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In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m not a social media expert, however, I am, however a great experimentalist. For the past several weeks I’ve been leading the Dallas Startup Week social media efforts, specifically managing most of the Twitter and Instagram feeds. I volunteered to do this mostly because I work cheaply for causes that I care about (and this was a good one!) and that I saw it as an opportunity to up my personal experience with social media.

If you’ve followed my posts so far, you know I’m a card-carrying “traditional” marketer. I tend to be skeptical when I read articles with headlines along the lines of “New Ways to Market Your Product” or “Why Traditional Marketing will Fail Your Start Up.” I believe that the tools and methods change but that the core marketing strategy has stayed the same for decades. 

So here was my chance to put my traditional marketing position to a real world, short runway test and I’m happy to share with you the following 5 observations:

1. Content is (still) King.  There are all sorts of ways to gain followers and there are loads  of people who tout their success by how many followers they have. My observation is that, I’d rather have 250-300 highly engaged followers than 2500 faux followers.

2. Engagement is Key. People like to know you’re listening to them. In my experiment, I made a point to acknowledge the majority of all mentions in the weeks leading up to our event. There are many bots that can make up a direct message to new Twitter followers, but nothing replaces personal interaction. And nothing replicates it. If social media is important to you, you have to put live bodies on it.

3. Get your Followers to do your Dirty Work. More than once I challenged followers to tell their friends about us and to help us grow first to 1000 followers then within a few days 2000 followers. Several tweets also asked event attendees to tweet pictures of themselves throughout the venues.

4. Use Your Hashtags. I hear a lot of people discount hashtags as overused, and a few months ago I, too, was blind to the value of a hashtag. As social media continues to grow, your hashtags are shortcuts for readers to find your content. Sure, they can be funny and ironic but, generally you want them to be meaningful and relevant.  It’s like a little “Google Search” built into every Instagram post.

5. Not all Social Media is Created Equal. If you’ve been using social media this isn’t news to you. And depending on your product or service, your social media needs are different.  Many social media interact with each other, but the impact can be very different. Determine your objectives first THEN pick your social media weapons. Several companies offer templates to help you build messages across platforms.

So there you have it, my down and dirty observations about using social media effectively. I encourage you to conduct your own experiments. Try different content. Try different times of day. Try different automation tools. Be ready to change your plan accordingly. I’m also especially interested in how you successfully convert social media followers to customers so if you have a thought or two on that, please share via comments below.

When you’re creating your marketing campaign(s) you probably find yourself creating some semblance of “persona” to represent your customers. Whether it’s knowing your “best customers” and trying to find more of them, simply having key SME sales support focused on different industries, this is, in part an homage to the notion of persona.

Personas are representative archetypes, which models behavior.  In psychology, archetypes are used to model various norm and atypical behavior.  In the design world, personas are used to model usage behavior.  In the business world, buyer personas are used to model buying behavior. – Tony Zambito

But let’s say we want to get a little more formal with the personas, how would that look? How can the benefit us beyond helping us develop different SEO, sales presentations and direct mail? (although those are good starts!)

For the most part you need to follow a couple easy steps:

•  ANALYZE YOUR CUSTOMER AND PRODUCT DATA

Pull your sales records for the past 14-24 months and sort it according to profitability. And ask yourself some questions:

1. Who is buying your most profitable product?
2. What type of businesses are they?
3. What do they have in common?
4. Are they buying it at certain times of the year?
5. Are they repeat clients?

• STUDY UP ON THE COMPETITION

Make a list of your top 3-5 closest competitors and again ask yourself the critical questions. Social Media, Blogs, Web sites, etc. are all easily accessible and great places to learn the following

1. What are they saying to customers?
2. How often are they talking to customers using their blogs and or social media?
3. Who does it seem like they are talking to most?
4. Are those the people you want to talk to?

This simple exercise should give you a good understanding of who make up your “personas.” Now you can start to use that information to craft your product development efforts.

Step 1. Take the “people” that you find in the two categories above and prioritize them. You probably have only a handful and if you have more you may be too granular. Try to combine them so that you have 2-3 key personas. Of course the more complicated and dynamic your product is (patient education for example) you may have dozens of personas. If so you probably better enlist the resources of a highly skilled-market researcher and content development manager to help.

Step 2. Put yourself in the shoes of these customers. What helped those customers choose your product over the competitors? What aided them in choosing your competitors’ widget over yours? Find the marketing messages or product enhancements that you can wrap around this information. For example, if you notice that a one of your key competitor’s blog talks about their success in offering an enhanced or extended implementation schedule or warranty. It’s logical to deduce that  at least one of your personas requires more substantial customer service than you’re currently offering. They need more assurance and support, so this needs to become part of your core offering.

Step 3. Measure, Test and Refine. When it comes to marketing messages social media and online marketing offer great ways to test your marketing messages almost in real time. You can immediately see which posts get shared or liked — which products resonate. Your web page can include varying text based on the search engine terms your customer used to find your site. You’ll see trends as to how people are coming to your site, you can also begin to attach sales data to those initial trends. Over time you’ll begin to learn which personas are coming to you from which vehicles. But personas can be most beneficial to your product development efforts — and that generally means market research. Focus groups and usability studies can help confirm that you’ve created products for each persona.

Creating personas is a easy way to help companies understand their customers and to organize your marketing plans. It also sets up an easy way to measure the effectiveness of your customer data and your campaigns, and as we all know, what gets measured, gets improved! Good luck, marketers!

Leave a comment below with any successful persona development!

Like so many of us my days seem to fly by. One of my tricks is to listen to TedTalks Audio when I walk my dogs. This is 30-40 mins where I can sometimes be entertained, sometimes be saddened and always learn something new.

My passion has always been patient education, it’s the sort of marketing I like to do best. When I left my corporate marketing operations job, one of my main objectives of branching out on my own was to be able to keep a broader eye one the healthcare industry (beyond the Medicare Part D space where I’d spent seven or so years.)

Earlier this week my trusty phone had downloaded  and August 2014 Ted Talk, featuring Rishi Manchanda and the topic was “upstreamists.” Manchanda’s talk was both educational and inspiring because it reminded me why healthcare marketing is my passion: because it’s about the person.

According to a Forbes article from around the same August timeline,  “Our healthcare system spends about 80% of its resources caring for people who are seriously ill. Both the incentives in the healthcare system and the culture of U.S. medicine reward the use of high levels of skill and technology to “cure disease”. And of course that is what we all want: when we are sick, we want to know that the medical system will cure us. This is “reactive” medicine: fixing the problem after it occurs.”

That leaves a mere 20 cents of every healthcare dollar focused on keeping the well from becoming sick. And that’s not enough.

During Rishi’s TED Talk he uses the anecdote of saving children from going over a waterfall. In order to do this, we build rafts to collect several children at a time. Some rescuers swim out to the children and bring them in one at a time.  Others stand on the side and toss ropes to children that can be reached. All successful and admirable efforts. But one rescuer started swimming upstream, and when asked where she was going she replied “I’m going up here to see who or what is throwing this children into the river.”

The most most effective way to turn the healthcare of this country around is to shift where the energy and $$ goes. Manchanda calls these the “Upstreamists”. The Forbes author calls it proactive medicine. Either way it requires healthcare administrators to focus on behavior change, and the basis of behavior change is where we then have to step it up with patient education.

Innovators in the coming years have a huge opportunity to build wearable technology that collects and shares an unprecedented amount of a patient’s data, but it has to be broader than blood pressure, heart rate and sleep. And it has to reach an audience broader than the weekend fitness warriors.

Patient educators have to be equipped (and motivated) to know that they can help “cure” social and environmental risk factors.  Wearables that will take snapshots of things as stress levels, air quality, family situation will truly be able to drive upstream changes in health.

In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is failing. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.”
– Seth Godin, Marketing guru and author of The Purple Cow and Tribes.

Many of us are embarking on our 2015 marketing plans with renewed vigor (and freshly approved budget.) The challenge most of us face is how to make our message, and therefore our products stand out from the crowd.

I was reading an article earlier tonight about an HIMSS attendee who walked the trade show floor and found it hard to find anything unique.  “Partnership” “Value” “Outcomes” in the healthcare industry these are the buzzwords that everyone uses — the trouble is that when everyone says the same thing, no one really says anything.

In order to create a Unique Selling Proposition we have to again revert back to our marketing roots and dust off the theories that make marketing different than advertising.

Here are 3 quick ways to help your messaging differentiate you on the next trade show floor.

1. The WIIFM

Your customer needs to know what’s in it for them. We’ve all heard this and yet, we try to make it harder than it has to be. At the end of the day your product should solve a problem for your customer (if you don’t know who your customer is see #2). This should be a “10-words or less” statement. If you can’t define the WIFFM in 10 words or less, you probably don’t understand the problem well enough.

2. Know Your Customer

No product can be all things to all people. You have to know where your product is going to be the best received. Then you need to know how to reach that customer. Whether it’s attending a trade show or delivering online content knowing how to get front and center with the decision-makers is key to your success.

3. Focus on the Message not the Image

Sure a picture is worth a thousand words but  it can also lead your audience astray. If you have a succinct message you’ll only need a few words to begin with.  Do this by making the most of your headlines and subtitles.

“We are the only….”

“The first to ….”

You can even go a little extreme here and enlist a headline that makes your skeptipcal passers-by want to know more.

“We grew revenues by 25%”

“We decreased readmission for 5 of the nation’s leading health plans”

Once you determine your message, then enlist your design team to select an image that supports it. We all like pictures of smiling happy retirees, the problem is that you could be selling financial services, a progressive retirement community or cutting edge telemedicine. The image can’t be relied on to get attention — you have to use a meaningful message.

Standing out will always be a marketer’s challenge, starting with these fundamentals will help you show your potential customers that you understand them. Then you’ll truly be able to break through the clutter.