Crumbs from the Scone
“People use LinkedIn to connect with coworkers and industry peers, get business advice, and even find new jobs,” writes Diana Freedman at HubSpot. “It’s a great place for businesses to make relevant LinkedIn users aware of their brand.” But, she cautions, those positive outcomes won’t happen if you make mistakes like these:
Failing to answer questions. When you respond to business-related questions at LinkedIn’s “Answer” section, you establish yourself as an expert—and it might even generate new customers. “Take a few minutes each day to look at the new questions in your industry,” she suggests, “and see if there’s one you can provide a helpful answer to.” Be careful, though, to reply without blatant promotion of your product or service. “If you were in a bind and reached out to a community of peers for help,” she explains, “would you want the only response to be ‘Give me your money’?”
Failing to complete your personal profile. If you want to build trust, you have to let others know who you are. “Describe your role at your current and previous companies,” she advises, “and provide links to your website and any relevant profiles,” such as Twitter.
Failing to post status updates. Don’t worry about the apparent redundancy of posting updates at LinkedIn when you’re already active on Twitter and Facebook. There’s a good chance your LinkedIn network has business connections who wouldn’t see your updates in other venues. “It’s ok to re-purpose content across all of the social channels, as long as you’re not duplicating the content,” she notes.
Active, transparent participation at LinkedIn will deliver the best networking results.
Source: HubSpot.
Crumbs from the Scone
“Just a few years ago, I could count on receiving a mailbox-full of direct mail nearly every day, including the crown jewel of direct marketing, the BIG direct mail piece,” writes Dean Rieck at Direct Creative. “Thick #10’s, fat 6×9’s, and beefy 9×12’s once stood atop the mountain of attention-grabbing communication.”
Although the recession and a shift to online marketing channels made direct mail seem expensive and outdated, it hasn’t gone away—for one simple reason: “What people are discovering is that traditional media, including direct mail, still work. That includes the big direct mail piece,” according to Rieck.
Here are a few of his reasons why big direct mail pieces might be just what you need:
- They face little competition in a recipient’s mailbox. “A mail stream full of dinky formats makes larger formats stand out,” he notes.
- They provide extra space for marketing copy. “[This is] the driver in any direct mail campaign.”
- They encourage recipients to focus on your message. People will give a bulky direct mail piece more consideration than the second or two they spend on an email’s subject line.
- They give your company an innovative image. “[T]hose big packages seem novel now,” he says. “They let you zig while everyone else zags.”
This might be the time to test a large direct mail piece—an old media stalwart might just deliver new media results.
Source: Direct Creative.
Crumbs from the Scone
The forward to Harvey Mackay’s bestselling Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive featured 15 solid pages of praise from VIPs like President Gerald Ford and the Reverend Billy Graham. “The kicker?” writes Hal Licino at MarketingProfs. “By the time the reader read those 15 pages, they were so convinced that the book would change their lives that what followed practically didn’t matter.”
Don’t underestimate the power of the testimonial. Such endorsements can be up to seven times as effective as paid advertisements. So go ahead and energize your email campaigns with testimonials by using pointers like these:
Ask open-ended questions in surveys. If you give customers a yes/no question, there’s a chance that they might respond without elaboration. Encourage in-depth responses—and increase the chance of positive feedback—by asking questions that facilitate lengthier answers.
Don’t limit your testimonial-gathering efforts to survey feedback and notes from customers. You may, for instance, invite customers to submit video reviews of your product or service. Or: “If you are recording your customers’ telephone conversations,” suggests Licino, “you will likely discover a treasure trove of kudos and props. Simply contact those customers again and ask for permission to use their comments as testimonials while offering them a thank-you gift or discount.” He notes that incentives should be substantial enough to warrant customer participation, but not so large that it looks like compensation.
Learn to edit for length. “There are no hard-and-fast rules,” Licino says, “but if you can edit … down to 35 or fewer strongly indicative words, you should fall within the limit of the average attention span.”
Above all, use testimonials to highlight a unique experience—something prospective customers can’t or won’t get elsewhere.
Don’t be shy. Find ways to encourage fans to offer unique praise; you could boost the power and reach of your testimonials.
Source: MarketingProfs.
Contact Shadowbend Studios and learn more about our video testimonial techniques
Crumbs from the Scone
Not long ago, Gap sparked a social-media firestorm when it quietly unveiled a redesigned logo. People not only disliked the bargain-basement aesthetic—they hated it. And, writes Umair Haque at Harvard Business Review, for good reason: “The new logo reeks of something designed not just by committee,” he says, “but by a committee of bean counters who don’t have a creative bone in their body, a suite full of suits who just might be missing the empathic, intuitive right hemisphere of the brain entirely.”
It’s a harsh appraisal, certainly, but any business may be similarly judged if it lets the importance of good design slip off its radar. “Most companies see design as a superficial afterthought on which a few pennies are spent if there are a few bucks left in the budget,” he explains. “For most boardrooms, design’s never counted less, but the truth, I’d venture to guess, is that design’s never counted more.”
So how can you achieve a cost-effective balance between right- and left-brained priorities? Haque suggests asking questions like these:
- How frequently does your company’s leadership solicit input from its designers?
- Are designers invited to help shape business decisions and future plans?
Finally, Haque poses this question: “How much weight does senior management give to right-brained ideas, like delight, amazement, intuition, and joy? Just a little, a lot—or, as for most companies, almost none?”
It might be difficult to quantify the ROI on good design, but the public’s reaction to the Gap logo tells you it matters. “In the 21st century,” argues Haque, “creating enduring advantage is going to require organizations that have a whole brain—not just half of one.”
Source: Harvard Business Review.
Crumbs from the Scone
For years, writes Stephanie Miller at the Deliverability blog, marketers have enjoyed the linear nature of the email inbox—your newsletters and offers sitting cheek-by-jowl with personal correspondence from a subscriber’s friends. But you shouldn’t get too comfortable with this privileged arrangement.
“The world is changing,” Miller says. “A new set of inbox management tools are emerging from the global mailbox providers like Yahoo!, Hotmail/MSN and Gmail. These tools make it easier for subscribers to avoid whatever is not interesting to them.”
In essence, tools like these will create what Miller terms the Ultra Managed Inbox, where marketing messages are sent to secondary folders that might—or might not—be checked before automatic deletion.
“We can no longer ‘ride along’ for attention by cozying up to personal messages,” she notes. “We must re-earn our way into the inbox, or at least into a folder that subscribers check frequently.”
Miller has some recommendations for doing so. Here are a few:
- Segment your “from” addresses. The actual email experience must be unique and tied to the “from” address, Miller advises. That’s because services like Hotmail Sweep now filter an entire “from” address—not simply the domain. “We as marketers know the nuance between marketing@ and transactional@,” she explains, “but subscribers may not.”
- Impress new subscribers with the quality of your messages. Remember that your initial messages will likely make it straight to their inbox. “This is the chance to be relevant, and earn the right to stay in the inbox,” she says. “Give considerable thought to the first 3-5 messages a new subscriber receives.”
Times are changing—again. The Ultra Managed Inbox has plenty of potential for email marketers, argues Miller, “but only if we get ready now and start testing what it really means to engage and compete with the clutter surrounding our messages.”
Source: Deliverability.
“People use LinkedIn to connect with coworkers and industry peers, get business advice, and even find new jobs,” writes Diana Freedman at HubSpot. “It’s a great place for businesses to make relevant LinkedIn users aware of their brand.” But, she cautions, those positive outcomes won’t happen if you make mistakes like these:
