Announcement: Han’s Bi-weekly Column on Entrepreneur

Exciting announcement: I now have a column on Entrepreneur.com!

In my most recent article, 5 Lessons Video Games Taught Me About Success,  I talk about how my favorite childhood outlet prepared me for adult life.

Now that I run my own business, I barely have time to play games. But I have had a lot of time to reflect on the life lessons they taught me. In fact, I’m convinced that playing games taught me important lessons about how to succeed at business.”

I relate how the lessons  I learned, such as embracing failure, taught me life-long habits.

“Repeated failure is built into the learning curve of any well-designed game. Overcoming failure is what makes games addictive in the first place. Yet, so many gamers forget this lesson as soon as they put down the controller. Failure is a crucial part of success in real life, too, and you have to learn to embrace it.”

Want to know what other lessons can be learned from video games? Check out the complete article here.
Don’t forget to follow my bi-weekly column on Entrepreneur,  I’ll have a new article out every other Friday.


How to Spring Clean Your Marketing Strategy

You’ve probably cleaned out your house countless times, but have you ever thought about sprucing up your marketing strategy?

Spring cleaning is a great tradition. After spending months cooped up indoors, it’s a chance to refresh and refocus for the second half of the year. Why not apply that same energy to cleaning up your marketing strategy as well?

Step 1: Organize Your Efforts

If your team has been winging it, take this time to meet and document your marketing strategy as best as you can. Make a list of the different efforts you want to focus on this year, and fill in as much as possible. How are you reaching you social media goals? Content Marketing? Branding? Networking?

Creating editorial calendars and written strategies that document your plan keeps focus sharp long-term.

Step 2: Polish the Important Pieces  

It’s easy to neglect your platforms once they’re set up and rolling smoothly. Don’t make the mistake of accepting “functioning” as “succeeding.” Use this spring cleaning exercise as an excuse to do a self-audit of your platforms, content and brand

Start by pulling all of the data you can—analytics on everything you have. Take a look at them, one by one, and ask yourself questions such as:

Social Media

  • Which social media platforms are generating engagement? Is the engagement valuable (i.e. is it leading to conversions?)
  • Which aren’t? Is it because you don’t have an audience on the platform? Is it because your audience isn’t present on that platform?

Brand

  • A brand evolves over time. Is yours still speaking to your audience? Is it still representative of your company?

Content

  • Which topics resonate well with your audience? Is your content actually useful, or is it just a sales pitch?

By cleaning up and polishing these important aspects of your business, you reboot your entire company’s vision and focus.

Take Out the Trash

Are you wasting your energy on duds? Marketing in general takes a great deal of resources, and there’s no point investing resources into a void.

Now that you’ve audited and seen the analytics, you have a better idea of what’s working and what’s not.

To invest your resources wisely:

  • Be selectively social: Having a dead Instagram account linked to your company’s homepage weakens the company’s brand as a whole. If you haven’t posted in months, let it go.
  • Go through the mail: email marketing analytics make it easy to see which email addresses are responsive to your campaigns. If there certain email addresses that always bounce or end up undelivered, delete them. This will make your analytics more accurate and provide deeper insights.
  • Back up your brand: Content that no longer speaks to your brand or provides no value to your customer is the marketing equivalent of having shag carpet in your living room: it sets a bad (and wrong) impression. Let it go. 

Stock up on Essentials

Now that you’ve figured out your plan, dusted off and re-booted your strategies and optimized your efforts, it’s time to make the rest of the year go as smoothly as possible.

Having a generous backlog can ensure that there is always quality content coming out, without having to worry about falling behind during a busy week.

  • If you have a content calendar, try to work 2-4 weeks in advance. This keeps pieces timely, yet provides enough leeway to fall behind every now and then.
  • If you don’t have a content calendar, try to make one for the next quarter or the rest of the year. Keep in mind important company events, holidays and promotions.
  • Make an email marketing idea list. It’s hard to come up with new and engaging topics every week, so having a list of fallbacks and sure-winners helps streamline the process.
  • Stock up on visual content (such as pictures and videos) that you can easily pull from to post on Instagram, Facebook or blogs.

Do You to Spring Clean Your Marketing Strategy?

Try to remember how good it feels to sit in a nice, clean room and how glad you were that you finally got around to cleaning it.

This year, focus on achieving that same feeling for your marketing strategy:

  • Organizing your efforts: make your goals easy to find and easy to maintain
  • Clean up your presence: make sure your brand and its assets are helping and not hurting you
  • Invest resources wisely: don’t keep dragging along dead initiatives
  • Keep a backlog: Having content to pull helps streamline your strategy

Tailored Ink Co-Founder and CEO Han-Gwon Lung Featured in the Millennial Minds Series

Our co-founder and CEO, Han-Gwon Lung, recently sat down with 20 Something’s Cara Kovacs  as a part of their Millennial Minds series.

The Millennial Minds series “casts a spotlight on those among us who have been creative and courageous enough to make money doing what they love.”

The series features successful Millennials who disprove the negative stereotypes associated with the generation, and uses them as examples the creativity, resilience, and business savvy the generation possesses.

Han is in good company as a featured Millenial for the series. Others featured include filmmaker Nicole Groton, international lifestyle blogger Erica Fox, and pro basketball player turned financier turned entrepreneur, Chris Turi.

During the interview, the two spoke about the inspiration for Tailored Ink, breaking the boundaries of traditional business, and why the corporate life isn’t for everyone.

“Don’t think that corporate life will get better. If you don’t like it at entry level, you won’t like it in a managerial role, either.”

Han also shared a few pieces of wisdom he’s learned along the way:

“If you want true flexibility and the satisfaction of ‘eating what you kill’ (and not relying on the whims of managers for raises and bonuses), learn how to do sales. Then start your own business.”

You can read the full interview here.


Different Strokes for Different Folks: Marketing to B2B vs. B2C

How to Sell a Knife

I’ve always found Cutco’s business model fascinating. If I had to try and sell kitchen cutlery door to door, knives wouldn’t be my first choice (for various reasons). So say what you will about Cutco’s high school and college sales reps—they they know how to sell knives.

The fact that Cutco’s business model holds up at all is a testament to their targeted marketing. They know they’re a B2C knife company—they’re the only one I can think of—and so they market their knives differently than B2B knife brands like Shun or Zwilling that sell directly to stores.

Which brings us to the topic of this blog post.

Marketing to B2B vs. B2C

Marketing of all kinds has only one goal: sales.

The strategy used to achieve those sales, however, differs when marketing to other businesses versus directly to consumers. While B2B marketing is more relationship driven, B2C marketing is more product driven, and these factors need to be taken into consideration when creating a comprehensive framework and strategy.

Who are you talking to, again?

As we’ve talked about before, finding your ideal voice is crucial to business success. Your B2B voice should probably be mature, professional, and knowledgeable. When writing for businesses, you have to consider all of the people you need to sell your product to before reaching the decision-maker. This can include managers, directors and even the C-suite.

On the other hand, your B2C voice could be very colorful or conservative depending on who you’re targeting. After all, there are a lot more individual customers out there than there are businesses. Keep in mind that when writing for consumers, you’re typically only talking to one person—the decision-maker.

Are you speaking their language?

The right content types differ for B2B vs. B2C marketing strategies as well.

In B2B marketing, longer, more technical pieces fare better than the personable, pithy pieces that are staples of B2C writing.

In fact, according to research from the Content Marketing Institute, the most popular content marketing methods for B2C brands are:

  • Social media
  • Illustrations and photos
  • Newsletters
  • Videos
  • Blog posts

B2C tactics revolve around engaging and delighting the individual consumer. In contrast, another study from the same institute identified the most important B2B Marketing tactics as:

  • In-person events
  • Webinars/webcasts
  • Case studies
  • White papers
  • Videos

The B2B tactics revolve around creating relationships (e.g., through in-person events, such as conferences or trade shows) and developing an authoritative brand (through highly detailed thought leadership content, including white papers and videos).

Takeaway: the decision-makers at businesses make decisions based on logic, rationale, and budgets, while general consumers are more impulsive and make decisions based on their emotional state.

Are you ready to create your own strategy?

It’s not complicated to  figure out how to tailor your marketing strategy to meet your needs, even when considering B2B vs. B2C. When creating a strategy, consider:

  • Generalized vs. Tailored: B2C businesses can afford to talk to a large audience. Consumer purchase decisions are usually based off simple needs, while business purchase decisions are usually very specific, and need to fit the complex needs of an entire business.
  • Emotional vs. Logical: Decision makers at businesses are focused on budgets, benefits, and efficiency. Consumers are focused on happiness.
  • Engaging vs. Valuable: (Most) consumers don’t spend hours and hours trying to decide whether to buy from one company or another, but you’d be hard pressed to find a  business that doesn’t vet all its vendors. Businesses want to see that they’re buying from professionals that understand and care about their specific needs, while consumers want to know they’re buying from a brand that has the same values.

 


Finding and Speaking to Your Ideal Customer

Finding your ideal customer is crucial to business success. Once you create that buyer persona, the rest pretty much falls into place. It becomes easier to build a strong brand, target your social media efforts and create other types of targeted content.

An easy way to understand the power of a buyer persona is to compare a small table of people at lunch to a stadium with thousands of spectators. Which group do you think is easier to sell to?

Define Your Brand From Your Customer’s Point of View

The biggest mistake you can make is to build your customer base around how you want your company to be perceived.

Instead, ask yourself, what benefits do your company offer to your ideal customer? How can it solve their pain points? Then ask yourself, who does this really speak to?

That’s why the most effective way to gauge your audience in an unbiased manner is by taking a data-driven approach.

Take the NFL, for example. Historically, football has been considered a male sport. It seems to make sense for the NFL to focus on a male audience. Right?

Wrong. In 2010, the NFL learned that women make up close to 40 percent of all football fans. So they re-targeted by creating more modern, sophisticated apparel (read: not just pink jerseys) and women responded. In 2014, Super Bowl XLVIII was the most-watched television event among women.

Creating a Buyer Persona

Now it’s time to put together everything you’ve come up with so far. A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer.

Creating a great buyer persona requires:

  • Data
  • Insight
  • Understanding your customer
  • Understanding your company
  • A little imagination

It takes some work, but in the long-term personas will allow you to tailor your content, services and brand to meet the specific needs, concerns and behaviors of your potential customers.

Once you have an idea of the group you want to target, it’s time to analyze them. Are they more likely to be male or female? Are they younger or older? Are they from the East Coast or West Coast? Do they download apps? How educated are they? Some of these may seem trivial, but they’ve been proven to affect what a customer expects out of his experience.

From there, create a succinct elevator pitch that addresses all of those, and explains how your company can help.

Keep persona in age when building content. This will help you decide whether to spend more time on Instagram or Facebook, whether your emails should be more informational or witty, and whether you need more videos or testimonials on your webpage.

According to Hubspot research, using personas made websites between two and five times more effective to use.

Speak Directly to the Customer

You’ve done the research and compiled a perfect buyer persona, you have an elevator pitch that could sell ice to an Eskimo. Now what?

It’s time to put that work to good use by creating targeted content. By tailoring your content to your specific audience, you are able to concentrate your efforts and optimize your resources.

Skytap, a self-service cloud automation company, launched a tailored content marketing strategy and saw a 210 percent increase in North American traffic and that targeted personas brought in 124 percent more sales leads.

In a marketing world that revolves around social media, email marketing, and user experience, customers expect more than a generalized sales pitch.

Seamless is a great example of the powerful ads that you can create when you know your audience. In 2015 they launched a New York City subway campaign that uses witty one-liners and NYC generalizations to create effective, memorable ads.

They know their audience is the busy millennial, and they speak to that with adages such as “Cooking is so Jersey” and “Avoid Cooking like you Avoid Times Square.”

Who’s your Audience?

Finding the right audience isn’t necessarily easy, but it pays off in the long run. Luckily, experts and business owners have developed a bit of a process to help you along:

  • Define your company from the outside-looking-in.
  • Collect as much data and research as you can find about your audience.
  • Compile the information into a buyer persona that examines demographics, behavioral patterns and translates them into an elevator pitch.

Only then are you ready to sell.