The Best Way to Market Your Business

The Best Way to Market Your Business? There's no magic bullet.
One question seems ubiquitous among new business owners: "What is the best way to market my [insert niche business idea here] business?"

I see two problems with this question. First, the question seeks a silver bullet, a magic bullet, whatever bullet that can cause the product, service, or business take off in a viral message campaign that crushes sales projections. Second, the question shows the high focus on the business idea as something different as if what works for other companies can't possibly work for this business.

So let's address these two concerns first in answering the question.

First things first, magic bullets are hard to come by. People stumble across them, to be sure, but if you intend to plan your business around them, you might also want to buy a few lottery tickets. That said, when the pot's big enough, lottery sales go through the roof. So take a moonshot every now and again. Just don't assume that's your bread and butter.

As for the idea that your business is so different, you're right. Your business is a special snowflake, unique in every single way, just like every other snowflake. Except snowflakes are only unique in pattern. They all are made of frozen water. They all fall from the sky. The same weather conditions create all of them. For millions of years. So when you think about marketing, you might want to focus on how you can use similar techniques to other companies to attract customers rather than different ones.

So as a new business owner, what do you really need to do?

Create a Multi-threaded Plan

First off, instead of just haphazardly trying things, you need to take some time to actually think through your strategy and create a marketing plan. 

Your marketing plan needs to have multiple channels as well. You can't just rely on one or two methods to get the word out. Instead, just like large marketing departments do, you need to include elements from all kinds of marketing strategies. Traditional marketing, content marketing, social media, referral programs, retargeting or remarketing, affiliate networks, and interaction between your brand or representative and potential customers on aggregation platforms (like Quora or Medium) could all be a part of your plan (as well as whatever other mechanisms you can think of).

Track Your Results

As you create multiple channels, you need to find ways to track the results of each prong of your plan. What good is having a bunch of marketing efforts if you don't know whether they are actually resulting in sales?

I know a company that takes out ads in various magazines, for example, and includes a toll free number. However, they put a different number in every advertisement that they purchase. This strategy allows them to track inbound calls to different numbers to understand what advertisements are generating the most inbound calls.

The internet offers even more opportunities to track the results of your online marketing, but again it requires a bit of planning to determine your source and target information and how you go about determining what methods succeed for you.

Test and Adjust

A common marketing strategy is called A/B testing. Basically, you create two potential marketing avenues and then measure their results before declaring a winner. 

What succeeds, though, is continuing this process. In the boxing ring, there is always a challenger to the champion. I used to love when radio stations would do a nightly countdown and see if one song would beat out the others to be the best of the day. The competition continually improved the output and would, sometimes for weeks at a time, validate that the winner was, in fact, the best song of the time.

When you approach your marketing with a challenger that you think not only worthy to take on but also potentially defeat the reigning champion campaign, you challenge yourself to perform better and learn to continue growth even on top of your successes.

Once you get your results from your tests and efforts, you have to adjust. Perhaps you adjust by running yet another A/B test against the winner of the first. Perhaps you try some different channels to see if they perform better (if you didn't figure it out, that's also an A/B test).  Regardless what you do, the concept is to continue to test your methodologies and adjust your approach.

Conclusion

You have a very low probability of winning the lottery, and a pretty similar likelihood of finding a magic bullet in marketing where you can just "do one thing" and have your business take off.

Instead, you have to formulate a structured approach, where you try many different types of marketing, track the results, and then adjust appropriately to make sure you get the best return on your marketing investments.

If you want to go deeper into this topic, drop me a note and let me know from the contact section. I'd love to continue the conversation with you.
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Content Marketing and Product Development Should Focus on Quality: Lessons from Buffer

I recently stumbled across Buffer's "Marketing Manifesto in 500 Words" over on Medium. The original was evidently a shared Evernote note. I'm glad they shared with us, too.

I find Buffer itself a fascinating company. For starters, they have a wonderful product. If you are trying to stay active on social media, but have limited time to do so, Buffer offers the ability to just share and store things in a queue that will eventually post out on whatever schedule you choose.

What Buffer also performs well, though, in analyzing the performance of tweets and posts and providing free information to its users (or anyone that stumbles across its site) with valuable stats. They have identified the best times to tweet in any give time zone if you are seeking engagement, for example, by analyzing the results of thousands and thousands of tweets posted by their users.

They post the results often on the Buffer blog, which also offers a transparent look into the behind-the-scenes efforts of the company, even whenthose efforts end up negative in the results column.

In reading through this bold statement about how they intend to market through content, I gleaned a few gems worthy of noting for myself. Perhaps they resonate with your efforts as well.

Be Uncomfortable With Your Product

First and foremost, the manifesto stresses the need to truly own a concern that what you put out into the world is not good enough. Nobody wants to focus on that.

It's much easier to think about all the millions we will make and what model Lamborghini will look best in our driveway. But not everything hits a home run right away. Every post you write will not go viral and every product will not become the "hottest product of the season" (hopefully some do, but who knows).

When you solely focus on quantity, churning out article after article, you can play fun games with computer algorithms, but rarely connect with people. On the other hand, if you focus on connecting with people, not just potential customers, but individuals, humans with thoughts and concerns and dreams, then the importance of the idea that we should take care what we produce shines through.

This advice isn't just for bloggers either. If you make sandwiches, if you produce fiction, if you sell cloud data center space, take a healthy dose of self-doubt before you set something loose upon the world. Be vulnerable. Be edgy. Be scared. It's OK.

Focus on Quality

"Treat every piece of content — every tweet, every Facebook post, every CTA, every press outreach email — with the utmost care."

That's how this 500-word post starts, and it's beautiful. It's not a new idea, the whole zero defect/TQM approach to producing product. But the phrasing here to treat every single thing you do as if it is an important and qualified piece of content that you are releasing shows the brilliance of this statement.

The hyper-focus on quality creates some of the discomfort in releasing product. As the author notes, it's not perfectionism, but the idea that everything you do represents the company. Every piece of content and every product you release demonstrates the company's commitment to quality.

On the contrary, every crappy or shoddy product that you allow to make it to the public in the interest of quantity dilutes the brand of the company.

The endless chase of perfection prohibits truly releasing anything. Often a "good" or "really good" product could change the lives of thousands or millions, and the chase for a "perfect" product might delay that beneficial change. But the question you should ask yourself after reading this manifesto is whether what you are about to release is "good enough." 

Reflect

The manifesto at its heart represents a reflection on the efforts of the company and acknowledges failures as well as successes. 

Too often we get caught up in searching for the victory that we fail to see what we can learn from the defeats. This post acknowledges failure. It acknowledges missteps.

Most people flee from that type of self-evaluation. They can't handle the idea that they should confront their own failures to learn from them. 

But that's how you grow.

Embrace the idea that you need a little time every now and again to reflect on how you could perform better, or how the company could work better. 

Conclusion

I've been impressed with Buffer for some time. Again, their product and insight have been extremely valuable to me.

This article, though, shows an honest and vulnerable side to their marketing that I would encourage all marketing departments and companies to look at and potentially embrace.

The idea is simple: create a quality product for your consumer. Someone relies on you to produce, and instead of producing en masse for pure consumption sake, produce something of quality, of value, that has potential. Potential to change lives, businesses, relationships, people.

The burden of creating quality product weighs heavy. The result of accepting that burden is a constant internal struggle, a decision point about everything that represents the company and brand. You will have to ask "Is it good enough?" over and over again.

Once you've pored over everything that you produce, you must pore over it again. Reflect and reflect to try to understand all of the complexities that led to failure and all of the equal complexities that led to your success (here's a hint, you didn't succeed just because you were a genius, though that might have helped. So did luck.).

I'd love to hear your thoughts here. Go read the Buffer marketing manifesto and come back. Leave me a comment or drop me an email and we can chat about it.
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New Content Creation Strategy Concepts I Learned From Gary Vaynerchuk

Content Creation Strategy
If you don't know Gary Vaynerchuk, you should get yourself acquainted with him. He is an entrepreneur who has an often refreshing take on marketing, media, and business.

He also has great taste (and advice) on wine.

I follow Gary on Twitter and often check out what he's doing in other corners of the web, like this gem I stumbled across on Medium last week.

In the article, Gary discusses a growing trend in video content towards short-form content being produced by big media outlets, such as HBO. The content creation strategy corresponds with online trends and general catering to an ever-shrinking attention span.

But Gary offers a unique perspective which gave me a few takeaways.

Strong Brands Drive Value in Any Form

Gary uses HBO's signing of Jon Stewart to produce new short-form content as his primary example in the article. Jon experienced tremendous success in his long run on The Daily Show on Comedy Central and created a brand around himself of a certain type of humor and wit that resonated with his audience.

Because of the strength of his brand, Jon can attract a certain audience with just about any content creation strategy. Much like his protege. Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart can change formats and channels and still attract a following.

The key concept here is that when the brand has enough strength, it can carry over to different formats, and the content could be long or short form. 

Quality First

In urging companies to buck the trend and pursue immensely epic long-form video content, Gary stresses the idea of creating quality long form content.

The key is in the quality.

Whether an established or new brand; whether creating long or short content; whether generating video, audio, or text; creating quality content wins. Every piece of content should have a purpose. Every piece of content should deliver value. Every piece of content should offer something unique. Every piece of content should require effort to produce.

Create New Things

A bold suggestion hides in one of the latter paragraphs of the article: for Fortune 500 companies to build a brand new type of content creation strategy. One that embraces long-form video or fiction or both to build brand loyalty. One that crafts the content around product rather than using product placement to hide and disguise the product within the media.

Whether you agree with Gary or not on the particular suggestion, the concept is novel. Not only that, it should serve as a beacon for large corporations to realize their need for media outlets and information streams and to manage their ability to traverse across multiple media types.

Conclusion

You can learn quite a bit from listening to and reading things by Gary Vaynerchuk. (Especially about wine).

However, when thinking about content, Gary gives us perspective in terms of who can create content at what level (anyone) (and at any length and format).

If you have an established brand with an audience, great! Keep up the good work. If you don't, while it may require more work you can still get rolling pretty quickly.

Otherwise, let your content be your guide. Try to get as many people interested in that content as you can.

Thoughts? Go read Gary's article and then ping me to join the conversation here.

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