social media objectives Archives - Page 4 of 8 by Mark Murnahan

Social Media Express: Avoiding The Social Media Train Wreck

Social media is more than just a little bit special to me. Perhaps, if you have been using social media for a while, you feel this way, too. I have lived with my Internet connection close by my side for many years, like a good friend. Just like any longtime friend, it has changed. It has built me up, and it has let me down.

Social media has helped me to meet many wonderful people that I never would have met elsewhere. Those people include some of my closest friends of the last 15 years, and even my wife and mother of our three children, whom I met back in 2000. I think a lot of people can relate to how I feel about this special part of my life where I laugh, learn, and spend many hours working.

I still cherish many memories of times when social media was simpler. I guess it must feel kind of the way my 94 year old grandmother feels when she recalls her earlier days. The pace was more manageable, and people would still wave from their window in a train, and take more time to visit with the passengers around them.

Today, I want to encourage you to slow your social media train to avoid a crash. Yes, I said slow down … take your time. Read about one of the worst hazards of social media, and consider how you may avoid it.

Don’t Let Your Social Media Train Derail

Over the past few years, we invited the whole world to board the “Social Media Express”. It has created a time in our society which can adequately be termed “astonishing”. Now that the train is full, we all want to go somewhere, and get there fast.

Sometimes it seems that social media is like a runaway train with a huge payload of information and passengers just sitting there oblivious to the derail ahead of them. I have ridden this train to many derails, such as Yahoo! Groups that fell apart, and services that eventually phased out and friends lost communications. In cases where I looked far enough ahead, I could see it coming and warn my friends and we could slow the train down to resume our comfortable ride.

I feel very fortunate for the many people I met through social media and still communicate with regularly after teens of years. It took some effort to avoid the scattering effect of a train derailment, but it has been very worthwhile to me.

The big crash that I have emphatically warned people about is trying to “follow”, “friend”, “connect”, and etcetera, with excessive numbers of people with whom they never have any intention or ability to build a meaningful relationship.

I understand the huge urge for people to feel popular. I hear it all the time, even from people who have no real agenda to have a squillion connections, but just enjoy the appearance of being popular. If I had to point a finger at one single overriding challenge in social media, this would be it.

What so many people overlook is that having real communication and meaningful relationships with a smaller group who really listen to you or care about you is much more rewarding. This is true for both personal and business purposes, because it only takes about 150 people sharing something worthwhile to set it on a path to “viral” communication. Don’t try to argue this point with me, because I really will win this one.

Robin Dunbar Meets The Social Media Express

Have you ever heard of Dunbar’s Number? I will explain with a quote from Wikipedia:

“Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.”

I watch people trying to push Dunbar’s Number to a breaking point every day. Once they run through each passenger car on the “Social Media Express”, they burn out and jump off the speeding train when they don’t get what they hoped for. They don’t pull the hand brake, they don’t say goodbye, and many of them will never board the train again. They broke their social media train.

I can certainly place a good amount of blame on the implied importance of somebody with a lot of “friends” in social media. After all, I must be more important if I have xxxxx followers on Twitter and xxxx friends on Facebook, right?

There is another big challenge created by the many desperate people producing deafening levels of static while trying so hard to become marketers. With enough of that static, it causes many people to build up stronger than ever communication barriers. This overheats the train’s brakes, and sends more than a few passengers jumping off between stations.

Can You Share in My Guilt?

I witness many examples of pending challenges in my own use of social media. For example, I tend to tune out a lot just in order to keep up with people communicating with me directly. I am always available to anybody on this Internet, but it takes a lot of effort to reach out and see what all of those people have to say. So I let them come to me. I have even found out shamefully late of people who died, because it took me a long time to make my rounds to their Facebook profile.

I do my best to put friends and interesting people into lists, and I try to keep up, but nobody is immune to the challenge of “keeping up”. Many of the people I used to hear from every day stopped participating in social media, because they felt burned out and like nobody heard them anyway. Twitter makes a profound statement in this area, and has a horrible churn rate. It is not just specific networks, either. Many bloggers have expressed concerns that although people are reading, their comments have diminished. I certainly see it here, as well. Even while my readership is consistently high, it seems that many people don’t want to discuss topics the way they used to.

Do Those Big Numbers Really Matter?

I have studied this dilemma for years, and I know the importance of reaching a lot of people. Sure, it may increase your odds, right? Well, the truth is that if those are not the right people, and they are just a number for the sake of numbers, your impact will not be proportionate with your efforts. When you see somebody with a lot of friends, followers, and whatever you want to call them, it generally happens for one of two reasons: They either sought a lot of people who were also looking for big numbers for the sake of numbers, or they earned those numbers by reaching an appropriate audience who cared what they have to say and pay attention. One method imitates popularity in order to appear important or to throw spam at the wall and hope it sticks, and the other method is to do something people care about and presenting it to the right people.

I recently looked at my Twitter followers to find that many thousands of them had not used Twitter at all in the last six months. I filtered them out by those who had not sent an update in the last 90 days, and found that for many of them it had been over six months. I unfollowed 1,000 of them, which were mostly just nameless and faceless to me, and then I stopped. I realized that it was a waste of time to keep sorting through the graveyard of fallen Twitter users. I had only followed them in the first place because they had followed me, so I don’t feel some huge loss of a close friend.

Back before it became so popular to try and follow everybody under the sun, I used to see a huge value in Twitter. I liked it enough that I was asked to write a book about Twitter. I wrote it, and it was pretty good. I published it in July 2009, but I wish I had written it a few months sooner, before the Twitter graveyard started filling up.

Back in the good old days of social media, even as recently as Twitter, people paid attention to others. There were more conversations, and the conversations turned into friendships, and many times into business.

Today, I tweet something and it can sometimes seem to go unnoticed, even if it is totally hilarious or brilliant. Very few people respond, and almost nobody retweets things, compared to earlier years. Is it because they all hate each other, or is it because they simply went blind and only communicate if you go directly to them?

It is a tough call, but the numbers clearly indicate a speeding train.

Do You Slow Down and Say Hello Enough?

As a person who works and socializes here in this social media world, I have sometimes wondered “Is it me? Did I do something that changed things? Did I contribute to the extra hustle and bustle?” I really don’t think so, but I always try to keep myself in check.

I still find great value in many areas of social media, and it is still a very good place to make friends, build relationships, and produce new business. In fact, far better than any other, but it requires greater effort than ever before. It is not as easy as it used to be, and it can be more challenging than earlier years. It sometimes makes me wonder if I hadn’t been in my industry for so many years, what it would look like to me today. I have watched it evolve, and I have evolved with it nicely, but for somebody new here, I think it could get pretty overwhelming, and lose its luster quickly.

The Social Media Train is Human-Powered

I have written volumes of thoughts on the human aspects of our technical world. I write it in books, blogs, and I talk to groups about the importance of the real human communications that social media is so great for.

We control the pace of the train we are on, and the direction it travels. There are no rails, and plenty of great people and places to see. I only hope that more people will enjoy the ride, consider the people, stop running from car to car seeking more people to irritate with bad marketing, and avoid the train wreck.

Here is just a small selection of things I have said to try and caution others, and help them become more cognizant of the people around them. The longer list is found throughout my blog archive and in my books. I would not say these things if I didn’t mean them, and can stand behind them.

A Story from My Social Media Train Car

Something slowed my train nicely a few days ago. As I was unfollowing that 1,000 people on Twitter, as I mentioned, I came across several old friends who had dropped off the face of Twitter. One of them was Tom Roquemore, whom I met on Twitter a couple years ago. I like Tom, but he stopped using Twitter last October, and we hadn’t communicated since then.

Remembering good talks we had shared, I put him on my list of people to contact by phone. Before I even got around to calling him, my phone rang and it was Tom. We talked for a while and it was great to hear from him again. The timing was kind of uncanny, but we probably would have talked even sooner if our train was just moving a little slower.

How Does Tom Roquemore Affect My Social Media Train?

I have used social media, in one way or another, since before Yahoo! purchased GeoCities. That has been a long time, and I have seen a lot in those passing years. One thing that I have found to be the most valuable of all is to focus on a core group of the right people who really listen and feel strongly about the value you represent. That is where true and worthwhile popularity stems. It is like the initial spark of an explosion, and it starts very small. This holds true in the largest of all marketing campaigns, and in the smallest of groups. If you focus more on value over volume, your success and your enjoyment will be far greater. You just have to slow the train to recognize it, and find the truth in what I am telling you.

If some of you great people will slow down and add your comments here on my blog, maybe we could show others the start of a better habit. A habit of taking the time and effort to bring better communications back to social media, and not just rushing to the next thing that seems urgent.

Conga line image credit to fallingrock via Flickr

The Biggest Fallacy of Social Media: More is Better

I want to discuss the biggest fallacy of social media for a moment. It surrounds a tightly held misconception that many people will refuse to let go of, because somebody with perceived authority told them it is “how social media is done.”

It is made worse every day because of all the people who have the mentality that “if they are doing it, it must be OK.”

People often want examples to follow. It makes them more comfortable with their decisions. Sometimes it turns out just great, but it often leads to a whole lot of “imitation marketing” with horrible results. Didn’t your dad ever use the line about your friends and a cliff with you?

“If they were all jumping off a cliff without parachutes, would you just follow along with them?”

–Dad

Enough of the crescendo, let me explain this famously popular trap that has become the biggest fallacy of social media. Did somebody tell you that you need whole bunch of people to “follow” you, “like” you, and “friend” you? The odds are great that the person saying that is full of crap about other things, too.

The truth about the biggest social media successes, and in fact, the way that things actually become “viral” is quite the opposite from what it seems. It does not happen because of a huge number of followers, friends, and fans. Success happens because of thinking, creating, and doing something amazing enough that your dearest core group of true listeners, who care what you have to say, share it with emphasis. Before you even consider anything else, it is important to concentrate on the “amazing” part.

Who are those “core listeners” I am referring to? They are the people who like what you have to say, enough that they subscribe to your blog, follow you on Twitter, Like your Facebook page, and link with you on LinkedIn. They pay attention because they want to know what you have to share, and not because they just want you to add to their numbers. They are often great people to have as your friends, too!

This topic was inspired by a discussion on Mark Harai’s blog, in an article titled “How to Build Online Influence“. My comment there was as follows:

“It is absolutely true about the numbers. I have enough “followers” in some circles to properly seed a new landfill. Without bilateral communication, that is where those relationships are.

I even wrote a book that gave strong caution to the big numbers game of social media. People really want so badly to believe in big numbers, unless they have big numbers, and then they understand.

The mentality is not so unlike like desire for wealth. Many people want it badly but they use it unwisely if they get it.”

What most people do is called “conventional”. Convention is lazy, and conventional will not make you stand out! It is why “The Pareto Principle“, also known as the 80/20 rule, always holds true.

No, I am not that guy who will tell you that successful marketing is only about building relationships to make your social media marketing successful. It takes a lot of other things, too. If you want my “short list” of things that make social media marketing successful, go to my blog archive. The list includes 267 (often lengthy) topics I have written about. Not a single one of them says to get more followers, but many of them certainly do address the importance of relationship building.

Social Media’s Hardest Lesson to Learn

I have argued against the mentality that more followers is the key, but it seems that as with most other things, people just have to learn it for themselves. They learn it the hard way, just like people dying to win a lottery who are broke a year after they collect their squillion dollar jackpot.

If you just can’t stand it, and you need proof that I am right about this, let me show you some numbers: 24 28 45 49 52 2

Those are your Murnahan lottery picks for this week. That will be easier for a lot of people to understand and accept than what I would say about the horribly over-valued hype about big follower numbers. By the way, this is last week’s winning Powerball Lottery numbers. Maybe they will “hit” again, you never know!

If you really want to know what I think, I offer you these previous articles which address the matter.

Social Media is Not Just Who You Know … It’s Who They Know!

I urge people to remember that social media is not just about you, and who you know, or who follows you. I know very well that I can bore the heck out of some people with things they have no interest in. I also know which people will find value in things which I produce, and I know which ones may be a good match to connect with other people in my circle of friends and “core listeners”. My friends and “core listeners” know these things about me, too. It is called networking, and it trumps all that you may hear about having a massive number of followers.

All it really takes to make something extremely popular is about 150 people who are connected to you the way I have described. Ironically, and conveniently, 150 is also the number that is commonly referenced as Dunbar’s Number. If you can focus on those people, the rest comes down to simply having brilliance, and you probably have a lot more than you are using.

Social Media Backlash of Extended Reach

Social media is a funny thing. Most people can figure out the basics of how to use social media websites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, and the squillion others. A few can figure out how to use social media well, and enhance their business. A tiny fraction of those people will use social media in a way that does not irritate or offend somebody, somewhere, for some reason.

Yes, social media popularity has its drawbacks, and there will always be some people who hate you, just for breathing. I have often said that if I don’t get a death threat now and then, I must not be reaching enough people. Even the littlest things can set some people off, but it is not my job to make everybody happy. I just want to make a few of the right people happy. Would you believe I actually had a death threat come as a result of this humorous article titled “Hookers Write the Best Blogs“?

You don’t need “death threat” levels of popularity to get all that you want and need from social media … nobody does. You just have to concentrate on your core listeners, and the awesomeness you can create for and with them. Let the rest of it come into place naturally and those followers will come to your awesomeness like a Murnahan to a plate of bacon.

Photo credit to scorpio58 via Flickr

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Social Media and The Absurdity of Implied Reciprocity

If you are one of those people who expect social media favors because somebody owes you something, just stop it! If you like something and find value in it, share it with others or do whatever it is that you do with good information. Just don’t assume that it means people owe you anything.

In business, and in life, reciprocity is a wonderful thing. It feels good to do business with people who do business with you, right? You have probably heard the old saying, “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.”

A problem with reciprocity comes when people start doing things they would normally not do, only in hopes of demanding favors in return. It is nice to reciprocate, but this does not mean it is implied.

I received a message on LinkedIn yesterday that read as follows: “Hi. I liked ur PAGE through LINKEDIN GROUP. Expecting ur LIKE and SUPPORT.” I thought to myself, “Really? You liked my page in order to add to my number of people artificially interested in my work and you want me to do the same? Oh, and ‘SUPPORT?’ Does this mean you want me to feed your kids, too?” I guess I just didn’t see that as any kind of favor.

If you like what I do, and you think you could learn something from a guy with over 20 years of successful marketing experience, by all means, “Like” my Facebook page. If you think you have done me some great favor and I am going to do you a favor by liking your Facebook page which has absolutely no interest to me, you need me worse than you think!

Why would you have any desire whatsoever to have me “Like” your Facebook page if I will never, ever, be a customer or recommend you to anybody because you are a a demanding douchebag who expects something from me?

If You Like Me, Just Like Me, But Stop Expecting Favors!

Rather than to rewrite the whole thing, I want to share something I said in a previous article titled “Do You Tweet and Retweet Seeking Favors?” Here is the closely paraphrased version:

People in the social media field often build relationships in which they will work together to spread a message. As long as there is honesty and integrity in the message, I am generally happy to help. However, I have been hit over the head with some of this recently. It seems that I get a lot of requests to scratch somebody’s back. It is all fine and good to be reciprocal, but is it good to take away the human filter that makes us who we are?

If all I was doing was tweeting, retweeting, blogging, Facebooking, YouTubing, Digging, Stumbling, and etcetera, because I hoped people would return the favor, would people still care what I had to say? I do not imagine the answer is “yes”.

Reciprocity Has Its Place

Don’t get me wrong, reciprocity certainly has its place, but if you are doing things with expectations of others doing things for you in return, don’t you at least think it should be something meaningful or useful?

The only time I recall actually being a little hacked by lack of reciprocity was from a car dealer. Hell, I purchased three brand new Corvettes and a Cadillac Escalade (total cost over $240,000) from this guy in under a year’s time, and I sent him many new customers. When he went to somebody else for his web hosting because it was cheaper than my recommended $209 per year plan, I kind of thought that was a bad business decision. Then when he asked me about a new website and used my website proposal to shop around, I wanted to kick him in the nuts. Yeah, I kind of felt slapped in the face, but I will still buy a car from him based on the merits of his business … not mine!

I Did Not Buy These Just to Sell a Website!

In summary, don’t “Like” my Facebook, subscribe to my blog, follow me on Twitter, link to this page, kiss my butt with kind comments in my blog, or anything else of the sort if it is only because you want something. Do it because you know I am not full of crap and because you receive value from my hard work.

I may reciprocate, but not because I feel guilty if I don’t.

I have just one more thought for you, and it is what my wife said when I mentioned this subject to her. Here is another way to look at it, and a brilliantly performed song.

Note that since I wrote this, I have replaced the Bonnie Raitt version of the song. Apparently she stopped allowing her YouTube videos to be embedded in web pages. this guy performs it nicely, too!

“I Can’t Make You Love Me“

Dog Photo Credit to wsilver via Flickr

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Will Your Social Media Noise Withstand 2011 Filtering?

Toward the end of the year, it is easy to look back at the last twelve months, and to form new thinking of the year to come. We may try to do this all year, but let’s face it, as we see the clock tick toward 2011, it is easier to close one chapter and open another with a fresh mind. I want to share some of my social media observations of 2010 and look toward 2011. Please join me.

This year, as with past years, many people were frantic to learn the value of social media marketing for their business. During 2008, 2009, and 2010, social media experts in shining armor came riding along on their strong white steeds to save the day with theories from A to Z.

As we near 2011, there are about as many theories on social media as there are “social media experts”, and let me tell you, there are a lot of people calling themselves experts these days. In the past few years, the field of social media marketing took on the excessive noise of squillions of unemployed and starving advertising salespeople, public relations reps, marketing strategists, receptionists, real estate agents, automotive line-workers, and broom-pushers from around the world. Go ahead, shoot the messenger, but what I say is the truth.

Many newly self-appointed social media experts formed theories of what creates enough value in social media that they can sell their services to the abundant number of companies desperately trying anything to get their bills paid. A lot of these so-called experts agreed on things such as the best tools to use, the value of listening to the public, and engaging their customers and potential customers using social media. However, there has often been a huge disparity between the theorists’ ideas and their actions. Worse yet, they have often confused efforts with results.

A lot of people have claimed to have expertise with a given angle, such as how to become popular on Twitter (a very funny topic, by the way), or how to manage a Facebook campaign. Other experts will dig a bit deeper with topics of social media data analysis, and a smaller few experts engage the psychology of people in order to build upon their pack mentality and create a desired response.

As the experts came calling, so did their noise. Even the people who are reliably good at their jobs in social media found that there was a strong barrier of noise to overcome. What was often heralded as the most important factor, which was “engagement”, began to fade as people implemented a stronger filter to strain out the noise. A hazardous outcome of this was that many of the “experts” simply turned up the noise, rather than to create a new strategy and new tactics.

Making a Whisper Heard in Social Media

Social media is a very noisy place, and most of what people will encounter on a daily basis is easy to consider “junk”. That is because it is junk to them. I urge you to remember the old adage that says “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” and it goes both ways. Your treasure may be their junk.

The Internet is inundated by noise (people are noisy, after all), and there is likely only a small percentage who will see value in your “junk”. What I have to say is certainly “junk” or “noise” to the mango farmer in Navsari, India who just needs to find a new truck to haul his crop of mangoes. He is not my target, and thus, I keep my noise level down so as not to bother him. If he needs me, I am still here, but I am not going to bug him.

Where many failed social media campaigns sealed their losing fate is by simply adding to the noise. Failing to reach a specific target audience is not only wasteful, but leads to a significant filtering-out effect. As a marketing professional, myself, I have been stunned by how many people contacted me in 2010 to try and sell me their SEO and social media marketing services. They would actually even email me through my blog’s contact page where they have to enter a captcha code to send their email. This indicates that it was not just automated, but actually a live person entering their sales pitch to sell me the same services which I provide. Before you waste time with this approach, you should at least note the title of the blog.

These people who approached me had no idea of a target, and they added to my filtering-out of the majority of others in their industry … my industry. People approaching their market in this way made so much noise that many people’s “noise filters” went into hyper-drive and tuned them out. This was not limited to my industry, either. The noise level of the Internet as a whole is higher than ever, and with noise-filtering becoming more important, often times a whisper is heard above a shout. This means that the challenges are in careful targeting and balancing volume with value.

Social Media Balance of Volume vs. Value

There is an easy assumption that the volume and reach of a message creates value to a company. This is what we have all be taught through years of commercialization. It is true that there is a strong correlation, but there is a big backlash, too. In the realm of social media, there is a very common outcome of being filtered out.

A better solution is to be filtered-in by proving your value rather than just your volume. Anybody can create volume, and it is quite evident online. It does not take a marketing genius to promote something online and put it in front of a lot of people. Doing it in a way that gets you “filtered in” instead of being “filtered out” is a lot trickier.

Can I claim that this will be the most important piece of your social media strategy to address in 2011? I am not going that far, because there is already plenty of argument on the matter. There are many points of your social media strategy which should constantly be analyzed, criticized, and adjusted. What I can say regarding volume vs. value is what I have experienced. If you wonder if I actually mean what I say, simply look at my frequency of blog updates and usage of other social media for my answer.

I have been claiming it for years that volume alone is often wasted effort. Reaching a good balance of volume and value is important. I believe that as 2011 moves on, the balance will become even more important than ever while people continue learning to filter in good information and filter out noise.

Just as before, but with more prevalence than ever, targeting your message more carefully to reach your market influencers and discovering what they want will factor heavily in the success or failure in many social media campaigns.

Social Media at a Whisper

In summary, it is my continued belief that careful targeting and keeping value high will trump the importance of volume in 2011, just as it has in past years. As such, I invite you to filter me in and subscribe to my blog by RSS or email. If I do not have something to offer which I believe you will find useful, I will keep the noise to a whisper.

Photo Credit to Joe Shlabotnik via Flickr

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The Best Marketing Strategy Ever!

In business, we all want the best marketing strategy ever. What often gets in the way are the tactics, and response to failed tactics, which cloud our strategy. Many companies will go through the motions of tactics such as social media sharing, SEO (search engine optimization), ad buys, and etcetera, and waste a lot of precious resources. Too often, the strategy is just out of reach, yet right under their nose. Going through the motions of tactics will not make it a strategy, regardless of how well you do it.

There are many pieces to a great marketing strategy, and bringing them all together can be tricky. I hope these ideas will inspire you, and help you in a good direction. Before you dismiss any of the points I will make, I want to explain that, although I am a marketer, I am not here to take a single dollar from your pocket. I will also share why I feel qualified to offer this assessment of the best marketing strategy ever. This really is for your benefit, so make no mistake about that.

I have been a marketing guy for my entire adult life. I started my first company just after I left school early at 15, and that was over 22 years ago. Even as a kid, I knew how important marketing would be in my business. I am pretty sure that you know this about your business as well, even when it is hard to implement. It is what puts the butts in the seats for your big show. Since my time as a zit-faced teenager, I have worked on marketing projects ranging from the tiny little spark when a company is at its inception, to the raging inferno that burns it down. I have started and stoked some big fires with my marketing. It took a lot of burning for me to uncover the biggest of all challenges, but here it is … I am going to help you put some fuel on your best marketing strategy.

I will break this down into some digestible segments for you, but be ready to spend some time and effort to discover how this applies to your business. It will be worth it.

Marketing Strategy Begins With Focused Desire

I remember a relatively early time in my business career (at age 15) when my stepfather gave me a book titled “How to Sell Anything to Anybody”. It was written by a Guinness World Record holding salesman named Joe Girard. Joe learned how to sell more cars than any retail car salesman, ever. He did not do this just as a car guy, but rather as a marketing guy. He figured out what people wanted, but before he could do that, he had to know what he wanted. In that book, there is a chapter titled “It All Begins With Want”, and in Joe’s case, it started as a bag of groceries for his family. I still clearly remember his message decades later. How do you like that example of marketing longevity? I still remembered it, even without double-checking it on Google.

This is a critical piece of your best marketing strategy: You must want it! The trouble for many people is how to define “it”. After all, if somebody asks you what you want the most from your work, don’t you stammer for just a moment and have a hard time coming up with something other than the typical cliches like financial security, world peace, happy family, good health, or whatever other first-glance wish that you can come up with?

I think the answer to what you really want is a huge challenge for many people, and many businesses. You are not alone in this dilemma, but in order to get it, you will need to develop a clearly defined answer to this question. It will require confidence, persistence, and moving beyond your comfort zone. It means putting complacence in the past, and pushing your marketing “go” button.

Wanting something and being able to define it is imperative. You must be passionate about it … whatever “it” is for you. You must love what you do, or uncover enough love for it to inspire the important work and sacrifices that will otherwise be neglected.

This brings up a point about professional marketers. An important task of marketing is to look at a company and find their passion. What is it that makes them worthy of their market share? What have they neglected that could make them better? What is missing that will reflect their passion and pass that passion along to the people they hope to gain as customers? What is their best value proposition? The questions relating to market growth are numerous, but they are hard to address without knowing the “want” of an organization and defining an overall purpose.

Marketing Beyond Visibility … Matching the Need

Visibility is the easiest and most common crutch to lean on for most companies in their marketing. In fact, it often surprises me to hear people express a sense of satisfaction in simply being visible. It is important, but when that visibility is not placed well, and with the right message, the visibility alone is not enough to drive responses. You can try to sell me knitting needles all day long, and it will not work.

If you want to develop a fanatical response to your marketing, be sure to make it useful. A great lesson can be taken from the character “Big Weld” from the animated movie “Robots”. Big Weld’s mantra was “Find a need, fill a need.”

Even if your product or service proves to meet all the logic which your research and development has come to embrace, it is not truly useful until the marketing matches the need, and solves the need. You must match your offering to the desires and needs of your purchasers.

You certainly need to make your marketing visible, but visibility is easier than making it useful in a way which resonates with buyers and helps them understand how it will benefit them.

There are a lot of ways to make things visible, and a unique slant on your market can be just the trick. Whether it is presented with humor, tragedy, assistance, or otherwise, making something visible is really not all that hard. It just takes a good look at what people in your market will receive favorably, and what they will have a propensity to act upon.

Branding is massively important, and you should never dismiss the value of high-visibility within your market. Let’s be clear, though, that visibility alone is not the whole strategy. Getting closer to home and looking at yourself can emphasize points about marketing visibility. In this case, I want to point out that I have still not purchased a single Old Spice product even after watching the many humorous videos they have produced. Although they have over 167 million YouTube video views, their website traffic still only ranks a relatively few small notches above the one you are reading right now. Sure, you are more likely to buy deodorant from them than you are from me, but the point is that visibility is not everything. Their visibility alone was not able to put the fire in my veins and make me brand-loyal. The call to action failed. Perhaps they just didn’t reach me at the right time, which further emphasizes that exposure is only one part of a strategy.

Timing and Placing Your Marketing

If I saw the funny Old Spice videos while walking through the deodorant isle in the grocery store, I would probably have a quick sniff to see if I like their product. Actually, I kind of do like their product, and I remember my dad smelling like it. As a kid, I would splash it on just to smell like him. He was my hero, after all.

My wife does all of our shopping. I am really bad at shopping, because I buy into all of the marketing. In fact, my wife dreads sending me to the grocery store, because I always come home with stuff that, according to her, only I would buy. It is ironic, yes? The point is that timing and placement is important. If you want to reach my wife while she is making her shopping list, you need to know where she is, what she is putting on her list, and you need to catch her at the right time, to be sure that she lists your brand name. It must seem wildly complicated, right? Don’t worry, it is not as hard as it sounds.

Success in producing “the best marketing strategy ever” will require some careful market research, but this is an area which is likely a very weak spot for many of your competitors. Research is a significantly underestimated and underutilized area of marketing for many companies. The good news is that if you have your “want” in place, you will find this research much easier to handle. Market research is one of those areas where the sacrifices I mentioned earlier will come into play, because it can take a lot of effort to get it right.

Build in Consistency

An unsustainable marketing strategy can be worse than no strategy at all. A brand message without consistency can create business volume in unpredictable waves, and can also show the competition your weakness.

A consistent and sustainable marketing strategy will create a much steadier upward curve in your business. It will also become far more measurable, giving you the data you need to further grow your market.

Make Your Marketing Actionable

I addressed some requisite factors to the best marketing strategy, but much is lost without measurable action that provides a positive return on your investment. Reflecting back on the earlier topics, let’s consider this: If your “want” is well-defined, it will be easier to uncover the creativity to make your marketing useful and visible, and the fortitude to make it consistent. If you do not shortcut the research, you should really understand how to place your marketing with the right people. The next piece is the action.

What is the action you want? Oh, there I go again with the “want” notion, but I did express that it all starts with want, and it is the basis for all these other things.

You must have an actionable purpose to your marketing strategy. Otherwise, you will have a lot of lost efforts to account for.

Do you want somebody to make a purchase right now, or do you want them to help spread your brand because they think you are great enough to recommend to their friends? Whatever the case, this part should only come after all of the other pieces I have listed are in place. If the rest of the pieces are well-formed and in place, the action should be a natural conclusion. Since you have already given them confidence and reason to take action, be sure that you point out the action you want them to take.

Summary of The Best Marketing Strategy

I have had a lot of recent reflection on what my career in marketing boils down to, and what it has always really been about. I think I have a good answer to the burning question of “the best marketing strategy ever”, and it truly does all begin with what you want. Without focused desire, there is a lot of waste in marketing.

The best marketing strategies will come with a lot of passion. Caring, or lack of caring, is a huge determining factor to business success. I have witnessed it for over two decades, and I am not the only person who has expressed this notion. I would like to share what Gary Vaynerchuck said in his book, “Crush it!” He tells it well in this short video, and I recommend it!

If you do not have the passion, it is best to discover the people who do. That may mean asking people around you, and social media is great for this. It also may mean hiring a marketing professional to help you uncover the passion and guide you through all the other many elements for your best marketing strategy.

Here is another video worth a moment to consider.

Calling the Action

I said that I am not going to take a dollar from your pocket, and I meant it. I recently made a pact with myself to stop providing marketing consulting for clients by mid-2011. This is because I am far more fulfilled by long-term projects which often only come from working with the exclusivity of one company at a time. I simply do not get the same enjoyment by working on the ever-increasing number short-sighted projects thrown at me. I am following my “want” by moving into greater exclusivity and focus in my work. That is what I want, and I am passionate about it.

My only actionable request is that you share this with people who will appreciate it, and let them know that a guy named Murnahan is “for hire” and seeking that one company to feel passionate about enough to create the elements addressed here. I know what I want, and that is to enjoy my work marketing for a company with courage to grow. My passion slants toward the automotive and other gearhead-oriented industries where the people have motor oil in their veins and gasoline in their coffee, like me. I could market feminine hygiene products just fine, but I know what I want, and I know that I will find it.

I hope you will help me to create my best marketing strategy. In return, I am delighted to answer your questions, comments, and your telephone calls. I am always open to your brainstorms. Ring me up any time at *REDACTED DUE TO AGING WEBSITE* (*REDACTED DUE TO AGING WEBSITE*).

I have added very simple links below to help you with my call to action. Please share.

Thank you!

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