Tell a Story
When most companies develop marketing collateral they think in terms of what their product or service will do for their customers - what the features are, what the benefits are.
But when you take it a step further and translate those features and benefits into a story that resonates with prospects, your marketing instantly becomes more understandable and more memorable.
In today’s blog post, I interview a marketing consultant who specializes in developing stories.
Her name is Kim Gusta and she has 13 years of experience doing marketing for Symantec and other software companies.
Judy: I’ve heard you say “Marketing is much more effective when it tells a story.” What kind of a story are you talking about?
Kim: Most software marketers are tasked with “checklist marketing” or marketing that is driven by a list of deliverables to create for different marketing activities such as a product launch. The product launch checklist might tell them to create a standardized set of deliverables like a datasheet, PowerPoint presentation, and an FAQ. The advantage, of course, is that this approach ensures consistent marketing coverage for each product or campaign that is created.
The problem with checklist marketing, though, is that it follows a regimented approach. Your prospects’ unique information requirements aren’t necessarily taken into account. Checklist marketing really institutes a “one-size-fits-all” approach and the messaging for each marketing piece often exists in isolation from other pieces. The pieces often don’t work together to tell a story about how your organization can help solve your prospects’ challenges.
The story approach I’m advocating means all your content marketing activities (collateral, website, blog postings, webcasts, etc.) have strategic content that progressively tell a story about how you can solve your prospects’ challenges.
A great book that lays out this strategy in detail is Ardath Albee’s eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale.
Judy: Why does using a story make the collateral more effective?
Kim: As prospects investigate solutions, they’ll be exposed to many messages in your various marketing activities. If you think about someone who is just starting to explore solutions to their challenge, they probably want high-level, objective information about their issue.
For instance, say you’re a marketing manager at a software company that helps organizations migrate to new operating systems, and you target system administrators investigating Microsoft Windows 7. For prospects at the very beginning of their research phase, they want broad, objective, and useful information about how to migrate Windows 7 but they’re not interested yet in hearing about your product. Useful content examples could be providing analyst reports about Windows 7 migrations, creating a web page with useful industry links about how to do a migration, etc.
As this prospect digests your information, you build a relationship with them. They gradually begin to trust that you’re an expert source on Windows 7 migrations so they look to you to provide more useful information. The key to this approach, though, is recognizing the prospect’s needs for information and to not push your products at them. That’s a turnoff, it doesn’t build trust, and it’s not useful in this information-driven approach.
Judy: How can you use a story to get prospects the right information at each stage of the sales cycle?
Kim: First, you need to understand the stages in your sales cycle. Then you analyze your prospects’ information needs in each of those stages. In the example above, the system administrator who is just starting to learn about Windows 7 migrations is early in the sales cycle and has very broad information requirements. He’s not interested in hearing about your product yet. He wants to learn more about Windows 7’s new features and how a migration process works. It’s not until later stages in the sales cycle that he wants to learn how your solution specifically solves his challenge.
Your goal is to build a set of marketing materials or activities that map the buyer’s information needs to each sales cycle stage. Each of these materials should work together as a story to support the buyer’s information needs.
Judy: How can a company get started telling a story in their marketing materials? What is the easiest way to start using this strategy?
Kim: First is mapping the stages of your sales cycle to your buyer’s information needs. Of course, this requires that you have an in-depth understanding of your buyers, their challenges, and the types of information they need. Next, you create a content plan that outlines the deliverables you’ll create that address the buyer’s information needs and map to the sales cycle stages. It’s a bit like creating an editorial calendar. But, rather doing checklist marketing, which dictates a standardized list of deliverables, your content will be driven by the buyer’s unique information requirements.
Judy: What are other advantages to this approach?
Kim: With this approach, your marketing has the potential to really engage your buyers, because you’re showing them you understand their information needs. That pays off in many ways – they begin to trust information they receive from you, and they’ll continue to come back for more. And because you’ve become a trusted advisor, they’re much more likely to share this information with their friends and colleagues.
For more information about Kim Gusta, check out her website at www.kimgusta.com.
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5 Types of Nurture Programs
I talk a lot about nurture programs.
That’s because they are some of the most inexpensive and effective marketing any business can do.
They are also incredibly versatile.
Here are 5 different ways you can use a nurture program in your business…
1. Nurture prospects during the sales cycle
This is the most common way to use nurture… To take people who are serious prospects for your business - who are already interacting with your sales force - and send them something on a regular basis that reinforces what your sales people are doing with them and educates them about the value you provide.
Nurture programs of this type are typically heavily educational, since your goal is to overcome objections and teach them what they need to know to understand why your solution is the right one and why it is worth what you charge for it.
You might send case studies, educational articles you have written, reprints of articles published about your business or written by someone in your company, and articles written by others that support your point of view or explain why it makes sense to do things the way you do.
You might send links to videos of customer testimonials or demonstrations of how to use your products. You might have links to podcasts of interviews with you or key individuals in your company.
The goal of this type of nurture program is to help people move through the sales cycle faster, and to convert more prospects to customers.
2. Nurture “B” or “C” prospects
This is the second most common use of nurture programs…
These are people who are not quite ready to be serious prospects. Maybe they don’t have a budget yet, maybe they are still very early in the research stage.
They have contacted you and expressed an interest, but it is too early for them to actively engage with a sales rep.
However, you don’t want to ignore them because they are likely to buy at some point and you want them to buy from you, rather than a competitor.
Setting them up in a nurture program keeps your company in front of them, and lets them learn about your offerings in a low-key way.
Your goal here is to keep enough mindshare so that when they are ready to get serious, you’ll be on their list.
3. Nurture “ideal” prospects
This is an interesting strategy that can be extremely effective.
You identify up to 100 people who you would like to be customers.
They might be marquee customers, people or companies who are well-respected in your industry. They might be companies in an area where you want to expand and do more business. They might be organizations that are a little larger or better funded than your normal clients or just companies you really really want to do business with.
But they have never contacted you. They might not know you exist.
Well, you start marketing to them. You mail them something every month, something that educates them about what you do and what your offerings are.
Get in front of them month after month, and they will start falling into your sales cycle.
Your goal here is to introduce your company to high-value, ideal prospects and convert them to customers.
4. Nurture people who refer business to you
Most small businesses get most of their customers by referral. And most small businesses do nothing to general more referrals.
The main reason that’s the case is that almost all of us hate asking for referrals.
But it’s possible to get referrals without asking for them. At least, without asking in person.
You can set up a nurture program that goes out to people who refer prospects to you (or who could refer prospects to you) and have a little note on some of the pieces that says “We love referrals” or “If you know anyone who might be interested, we’d love to hear from them” or “Know anyone who might be interested? We’ll take excellent care of them (and send you a cool tshirt to say thank you).”
There are dozens of low-key ways to phrase a request for referrals. You can use any number of them.
But how you ask isn’t as important as that you DO ask.
Your goal here is to make sure the people who could refer business know what your business does and feel good about the quality of work you do, so they are comfortable making referrals. And, of course, to ask for the referrals.
5. Nurture your customers
You’ve seen all the statistics about how much more cost-effective it is to keep a current customer than attract a new one.
So direct a bit of your marketing budget towards making your current clients feel special and valued.
This is particularly easy if you have relatively few big customers. But it can be done even if you have thousands.
If you have fewer than a couple hundred customers, you can send a small gift once or twice a year. Not during the holidays, which is when everyone else does it. But in the spring or summer or early fall.
It can be inexpensive and clever - something with your company’s logo on it.
Or it can even be electronic, which is the way to go if you need to deliver thousands of them around the world. It could be a free ebook or tips on how to get the most out of your products…
The goal here is to make your customers feel appreciated and special.
There you go… 5 inexpensive ways to use nurture programs to help you grow your business. Which one are you going to try?
Sphere: Related ContentHelp for Haiti - Ideas for Small Businesses
If you are a football fan like I am, you couldn’t miss the American Red Cross ads that ran throughout the games this past weekend.
They were encouraging everyone to text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to their Disaster Relief Fund.
That’s a great idea. And it’s working.
As of a couple days ago more than 700,000 people had donated money, raising more than $7 million dollars.
There are lots of other places you can donate too. See a few of them at the end of this blog post.
We’re all looking for ways to help.
If you want to do something beyond donating money, this blog post is about ideas you might copy.
I know, it’s not exactly marketing.
But in a way, it is.
If you copy one of these ideas and share it with your customers or your list, you’re showing that you are a good world citizen. Everyone wants to do business with good people.
And you’re getting in front of your audience with a solid message. That has value too.
So check out some of these ideas and see if you think any of them are worth copying…
Give away your products to people who donate money
MJT Net and Perfect Table Plan, both small software companies, will send a free license for their software to anyone who donates money to Haiti Disaster Relief. You could do this with services too. In fact, we’re doing it at JMR. The web page should be up in the next couple of days.
Auction off a product and donate the proceeds
Olivia Wilde, Meryl Streep and others are auctioning off the clothes they wore at the Golden Globes through Artists for Peace and Justice. The auction will be run through eBay, which is handling similar auctions for other organizations, including the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. If you sell products on eBay, this wouldn’t be hard to do.
Donate a percentage of sales
Designate a period of time (maybe one day or one week in January) and donate a percentage of that week’s sales. John Bartlett, owner of a NY mens clothing store did that this past weekend.
Donate products
If you have products that can be used by the people of Haiti, contact a local relief organization to see if anyone is putting together a shipment. See if your customers or partners want to contribute anything along with you.
When you raise the money to donate, here are a few organizations you can feel comfortable sending it to:
American Red Cross
Doctors Without Borders
Plan USA
Save the Children
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3 Ways to Use Interviews on Your Website
Looking for ways to add depth and dimension to your website?
Consider adding some interviews.
If you want to, you can work with someone to do a “real” interview. You can record it and post the link to the audio or video on your website or blog.
Hint: You don’t have to pay $3000 or more to have a news personality do a formal interview. You can have one person in your company interview someone else. For example, you can have your marketing director interview your CEO.
If you decide to do a video, the easiest way to make it more professional is to do the filming yourself and then hire someone to edit it, adding a professional intro and conclusion. We worked with Pixability recently to do this and they did a great job for an affordable price.
You can also do the interview with webcams via Skype, if you want something very informal and inexpensive.
If you want only audio you can use Audio Acrobat (which is what we use) or one of the many similar services. Just do the interview over the phone, record it, and post the link to the recording.
But you can make it even easier…
Here’s how…
Just do a written interview. Write down the questions you want to answer, then answer them. Write it so it looks like a back-and-forth with an interviewer.
Here’s an example from one of our clients (I’m the Judy who did the interview):
Upgrading to iMIS 15: What Associations Need to Know
Can you see how easy that is?
And it has a lot of value. It has useful information, so it has value to web visitors. It’s keyword-rich, so it does well with the search engines, which helps bring people to the website.
Anyone can do interviews like this.
Here are 3 ways to use them:
1. Explain why your product or service matters
Lots of times, websites use formal language. They are written like a brochure, talking about what the company does, what the products do.
But that doesn’t tell you why people actually become customers.
You can explain that in an interview.
You can talk about how people use your products and services in an informal, casual way - what’s really cool about them, what kind of results they get, why they really buy - the way you would explain it to a friend or family member.
It’s a great way to add commentary to your website, to make points you can’t really make any other way, and to tell people what really matters.
2. Share your opinion on a hot topic
If you’ve got thoughts about a hot topic in the industry (and you’re not already blogging - or even if you are), this is a great way to get your opinions out there.
This is also a very useful way to bring traffic to your website, because there are probably a lot of searches on this topic. Just make sure you use the relevant keywords repeatedly throughout the interview.
3. Talk about what’s new
I bet you’ve got a new product or service that you introduced recently.
Do an interview about why you created that product or service. Talk about what’s great about it, why people need it. Share your excitement - let people see how much you care about this.
This is a good way to keep your website up-to-date. It also helps round out a launch and make it more interesting.
And it’s a good way to engage prospects and customers and bring them to your website - you can send them an email with a link to the interview and ask them to check it out.
So find a topic that would work for you and get an interview up on your site this month.
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3 Ways to Use Crowdsourcing
You have heard of crowdsourcing, I’m sure. The idea is that instead of outsourcing a project to one person or company, you outsource the same project to a group of people and then pick the result you like best.
There are a lot of advantages to crowdsourcing…
- You get a lot more brainpower poured into your project - the more people working on it and thinking about it, the better your results are likely to be.
- You typically get results pretty quickly. When people know there are others working on the same project, there’s more pressure to get it done and delivered fast.
- A lot of people do better work when they know they are competing against others. So there’s an incentive to deliver their best work.
- You can get some pretty innovative ideas, because people want their work to stand out.
Naturally, there are disadvantages too…
- Typically the best freelancers and firms don’t need to work “on spec” and so they tend not to participate in crowdsourcing. So you are likely to be dealing with people who are more junior or have enough time on their hands to dabble in outside projects.
- No one is going to invest a huge amount of time in a project where payment will be small or non-existent, so they won’t spend a lot of time learning about your products and your market.
For a lot of companies, the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages, at least for certain projects. So let’s look at a couple ways you can use crowdsourcing in your marketing…
Graphic design projects
There are marketplaces that have sprung up where you can post projects, typically for graphic design. Site members submit their designs, you choose the one you like best and pay the winner a fee - usually a fraction of what you would have paid a traditional design firm.
Two marketplaces that offer crowdsourcing are:
crowdSPRING
99designs
If you are looking for a new logo, letterhead or business cards, brochure, website design, advertisement, or something similar, this can be well worthwhile.
It’s also a good way to audition designers and look for someone you’ll want to work with on a regular basis.
Brainstorming and problem solving
A company that takes a slightly different approach is Ideas Culture. They have a program called Ideas While You Sleep.
You submit a challenge or a problem that you’re working on by 4pm (in the US) and they send it out to a group of people who work on it overnight. (They are in Australia.) They send you the input from everyone by 10am the next morning.
We tried this recently with a naming project. We had brainstormed internally and were getting nowhere. So we submitted the naming challenge to Ideas Culture. By the next morning we had 122 more names at a cost of about $450.
Did we use any of their names? No. We ended up going with a brilliant suggestion from one of our partners. But we got a lot of good ideas that we are using in other parts of the project. It was well worth the money.
Get feedback
Another way to use crowdsourcing in marketing is to get feedback on what you are currently doing. For example, you could ask for opinions about a headline, an advertisement, your website, a brochure, a tagline, or a sales letter.
A crowdsourcing site that specializes in feedback is Concept Feedback.
It’s designed for marketing professionals, but small business owners can use it too. You post what you’re working on or want feedback on, people tell you what they think, and you can act on it or not.
It’s free, but if you want faster results or more prominence for your project you can pay $9.99 to get higher priority.
You can also do something similar yourself (although you probably won’t get as many responses)… Just get on Twitter, Blellow, Facebook, LinkedIn or any industry forum, post what you’ve got and ask people for suggestions. Lots of times you’ll get really good input.
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