Social Media Marketing Archives - Page 16 of 24 by Mark Murnahan

Marketing at 20 Percent Brilliance and 80 Percent Trial

Wouldn’t it be great if all of your marketing efforts worked just exactly as planned? Just imagine how great it would be if every piece of marketing material that you put on the Internet or elsewhere was a smash hit. That would be amazing! You could cut your expenses, earn squillions of dollars, enjoy more leisure, and retire early.

Now rub your eyes, grab another cup of coffee, stop daydreaming, and get to work. This is the real world, and we welcome you to come back and join us.

Nobody is brilliant 100 percent of the time. Some people come closer than others, but none of us walk on moonbeams while tending to our herd of unicorns. It is just not going to happen, but that should not discourage you from trying.

What is more important than creating 100 percent brilliance is to keep trying and testing new things. Even the least glamorous of your marketing efforts can have some level of success. This is more important to remember on the Internet than any other place. If you are holding back your efforts because it doesn’t peg your spectacular-ometer, you will miss out on a lot of what makes your brand what it is. Like any brand, your brand is made up of people … people and their opinions. These people are not all the same, and even some of your bottom percentile marketing efforts will be appealing to some of them.

Marketing with Juran’s Pareto Principle

A historic man named Joseph Juran observed that approximately 80 percent of effects come from 20 percent of causes. Many people know this as the 80 / 20 rule, and if you consider it carefully, you will likely find it to be both fascinating and virtually unbreakable. If you are unfamiliar, I strongly urge you to read the astonishing findings of Juran and the economist he named his studies for, Vilfredo Pareto. You may read more about The Pareto Principle and related Pareto Distribution at Wikipedia. Note that The Pareto Principle is not guesswork. It is a diligently researched, mathematically defined, widely documented, and well accepted socioeconomic principle.

Some ways the Pareto principle of 80 / 20 may be observed in your Internet marketing are as follows:

20 percent of your website pages receive 80 percent of web traffic.
20 percent of your marketing receives 80 percent of social media sharing.
20 percent of your blog articles receive 80 percent of reader comments.
20 percent of your marketing efforts can be tracked to 80 percent of your sales.

There are many other examples in which you will likely discover this principle to hold true, but I just want you to consider it and how you may apply it to your marketing efforts. Applying The Pareto Principle to your marketing may surprise you.

It is important to remember that if you reduce the 80 percent, you will also proportionally reduce the successful 20 percent. Do not neglect or devalue your 80 percentile efforts, because it has a purpose, too. Consider this: Have you ever received a compliment for something that you didn’t consider your best effort? I have, and sometimes for things that were not very popular or amazing to the masses, but were just right for somebody. I offer you this example that started with a home video of a little girl named Madeline from a few years back. I saw a message in it, so I put it on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. It did not have amazing results, but a few people thought it was cute. Those few people were worth it, and the video brought me just a bit closer to my next great 20 percentile effort. Plus, it is another tiny piece of branding that makes up the whole mix. Is it brilliant? Perhaps it is not brilliant, but do I think is it valuable? Yes, without a doubt.

Do Not Neglect Your 80 Percent Marketing

It is certain that you cannot achieve 100 percent brilliance, but even that 80 percent that is just “pretty good” may be what somebody was looking for. If you keep it to yourself, you will miss many opportunities for exposing your work to that smaller percentile of people who will think it is brilliant.

Nothing is an out of the box success. Any product or service offering will require a lot of effort to become successful. If you look at the 80 percent of less-than-brilliant efforts as simply wasted, it will not mean that the 20 percent left is all perfect. It will just mean that you still have only 20 percent of that 20 percent that is the most effective, but there will still be 80 percent that is less effective.

When you consider your marketing, remember that it cannot all be your best. There will always be a portion of your marketing which is more successful than the rest. If you try to reduce it down to just the things which are “perfect”, you will reduce your reach of a message that will work just great for some people.

So where does this article rank among my marketing efforts? I do not expect it to be a top 20 percentile piece of work. That does not matter to me as much as the fact that I am still trying, and getting even closer to my next 20-percenter all the time.

Remember This: Marketing talent requires practice.

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Is Your Blog Sending Mixed Messages?

Have you been here before? I do not just mean here at my blog, but have you been faced with questions or doubts about your efforts? Maybe you question whether people understand the intent and purpose of your blog, or maybe you question the intent and purpose of the blogs you read. These are legitimate considerations for a lot of bloggers, whether producers or readers.

I am a big proponent of blogging. In fact, if you just google “reasons to blog”, you can see that I am practically a poster child for the benefits of blogging. If you need encouragement, I suggest giving my list of “10 Really Good Reasons to Blog” a thorough read. If you need blogging tools, I would recommend “6 Essential Blogging Tools for Bloggers and Non-Bloggers“.

Let’s face it, great blogging is hard work. I have actually considered making a video of my steps to produce a blog article, but then I want to break my own fingers just to avoid the temptation of all the video editing on top of the other efforts.

What does it take to produce a blog article? Here is a one-sentence rundown for you: I get a bright idea, then I research, write, print, proofread, edit, print, give it to an editor, edit again, find a graphic, edit the graphic, categorize it, tag it, keyword it, write a description, produce an excerpt, record a podcast, upload podcast, title and tag the podcast, review the podcast, preview the article, edit it, preview it again, publish it, tweet it, facebook it, linkedin it, stumble it, reddit it, ping it, diigo it, mixx it, delicious it, then watch my web stats and keep my fingers crossed while hoping that some people will digg it, stumble it, facebook it, tweet it, and etecetera.

Somewhere in blogging, there must be an earthly reward. This is not the extent of what it takes to produce and promote a good article, by any means, but I was running out of breath trying to fit it into just one huge run-on sentence. There is a whole lot more to it than just that one breath. Through all of this effort, I hope that readers will appreciate it just a fraction of how sincerely I was trying to benefit them. If I benefit them enough with useful topics, they may help pass my blog along to somebody interested and in need of my marketing services, so that I can keep blogging without my kids getting too skinny.

Ahh, true passion of the SEO and social media marketing blog producer … you want some of that, don’t you?

Fun and Simplicity of Blogging

I already pointed out that I am an advocate of blogging. It it true that blogging holds many great rewards, but blogging is not an easy task for most of us. Some people will promote how fun and simple it is to produce a blog, but then I once heard a woman say something similar about having a baby, too. Yes, blogging can be very worthwhile, but there is also a pregnancy and labor side of blogging. Good blogs come from things like pixie dust and unicorns, but great blogs come from mind-numbing levels of creative effort. This is especially true if they are business blogs, which require a high level of marketing talent.

Knowing that it requires a lot of work to produce a useful blog, it would be a horrible shame to create and promote all that great work and not at least receive a few comments from readers, more subscribers, additional business, or something to justify all the effort and keep you wanting to continue giving your works to this amazing Internet resource we all build together.

Why Do I Make So Much Effort to Blog

Yes, here comes the reason I work hard to serve you. I will break it down really simple to tell you why I work hard to provide benefit to my readers. It is not as despicable as you may have thought.

If you are a subscriber to my blog, you have seen my crafty works to help get your thoughts racing about SEO and social media marketing. You may wonder why I work so hard to help people with marketing tips and ideas. I do not sell advertising here on my blog, so how can this possibly be worthwhile to me? I do not even promote my own company. Actually, the opposite is true, and my company promotes my blog.

What the following description of my efforts should drive home for you is the very most essential piece of the combined art and science of online marketing. Here it is: The most important thing about my blog is to serve people with something useful and compelling. The short version that I often tell people is “be useful!”

Yes, there you have it. The emphasis of my effort is to be useful and compelling. The kicker is this: When I am useful and compelling, people will share my work with others. If they share it on their blogs and social networks, my search engine ranking is improved, my readership is improved, and far beyond any big ego boost you may suspect, I actually stand a greater chance of having a paying customer ask me to help to do the same for them. Now that does not sound so much like the kitten-killer you may have made me out to be, does it? I did not even con you into buying something you do not need. That is refreshing in this day and age, don’t you think?

Have I Helped You?

I want to ask that in consideration for my efforts for you to pass along my work. If you are a do-it-yourself’er, please pass this along to people who may hire out my marketing services. If you are a marketing person and you do not have a conflict of interest, please spread this to others in our field. If you are a marketer seeking a client, just like me, I want to ask you to reach out to me so we can share ideas. Maybe I can guest blog for you and help promote you to your best audience.

In any case, if you find it useful, I want to ask you to subscribe to my blog and share your comments with others here. Also, please do not be too ashamed to pass along what I offer to others on your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, or other social networks. I am not your embarrassing Cousin Eddie. Helping me to share my work with people who can benefit is nothing to be ashamed of. I may be just “a web guy” to you, but I may provide a lot of benefit to somebody you know.

I promise that, although I am from Kansas, I will not behave like the famous Cousin Eddie from Kansas depicted in this video.

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Market Research Tip: Jumbo Jets and Jelly Beans

Shoppers lie. It happens all the time that they say they want one thing, but the truth is actually quite different. This happens because most shoppers feel a bit insecure about their purchases. Just picture yourself walking into an auto dealership to understand this better. You probably make up reasons to say “no” before you even drive on the lot. It is how consumers “protect themselves”, and it is rooted in cynicism. People want to buy things on their terms, and not the seller’s terms, and if that means they have to lie, they will often lie.

I am not going to call everybody a liar. No, I am not going to do that. What I will say is that during the purchase process, there are often things which are not exactly as they seem. This begins in the very earliest steps to a purchase, and it is the marketer’s job to overcome those smokescreens. We do this in many ways, including fact-finding about our market to better understand the ideal customer and how to meet their objectives. We perform careful propensity modeling to determine exactly who to target. Then we create a strong call-to-action to entice customers to take action now, before they can dream up another lie to help excuse themselves from committing to the purchase.

It should not be surprising that much of this process is made far more difficult by trying to market to the wrong people. A lot of marketing efforts miss the target miserably by skipping the research and trying to sell to people who are only marginally interested in the offering.

NOTE: When I say “take action” I mean for the customer to get what they want … what they came for. After all, when a prospective customer comes out of hiding, there is a reason. They want what you offer.

The purchase of anything from jelly beans to jumbo jets has two sides; one side who wants the sale, and the other side who wants the sale. They ultimately both want the sale! Marketers often neglect this, and place themselves in a very defensive role as if the customer holds all the cards. Something important to remember is that the customer also wants what the seller has to offer, often much more than they will let on. After all, they are ready to trade their money for it. You just have to suit their objectives and help them to buy on their terms. The best way to do this begins long before you ever even encounter the customer. The best answer is to know who the buyer is, and to know their terms.

Stop Marketing Jumbo Jets to Jelly Bean Customers

I have taught many people how to market and sell things, both online and offline. I have been in the marketing field for over 20 years, and I have seen a lot in that time. I have seen about every smokescreen that a customer can hide behind. There is a common saying that “buyers are liars”. It sounds ugly, but it really just means that until you uncover the customer’s real objectives, they will often be less than forthright about their purchase decision making. It may sound like a “lie”, but it is actually just to cover up deeper objectives, and a prospective customer’s attempt to feel secure while getting what they want. You see, if they tell you the whole truth, then you have too much power (in their mind), and they become “vulnerable”. The common fear is that if they open themselves up to your influence, they may end up coming to you asking for a bag of jelly beans and leaving with a jumbo jet. Of course, if that is the case, it really means they actually wanted a jumbo jet, but they were afraid to admit it and afraid of the sacrifice. It also means that the seller was reaching out to the wrong audience instead of discovering the people who are asking for jumbo jets. When you reach the right market, much cynicism is averted.

Marketers who understand what customers really want are the marketers who earn happy customers and become very successful. Effective marketers do the necessary discovery work to find out who the customers are and what they really want. This helps us to understand how to reach the right people, define the marketing approach, and thus improve response rates.

If a given group has a propensity to purchase jumbo jets, effective market research will uncover the facts. Market research helps to determine the most effective means to reach the target audience, and the right marketing message to implement. In my work, I find a lot of people trying to sell jumbo jets to jelly bean customers, simply because they never took the initiative to understand who the customer really is and what the customer wants and needs.

Wasteful Marketing Efforts

Many people will take the approach of simply seeking more audience. We all want more audience, but as a sole effort, that can lead to a whole lot of waste. Marketing duck hunting to vegetarians may reach a lot of people, but it will not produce desired results.

Other people will focus too much on a stronger call to action. A strong call to action is good, but again, this alone often leads to more waste. Offering a huge discount on lipstick will probably not bring the greatest results at a gun show.

Another huge waste I see in many marketing efforts is to assume that markets are less defined online than that of vegetarians and gun shows. The fact is that marketing online provides much greater definition to market segmentation. I encounter many people who think of the Internet as a place to market to the whole world, but take little or no care to define their market and understand the best ways to reach the right segments.

These are extreme accounts of wasteful marketing, but I see much more subtle mistakes being made every day. A better option is to know who to reach and what they want. Put yourself in their shoes and research your industry from their standpoint. This is not easy, and it is not natural for most business people. It is also why there are people who specialize in the field of marketing.

Wasteful marketing efforts will cause you to constantly be at odds with the prospective customer and they will seldom come over to your side to see the benefits of doing business with you.

How Do You Bring the Customer to Your Side?

The first step to winning customers is to know your market and why they want what you have. If you can realize the objectives of your market, you can bring the customers to your side so they can see it from both perspectives. Then they can see your vision of how your product or service will benefit them. If they want a jumbo jet, you will be the one who sells it to them.

Market research and gaining an understanding of the customer is a huge missing piece in many marketing campaigns. I have been shocked countless times to find that for many companies, market research is a confusing task that just seems like wasted effort. You can believe me or not, but it is the most important piece of all. Market research allows you to know what people want and what they will respond to. It is what tells you who to reach and the message to reach them with. Without proper market research, you may as well advertise jumbo jets for sale in your local candy store. If you keep trying to sell jumbo jets to jelly bean shoppers, you will waste a lot of time and expense.

Take your market research seriously.

Unless I am mistaken, you want to know how to earn more business by having more effective marketing reach. That is what I sell. You did not come here for jelly beans.

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Are You Going to Eat That Digg Fame?

If you are not going to eat that Digg fame, may I have a bite?

I was feeling a bit down about Twitter yesterday after remembering those days when Twitter was the next big Digg.com-like traffic-generating left-coast geek craze. If you were there, you would know it as the days when everybody who Kevin Rose (of Digg.com) had worked so hard to encourage to get their moment of Digg fame had become Twitter-stunned. It was back when anybody who had been kicked off Digg.com professed that tweets were the new diggs, and it was time to adapt to the new rules.

What The Heck is Digg?

For my readers unfamiliar with Digg, I will explain it in simple terms. Digg.com is a massively important … no, wait … monumental piece of Internet marketing history. It is a largely bullshitopotomus platform for zit-faced Star Wars fans to gain importance by stroking each other’s ego. The primary demographic are 17 year olds pretending to be 30, and 45 year olds still wearing Scooby Doo pajamas. Digg users can be largely summed up as semi-adult with $200 per hour talent getting paid $13 per hour to submit “diggable” stuff without looking like a “business digger”. They will carefully digg a squillion things per day while they sit in their mother’s basement passing time until she kicks them out on the street to get a real job and stop playing on that damn computer.

Typical Digg Users Need Jobs

A typical Digg user would be more inclined to plagiarize somebody’s good resume and hack their way into a real job, but there is a catch. They are hard-pressed to find time in between potentially popular photos of Lego sculptures and celebrity gossip to throw their Digg authority upon and earn another $0.43 per click for that advertisement which is cleverly placed between that badass Lego sculpture of The Empire State Building and Jennifer Aniston photoshopped making out with their buddy. When they have time to eat their bologna sandwich and chips (thanks mom), they sit there thinking “Damn those Lego statues and funny photos of the dude crashing his skateboard. I could have been somebody! … and Damn You Jennifer Aniston!

The Big Point About Digg

So the point of this article was actually this: I wrote something yesterday to tease Twitter users. I titled it “How To Become Popular on Twitter Without Actually Being Useful” and it was pretty well-received. Fame? No, not fame really, because I used to see many times as much attention to an article on Twitter … any article on Twitter. Heck, I could tweet about blowing my nose and see 100 retweets back when Digg was supposedly dead.

Damn it … those zit-faced kids went back to Digg, but I still found some people amused by my Twitter humor and snarky insight. What I have done here is to point out yet another typically popular thing to do. If you have something popular come out of your blog, it is often a good idea to follow it up with something of a similar nature that people can relate to. It really is an important practice, because your audience will tell you what they want, and you should be willing to deliver it.

I was going to blog about something totally different today. Blame the 40-something year old in the Scooby Doo pajamas and those knucklehead Twitter people who surprised me with their signs of a heartbeat yesterday.

By the way, I should add that those zit-faced fellas on Digg really don’t have a sense of humor. They just act like it for $0.43 per click. Sorry … this is one blog post the Digg fellas probably will not like very much, but you are welcome to Facebook it!

Photo of Kevin Rose courtesy Brian Solis on Flickr.

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How Good SEO Becomes Great SEO: Feed the Gorillas!

I recently returned home after an all-day meeting with a company in need of my SEO and social media marketing services. I wrote about them in my recent article titled “99 Percent of Marketing Fails, But Eleanor Can Fly!“. The company asked me to come to Chicago and meet with them at length about their needs, and get to know them. They don’t just want a consultant, they want me to share in their vision and help them to achieve some really big goals. They want my commitment to their long-term success.

We had a great time, and I learned a lot about things which make the company really great. The culture of the company is to do things with purpose. They do meaningful things and they do them for the right reasons. Their purpose is not all about the money, but the money is all because of the purpose. I suppose it is easier for them to come by their purpose, because they are a family-owned company in their fourth generation. The culture was passed down, and there is a strong sense of responsibility that comes along with that. I am still optimistic that a greater purpose can be developed in newer companies, too. They must first understand that greater rewards come from a bigger vision than themselves, and not just a clever business plan.

Tangent Thinking Creates Great SEO and Social Media

While I was meeting with these fine folks, we often spoke in tangents. We let our minds wander with our ideas. Thinking and sharing your tangent is often the best way to discover your greatest creativity. I told the guys that if I was there in the office each day, much of my best work would not be sitting at a desk and doing geeky stuff like reprogramming their websites, but rather pacing the sidewalk smoking cigarettes, and chugging coffee. I forgot to add the telephone. I need cigarettes, coffee, and a telephone so I can call for more inspiration and ideas from that perfect person in my giant network of creative and resourceful friends who can help me think through my latest flash of genius.

I explained that good SEO takes a lot of hard work, data analysis, and understanding of technologies, but that great SEO requires something a whole lot different. It requires creativity, passion, and doing something truly exceptional and showing people what makes your company amazing. Yes, SEO is a whole lot more than just picking some keywords and putting them on a perfectly crafted website. Really great SEO (search engine optimizers) know that asking for a link from other webmasters is a huge waste of time. They know that if you do something really out of the box that people love, more people will link to you because they are compelled to share the value you provided them. Yes, there I said it. I just gave you the single best tip in my SEO bag of goodies.

When the SEO Light Bulb Comes On

While I was on a tour of the company’s facility with the VP of Marketing, his right-hand man, a brilliant note-taking scribe who goes by the title of “Director of Innovation” came to re-join us on the tour. The three of us stood in the “bird cage” high atop a huge facility where employees were working hard to do their jobs. As we talked about them, it really began to feel like they were not just there to get the job done, but that the culture of this company allowed them to all be a part of a bigger picture. They worked side-by-side with family members, and I don’t just mean the strong family which is the company. They worked with people they had known since birth … you know, actual family members. Many of them had been there for a very long time. Sure, jobs are harder to find these days, but I don’t think these people came to work each day just because this was the only job out there for them. They understood the vision, and if any of them question their corporation’s intentions, they shouldn’t. I don’t. Hearing it from a guy with the founder’s same name, I can say that the higher-ups really have a whole lot of heart wrapped up in that staff. They really do care about the employees, and they feel a huge sense of responsibility to the thousands of people it can affect if they make bad decisions. It gave me goosebumps more than once.

While we stood there talking about these hard workers and sharing our visions for the company, the Director of Innovation had a moment which really came to seem like a light bulb turning on. He knew that what I do is more than just things he had read about SEO and Internet marketing, but had not put his finger on it just yet. In this light bulb moment, he really started seeing how the initial perceptions of SEO as a technical trade went a lot deeper. He noticed that it also has a lot greater than expected roots in people, talent, creativity, networking, and so many other branches of a marketing tree. It was in this conversation when he realized that there really is a lot more to the job description of search engine optimizer than he thought. It is not just about getting a bunch of website traffic. It also has a lot to do with being able to express the value of something, and doing it in a way that people can relate to. It has to do with building a brand and sharing that great culture of the company with other people who will appreciate it and benefit from it. It has to do with building consumer confidence, which often takes a lot more than just being the first search result when people search for what you offer.

Social Media Seeds SEO, But Here is How!

In our discussions, I mentioned that social media is like seeds of SEO. Actually, SEO is social media, and I will explain that briefly. If you consider that Google’s most important SEO ranking factor is quality links pointing to your website, you can see that it is all about the people’s opinion. People who have confidence in your brand, and see value in your message, will link to your work. Google is just a bigger tree in the social media forest. It reflects what the people like, and what the people want. It is largely based on the same principle of great things being popular.

Google is just a bigger tree in the social media forest. It reflects what the people like, and what the people want. It is largely based on the same principle of great things being popular.

There is a lot more to it, but it is the whole forest that I want you to see. Sure, you can swap a bunch of links and ask people to link to your website. If you think that works so great, consider how long it would take to get thousands of incoming links to your site by asking for them. Then consider how much more effective it would be for your business to do great things and provide great value, then present it in a way that people will love to share. Getting this wrong is why I say that most SEO fail at link building.

How Does a Good Business Become Great?

A wise man who knew about making a good business great described it as feeding the gorillas. You must give them what they want, and they want bananas. Give them bananas and they will be happy gorillas who will be loyal to you. I think there was a lot more wisdom in this than just the picture you have in your head right now of a silly man throwing bananas to a gorilla (you saw that guy in your mind, too … I know you did). It means giving people what they want in life and realizing that is the most effective path to getting what you want. This holds true, whether it is a link to your website, a purchase from a customer, love of another person, or becoming a massively successful brand. Feeding bananas to gorillas is what made the company I met with yesterday a great one. They have been giving people what they want for a long time, and the success is evident.

I really enjoyed my trip to Chicago and the day I spent getting to know these guys. I hope they see just how much similarity we share in our methods and motivations. I suspect as they read through the copies of my book, “Living in the Storm” that I left with them, they will see that I strongly believe in feeding the gorillas, too.

Mark’s Side-Note
This may seem a bit outside of the topic, but it does relate. I want to add that while I visited with my wife on my way back home, she sensed an emotional attraction that I have to this company. She said that from all I told her, I could not have dreamed up a more suitable and exciting opportunity to do the things I love than what this company has in mind for me. I was not looking for this, and I have been a CEO for two decades. The company found me, and has expressed an interest in making me an employee of their corporation. This is certainly not something I would normally even consider. At the same time, it really proves that if you do great things, with great purpose, and you present it in a way that people love, nearly any goal can become reality.

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