Every time I hear a guru like Brian Halligan speak I feel wholly inadequate. Just when I feel like I am getting a handle on Twitter or Facebook or the metrics for all the marketing work I am doing, then I read a book like Brian’s Inbound Marketing or hear a speaker that shows me how much I am missing. It would be nice to have the money to hire a company like Hubspot as long as I have an extra 3 full time employees or thousands of spare dollars lying around. (Which obviously I don’t.)
Imagine, unlike today, my SEO – Search Engine Optimization would be perfect along with my SMO – Social Media Optimization and my NPS – Net Promoter Score. Tons of people would flock to me and want to do business. Maybe. What Brian spoke about and created at Hubspot was a great series of tools. In fact some of what they bring to the table is actually tools for measuring tools. Brian spent 60 minutes aptly listing and organizing all the marketing tools and measuring tools you could and should have to maximize your presence with electronic media. It was impressive. It was overwhelming. It might have been futile. Brian forgot to mention a key point.
You need a compelling message. Just because you put stuff out there on Twitter or the web, doesn’t mean enough of the right people will respond to create a successful business. All the traffic in the world won’t matter if you aren’t resolving the pain and fulfilling the needs of your constituency. This is the focus of my book ROAR! To truly get heard in that Social Media jungle you have to make sure the buyers in need know that you get their pain.
Empathy is the magnet that attracts buyers predisposed to buy and at a premium price. Of course you also have to deliver a worthwhile solution as well as clear differentiation as to why you are the best solution provider to close the deal. But it’s empathy that gets the attention of the buyer in the first place.
Too many social media marketers love to use snarkyness and features to get your attention but they often garner attention from the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Then they don’t follow through with a real solution and actual differentiation. They focus heavily on getting you to their site only to sound the same as their competitors in a self indulgent manner.
I believe marketing should be about efficiency rather than volume. The concepts in ROAR! are designed not to pull lots of people with little pull-through, but rather to attract the right people and serve their need with little convincing and effort.
With only 140 characters or less than 3 minutes in a video, one has to hit the heart directly and correctly. Otherwise the message falls away and becomes part of the noise. We try to make this empathetic connection in our ROAR! marketing materials. In the new ROAR! video we go right for the pain/empathy from the very beginning, show the solution and differentiate all in less than 2.5 minutes. And we work hard to make it entertaining so people will pass it around. Will we be the next “Will it Blend”? (iPad lovers shouldn’t watch this.) Probably not, but we should attract, serve and benefit plenty who need to communicate in a compelling way.
I believe the consistency of my marketing approach explains why ROAR! became an Amazon #1 best seller so quickly. Yet I continue to refine my material so I can get more relevant eyeballs and make greater impact. Whether through my speaking, writing or even the press I try to focus on solving the pain of how to say the right things to the right people in the right way. Using the ROAR! solution may decrease some traffic by repelling those who don’t suffer that pain but should increase traffic among those who do, providing better efficiency for social media dollars. Where most marketers fall short is focusing more on the medium than the message.
Our social media program is still far from perfect and I try to learn new methods and practices every day. Sitting at the speaker’s table at Gazelles I was lucky enough to sit next to Brian and shared thoughts with him after his speech. The conversation was open and receptive and in true admirable, consistent fashion worthy of a social media guru, his response was “Good point. You should blog about it.”
Hi Kevin.
Interesting post.
I think the key word that marketers need to keep in mind is the word “remarkable.” Ten years ago, you had to spend lots of time and money on pr & advertising to “spread the word” about your business. There was lots of friction in the marketplace that could be overcome with money. Today, unremarkable ideas languish unfound regardless of how much you spend on pr & advertising. Today, if your idea is “remark”-able, it will spread much more easily today than ever. You don’t need a lot of money — your marketing success if a function of the width of your brain, not the width of your wallet. The friction in the marketplace today is much much less than it ever has been.
My advice to your readers is to dig deep on your goto market strategy and your product strategy as the highly differentiated win today even if in the narrowest of verticals because the internet really opens them up to huge number of potential customers. …If you can’t come up with a highly differentiated product, then you should at least start writing highly differentiated, remarkable content about your industry (not your product) on your blog.
If folks would like to learn more about this, check out chapter 3 of my Inbound Marketing book: http://www.amazon.com/Inbound-Marketing-Found-Google-Social/dp/0470499311/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272404766&sr=8-1
Brian.
Thanks Brian,
It’s a great point. Being “remark”-able as you say is critical to get attention and build followers. Ever since Seth Godin wrote Purple Cow marketers have been talking about being remarkable and yet figuring out what it takes to have someone talk about you is harder than it seems.
At an event I produced in November for EOers, Rick Newman, Chief Business Correspondent for US News and World Report looked out over the crowd of entrepreneurs and said, “All of you have interesting stories, and none of my readers give a s**t.”
To his point too many marketers today judge what’s remarkable through their own eyes rather than that of the audience. Many write something decent and fool themselves into thinking it will have impact. The most successful marketers focus on what makes their material boring and then find ways to flip it, twist it and create revelation or an “Aha” moment in the minds of their customer.
A noble cause and yet very difficult to achieve consistently without focus, scrutiny and the willingness to keep ego and self congratulations out of the mix. I for one like to keep my rather large ego in my wallet where it belongs.
I wonder if others find it easy to view their own material through their customer’s eyes. Is it nature? or nurture?
Kevin