Content Marketing Pt.1: Marketings New Weapon of Choice

It’s official! Traditional “interruptive” advertising (both online and television) isn’t so hot nowadays. On the other hand, content marketing is emerging as the weapon of choice for brands who are in it to win it. Over a series of posts, we will explore the ins-and-outs of smart story-driven marketing, what it looks like when it’s done right and its importance in the social media landscape.

First, let’s mull some basic statistics that will illustrate how bad it really is for interruptive advertising. For television, the prospects are grim: one third of millennials already report not watching broadcast TV (originally reported by the New York Times in October 2013) with the numbers of people willing to break up with television at an astonishing high rate of 16 percent year over year (YOY).

And then there’s digital. Recent data show that online (and mobile) advertising isn’t on fire, either. According to the Contently Playbook, banner ad click- through rates (CTR) come in between .10 and .04 percent, some of which most likely represents some bot activity. They also state that ad recall (banner ads specifically) is abysmal with 86 percent of consumers unable to recall the last ad they saw. 

To drive the sorry state of digital ads home, Contently states, “You're more likely to survive a plane crash or join the Navy SEALs than click on a banner ad.”

Ouch. So much for the bad news.

Ready for the good news? Content marketing is a very attractive alternative to interruptive advertising and recent findings offers the numbers to back up its current lofty status in the marketing community. Business2Community reported content marketing driving traffic with 68% of consumers. In addition, they noted that “up to 55% of consumers are not only attracted to custom content but most would buy the products or services of the content provider.”

If these numbers persist, the future of content marketing looks quite rosy, indeed. There are, however, a few things to be aware of when venturing into a content marketing strategy.

One important issue with content marketing is the emergence of Peak Content, a phenomenon we reported on in February. At the time, we quoted author Kevin Anderson’s 2014 definition: “Peak Content is ‘the point at which this glut of things to read, watch and listen to becomes completely unsustainable.’” As of March 2016, we are still noting the trend.

The unprecedented rate at which people are posting content online is one quick example of Peak Content. Taken from the infographic, 24 Hours on the Internet, it’s reported (and this was in 2012) that 2 million blog posts are published every day. That’s 720,000,000 blog posts a year. With numbers like these we quickly see why quality is paramount to rise to the top of the content pile.

Additional evidence comes from the marketing data company TrackMaven that reported social media channels are suffering from lower engagement. They acknowledge low quality content is contributing to the decline.

The report states, “Most content fails at the content creation stage. Smart content can overcome bad distribution, but smart distribution cannot save bad content.”

Marketers either already know, or are catching on quickly, that high-quality content is the way to achieving greater engagement, including increased CTR, sales and all the other good stuff a company or brand likes to see.

In a nutshell, all signs point to the need to bring your A game when embarking on content marketing. 

Now that we know it’s working, how is it being done? More to the point, how is it being done well? In regards to content creation, options vary. A company may decide to use experts in a given field, hire freelancers, create an in-house team or create a unique cocktail of creation options that work with the brand’s needs and resources.

In our next post we’ll explore the growing “virtual newsroom” where content marketing is “beat” based and provides the space and structure for the highest-quality journalism-style content marketing…and the growing relationship between journalists and content marketing.

Stay tuned.

For more articles on sales and marketing, visit smstudy.com.

Photo courtesy of Florian Klauer, Unsplash.

Sources:

“Third of Millennials Watch Mostly Online Video or no Broadcast TV” Andrew Beaujon, Oct. 10, 2013, Poynter. http://www.poynter.org/2013/third-of-millennials-watch-no-broadcast-tv/225528/

“24 Hours on the Internet,” digtalbuzz blog, March 13, 2012 http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/infographic-24-hours-on-the-internet/

“Marketers Are Creating More Content, but They’re Not Sure Why,” Natalie Burg, March 8, 2016, Contently https://contently.com/strategist/2016/03/08/marketers-creating-more-content-not-sure-why/

“The Ultimate Content Strategist Playbook No. 1: Evangelizing Content and Setting Yourself Up for Success,” Contently,https://contently.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/150303_Playbook.pdf

“Your Social Content is Failing. So now what?” Kara Burney, Feb. 5, 2015. http://trackmaven.com/blog/2015/02/data-backed-proof-that-social-media-content-is-failing-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/

“8 Hard-to-Ignore Content Marketing Benefits (Infographic),” Jomer Gregorio, Oct. 20, 2014, Business 2 Community. http://www.business2community.com/infographics/8-hard-ignore-content-marketing-benefits-infographic

Understanding the Sales Process

In this competitive age an effective sales organization is supported by marketing assets and includes a proper sales structure. The sales organization and governance must be designed to optimally support sales targets and create visibility into the sales team’s performance to allow for adjustments and course corrections as necessary to ensure that the business meets its sales revenue objectives. Since sales targets are directly linked to all sales and marketing and financial objectives, they are essential components in the achievement of company’s overall objectives.

Most experienced sales teams have an existing sales process. If this is the case, it is important to constantly evaluate, improve, and fine tune different components of the process. A new company, however, must define a sales process by adapting established frameworks to suit the specific needs of the business, leveraging identified strengths, and identifying and filling gaps.

Five Basic Steps in Sales Process

1. Pre-sales—This first step in the sales process involves reviewing the current activities and selling processes. These activities include those carried out from the initial contact with a customer to the final delivery of a product or service. This step allows a developing company to assess its organizational capabilities to carry out the sales process. It includes understanding and strengthening the value proposition for customers. The different channels required to sell products in the future are also determined. Planning sales governance, setting sales targets, setting up the incentive structure for the sales team, and creating the marketing assets is also done at this stage. The sales team is also trained on products as well as the sales process and negotiation to prepare for selling activities.
    
2. Profiling of Target Customers—The first step in the prospecting stage, profiling target customers and decision makers, involves identifying and benchmarking profiling criteria for prospects, as well as decision makers. Characteristics of ideal customers, such as annual budget, are used to benchmark the profiling criteria.
    
3. Lead Generation and Qualification—The second step in the prospecting stage, lead generation, is the act of identifying prospective customers and generating ways to gain new customers. Profiled criteria and benchmarks are used to generate better leads. Lead generation uses various offline and online techniques and can be inbound or outbound.
    
4. Needs Assessment—Conversion starts with understanding customer needs for products or services. This understanding of needs is vital in the conversion process and enables the sales team to demonstrate to the customer how their product can fulfill the customer’s requirements.
    
5. Presentation, Negotiation, and Closure—This is the final stage in the conversion cycle. The corporate sales team presents the features, benefits, and advantages of the proposed products or services that can fulfill the needs of the prospects. At this stage, prospects present their objections to the sales proposal. It is the job of the corporate sales team to overcome these objections to close the deal. 

Understanding these five steps and adapting them to suit the business requirements will help establish a framework for a comprehensive and effective sales process. 

To learn more about the sales process, visit www.smstudy.com

Focusing on the Why

How do we inspire people to take action such as buying a product or service? Everyone wants to know! Well, author Simon Sinek says the answer lies in the Why, the centermost part of his Golden Circle.

Imagine a bullseye target with three rings (such as the one in the above image); the outer ring is What, the middle How and the center is Why. Simply stated, the What is the product or service you provide. The How is everything that you or your company have done to improve upon or create the What. In other words, all the selling points of the product or service. And finally, the Why. The Why is the place where the purpose or belief behind the company is stated and hopefully inspires a person to action. Ideally, they relate to the company’s core beliefs. This is the Golden Circle, and according to Sinek it explains all human decision-making behavior.

Sinek states that all human decisions, such as “should I buy this product?” occur in the limbic system, the part of the human brain that is directly responsible for feelings of trust and loyalty. Interesting to note, the limbic brain’s reaction to a company’s core beliefs (their Why) is not logical and lacks the capacity for language. From this understanding we gain important insights into what drives a person to make a purchase. It’s not the description of what a company does or how they do it, although those can be beneficial in supporting the decision. The How and the What do not sway a consumer to buy; it is the Why that compels humans to purchase a product or service.

Sinek repeats his statement twice for emphasis, “people don’t buy What you do, they buy Why you do it.”

Will an understanding of The Golden Circle affect marketing success? Sinek gives a definitive Yes!

As an example Sinek uses is Apple computers.  

As we can see Apple’s What is great computers.

Their HOW is an offering of greater creative freedom, less viruses, user-friendly interface, etc. All the cool things MAC computers can do.

And finally the WHY. In the case of Apple, we see a very strong belief and ideology emanating from the company. They believe in challenging the status quo and thinking differently as Apple’s Think Different marketing campaign declared in the late 1990s. The Think Different campaign has been Apple’s boldest “Why statement” to date and is still credited with its success nearly 20 years later. Take a look at an example, “Here’s to the Crazy Ones”, and see if you feel anything bubbling up…

Once consumers made the “Why connection” with Apple, the bond has proven nearly unbreakable. So strong is the loyalty, in fact, that people are willing to purchase, not only their computers, but all the other products Apple has released, including iPhones, iPads, etc.

Sinek notes that every incredibly successful company (such as Apple) has done so through clearly showing and explaining why they are doing what they do. As he points out, every company in the world can say what they do…and many can tell you how they do it. But very few can clearly tell you why they do it. And that makes all the difference.

And one more time for good measure…

“People don’t buy What you do, they buy Why you do it.”  So, focus on the Why.

Find more articles on sales and marketing at smstudy.com.

Psychology, Sales and the SMstudy Guide

Could a beer seller’s story about their purple wisteria saving the day help you?

When the story is an example of using psychology and emotion-driven sales, it can and probably should. London Pride accomplished this with their advertisement featuring a uniquely ancient wisteria plant: “The purple genus has been steadily scaling our brewery walls since 1816. It’s the oldest in England.”  It seems the Brits value their past, their national pride and their wisteria.

“London Pride beer uses emotion-driven marketing … that hooks the reader with a memorable story about something Londoners are familiar with and proud of,” says Kath Pay in Leveraging Psychology in Digital Marketing.

A Guide to the SMstudy® Sales and Marketing Body of Knowledge (SMstudy® Guide), makes a similar point: “The most popular blogs choose topics that are of interest to a large community. Successful blogs have something interesting, useful, or creative to share, and do that sharing with an engaging style.”

How does one leverage psychology in his or her marketing efforts? SMstudy® Guide’s book Marketing Strategy explains one of the ways: “Psychographic segmentation is primarily used for consumer markets and involves segmenting buyers along one or more psychological variables including, but not limited to, the following—Attitude, Personality, Values, Fears, Lifestyle, and Life stage (e.g., early childhood, youth, young adult, newly married, married with young children, married with teens, empty nester, elderly and retired).” This type of segmentation begins the process of researching and analyzing a target market’s psychological profile.

“To make the path to conversion clear, you must understand the psychological cues that prompt action, and then consider the entire customer journey, using both implicit and explicit directional cues,” says Pay.

How can you find the cues that prompt consumer actions? The SMstudy® Guide helps here, too, suggesting the use of behavioral segmentation and explaining, “There are five variables that can be used for behavioral segmentation.”

Needs: Users are segmented on the basis of their needs related to a product. Here it is important to understand the users’ category and brand purchasing motives, their value systems and their perceptions in order to draw a composite image of each user and his or her needs.

Consumption Behavior: Purchasers may not be the direct consumers or may not be the only consumers for a variety of products. Therefore, consumption patterns for these products should be considered separately.

Purchase Behavior: Users are segmented on the basis of their purchasing patterns. Some of the patterns are non-user, potential user, first-time user, one-time user (also referred to as “one and done purchasing”), repeat user, former user, product/brand loyalty-based user and early adopter.

Communication Behavior: Users are segmented on the basis of how much they communicate about the product with others before, during and after purchasing. In this respect, opinion leaders are particularly influential as they are knowledgeable about, or are regular users of, particular products; are very vocal about their views regarding such products; and command the attention of other potential customers. In addition to examining how these users communicate, it is also important to understand how they prefer to receive communication. For example, what types of media do they consume?

Consumer Purchasing Roles: Consumers can be categorized based on their roles in the purchasing process. Individuals take on one, several or all of the following roles in the purchasing process: initiator, influencer, decider, buyer and user. When segmenting based on consumer purchasing roles, businesses will often target influencers rather than buyers in an effort to connect with those with the most influence on the purchasing behavior of the group.

Looking at the traits that put consumers in each of these categories provides cues to their motivations and the directions those motivations will lead them.

Using some practical suggestions from www.SMstudy.com can help leverage psychology and make people think that buying from you is a good idea. Cheers.

5C Analysis

5C Analysis is a technique used to conduct situation analysis. Conducting a situation analysis is one of the important steps in identifying the research problem. A situation analysis involves examining the external environmental factors and internal organizational capabilities that impact how a company operates.

5C Analysis is one of the most popular and useful frameworks in understanding internal and external environments. It is an extension of the 3C Analysis that originally included Company, Customers, and Competitors. Collaborators and Climate were later added to the analysis to make it comprehensive. This integrated analysis covers the most important areas of marketing, and the insights generated can help identify the key problems and challenges facing the organization. However, it should be noted that not all five elements need to be considered when identifying the problem in a particular area of marketing. Depending on the area of marketing under scrutiny, some areas need to be given more importance than others.

• Company—The company analysis studies an organization’s vision, strategies, capabilities, product line, technology, culture, and objectives. It is useful in understanding the existing and potential problems with the company’s business.
• Customers—Understanding customers is a key part of situation analysis. It involves knowing the target audience, their behavior, market size, market growth, buying patterns, average purchase size, frequency of purchase, and preferred retail channels.
• Competitors—Competitor analysis is critical in understanding the external environment in which the firm operates. This analysis involves knowing the competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, positioning, market share, and upcoming initiatives.
• Collaborators—Collaborators are the external stakeholders who team up with the organization in a mutually beneficial partnership. Agencies, suppliers, distributors, and business partners are typical collaborators. It is important to understand their capabilities, performances, and issues to better identify business problems.
• Climate—Climate analysis is the evaluation of the macro-environmental factors affecting the business. PESTEL analysis can be used to analyze climate—political, economic, social/cultural, technological, environmental, and legal scenarios are included in PESTEL.

To learn more about 5C analysis and other situation analysis techniques, visit SMstudy.com.

Evolution of Sales and Marketing - Part 1

Sales and marketing, though sharing the same objective, differ significantly. Sales can be considered the last stage of marketing. It would be interesting to explore how they differ, but we will reserve that discussion for another day. In this post, let us look at an equally interesting topic of how sales and marketing have evolved over time. Let us begin with one of the earliest forms of sales and marketing: the barter system.

More than a thousand years ago, when coins and other forms of money were not yet popular, the typical and most common way people procured their products or services was through the barter system--the direct exchange of goods or services without the use of money. For example, a farmer might have exchanged some of his harvest with a carpenter for some wooden furniture. Sales and marketing with the barter system relies on having access to the appropriate persons with whom things can be exchanged for mutual value. Then came the traditional marketplace.

The growing popularity of coins and other forms of money as a medium of exchange gave rise to the traditional marketplace in which producers such as farmers, craftsmen, and carpenters created products, sold wares from shops, and shouted out to crowds of potential customers in order to promote their products. Traditional marketplaces are usually small markets where price negotiations and other decisions related to sales are made quickly, often by one or two persons. Next came the sellers marketplace.

The Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries marked a shift toward mass production in factories such as textile manufacturing. Goods were produced more efficiently and economically and could be sold to a wider market. This created the sellers marketplace. The main objective of the sellers marketplace is to establish a supply chain to procure products and then establish a distribution channel to sell the products to a wide variety of customers, often referred to as mass marketing This was followed by conventional mass media marketing. We will discuss this along with the innovative fragmented new-age marketing of the twenty-first century in the next post. Until then, keep selling!

Identifying Competition: An Essential Element of Marketing

All industries are growing at a rapid pace with emergence of more and more companies. For a company to exist in this race, it needs to mark its presence and grow at the same time. Knowing competition for a company and accordingly positioning the products is something businesses are concerned with today.

Listing Competitors

To get a clear idea of the differentiated positioning the company needs to identify its potential competitors. A thorough analysis of the competitive products, their features, strengths and operational excellence would give the company a clear picture of the market operations and the trends. Understanding the value proposition provide companies a sustainable competitive advantage which can be utilized in attracting customers from the competitors.

In the process of identifying competitors the company should consider the product, substitutes, technological challenges, new entrants, old established brands. Future competitor analysis also plays an important role in creating a brand presence in the market for a product.

How to Identify Competition?

With the help of senior management direction and insights the company can have a better picture of the competition in the market existing for its products and services. Also from the market research reports and information published by the competitors help in identifying the details of the competitors and their ways of operation.

In order to understand the competitor in the market for a particular product the several analysis are to be carried out such as future competitive analysis, marketing research and meetings and discussions with industry leaders and experts. Understanding the emerging technologies, new entrants and actively scanning the industry gives a complete idea of the competitors and their structure and functioning. A SWOT analysis of the available list of competitors also gives a fair idea of the trends the competitors following and can help in improvising the products of the company and expand the customer base.

Every business that we see today is part of one or the either industry. With the moving pace and increasing consumer demand the business are expanding. Competition is something which has always been there and shall exist till ever. To find a way out and present the product in a better way in comparison to the competitor’s product is every business’s requirement and they should be focused towards it. Identifying competition empowers the business and gives scope for improvement, which enables it to prosper.