Jul

Use Social Media to Unlock True Fan Marketing

written by Scott Olson

This article was also posted on VentureBeat this morning:

Quick marketing poll. Who has ever bought an industry contact list and used that to send out direct mail, email or some other marketing promotion?

Guiltily holding your hand up? You’re not alone, but it is pretty well established that this approach no longer work. Playing the numbers game of less than 1% response on marketing outreach to unknown contacts doesn’t have a future.

Social media and the decline of traditional media have changed the marketing discipline forever. Broadcasting marketing messages to a vast population who may or may not care is a marketing formula for failure. It is more important than ever to tailor your outreach and messages to connect to people who care.

Tailoring your marketing to be interesting and relevant to the people who receive it will both increase its effectiveness and build relationships with your company’s customers, prospects, and contacts. This often difficult task can be made easier by utilizing social media to identify, listen to, and connect with the true fans of your company, your peers or competitors, and your industry as a whole.

Seth Godin, one of today’s most recognizable marketing visionaries, wrote about this on his blog titled “The circles (no more strangers).” In this blog he states “one true fan is worth perhaps 10,000 times as much as a stranger.”

(more…)

Tags: social media
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26

Jul

Thanks for a great first year for MindLink Marketing

written by Scott Olson

It’s hard to believe that I have the first year under my belt at MindLink Marketing. It’s been a year that has far exceeded my expectations and I wanted to say a special thank you to all of the people who have helped make MindLink a success and who make me so excited about the future:

My clients – What can I say. I have worked with a great group of people who have all treated me like a member of their team, not just another consultant. Thanks for running great businesses and letting me participate in such interesting projects.
Friends of MindLink Marketing – So many people have been eager to give me their help, advice and references that I am overwhelmed. Thanks to all of your for your trust and friendship.
Stan Carlberg – My collaborator and partner in crime, Stan Carlberg has been a tremendous addition to the MindLink Marketing team.
My family – A special thanks to my wife and family for being so encouraging and supportive in the crazy process of starting something new.

I am proud to look back at what we have accomplished this year and look forward to the year to come.

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19

Jul

Great content marketing book – “Content Strategy for the Web” by Kristina Halvorson

written by Scott Olson

I came across Kristina Halvorson’s book, Content Strategy for the Web, after a colleague recommended it and it came up again in a content marketing meet up in Portland. Kristina’s book is very easy to read with practical advise for your web content.

She starts right off with some direct advice on how to improve your web content immediately:

Do less, not more.
Figure out what you have and where it’s coming from
Learn how to listen
Put someone in charge
Start asking, Why?

There is much more about responsibilities and content strategy and if you are a marketing professional, this is a must read in my opinion.

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22

Jun

Target your messages appropriately

written by Scott Olson

Seth Godin is always a good source for marketing food for thought. Today he has a funny post “Don’t snowglobe me, bro.” It focuses on the problem of putting out a message that might only be relevant to 1 in 1,000.

Relate this to your own lead nurturing and email marketing strategy. Are you properly segmenting your messages, or do you blast the world? Today’s sophisticated audience will tolerate nothing less than a targeted, relevant messaging strategy.

Tags: email marketing
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3

Jun

Content is king, but understanding how to reach your customers comes first

written by Stan Carlberg

When it comes to B2B marketing, we all know content is king. Providing engaging, useful information is essential to motivating your sales leads to take the all-important next step — contact you about your products or services. After reading a number of content marketing blogs, something occurred to me. While the many arms of social media provide 101 ways to get your message out to your prospects, understanding how they prefer to receive and break down the information is critical to getting their attention in the first place, even before you can nurture them through the sales process.

In the 24/7 communications age we live in, everybody’s receiving too much information, too fast. As a B2B marketer, if you think you’re busy pushing information out there, imagine how little time a CEO or senior manager spends reading emails each day, particularly marketing emails. Their demanding schedules pretty much dictate how they communicate with others.

To successfully get on somebody’s radar, you first need to understand how they prefer to communicate and receive information. Whether you’re reaching out to your customers via email, IM, Twitter, a monthly newsletter, a webinar invite, or a simple old-fashion phone call (imagine that!), understanding the most effective way to reach your target audience is a critical step to building a closer relationship with your prospects and customers, and sets the stage for delivering great marketing content that actually gets read.

Understanding the differences in how your targeted CXOs, senior management, and IT managers communicate and receive information can help make your marketing efforts more efficient, and ultimately, generate better results. Once you’ve successfully figured that out, and the attention is on you, that’s when your awesome marketing content can shine.

Tags: B2B marketing, content marketing, social media
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17

May

Good post on developing a Twitter strategy for your business

written by Scott Olson

TopRank Blog has a nice post “5 Steps to Build a Twitter Marketing Strategy.” It’s worth checking out if you are looking at how you should engage in Twitter for your business and what your goals ought to be.

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14

May

Assessing your content marketing strategy – five questions to ask yourself

written by Scott Olson

Content marketing is more important than ever. It’s how your customers find you. It communicates what you have to offer them and what value it brings. It differentiates you from your competition. Have you spent the time thinking about your online content marketing strategy properly? Here are five questions to ask yourself:

Do you clearly identify and communicate your value online?
Is your site optimized for search relative to your competition?
Is your site easy to navigate and find key content?
Do you have a regular content and communication plan to nurture your contacts?
Are you utilizing multiple marketing channels for your content, i.e. website, email, blog, PR, social media?

These are just the basics and you should be able to confidently answer yes to each of these questions. When looking at your marketing strategy, your overall online content should be front and center in your plans. A well thought out content marketing strategy can be a key competitive advantage and will help you connect with your ideal customers much more effectively.

Tags: content marketing
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4

May

Customer experience trumps business convenience

written by Scott Olson

I was on a business trip yesterday and one thing kept bugging me throughout the trip. My rental car keys. As a guy, I keep the keys in my front pocket and the fact that they had put two copies of the car key on the keychain, along with a valet key made it an uncomfortable lump I had to deal with every time I got out of the car.

I know why they made this choice. It was one of convenience. It keeps all the keys together for the time that they might resell the car. It saves them the administration and storage of the additional keys. These are all conveniences for the business. It certainly did me no good having a valet key that I couldn’t even remove from the key chain. I would be curious to know if they even thought about the fact that a bulky key chain is a less optimal customer experience before they made that choice. Businesses far too often side on their own convenience rather than focusing like a laser on what the customer experience will be with their product or service.

I have personally been on the wrong side of some of these decisions. Whether a company should sell an appliance or software. Whether a company should deliver a web based interface. How should customers upgrade and migrate from older versions of software. There are many difficult decisions to be made in technology companies and many of them involve the tradeoff of customer experience with business conveniences.

Try something next time. Focus on the optimal customer experience and find a way to make it work for your business. This is the way that great companies are made and fanatical customers are nurtured. Would I have noticed if Hertz had only had one key on the key chain? Probably not. But, would I notice now if one of their competitors only had one key? Most definitely.

In a world of too many features, gadgets, and competitors, a relentless focus on the customer experience is still the great differentiator because so few companies really do it.

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