Get High at Work!

Author: Kevin Sandlin

  • Old marketing vs. new marketing: the only difference is data

    I love finding old ads for products we used to own in our childhood or teen years, like this 1983 Jeep Grand Wagoneer. Classic! I also am a huge fan of the series “Mad Men”, which is the essence of old school marketing, better known as advertising. Back then, it was similar to the old waterfall method of developing software, in which you do all the planning up front, freeze the specs, and build for months and months until launch. They used to buy magazine and newspaper ads months in advance, and then measure the results in the quarters that follow. They used data, but very much after the fact.
    Today, the basic operation is the same, but the game is so much faster. Digital marketing enables the marketer to conduct tiny, inexpensive (if not free) experiments to find the best avenues to gain market share, and then stomp on the gas when they discover what works the best. And then keep on experimenting. It’s really amazing to those of us who have experienced it both ways. The game is still the same, but it’s played at digital speed, rather than print speed.
    We rely on data vs. emotions. I think there’s a big misconception about the ads and campaigns they created in the Mad Men days. Yes, there was a lot of emotion involved (more in the show than real life), but the results were still measured in revenue, market share, traction, and growth. Back then, it took quarters and years see the results, and market share reports came in the mail.
    The numbers (still) never lie. Doesn’t matter really what you’re marketing or how you market it, if your strategy is wrong, the numbers will eventually reveal the fault. If your strategy is right and your tactics wrong, the numbers will tell the story. The difference is that, today, you can determine whether you’re on the right or wrong track in a day, not a year.
    The new marketing is still marketing. That’s my opening line for the General Assembly Digital Marketing class and bootcamp: “digital marketing is still marketing”. What I mean is the goals are still the same. We just don’t print a whole lot of anything anymore, but rather make sure it’s responsive and looks fantastic on a 4″ or 5″ screen. But we still aim to reach people who didn’t know about us before, and draw them into and then down the marketing funnel to become customers, and then engage and please them such that they become loyal advocates of our products.
    All the data is there now. Don Draper had data…after the fact. Results data was all that mattered. Today, we have instant data on every move our users and customers make on our web sites. We can even watch their mouse clicks and put a cookie on their device and retarget them when they leave our site. We couldn’t do that back in the day.
    I have fond memories of implementing marketing campaigns that utilized the sending of a grayscale fax to thousands of colleges and universities, and then coaching inside sales teams as they followed up, “did you get the fax we sent over yesterday?”
    Yesterday. Yesterday we had data to determine results, success or failure. Today we have data to see results in real time. Today we can take what was old, and make it look new.
    This is actually MY 1990 Grand Wagoneer, photoshopped into an AT&T ad in 2012. Amazing.

  • It’s not you. It’s me.

    I led an all day seminar this past Saturday at General Assembly in Atlanta. This class was a 6-hour event in which we compressed the 60 hours of the GA Digital Marketing class down to 6 hours, lunch from Chipotle included. Here’s a good description of the class and here’s a follow up to the last time we ran this class.

    This past Saturday had some challenges, and hats off to the folks at GA for pulling out all the stops when the Ponce City Market power went out on Friday night, leaving GA with no air conditioning all day Saturday. You heard that right. It reached 80 degrees in our classroom, but the many oscillating fans and ice cream sandwiches and popsicles made us feel loved anyway.

    And we used this problem to discuss the first aspect of digital marketing: branding. One of the most visible aspects of your brand is your message. What you say matters. Every word matters, because your brand is everything you do. The exercise we used to illustrate this point is outlined in this post on the General Assembly blog. It’s a good way to find out (a) if you know your brand and (b) how well you know your brand. We walk through this exercise because if you, as the founder or entrepreneur or brand ambassador don’t know your brand, how can you communicate that brand to anyone else, inside or outside the company?

    We start with – and for purposes of this post, we end with – the second part of this exercise: “what is the industry or market problem you are solving?” In creating this little exercise, the inspiration for this step is Simon Sinek’s 2009 TED Talk and his book, “Start with Why.“

    The class did this exercise, taking about 15 minutes to create the 4 tweets. Where we ran into the most trouble was this step number 2. It is a trend that I have seen throughout my teaching experience at GA and for 2 years at Pitch Practice that entrepreneurs have great difficulty distinguishing the problem statement from the description of their business. In other words, when I ask “what problem are you solving?” the answer I get most often is “we do this and that, creating value here and there and saving our customers time and money with these benefits,” and then they proceed to list all the benefits.

    This answer is completely wrong, and it starts with the first word, “we”. The problem you are solving has absolutely nothing to do with “we” or “you” or “I” or “me”. The problem you are solving is a problem in the market that your customer has. When you are talking to a potential customer and that customer hears (ad nauseum) what you do, you’ve lost them. When you start with the problem that your customer has ever day (start with why), you make a friend. They now know that you see and understand their problem. Oh, and by the way, we solve that problem.

    This situation reminds me of this clip from Seinfeld:

    When you’re stating your problem, remember “it’s not you, it’s me”, and “me” is your customer. It’s all about the customer’s problem. Your problem statement has nothing to do with you. Rather, it’s why you exist. Start with why. Start with the problem, and solve it.

  • 3 things that make it hard to tell your story

    It is my business to help entrepreneurs and small businesses tell their stories. Telling your story with great, compelling, consistent content builds trust among your audience, and helps them know that you have a solution to the problems they face every day. Most entrepreneurs don’t think they can tell their story, and they also don’t think they have enough great content. Both are incorrect; however, there are several things that make it difficult for anyone, let alone an entrepreneur in the thick of building a business, to tell their story on a regular and consistent basis.

    Here are three things that can make it really tough to create great content on your own behalf in a way that is compelling and credible to your audience.

    • You’re too close to the product. You invented this thing, this solution to a market problem. You know it inside, out, and backwards. You can explain every feature, function, and bug. You know where it’ll be in 2 months and 2 years. But your customer can’t see any of that, and, for now anyway, doesn’t care. They want their problem solved right now, and you are not able to see the flaws that your customer sees instantly. It’s not a hit against the entrepreneur to be “too close to the product.” That’s your job! But it may mean that you can’t tell the story, explain the problem, or empathize with the customer objectively.
    • You are not your user. Just because it looks right to you and sounds right to you and seems right to you doesn’t mean that your user will like it, know how to use it, understand it, or even care. How can you share what you’re dreaming of from your perspective, when you really should be looking at the solution from your user’s perspective? It’s interesting to see how often an entrepreneur will fall in love with their own product. “I love this app!” they’ll say. But the app is not for you. It’s for your user. Do they love it? They might, but they might not, and the reasons they love it may be very different from your own.
    • You speak in your language, not the customer’s language. One of the funniest and most entertaining things in every small business and startup I’ve been in is the jargon, the language, the acronyms. At the telecom startup that was acquired by First Data, we once named a module “Ope”, which was really an acronym for “Order Processing Executive”, and yes, there was also an “Andy”, though I can’t remember what that stood for. Someone actually said these things in a meeting with a customer. After some very strange looks, we explained what it all meant. The customer got a good laugh, but couldn’t care less what we called our internal systems. They just wanted their information to get disseminated quickly and properly.
    While you really must tell your story, especially if you’re a startup or small business, it can be difficult, and these are some of the reasons why it can be hard. But that’s ok, because “you” doesn’t always have to be “you” personally. Your organization needs to create great content that tells your story as it unfolds and brings customers closer, and you can outsource that process or dedicate an internal resource to it.
    The vision should still come from the one who holds the vision, but the words do not have to be typed by you personally.

  • Why to Tell Your Story

    I’ve written recently about telling your story and how to keep telling your story ad how some stories write themselves, but haven’t really delved into some deeper reasons to tell your story, so here’s the “why” of telling your story, both your personal story and the story of your business.

    I spent the day today on the road with my family going to and from a funeral in Murfreesboro, TN. I have two teenagers, so part of the chatter on the way up was about why exactly we were driving 3 1/2 hours each way to go to the funeral of a lady we never met. It was an excellent teaching time, mainly to get through to a couple of teenagers that it’s not about them, but also that it was about our friend who’s mother passed away after 88 wonderful years of life.

    It was a wonderful home-going celebration of this lady’s life, and the theme that ran throughout all the words shared about this lady was “stories.” Sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, and friends all spoke of the stories this lady would share about life, love, friends, family, history. Everyone who knew this lady knew everything about her life…

    Because she constantly told her story, both in writing and verbally.

    What’s this mean to you and me? Here’s 4 simple thoughts to answer that question, and I hope drive you a little closer to sharing your story.

    • All it takes is one generation who doesn’t know your story for your entire story to simply vanish forever. If you don’t regale your new employees with the genesis of your business, how will they ever know, understand, and live out the culture that you created?
    • How will they know how it all started? It’s said very often that you can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been or where you came from. Or that you should always remember where you came from. But what if you don’t know where you came from? What if those who came before you never shared those stories? Who have you received advice from? I’ll bet you next month’s coffee bill that they gave you advice in the form of war stories from their own hard knocks.
    • Who else knows your story? Very few people know your own story as well as or better than you do, so who better to share your story than you? If you don’t share it, who will? We’re not talking NY Times bestselling autobiographies here, but rather simply how you got where you are today and why you chose that path, or that path chose you.
    • How do you entrench your team in the culture if you don’t tell them the stories behind each and every part of the culture and why that particular word or phrase is used? How will they know?

    You have to tell them. Everyone loves a story, and everyone has a story. Your story matters. Tell your story, or it might just vanish. That reason alone is a huge part of why we’ve engaged in telling the stories of the people who have walked the halls at Atlanta Mission. Their stories are rarely told, because many times their stories are not pretty and don’t always end in “happily ever after”, but those are the stories that make us understand how important our own stories are to the people right next to us.

    I’ll let you decide whether these points are more appropriate for your family tree or for your business, but it’s likely that the two are very intertwined.

  • The Seven Things You Must Do to Win at SEO

    Most non-developers are completely ignorant of, if not intimidated by SEO. Even some software developers won’t go near it. SEO has been called “black magic,” “dark art”and “pseudoscience,” most likely because if you happen to get it right, you win all the Googles! And everybody wants to win at being on the first page of the Google search engine results page (SERP).
    Well, when you’re done reading this post, you won’t be quite as frightened at the mention of “SEO” as you used to be, and you might even have the confidence to say, “I can do this!” because you actually can. Here are the seven things you have to do to win at SEO and get your website to the first page of the Google search engine results page.
    1. Get an exact match domain name.
    You might want to quit right here! But don’t. Google absolutely looks at your domain name in its ranking algorithm. If your domain name is di4jel7.net, Google has no idea what you do, nor how to rank you for any search for what you actually might do. Even if your tagline is perfectly descriptive, your domain name will count. I chose AtlantaTechBlogs.com because (a) it was available and (b) it describes exactly what we’re all about.
    Admittedly, it’s a bit long when you consider Buffer has declared the optimal length of a domain name to be 8 characters plus “.com” (also a ranking factor), but Google looks less at the length than the substance of your domain name. Note: The opposite is also true that if you get an exact match domain name like “googleseoguide.com” and it has nothing to do with SEO, Google will ding you pretty hard.
    2. Use Google Webmaster Tools.
    Google created tools to help you use Google. Yes, it’s like Cosmo Kramer being at the intersection of 1st and 1st, the nexus of the universe, but Google wants to index your content, so they show you how. GWT is very easy and gives you fantastic information about your site and how Google sees your site. You must use GWT for your website.
    3. Give Google a sitemap.
    If you use WordPress or any other content management service (CMS) software, there will be an option to produce a sitemap (usually sitemap.xml) just for Google. Do this, and submit it to Google from within Google Webmaster Tools. It’s very, very easy, and doing so is like inviting Google into your home (your website) and giving them the floor plans, blueprints, and furniture arrangements. That’s what Google likes.
    4. Make sure you’re mobile friendly.
    You’ve heard the term “mobilegeddon,” and once again, it’s Google stating that they will put a lot of weight on whether or not your website is mobile friendly. Fortunately, Google also provides a very simple tool to tell you in very short order if your site is mobile friendly or not. Go here, and use this tool. If your website is not mobile-friendly, you should fix that immediately.
    5. Use HTTPS / SSL certificate.
    Google has also recently announced that secure web browsing will be a high priority in its search engine rankings. Google has stated very clearly that this ranking signal will start slow and pick up speed as they do more and more research into web security. If your website is anything other than a blog, you should get an SSL certificate and implement https, period.
    6. Create new content every day.
    The highest ranking signal in Google’s algorithm is “quality content,” and there simply is no substitute. What does that content look like? The clearest type of content is your blog, but there’s also video, audio, images, and user-created content like forums, comments on blog posts, and curated content (via RSS or social widgets). Content is king with Google, and there’s no end to the types of content you can create, curate, and publish. But remember the other word that goes along with content, quality. Google knows high-quality content from junk, and they will rank accordingly.
    7. Be patient.
    You got this far, so don’t give up! The hardest part of ranking high in SEO is the time it takes for your website’s reputation within the Google algorithm to catch up to your amazing expectations (and hard work!). It took AtlantaTechBlogs.com more than 7 months to reach the first page when you search for “tech blogs,” but now it’s there. In the grand scheme of things, seven months is not very long to wait work. And, you won’t be waiting because you’ll be creating fantastic new content every day and the time will pass very quickly.
    Also, SearchEngineLand.com has a great illustration of their interpretation of Google’s ranking algorithm that they put into a form that we all remember from high school chemistry: the periodic table. It’s actually a great way to see just exactly how much weight is put on content.
    Learn more about SEO and other key topics in digital marketing.

  • Three Digital Bootcamps This Saturday at General Assembly

    I’ll be leading the second coming of the Digital Marketing Bootcamp this Saturday at General Assembly at Ponce City Market, while Vince Baskerville, head of UX at CallRail leads the UX Bootcamp and Chidi Afulezi, Co-Founder at aKoma, leads the Product Management Bootcamp.

    The Product Management class is 10-12 noon, while the DGM and UX bootcamps start at 10am and last until 4pm, and include a great lunch. The folks at GA always take care of their students (and instructors!).

    Here’s a few learning points that you’ll get in the DGM Bootcamp.

    • Everything starts with your brand. Digital marketing is still marketing, and the first place you start in marketing is your brand. Where do you start with a new brand? How do you re-start your brand if you’re going to re-start marketing? We’ll dig deep into those types of questions.
    • What does success look like? In order to know if you won, you have to keep score, and we do that by measuring everything, because if you don’t measure it, you cannot manage it. More importantly, you can’t change the result if you don’t know the result.
    • The purpose of marketing is to reach as many of the right people as possible, and bring the highest percentage of them down through your marketing funnel to make them customers, and preferrably repeat customers. How do you do that? That’s the magic of the marketing funnel.
    • In real estate, everything is about location, location, location. In digital, it’s all about content, content, content. We can make it, buy it, or earn it. Or we can do all three. How much budget do you have?
    • Nothing hurts like a date, so we’ll get you started using your very own marketing calendar. Your marketing calendar will be your best friend and your most hated enemy, because nothing hurts like a date.

    Are you ready? Join us this Saturday for a full day of fantastic fun and learning. We will laugh, learn, and love digital marketing. I look forward to leading this great class, and thanks to the folks at GA for the opportunity. Will you join me?

  • The first step of social media marketing

    We had a fun class today at General Assembly for “Advanced Social Media Strategies,” and we’ll be holding this class again on Tuesday, June 30, from 1-4PM. One question that came up several times, because several of the attendees were in a similar position, was this:

    When you’re just getting started with a new business, and you know you’re going to be using social media, what’s the first thing you do? Where do you start?

    The context of this question is important, because if someone is starting from a blank slate, then the first place is with their core values and brand. But in today’s question, those pieces were already in place, so the marketers were interested in determining their first step with social media.

    The way I answered the question fits in well with the positioning of this particular class. The first step, assuming you have your core values and brand well buttoned up, is to create a content strategy. In other words, start with:

    • What kind of content will you produce? When you know your audience, you know what kinds of content will resonate with them. Produce this kind of content.
    • What channels will you use to publish and share? If you’re creating video, you used to just go straight to Youtube, but Facebook now has more daily uploads and views of video than Youtube. If your content is written, what blog platform will you use? 
    • How often will you publish & share it? There are best practices for how often you should share the same piece of content, whether it’s video, images, or text.
    • How will you define success? You have to set goals for social media. Too many times, people just jump on Twitter or Linkedin for their businesses or setup a Facebook page without any way to determine if their efforts are yielding any results at all.
    Then create some content, with a solid understanding of where and how your target audience consumes content. Once you have content, then you share it using best practices for social media.
    We take this approach because social media marketing should be viewed as a subset of content marketing. Every word, image, video, graphic, photo, etc., is your content, whether you publish it on a blog or a long Instagram post. All your content should reflect your brand.

    Social media marketing is content marketing, and content marketing is an outgrowth and reflection of your brand in the form of educational, engaging, and exchange with your target audience.

  • Advanced Social Media Strategy @ GA Saturday 1-4PM

    This Saturday, I’ll be teaching a half-day class at General Assembly at Ponce City Market. This class is Advanced Social Media Strategies, which I’ve taught a few times before, and it’s always a fun class to teach. The class will be from 1-4PM, and here’s a high level look at what we’ll be covering.

    • UNDERSTANDING of what exactly social media marketing is. Hint: it’s content marketing.
    • STRATEGY always begins with your brand, and then your audience. Everything else is window dressing.
    • CHANNELS or which social media networks (e.g., Facebook, Pinterest, etc.) you utilize are governed by one thing, and one thing only. Hint: it’s not the channel that you are most comfortable with. There are best practices for every channel, but everything is still so new that experiments are highly recommended.
    • ENGAGEMENT is more than what you think, and you can have full on engagement without ever making a single post.
    • CALENDAR is your best friend and worst enemy, because nothing hurts like a date, but everyone loves a plan once it’s in place.
    • MEASUREMENT is your only means of seeing if you were right in any or all of your experiments.

    If you’re using social media to market your business, and you need to take your game to the next level, this is the class for you.

    And, yes, this is a complete and total shameless plug for the class I’m teaching. Also, it’s going to be dreadfully hot on Saturday afternoon, so take advantage of a beautiful morning in Atlanta, and then spend the afternoon in air conditioned comfort, learning how you can make a big difference on Monday.

  • How to Keep Telling Your Story

    Continuing with yesterday’s post, which gave five more reasons that every startup really needs to tell its story, it’s easy to understand how many startups simply don’t know where to start telling their stories. Many times I speak with entrepreneurs about blogging and they end up at a point at which they can’t see themselves having anything really good to blog about after they’ve covered the basics of their business. It’s a misnomer that once you’ve blogged on a topic, or created any content on that particular topic, you can’t focus on that topic again. It’s just not true. In fact, the opposite is the case.

    Ask any marketer how many times their target audience has to be shown the marketing message before they actually see it: at least 6, and more like 10. The same message has to be presented to your target audience 6 – 10 times before they ever realize what they’re seeing it. This is the same philosophy behind showing the same old commercials on TV over and over and over ad nauseam.

    Why should it be any different for your company’s blog? For many startups and most small businesses, the blog is the primary method of publishing the content of their marketing message. Here are three constructs that you can apply to your content calendar to make sure that you keep telling your story until your audience actually sees it.

    • Yesterday | Today | Tomorrow – This method is the simplest, and really is just what it says: what happened yesterday (or last week or month); what’s going on today (or this week or month); what’s planned for tomorrow (next week, month, or quarter). Literally, tell your audience what’s going on with your business. Have you hired anyone? Made any changes to your product or website? Gained any new partnerships? Created any new offerings? What’s coming in the future? What did you just launch or announce today?
    • Educate | Engage | Exchange – This model fits well into the types of content to offer up, assuming you have a lot of content as part of your business. “Educate” means to teach your audience something relevant to your business. Salesloft and Rivalry do a great job of teaching businesses different aspects of the B2B sales process. “Engage” is about engaging in a conversation on a more personal level by sharing your team, your culture, or your values. And “Exchange” means commerce, or a more direct marketing message, e.g., “Big Summer Blowout!”
    • Winter | Spring | Summer | Fall – This third construct is event and calendar driven, or may apply simply because your business is very seasonal, and you really do different things in each season. An example of this might be a restaurant with a seasonal menu or an outdoor patio or some other part of the restaurant that opens or closes depending on the season. 

    More than one of these constructs may apply to your business, and each requires a different level of planning using your content calendar. The idea is to make sure you never lack for content, types of content, and meaningful engagement with your audiences and customer segments.

    Which one of these content constructs might help you in telling your story?

  • Tell Your Story

    There are not many days that I don’t have the conversation with an entrepreneur or small business owner about “telling your story”. It’s incredibly important these days to maintain a constant flow of communications out from your HQ to your target audience. Here are 5 reasons that your outflow of story telling must stay constant and consistent.

    1. There is so much competition these days because it’s so easy to create a startup with a web site – a good looking web site – that it’s easy to be overrun in a space that you’ve owned, just because it looks like you’re asleep at the wheel and the new kid on the block is kicking it.
    2. The 24 hour news/social cycle enables someone who’s never heard of you yesterday to be your most adamant fan today, just because you connected with them and showed the right empathy for their pain.
    3. Your story is constantly changing because your are, after all, a startup, and that’s the job of a startup: do dozens of experiments until you find the right solution for the biggest problem with the most customers willing to pay.
    4. Your market is always growing, so there are always new customers who haven’t heard of you yet, and the most popular way consumers make decisions these days is by consuming real information from blogs and peers that they trust.
    5. Your audience is always looking for the solution to their problem. They just haven’t found you yet. Thirty years ago, would you have opened a little office and put out a shingle and then hid inside the office? No, of course not. You’d have set out to meet every potential customer in town so you could – wait for it – tell them your story.

    Now you have the internet. No more telling your story to one person at a time. Sangram Vajre, the CMO of Account Based Marketing startup Terminus, just published a post that somewhat transparently says “here’s the tools we use to market ourselves.” At the bottom of his mar-tech stack, the building blocks on which everything else relies, is, you guessed it, their blog. That’s how they tell their story. Check it out here.

    Those are just a few reasons that your startup needs to constantly tell its story. It just so happens that the easiest way to tell your story is in a daily, weekly, or bi-weekly blog. Tomorrow I’ll review a couple of constructs that can make it much easier to keep the stories flowing.