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The Artillery of Marketing: A Soldier’s Perspective

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A Guest Post by John Durfee

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The “freedom” in Operation Iraqi Freedom didn’t start out that way. We came in looking for WMD’s and to free an oppressed people. Afterwards, we realized national security lay in the continued stability of the region and the country, which had been driven into chaos. The mission turned from a matter of finding WMDs to rebuilding a broken society and infrastructure. We turned from a fighting force to one that suddenly had to win the hearts and minds of the local people. The lessons I learned in Iraq are directly applicable to the modern day marketing, where you’re winning the trust of the customer landscape.

Blend In and Talk the Talk

A component of winning the Iraqi people’s trust was to blend in. The adage “when in Rome” comes to mind. We were encouraged to ‘nativize’ by growing out our beards and to wear local clothes like the large shawl-like shemaghs.

In the same way, you don’t want to address your customers as someone separate from their group trying to sell them something. Do research, and understand the lingo and terminology. Imagine trying to sell a surfboard. Would an avid surfboarder be more receptive to a message from a stranger who explains things dryly, or a message from someone with just as much passion and fervor as they do about it?

Nevermind the Set-Backs

No matter how hard we tried in our mission, I learned we couldn’t please everyone. We would keep trying by rebuilt roads and providing necessary protection to civilians. Yet no matter how much we tried, some locals always met us with fear, suspicion, and hostility. It was fine if they didn’t like us, just as long as they weren’t shooting at us. However, it always made me wonder the different reasons why. It could’ve been for a legitimate reason, or purely based on fear and emotional reaction from group opinion. While I couldn’t change the opinions of every person, knowing who these people were enabled us to pay extra attention to who they were affiliated with.

This lesson is just as important in a marketing environment. When doing research on public opinion, those who are most vocally against you provide a valuable source of information. They could have been a previous customer who received a broken product and who never reached the proper channels to get it repaired. Instead they held in that grudge until they had a viable way of spreading their experience (either on a product review, blog or review site, or word of mouth). They could be someone who heard from a friend of a friend about an order gone awry. Or they could be someone who provides valuable constructive criticism on how to improve your company’s brand, products, or image. In any case, It gives you a chance to reach out as well as getting a more rounded view of how your company is viewed, for both better and worse.

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John Durfee is an Operation Freedom War veteran and a manager for Airsplat, the nation’s largest retailer of Airsoft Guns including Spring Airsoft Rifles .

Thank you, John, for your service … and for this guest post.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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Are You the Company Who Will Sell to Anybody?

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Her name was Darcy. Well actually, I’m not sure. She wasn’t all that memorable. What I remember most was that every day she would come to work sad, disappointed, and almost depressed that they she didn’t have the slighted prospect for a date. Darcy, or whatever her name was, seemed certain that the problem was outside of her. When I looked at her situation I was as sure. I’ll let you come to your own conclusion on the facts that I knew.

  • The kind of guy she was looking for was any guy who would take her out to buy her dinner.
  • She didn’t care where they went, where they ate, or what he had to say.
  • It was about the transaction not the relationship.
  • She thought she shouldn’t to try too hard to predict what such a guy might find attractive. When he showed up she’d adjust and be what he was looking for.
  • Every night after work she went home to watch television. She didn’t think much about what sort of guy might be the right one or where the right sort of guys might hang out. She was content to wait for anyone who came her way.
  • When I asked her about updating her wardrobe and getting involved in things that might be fun for her, she would say, “I like a lot of things and I like a look of fashion. I don’t want to alienate some guy who might be interested by choosing something that might not be his taste.”

And so I listened daily to the stories of her boring evenings or the awful dates that her family set up for her that never worked out. I never was sure what she was expecting. Did she think the perfect guy was going to figure out she was in the third house from the end waiting to be everything he desired?

I wonder now 20 years later whether she’s still waiting or whether that guy just came up and knocked on her door one day. Darcy was more than willing to go out with any guy who came her way.

Does your business work this way?

Do You Really Want to Attract Customers Who Don’t Value You?

So what kind of woman (or man) wants to date anyone who will make the invitation? And what kind of person wants to date the kind of person who has standards that include everyone?

Let’s just say I don’t want to spend my time with someone who wants to date cheaters, liars, theives, bullies, and serial killers. I don’t care if they’re willing to dress up and pay for dinner. After all the folks we hang with define us in so many ways.

That girl who will go out with anybody is going to attract just anybody. If you’re doing business the way she’s dating, you might consider all that’s wrong with that.

  • Anybody can decide what to value about your offer. It’s our values that attract the people we want to work with. If we don’t put our values out there, other folks get to decide what to value. She didn’t care why someone might want to take her to dinner. We have to care why folks want to be our customer. Great, loyal relationships are built on that.
  • Those “anybodys” define our network. The people with whom we spend invite their friends to meet us and become part of our circle. That girl who dates anybody, soon meets other anybody sorts of people who value her for the same reasons the first anybody did. Was it because she was willing to give herself away so easily? Has she become a magnet for folks who don’t have any standards? Do people who want to be somebody start thinking that she’s like the folks around her? That network of “anybodys” becomes part of her value proposition. Go out with her and you get all of them as your friends.
  • We slowly become what we look at most. If we don’t establish our values and pick our friends and customer based on the values we choose, then we tend to take on the values the friends and customers we choose bring with them. A group around us all doing and believing the same things tends to become our basis for judging reality. For business that means if they we start to take on their world as our own.

The same is true for businesses who don’t choose their values and decide who they want for customers.

This week I had consultations with two businesses that reminded me of Darcy. Both were passionate about connecting with customers, both were uncommitted about who their customers should be. They wanted lasting relationships but they were waiting to define their offer because they didn’t want to alienate anybody who might otherwise come their way.

How do you define the right customer so that you’re not working with “anybody”?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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The Single Biggest Secret to Getting People to Invest and Participate

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Every Great Offer Has a Part of You Inside It

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Last week in Arizona, I had the pleasure of a “long-thoght” conversation with that great mind that is @MikeCassidyAZ on Twitter. We discussed how we both got where we are – the ups, the downs, the people we work with and the people who buy what we offer.

I had the joy and pleasure of being able to share with him the project that @starbucker and I are launching in the first quarter of 2011. The endeavor is what we’re calling the “New Leadership and Loyalty Business,” and one part in particularly reflects and expands all that we’ve learned in the five years we’ve been working with the leaders who share their time with us at SOBCon.

As I talked Mike through the genesis of the training program that we’ve developed. I explained the nuance and the thinking behind each question and each task set before the group in action. And as he walked with me through the vision, it was obvious he could see the impact and influence of what we’re offering. In fact, his reaction was similar to the one that keeps happening.

I’m starting to feel like Billy Mays saying “But wait! You haven’t hear the best part yet!”

What was so compelling about the offer that makes folks immediately want to bring it into their building? And I’m so aware of the risk of talking so much that I “buy back” the interest I’ve generated. Yet that never seems to happen.

So after our conversation. I spent some time thinking about what makes the new offer, the new idea that we’re bringing, so attractive and compelling that to a person folks are paying attention and asking to hear more and more about it.

And here’s the best of my thinking on what drives their attraction.

  • The concept has been years in the thinking, Thousands of hours have been spent doing it, writing about it, discovering the holes in the process and fixing them.
  • It’s based on the skills and successes that @starbucker and I have had with SOBCon and in our business careers.
  • We’ve been looking at the problems of the people we love serving and tweaking what we’re doing to suit their situations in ways that make it easier, faster, and more meaningful for them to be heroes at what they do.

In other words, it’s darn good and hard business thinking, but that’s not what makes it so compelling.

The critical part is that we’ve put ourselves into the risk not just the benefit.

We’ve built in accountability that holds us equally responsible with every member of the team for the success of what we bring. No skimping. We’re in — willing to lay our time, resources, and trust on the line to deliver a successful outcome.

Leaders want to build something they can’t build alone.

How do you get people to invest and participate in your business, your brand, or your projects by sharing the risk as well as the benefits?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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What Is the Most Crucial Element of Influence?

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The Outcomes We Achieve

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Every person has influence. What what we say, and how we act has an effect on how others think, feel, and behave. As a writer, an observer, and manager, I’ve watched and studied how people respond to what we do, what we say, and what they see.

As every parent and pet owner knows, sometimes the outcome we’re going for — a change in belief or behavior — isn’t the outcome we achieve. Our intent, our feelings toward an audience are only one side of the equation. How that audience interprets our words and deeds determines the change in belief or behavior that might result.

Our influence is highly affected by context.

  • The world view of the people we might influence. An individual’s emotional associations and beliefs can filter how people interpret our intentions, our words, and actions. A person who believes all learning must be their own experience will ignore a warning to avoid a dangerous part of town. A person who has only had bad experiences with people from our “group” may fight against any message we offer.
  • The value those people put on their relationship with us. Filters such as the halo effect and other cognitive biases, such as wishful thinking, can change how our message is processes and received.

We don’t control how other people think, what they feel, or how they interpret what they hear and see.

Though we may carefully consider and choose the most generous way to communicate and interact within those those contexts, the audience will choose their interpretation of that interaction. The same authentic, highly influential, collaborative message to one audience will be a disingenuous, controversial, alienating rebuff to another audience. We see that all of the time in the world of politics.

The most crucial element of influence is understanding what the audience and what the already believes. If we want to influence people, to move them to an important action, to change their core beliefs, we need to know the audience, listen to their world view, champion their cause, and honor their reality. Lasting influence is a trust relationship built through time and shared experience.

How do you champion the audience you want to reach?

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

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Above and Beyond YouTube: Using Video To Promote Your Business

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A Guest Post by Maureen Page

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Many are now turning to video to help promote their company. Many others are “dabbling” with video or thinking about it. With the advent and popularity of YouTube and other web-based video services, it has become amazingly easy to get videos published for the masses to see.

Stop and Think About What You are Trying to Accomplish

Before you get into video in a big way it is important for you to establish what you want to accomplish with video. If all you want to do is make people aware of your company and your products or services, then simply posting videos to YouTube may suffice. Most companies, however, aspire to more than simply being known. Most want to sell something. If you have more lofty goals of bringing people to your website and generating prospects for your products and services, then your video efforts will need to move beyond YouTube. Make no mistake about it. YouTube will still be a component of your strategy; it simply will not be the major component of your strategy.

Using Video to Get Traffic and Prospects

So you want traffic to your website and prospects for your products or services. The challenge is that in order to get traffic, videos need to be on your website. In order for the videos to be more easily discovered they need to be on YouTube. So what is one to do? The answer is simple – you need to put the videos both places. But you should not put all of the videos both places. Some of the videos need to go on YouTube to be “discovered.” Others need to be on your site to generate traffic. The best way to accomplish this is to create a video series. The first couple of videos in the series should be posted to YouTube. They should promote that they are part of a series and that the rest are on your site. The remaining videos should be posted to your own site.

Some things that help this to be particularly effective:

  • The video series should be on a topic of general interest, not simply a commercial for your
    company, products, or services.

  • Each video should advertise that it is part of a series and advertise where to get the next video
    in the series.

  • Put your branding and website URL in the lead-in and trailing parts of the video. Also, in the
    trailer advertise where the next video can be seen along with the URL to access that video.

  • It is all right, and important for completeness of the video series on your own site, to put the
    code from YouTube for the first couple of videos onto your own site. PLEASE NOTE: You should
    not simply put all of the videos on YouTube and then put them on your site using the YouTube
    code. If you do this the vast majority of people will simply view the videos on YouTube and very
    few people will actually come to your site. You need to purposely split the videos as mentioned
    above to force people to your site if they want to see the rest in order to get traffic to your site.

Following this strategy should:

  1. Help to get exposure for your videos by placing some of them on YouTube.

  2. Funnel traffic and potential customers to your site because the rest of the videos are there.

Maureen Page is VP of Discount Security Cameras. To learn more about security camera systems and video surveillance visit the Discount Security Cameras Interactive Security Camera Learning Center.

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–ME “Liz” Strauss
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Do You Know Your Blog’s BIG IDEA?

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What’s Your Goal?

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Blogging is like paper and pencil, like an answering machine, like an email or text message to the world. It’s meant to carry information from a writer to a reader. It’s more than Twitter. It allows for a longer thought and a deeper conversation. And well, … the url sets up a certain expectation with readers and search engines that you might add more to it that will be useful and valuable at a future date.

A blog can be text, audio, video or the format can be mixed. Most important is that add value, reaches out, connects, and offers some sort of expertise, especially now that the social web is providing us with so many places to gather and discuss.

It takes a strategy for fitting a blog into all of this.

and it takes an idea …

What’s Your Big Idea

Whether we’re writing a single blog post, planning a calendar for a week or a month, or setting out to start a new blog, we have to know what we’re planning to communicate and the direction we want that communication to go.

Knowing your BIG IDEA makes every other decision about your blog easier.

Decide these two elements:

  • know your goal and message — what your blog is all about in 25 words or less. Filter that down to less than 6 or so words and you have a tagline.
  • name your audience of readers you want to reach — who wants to hear what you have to say?

Determine how to address both of the above with a great mind.

  • What quality content and questions can you bring?
  • What great thinking and value can you add to that?
  • What other quality thinkers and content producers can you preselect and promote?

Figure out how to weave your values in.

  • What passion drives you talk about this?
  • How will you let your humanity come through?
  • How will you celebrate and honor people who do good things in the areas you care about?

Your message, your audience, and how you’ll blend great thinking with great humanity together they add up to your BIG IDEA. The BIG IDEA shows itself in your blog’s design, your writing style, your frequency of updating, even the words you use to name parts of your blog. When a choice confronts you; just hold it up to your BIG IDEA to see if it belongs.

The blogger who fully thinks through a BIG Idea enjoys success, readership, and a community filled with engaging, relevant conversation.

Whether your blog is new or five years old, do you know your blog’s BIG Idea? Can you write it in just a few words?

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

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