Your marketing deserves to be legendary! Your brand and it’s story crave sharing from one customer to the next. That is the difference between a story and a legend. Think about the brands you admire most; isn’t it because of how those brands make you feel? Isn’t it the way you “flow” through their delightful customer experience? Amazon.com is of those brands, even if they can’t seem to make a profit. Jeff Bezos is quoted, in the Everything Store: Jeff…
Over the course of almost two decades, Jeffrey and I have worked directly with hundreds of content writers. Many of them were our secret weapons in many of our most exciting client success stories. Once the writers understood the personas they were writing for, had a clear sense of the narrative flow of the scenario and the context (where their content piece fit with in that scenario) they almost always delivered content that was both relevant and persuasive. However, a…
Jeffrey and I built our business on content. When we first started our agency in 1998, we had zero capital (even rent & grocery money was tough). What we did have, for those of you who really know us, was lots of opinions. So we started writing, first in discussion lists (remember i-sales, etc.), then our own newsletter and then ClickZ. We started blogging before it was even called blogging or even thought of as content marketing. All these years,…
Brands must make sure their stories are being told properly across all channels and that they can measure alignment and congruence across the channels as well. In 1967 Maytag aired its “lonely repairman” TV commercial, telling the first of many tales of a Maytag repairman with nothing to do and nothing to repair. The Maytag repairman became an icon and for more than 40 years the campaign bound the word “reliability” together with Maytag in the minds of millions of…
Do you publish content or have a blog? It seems everyone has one today. In the last year or so, many more companies have been in touch, asking us how to improve blog conversions. That could be from blog to actual leads or customers, blog to blog subscribers, blog commenting and sharing increasing, etc. Having recently published on my blog how Jeffrey and I helped Marketo increase their blog visitors to subscribers by 10x, I was asked to present more information…
A Bain survey recently shared that 80 percent of company executives believed they delivered a “superior experience” to their customers. But when Bain asked the executive’s same customers about their own perceptions, only 8 percent of customers felt those companies were really delivering. That’s a huge disconnect. How can that be? Great social media metrics often disguise mediocre performance. That’s what happens when metrics are focused inwardly on company performance instead of customer experience. It happens everywhere but nowhere is…
The social and mobile revolution is about data. It is the enormous volume, real-time velocity and variety of data from disparate sources that is causing indigestion issues for most business’ corporate metabolisms. It’s not a publishing revolution! The disruption caused by social and mobile technologies is not entirely about how the voice of every customer can be shared in public at anytime and anyplace. There has been a major change–customer have different expectations of the companies they patronize. Technological and…
With news that Facebook gift sales and revenue are off to a rough start, they are starting to show how desperate they are for people to start buying gifts. Have you noticed their latest offer of desperation (Get $3 off your gift of $5 or more): Maybe they didn’t think people could see that they could buy their friends gifts when you go to wish them a happy birthday from the birthday notifications and below each person they tell you…