Get right from the get go – the art of introducing yourself

Creating relevance and explaining the benefits are central for making a good introduction. Once you have gained the attention of your prospective customers, you must immediately create relevance with them. You can do that by explaining them their pain and present your approach for solving it. The attention span for the audience is short at this stage, so you must avail the opportunity and develop their interest in you. You should get straight to the point – apply four seconds rule and take no longer than a paragraph (two at most) to establish your relevance with the audience.

Remember that content marketing is all about the audience and so shall be your introduction. There should be no boasting of your credentials as it is in the typical advertising. If you appear ‘full of yourself’ to the audience, they will lose interest in your message. Your message should be customer-centric and demonstrate the value that you can offer to them. A customer-centric message could appear something like this;

Are you looking for a partner to promote your brands through advertising? We will provide you a marketing solution that is just right for your needs. By choosing Champion Advertising as your marketing partner you will gain access to our state of the art production facilities and some great creative ideas to promote your brands. We believe in making you the real champion, while we stand behind to support your brands.

Now compare that with a typical company-centric message. This message is great to inflate your egos but not so to gain the interest of your audience;

Champion Advertising is a leading agency in the industry with years of experience in building great brands. We provide best advertising solutions to our customers and pride ourselves in being best in the business. Our state of the art production facility and top creative minds gives us an edge over everyone else. Let Champion advertising take your brands to the new high.

If you are a stakeholder at Champion Advertising this message may make you feel great about yourself. But if you are a customer, you will think ‘so what’ or ‘how does this concern me’ and lose your interest in it.

Company introduction and benefits are ideally placed on the first page of your website or in an introduction slide of your presentation. If you do this right at the start, you will gain the interest of your audience and take them along on this journey with you.

Some tips for creating great content for your introduction are stated as follows:

1. Remember four seconds rule: Have a compelling start – Choose wisely what you tell your audience in the first two lines of your starting paragraph.
2. Be customer-centric and explain the value from their perspective: You may start by explaining the pain and briefly explain your approach for solving it.
3. List top five benefits that a customer would gain: Customer benefits are different from the features of your product and service, understand this difference. List benefits as bullet points.
4. Write naturally: As talking to a friend – but maintain an appropriate degree of formality and sound professional.
5. Maintain an objective tone: Rather than exaggerated claims or boasting your credentials.
6. Have supportive and balanced graphics: Graphics should provide a suitable environment for your message. They should complement the story but without overshadowing it.
7. Limit your introduction: One paragraph should be sufficient or write two at most.
8. Have fun in creating content

Let me conclude this article with an interesting video clip of a cartoon character. I hope it will help you understand my point.

 

 

 

See my presentations to learn about content marketing strategy

Marketing that provides real-life solutions is the winner

Creating relevant and valuable content is central to the success of social media marketing. People are generally passive in consuming advertisements. They don’t want to hear how great your brand is. They want to know how you can solve their problems. People are inspired when your content helps with their day-to-day challenges. When you continuously provide people with valuable information, they will listen to you, and ultimately reward you with loyalty and business.

Our normal lives have simple problems, which needs simple and life-size solutions. The content created for normal day problems need not be larger-than-life. It means that the content should communicate with people at a real person level, in real-time and space. A life-size content is never seen as “fake” unlike the conventional ads. There are no expensive props, big budget sets and superheros in life-size content. There are just these normal folks, dressed in daily cloths and giving common solutions.

Following is a fascinating content campaign by Apple. It is a smart campaign – life-size, simple and focused at customer pains. A good example of life-size content marketing and also fun to watch. Enjoy viewing it.

 

 

For creating life-size content, acquiring the equipment, shooting, editing and producing should not be a challenge. You can buy or rent simple cameras and Google for top ten tips on shooting a video or on taking great photos. The rest you can learn as you go. In fact, creating the content is the easiest part in social media marketing – to decide what to create is the difficult part.

To keep it relevant, valuable and interesting for the audience is the real challenge in content marketing. With a live audience there is always enough stimulus in the environment to get started with an interesting discussion. You can learn about the interest of a live audience through observing, listening and understanding them. You can entertain them, give them good tips or share good stories to keep them engaged on the topic of interest.

But how can you learn about the interest of your audience, when you have recorded videos, photos or a written article. How do you know what to say? There are no environmental clues to observe or live audience to listen and understand. The trick here is to do your homework well. One can learn about the audience through customer research. Brainstorming and deep things are the techniques that you can then use to create great content ideas. But it can be useful when you know what to say and that is done through research.

I am not suggesting  fancy research like that of a big company. For your business, research should be simple. You should, however, make it formal. This means that you should make good notes, record all observations, document your findings and report them formally.

I suggest you should start with the background reading. Read as much as you can, Google search for the information, check previous records in your company like customer complaint register etc. You can join social media groups to learn about your customers. Gain as much insight into your audience as you can by using secondary research. Give yourself time to gain new insight into your audience as this lays a strong foundation for a successful content marketing campaign.

Another highly recommend research technique is the one-on-one interviews. You should talk to your customers face-to-face to know more about them. Make sure you take an appointment so they can fully dedicate their time to you. Prepare an agenda, list your questions or make a list of things that you want to ask them. Tell them the purpose of your meeting in advance and also repeat it before you start the interview. Ask them questions, listen to them patiently and take notes. Don’t put words in their mouth – listen – understand – and when required, softly probe. You need 15 or more interviews to gain some insight on your audience. And to refine your findings, review the facts that you have collected. Connect the facts with some general laws of human behaviour to gain insight. At the end, conclude your research by formally documenting your findings.

Some quick tips to create winning content are listed as follows:

1. Be simple and life-size: This is the real beauty of social media; your creativity is not restricted by your marketing budgets.
2. Spend time to understand your audience: This insight will go a long way in delivering success in social media marketing.
3. Don’t advertise: People are getting sick of ads so offer them real value through your content. Focus on solving problems and addressing pains so your audience can truly benefit.
4. Make a strong subject line: Start strong to engage your audience in the first 4 seconds or the first two lines of your content. The online audience have small attention span so you must grab their attention in this small window of opportunity.
5. Engage with your customers on social media: Read their comments, note feedback, respond to any inquiry that they may have. Be proactive in your engagement, listen, understand and learn. Offer help when possible.

In content marketing everyone is a winner

Content marketing is the process of attracting and retaining customers by creating and distributing relevant and valuable content. Instead of pitching your products or services, you deliver information that makes buyers more intelligent. When you deliver consistent and valuable information to customers, they ultimately reward you with business and loyalty.

In content marketing everyone including the audience, business and agency are the winners.

The audience is a winner

In the content marketing audience is a winner. They get free access to valuable information and advice, which they can use to gain benefit. Moreover, content marketing is completely pressure free. There is nothing like loud advertisements and pushy sales pitch in content marketing. It is a soft and settled form of marketing.

For example: a health club would offer exercise tips, diet plans, workout routines and free advice from nutritionist using Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube or other social media outlets for its marketing. If you are an existing or a potential customer of the health club, you are conscious of increasing waist or your weight is a concern for you, imagine how nice it is to get free advice that can help address all your health related concerns.

The business is a winner

In content marketing the business is a winner. Marketing through social media is a cheaper and an efficient way to reach to your target customers. This means that you will get higher returns for your investment (ROI)

The content development for social media is quite inexpensive as it is life-size medium – against the mass media, which needs larger than life formats. This means that you can be creative, make more content, in less time and at a fraction of the cost of mass media production.

Social media is an interactive medium, where you are continuously communicating with the customers, building understanding of their preferences and receiving feedback from them in real-time. Marketing without customer insight is like shooting in the dark. In the world of the conventional marketing and advertising, every mistake is an expensive mistake. Social media can help a company avoid making expensive mistakes.

Imagine how useful it is to gain insight in customer likings, in real-time, against waiting for months for your survey results to arrive. You can take decisions faster, save costs and increase revenues by being proactive through using social media marketing.

The agency is a winner

In content marketing, the agency is a winner too. They can build life-size content – which connects well with the ordinary people and be creative at it. This means that a marketing firm can think out of the box, which is possible in the absence of pressures and restrictions of the mass media production.

Besides that an agency can now serve a much bigger market of large and small businesses, including the B2B* companies with social media marketing. This means that there will be additional revenue streams through content marketing. You will still develop big budget campaigns for your large B2C** clients and also have regular revenue coming from a big pool of small business clients. No longer is your fate tightly connected to your few ‘big-ticket’ clients. With a content marketing portfolio you will reduce your business risks and also earn higher incomes.

Let’s celebrate these victories with the social media marketing strategy that delivers results.

*B2B or Business to Business is a reference to organizations, which sells products or services to other organizations

**B2C or Business to Consumer is a reference to organizations, which sells products or services to consumers.

The case studies – a key tool in your content marketing arsenal

Every company must provide evidence of capability to their prospective clients by sharing case studies with them. Case studies are the success stories from your past that serves as a confidence building tool for your future clients. A case study would help build trust of prospective clients in your offers because ‘if you have done it right in the past’, they would feel that ‘you can do it right in the future too’. A good case study is one that tells a story of one client to another, and in doing so, establishes your credibility. Always remember that it is the story of a client and not yours, and so, the client has to be the real hero in a case study.

Common mistakes one can see in the case studies are that quite often they start to sound like a commercial or technical manual. I can see why people are tempted to make such mistakes. If only one could appreciate the purpose of a case study as a tool in building credibility among the newly acquired prospectus, they could avoid making these mistakes. The purpose of a commercial is to gain attention – which comes earlier in a sales cycle – whereas the purpose of a technical manual is to educate a customer – which comes later – and, that too, when you are selling high-tech products or services.

Another mistake in case studies is that companies often make them very long. Of course you would want to do that when your purpose is to educate readers regarding the processes (starting from how the project was acquired to the challenges faced in the execution and the achievements, and so on), which would be narrated in detail. Such case studies serve well as academic references. The purpose of the case studies in marketing of an organization, on the other hand, is not to educate, hence the size of these would be smaller.

In my opinion, a marketing case study should not be over 5 pages. An ideal case study would be 2 or 3 pages long. A case study should be available for download on the company’s website and may also be attached with the bids. A case study can be a written document, a presentation, an audio file or an audio-video clip.

A case study could provide information in the following sequence:

1. Introduction of the client – size, industry, competition, customers etc. (1 to 2 paragraphs)
2. The challenge statement or the objectives of the assignment (1 paragraph or few bullet points)
3. The approach that you took in solving the challenges (1 to 2 paragraphs)
4.  The solutions that you offered (a list of products or/and services)
5. The results that were achieved (1 to 2 paragraphs – provide evidence of your work quality or highlight numeric achievements, when possible)
6. A case study may also contain testimonials from clients highlighting your achievements – an endorsement is better than the commercial

You must always get the text of case study approved by the client before it is published. In making a case study you should take utmost care in securing the trade secrets of your organization and that of your client’s.

See a sample case study on Marketing of Health Club, a consulting assignment that I completed in 2008.

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12 reasons for you to market your organization using the social media

Here are the 12 reasons for small businesses, startups and B2B companies to market their products and services, using the social media:

1. On-the-go marketing: You can reach people at work, home or on the go as they can access social media sites through a PC or handheld mobile devices.
   
2. Narrows down on your customers: You can narrow down on your targeted customers. Social media marketing is great for small businesses as they operate in niche markets. B2B companies can also benefit from the social media marketing, especially when marketing through LinkedIn.
   
3. Bringing people closer to the businesses: The social media consumption is growing fast, bringing people closer to the businesses.
   
4. The national boundaries have faded: The national boundaries have faded and you can market at any place in the world, using the social media. This is a good news for businesses involved in international trade.
   
5. Longer lives the message: The life of a message posted on social media is longer compared to traditional media. It stays there as people keep coming and commenting.
6. High involvement marketing: People comment and engage with each other on the marketing content provided by your organization. This increases their involvement level and hence is an opportunity to create higher brand recall and recognition.
   
7. It is viral: People like to share content with other people through social media. This makes a marketer’s job easy and hard at the same time. The consumers now also spread the message of the organizations, voluntarily – making it easy for marketers to reach new customers. And because content marketing should always be interesting, the bar has been lifted on what consumers’ choose to like and share – making it harder for marketers to create interesting content, frequently.
   
8. Scalability: Social media can be scaled up or down to match the marketing needs of all businesses. You can scale up your marketing at anytime, as often as you require and always with a marginal increase in the cost.
9.  Inexpensive: It is fairly inexpensive compared to the traditional media. It can match the pocket sizes of any business – startup, small or large.
   
10. Receptive audiences: The audience on social media is more receptive to the marketing content as they have not developed mental filters to block the commercials.
11.  Social media encourage interaction: There is a two-way flow of information between the company and the customers in social media, giving everyone the opportunity to engage and learn.
    
12. Ease to measure results: It is easy to measure performance of marketing efforts on social media. Simple to use and free of cost tools are available to measure the effectiveness of social media marketing.

For information on how it works, see my presentations on social media marketing strategy that deliver results.