Successful Blog

Give Your Content Marketing An Emotional Storytelling Touch

by

Guest Post by Stacey Acevero

cooltext443809602_strategy

Stories Stay With Us

Remember as a kid when you listened to stories around the campfire? The ones that gripped you and stayed with you long into the night were the ones that played upon your emotions. They scared you or made you cry or made you laugh. In other words, they moved you.

Do the same for your online audiences. Use storytelling to make your content marketing stick in their heads. When you do, you’ll give your content more mileage because not only will people respond to your message, they’ll remember it longer, too.

You may wonder where storytelling fits into your content marketing. After all, you’re just trying to get the word out on your brand, right? Wrong. Just getting the word out isn’t enough to create a following. You’ve got to make a connection with people and there’s no better way than drawing them in with stories that tap into their emotions.

To give your content marketing an emotional touch, follow these 3 storytelling tips:

1. Find The Stories Around You

When we meet new people, we establish connection through sharing stories — where we went to school and why, what kind of work we do, what things in our lives define us. Imagine your reader is a new acquaintance. What kind of story can you tell to get them engaged quickly?

Think about the things that set your company apart – those details that you’d share first to give people a sense of you and your brand. For example, at the heart of every company is the story of the person who had a big idea. Think about your company, what is the inspiration behind its inception? You’ve got a story right there.

2. Build Your Story Around A Character

A strong story has a character audiences can connect with and a plot that keeps them engaged. Find the human factor in your brand and make it your central character. Introduce employees who are making a difference in their communities or share compelling profiles of the people who have benefitted from your products.

Then offer readers a glimpse into how these people changed, i.e., through the volunteer work for an important cause or because of the positive impact your products made in their lives. The journey of a character through circumstances carries more clout when readers see how those events shaped that character.

3. Use Emotion To Make An Impact

People are drawn to emotional images and language, so use those powerful tools in your content marketing.

Photographs and video can immediately boost your content curb appeal. They can also provide inspiration to your content creation. For example, a humorous video can not only grab audience interest, it may just have the emotional impact to go viral.

Give your written content more life and emotional connection, as well. Use active language and sentence structures to make reading easier and more interesting.

Try this simple way to start – change all your verb forms of “to be” into active words. For example, instead of “Our company was looking for a way to be a better supplier for our customers”, try “XYZ felt our customers needed better service. These new changes do just that”.

The best way to keep your content marketing fresh is to play with it. Experiment with new perspectives and integrate the things you find interesting.

Keep in mind that your message should always compel your audiences to act. Use your story to motivate people to visit your website, check out your product or download your latest whitepaper.

Have you had success integrating emotional storytelling into your content marketing? We’d like to hear your best campfire story here.

—-
Author’s Bio:
Stacy Acevero writes about PR and social media at PRWeb.com. You can find her on Twitter as @sacevero.

Stacey, you and your stories are irresistible! 🙂

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

What if Your Salespeople Stop Selling?

by

Meet Larry Bailin

cooltext443809602_strategy

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of sitting down with Larry Bailin to talk shop. Larry is a talented internet marketer and a nationally sought keynote. Larry’s in his second edition of his book, “Mommy, Where Do Customers From” and enjoys continued success at his firm Single Throw located in Wall New Jersey.

The two of us sat across from one another and covered all the requisite mainstays like what portion of your mix should comprise PPC, how much of your social footprint should be automated (Larry says none and incidentally, I think he’s right) and the two of us agreed that Seth Godin is a keeper. But the typical talking points of our conversation, while enlightening and entertaining in general, didn’t move the needle.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s fun to talk to other internet marketers – particularly those that the industry leans on as much as it does Larry. But no. The conversation was cool, but the majority of the time largely academic. The majority that is. You see, something fascinating DID happen. Something was unearthed. A fortuitously excavated idea emerged from an otherwise casually enjoyable dialogue between two passionate internet marketers.

The Fortuitous Idea

So what was so gripping about our talk? What topic emerged that did, in this marketer’s opinion, move the proverbial needle?

It was this: salesmanship. Specifically, how to disarm buyers when engaging them.

Nothing special right? I mean who among us doesn’t understand that disarming buyers is critical to earning a customer’s confidence? None that I know. But Larry helped me stumble upon a model for appealing to buyers that, for me, called upon marketers and product makers to sell as much, if not more, than is expected of the sales team.

It’s an uphill climb … Salespeople are gods of optimism. Salespeople have a tough job. We all know it.

Selling well takes a scientific understanding of the human condition. Being great at it requires all that, plus the grace of a ballerina, the poise of a Super Bowl quarterback, and the precision of a brain surgeon. This is why selling is often perceived as Herculean. Just ask any seasoned seller. They’ll tell yah: sales is not a vocation for the weak. And it’s because the nuance and complexities of the sales dance, that establishes trust with buyers is a salesperson’s toughest obstacle — they face built-in quantities of both skepticism and doubt.

To their credit, the ever-hopeful salespeople press on, despite a century of data that tells them every day that 95 percent of their effort, or better, is a waste of time.

Wow. Nearly 100%? Just wow!

It’s Time Salespeople Get a Hand

What if your salespeople weren’t the only ones selling? What if she wasn’t the only one attending the all those breakfast briefings, tradeshows and mixers? Not so novel you’re thinking, right?

Scott, our salespeople do travel to these events with product specialists and marketers.

I know, I know. But let’s dig a bit deeper into the potential role that supporting cast could play in securing that sale for our valiant sales peeps. We’re bringing them, but are they helping?

Ok so, what if – just what if – the salesperson wasn’t the salesperson?

What if the product makers were also marketers … what if marketers were also salespeople? What if every person on the team was all three?

I told Larry that I never seem to come off appearing like the salesman toward buyers, although I’m always selling my stuff.

Says Larry, “It’s because you’re not the salesman, Scott. Someone else is the salesman. You’re just Scott. A nice guy with great ideas.”

And the church choir erupted in sonic ecstasy! And birds softly propped on slate roofs everywhere, all at once, scattered in a flurry into the dewy fog of an early May sunrise! And there it was.

“But Larry, my brother, I am selling!”

I am the salesman, the marketer and the product expert all at once. And I should be all these things if I want to help my sales folks make the sale. And because I am not actually the salesman after all, I get to say, “Hey buyer, I’m not the salesperson.” When I bring the salesperson to meet the buyer, I get to say, “This is Jane. Jane handles sales. I’m Scott. I just help.”

This tag-team method of prospect engagement builds relationships in these ways.

  • It disarms the buyer.
  • It tells the buyer that they’re not dealing with a pushy, pressure-fraught situation.
  • It likewise tells buyers they’re dealing with a person who helps with problems and isn’t driven by thinly veiled sales agendas.

It’s been my experience that the buyer ultimately ends up saying to me,” Hi Scott. What’s your story?” And the sales process has begun.

So before your sales team gears up for the next event, get your product people, your marketing people, and your salespeople in the same room to talk about how to evolve your sales process.

How might your team captivate buyers with a disarming and helpful approach?

Kudos Larry. Great talk.

—-
Author’s Bio:
Scott P. Dailey is a Web designer, copywriter and internet marketer. Scott’s blog, ( scottpdailey.com ) makes connections between social networking etiquette and the prevailing human social habits that drive on and offline business engagement patterns. You can connect with Scott via Twitter at @scottpdailey.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Influencing Decisions Part 1: 4 Things to Know Before You Propose an Idea

by

IRRESISTIBLE BUSINESS: Influencing Decisions

Be Prepared to Influence the Results

cooltext443809437_relationships

The CEO was a great thinker. He made his decisions on the facts. As I watched him in meetings as people presented ideas with their best efforts to win him over, I learned a lot about what influences the decision making process.

One of the most important things I learned was what I should know to hedge my bets.

Influence is built on trustworthiness and connection.
To achieve those and meet our goals, it’s important to finely focus on the roads that will take us to our goal and the ways of inviting people to join us that move their mission forward as well.

4 Things to Know to Move Forward Before the Abyss of Next Steps

Whether we work for a huge corporation or sit at a desk in our living room, we can’t be successful without tapping into the influence of others who can help us make our ideas and our projects become real. Yet, we all also know the experience of leaving a meeting or ending a phone only to find that the decision we wanted fell off the table into an abyss called “Next Steps.”

Knowing a few things before we go into those meetings can influence the results significantly by building foundational trust in our competence and connecting our goals to how those we want to help will benefit.

    1. Know your short term purpose. Who are you and what are you building? Too often, we enter a meeting, write a blog post or email, or walk into a meeting without a specific and thoughtful goal in mind. Why are you there? Are you trying to rally support for a new idea? Do you want to change a plan in progress? Are you exploring ways to work together? Are you after funding to research the idea? Will you share something new you’ve discovered? What do you want to be true when the conversation ends?

    2. Know how this project will make the answer you want clear. Know how you’re going to make the project happen. Ask yourself before you meet, “What would be next if the answer is yes.?” Sketch out a plan of action and reasonable estimates for the costs and the resources needed to execute that plan. Do the thinking so that they don’t have to. Present a simple plan that can stand on its own.

    3. Know how your plan will bring relevant and positive results faster and easier. Establish context that makes your goal relevant to the audience you want to enlist. Why are you pursuing this goal and why would the audience want to align their goals with yours? Are you informing a large audience or a small one? How deeply do they need to know the details? ?How will you connect what you want to happen to what already is? How will the proposed project fit into what they’re already doing? How can you make your proposal mission critical to THEIR goals?

    4. Know how your experience will add value and mitigate risk. How will you establish your knowledge base as an expert? If possible, tie the proposed idea or project to something you’ve succeed at in the past. If you can’t, know what you’d expect based on your experience and be able to explain why you’re confident that together you can make this innovative approach a success. Research similar ventures. Be prepared to speak to one or two you know well.

Ideas are fun, but they’re not the genius that builds an economy. For no matter how ideas — genius or not — that get set on the “business table,” it’s the ones founded on solid thinking, realistic plans, and influential support from the right sources that develop into the next awesome technology or killer app we own.

If we do the strategic thinking and develop credible plans before we propose the idea, attracting the influential support of the right people is faster, easier, and more meaningful. In fact it could be said to be irresistible.

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Offline marketing strategies: Back to the basics

by

cooltext443809602_strategy

In the pre-Internet era, business establishments did not have the options to resort to online marketing strategies. Conventional offline marketing strategies such as print advertising, discounts, special promotions, direct mails etc ruled the roost. Like the online marketing strategies, the aim of offline marketing strategies was same – to boost your small business. Anyways, despite the rapid surge of online marketing strategies, the importance of offline marketing strategies can not be denied even in the modern times. Basic offline marketing strategies still play crucial role in expanding your business. Here we discuss about some typical offline marketing strategies which are indeed helpful to boost your small business.

Print marketing

Advertising products and services in print media such as newspaper and magazine is a popular offline marketing strategy. Through advertising your products and services in the newspaper you can reach out to varied classes of people. Again, magazine advertisements aim at targeting a particular sector of the customers such as teens, women or the car lovers.

Broadcast

Radio and television are popular marketing platforms which are still being used very widely. The main advantage of broadcast marketing is that it reaches a large audience at a very quick time. In television advertisements, people can actually see how the products work. However, it is to be noted that advertising through radio and television is comparatively expensive than other forms of offline marketing.

Direct mail

Direct mails are used by many small businesses to augment customer base. This aims at raising the awareness of a product through letters, postcards, brochures and fliers. In direct mail method, a particular type of target market is aimed at. Moreover, this type of marketing strategy is costly too as it involves designing and printing costs.

Referral marketing

If a particular customer is satisfied with the product or the services that you offer, he or she may refer it to other customers. This way your client base increases through word of mouth or referral marketing. However, referral marketing is not any strategic marketing plan but it is useful to build up a loyal customer base. This type of marketing however does not require any cost. You, as the owner of a small business, should not entirely rely on referral marketing. Referral marketing should combine with other forms of marketing so as to reach to a wider section of the market.

Co-branding strategies

Co-branding is a smart offline business marketing strategy. Co-branding implies mutually beneficial marketing agreement between two business units. Two parties that embrace co-branding strategies do not compete with each other, instead the products offered by the two parties complement each other. Through this strategy you can attract those clients which you can not attract through other offline marketing strategies.

Loyalty programs

Even small business units can use these programs to expand customer base. Incentives are given to the customers to purchase more products. For instance, a movie theater owner may offer free movies to the customers on their fifth visit. This way, encouragement is given to the customers to purchase more units of a good.

Discount pricing

This is a very popular marketing strategy to augment your sales. Advertisements of discounts are given in radio, television or in newspapers. Giving bulk discount is a very popular practice. The aim of giving discount is to increase the sale of the product. However, while giving discount you should not compromise on product quality.

These are some offline marketing strategies which are still very much relevant. Even in this online era where increasing thrust is being given on online marketing, basic and traditional offline marketing strategies are very much required to keep your business in good stead. In fact, an ideal marketing strategy should be a judicious mix of both the offline and online marketing strategies.

—-
Author’s Bio:
Alex Brown: Alex is a prolific writer with specialization on various aspects of financial finance. His articles on debt, mortgage industry and personal finance are offer valuable guidelines to the readers.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Influence and Intimacy: 5 Solid Ways a Key Customer Strategy Grows Business Faster

by

IRRESISTIBLE BUSINESS: Strategic Foundation

Let Everyone Build for Every Customer

When I took the job at the small publisher, it had been losing over 10% in revenues ($millions) every year for the past three years. It was a dream job, I would get to conceive and drive the strategy that would turn the company around and build a customer base of fiercely loyal fans. For them, it was a moment of truth, the company had recently downsized by more than 50%. For me, it was an “Ok, big shot moment. Let’s see what you’ve learned from all that experience.”

I read all of the current product. Over the years, every product had somehow come to be defined by the same 5 buzz words and were for the same customer group — defined as all teachers inside and outside the classroom. I realigned and differentiated it so that teachers could choose the product that best suited their classroom situation.

Then I chose the first new product we would publish and it raised some alerts. The 20 manuscripts I had selected were from an Australian publisher. They were written at a 7-year-old reading level, but were far too racy for 7-year-olds in American schools.

The Founder of the company said, “These books are … um … a little irreverent.”
The President of the company said, “Yes, I’d describe them as irreverent too.”
I said, “And that’s exactly why we’re going to publish them.”

They said things like

  • Parents of second-grade kids would go ballastic if 7-year-old brought these home.
  • Second-grade kids will never understand these.
  • Second-grade teachers will never buy these.
  • States will never fund these.

I replied something like

Every publisher is building books for every kid. And they’re not intimately close to any of them.
We’re going to publish these books for the 13-year-old boys reading at a 7-year-old level.

And so Second-Chance Reading was born.

5 Solid Ways a Key-Customer Strategy Grows a Business Faster

The situation was clear. The investors were unhappy at the downward moving growth curve. A turnaround was imperative for survival. We needed to grow the business quickly and meaningfully. The strategy was simple. Get clearly-defined product to market that would attract a fiercely loyal key customer group.

By identifying teachers of severely vulnerable students — 13-year-old boys reading seriously below level — as a key customer group, we were taking advantage of these 3 solid ways to grow a company faster, easier, and more meaningfully.

  1. Focus is attractive: You can build a website and an offer that shows you know your key customer deeply. If you serve everyone, you serve no one well. I want a company that wants me as a customers. When I walk into a hotel or a restaurant or visit a website, I know immediately if it was designed with people like me mind. Trying to build a location or a website that appeals to everyone flattens the attraction. Teachers, gamers, and CEOs don’t share expectations or sensitivities. Focusing clearly on the key group you will serve means that when they arrive they’ll see immediately that you “get” them intimately.
  2. Intimacy leads to expertise: You get to know the problems. A teacher, a farmer, and a CEO have problems in common. However, those problems play out on different fields with different rules. When you focus on a clear key customer group, such as all teachers of 7th graders who read below level, you see the same problems across similar situations. You get to know the issues and what triggers them deeply. You develop strategies that serve the customer more meaningfully because you’re intimate with their needs, desires, and restrictions.
  3. A clarified group: Your impact is spread more quickly. If you work with one teacher, one farmer, and one CEO, your impact is diluted by the simple fact that teachers, gamers, and CEOs rarely talk business to each other. Three teachers of 7th-grade students who read below level are much more relational. They’re much more likely to trade techniques, offer support, and share success stories. They’ll tell their friends about you.
  4. Simple shareability: You are easier to share. Whether it’s a networking room at the Four Seasons in NYC or conversation on Twitter, a key customer strategy keeps you top of mind, much like a key word keeps you top of Google. If you are well-known for one thing, much like Oprah is known for being a talk show host, the minute someone mentions that one thing in conversation, I think of you and your product or service.
  5. Thoughtful extendability: You can build out infrastructure and customer base simultaneously. Having a key customer focus grounds a strategy that allows you to build a solid foundation. From that foundation, you can move out to people who know the first key customers — their friends, partners, vendors and other relations. The marketing effort it takes to extend to these new groups — for example: 8th grade teachers of students reading below level, parents of 7th grade students reading below level, teachers of 7th and 8th grade students who need reading practice — is less costly and less risk than developing a fully-new market and your reputation precedes you. Your business can project when to enter the market and what the return will be on investment.

Whether your business is a corporation or a sole proprietorship, a key customer strategy keeps the most loyal of your fans close, limits risk, and raises your visibility to grow your business faster, easier, and more meaningfully than any simple campaign might.

Campaigns make sales.
Relationships build businesses.
Deep relationships are irresistible.

What are you doing to build a stronger key customer strategy for your business?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Doostang Today: An Apology – Better Late Than Never

by

Conversation Is Often the First Step

cooltext443809437_relationships

In 2008, I wrote a blog post entitled “3 Reasons I’m Sorry I Joined Doostang … ” which has become one of most consistently visited blog posts on my blog. That missive explained a bad experience that I and my friends had with the web platform in mentioned in the title.

Upon publication, I heard no word from the people at the site in response to my many attempts to solve the problems.

About 2-and-a-half years, I received an email from an employee asking if we might talk. We had a lovely hour-long conversation in which we talked about what the company was doing and how she said it had changed. I asked her, how would I know? Could you give some reason that I might believe you? I never heard from the company again.

A few weeks ago, I received an email explaining that Doostang had been sold and set up another conversation with Jeff Berger the new CEO. We talked for almost an hour about what had changed, where they were focused, and the history of the blog post I just described. He asked if I would take the blog post down. I said I wasn’t comfortable doing that because of the extensive comments on it, but I offered him the opportunity to write a blog post of his own.

What follows is that blog post …

An Apology – Better Late Than Never
by Jeff Berger, CEO, Doostang

I recently came across Liz’s blog post about Doostang from 2008 and am disappointed that the previous team demonstrated such arrogance and poor customer service. The entire situation was mishandled – Liz, I’m very sorry.

I was not part of Doostang in 2008, nor was anyone on the team today. The company was acquired last summer, and we’re a new group with a single goal – to provide our members with thousands of hand-picked job opportunities from top employers. Our focus is entirely on quality job content, and we’ve removed the troublesome networking features that Liz blogged about.

We’re changing the way we do business at Doostang, and we hope you will give us another chance to help you find your ideal job. In the future, any prospective or current customers experiencing trouble with Doostang can email me directly at Jeff@doostang.com.

——

Thank you, Jeff.

Do you have any advice for Doostang in this day of reputation management?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!