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.
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?
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.
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
Brand
Content
By cleaning up and polishing these important aspects of your business, you reboot your entire company’s vision and focus.
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:
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.
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:
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.
]]>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 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:
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:
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.
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:
]]>
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?
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.
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:
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.
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.”
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:
Only then are you ready to sell.
]]>Here’s what you need to keep in mind when you go to write.
Ann Handley, author of the go-to handbook, Everybody Writes, puts it in a much better way: “
“Assume the reader knows nothing. But don’t assume the reader is stupid.”
You want to inform them, to persuade them, to educate them. You don’t want to talk down to them and you definitely do not want to waste their time.
A surefire stay relevant to your audience when you write copy is to speak to them directly. If you’re publishing an ad in a trade magazine, don’t keep boilerplating your main features, speak directly to your audience’s pain points.
Say you’re selling a cell phone.
Your website might say: “Our latest model connects you to the world around you, one app at a time…” before going over its top features.
Similarly, an ad in a photography magazine should focus on a photographer’s biggest pain point: “Never miss a moment. With our latest model, you can leave your camera at home. Capture professional quality pictures with our 16 MP camera….”
You get the point.
Don’t use your valuable space to push a handful of obviously scripted, vague testimonials, either. Do you actually believe the people in commercials? Testimonials are a great tool, but make sure they’re real and sound like something a real person would say.
A study by the Nielsen Norman Group estimated that on average, users only read 18% of what’s on a page. They concluded that 8 out of 10 people will read the headline, but only 2 out of 10 will read the other copy. You have a very small opportunity to make an impression.
Have a punchy personality
Have you ever tried to read an oven manual? How about a press release? Technical writing doesn’t make for good copy.
Don’t forget your brand’s voice. If you have a strong brand, it’s developed a lifelike personality, and that should shine through. Be sassy, be sarcastic, write copy you would want to read.
Tell a relatable story
Writing copy is very much an art form, just like any other form of writing. Even if you don’t have formal training, just think back to your eighth grade writing class: Show, don’t tell.Have a beginning, middle, and end. Be descriptive. . Find your voice..
Everyone loves a good story. Start by making sure your business has a great background. Make your customers love you because of where you came from and what you stand for. If they can relate to you, that’s fantastic.
That way, when you write copy elsewhere, you have a great foundation to work with. Perfect copy doesn’t make you feel like you’re reading a sales pitch, it lets your imagination do the work. Feed your readers metaphors, imagery, humor, and pithy takeaways.
Not too long ago, York Peppermint Patties did a great job of creating ads with powerful imagery. You remember them—someone in an everyday setting,taking a bite of the cool, minty candy…and bang! They’re on a snowy mountain far, far away.
Imagery is transportive, especially in copywriting.
Be direct and clear
While literary devices are great, they’re not always fitting. Sometimes, it’s more powerful to be direct.
Manhattan Mini Storage launched an ad campaign last year that instantly connected with readers. “I like my wife. I love my storage room.” They showed why customers need their service, speaking directly to everyday situations (my wife wants me to clean out the basement, my parents are coming to visit and I have stuff I don’t want them to see…)
“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” -David Ogilvy
The first 50 words are the most important. Can you make them count?
Stop saying please and start inspiring your audience
When writing a call to action, “Please sign up” is disarming but still demands action, while “Sign up now” seems too pushy. Instead, inspire them to take action. Content Verve A/B tested two call to actions: “Sign up now,” and “Sign up now and get started,” to find that the latter led to a 31.03% increase in sales.
Don’t waste your words
Prioritize what needs to be said. Cliches may be cliches for a reason, but there’s no room for them when every word counts. If you can’t come up with a more colorful or original way to say something, cut it out.
Add value with data
Anyone can write paragraphs claiming to be the fastest, best, or most stylish. Superlatives are too overused to be effective. Look for quantifiable statistics that add value instead. A car afficianado would be wary if you just said that the 2015 Infiniti Formula 1 Red Bull RB11 is the fastest car in the world. If say it goes from 0 to 60 in 1.7 seconds, however, that’s going to catch his attention.
With an average price tag of $4.5 million per 30-second ad, why are companies spending their entire advertising budget on a single commercial? Brand exposure.
The Super Bowl has a huge audience, and it gives smaller companies the same level of exposure as the Coca-Colas and Apples of the world. But he fact of the matter is that all of the money in the world can’t buy consumer love.
That takes a strong brand.
Without customers, a brand has no value. To understand your customers enough to create a foundation of a brand, you need to get inside their head.
That’s why it’s important to understand the underlying psychology behind a consumer’s choices.
Purchases are usually based off of one or more of the following factors:
This means that a decision to purchase your product or service is dependent on many variables.
A brand is much more than just how you speak to a customer, it’s just as much about how you present your business.
Something as simple as color can make all of the difference. In fact, color increases brand recognition by up to 80 percent. This isn’t to say that you should choose the brightest, most noticeable color there is, because brand appropriateness plays a huge role in what a customer chooses to buy.
A company’s font selection requires just as much thought as its color. No one over the age of eight wants to go into a shop that uses Comic Sans on their storefront, and no one will take a website that uses Curlz as its default font. The smallest details matter.
In 2016, this has never been more true. The gap between company and consumer is more narrow than ever, mostly due to social media. When a customer tweets at a restaurant, they expect a response. These days, a customer wants to get to know the brand as much as your company wants to understand its customer.
They want to know your beliefs, your values, and how you handle complaints. They want to feel comfortable enough with your brand to consider it a friend. You’re on their social media, so they need to like you. That’s how brand loyalty is born.
If you don’t remember anything from this blog post, remember this statistic: 80 percent of your future revenue will come from just 20 percent of your current customers.
While there is no set formula to creating a better brand, understanding brand psychology and how your customer makes decisions is a crucial first step. Keep these points in mind when creating your own brand:
Resolutions are a great concept. They give you focus for the year and motivate you to get more done. So often our work lives overlap with our personal lives—wouldn’t it be easier to just make one set of resolutions?
This is everyone’s perennial favorite, and for good reason: when you’re in shape, you feel at your best. It’s the same for your business. One of your marketing resolutions should be to lose dead weight and make healthier business choices.
This year, instead of indulging in every marketing tactic out there, concentrate on the ones that will strengthen your business. Does your accounting business need a Pinterest? Probably not. Do you need to
Instead of sending out quick emails and posts that get you through the day, work on campaigns that will carry you into the future.
Long gone are the days where a simple HTML website was enough to impress a client.
These days, it’s all about user experience. Consumers have grown to expect a lot from companies. User experience is no longer just about how your website performs, but how it looks, as well as how well it’s optimized for mobile.
Instead of choosing website elements based off of your personal preferences or keeping certain elements because they’ve been there since day one, think of your customer. 88 percent of online consumers are less likely to revisit your site after a bad experience.
How do you prevent that? By focusing on the little things as well as the overall experience. A user experience manager for Bing credited using a specific shade of blue for at least $80 million in additional annual revenue.
You can also just listen to your audience. Have they been asking for a search bar? A better way to contact you? Give them what they want—the customer is [almost] always right. ESPN saw their revenue jump 35 percent after incorporating customer feedback in their homepage redesign.
In 2016, stop sending out tweets that get no engagement. Stop sending emails that are never opened. Stop writing blogs that are never read. Start learning from your mistakes.
Marketing is a vast and complex business. What works for one company might not work for another. A very easy and practical way to figure out what works for your business is to start A/B testing.
A/B testing in its most basic form is simple: make different versions (such as a version A and a version B) and see which one does better. It’s a near-universal practice that works on social media strategy, email blasts, landing page copy—pretty much all types of content.
By A/B testing, you’ll be able to actively compare conversion and engagement rates and use that data to figure out what resonates best with your audience. A/B testing helped ComScore increase lead generation by 69 percent, and it helped Sony increase purchases by 20 percent.
In 2015, businesses (both B2B and B2C) that prioritized blogging were 13 times as likely to see a positive return on investment. Don’t miss out on a statistic like that. This year, one of your marketing resolutions should be to make time to write.
Even if you’re not a writer, you should write more. Setting aside a just a few minutes a day to get your thoughts down on paper is not only therapeutic, it’s a great way to brainstorm, organize your thoughts and come up with the next big idea for your company.
It’s never too late to set goals for yourself or for your company. This year, try to:
First off—what does that even mean? Second, how ridiculous! This client wanted his beauty brand’s tone of voice to match what he was accustomed to (he used to work as an investor on Wall Street).
But he failed to understand a fundamental truth of branding: you market to the customer, not yourself. His target market was beauty, but he didn’t know how to speak with their voice. He just didn’t get it.
When you first started your business, you probably heard the word “branding” more times than you care to remember. People like to say: “The brand is the most important part of a business.” Turns out they’re right.
Your company’s brand is what races to a person’s mind when they hear your name. How important is it? Coca-Cola’s annual branding budget is more than Apple’s and Microsoft’s combined. These Fortune 500s aren’t skimping on their branding budget, so you shouldn’t either.
Then there’s your business voice, the most crucial component of your brand. Your company’s voice is how you speak to your customers.
Why is finding the right brand voice so crucial? Think about it this way: in an ideal world, you’d get to meet every person who visits your website and charm them with your perfectly tailored sales pitch.
Except this isn’t a perfect world. In reality, most people use the Internet as their primary source of information. In fact, 81 percent of customers conduct online research before making a purchase.
What this means is that you need to project your voice onto your website. Your site needs to sound like you’re talking to someone right in front of you.
It’s important that you’re creating the right brand voice, but what’s even more important is that you’re creating the right voice for your customers. For most brands, the two do not always align.
Taco Bell is a perfect example of a shift towards the right brand voice. In the early 2000’s, Yum! (which owns Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut) shares hovered below $10 a share. Taco Bell tried to brand itself as “authentic” Mexican food, even going so far as to have a Chihuahua as its mascot.
Fast forward to May 2015. Yum! Brands stock hits an all-time high close to $94. What changed? Taco Bell found its brand voice. It started talking to the right people, in the right way, and the right people answered.
Instead of going for fast, “authentic” Mexican food for families, they started talking to Millennials. They developed the concept of “Fourth Meal” and created the Doritos Locos Taco. They created a wonderfully human Twitter profile and branded their sauce packets with clever sayings.
Taco Bell rose from the dead to become better than ever by adopting a new voice that was right for its customers.
So, how do you find your brand voice? Start by asking yourself the following questions:
Once you can answer these questions, the path to finding your brand voice gets a lot clearer.
To summarize, keep the following ideas in mind:
Stay human. Too many people think as soon as their fingers hit the keyboard, they’re someone else. This shouldn’t be the case. In fact, customers are more likely to buy when they can relate.
Know your audience. Will your customers be irritated by emojis or delighted by them? Will your tagline be perceived as aggressive or confident? It depends on what you’re selling, who you’re selling it to, and where you’re selling.
Nitpick. Be thorough. When you tweet, will you use “we” or “I”? How do you feel about contractions? Acronyms? Is LOL okay? Your identity is your business and vise-versa.
]]>If you’re anything like most American workers, you probably have. But you probably haven’t done anything about it.
Find out which fears are holding you back, and how you can overcome them.
]]>