Why Content Marketing Can Get You More Customers

Content is critical in today’s marketing. With so much competition you have to be able to differentiate your product from your competitors by creating unique content.

As a business professional, experts, marketer or even just a blogger who’s trying to navigate the changing landscape of this digital media evolution, you must understand that the routes connecting customers, companies, products, and services are becoming more unpredictable, complex and disruptive.

If you want to survive and thrive you need to realize that every aspect of every business is increasingly carried out through the media.

This is basically a revolution in communication on a scale not seen since the invention of the printing press.

From advertising and marketing to sales and customer service, everything in business is more likely to happen on a computer or mobile device connected to the Internet. All businesses must learn to think like media companies and become trusted curators and providers of content across all new media platforms.

And with this real-time dynamic platform that’s changing how people consume media, it also brought a new level of distribution, replication, sharing and the value of content marketing.

Here are 3 keys to remember when creating your content marketing strategy.

Customers Are in Control

Everything is converging into an interlaced network of content and this means you have every opportunity and chance of making the headlines tomorrow or going viral on YouTube.

You could fall to the same threats facing the TV networks, newspapers and magazines.

What threats are we talking about here?

Think about what happens when you flip to a lousy TV show or scan across a boring ad in a magazine? The same thing that happens to an uninteresting online banner – it gets tuned out!

Your customers can post feedback on your blog, review your service vie Yelp or complaint via Twitter.

The Internet has provided your customer much more leverage and power to take control of the relationship they have with your business.

In order to be successful in growing your business, you must walk the walk and deliver whatever you promise in your marketing.

In fact, you can hire top marketers to drive traffic to your website but if you sell a crappy product or have poor customer service people can read about it instantly hurting your reputation and bottom line.

It’s not just about setting up your products or services as the answer to the challenges your prospects and customers are facing, that’s just the marketing part of it.

Your solution simply has to work.

Content is Marketing

As marketers you can use social media as a way to get you message out which allows you to position yourself or your business.

Just like newspapers and magazines, you get readers to react and respond to your social media content.

But don’t confuse medium and the message. Social media is just a vehicle (mostly push marketing) to carry out your content you still need to create engaging content, magnetic copies and effective headlines.

Good publications retain customers and get more advertisers because they’re able to add and keep subscribers consistently.

That’s the beauty of subscription based business model; you’re exchanging attention for revenue so the key is keep coming up with relevant and interesting content.

Keep in mind that all the value starts with the content and the media simply being the delivery mechanism.

Whether you’re writing a book, content for your marketing, or a blog post you want people to act on, the key is to give your customers what they need to make decisions and take actions to get the result they want.

There is no difference between content and marketing.

The quality of the content and its ability to give people the action steps and the information they need to be effective is critical to your success.

Relationship Sells

The difference between how an expert thinks and how a marketer thinks can be the key that’s holding you back from growing your business.

Yes, content is marketing and marketing is sales.

And great marketing is great salesmanship. But what most business professionals, coaches and gurus often forget about salesmanship is that it’s built on trusting relationships.

And in today’s over-communicated digital world, trust is already hard to come by because there is already a huge distrust in general information that’s out there so earning trust should be your top priority as a way to start building long-lasting relationships with your customers.

In fact according to the Gallup poll, a record 57% of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly

Distrust in U.S. Media Edges Up to Record High

Real relationship requires a two-way conversation – a receive and response, response and response mechanism. Don’t make assumptions on what your customers want, hear what they’re saying and listen.

Look at all the top publications like The Economist, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, you’ll find that they all have strong relationship with their audience because they truly understand and give their customers what they want and what they need.

Bottom line, you need to do everything you can to understand what your customers want and the most effective way is to truly focus on getting your customer’s perceived needs met by becoming the customer.

The take away: Unlike the old days where a powerful distributor can help you boost sales due to the lack of distribution channels and competitors (think TV with only 3 channels to watch).

Today there are thousands of distributors and having a large distribution channel will not overcome the true value of your content.

Experts are so used to broadcasting and receiving on what the customers need based on their professional experience that they often just want to get to the end – stuffing down what the customers need (with good intention) asking for the sale.

However; in today’s hyper-connected world, content marketing is the new new thing.

If you want to get more customers you must learn to leverage content marketing and get inside the minds of your customer.

The Long Tail of Trust in New Media Marketing

by Eric Tsai

In today’s fragmented media world where we all have some attention deficit in our busy lives, there are simply too many sources of information thus finding a filter that we trust is extremely important.

Most people tend to prefer value, look for key opinion leaders and trust one-on-one communication sources.

Accordingly to a recent “Purchaser Influence Survey” by EXPO provided to eMarketer, over 92% of US mom internet users trust peer review more than manufacturer’s brand information.

This data should not be a surprise because if you want recommendations for a restaurant or suggestions on buying a new cell phone, you’re pretty much going to first ask your friends.

If you’re really serious about the purchase, you will do your “homework” first by reading bunch of online reviews from Yelp to Amazon before accessing your trusted sources.

Thanks to the increasingly social web, everyone can have a voice in their sphere of influence.

As a result word-of-mouth has become the ultimate marketing arsenal for marketers to tap into their loyal customers and advocates to help spread their marketing messages through what it’s called earned media.

Earned Media vs Paid Media

As opposed to paid media where publicity are gained through advertising, earned media usually are from real people, not marketers, which explains why consumers tend to trust them more.

It’s indicative from the survey conducted by Synovate for word-of-mouth ad network PostRelease, over 50% of the word-of-mouth activity was to help a friend or family member with a purchase decision, as well as sharing information they found on the web offline.

While these finding are insightful, it’s simply a confirmation that earned media is what’s working and will continue to lead the way as we crawl out of this recession.

Obviously, there are other factors that contributes to the buying decision that aligns with the “four Ps of marketing” (price, product, promotion and placement), but there is a definite shift in the perception of value that builds on trust.

So how what does trust mean to brands today?

According to the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer from PR firm Edelman, transparent and honest practices and trustworthiness are extremely important while financial return have fallen below those factors.

One thing I must point out is that these data can be misleading because financial returns actually increased but have fallen behind other factors so there is merely a shift in value perception.

We’ve gone from push advertising to social influence marketing. Online users have learned to focus on content and ignore online banners (banner blindness) simply because display focus too much on getting attention and have failed to deliver.

The concept of getting attention as a way to create brand awareness is being seen as noise which leads to resistance.

People have caught on to the fact that more marketers are increasingly behind influential bloggers, social media rock stars and even popular portals by endorsing their content diluting the credibility of peer-to-peer networks.

Long Tail of Trust

In the ear of new media, brands have quickly learned social marketing is build on the idea that people trust their friends more than they trust authorities, but on the other hand, consumers also start to question the intend and authenticity of their social networks.

As I’ve mentioned previous in “7 Keys to Creating Social Media Strategy for Your Brand”, social proof plays a key factor as a weapon of influence, the challenge for marketers is to earn trust as skepticism remains about how long trust will last.

When it comes to trust and brand loyalty there is no silver bullet, but knowing what value proposition to focus on and how to make adjustments can help marketers to acquire high level of trust over time.

If you truly want to earn the trust of your audience, don’t get sucked into the numbers game.

How many Twitter followers, Facebook fans or Linkedin connections you have on is far less important than how you interact with them.

Instead of concentrating on how many social network participants you have, try instead to gauge success on how engage they are with your brand.

The take away: When it comes to trust, it pays to earn it over time via high targeted more personalized channel that drives engagement and loyalty.

Mass media may reach a wider audience faster but the conversion rate is low and the experience becomes de-personalize.

There is still a place for mass media, but there is growing concerns over the value and ROI in the long run.

Moving forward companies should focus on shifting towards a customer centric strategy that retains long term customer loyalty as a sustainable competitive advantage.

Unless your brand connects with the customer, your chance of earning trust will be slim.

The role of marketing is only going to become even more important and integrated closely with customer interactions.

Get back to the basics in the context of customer feedback.

It should be more about starting the conversation to understand the customer’s point of view in an holistic effort to co-create value that defines your brand strategy.

3 Social Media Marketing Tips for Business to Consumer Brands

by Eric Tsai

I’ve been busy with end of the year work and now I’m back on track. For those of you that follow the designdamage blog since the beginning, I want to take this opportunity to thank you for the support and hope I can continue to provide value for your time.

Although no new entries were posted for the past weeks, I continue to follow industry trends and send out useful content via my Twitter account. You can follow me via @designdamage

Now back to work.

After reviewing some important data and content from 2009, I’ve come to these conclusions that in 2010 social media will follow the footsteps of SEO and other forms of digital advertising: on the path to commoditization. As I’ve mentioned in the post “When to Adopt Social Media for Your Business?” that social media is still in the early adopters stage, but it’s heading towards early majority phase as the concept of connecting and sharing information online are gradually accepted.

According to eMarketer’s report supported by research from Cone “More than one-half of new media users (53%) believe brands should have a presence in new media, interacting with consumers as needed or by request only, while a further 36% demand a new media presence with regular interaction.” These type of users wants experience, dialogue and immediacy so if you want in on social media, you must provide a combination of those attributes.

So what can you do that’s different in 2010 that you haven’t try in 2009? Here are some ideas to get you started:

Create New Brands & Co-Branding

The shift in consumer behavior will continue towards “value” even for luxury brands so private label brands and sub-brands will stand to benefit moving forward as we emerge out of the recession slowly.

For companies with strong core brand, creating a sub-brand or a new one that targets new customer base has been a popular strategy.

For businesses looking for cost-effective and fast-to-market ideas you can try partnering with other companies for a co-branding effort that creates exposure in other markets while extends your brand story.

Develop a Fascinating Story For Your Brand

The word-of-mouth marketing will continue to grow acting as trust agents providing top of mind reference for consumers. Brands will shift advertising strategy to focus more on storytelling rather than push advertising.

This means developing a story that demonstrate the personality of the brand in campaigns such as supporting non-profit initiatives (social responsibility, cause marketing), co-branding to create unique content, or collect and promote stories about your customers.

The idea is to implement customer engagement strategies for the company to build a strong human connection that helps build brand loyalty. Incorporating free resources to help educate your audience is another way to develop a story.

Another great way to build a rewards program around your social network fans by rewarding their participation. Another great way to ramp up your fans is to offer them something they can’t get elsewhere

Collect Valuable Customer Data

It’s time to review your customer data collection process especially if you’re going to use social media with traditional media.

Information such as where they are, what they spend money on, what are the key influences, and what content or applications they download can provide you some advantage for tailoring future product/service experiences to the individual. Just knowing their demographic or what they buy will not be enough, leverage social media’s crowdsourcing feature and establish

The take away: It’s indicative from this past holiday shopping data that consumers simply wants more for less. This is where smart companies find ways to cut costs so they can pass on the savings to the consumers.

It’s about keeping the customers coming back, allowing word-of-mouth to work in favor of value for money incentives, and maintaining a healthy relationship with your customers. Why would customers come back or past on your name to others when you didn’t provide value beyond what they paid for?

If you’re a small business, think of ways you can leverage technology instead of people and be creative with your marketing dollar.

Discounts, promotions, rewards programs are all vehicles to build a relationship with your customers. You may see smaller profits and longer time to get the ROI (return on investment), but that’s all part of investing in your customer for the long haul.

If you want customers to be loyal to your brand, be prepare to deliver a consistent level of value and experience that they can come to expect in 2010.

The goal is to build and maintain customer trust, a key to gaining access to more profitable relationships with customers and competitive differentiation.

We’ll be looking at B2B ideas next to help with strategy planning in 2010.

Technology Paradigm Shifts How We Work

by Eric Tsai

We are in the middle of a second major paradigm shift in IT (information technology). This is not about simply going from web1.0 to web2.0, but something that’s going to have a major impact on how we work. I am referring to the disruptive force of “cloud computing.

I’ve been focusing on brand strategies in the technology sector for quite some time now and I’ve seen some resemblance in cloud computing hype similar to that of social media on the web. Further investigation led me to identify some of the underlying implications and the cumulative impact of them on businesses.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Primary Characteristics

Cloud computing is basically a dynamic computing environment that’s delivered over the internet with on-demand resources that are scalable and flexible. In the old days businesses had to purchase hardware, software and then hire IT staff to manage them. With cloud computing, you simply pay for the service on a per usage model, as known as software-as-a-service (SaaS).

Benefits: Eliminate the risk of owning and maintaining software, hardware and hiring resources. It allows business to shift from capital expense to operating expense (think of it as leasing instead of buying) typically with little to no upfront costs.

Concerns: Still in the early stage of the hype cycle, unproven ROI, and slim margins. Market is not completely ready to accept this model, but few early adopters have incorporated cloud with existing infrastructure forming a hybrid hosting model.

Social Media is a dynamic publishing technology that’s highly accessible and scalable taking place on the internet. Traditionally, brands have mostly monologues with their customers via old media such as TV, newspaper, magazines and PR. With social media, you have real-time dialogues (such as Twitter) that encourage interactions allowing people to connect globally to form relationships.

Benefits: Potentially an inexpensive low barrier to entry marketing vehicle compare to traditional media channel. Allow businesses to expand their reach and own their channel of media distribution. Great for customer relationship management, reputation management, and has the ability to go viral.

Concerns: Also in the early stage of the hype cycle with indirect, difficult to measure ROI. Consumers aren’t all ready to use social media to communicate with brands, and there is a lack stickiness in user adoption (with the exception of Facebook maybe). Brands that had success leveraging social media use it in the hybrid marketing model in conjunction with traditional media.

There are some similar characteristics with both cloud computing and social media. Mainly both are fresh concepts that challenge the traditional mindsets. In addition, both adoptions are accelerated by the current economic downturn forcing companies to reduce financial and operational risks associated with technology (so going with cloud makes more economic sense) while evaluating new ways to market their products and services (more cost-effective brand strategies).

Frankly I find it interesting that one of the earliest form of cloud computing is ironically the first online social media tool – email.

When I created my very first email account on MSN Hotmail back in 1995, little did I know that’s the first form of cloud computing. Since then I’ve been socializing with family and friends sending emails back and forth, reading replies like comments on a blog post, or simply write short messages in the subject line without content similar to micro-blogging.

Today, email is mostly delivered via the cloud (over the internet) and is arguably the original online social media tool.

Relevance to Businesses

Even in these cost-conscious times, the moniker “trusted advisor” or “trusted brand” still holds value as customer relationship is the top priorities for many businesses. This is why social media became an attractive tool for companies now because it’s all about servicing the customers and optimizing client engagement. End users look to experts to guide them via the decision making process of purchasing branded products and services.

As the IT landscape continues to evolve, we need to rethink how we work, how we sell, the tools we use and the processes we implement.

Nobody wins competing on price alone, even private label brands are thriving by providing excellent value-for-money propositions against premium brands. We have entered into a new era of converged technologies where IT solutions are driven by business needs and management needs to focus on building meaningful trusted relations moving forward.

The secret is to stay relevant with IT and seek new ways to abstract value out of your business.

This is the time to strengthen your brand and focus on your brand strategy. Review your operational status and plan for future growth is the key to success when economy starts to rebound.

Field Messages: Sell The Outcome

by Eric Tsai

My last blog post talked about building your marketing messages. The purpose is to help you identify a framework for your offering so you know your position in the market and to help you create the building blocks for your brand. Once you have those elements in place, it’s easier to develop “character” or “personality” for your brand. Think of them as the core pillar messages.

Brand personality is the first step in creating your overall marketing message. Nobody cares about your personality or your story if you don’t care about them. So in order to get a chance to pitch your marketing messages you must understand your customers.

Marketing messages are about you, your company and your story. The opposite of that is called field messages. A field message is used when persuading customers to buy while marketing messages is to generate value proposition; and together they form your brand’s initiate market perception and impression.

Branding is how your customers engage with your brand and is only meaningful when you’re able to streamline your marketing messages to your field messages connecting your product to your customers optimizing the experience. It matters more as you grow and to grow you must gain customer’s trust via communication and demonstration.

You need the right go-to-market strategies, a team that can execute and support the entire process. And of course it helps if you have a real product that’s attractive and competitive. Ask yourself this: What are you doing to influence, persuade, acquire and support your prospect? How do you change your audience’s mindset, even when they aren’t looking to buy? Where do you go to find your customers? How does your customer feel about the experience of your product and services?

Customer Engagement – The Right Field Messages

Marketers today are too focused on creating awareness and recognition and forget the true purpose of marketing – create sales dialogues, attract leads and deliver revenue. Again it all goes back to “what’s in it for me?”

New customers are out there. They need your products and services. They are searching for you, but you have to efficiently communicate your value to them in the simplest matter. When a representative of your company, a salesperson or yourself is out in front of the prospective clients, you need to have your field message straight.

Make sure you cover the 3 major points below:

Does the message communicate that you understand your prospect’s needs? And their pain points? Your product could be the best thing since sliced bread, but if you’re not solving their problems or you don’t understand their business pain points, you possess no value to them. And why should they continue to stay engage in conversation with you or your brand?
Is it the message focused enough on your unique offering? What are they buying, what do they get and what’s included should be covered at some point. If you are not unique and different, what’s the advantages of you, or doing business with your company? People go to Costco because not only do they offer value-for-money products but an unbeatable return policy, with awesome $1.50 hot dogs with free unlimited refill drinks – more reasons to go.
Did you do your homework in researching your competitors? Put yourself in your customer’s shoes – wouldn’t you shop around for the best deal when buying a new car or purchasing a new cell phone? Not to mention all the review articles and blogs you can find online. So make sure you have the facts to backup your marketing statements, and be ready to explain in detail about your competition and their offerings.

If you’re able to address all the points above with your field messages, chances are that you will get to pitch your offering. Getting someone’s attention in a meaningful way will also make you memorable and the crafting your field message is no different. Get to the point fast and deliver the punch at the right time.

Here are a few more tips on starting your field messages: instead of starting your field message with “XYZ company is a SEO company that provides SEO services for onilne lead generation” you could start with “Businesses today face challenges of optimizing SEO campaigns from outsourcing companies, but often does not get the result they want.” There you address their problem and pain point of not able to get the desired outcome. Another approach could be “what are you doing to optimize your SEO leads? How effective is your ROI on SEO?” An open ended question is often something that works well to get readers thinking, it works well if you know who you’re talking to first. And it goes back to my last blog entry about identifying your audience first.

There is no doubt that it’s important to showcase how great you are, but it’s even more vital to “communicate well” why your customer needs to continue listening to your pitch or read your materials.

The Web has fundamentally altered the way that people engage and interact with brands, products, companies, and other people. This leads to a shorter attention span from viewers across all media, there are simply too much information to absorb from news on TV, radio ads, online blogs, and social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. With prospects, with customers and between prospects and customers, engagement is more complex, but substantially more powerful because of how we interact via the web today and the constant shift in consumer psychology.

I will be providing free brand message worksheets for blog subscribers soon on field and brand message, stay tuned.