Making a Difference

Affirmative action, differentiation, Lifestyle

I was listening to an interview of Sir Richard Branson of the Virginia brand today. It was a fairly dated interview, I think about 10 years old. I found it on ilovemarketing.com.

There were three things which stood out for me in this interview. One was the fact that the whole philosophy around which Sir Richard Branson operates is how can he and his companies make a difference in the world.

Even when someone asked him for advice to entrepreneurs, he mentioned about how you can keep increasing the circle of influence where you make a difference, as your company grows.

The other thing which stood out was his emphasis on protecting his time. These people who were interviewing him had all paid a quite a handsome amount to his charity to get an opportunity to interview him. But on the clock he politely closed the interview.

The last thing which I was amazed about was his focus on his family. I have not known too much about him so didn’t know anything about his family. But the way he spoke about how he always ensured , inspite of the fact that he has such a huge business empire, that the family was together was a delight to hear.

If people who run such huge companies can find time to be with their families and also do good and make a difference, then we should be able to also do small bit to the society in which we live.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Lead magnets…..different medium….different possibilities

campaign, digital, lead generation, Marketing, Sales

Marketing is applied psychology. So you need to figure out the strengths of each medium and blend it with human psychology to help you get leads.

In my earlier posts I have written about different physical and electronic media for generating leads. Today we will limit to seeing how you can utilize electronic media.

One of the key things about Google (including YouTube) paid search and to some extent Facebook paid search is the fact that if you can master them, you can can have the equivalent of thousands of sales people working for you, whenever someone is searching for something similar to what you offer.

So while you might show up because of the PPC, how do you ensure that people click on your advertisement first and then leave their email id, so that you can keep marketing to them in the future.

This is where the challenge starts. With PPC, if you have some smart people, you can get your advertisement to show up at a reasonable cost. But there’s no point if they come to your site and leave without giving you their email address. Then your advertisement has been wasted.

One simple way which I have tested after listening to Joe Polish and Dean Jackson on thir Ilovemarketing.com podcast is offering relevant reports. Why this works is that human beings are gatherers/ collectors. So when you are offering something which the person can collect right now and consume whenever they want, they tend to give their email ids.

Right now I have seen that offering this lead magnet using this psychology has worked on getting about 10 email ids a week. I am now working on seeing how to scale it up to see if I can take it to a about a hundred a week….Will keep you posted.

I would suggest mean time if you’ll can also try and give me feedback, in the comments section below, on your success or failure with this.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Simple steps to Creating continuous content for the B2B market

content, education, Marketing, messaging

One big question that I hear a lot of times, how do I create a regular messaging / content calendar; I don’t have enough content.

So this will be a very short post with a simple set of tactics to cover roughly half the year. If you don’t come across anything else during those 6 months which can be created into content, within the 6 months, then you can recycle this. Or I will give some other ideas also….read on.

I learnt this technique from Dean Jackson while taking one of his courses and listening to his podcast on ilovemarketing.com.

The assumption over here is that you know your market well, since you’re focusing on a Single Target Market at a time.

If you know your market well then you will know the typical questions that go on in the mind of the customer, their apprehensions and their aspirations. List down 20 of these questions. Make a response about what’s the best way to handle those questions as they relate to your offerings. Send out out one of these every week. You would then have a calendar decided for 20 weeks.

Then create 6 posts, where you analyse the 20 questions, customer feedbacks, comments etc. This way you would have created a calendar for the complete 6 months.

If after 6 months you don’t have content, then as I said earlier, you can recycle the same content or you could ask your some of your customers about what are the pet peeves that they have with your industry. If you have 10-12 customers and each of them has at least 2 unique issues with your industry , you have created roughly another 24-26 weeks of content, by taking their point of view and also giving suggestions to improve.

Your customers can give you all pointers to the content you will need , if you ask.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

What is the JOB that you want your campaign to do – 2

campaign, lead generation, Marketing, media

This topic was not supposed to be split into 2 posts but it so happened that today morning I was watching a YouTube recording of the ILoveMarketing Meetup Group where Dean Jackson was interviewing Paul Colligan on the topic of podcasting. For those who have not read my post yesterday – I was referring to the Clayton Christensen experiment where he talks about the JOB of a McDonald milkshake. I had used that analogy to talk about why this question is important when you are choosing media instead of blindly following others.

He made a statement similar to what I had made when I was discussing with the media company regarding people blindly choosing Instagram because they get followers faster. Paul narrated a story where he asked a prospect about what was the objective of the podcast that he was trying to make and the prospect said “downloads”. So Paul asked him if downloads from China do or if they were to come from Fiverr – would they meet the objective? Clearly the prospect got the message.

Since there’s so much hype about followers / downloads most people think the objective is to create followers or to get downloads. You need to have clarity on what is the JOB you want your campaign to do. Not multiple jobs. Just one job.

If you are going on any platform – not only social media -for business purposes, there has to be a clearly defined JOB that you want the platform to achieve. Then understand if that platform will meet the objective in the most cost effective way. This is important because you don’t have unlimited supply of funds – even if you have, it would be stupid to get an email address at $10, if there was a way to get it at $1.50.

Don’t get muddled in your thinking based on the hype of the media companies. Its their JOB to sell you on the positives of their medium, but its your JOB to determine, what’s best for you.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!