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June 16, 2015 by Mack Collier

The Art of Empathy: How to Get People to Give a Damn About You

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Lady Gaga was performing a concert and staying at a hotel in that city. As usually happens, her hardcore fans figured out which hotel she was in, and lined up outside hoping she would come and meet with them, which she did. One of the people standing in line was a homeless man that had a ring he wanted to give Gaga, an ‘engagement’ ring.

Gaga met with the fans in line, and when she reached the homeless man, she graciously accepted his ring, then she leaned toward him to take a picture. The homeless man immediately leaned away from her and whispered “But I smell…” Without missing a beat, Gaga whispered back “Don’t worry, I smell too…” and leaned back toward him to take the picture.

Loosely put, empathy is your ability to see the world through someone else’s eyes. I would also argue that as a marketer, it is one of the most important skills you can hone and develop.

The problem is, there are many things that tug on us and make it more difficult to practice empathy:

Preoccupation with our own problems. Why should I care that this guy can’t make his car payment this month, hell I am behind on my mortgage!
Having too much on our own plate. That sounds terrible, I would like to help, but right now I need to finish this project. I’ll come back to this when I have time.
Past history. This guy? Last year I asked him for help with my job search, he never returned my call.
Not caring. Ugh…everyone needs help! I need help too, who is going to help me?

A big component of empathy is recognizing that someone needs help. There’s also a big distinction between someone that wants help, and someone that needs help. Too often, a person that needs help, won’t ask for it. This is a terrible flaw I have, I never ask for help when I need it. I don’t want to be a burden to the very friends that would be happy to help me, if they could. But still…

And many people feel this same way, which makes it even more important to be perceptive and to notice when someone needs help that might not be willing to ask for it.

Let’s be clear: I’m not talking about someone that wants help. People are usually more likely to ask for help they want, vs help they need. Or perhaps they need help, but don’t realize they do. As a marketer, it is incredibly important to realize when a customer needs help. Not only so you can actually help them, but also so you can realize that the need for help can be affecting how they act toward you. Needing help with say a product failure can lead to anger, fear, desperation, depending on what the product is and what it means to the owner. It’s one thing if a customer can’t figure out how to put the toner in a printer and quite another if their truck has just broken down on the interstate at 10:30 PM.

Empathy allows you to put yourself in the shoes of your customer and see their point of view. It allows you to understand why the guy on the interstate is yelling at you on the phone, it’s because he’s stranded on the interstate at night and he’s scared. But if you show empathy to your customers when they need your help the most, that’s one of the most powerful ways to build lifetime advocates for your brand. It starts by making an effort to listen, be perceptive, and actually caring enough to do these things.

How do you get people to give a damn about you? By first giving a damn about them.

June 10, 2015 by Mack Collier

The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show Episode 30: Measuring the ROI of Social Media and Brand Advocacy

Hey y’all! Welcome to the 30th episode of #FanDamnShow! In this episode I talk a bit about finding the ROI of your social media marketing or brand advocacy efforts and how to structure the measurement process.

But first a reminder that this episode is brought to you by the Marketing Writing Bootcamp, from Marketing Profs. The Marketing Writing Bootcamp begins on June 11th and features 13 classes with almost 8 hours of instruction! You can learn more here about the Marketing Writing Bootcamp and if you enroll with promo code FANDAMN you’ll save $200 on Marketing writing bootcamp. Plus, you’ll get over $1,000 worth of Marketing Profs seminars, classes, and video tutorials, free – just for registering!

Social Media ROI is a big struggle for a lot of companies and it doesn’t have to be. A good way to get a handle on figuring out the value that your marketing efforts are creating is to do a little planning BEFORE you launch that initiative or campaign. Here’s a quick checklist:

1 – Ask “What will success look like?” In other words, before you start that blog or that outreach campaign or launch a brand ambassador program, ask yourself what needs to happen as a RESULT of this in order for it to be a success?

2 – What are you trying to accomplish? Raising brand awareness? Improving customer loyalty? Generating sales? Think about what you want to happen.

3 – What metrics will you measure that tie back to your goals? If you want to launch a blogger outreach program to increase sales, how will you measure if sales are up? What metrics will you track?

4 – Measure meaningful metrics, not easy ones. This is where a lot of companies mess up. Just because it’s easy to track retweets on Twitter or Likes on Facebook doesn’t mean they impact your bottom line or indicate that you are reaching your goals. Put in the time to figure out what the more meaningful metrics are to your company, and measure those.

So that’s what I talk about in this episode of #FanDamnShow! Please give it a listen and let me know what you think in the comments! Here’s where you can download and listen to the episode directly. And if you can, please subscribe to The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show on iTunes, and I would *love* it if you could review the podcast on iTunes as well. Also, #FanDamnShow is now available on Stitcher as well!

Also, don’t forget that sponsorships are now available for The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show. This page that has all the information on how your brand can sponsor #FanDamnShow and the rates. Please note that all available sponsor slots (starting with July) will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis, so please email me if you are interested in sponsoring #FanDamnShow.

We’ll talk again next week!

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June 7, 2015 by Mack Collier

How Your Twitter Community Can Help Your Blog, Tonight’s #Blogchat Topic With Jessica Northey!

Update: Here’s the transcript from tonight’s #Blogchat with Jessica Northey!

So let’s talk about Jessica Northey for a second. She created #CMChat as a country music chat on Twitter, and has literally turned it into an empire. It has its own website. It has its own awards event. She knows some of the biggest country music and rock stars. Blake Shelton. Garth Brooks. Ronnie Dunn. Alabama. The Oak Ridge Boys. She also works with some of the biggest global brands.

Jay Baer? Chris Brogan? Brian Solis? All rock stars in this space and I think they are brilliant. But if you look at everything that Jessica has accomplished in the last 3 years in this space, she holds her own with anyone.

Which is why I am thrilled that she’ll be returning to co-host #Blogchat tonight! We’ll be chatting about how you can leverage your Twitter community to grow your blog. Here’s what we’ll be chatting about:

8:00 – 8:20 – What’s the best way to build a following on Twitter? Jessica will tell us what’s worked for her and how you can do the same.

8:20 – 8:40 – How can you use your following on Twitter to help promote your blog content?

8:40 – 9:00 – Jessica will talk to us about how she grew #CMChat from a Twitter chat into a literal online and offline empire. REALLY pay attention to this portion because I think Jessica has been brilliant in creating and building the #CMChat brand.

If you are one of the 2 people that aren’t already following Jessica (over half a million followers on Twitter) then follow Jessica here. We’ll get started tonight at 8pm Central. If you want to sponsor #Blogchat in July, here’s rates and details.

June 4, 2015 by Mack Collier

My Blog Traffic and Podcast Audience Results for May

For every month in 2015, I’ve set specific goals for growing my blog readership, and podcast audience. The end goal is that by December this blog will have at least 100,000 visitors for that month, and the podcast will be downloaded at least 10,000 times for December. Every month I am going to write a post like this recapping how I did in the previous month, and share any lessons I have learned. The goal is to help you learn how to build a blog readership and podcast audience as I do.

First, here were my goals for May:

Blog – At least 65,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 2,000 downloads

My blog traffic in May was 39,000 visitors, averaging 1,258 visitors a day. In April, the blog’s traffic was 40,980, averaging 1,366 a day. So a slight decrease, but not nearly as bad as it has been the last few months. If you’ve been following these monthly updates, you know that in February I made some backend changes to the blog. I switched from Godaddy’s shared to managed WordPress hosting, and I deleted a ton of plugins. The upside to these moves is that site performance, especially load times, was greatly improved. Avg load times for the site went from about 6 seconds before, to around 2-3 seconds now. Unfortunately, as soon as I made these changes, I noticed that traffic started dropping, especially search traffic. Here’s how each category of traffic did in May vs April:

Search traffic – Down 3.61%

Direct traffic – Down 13.28%

Referral – Up 1.9%

Social – Down 41.67%

Other – Up 362.65%

A note: The ‘other’ traffic spiked because Google Analytics apparently moved Twitter referrals from my blog’s Social Warfare plugin from Social (Twitter) to Social Warfare, and started counting it in the Other category. Which is why Social had a sharp decline, and Other was up sharply. Move the Social Warfare-based referrals back to Social, and Social traffic was about flat last month.

It appears to me that search traffic has almost reached a point where it is no longer falling. I am hopeful that once search traffic completely stops falling, that it will start increasing again. This is what weekly search traffic looks like for January through May:

As you can see, search traffic has been going more or less sideways for the last few weeks. I am hoping that this will mean a slight increase in search traffic in June over May.

BTW, what about mobile search traffic? As you may remember, Google claimed that it was going to start using mobile-friendly sites as one of its ranking signals. Meaning, if someone searches on a mobile device and your site is mobile-friendly, Google said it would consider that and rank your site’s content higher as a result. Or at least not penalize your site’s content while content from a site that was NOT mobile-friendly, would be penalized.

So I made sure that Google was reading my site as mobile-friendly in time for its April 21st deadline for doing so. So what type of jump did I see in mobile search traffic in May? Not much, in fact I saw an increase from 10,954 mobile search traffic visitors in April, to 10,970 in May. An increase of 16 visitors. Definitely not the jump I was hoping for, but at least it didn’t go down!

I wrote 13 posts in May versus 12 in April. I would like to write at least that many in June.

Podcast Numbers and Overview for May

While blog traffic was down again month, podcast downloads again did very well in May.

The goal for May was at least 2,000 downloads of the podcast, and The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show actually had 4,444 downloads in May. So the number of downloads exceeded my goals by over 100%. Here’s the number of daily downloads so far this year:

The podcast continues to do far better than I expected, so at this point as long as monthly downloads increases at all in June, I’ll be happy.

So those are my blog and podcast results for May. Here’s my goals for June:

Blog traffic – At least 70,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 2,500 downloads

These were the goals I set for both at the start of the year. So it looks like the blog’s goal will be all but impossible to hit, and it looks like the podcast’s goal will be all but impossible to miss. Honestly I will be happy with any growth for both over May numbers at this point.

I’ll be back in one month to share my results for June!

June 3, 2015 by Mack Collier

The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show Episode 29: Stop Comparing Your Reality to Their Highlight Reel

Hey y’all! Welcome to the 29th episode of #FanDamnShow! In today’s episode I switch gears a little bit. Today I wanted to talk about the risks associated with comparing yourself to others. We all do it, but the issue is, we aren’t getting the full picture.

But before I get into the Show Notes, a reminder that this episode is brought to you by the Marketing Writing Bootcamp, from Marketing Profs. The Marketing Writing Bootcamp begins on June 11th and features 13 classes with almost 8 hours of instruction! You can learn more here about the Marketing Writing Bootcamp and if you enroll with promo code FANDAMN you’ll save $200 on Marketing writing bootcamp. Plus, you’ll get over $1,000 worth of Marketing Profs seminars, classes, and video tutorials, free – just for registering!

A few years ago I noticed that a blogger got like 50+ comments on every single blog post he wrote. I remarked to a friend how odd it was that they could do this, because they only posted once a month or so. Yet without fail, every post got 50 or so comments. While here I was sitting writing 2-3 posts a week, and getting a fraction of that.

The friend said “You know those comments aren’t coming from his blog, right?” The friend then told me that this blogger had an email list of over 100,000 people that he had built up over the last 10 years. Turns out, this blogger would send every new post to his email list, and they would go to his blog and 50 or so of them would leave a comment.

Which illustrates the point that we never know the whole story when we compare ourselves to someone else. And online we are never getting the full picture, just what someone else wants to show us. And each of us knows what are reality is. We know where we succeed, and where we fail.

But on Facebook, we just see the successes. And when you see 100% success from someone else and compare it to your failures, it’s easy to feel inadequate, or that you don’t measure up.

Which is exactly why you need to stop that. And that’s what I talk about in this episode of #FanDamnShow.

Here’s where you can download and listen to the episode directly. And if you can, please subscribe to The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show on iTunes, and I would *love* it if you could review the podcast on iTunes as well. Also, #FanDamnShow is now available on Stitcher as well!

We’ll talk again next week!

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May 27, 2015 by Mack Collier

The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show Episode 28: 10 Easy Ways to Create Fans With Social Media

Hey y’all! Welcome to the 28th episode of #FanDamnShow! In today’s episode I give you 10 quick tips for creating fans via social media. This is perfect if your business is just getting started using social media and want to quickly ramp up your efforts.

The Marketing Writing Bootcamp will be the sponsor of The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show through the middle of June. If your company is interested in sponsoring #FanDamnShow, slots are available starting in July. You can learn more about sponsoring The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show and get rates by clicking here.

Show Notes:

2:20 – Four ways you can use the content you create to cultivate fans

11:20 – Three ideas for engaging with your customers in a way that creates more fans

15:25 – Three ideas for putting the spotlight on your best customers

We’ll talk again next week!

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May 24, 2015 by Mack Collier

How Your Business Can Tell Its Story With Blogging, Tonight’s #Blogchat Topic!

UPDATE: Here’s the Hashtracking transcript from this #Blogchat.

Tonight (5-24-2015) on #Blogchat we’ll be discussing How Your Business Can Tell Its Story With Blogging! We’ll talk about what businesses should be sharing on their blogs, and what customers want to read. And if you have some examples of company blogs that you love, please feel free to share those in the comments and during #Blogchat as well!

And don’t forget that this month’s #Blogchat sponsor is the Marketing Writing Bootcamp from MarketingProfs! The Marketing Writing Bootcamp is a 13-class online course that begins on June 11th. And if you register via this link and use promo code BLOGCHAT you will receive an additional $200 discount!

Our topic tonight is How Your Business Can Tell Its Story With Blogging. We’ll cover three main areas:

1 – What information should companies share on its blog. History? Background? What makes for an interesting story to customers?

2 – Should companies focus on their employees on their blog? Does it make a company more interesting and trustworthy to you if you know more about its employees?

3 – Should companies incorporate their customers into their stories? Should they focus on individual customers that are their ‘rock stars’?

#Blogchat will begin at 8pm Central on Sunday, 5-24-2015.

And because the Marketing Writing Bootcamp is sponsoring #Blogchat in May, they will have a very special giveaway just for #Blogchat! The Marketing Writing Bootcamp is focused on helping you solve your writing problems and becoming a better writer. To that end, MarketingProfs will be giving away one free pass to the online Marketing Writing Bootcamp. In order to be eligible to win the pass, all you have to do is write and publish a blog post by 5-31, discussing your biggest writing challenge. When it comes to writing, what holds you back? Share what your biggest writing challenge and MarketingProfs will select one post from one blogger at the end of the 5-31 #Blogchat to win a free pass to its online Marketing Writing Bootcamp!

To be eligible to win the free pass to the online Marketing Writing Bootcamp, do these two things:

1 – Make sure in your post that you note that the post is written as your chance to win a pass to the Marketing Writing Bootcamp and please link to the Marketing Writing Bootcamp at URL http://mprofs.com/blogchatmwb

2 – Leave a comment here with a link to the blog post that you write as your entry in this giveaway. Just leave a comment and share your post. Something like ‘Hey Mack, here’s my entry, my post on my biggest writing challenge is here – http://www.myawesomeblog.com’ You must leave a comment here to be eligible to win the pass. This helps Marketing Profs keep up with everyone that’s written a post.

And if you want to save $200 on the Marketing Writing Bootcamp, remember to use promo code BLOGCHAT to register for the Marketing Writing Bootcamp and you will receive a $200 discount off the $595 price!

See y’all Tonight at 8pm Central on Twitter!

May 20, 2015 by Mack Collier

The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show Episode 27: Four Ways Your Fans Can Grow Your Business

Hey y’all! Welcome to the 27th episode of #FanDamnShow! In today’s episode I talk four different ways you can work with your fans to help them grow your business. I also cover all four areas in much more detail in my book Think Like a Rock Star.

But before I get into the Show Notes, a special thank you to MarketingProfs for becoming The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show’s first sponsor! This episode is brought to you by the Marketing Writing Bootcamp, from Marketing Profs. The Marketing Writing Bootcamp begins on June 11th and features 13 classes with almost 8 hours of instruction! You can learn more here about the Marketing Writing Bootcamp and if you enroll with promo code FANDAMN you’ll save $200 on Marketing writing bootcamp. Plus, you’ll get over $1,000 worth of Marketing Profs seminars, classes, and video tutorials, free – just for registering!

The Marketing Writing Bootcamp will be the sponsor of The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show for the next 2 months. If your company is interested in sponsoring #FanDamnShow, slots are available starting in July. You can learn more about sponsoring The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show and get rates by clicking here.

When most companies think about how their fans could help them, they usually focus on how those fans can help them sell more products. But that’s just one way your fans can help you, there are three more!

Show Notes:

3:20 – You can work with your fans to promote your brand and why your fans love doing this

6:45 – You can work with your fans to generate more sales for your brand

11:05 – Working with your fans to help them provide better customer service to customers they interact with

14:20 – Leveraging your fans as a feedback channel (this gives your brand the most bang for its buck!)

We’ll talk again next week!

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May 19, 2015 by Mack Collier

How to Price Your Products and Services

Tonight (5-19-2015) at 7pm Central I will be joining #InfluencerChat on Twitter to discuss how to price your products and services. Setting prices is a big gray area for many consultants, I am constantly having peers contact me asking for advice on what they should charge. Especially when they are starting out.

Over time, and through much trial and error, I have learned the three keys to pricing your products and services as a consultant:

1 – Know your worth

2 – Charge what you are worth

3 – Never apologize for doing so

I say that I learned this through much trial and error because when I started consulting 10 years ago I did *not* do this. Back in 2005 it was very difficult to determine the ‘going rate’ for social media consulting, and that was my focus at the time. So I usually based my pricing mostly on what I thought the client could afford. A lot of consultants do this, especially when they start out.

Another key mistake I made was that I didn’t mention costs upfront to the client. In fact, cost was usually the last thing we addressed. This is an obvious problem because it meant that I would sometimes spend 2-3 weeks playing phone tag with a potential client before finally learning that they need $3,000 worth of services and have $500 to spend. It wastes their time, and it wastes mine.

Today, I give all potential clients my prices upfront. If I cannot give them an exact prices then I give them as defined of a range as possible. This saves me time by setting expectations upfront. The ball is then literally in their court. After telling them my price, they typically either never respond, or tell me that their budget isn’t quite that much and make me a counter-offer, or they accept. Either way, it saves time for me.

It also makes sense to publish your rates. Many consultants balk at this, but again, it saves time for everyone. If you prefer to adjust your rates based on the client and circumstance I get that, but the potential issue that creates is it becomes more difficult for your desired clients to find you. Small businesses have different budgets for marketing services than global brands do.

This also communicates to the potential client that I know my worth, and am comfortable asking for it. Which also communicates to the potential client that I am getting my worth.

Case in point, my speaking rates for events start at $7,500.00. My rates and everything I provide are clearly listed here on my site. Let’s be honest, $7,500.00 is a lot of money for any event to spend on a speaker. So when an event planner or organizer contacts me about speaking at their event, I tell them my rates start at $7,500.00. I will also explain exactly what they will get for that $7,500.00:

1 – I will provide a presentation of up to 90 minutes (including Q&A)

2 – I will stay at the event during the day on which I speak, answering any questions that attendees have

3 – I will conduct a book signing at the event, selling my own books, which I will bring

4 – I will help promote the event on my site and via my social media channels beginning 2 months before the event

This clearly communicates to the event planner what I cost, and the value I will create for them. As a result, it becomes much easier to justify my speaking rate when events learn that I will stay for the duration of the event and help them promote it beforehand. By doing this I am not only creating more value for the event, I am also helping to ensure the success of the event. Which ultimately benefits me (the speaker) as well, because if every event I am speaking at is a success, it not only makes me look good to be speaking at successful events, it also increases the chance that I will be invited to speak at more events. For example, I spoke in Gulf Shores last week at a tourism event because the organizer had attended a similar tourism event I spoke at two years ago in Huntsville. She loved my presentation and asked me to present to her group, and I did.

So when it comes to setting prices for your products and services:

1 – Know your worth

2 – Charge your worth

3 – Never apologize for doing so

We’ll chat more about setting prices tonight at #InfluencerChat on Twitter, starting at 7pm central!

May 17, 2015 by Mack Collier

Writing For Social Media, Tonight’s #Blogchat Topic!

UPDATE: Here’s the Hashtracking transcript for tonight’s #Blogchat

Tonight (5-17-2015) on #Blogchat we’ll be discussing Writing For Social Media! We’ll talk about how and if you need to change your writing for promoting on social media sites, or if engagement on social media sites shapes the type of content you create, IOW do you focus more on including pictures that are pinnable to Pinterest or that can be easily viewed on Twitter, etc. We want to create content that’s useful to our readers, but we also want to appeal to potential readers that are active on other social media sites as well!

And that’s because this month’s #Blogchat sponsor is the Marketing Writing Bootcamp from MarketingProfs! The Marketing Writing Bootcamp is a 13-class online course that begins on June 11th. And if you register via this link and use promo code BLOGCHAT you will receive an additional $200 discount!

Our topic will be Writing For Social Media. We’ll cover two main areas:

1 – How Can You Write Better Headlines For Your Blog AND Social Media?

2 – What Content Elements (Photos, videos, infographics) Work Best on Other Social Media Sites?

#Blogchat will begin at 8pm Central on Sunday, 5-17-2015.

To be eligible to win the free pass to the online Marketing Writing Bootcamp, do these two things:

See y’all Tonight at 8pm Central on Twitter!

The Art of Empathy: How to Get People to Give a Damn About You

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How Your Twitter Community Can Help Your Blog, Tonight’s #Blogchat Topic With Jessica Northey!

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My Blog Traffic and Podcast Audience Results for May

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The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show Episode 29: Stop Comparing Your Reality to Their Highlight Reel

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How Your Business Can Tell Its Story With Blogging, Tonight’s #Blogchat Topic!

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The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show Episode 27: Four Ways Your Fans Can Grow Your Business

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How to Price Your Products and Services

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Writing For Social Media, Tonight’s #Blogchat Topic!

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