Two Things Matter to Your Business

The Media Cartel Business Article Two Things that Matter to Your Business

If you want to survive in business you need cutting edge strategies to help your business reach a mass audience. 99% of marketing companies do not use the best marketing strategies to help a business grow fast. So the question we have for you and the question that we ask ourselves a lot is: Why is it that most marketing just plain sucks?

If you look at a billboard, if you open up a website, if you search the internet, most of the marketing that you see, it’s not just okay, it’s not bad, it sucks. It’s horrible. It’s poor—it’s like throwing money down a rat-hole. We all know that this type of marketing was not created by people who didn’t care about the marketing. Most of it was created either by caring business owners who were doing their best job tryin to communicate, or by professional marketing firms who are paid to do this, who’ve been doing this for five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. So why is it that most of it sucks?

Number one is marketing, number two is innovation. Furthermore, everything other than marketing and innovation is a cost—it’s an expense, it’s overhead. Marketing and innovation is where all the profit comes from. What are these two things? Innovation is creating new things that people want and marketing is connecting with those people. The best products and services don’t really need to be sold to people, because the best products and services are solutions to problems or results all in themselves. So, what are people buying when they’re buying your product or service? Are they actually buying the product or service? No.

We believe that business is about two things, and only two things matter to your business.

They’re buying an outcome. They’re buying a result. They’re buying the delivery or escape from some pain or anxiety that they’re feeling. The product or service is a means to an end that they’re seeking. A fundamental mistake that most business people make when marketing and selling their products is they try to talk people into wanting their product instead of saying, “I understand the outcome you’re trying to achieve, I understand you fear of frustration, your pain, I understand what you want.

When you have a fast growing business, (start-up) it is critical that you understand that for you, marketing is not the same as it is for a big, multi-national fortune 500 company. They are two completely different games. What works for them not only probably won’t work for you, but it will probably cost you a lot of money that you could’ve used in much better ways. So the strategy that these big companies use might roughly be described as trying to get their name out there.

Dean Jackson has this great metaphor, he says,” It’s not about getting your name out there, it’s about getting their name in here.” So for you if you have a small unknown brand or high-growth start-up, let’s try to figure out how to get their names in here instead of your name out there, because we don’t want to stand on a mountain top and yell the name of your business and hopefully drum up a billion dollars to spend branding our logo like companies like Nike (which has spent a billion dollars branding their logo…) I don’t know about you, but we don’t have an extra billion dollars around to drive a little shape and a name into the minds of my prospects, We need to do something a little bit more street-smart, a little bit more result-oriented.

So, to us, the kind of marketing that we’re going to do is about getting their name in here. It’s finding your audience, finding your market, understanding their needs and then communicating clearly that your product or service, the thing that you offer will deliver them to the promised land, will help them get the results, the outcome, the delivery from the fear, the anxiety, the pain that they seek at a fair price; and you’ll make an offer to do it. You might want to cut and paste this for your twitter account. Marketing is about conversion, not communication. You’re not trying to communicate with people, you’re trying to get them to come in and convert and give you money in exchange for what it is that you’re trying to sell.

Why Does 99% of Marketing Suck?

The Media Cartel Why 99% of Marketing Sucks Article

We believe that business is about two things, and only two things matter to your business.

If you want to survive in business you need cutting edge marketing strategies to help your business reach a mass audience. 99% of marketing companies do not use the best marketing strategies to help a business grow fast. So the question we have for you and the question that we ask ourselves a lot is: why does most marketing suck? Why is it that most marketing just plain sucks?

If you look at a billboard, if you open up a website, if you search the internet, most of the marketing that you see, it’s not just okay, it’s not bad, it sucks. It’s horrible. It’s poor— it’s like throwing money down a rat-hole. We all know that this type of marketing was not created by people who didn’t care about the marketing. Most of it was created either by caring business owners who were doing their best job trying to communicate, or by professional marketing firms who are paid to do this, who’ve been doing this for five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. So why is it that most of it sucks?

The best products and services don’t really need to be sold to people, because the best products and services are solutions to problems or results all in themselves. So, what are people buying when they’re buying your product or service? Are they actually buying the product or service? No. They’re buying an outcome. They’re buying a result. They’re buying the delivery or escape from some pain or anxiety that they’re feeling. The product or service is a means to an end that they’re seeking.

A fundamental mistake that most business people make when marketing and selling their products is they try to talk people into wanting their product instead of saying, “I understand the outcome you’re trying to achieve, I understand your fear of frustration, your pain…”

So, to us, the kind of marketing that we’re going to do is about getting their name in here. It’s finding your audience, finding your market, understanding their needs and then communicating clearly that your product or service, the thing that you offer will deliver them to the promised land, will help them get the results, the outcome, the delivery from the fear, the anxiety, the pain that they seek at a fair price; and you’ll make an offer to do it. You might want to cut and paste this for your twitter account. Marketing is about conversion, not communication. Marketing is about conversion, not about communication. You’re not trying to communicate with people, you’re trying to get them to come in and convert and give you money in exchange for what it is that you’re trying to sell.

Marketing with AI Robots

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Leveraging Influence with Machine Learning Robots

Don’t worry Stephen Hawkins Artificial Intelligence (AI) or machine learning robots should not be feared, truly smart influencers are already using AI to forge a better and more personal relationship with customers. It’s already making a big difference to marketing communications and product design — and it’s going to expand exponentially.

The goal: automated but personalized and relevant interactions that foster value-generating relationships. Robots will help people learn new things, manage their time, provide financial and fashion advice or guide people to live a healthier, better and happier life.

As (AI) machine learning robots evolve more broadly, it will reach the potential of human-level brain intelligence, that can reason, respond and react like a human being. The engagement opportunities are endless, building emotional connections with audiences through robots that have personality, sentience and multi-dimensional capabilities.

While it may sound like a science fiction storyline, the brand associated with a robot is highly likely to impact human decisions; just like celebrity endorsements or content marketing does today.

We have the movie-induced visions of robots taking over the world, creating a society with no humanity or culture or displacing humans completely, but the possibility of replacing the Kardashians’ makes the risk worth it. Imagine a future where a person wants to lose weight; they could seek out a robot that embodies a healthy lifestyle— a Jenny Craig robot perhaps. Or a Marvel Ironman fan might seek a robot that simulates the character Jeeves. Maybe CNN decides to replace current anchors for better robots.

While it may sound like a science fiction storyline, the brand associated with a robot is highly likely to impact human decisions; just like celebrity endorsements or content marketing does today. The benefit is not about the technological savvy — it’s about lifestyle benefits.

Dear savvy humans, it’s time to move forward with machine learning robots. Commercial, cultural entities, and brands will play an important role in the evolution of robots that will convey message, provide utility or entertainment. Those robots that provide a narrow scope of benefits today will most likely transform and evolve into the ones that we will trust to help make significant decisions in the near future.

Why Strategies Go off the Rails

Media Cartel Article Why Strategies Go off the Rails

Have you ever been in a situation where everyone seemingly agrees on a particular strategy, but somehow it never happens?

See if you identify with this example: A technology firm — with a number of different product areas, geographic units, and service functions — was figuring out how to integrate services for their largest global customers. After extensive planning, the senior management team decided to assign experienced executives to a dozen of these customers, and give them the authority to manage the accounts end-to-end. What they failed to address was that many of the best sales executives couldn’t be released to take on these roles; the financial systems couldn’t provide the right information on a customer-by-customer basis; compensation plans didn’t support integrated selling; and research programs remained geared towards new technologies instead of integrated solutions. So while everyone agreed that an integrated approach was needed, very little change actually occurred.

The fascinating thing about this case, and many others like it, is that nobody took accountability for the lack of strategic execution. In other words, everyone felt individually successful, even though the company experienced a collective failure.

I recently saw this dynamic play out at a meeting of a large consumer products firm, where the top 100 managers were anonymously surveyed with two questions: How aligned are you with the company’s ambitious change strategy; and how aligned do you think your peers are with the strategy? Over 90% of the managers said that they, personally, were aligned with the strategy — but 50% felt that their peers had doubts. In other words they were saying, “I’m fully on board, but many of the other people here are not.”

Obviously something about these answers does not make sense. So to understand them, let me suggest three underlying psychological factors that often cause strategies to derail:

Most people do not want to be part of a collective failure — so holding up a mirror can be a powerful way of helping managers realize when they are headed in the wrong direction.

Passive aggressive disagreement: It’s unlikely that everyone in an organization will agree with all of the nuances of a major strategic shift. Disagreement can be based on logic, experience, or (perhaps unconsciously) discomfort with change or loss of power. In any case, if the culture of the company does not encourage dissent, the resistance will go underground. People will voice their support but not actively do anything to make it happen. For example in our technology case above, the newly appointed account executives found that the finance function, while not standing in the way of the integrated customer approach, also was not doing anything to help.

Fear of confrontation: In most nice organizations where teamwork is encouraged, managers hesitate to confront colleagues who are not fully engaging in the strategic shift. They may not want to make waves or fear harming the relationship. So instead they try to work around it and end up sub-optimizing the strategy. Again, in our case, the account executives and their sales leaders didn’t want to push too hard on finance for fear that it could make things worse for them later by damaging relationships.

Lack of persistent top-down demands: If the successful implementation of a strategy requires change across a number of functions, then a senior leader needs to get everyone on board. Without this explicit expectation — reinforced again and again — people will avoid taking action even though they will continue to smile, nod, and profess support. Many senior leaders are hesitant to push too hard for fear that they will have to take drastic action, like firing someone. So instead they just assume that the pieces will fall into place.

Obviously it’s not easy to change these dynamics, especially when they are often invisible and rooted in long-standing cultural patterns. A good place to start is to point them out and provoke some dialogue, which was the purpose of that survey used at the consumer products meeting. Most people do not want to be part of a collective failure — so holding up a mirror can be a powerful way of helping managers realize when they are headed in the wrong direction.

Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Schaffer Consulting and a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective.

Building Spaceships is the #1 rule to Ranking in SEO

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NASA does a terrible job at SEO and SEM. The urls and the title tags are unorganized. They use flash design all over their sites, the site map and and hierarchy of the site’s navigation is a search bot mess. But look at these the links, likes, and other metrics!

Do you think anSEO company made these numbers happen? How many search engine marketing tactics did NASA use to earn an amazing Domain Authority of 96/100? How much did they spend on google PPC to market this site with millions of monthly page views? My best guess is ZERO for NASA!

NASA doesn’t spend any time working on building links because they’re busy doing cool stuff, building rocket ships instead. They make space ships. When you do something so fantastic and amazing that people have to talk about it, then SEO becomes much, much easier.

Bottom line, if you are spending a majority of your time doing SEM/SEO and only a small percentage creating something useful, then you’re doing it in the wrong order.

Bottom line, if you are spending a majority of your time doing SEM/SEO and only a small percentage creating something useful, then you’re doing it in the wrong order. But, if you’re spending most of your time creating something amazing then then that little time you spend on doing SEM/SEO will be the easiest part of when promoting your business.

Let get real, being successful in SEO doesn’t mean you have to build NASA Space Ships, but you must be extremely talented and dedicated to building amazing, innovative, useful and engaging products to improve your part of the planet.

To do SEO right, build your spaceship first.

Video is Still King of Content

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Brands and Marketers have long stressed the benefit of content for providing customers and prospects with information and meaningful insight. Now with the rise of digital distribution and media channels has propelled content marketing to new heights and investments.

Brands interest in custom content marketing is a growing trend. The Content Council and ContentWise found 52% of North American companies used video for content marketing in just the last year, The cost efficiency of producing and distributing digital content and the ever-increasing amount of time population spends consuming digital media are two major factors driving a greater adoption of digital content marketing formats.

A large portion (35%) of North American companies plan to invest more in content this year, with an even larger percentage (54%) expecting to do so with creating video content. A report released in March 2012 from ContentWise and the Custom Content Council, North American content marketers spent $40.2 billion to produce and distribute content last year, up slightly from $40.1 billion for the year prior. Keeping with the old tradition, print used the majority of budgets (58.7%) last year. Other digital investment in digital content formats, such as websites and email, were slightly down, but spending on other forms of digital content marketing, which include events and video are up 44.4% this year.

One area of opportunity for website updates and growth is mobile. As the US population continue to adopt smartphones and tablets at a rapid rate, mobile website traffic is bound to increase. As consumers search for information on smartphone devices, video content marketers will have to adapt their content assets to meet the needs and viewing requirements of this growing format.