mkf 7 marketing insights 2018 › wp-content › uploads › 201… · marketer overseeing content...

7 marketing

insightsBy Marc Fey

MKF Strategic Marketing


MOST COMMON MARKETING MISTAKE:

Misplaced focus on FRUITS Instead of a focus on ROOTS

...trying to get RESULTS before you know what WORKS.


misplaced focus on FRUITS


focus on ROOTS

Building relationships of trust


Strong roots:

INSIGHT #1 Educate & inspire your best customers


Every effective merketer knows the power of referrals. The “net promoter score” movement is the best example of this emphasis. Referrals represent the most efficient marketing dollars you can spend—to encourage your happy customers to tell others.

If your product or service is making a difference in your customers’ lives, then it’s your job to tell those stories and to continue to educate your clients. The stories you tell are YOUR CLIENTS' stories of success and effectiveness...not your story helping your client. The StoryBrand approach, which we use at MKF Strategic Marketing, assures we're telling the right story.

Also, because your clients’ needs are real, their stories are real, staying close to your customers gives you insights that will pay off for future marketing efforts, helping you continue to develop your product or service. Educating your customers keeps you in the role of trusted guide.

Is there a new challenge your customers should know about? How are your best customers using your product or service?

While it might seem counter-intuitive, the same nurture marketing you do at the top of the funnel needs to be done at the bottom of the funnel—and in fact, I’m suggesting you start your marketing efforts with your customers.

Educate and Inspire Your Best Customers1

Besides referrals, staying close to your customers gives you invaluable insights into how your product or service is working, the stories you can share in your marketing, and perhaps most importantly, you won’t be the last person to hear about problems your customers might be having.

Application: Build a nurture marketing campaign for your clients, being sure to 1) tell stories your customers' stories about how they're succeeding with your product or service, 2) keep educating your clients regarding adjacent topics (for example, if you sell software for customer relationship management, educate them on software that manages other aspects of the client relationship, like finances or help desk tickets).

Then, when the time is right, ask your customers to be an advocate for you—being involved with you in delivering your product or service to others who are overcoming the same challenges your client is overcoming.

Always follow up. Contact them again to say thank you. Then, show them what you're accomplishing together. Giving your customers a real-life look at you’ve accomplished together builds trust that they've got the right business partner.

Educate and Inspire Your Best Customers1

INSIGHT #2 personalize the experience


Not everyone comes to a product or service offering for the same reason...which is why it's so important that you truly connect with potential customers. That means learning what a meaningfulrelationship looks like from your customers' point of view—one you shape based on their unique needs, questions, and problems.

Think about what your customer doing when they come to your website. One of my clients is a provider of before and after school programs. When parents come to their website looking for resources, my client answers their questions based on the specific neighborhood where they live. This communicates to clients that the specific challenges they are facing matter, and therefore the solution is based on a personalized understanding of parents' needs.

Personalize the Experience2

With our StoryBrand approach, we walk through the story of our hero, our target audience (call this "persona" too), addressing the conflicts he or she faces, the internal and external struggles, and ultimately what our customer is after (and the answer to that is rarely, directly your product or service).

Once you have the target audience's story, you can develop marketing experiences that are personal and meaningful. Meet them where they're at, then provide these experiences for their benefit. It's not easy to meet people their surroundings exactly at the time they're asking the questions your product or service answers (in marketing called "right place, right time"). “When the right message is sent at the right time, engagement and conversions rise.”

Personalize the Experience2

INSIGHT #3 Achieve a sustainable model


Your business has to run sustainably, which means you usually never have enough marketing budget.

My clients often fall into one of two categories: they don't spend any real dollars marketing their productor service, or they spend money and have no idea what exactly they are getting for their dollars.

Where should you start? We assemble all the marketing measures and data we can to put together the picture of what our client's marketing dollars are getting, answering the question, what is the return on investment. Of course, I have yet to meet a client who isn't highly sensitive to ROI--what is the problem is, how to I get the data and then answer the question, is this the best ROI I can get?

Achieve a Sustainable Model3

Sure, you can throw the Hail Mary for that million dollar donation. But the practical trick to really

over time (Hubspot).

There has been a lot of talk about what kind of people Millennials are. Being self-absorbed and entitled are the two stereotypes people usually reach for. The statistics, however, don’t match. In fact, the 2014 Millennial Impact Report found that 87% of employed Millennials surveyed had donated to a nonprofit, usually more than $100 over the course of a year (Commit Change).


Once you have the right picture, which is full transparency into what your marketing dollars are getting,the hard work begins to test and measure and test and measure what marketing approaches, tactics, campaigns, etc are working and which are not. In today's digital marketing environments, the good news is that you can see what you're getting for your dollars. The difficult thing is that often the margins for your marketing spend is more narrow, and so knowing exactly what tactics work and which ones do not is the difference between profit and loss.

For our clients we build the "test kitchen" for their marketing campaigns--the place where they can test and measure everything they are doing. Then, through an ongoing iterative process, they continually optimize their marketing to achieve their outcomes, more efficiently and more effectively.


INSIGHT #4 shift to integrated digital marketing


Is print your medium of communicating with donors? If so, you should implement a digital strategy as soon as possible. According to the research, the only donors who respond to direct mail are over 55 years old (Hubspot).

You don’t have to become all digital right away. In fact, you shouldn’t. What you should do is phase print out at the rate at which your donor demographics change. What if you’ve never published online before? Start by always sharing everything you pint somewhere online. Then, distribute it through your social media channels.

Don’t stop there though. In fact, marketing experts say the best way to lose an audience is by failing to write posts that match the medium. That is, if all you do is post articles, social media users won’t find your account engaging and will probably tune out.

Address your audience. Ask them for their thoughts and share yours. Show who you are, what you do, and how you do it, with text and pictures from everyday operations. Remember to think of your company’s story and incorporate it in each.

Shift to Integrated Digital Marketing4

INSIGHT #5 Create, document & work your plan


The strategies above are the touch-points with customers, but much more goes on behind the scenes. What about the moving parts that go into maintaining a consistent strategy and developing your marketing for the future? For many, it’s a time problem. And others, as many as 70%, have a marketer overseeing content marketing, but only 30% have a written plan in place.

How do you create a proactive strategy? Here is a three-step process I’ve used as a marketer for years.

1. Start by gathering all the information. Create a baseline of your existing efforts using all the stats available. Subscribers, email open rates, and Google analytics. Document everything you know about your clients, from their demographics to their interests, to what they’re engaging with and when.

2. Stay as up to date as possible. Never stop learning about the major trends in your industry space, marketing, and the world in general. That way, you can be preempt the trends and take advantage.

Create, Document and Work Your Plan5

3. Synthesize the information. Give your marketing a purposeful creative direction by combining these currents in the present and projections for the future. With all your information gathered, you can draw a line from where you are now to best practices and the position you want to be in.

My favorite articulation of the process comes from Steve Jobs, “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experience they’ve had and synthesize new things.”

All the best marketers look like psychics. In reality, they’re just highly attuned to the forces, large and small, growing or shrinking in the world around them. Gary Vaynerchuk, for example, built a million-dollar wine e-commerce business because he understood the possibilities of the internet and culture’s adaptation to it. It’s a vision he cultivated from a young age:

“When I was 19, I knew that the internet was going to be a big deal. That’s why I convinced my dad to let me launch Wine Library, one of the first e-commerce platforms in the world for wine. The day Google ad-words came out I bought the word “wine” for 5 cents a click. This was a great bet. […] I just believed in where the market was going.”


https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/much-money-made-twenties/

Vaynerchuk made a smart, but simple observation. In the same way, give yourself time in your own planning to look for opportunities. You might be surprised at your own insight--when you give yourself the opportunity to find it and then build out the opportunity.

Not to say that it’s easy. Building an innovative environment for creative planning is difficult, and it's one of the things we help our customers create.

Once you have the big idea, we help our clients break down the vision into smaller goals by starting at the end and working backwards. Before each, ask “what needs to be done to achieve this?” This way, you can clearly delineate your efforts as they branch off into more minute goals. Then tie KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to each goal. Make your benchmarks realistic. At the same time, they must be set high enough to realize success in the next step.


This exercise brings meaning to your efforts on a daily basis and allows you to allocate your precious resources strategically. With your plan in motion, you can monitor progress and make changes accordingly. For example, if your conversion rate is meeting your benchmark but your reach is not, then you can take steps to improve it by tweaking your messaging or social media strategies.

Now, you have the insight to identify all the challenges and opportunities in your indstry's landscape. Personalization, messaging, and social media are just the strategies you employ. In the end, you have to spread your story to incite action. If you can do this effectively and consistently, you marketing efforts will deliver your organization to a place you can confidently serve the needs of your customers for years to come.


INSIGHT #6 Steward your brand, especially the promise


Your voice is what your audience knows you by. It’s what you say and the tone that you saw it in. Think about the adjectives that define your organization’s identity best. Is it smart or bold? Problem-solving or challenging? While adjectives like these are not mutually exclusive, prioritizing the ones more central to your company's mission will enhance the way market.

With our clients, we help them identify the promise they deliver on EVERY TIME, no matter the situation. Then we help them name the brand dimensions that articulate their "personality." And finally, we parlay that into the stylistic decisions that match this identity. Are you conversational or educational; enthusiastic or appropriately reserved? Do you speak to your audience in the second person or not?

The final piece of your voice is the look and feel. Make sure every visual decision fits in with the identity you have chose and the experience your customers have when they interact with you.

Finally, make sure you maintain consistency across all events by sharing designs and creating a style guide you can share with the sometimes numerous satellites of an organization. This way, people can recognize and trust your professional brand no matter how far it is removed from headquarters.

Steward Your Brand, Especially the Promise6

INSIGHT #7 Use social media effectively


Make sure you are on every platform that your customers and potential customers use, even if it feels uncomfortable to you at first. You can capture their attention by being where they are and delivering attention-grabbing content. That means you should be on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Video attracts the most eyes, especially on platforms where people expect to watch them like Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube. The demand for video outstrips what is currently produced. Additionally, one of the most popular video types are “explainers.” This is a great opportunity for any company. You can share your knowledge, provide updates to your community, and give them an inside look at the visuals of your operation.

It doesn’t have to be fancy. Have one of your experts write a script and overlay it on top of your footage. For Facebook and Instagram especially, users often watch videos without sound and read the captions. However, if your data shows people are watching it during work hours, you’ll want to give it narration so they can listen to it when its open in another tab. Either way, you are providing great sharable content. If it’s relevant and tells your story in a compelling way, your piece has the chance of going viral.

Use Social Media & Other Innovative Channels7

That’s the real jackpot for a any organization--viral outcomes. One famous non-profit example is the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. The American A.L.S. Association raised awareness and $168,000 per week

versus their average of $14,000 per week the year before.

What did they do to achieve such organic visibility and success? They were able to gamify the experience. They made it fun. Pour ice cold water on your head or donate $100. In the end, users posted over 17 million videos and raised $220 million (Blue Sky ETO).

What they understood was the incentive to avoid donating for some would lead to more challenges, and therefore, more awareness and donations from participants and viewers alike.

Is there a way you can similarly gamify the sharing of your message?


That’s the best possible solution to your marketing’s sustainability. If you get enough momentum, it

can even achieve exponential growth.

Most of us don't have the benefit of a huge viral campaign. That's why it's important to remember that meaningful content spreads mostly organically, while high-spending campaigns without a compelling message won’t reach their expected return, making your organization look bad (Hubspot). The take-away? Provide your audience with meaningful content through social media channels and over time your audience and influence will grow, slow and steady maybe, but over time you'll be surprised the following you'll develop.

One final tip for social media: If you build it, you have to be prepared to maintain it. A social media account without updates for months damages your brand. It will make your organization look incompetent, disorganized, or not very busy.


Building relationships of trust


remember:the goal is

www.MKFStrategicMarketing.com 719.246.0117

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A word about the MKF Strategic Marketing Process. In the next few pages, please see a description of the process we use to serve our clients. Beginning with the StoryBrand script, and then leading to strategic planning based on the unique needs of our clients, our approach is personalized to each client. If you have questions or would like to learn more, reach out to us at 719-246-0117.

http://www.MKFStrategicMarketing.com

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MESSAGING PLATFORM

‣ Client is the hero‣ Role of Trusted Guide‣ Clear Process and CTAs‣ Defining success

BRAND SCRIPT LOW HANGING FRUIT

BRAND SCRIPT

‣ From the client’s point of view,connecting value proposition

‣ Being clear about the “why”‣ Brand dimensions (first

discussions)

‣ Questions and prickly challengesthat need resolution

‣ Recommendations forimmediate successes

WEBSITE & SALES FUNNEL

MARKETING STRATEGY

EXECUTION (CAM-PAIGNS & FINANCIAL)

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

‣ Keeping the long term view‣ Reverse engineering, beginning

with the end in mind.‣ Starting point

‣ Connecting the brand script toreal needs

‣ Identifying role of educationalcontent and other offers

‣ Test, test, test

‣ Campaign integration‣ Marketing systems, tools‣ Assignments, roles‣ Budget and financial model

A word about the mkf process

MESSAGING PLATFORM: CLIENT NAMEStart with the Brand Script, go to Messaging

VALUE PROPOSITION 3 We articulate your value proposition.

We identify your “Why” Providing clients (and advisors) with discretion, expertise and transparency to clients to manage high risk & underperforming investments.



Strategy 1 Detail about Strategy 1.





LOW HANGING FRUIT

IMMEDIATE PROGRESS We’ll help you identify 3 to 5 strategies leading to immediate wins.

Thank you!


MKF Strategic Marketing719.246.0117

mkf 7 marketing insights 2018 › wp-content › uploads › 201… · marketer overseeing content...

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