Thumbnail Marketing

It’s time to end recession thinking with the official close of winter — and spring forward with marketing for the economic recovery. Several of my nonprofit, small business and independent consultant clients have spent the last weeks of winter taking the 3 critical steps to rebound their activity in activity in 2010:

• Focus
• Focus
• Focus

Communications activities suffered badly in the recession, although communicating value was never more important. Yet stretched budgets, reduced revenues and decreased fundraising income often left little choice. Survival thinking took a toll on creativity and caused everyone to think small, reminding me of the “lizard brain” paralysis described in Seth Godin’s new book, Linchpin.

Last year found many small organizations getting stuck in the churn. Getting unstuck can take two paths, both driven by “focus.” One is to understand your value proposition and do it better than your peers and competitors. The other is to carefully differentiate between a brand problem and a business problem. Once that’s resolved, reviewing and perhaps repositioning your marketing is the logical next step.

The latest research confirms that customers are tired of hearing about the recession, paving the way for tapping into consumer optimism. Stepping back to take a good look about how you are positioning your business is a timely exercise that can put you on the leading edge as the recovery heats up. It’s the core of a communications audit.

Is your message buried in your materials? Have you truly leveraged your business concept in your marketing? Are you trying to pursue too many audiences and none of them with full attention? Have you listened to your customers recently, and what are they saying? Do the people in your organization have the tools to be your messengers and ambassadors, whether it’s you, your small staff, your volunteers?

I’ve developed this “Spring Forward Bootcamp” as a cost-effective half-day program to refocus and rebound marketing communications for community nonprofits, small businesses and independent consultants to refresh your marketing with impact and momentum. We’ll roll up our sleeves together to (1) clarify and target communications goals, (2) review and assess messages, materials and systems and (3) focus your story and map out strategies into a communications action plan for 2010.

What I know today about marketing I learned in the first half of my career in journalism. The basics are the same – who? what? when? where? how? — and, most importantly, why? With these fundamentals, you can truly focus your marketing outreach:

• Who are you?
• What value can you provide me?
• When, where and how do you make it happen?
• Why should I do business with you? Why should I donate to your cause?

I’ve been applying this thinking to my own “spring forward” value proposition – helping you map out the framework to strengthen your story, develop the strategy and implement your communications roadmap to take advantage of the rebound in 2010.

What steps would you add to this “rebound your marketing” plans?

Consultants and entrepreneurs are typically thought leaders, but may not realize or appreciate it, so they miss personal marketing opportunities. That’s often true of marketing consultants, who excel at marketing their clients but not themselves. And it’s even worse for many women consultants, according to Kate Purmal, a consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area, told the Women in Consulting North Bay/Marin group. “You know your material, you deliver it, it all seems painfully obvious, but you feel you don’t have that much to contribute.”

Purmal, who has her own firm — Kate Purmal Consulting – works with start-ups, emerging ventures and small businesses to launch and implement strategic initiatives and coaches clients on thought leadership and sales skills.

The term “thought leader” was coined in 1994 by Joel Kurtzman, editor in chief of Strategy and Business – one who is a “futurist” or is recognized among peers and mentors for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights.

Why position yourself as a thought leader? The advantages are clear, Purmal noted:

• Establish yourself as a credible source
• Showcase the breadth of your skills
• Deepen your role as a trusted advisor
• Create more exposure and generate more leads
• Build and elevate your brand
• Raise rates and increase revenue when you develop supporting collateral, such as a book

Thought leaders establish their positioning in various ways. Some thought leaders are trend-spotters (Faith Popcorn), others are provocateurs (Timothy Ferris, author of The 4-Hour Workweek). Some have a unique voices while still others are curators of ideas and aggregators of thoughts, but applying them in fresh ways.

Working with clients to develop and promote their own thought leadership, I’ve found that it often takes a particular lens and outside perspectives to identify and put shape to what’s potentially “thought leadership.” That can apply to personal and small business marketing, as well. It’s smart to bounce your ideas off others and work carefully to refine a succinct message. But that shouldn’t mean paralysis-by-analysis either. Here are other ways Purmal advises to get started or continue the thought leadership journey:

• Don’t be afraid. Take a stand.
• Pick the most valuable thing you do and use that as your calling card, at least to get in the door.
• Craft a compelling and credible bio.
• Convert your area of expertise into a thought leadership platform that you can use in a variety of ways.
• Find the hook — and apply it in blogs, whitepapers, email newsletters, presentations and social media posts (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn).
• Believe in the value of improvisation, innovation and the “art of possibility.”

Social media and “killer content” held court today — once again — at Marketing Profs’ Digital Marketing Virtual Conference, the second one this year. Cruising through the sessions and booths at this information-loaded real-time experience is completely worth an all-day visit.

The statistics continue to accelerate — 60% of Americans use social media, according to Becky Carroll of the Petra Consulting Group and Michael Brito, social media strategist for Intel, in their presentation, “Building Customer Loyalty on the Social Web.” Of that 60%:

• 59% use it to interact with companies
• 93% believe that companies should have a social media presence
• 85% believe a company should interact with its audiences via social media

It’s remarkable how the social media buzz has changed from the “wow” factor to some serious long-term thinking. The experts have moved beyond their fascination with the cool tools and more thoughtfully into the durability of the social web for longer-term marketing strategies. In getting started, how’s a business to choose the best course of action? The marketing basics of relationship-building still count. ”Map out a strategy first, because the tools will change, and you want to be able to adapt to the next tool out there,” Carroll advised. “Believe it or not, Twitter won’t always be around.”

That’s really a solid point.  The Marketing Profs group certainly has its tactics well-mapped to an overall strategy: this virtual conference reportly has 12,000 registrations.

Another new study presented by Carroll and Brito correlates financial performance with ”deep brand engagement” among the Top Ten brands, such as Starbucks, Dell, Google, Yahoo and Intel. The take-aways here are that simply listening to customers without responding and taking action makes a business’ social media strategy not only ineffective but irrelevant. Social media marketing must create a real conversation, not just sell your brand. That means showcasing competitors’ good ideas, exchanging knowledge, being authentic and believable. Through that service comes credibility, and the most successful firms, small to large, have proven that credibility through social media leads customers to action — to buy.

‘Killer content” is a term that’s been refined, too. Think of it as engaging customers outside of particular transactions, noted presenter Kathy Warren, digital strategy-social media program manager for Hewlett Packard, and Kari Homan and Natanya Anderson of Powered, Inc., in another session. Killer content is something far different from messaging, demos and press releases.

Take HP’s online Learning Center, which they described as the “crown jewel” of the firm’s integrated marketing strategy. The interactive site drives brand loyalty and acquires new prospects through a learning environment rich in lifestyle content based on consumer needs and interests. The 115 content areas, tied to HP’s business objectives, are broken down into four categories: PC Security and Maintenance, Home Office, Digital Photography, and Microsoft Office and Adobe. Users create profiles and choose from a host of options — such as newsletters, customer insights and analytics, and social tools. Through this unbiased information, many customers eventually migrate to a purchase decision about an HP product, but that’s not the exclusive — or apparent — goal.

HP’s numbers tell the story of a successful Learning Center strategy:

• 22 million visits since 2004
• 1.3 million enrollments
• 92% would recommend the site to others
• 22% reported a purchase of an HP product
• 11% have stayed actively engaged since 2004

Among what the presenters called the “10 Commandments of Killer Content,” keep these priorities in mind:

• No infomercials — ever!
• Know and honor your audience and what they want to learn.
• Offer breadth and depth of content — keep it fresh and relevant but also some content that will have a long life.
• And here’s a really good one — listen to your customers and use that data to cut through organizational politics to make decisions about the content that will make them part of your community.

Blogging fatigue set in during the second half of the summer. There’s something ancient, seasonal and even spiritual about this contemporary phenomenon, which has been amplified this year by the recession. The sages of Chinese medicine identified late summer’s heat as a real drag on activity and dispositions. In the modern era, Europeans in droves vacate their homes and countries for somewhere else in August. Here at home, Congress acknowledges its lethargy, gives up and disappears for a few weeks, or tries to… 

But it’s difficult to be purely philosophical about such cycles in 2009 when the Internet seems to have become everyone’s professional and personal salvation — and there is today no escape from the online heat, whatever the season.

Experiencing blogging and social media angst, I turned to the masters of the craft for guidance and found it, happily rather quickly, from Beth Kanter, the high-octane blogger who always says something worth reading. Sure enough, in the dog days of August, she counseled about Information Overload Awareness Day. The bullet point that really hit home was the New York Times’ article, Blogging at a Snail’s Pace.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of research lately on changes in the workforce due to the recession — facts like these, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report this week:

• 14.9 million people out of work in the U.S. since the recession began in December 2007 (and still growing)
• A tripling of temporary workers since 1990 — from 1 to 3 million — and a pattern expected to reach 12 million in the next decade

It’s not hard to do the math through simple observation. People have more time on their hands, and the Internet, as we all know, has given everyone a vehicle for business and personal marketing. Yet the statistics are even more startling, as listed in a few mind-blowing nuggets: there are more than 133 million indexed blogs in Technorati, and Twitter has grown 1000% in the past year. Want more data?

Which leads back to the question at hand: What’s your Internet voice? It’s an age-old marketing challenge, traditional, social, or otherwise — what do you have to say, what’s distinctive about it, and, what’s more, when, how and to what audiences are you going to say it?

So as we regroup for the post-recession and perhaps apply some useful marketing lessons from today’s online frenzy, let’s refocus on strategy.

Why are you online? Know your strategy so you can choose the best tactics from the abundance of Internet tools:

• To engage customers? Build a relationship by listening and acting.
• Be a thought leader? Have something to say that sets you apart.
• Express yourself? Enjoy and create. (I’ve had a travel blog, www.womantraveler.info, for years and post entries only when I’ve had a terrific trip, discovered a fabulous tip, or need to register an opinion that might be helpful to helping others “travel on their own terms.” Nonetheless, I have regular unsolicited followers of my current as well as archived articles.)
• Fill up time? Use the Internet to learn something new and inform yourself.
• See and be seen? Go work out at the health club (another scene that is busier than ever these days)…

I’ve used this pause from blogging to get my business ready for the post-recession. Stay tuned.

“Thumbnail marketing” – doing more with less — is increasingly driving the thinking of nonprofits (from universities to community agencies), large and small business — and the communications pros/marketers who serve them — from agencies to sole proprietors. We see it daily in our client conversations, partner networking and online chatter. It’s not about decreasing quality — it’s about enhancing messages and customer connections with smart, efficient tools. Here are some recent finds offering technology and thoughtful resources that zero in on core activities that will advance your marketing goals:

Online Newsrooms

• Online newsrooms on small business websites are a marketing strategy must. Adding social media is the saucy sauce that keeps the conversations hot. None of this is difficult — but you have to establish your “story” before marketing can take off.

Social Media

• The 5 P’s of Social Media: Where Do You Start?” from Fast Company – steps that boil it down to the essentials for jumping into Web 2.0 successfully.

Websites

• Web Redesign on a Dime from University Business –tools and tips to update and revamp a higher education website when a major overhaul is no longer a budget reality. Universities are pushed to incorporate web best practices and social media tools ASAP given the expectations of their alumni, parents and students — who are likely ahead of the institutional curve.
• The eduStyle Guide to Usable Higher Ed Homepage Design, an e-book from eduStyle, which is dedicated to higher education websites. Don’t miss its popular blog.

Thumbnail Marketing

• The Complete (Thumbnail) Guide to Choosing the Right Media – for your small business. Of course, we love this idea since the entire focus of this blog is the thumbnail approach!

Search engine optimization for websites and blogs is more science and art — and more time-consuming than the experts make it sound. You have to be proactive about your web visibility in every way, not simply keywords and title tags in web and blog content.

Here are a couple of articles from Search Engine Watch experts that will help strengthen your SEO — submitting websites and blogs to “must-have” directories related to your business and optimizing your site content once they’ve landed on your pages.

And if you decide that hiring an SEO specialty firm is the best course of action, these pointers — including the reader comments at the end — are useful for guiding your “search.”

Daria Steigman’s “Independent Thinking” article about the “Small Business Edge” in this economy is well worth a read from the International Association of Business Communicators. Spelling out the advantages that solopreneuers and small businesses have in this economy, it’s a timely companion to our Center for Volunteer and Nonprofit Leadership brownbag discussion yesterday.

President Obama’s 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe was the keynoter at today’s Marketing Profs online conference, and the Obama 2.0 guiding themes for harnessing and managing volunteers should be in everyone’s brand loyalty playbook:

• Core messaging never changes, despite pushback.
• Messages are consistent across all communications platforms every day.
• Repetition, repetition…and more repetition.
• Believe in the power of people to deliver the message.
• Use every tool — from old-school tactics to innovation — and no tool is more important than any other.
• Embrace new technology, but don’t let it take you away from your strategic mission.
• The campaign’s website (“the people’s home”) and email were the central drivers. Twitter didn’t even exist when the campaign started!
• Arm volunteers with information and data so they can spread the word through their own social networking entry points and in their own words, as long as they stick to the core message.
• Use videos and Flickr for personalization.
• Don’t get ensnared in negative comments, but understand that they can be early warning signals.
• Analyze the customer base continually.
• Measure obsessively.
• Take risk!

The impact of the recession on communications practitioners is game-changing. I’ve been thinking about that forecast ever since the “Financial Meltdown Mania” panel discussion by the San Francisco chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) as 2009 had gotten underway.

Our Bay Area senior communicator colleagues from Double Forte, Goodwill Industries, Cisco, Wells Fargo Advantage Funds and Hart Communications followed a meltdown analysis by Tom Osborne, vice president for alliances at Exeros (“the only thing that remains the same is historical ignorance”).

The overall takeaways:

• Strong companies with a good story to tell have a marketing opportunity to get their messages out.
• Marketing in the crisis is not just about products but thought leadership.
• Status quo is not going to make it.

Useful tips:

• Leverage a niche that can be developed.
• Develop a communications playbook to drive marketing strategy, internally and externally, with a focus on expanding customer relationships while preparing for the economic upturn.
• Maintain transparency, be realistic, empower new communicators among your employees.
• Focus on the value that you can deliver.
• Communicate more — long periods of deafening silence, especially internally, breed fear and mistrust.
• As with any crisis, say what you know – and also what you don’t know.
• Don’t be afraid to break your model and try new things.