes as we know it will never be the same. This. Changes. EVERYTHING. It will honestly be tough on these student athletes to manage everything. And it will likely raise issues; what if the star quarterback decides to show up late for practice because he was shooting a commercial with the local auto dealership? What if the star running back wants to sit out the second half of blowouts in order to stay healthy for more endorsement deals? It’s going to create a lot of issues that casual fans won’t fully appreciate, or approve of.

The bottom line is this is the beginning of the end of amateur athletics.

But it’s also going to be insanely exciting to see what happens next. These student athletes are ridiculously savvy when it comes to social media and content creation. Many of them have already built engaged communities on Twitter, Instagram and other social sites. Those networks can now be monetized for the first time, and I for one am looking forward to seeing how it plays out.

If you want to get all the latest information on NIL laws and to see where we have been and where we are going, check out Kristi’s site The Business of College Sports.

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It’s Not About ‘The Hustle’, it’s About Having Something Worth Hustling For

the hustle is bullshit
Over the last 10 years or so, workers have been told that they need to work harder, or hustle.  In fact, Hustle Culture has been prized at many companies.

The idea is, the harder you work, the more you care. Working more hours makes you a better employee, or business owner.

Of course, it’s complete bullshit.

I’m an introvert. In general, introverts are highly organized, and thrive in a highly structured environment. We are very strategic thinkers, it’s why those of us that go into consulting, for instance, often flourish, because we can create strategies and bring order to chaos for our clients.

The problem that introverts have with the ‘just hustle’ mentality is that we need a reason WHY we are hustling. Telling us that we are supposed to work hard, and not giving us a reason WHY we are working hard, is completely deflating. Remember, introverts thrive off order, reason, logic.

When we are told to hustle, we will ask ‘Well why are we hustling?’  If we are told ‘Because that’s how we know you care’, then we check out. Hustling for the sake of hustling is completely meaningless to us.

You can tell an introvert that they need to work hard or hustle every day this week, 10 hours a day. Without a clear understanding of WHY the hustle is necessary and for what outcome, we will mentally check out.

On the other hand, if you tell an introvert that they need to work 10-12 hours every day this week, and lay out the exact project they will be working on, and a clear explanation of why all that time is necessary to complete the elements of that project, we are all in.

Tell me what I need to do, why I need to do it, and I can work all day. I have no problem with the hustle.

But tell me to hustle, without giving me a reason why the hustle is warranted, and I could care less.

Hustling for the sake of hustling is how you burn out yourself and your employees.

 

Define why the Hustle is necessary

If you want to motivate someone to work harder, help them understand why the hard work is necessary.

When I was in college, I worked night shift at a warehouse, driving a forklift. This warehouse had a day shift and night shift. The night shift’s job was to set up product for the day shift to use to complete orders. The night shift understood that if we did a better job of getting the product staged properly, that the day shift would be more productive, and we would actually have less work to do the following day.

We understood that sometimes we would need to do a bit extra work, we would need to hustle harder. But we also understood why the hustle was necessary, and what the positive result would be if we did hustle.

A couple years later, I was at the same job. By now we had moved to a different location and had new management. It was the week after Christmas, and night shift was told all week that we would only work from 4pm-8pm on New Year’s Eve. Normally, we worked a 6-8 hour shift. We were told we would come in, do some light clean up work, and go home early. Day shift was told they would be leaving early as well.

We arrived for our shift on New Year’s Eve, and it was a complete disaster. Day shift was still working, and wasn’t anywhere close to being done. We were told they would probably have to work our shift with us, but we would still leave at 8pm as planned.

A couple hours into our shift, we got an update; Day shift was probably going to be staying till around 10pm, and we would have to stay till 10pm as well. Upon hearing this news, some of the workers on day shift began to clock out and go home. Which meant we were further behind on work. So the night shift had to start finishing orders for the day shift.

At this point, no one was clear on why we were having to work so hard. Both shifts had been told they would get to leave early on New Year’s Eve, now it appeared that both shifts would actually have to work overtime. Obviously, something had changed to necessitate the extra work, but we weren’t told what had happened. Most of the day shift ended up working for 12 hours, and my night shift actually worked till 6am on New Year’s Day…a 14-hour shift, when we were told all week we would be working 4 hours. What made matters worse, was all during the day and night, we were told that we could leave in a few more hours. Then when a few more hours arrived, we were told it would be a few more hours. Workers were told to keep working hard, but never given a reason for the hard work. And all this was being required on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.

We were told to hustle, but never given a reason why the hustle was necessary. And the amount of hustle required kept changing, to reach a goal that no one understood. Such a working environment is toxic, it leads to less productive employees, and higher job turnover.

 

Being consistent is far more important than hustling

One of the biggest keys to success in digital and content creation is consistency. It’s honestly something I struggle with mightily. I talked before about how introverts need structure and order. Do this, and this happens. Introverts need to know that if they put in this work, that THIS will be the result.

The problem is, it’s difficult to apply this cause and effect structure to content creation. I can’t tell you how many posts I will need to write to see my traffic increase 50% from where it is right now. Maybe it will take a thousand posts, maybe it will take only one. All I know for sure is that by consistently creating content here, I am INCREASINGLY my chances of seeing my traffic increase.

That’s not very precise. But unfortunately, that’s about the best we can go on. For instance, I started creating regular, consistent content on this blog starting September of last year. Prior to then, my writing schedule was pretty unorganized, I would typically write whenever I had a topic I wanted to talk about and the time to write. But starting September 1st, or 8 months ago, I decided to commit to writing every week.

Since that time, my traffic has increased by about 50%. If I can keep writing consistently, the odds are I can increase traffic by another 50% in the same amount of time, if not sooner.

But there is no guarantee that this will work. And for workers that thrive of a cause and effect method of working; I do this and this happens, that can be very frustrating.

 

Learn when to hustle

So this is what I’ve learned; Work consistently until you get consistent results. When you reach that point, THEN you can begin to hustle. Once you know what the result is from your work, then hustling to complete that work will give you the result faster. But until you know what work is necessary to create the result you want, hustling only burns you out. Hustle only works when you hustle to complete meaningful work. If your work has no meaning or known purpose, then hustling does nothing but burn you out.

It sounds cliche, but if you want your employees to work harder, give them something to work harder for. Help them understand why the hustle is necessary, and what they will achieve as a result. If you are working for yourself, apply the same principles. Use ‘the hustle’ as a tool to become more productive, not as a tool to virtue signal to others how you are ‘getting shit done’.

Reality check, most of us are too busy on our own work to notice your ‘hustle’. So stop trying to impress others, just focus on the work that needs to be done, and only hustle if the work calls for it.

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The Secret to Spotting Business Opportunities

understand what the customer is saying
Well a Mustang IS a faster horse…

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” – Henry Ford

This quote from the founder of Ford Motor Co is often offered as an example of how the customer doesn’t always know what it wants. I disagree, the customer always knows what it wants, it’s up to the company to listen and understand what the customer is saying.

In the above quote, the customer is really saying that they want a faster and more efficient mode of transportation. Horse = transportation for the customer, because that’s likely the only form of personal transportation that they know.

Smart companies are the ones that can interpret what the customer is really saying, and wanting.  Another example is the iPhone. I remember when the iPhone debuted, a certain well-known branding expert claimed it would be a massive flop. The expert said people were used to having their alarm clock and radio and camera in separate devices. They didn’t want all of them smushed together in one clunky device.

Of course, the ‘expert’ was completely wrong about how successful the iPhone would become. Customers were happy to have all these separate devices smushed into one phone, if it was done in a way that created value for the customer. This ‘expert’ didn’t understand what the customer was saying.

When the customer gives feedback on what products it would like to see, the customer does so in terms of what products are currently available. Let’s go back to cars for a minute.  When the customer says “I wish my car got better gas mileage’, what they are really saying is they wish they didn’t have to spend XX dollars a week on gas.

Maybe that means they simply want the same vehicle they have now, with better gas mileage. Or maybe it means they would be willing to buy a completely new vehicle, if it got better gas mileage. Perhaps it means they would be open to buying a motorcycle, since it requires far less gas.

It’s up to the company to understand the core issue (‘I want to reduce the amount I spend on transportation’) the customer is facing, and offer products that match the customer’s wants and needs. If a company can do that repeatedly, you win the customer’s trust and loyalty. Apple does this, so when the computer company comes out with a music player, people buy it.  When Apple comes out with a phone, people buy it.  Because they trust Apple to give them a product that meets their needs.

One of the first jobs I had out of college was working as a vendor for Lowes. I represented a company that sold lawncare products. I worked Weds-Sunday. On Weds-Friday, I was responsible for stocking the shelves and making sure that my company’s products were correctly displayed in the store and available for purchase. If any customer came by that needed help, I provided assistance. On the weekend, my primary responsibility was to sell directly to the customer. I stayed in the store on the lawncare isle and helped any customer that needed assistance.

One weekday, I was stocking the shelves, when a customer came up and asked me if I could help him figure out what product he needed to get rid of a certain bug that had infested his lawn. After talking to him for a few minutes, it was obvious that he had no idea what product he needed, and what he really wanted was someone he could trust to tell him how to fix his lawn.

So I did the only thing I could do; I told him I couldn’t help him. It turns out that my company didn’t make a product that addressed his particular problem as well as the competitor’s product. So I told the customer that honestly, he needed to buy the competitor’s product, because it would do a better job than ours would. I even walked him to the competitor’s product, and handed to him and told him this was the product he needed to solve his problem. The customer took it from me, and walked away without a word, in a kinda confused state as if to wonder why I had just cost my company a sale!

Two days later, I sold in that same store. So there I was setup on the lawncare isle waiting for customers. As it turns out, a representative from our competitor happened to be standing at the front of the same isle, and like me, he was waiting for a customer to sell to.

Curiously enough, after a few minutes I noticed that same customer I had helped two days previous started walking down the isle. The representative from the competitor immediately pounced “Hello sir, can I help you today?”

The customer, without breaking stride, waved his hand at him and said ‘Nope! I’m here to talk to HIM!’ and he pointed at me. The customer then walked up and thanked me, he said my product recommendation from two days ago had worked perfectly on his lawn. He then asked if I had a suggestion for another lawncare issue. This time, it turns out that my company did offer the superior product for the customer’s issue, which he bought.

The customer always knows what it wants. It’s up to the company to listen and understand what the customer is REALLY asking for.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Clubhouse Signing Content Deals, Twitter’s Growth, Biz Returning to Pre-Pandemic Levels

Happy Monday! Big content week ahead, new posts every day through Friday, hope you enjoy!  Here’s a few marketing and digital stories that caught my eye:

 

Clubhouse signed an exclusive deal with the NFL to provide content during last week’s NFL draft. I think this opens up some interesting possibilities, as we already have some ‘listen only’ rooms on Clubhouse where the host just plays music all day. What if Clubhouse partnered with Sirius to create a Clubhouse Channel that was just on the platform? We’ve been thinking about how another social platform might acquire Clubhouse, what if a different company that’s already creating audio content decided to acquire Clubhouse to supplement what it already offers?

 

Twitter showed modest user growth in Q1. As I’ve said for months, I want to see what the numbers are for Q2 for both Twitter and Facebook. I’m not expecting huge numbers. As most areas of the country are reopening, I think we will see a flood of people getting outside this Summer and into the Fall. Twitter and Facbook spiked while many of us were cooped up in or homes last year, but that won’t be the case in 2021. It will be interesting to see how willing we are to tweet on the go this year.

 

A majority of B2B brands and marketers now expect a return to pre-pandemic business levels by the end of the year. A wonderful sign that the nation is reopening and it’s great to see the optimism. A big component of this will be a return of live, in-person events. I’ll talk more about this on Friday.

 

That’s all for today, hope you have a great week and see you back here tomorrow for an important post!

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Two Things You Can Start Doing Today to Immediately Make Your Business Blog More Interesting

Let’s be honest, most of us do not get up every morning ready to read our favorite business blog. I have great sympathy for the writers and content managers who are tasked with creating content for their company’s blog. Drawing people to a business blog, and engaging them so they become regular readers is a very difficult task. Here’s two strategies I use to help clients create more interesting and engaging content for their blogs:

1 – Talk less about your company and more about what’s interesting to your customer. Remember that when you are building a readership for your blog, you are attempting to connect with people that have little or no awareness about who your company is or what it sells. So you have to find a way to interest these readers, and the way to do that is by talking about things that are interesting to them, then relate those things back to your company.

I love marketing. Let me rephrase that; I love GOOD marketing. Good marketing often goes unnoticed, and makes everything better, not worse. When I first started blogging in 2005, my goal was to make marketing interesting to people that didn’t understand marketing or care to read about marketing. I did that by attaching marketing to things that DID interest them. I talked about how music artists use marketing, or how sports teams use marketing. And as I did, I talked about how those same marketing lessons could apply to their businesses.

You should do the same thing with your company blog. Focus on your audience, the people you want to connect with and reach. Figure out what’s interesting to them, and how you can tie that to your company. Think about how what your company sells can impact the lives of your customers and make their lives more meaningful. Blog about that impact, because once they see the impact, they will become interested in your content and in learning more about how your company can help them achieve that impact.

2 – Tell stories. Storytelling is an incredibly powerful way to get the attention of your readers. There’s two main ways you can do this, by telling stories of your customers, or telling stories about your company. By telling stories about your customers, you make the content more relatable to your readers. It’s easiest to see the content from the customer’s point of view many times than it is the company’s point of view.

You can also tell stories about your company. This is a great way to tell the history of your company or to talk about the values that your company holds dear or the causes it supports. This is a great way to connect with your readers by letting them know you support causes and ideas that they hold dear, or by talking about your company’s history, and making the case that your company has a long and successful history.

Here’s a simple example of how a company can use storytelling to tell its history. A couple of years ago I talked about how Maersk, a global B2B shipping company, created an incredibly engaged community on Instagram and Facebook. Maersk’s social manager discovered that the company’s archivist had amassed a collection of roughly 30,000 images associated with the brand over the last century. The images were literally sitting in a cabinet collecting dust for the most part. No one had ever thought to use them, but the social manager decided to use them to tell the story of the Maersk brand and what it does. So the brand started sharing the images on social media. This helped educate others on what the company does (global shipping), but that it has been doing that for a long time! And all it took was using images that the company already had on hand, that it saw no real use for.

As luck would have it, just as I am writing this post this morning, ProBlogger left a great tweet with 14 types of stories you can tell:

 

So hopefully, that gives you plenty of ideas for how to make your business blog content more engaging and interesting. Keep in mind that building a readership for any blog is a marathon, not a sprint. Consistency is the name of the game. I will have a blogging recap of what happened here in October on Monday, to give you an idea of how this blog is doing. Even with a much greater output of posts, it still takes a while to build a readership.

Hope that helps you!

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The In-Person Renaissance Is Coming

Back around May, I saw a video on Facebook. It was two cousins, both around 8 or 9. They were standing about 6 feet apart, and giggling. A parent of one of the children explained that the cousins hadn’t been able to see each other for weeks due to covid restrictions, and they were about to get to hug for the first time since. They looked at each other and the mom said “Go ahead!”, and they sheepishly started inching toward each other, and then finally their eyes met and they tackled each other in a big hug.

And at the same time, both children started sobbing uncontrollably. It was honestly heartbreaking to watch, and it perfectly illustrated the loss we are all feeling of a human connection right now. I’m introverted, so not being in social settings hasn’t hit me as hard, but I know a lot of my extroverted friends have been struggling this year. Just as introverts feed off solitude, extroverts feed off contact with others. There will be many studies and books done on how this country handled dealing with coronavirus in 2020, but one aspect that cannot be denied is that being locked up at home has had a devastating impact on the mental health of this country. And some experts believe its actually made the spread of the virus worse, not better.

So when the country fully reopens, there will be a great desire to return to normalcy. But the realty is, we have all adjusted our lives this year, and some of those adjustments will become permanent changes. I can see two big behavioral changes that we will adopt as a society moving forward:

1 – We will do far less in-person shopping for food. Trips to the grocery store will more often be to pick up an order that we placed online, instead of going to shop for food while there. We will also use delivery services more both for meals from restaurants, and to order from services that offer meals we can prepare at home.

2 – Many companies will decide to make remote work from home permanent for their employees. This year has been a trial-by-fire for many companies in embracing remote work, but many companies will find out it makes sense for them and their employees.

 

So think about how that will change our behavior. A lot of the trips out to ‘run errands’ like grocery shopping, picking up dinner, etc, will now be handled via delivery services.  So fewer trips away from the house. And more of us will be working from home, so that will eliminate even more trips away from home.

But, spending all this time at home will also greatly reduce the amount of in-person contact we will have with friends and co-workers. So I starting in 2021, we will see many of us placing a greater emphasis on leaving the house in order to meet with friends, co-workers and family members. A greater percentage of our trips away from the house will be of a social nature to connect with others.

And I think this will go beyond just heading to a bar or movie with friends. I think you’ll see more deliberate thought put into our social gatherings, and they will be considered more special and meaningful. For example, for Halloween 2021, I could the return of community hayrides, maybe school Halloween carnivals, community-wide trick or treating that incorporates ways for parents to have social time together as well. Activities that were normally aimed at individuals could be promoted as group affairs. For instance, more guided tours for groups at museums, giving you a chance to sign up to join a group instead of going alone.

For companies, I could see a greater emphasis on trips for employees, and in-person team-building exercises. Maybe the annual company retreat becomes a bi-annual event every six months. Conferences could begin to incorporate fun social events in the evening rather than just telling attendees they were on their own at 5pm, ‘See you tomorrow!’ And conferences are going to come back in a big way starting I think in Fall of 2021 moreso than in the Spring. So those of you that are about to start planning for next year’s events, focus on building time into the schedule for attendees to interact with each other. We will want and need that time.

Human beings are social creatures. We need contact, we need to interact with each other. We were not meant to live our lives in fear locked up in our homes. This is not healthy for our bodies or souls. Starting in 2021 I believe you’ll see us yearning for more in-person contact and social events. The smart companies are the ones that will provide more social options for us.

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We Are the News Now

This morning I saw this tweet about the fall of newspapers in the US:

https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1306529824383668225

This graph apparently includes digital as well as print, which is key. Note that growth across all metrics seemed to stall out around 2000, and around 2005-2006, everything started going downhill very quickly.

I think there are two key contributors to this decline. First, remember that in 2005 or so is when blogs started becoming popular. I started blogging in 2005 and there was already a decent community of bloggers out there. I don’t think usage was mainstream yet, but you could tell that it was heading in that direction. I also remember in those early blogging years how journalists looked down on blogs, how they said anyone could blog, but you had to be a professional to be a journalist! Over the years as blogs became more influential, journalists began to source bloggers more often, and many media sites added their own ‘blogs’ to gain a semblance of credibility. Times had definitely changed.

But another factor happening at the same time is worth noting. As blogs and social media use exploded, it meant more viewpoints and more discussion of the news. It also meant more discussion of the coverage given to news stories by journalists. We began to notice that a lot of the news was, quite frankly, biased. Some of it was outright dishonest. We see this today and it’s only getting worse:

https://twitter.com/LD25_GOP/status/1306224239783981057

The reality is, mainstream media sources such as newspapers are struggling in great part because most of us simply do not trust the information they publish. That’s why we are increasingly turning to other sources for our information. I believe this distrust of mainstream media is also bleeding over into social media platforms. For instance there is a popular saying on Twitter that ‘Twitter is not real life’, to speak to how users and media reference opinions that are popular among the Twitter user community, but disconnected from what the larger population thinks or feels.

I think all of this is working to the advantage of those of us who are leveraging blogs as a publishing platform. I also think every company should think of themselves as a publisher. In fact, it might be more useful to think of it in terms of being your Publishing Strategy instead of your Social Media or Digital Strategy. By creating and publishing a steady flow of content, you not only help educate current and potential customers about what your company does and what its values are, but you help differentiate yourself from competitors.

But perhaps most importantly of all, publishing regular content gives you a voice and the ability to reach others. On August 31st, I relaunched this blog, and began publishing 6 new posts a week. I’m two weeks into this new publishing schedule. My traffic is already up over 30% in just two weeks. Granted, we still talking small numbers, less than 100 visitors a day, but that still shows the power of creating content to drive awareness and generate interest.

Do this experiment; Think of your company as being a publisher. What would you talk about? What messages would you want to communicate to your customers? What would you want them to know about you? What areas would you cover? You could even view the publishing as creating sections of a newspaper. You could have a business section, a news section, a leisure section, an editorial section, etc.

We are all the news now. Make sure your company is sharing its voice, don’t settle for opting out of the conversation happening around and about your company. Take an active role in it.

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How to Create a World-Class Brand Ambassador Program

Creating a World-Class Brand Ambassador Program

This post on 10 Thing to Remember When Creating a Brand Ambassador Program remains one of the most popular posts I’ve ever written. So to start off the new year, I wanted to do a deeper dive into the topic of creating and launching a successful brand ambassador program, and walk you through the process from the brand’s point of view.

So where do you start? How do you measure results? How do you choose your ambassadors? How do you integrate the program with your other marketing and sales functions? We’ll get into all that in this post, so read on…

First, I have to say of all the consulting work I do, helping companies build out brand ambassador programs is probably the most fulfilling. I love the challenge of creating a plan that’s going to help companies better build relationships with their most passionate customers. It’s so rewarding to know that you’re helping to build something that will greatly help the brand, but even more importantly, that will provide a much better product and experience for the customer.

If I were going to work with your company to help you build a world-class brand ambassador program, this would be the process:

Plan Your Brand Ambassador Program; How Does the Brand Benefit, and How Will Your Ambassadors Benefit?

Related: How to Incorporate Millennials Into Your Brand Ambassador Program

At a high level, your brand needs to ask and answer two questions when you start fleshing out your brand ambassador program:

  1. Who is our ideal brand ambassador?
  2. What relationship will we have with our ambassadors?

To further expand on the second point, you want to as clearly as possible detail how your brand benefits from an ambassador program, and how your ambassadors will benefit.

The benefits to both your brand and its ambassadors need to be clearly defined, and very obvious and desirable to both parties. Too many brands can clearly point to what they want to accomplish with an ambassador program, but they struggle to detail meaningful benefits to the ambassadors if they participate. This is why it’s so key to create solid benefits to the ambassadors. You want your ambassadors to be thrilled to join, in fact you want so many customers applying to be ambassadors that you could never accept them all.

Think of it this way: Let’s say you want to launch a brand ambassador program because you want to increase sales of a particular product line by 20%. That’s a pretty heavy lift that you’re asking of those ambassadors, so you have to do some heavy lifting of your own and make it worth the ambassador’s while to join and then be committed to acting in a way that will help you realize that 20% increase in sales.

The more clearly defined and OBVIOUS the benefits you offer ambassadors, the more likely they will be to want to join your program and help your program reach its goals.

    Benefits - Ambassadors

  • Salary
  • Greater Access to Brand
  • Early Access to New Products
  • Recognition and Promotion
  • Professional and Personal Development

          Benefits - Brand

  • Increased Sales
  • Increased Promotion
  • Product Feedback
  • Customer Feedback

As far as measuring and tracking results: Clearly define what your goals are for your brand ambassador program. Maybe you want to increase sales, or decrease calls to customer service centers, or improve customer sentiment online. Start with your core goal, then clearly define precisely what you want to see happen.  The more precise you are with your goals, the more accountable everyone will be for reaching them.  Don’t just say ‘increase sales’, say ‘increase sales by 8% for the first year of the brand ambassador program’. And your KPIs will flow from your goals and desired outcomes.

An additional note about goal-setting: Don’t be afraid to regularly revisit your goals and measurement tactics to make sure you’re on a realistic course. This is especially important during the first year of your brand ambassador program. Self-audit frequently, at least every 3 months, monthly is better for the first 6 months. There will be a lot of trial and error involved in launching your brand ambassador program at all levels. Be mindful of this, and don’t be afraid to change course if something isn’t working as expected.

Your Brand Ambassador Program Needs Internal Ambassadors

Before you do anything else as far as fleshing out your brand ambassador program, you need to know who will own it and who will fight for it internally. Ideally, you want more than one person who are customer-centric, and who can clearly communicate to their bosses the value of the brand ambassador program, especially in the early days when a direct impact on the business bottom line will be harder to quantify. These will be the people that understand how a brand ambassador program will benefit their brand, but they can also envision how such a program will improve the product and brand experience for the ambassadors, and all customers.

Your Brand Ambassador Program Should ALWAYS Be Integrated Into Your Existing Marketing, Sales and Customer Service Efforts

The quickest way to ensure that your brand ambassador program fails is to put it on an island within your organization. Left by itself, a brand ambassador program could take years to see measurable results that justify its cost. At best. Few companies will be willing to invest the money necessary to reach that point. The good news is that a brand ambassador program can begin benefiting your company almost immediately, if structured correctly.

A well-designed brand ambassador program will directly impact and positively affect most of the core functions of your business:

  • Marketing: Ambassadors will help promote your products to other customers
  • Sales: Ambassadors will drive new sales
  • Customer Service: Ambassadors will interact directly with customers both online and off, addressing their concerns and answering their questions.
  • PR: Ambassadors will not only spread positive news about your company, they will also proactively defend it against trolls and attacks.
  • Product Design: Ambassadors will collect valuable product feedback directly from customers, which your company can then implement to improve product design.

Think of it this way; You’re not reinventing the wheel by launching a brand ambassador program. As my friend Kelly Hungerford says, a well-designed brand ambassador program makes everything your company is already doing, work better.

Kelly Hungerford

" A well-designed brand ambassador program makes everything your company is already doing, work better."


Start Small, Grow Big

For most companies, the idea of launching a brand ambassador program is a completely new initiative. There’s a steep learning curve involved at first, and much of the process will honestly be trial and error in the first days. To minimize the expense and improve efficiency, it makes sense to start with a smaller core group of ambassadors. The idea is that you want to iron out the kinks with a smaller group, then once you’ve got the process nailed (and you’re seeing the results you want), then you can branch out with a larger group.

For example, if you are targeting single moms, maybe start out with a group of say 5 or 10 ambassadors, and over time as you develop your program, you can scale it out to 100 or even 1,000 single moms. If you want your brand ambassador program to drive sales at your retail locations, maybe focus on only your San Jose market at launch, with the idea being to eventually branch out into a national program.

Create Channels to Directly Connect Your Ambassadors to Each Other, and Your Brand

This can be something as simple as a Facebook or LinkedIn group or a Twitter group DM or a Slack channel.  Also, you want to have the brand representatives that they will be working with regularly present and active in these groups as well.

Why this is important:

  • It gives your ambassadors a place where they can get to know each other
  • It gives your ambassadors a place where they can share ideas, bounce questions off each other and get help
  • It gives your brand a place where they can directly communicate with your ambassadors
  • It gives your brand the ability to quickly and easily collect feedback from your ambassadors
  • It communicates to your ambassadors that you take their feedback and connection seriously, which further motivates them to be more active

Beyond this group, you want to ensure that your ambassadors have as much direct access to your brand representatives as possible, as often as they need it.  Let’s say one of your ambassadors is ‘in the field’ and talking to a potential customer about your product. The customer is considering purchasing your product, and asks a technical question that your ambassador doesn’t know the answer to. If your ambassador had a way to message a brand rep and quickly get that information, it could result in an easy sale. This works regardless of how you will be using your ambassadors and across many core functions such as sales, PR, customer service, customer feedback, etc.

Collect and UTILIZE Feedback From Your Ambassadors

No matter what your working relationship is with your ambassadors, you should always focus on how you can empower your ambassadors to do a better job of collecting feedback from the customers they interact with, and from the ambassadors themselves. There’s a couple of key reasons for this:

  1. Think of the feedback collected from your ambassadors as being free market research. They will interact directly with current and potential customers, and get unfiltered product and brand feedback. The ambassadors will also have their own feedback to provide.
  2. Current and potential customers are more likely to give HONEST feedback to an ambassador than to your brand. Your ambassador will, for the most part, be viewed as just another customer by the people they talk to, so those people will let their guard down and give unfiltered feedback. That feedback may be more critical, but it will also be honest, and it will tell your brand exactly what it needs to do to win that customer’s business.

Your brand’s ability to collect and utilize feedback from its ambassadors is one of the biggest benefits from launching a brand ambassador program. The feedback your ambassadors collect from other customers aids your marketing, PR, customer service, and even product design. It’s invaluable, and a core tenet of your ambassador program should be to design it so that a premium is placed on collecting customer feedback.

All Your Ambassadors MUST Be Compensated

Whenever I talk to companies about compensating ambassadors, I stress two points to them:

  1. All your ambassadors MUST be compensated
  2. Paying them with cash should be your last option

Let’s take a closer look at each point.  First, you must compensate your ambassadors. The level of involvement and work you’re asking of ambassadors is about the same as a part-time job. By compensating your ambassadors, you are communicating to them that you value and appreciate their hard work, and that you aren’t taking it for granted. This keeps them motivated to work hard on your brand’s behalf. On the other hand, if you don’t compensate your ambassadors, they feel as if you are taking advantage of them and their time. Because you would be.

On the other hand, you should only compensate your ambassadors with cash if there are no other options. Paying ambassadors with cash frames their work as being a job. You don’t want the ambassador’s involvement to be viewed as work, you want it to be viewed as an act of love. They love your brand, and they want to work in a way to help grow and foster it.

So if you take cash off the table, how do you compensate your ambassadors? I always tell clients that cash should be the last option and ACCESS should be the first. Give your ambassadors better access to your brand and its products. Let them talk directly with the people that bring their favorite products to market. Let them have a first-look at new products, before even the press gets a chance to review them. In fact, in many ways giving ambassadors early access to new products can be a simple extension of what your brand is already doing with reaching out to the press to let journalists review your products early before they hit the market.  Treat your ambassadors as special people, because they are. Give them early access to products, give them tours of your facility, let them talk directly to the product and brand managers that help bring their favorite products directly to market.

And above all, ask your ambassadors how you can make their involvement worth their while. You will be amazed, but one of the best ways you can compensate ambassadors is to give them better access to your brand, and to take their suggestions seriously. Listening to your most passionate customers and ACTING on their feedback is one of the best ways you can reward them.

To be honest, simply paying ambassadors is pretty lazy. If that’s your best idea for compensating your ambassadors, then you really don’t know them very well. Go back to the drawing board till you come up with a better idea.

Don’t Just Read This Post, Act on it 

Too many people will read this post, think it’s a great idea to launch a brand ambassador program, then do nothing about it.

Yes, it’s a lot of work.

Yes, it may be hard to convince your boss to commit to it.

Yes, it will take a lot of time.

But the bottom line is, your customers are worth every bit of it. A well-run ambassador program is one of the greatest competitive advantages your brand can have. And as a brand employee, there’s nothing more satisfying than working directly every day with customers that genuinely LOVE your brand.

That’s what you get to do if your brand runs an ambassador program.  Start today, building the case internally for launching a brand ambassador program. Analyze your business, and detail all the ways that a brand ambassador program could positively impact your bottom line.  Scroll back up to the section on integrating your brand ambassador program as I’ve already given you the list.

Create a proposal for a brand ambassador program and present it to your boss.  Don’t position as ‘this is what it will cost us’, instead present it as ‘here’s how our brand will benefit’.  At worst, a well-run brand ambassador program should pay for itself.  At best, it will be a huge competitive advantage for your business.

Besides all of that, you are creating something amazing for your customers. You are creating a vehicle that allows your brand to not only get a better sense of who your customers are and what they think, but that also takes that customer feedback and IMPLEMENTS it and utilizes it within your brand.

And if you need help making the case to your boss and creating your plan, feel free to email me.  I’ll be happy to answer any question you have about creating a brand ambassador program, even if we don’t work together on it. I’ll be happy to help you get started, no strings attached, just reach out and I’ll be happy to help answer any general questions you have.

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How Often Should You Blog If You Have a Business Blog?

One of the biggest questions bloggers of all stripes face is how often they should blog. For personal bloggers, the answer is simple; whenever you want. But for business bloggers who use blogging as a way to drive new sales and for building awareness, a posting strategy is far more important.

Business bloggers face many restrictions that personal bloggers don’t have to worry with.  Probably the two biggest restrictions are a lack of time, and oversight from bosses and having to work within the confines of your company’s larger digital and content strategies.

 

If You Had All the Time In the World…

So in an effort to decide how often you should blog for your business, let’s start with removing the time restriction.  Let’s assume you had all the time in the world to write whatever you wanted.  If time were no longer an issue, how often should you blog?

The answer, of course, is “it depends…”  In general, publishing more content (assuming it has value to its audience) is better than publishing less.  If your blog is itself a business, meaning you will be selling advertising or sponsorships on it, then you will likely need a pretty aggressive posting schedule.  Likely one new post each weekday.  At least. The idea is that your advertising and sponsorship rates are set in great part based on your blog’s traffic, which is why you need to post more often in order to raise traffic levels.

But most businesses attempt to leverage their blogs as a way to generate new business leads or customers. So for these blogging businesses, a slightly less ‘ambitious’ posting schedule is more prudent.

If your business wants to use its blog to build awareness or generate leads, then ideally one post each weekday, Monday through Friday, would be perfect.  In addition, one of these posts, likely in the middle of the week, should be a longer, more in-depth post on a topic that’s core to your business.  Think of it as a White Paper used as a blog post. So every week, ideally, you would write four shorter posts, with one longer, more in-depth post published in the middle of the week.

So in a perfect world where you had all the time in the world…you would want to blog once a day during the week, with four shorter posts, and one longer, more in-depth post.

 

Now, Back to the Real World

Unfortunately, you don’t have all the time in the world. Your limited time means you have to prioritize your content creation efforts. If your primary goal for your blog is raising awareness for your company, then you need to create more content, plain and simple.  The more you post, on average, means more traffic for your blog, more exposure, higher search rankings, etc.

This means you need to balance your available time with posting once a day during the week, if possible. Posting more often helps your blog get more traffic and exposure. I’ve been very inconsistent in my posting the last few months, but just this week so far I’ve posted twice, and traffic is already up 10% versus last week.

What you need to do is balance your available time with making sure that you connect with your audience.  In other words, you want to make sure that your posts are going to be seen by your audience. If your audience only reads blogs on the weekend, then you only want to publish content on the weekend.  If they only read during the week, then that’s when you want to post.  If you aren’t sure, in general, most blogs see highest traffic levels in the middle of the week and during the middle of the day.  So if I know I can only write say 2 posts a week, I will publish those posts on Tuesday and Thursday.  If I can write three, then they will run one a day from Tuesday through Thursday.

Also, consider if your audience is seasonal. My audience is primarily managers and directors who work at companies and who have control of digital budgets and allocations. Basically, the people that can write the checks and sign off on hiring consultants like me to help them improve their marketing strategies. As such, I take into account the likely schedules of this audience.  For instance, most of this audience takes its annual vacations in July and August. As a result, I don’t blog as much during the Summer.  On the other hand, in late Fall and early Winter is typically when this group is planning budgets for the following year. They are doing research to see who they should hire which is why I ramp up my blogging efforts the first 2 months of the year, and the last 2. I want to be on the radar for decision makers when they are looking and researching their consulting options.

 

How Do You Decide How Often to Blog?

You start in the middle, and work your way out. Start by writing one new blog post a week, and start in the middle of the week.  If you can only write one post a week, publish it on Wednesday.  If you can write two, publish them on Tuesday and Thursday.  If you can publish three, publish them from Tuesday through Thursday.

If you reach a point where you can publish a new post Monday through Friday, congratulations! If you find that you have enough time to create even more content, I would advise that you instead focus on improving your current content creation efforts before expanding further. If the main goal of your blog is to build awareness for your company, then in most cases you will never need to publish more than one post every weekday. If you find that you have time to create even more content, then focus on other content channels such as your email newletter or webinars.

If you blog for your business, how many new posts do you publish a week, and how did you decide on that number?

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The Best Strategy to Adopt in 2018 is a More Flexible One

It’s the end of the year and companies across the country and world are knee-deep in business planning for 2018. Budgets are being justified, planned and allocated based on strategies created to execute against business goals for the coming year.

The best strategy you can adopt in 2018 is a more flexible one. The strategy you adopt in Q4 of 2017 for 2018 may not be relevant in a month’s time, much less for the entire year.

Increase the frequency of strategy performance audits.  It’s no longer enough to have a mid-year or even quarterly review of how your strategy is performing.  Adopting monthly or in some cases even weekly assessments of the effectiveness of your efforts will make it easier to pivot and capitalize on emerging market opportunities.

Make sure you are measuring the right KPIs for your strategy. One of the biggest mistakes companies make with their strategies when assessing if it is working is to measure the KPIs that are the easiest to measure versus what’s the most relevant to your strategy and goals. For example, when it comes to tracking engagement with your digital strategy, many companies default to the metrics that are the easiest to find, such as Likes, Retweets, or Comments.  If your digital strategy is built on driving sales, these aren’t the most relevant metrics to track as they are too far away from having direct impact on a sale.  You would want to track other metrics such as the number of times a sales page from your blog is loaded, or the number of times a call to place an order is initiated from your site or blog.

Engage in regular competitive analysis of your market players. This is a very powerful tactic if you’re smart about it. You should always be aware of what your competition is doing. Just because a competitor is doing something doesn’t mean it will work for your organization, but it still pays to know what’s up. Additionally, you can also easily scan feedback from customers via social media to see what they think of what the competition is doing.  For example, let’s say you are planning a marketing conference for Fall of 2018. What you could do now is identify 5 events that you feel yours would be competing with, and monitor the feedback from attendees on Twitter.  Any event in 2017 has a hashtag set up so that attendees can communicate with each other. This is also a great way for you to see what attendees are saying about their likes and dislikes associated with the event.  If you see common complaints from attendees across multiple events, that is a signal for what you need to focus on with planning for your own event.

BTW, competitive analysis can also work to show you what your competitors are NOT doing. I recently decided to shift my strategy in one particular area based on researching that most of my peers were NOT doing something that created an opportunity for me to serve potential clients in a way in which others were not.  So it works both ways.

Be open to adopting new tools to increase productivity or improve execution. This is especially important with your digital strategy as new tools are constantly popping up promising to improve content creation, engagement tracking, everything. Carefully monitoring social media sites and digital news sources will not only keep you up to date on the latest tools, it will also give you product feedback. You can see which tools are being promoted as ‘can’t miss’, then track feedback on these tools left by users on social media sites. Twitter chats and groups on Facebook or Linked are also great ways to see what tools your peers are utilizing within their organizations.

 

So keep these tips in mind as you are doing your strategy planning for 2018. In general, don’t be afraid to revisit your strategy and how it’s being executed, regularly.