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Jennifer Foster Marketing

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Creating Shareable Content for Social Media and Beyond

The most shareable social media need to be relevant to the reader's emotions.
The most shareable social media need to be relevant to the reader’s emotions.

This past week I was working on a digital marketing proposal for a client. A key element of this plan, or any plan that I’d put together is content: creating good content drives just about any avenue. And bad content won’t be saved by any of them.

Content factors break easily down into the old “Who, What, Where, When and Why”.

Millennials like to say they’re changing marketing by demanding that it be relevant. As a long-time marketer, my take? It’s always been necessary to make marketing relevant — at least  if you wanted to be any good at it. When it comes to making content shareable this is a huge measurement of relevancy. What is relevant gets shared.

  1. Know your audience and understand what they expect you to talk about. If you’re reading this blog or follow me on social media, you know I like to talk about marketing fundamentals and how to integrate them into today’s vehicles. My social media shares tend to be things that I like and believe in.
  2. What do you expect your reader to do based on the information? Generally, I think of social media as my public relations. I don’t expect this blog or that Tweet to convert to a $7k per month retainer (but a girl can dream, eh?) Rather my social media is how I relate to all you and hopefully establish myself as an expert in your minds and hearts.
  3. When is the right time to share? This is where your forecasting comes in handy. In all likelihood your business has some level of seasonality to it. For me, marketing budgets are set in 3rd and 4th quarters and plans are in place by May or June. Meaning if I’m not in the door in the next few weeks, I won’t see a return until 2016.
  4. How can your content help me? It’s no secret that readers are much more likely to click and share if your headline includes words like “Top 10 Lists” or “6 Steps to ____”. We’re all busy and we need help from people we think have good ideas and effective solutions.

When it comes to writing your content keep in mind that most content comes in one of 3 flavors

1. Motivate: Inspiration loves Company We love to be inspired. If I had a dollar for every motivational quote in my collective newsfeeds, well, let’s just say the retainer mentioned above wouldn’t need to be as big. Sometimes motivation for marketers comes in the form of making a sale (yep, sometimes). So leverage your content to help create or cement a need within your readers’ minds.

2. Educate: Keep, Stop, Start In doing my research for this blog I looked back over my personal shares and nearly all of them intend to help someone learn something. Start using an online app to raise money for pet shelters when you walk your dog, stop eating processed food, keep promoting the good deeds of my favorite political candidate. I share what I care about. So do your customers.

3. Entertainment and Current Events Last week when the royal princess was born, I was a bit irritated that no one had shared this. It was Saturday morning and I hadn’t turned on the TV yet, but of course I’d checked my various news feeds, probably more than once if the truth be told. There was no mention of this sweet new baby girl for nearly 2 hours! Imagine that?!?! If you’re like me, we expect our news to be everywhere, quickly. And if you can’t be first, you need to be unique.

The secret sauce: combine these flavors — a neapolitan social media strategy if you will — and you’ll hit the emotional sweet spot! Remember the inspirational story of the man who walked an extreme distance to or from work? It was a social media trend topic that THEN became a current event. Presto!

Would love to see your content ideas. Tweet me @jrfoster75231 or post your comments below.

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Pitch Perfect: Marketing Your Product in 10 Slides

Who can relate? My team regularly came to me with a flurry of detail of the challenge du jour, hopeful for my sage advice and direction. They’d explain this problem or that problem in great detail. Sometimes it was regarding a promotional piece they were putting together, other times it was a project management hurdle that they couldn’t get around, over or even under.

More often than not my response was “10 Words or Less.” Explain to me in 10 words or less what the problem is. If you can’t, then go think about it and boil it down.

Ah, the magic of 10.

Give me just 10 Minutes. 

10 Words or less.

Top 10 Reasons

Pitching or marketing your product or service can also take on the Magic of 10 — 10 slides in 10 Minutes.

If it’s not simple, most people won’t understand. It’s not that your idea is above them or is so unique or complicated, it’s that our brains are busy. It’s important to resonate in just a few words, else it’s unlikely that anyone is going to extend any energy trying to figure out your value proposition.

So what are we to do to get our complicated ideas into the minds of our intended audiences? Here’s the good news: As Guy Kawasaki outlined on Entrepreneur.com, nearly every start up pitch can be boiled down to a 10 slide deck but I  think it also applies to just about any sales presentation you may need to make or challenge you’re trying to describe. And if you’ve followed my blogs in the past you know that I’m a big advocate of the 4P’s which definitely come into play here.

A 10 SLIDE PLAN FOR PRESENTING YOUR PRODUCT

Slide 1 : Title. This is like writing your  name on the SAT — you get credit for it and it’s easy. Include your name, your company’s name, a website URL, Twitter or other social media handles, and contact info.

Slide 2: Problem. Here’s your 10 words or less task. What is the problem you’re solving. Simple statement followed by why it’s a problem worth even solving. Sure, sure you may have more than 10 words but it should be really simple. If you use more than 2-3 sentences to describe this, it’s too long.

Slide 3: Product Overview. The biggest and best P of all. What have you created? Here you get to explain how your product solves the problem above. Having a good product is critical to making the other parts of this presentation meaningful. If you struggle here. Stop and go back to the drawing board. You won’t do anyone any favors by faking this point.

Slide 4: Customer Overview: Who is going to buy this? What do you know about them? Be specific. If you think your product is going to resonate most with women 35-50, then say it and explain why.  If your customer isn’t your purchaser you need to explain. I remember seeing a presentation that predicted an adoption of and app by 20% of all women in the work place. Huh? How would you ever begin to quantify that?  You’re setting yourself up for failure when your stats aren’t based in reality.

Slide 5:  Show your MoJo: Mr. Kawasaki has this (he calls it Secret Sauce) after the product overview slide, but I think I prefer it here because you’ve introduced your customer. Now, as an audience member, I’ll have a more robust understanding of what you’re selling and to whom. Makes your mojo more meaningful.

Slide 6: Promotion and Distribution: How are you going to reach these customers? Where will they buy it and how much are they willing to spend? I think it’s important to include any notes about marketing research (primary or secondary) that you’ve done. People, especially investors, like facts. Make sure to include points about repeat business or downstream add-ons which will drive repeat or upsell business. (See Slide 8 bullet below as this may be a good time to include your forecast and projections.)

Slide 7. Competitive Space Overview: Who are you competing with? There are always options for your customers, including doing nothing. Do your research on who is also competing for your customers, their attention and even unlike products within your distribution channels. Anyone else ever visit Amazon.com to purchase something and leave with something completely different thanks to their recommendations  or deal of the day? Don’t overlook distraction as  competition.

Slide 8.  Your Team: Summarize the experts you’ve enlisted to get this far. Don’t skimp on showing yourself as well rounded, but don’t be pretentious either. I see a lot of startups who tout where their teammates successfully exited — no one mentions the ones they UNsuccessfully exited or what their exit looked like. Some people get the benefit of exiting without having actually contributed to the company’s beginnings. Be genuine about your accomplishments and experience.

Slide 9. Forecast and Projections. Mr. Kawasaki listed this here and I’m leaving it here but, also I think it could equally be a logical part of the Promotion and Distribution slide slide 6 . (Kawasaki actually calls Slide 5 the Business Model which could really lend itself to incorporating your forecast and projections.)

Slide 10. Explain Your Need. Luckily for the start ups I usually see at the Dallas Entrepreneur Center (www.thedec.co) their co-founder nearly always wraps up the Q&A with “how can we help” but on the off chance that no one asks you want to make sure you cover off on this topic. Whether you’re looking for a co-founder or an angel investor, again, being specific is your best bet.

So there’s my homage to Guy Kawasaki’s Infographic (you can see it on my small business marketing Pinterest board here). His idea was the obvious catalyst for this blog and I hope that I’ve paid appropriate respect to his ideas but added enough of my own flavor to be helpful.

Good luck and happy marketing (or pitching!)

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Market Research: What you can learn from your least satisfied customers

Anytime anyone asks me about the biggest risk associated with his or her corporate marketing plan, I always tell them that most vulnerability comes from within the market research. It’s either faulty, missing, or disregarded each of these can yield a very frustrating situation. There are several key ways to gain market research data but the most basic is via customer satisfactionThink like a customer.

Several months ago, I added a meme to my Facebook business page that read: Your most unhappy customer is your greatest source of learning. And I genuinely believe this is true. So much so that when I sit down with you as a client I generally tend to focus my questions and my curiosity on your least satisfied customers.  Even if the number of dissatisfied customers is relatively low, looking for trends in them can help you understand where to focus your process or product improvements.

How to Gather Customer Information
There are several ways that you’re probably already gathering customer information:

1. Primary Research Customer satisfaction surveys are a very easy ways to quickly get to metrics because they generally are done on a numerical scale they easily convert to averages and trends. You can also apply weighting to the questions because it may be more important that a customer is satisfied with her product’s installation process than she was with the advertising. An experienced market researcher can help make sure your surveys are worded in a way that doesn’t steer or create bias within your survey. Surveys should also include potential customers when you were unable to convert a sale.

2. Listen to your customers Chances are your customers are talking to you about your products and services. Listen to them and dig into their concerns or observations. It’s easy to try to jump to resolution, but understanding how a customer didn’t get their membership card or didn’t understand the invoicing process can help you begin to identify a trend that may need larger attention. You may have to talk to your customer service representatives to get this level of information.

3. Secondary research There is probably a company out there that you can learn from — for free. Research white papers and articles about your industry and some of the customer satisfaction measures out there. Marketing and consulting agencies love to publish their success stories. They’re generally available online and easily can be extracted to your specific situations.

How to Improve your Processes using your Findings
1. Reduce inbound calls. If you see trends in your research about why your customers are making (expensive) inbound calls, after receiving a monthly statement like an explanation of benefits, it may be an indicator that your communication materials aren’t clear. It could also be that they are in appropriately timed. So not only are you paying printing and postage to mail a piece to a member but then you’re causing them to make a call in to a representative.

2. Improve your personas. Using market research will automatically help you understand your customer better. You’ll know if they look for your products at certain places, or that if, you rely on distributors, how they feel about those partners. For example, in the Medicare space a member can actually open a grievance with a plan based on a retail pharmacies cleanliness. This obviously isn’t anything a health plan can control, other than their overall relationship with the distributor.

3. Product Development. This is where you’ll get the most bang for  your market research dollar. When it comes time to upgrade your product or introduce complementary products, you’ll know exactly what your best customer are looking for. This should save you time to market.

Market research can seem daunting and cumbersome but it doesn’t have to be, there are easy ways to constantly listen to your customers and use their feedback to drive process improvements throughout your company.

 

 

 

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Social Media Experimenting: How I Taught Myself a Few Tricks

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. JRF Marketing Social Media Content Image

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.

 

 

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Data is the New Black: Laying a Foundation for Personas

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.

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Your marketing personas don’t have to be shadowy characters!

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!

 

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Using Patient Education to Support the Upstreamist Movement

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.