Are you in charge of content marketing for your business or for someone else’s?
Are you already in but the platform keeps shifting and now you have no idea where to spring from?
I don’t know about you but I’ve been feeling it since last summer. A global shift in all the new’ishness of the online marketing world. We’ve been running frantically from door to door of each new tech platform and swinging the door open. Sometimes we’re just peeking in and other times we’re taking the full leap of faith. All with mixed results. For many of us it was a difficult, frustrating, and unsettling content marketing year. What worked before, like strong CTA’s, heavy branding, and pretty visuals produced flat results and what seemed trivial and simple hit it out of the park. I just could not put my finger on IT.
I asked myself every day “Why on earth do I want to do this for a living?” And my answer is always the same. I love the challenge and I’m a life long learner. So, I pulled up my big girl panties and got to work. The big questions this year were “How is all this going to shake out? And “What changed?”. So I dove in and began the search for answers. Recently two pieces of the puzzle have come to light.
Data, Data, Data, and Talk, Talk, Talk.
Drowning in data?
We hear it all the time, we know data is being collected in great quantities but what do we do with it? Recently I went to a Truckee Business Bites talk, the speaker, David LaPlant from Property Radar blew my mind. I realize that not that many people get excited about data and numbers like I do. I own my geekness and David’s ability to collect, organize and process very large data pools left me with four pages of notes and three weeks of deep thought processing.
What was at the end of the tunnel? It’s time to get specific and couscous with my marketing.
You can easily get lost in the great sea of data or get taken for a ride on the riptide of “ I got a 10K views - but not from my clientele.”.
My advice is, keep your efforts(and money) close to your own shoreline. No matter how small the beach is. Look for your people and stick with them. Expand consciously; always ask these basic questions.
Do they want/need my services?” Am I providing the service that they need or want?”Am I providing anything useful here? Knowledge? Entertainment? Value?
My big discovery here was that there is an ocean of online data, and it’s time to tap into it so you can focus on just the right people who want to hear from you.
Big nets are OUT.
The Shouting Game.
We’ve all been treading water in the deep or trying to ride out this new tidal wave of social media. Amidst gulps of air, sore marketing budgets, and shifting platforms, we’ve been struggling to be heard above the noise over rough waters.
The good news is it’s time to stop yelling, it doesn’t work and it’s a money pit. Take a slow deep inhale and breathe out slowly. Repeat 3X. The time has come for conscious thinking, thoughtful marketing with purposeful ideas and you can’t get there by gulping air and shouting.
Authenticity is no longer a cliche when you really believe in what you’re saying and doing. It gets real when you listen to what your clientele wants and start the conversation about what you can do now and in the future for them.
STOP SHOUTING, Talk to your people.
How do you compete when you’re not sprinting the marathon?
According to Mark Schaefer, author of Marketing Rebellion, the answer is conversation. Just because you can reach every single human on the internet doesn’t mean you should. It’s time to take the conversation to the people who really want to hear from you and have a real honest to goodness heart to heart talk. Shouting no longer works and bully marketing is best left for the big buck houses that can afford to play the numbers. David LaPlant will back me on this one, he’s played in the big sandbox and is set on evening out the playing field. And the beauty of online marketing is you can do just that.
I’d love to have that conversation with you.