As a social media advocate I often discuss adding value to the conversations, to the communities or to the relationships. I guess I assumed everyone already knew what the term means and how it applies to them until I started to get questions from people.
So what exactly is adding value and how? Is it just an over-used marketing jargon? An illusion of a feel-good emotion? The more I use the term “value” the more I feel like it’s loosing its soul (I’m guilty as charge at times).
One of my favorite artists, the awesome Hugh MacLeod had a great piece about Adding Value with the quote, “The aim of “adding value” is a hard one to argue with… who doesn’t want to add value to their current enterprise? But it’s also utterly meaningless…”
Well, obviously there are many ways to look at it but here is how I perceive the meaning of adding value.
Let’s face it, most businesses wants to add value to the bottom line which means making sales and growing profits. In sales, adding value used to mean networking in the best interest of your company or your career which is to sell, sell, sell! Today it means helping people to make informed decisions, finding out their needs first and showing an interest to solve their problems not yours. The one way sales pitch broadcasting simply becomes part of the meaningless noise in a sea of noises.
The Meaning of Knowledge
In sales, either the product sells itself (more of an affirmation and emotional validation) or it’s selling via education (information and data). A Porsche salesman don’t sell the 911 Turbo, they sell the experience of buying a Porsche (great products drives emotions). On the other hand, a Honda salesman sells the features and benefits against competitors like Toyota and Nissan (value proposition, more needs than wants).
In both scenarios, the goal is to ensure that the person feels good about the decisions that they’ve made (or going to make) on the purchase which leads to trust building. And trust is built on relationships from knowledge and actions.
The more knowledge you have, the less fear you have, the less stress you feel and the better you feel about your decision making process. You could think of having knowledge as freedom from limitations and having information is empowerment. The ability to make your own decision is valuable because who wants to be pressured into buying?
Emotion Trumps Logic
Now you know the importance of adding value through knowledge transfer, you then need to know how to take actions with your knowledge. Besides physically helping someone, the action part comes down to communication. And because emotions are the essence of the communication, marketers need to focus on the emotional needs of the customers at the time when feelings are vivid. This mean to empathize with your customers and truly focus on how to make their lives better. You can’t make people’s lives better if you don’t understand their lives.
When you solve someone’s problem, they’ll usually remember it not because of the facts but because of how they felt when it was happening. Simply put, memory is tied to emotions and emotions are more real than thoughts.
Now apply that to marketing and you’ll realize that providing useful and meaningful information does exactly that – it makes people remember you if you satisfy their needs by providing value!
This is why the increasingly Social Web is a great place to find those that are in need of knowledge (also why information product sells). When you need an answer, you want it now, you Google it (you can Yahoo or Bing it too of course). The online conversation across all social networks are as authentic as it gets, besides the offline in-person engagements, because it’s taking place when people are still feeling the emotions dealing with their problems – what is, how-to, why is, who can…you get the point.
The rest of it is about the context of adding value, at the right place at the right time. The optimal time to email your subscribers, the suitable LinkedIn group to contribute knowledge or the people you engage on Twitter – they’re all channels to add your value to the conversation within the communities to forge solid relationships.
Motives and Actions
The last point in adding value is the motives behind such actions. Why are you doing this? Why are businesses embracing the freemium model?
Most of the time the objective is to create brand awareness, build credibility and what I keep pounding the table on: to create social proof around the topics of health, wealth and relationships. However; there is always a trade-off, you get free Gmail with all the awesome features of other Google Apps because Google advertises around your inbox. The same applies to most of the social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. You’re exchanging personal information to use their products.
My take is that if you’re honest about your intentions and focus on serving only those that matters to your business, you will attract the customers you want. Like what Seth Godin wrote in his book Purple Cow, “the key to failure is trying to please everyone.” Well, he’s right, everyone is NOT your customers.
And the science behind motivation isn’t as clear cut as features and benefits or even monetary rewards. Checkout this video by RSA animation adapted from Dan Pink’s talk at the RSA on “The surprising truth about what motivates us.”
The take away: Identify your customer’s problem is where adding value starts. And listening when they talk is your opportunity to fill the value gaps. Think of it as facilitating the process of buying on their terms not yours. You have to create the right environment that entices people, and if you do it well, then they will show up and join the party. It is only by adding value you will be remembered, reciprocated and passed on (via word-of-mouth).
There are simply too much information and too little time. Marketing messages are everywhere and people have developed ad blindness, seeing doesn’t mean retaining.
Social media is changing how businesses find customers and how customers engage with brands. There are many reasons to believe that it will eventually overtake email marketing, but I’m a firm believer that it’s here to stay. In fact, I believe email marketing combine with search (SEO) and social media will the best strategy moving forward.
However; let me get a few things straight. First, email is the original social network. Second, you need email to open social network account and get alerts. And third, search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) will continue to index and aggregate social network data not to mention most social network has their own internal search engine as well.
It sounds like there is a lot of cross-over between the three, so how should you use these three tactics to help you strategize your marketing efforts? It’s hard to realize how these tactics can impact your business without some basic understanding of the big three. Let’s look at how each works and what you can do to get the most bang for your marketing bucks.
The Big Three #1 – Email Marketing
Why email – Today it’s hard to find someone without an email account and majority of account holders have had it for a while (I still check my hotmail from 14 years ago) thus letting it go is not likely for most. Account holders may reduce the time they spent on email but it doesn’t have the abandon rate (Facebook, Twitter) like majority of the social networks.
Almost all basic business communications are done via email not via social networks. The perception is that it’s more secure, private and user friendly (centralized contacts, integrates with calendar, easily accessible via mobile devices). Simply put, people will use what’s easy to achieve the same goal – to get work done and to communicate. Another benefit of email is that it’s a direct private channel of communication to alert customers on new product offerings or promotions. At the same time, customers can use e-mail to provide feedback and ask questions.
Done right, you will be kept away from the spam folder and earn a permanent spot on the white list. This is why great email marketers tend to focus on delivering high value content at the right time, with the proper frequency using attractive subjective lines that encourage clicks and forwards.
Building your email list should still be all marketers’ top priority. Give people a reason to subscribe and to remain subscribed is the ongoing art and science of email marketing.
The Big Three #2 – Search Engine Marketing
Why SEO – This one should be a no brainer. What is the first thing you do when you’re looking to buy a product? If you do your homework you would first Google it. This applies to almost anybody looking to learn more about a company, a product or how to do something. Often times, people don’t even question the search results because it’s just easier to trust Google’s rankings and feel good about the decisions you’ve made based on what was found.
It’s no surprise that 79% of United States hiring managers and job recruiters search online information about job applicants according to a recent research commissioned by Microsoft.
This is why smart businesses (and individuals) are putting more emphasis on content marketing and shifting their mindset to operate more like a media company. They understand search engine is catered to “people” and people want relevant, valuable content that’s going to move them a step closer to identify the information they’re searching for.
The key is to create great content around what your customers are interested in when looking for your product; such as how things work (the outcome of your product or services), step-by-step guides or research reports that reveals product comparisons. Then tie these high quality content with relevant keywords and over time you’ll likely to move higher through the non-paid “organic” rankings. And today you can SEO anything from websites, blog posts, videos, images, podcasts you name it.
SEO is one of the key marketing arsenals especially for retailers, direct marketers and authors. The latest Internet Retailer Survey (some sample data below) clearly shows a growing interest and investment in search to drive more online sales. It’s not a matter of why, but how.
There is simply too much information and too little time. Search engine is our instant gratification to today’s ADD (Attention-Deficit Disorder) society.
The Big Three #3 – Social Media
Why Social – If search engine is a way for people to find information, then social media is a way for people to find conversations and be part of them. It adds the credibility fuel to the fire of trust since social media is basically word-of-mouth. Instead of just believing in what you read from company websites or reviews you found online, you can talk to people you trust or listen to experts you follow. Similar to search, you can get people to your site with social media, and it’s a great tool to tell customer stories, demonstrate expertise, and stack up your social proof to win business from competitors.
The goal is to connect with customers on an ongoing basis to further understand their needs, wants and concerns. This will help you to build strong, lasting and engaging relationships with your customers for future business as well as referral opportunities by getting people to share your products on social networks to bring in traffic and find new customers.
And since social media is word-of-mouth, it’s your brand’s reputation on the line. Your digital reputation is your first impression and perception is reality.
How The Big Three Can Work Together
Although you can choose to only do one or two of the three, but to get the most out of your marketing investments, you should consider doing all three.
Here are a few ideas to consider on how to leverage the big three:
1) Create Once, Recycle Many- Focus on content not just promotions and sales, it’s about facilitating people through the sales cycle. People usually don’t buy base on just one piece of data think of it as adding “trust points” to people’s decision to buy. If prospects consumed a great piece of educational content on your landing page, that’s one point. If they read some great reviews about your product from a third party site, that’s another point. If there is more positive comments than negative ones about your brand in social networks, that’s another point. The goal is to accumulate enough trust so prospects feel good about why they’ve made the decision over you than others.
You want to invest your time and money on creating the best blog content, how-to articles, educational videos, whitepapers or anything that will get your audience to bookmark, download and share. Then make sure you optimize the content for search engine with the proper keywords and deliver them to the right people in your target channel via email and social networks.
For example let’s say you have a really good article on how to do something (try not to involve your product first, focus on solving the problem then introduce your product later when appropriate), you can package it in a downloadable PDF put it on a landing page that’s highly optimize for SEO. Then abstract the summary from the content for your email newsletter so you can send your subscribers to that very same landing page, a typical web marketing campaign. But let’s take it a step further by turning that piece of content into a video (using screen capture tools like Camtasia, or with a webcam or FlipVideo) and upload it to YouTube, Ustream or Vimeo to drive traffic back to your landing page. Then post the video on your blog, tweet it out via Twitter, send it to relevant groups on LinkedIn or submitted to social network sites like Technorati, Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon. Continue to produce great content and after 3-6 month you can recycle that piece of content with some updates and do it again.
2) Streamline with Process – Think about how your customers consume information and respond to connections. It’s NOT jamming the information down their throat like traditional one-way push advertising but allowing them to discover and get permission to establish a relationship. Talk to your customers, ask them what they read, who influence them and why? Understand what they don’t care about (don’t be surprise if it’s a lot of what you do) is just as important as what they care (a lot of what you should know). If you make the wrong assumption it will bring you the false conclusion which will impact on how you strategize your campaign.
For example if you know your customer reads certain blogs regularly, should you advertise on their site or is it better to build a relationship with the blogger? Once you’ve made your decision, focus on identifying the path to your web properties. Take out a piece of paper and map out that path and create a process to streamline every possible step that your customer may take so you can funnel them via your sales pipeline.
Remember, not everyone consumes media the same way, some people like to read while others prefer to watch videos or listen to a podcast. It’s important to have as many media options as possible available to maximize engagement opportunities.
3) Target, Track and Repeat – Without the right data you won’t know where to focus your marketing efforts and no accountability in your actions. What happens after your prospect conducts a search? What actions were taken after consuming your content? Was it shared on Facebook or forwarded to a colleague?
The biggest benefit from tracking your email, search and social media analytics is that you will be able to tie them all together and figure out your ROI. You’ll know where your site visitors are coming from, which email links they clicked on and what gets shared so you can make adjustments to improve conversion rates. Why continue to do something that doesn’t work? You need to know so you can keep doing what works and stop doing what doesn’t. Perhaps Facebook is not the best social network to target your audience or is it because your marketing messages aren’t resonating with them? Marketers must aggregate customer behavior information to build a holistic view of the customer.
This means analyzing quantitative data to measure and monitor customer-related metrics such as customer attrition rate, customer retention rate, number of products purchased, repeat purchases, likelihood to recommend, etc. When you have the right customer insights, you’re in a position to address customer needs, improve processes (to shorten the sales cycle), and to maintain a strong connection for an opportunity to turn customers into fans and fans to brand evangelists.
Do Your Homework, Fish Where Fish Are
Before you start, you should learn where your customers are at, the tools they use and why. This allows you to make better informed decisions and build a framework for your assumptions before you jump in. You can find some valuable research data from the internet and here are two examples I’ve found.
First is the Morgan Stanley Internet Trends Analysis, which has a lot of in-depth information about all things internet, mobile, cloud computing, email, social networks and more. (Check out slide 12 on social networking vs email usage).
The second report is from Edison Research on “Everything You Need To Know About Who’s Using Twitter.” I found it particularly interesting that people actually go to Twitter to learn about products, far more than they do with other social networks. (51% of active Twitter users follow companies, brands or products on social networks)
The take away: Email marketing, search engine optimization and social media are all great, but it takes a combination of know-how and creativity to get people just to open your e-mail, to click on your search results or to retweet your messages. Business owners and marketers need to have some technical knowledge of what methods produce positive results. Your goal should be to have a mix and balance of the big three utilizing content strategy that is useful and easy to share.
Think like a publisher, not only do you have to figure out ways to engage your subscribers (and to remain subscribed) but also prospects, people on the fence and try to sway influencers your way. Yes, it’s time consuming like what Jay Baer mentioned recently but think of it as investing in your customers, you get what you put in. It’s easy to setup your email newsletter, social network accounts and have SEO gurus optimizing your site, those are executions of tactics NOT strategy.
First, learn before you start, listen before you talk and research before you decide. You’re better off investing your marketing dollars to build your own targeted database (and customer segmentation!) with accurate information.
Questions on email marketing, search engine optimization or social media? Drop me a comment below.
There has been a few interesting development recently on the social web specifically with Facebook replacing the ‘become a fan’ phrase with a ‘Like button‘ and launching ‘Community Pages‘; expect all mainstream websites to gradually adopt the like button enabling visitors to see if their friends or family like the content (peer influence) as well as the number of people liking something. The other news is Twitter’s new tool that allows tweets to be directly embedded on third-party sites, making it easier to quote and share content .
This growing trend of the web becoming social will continue to encourage people to use it social. The more social the web gets, the more conversations it generates resulting in a permanent record of everything and anything people talk about, including your brand. Even if you’re not online or don’t have an online business, internet will continue to record down what people say about your brand.
And reputation is word-of-mouth thus it will only benefit your business if you include your community in defining your brand. So how can brands take control of their reputation via the social web?
One solution is through community building, the foundation of your brand’s reputation.
What’s In A Community?
Think of your community as a single platform where people can all gather to interact with your brand and each other expressing their opinions about your products and services. You don’t need thousands or even hundreds of people to start a community, it can be started with just a few people with the same interest and are willing to participate.
When building a community consider the following groups that makes up the community ecosystem:
Prospects – Interested in your product or want to learn more about it Customers - Made a purchase already Employees - Individuals that works for you and/or stakeholders Vendors - You bought from them (suppliers, service providers, operating expenses) Partners - Companies or individuals that you have business relationship with, a reseller or distributor of your products Media - Journalist or publications that covers your industry or your product category Regulators - Authorities or individuals that regulates your industry, could be government or non-government
If you’ve been in business for a while, you should be familiar with the groups above. The idea of having your own online community is to centralize communication via a single platform where you can empower members of your communities to interact with each other and engage with your brand.
How Communities Benefit Brands
Why would companies want to spend time, resources and money on building their community? The answer is simple, community defines your brand, demonstrates social proof and creates business opportunities.
Defining your brand - So instead of trying to control how you want people to see your brand, the ideal approach is to become part of that process by providing a dedicated community. A platform that allows prospects, customers, peers, colleagues and stakeholders to interact with each other, ask questions about your products, comment on their service experience or simply give praises. This is why brands are uniting their customers and fans online using platforms such as an online discussion forum, a Facebook Fan Page, or a LinkedIn Group as their primary ‘homebase’ to build their community. It’s fast, simple and easy to do.
In addition you can expand the community offline or locally adding tools such as Meetup.com, Amiando or Eventbrite. The goal is to provide easy access across multiple channels for your fans to hangout and express their feelings and ideas about your brand.
Social Proof and influence -The best way to change people’s behaviors is through peers that they trust and/or respect. Done right, your community will become one of your most powerful marketing vehicle helping you sell via conversations and defending your brand during crisis. This is also an emerging trend as many brands are leveraging customers and employees as brand advocates to help spread the “brand voice.” If prospective customers read some comments on how great your services are and sees many happy customer feedbacks (via your Facebook wall, Yelp, Amazon or blog), you’re likely to move them further down the sales cycle not to mention the information can be used for marketing as well as support reference.
Even Toyota is bouncing back from it’s PR nightmare because the brand still has a strong following and they’ve earned their customer’s trust over a long time. This is why sports fans are loyal to their teams and often go to the distance to defend their teams/players because they are part of a specific team’s fan community.
Opportunities to improve – Another benefit of building an online community is over time your community will accumulate enough information to enable you to abstract valuable insights to improve your products, services and reputation. One of the more popular approach is using crowdsourced data to help craft marketing campaigns and get the community involve to deepen the trust and create brand awareness.
And with those that are concern about negative word of mouth? My recommendation is to have a plan in place so you can respond in a timely matter with the right social media and crisis management policies. This way, when things go south, you can quickly pinpoint the problem and identify the proper solution to resolve the issue. In fact, it’s an opportunity to turn negative buzz to strengthen the relationship with customers.
As for managing the community it really depends on how your organization is structured for customer engagement. For example, during presale you can task your sales team to answer pre-sale questions and have your customer support staff responsible for postsale engagement. Then categorize and archive the Q&As to be used in the future for prospectives and customers. You can import them into your CRM system or publish them as FAQs.
Keep in mind that managing the community should not be limited to the marketing department, in fact, the marketing department should help facilitate the interaction to improve the brand experience by providing insights abstracted from the community to other department. Product engineers can learn how customers are using the product, sales staff can identify the main concerns of prospective customers and marketers can better position and communicate more effectively.
If your organization needs to hire a community manager, I highly recommend following the Community Maturity Model by The Community RoundTable, a private peer network for community managers and social media practitioners.
According to The Community RoundTable, “this model does two things. First, it defines the eight competencies we think are required for successful community management. Second, it attempts – at a high level – to articulate how these competencies progress from organizations without community management that are still highly hierarchical to those that have embraced a networked business ecosystem approach to their entire organization.”
This is an excellent way of looking at what’s necessary to build a serious, large scale community. As for small businesses, I recommend to simply focus on 1 or 2 of the competencies below that aligns with your business objectives and just keep working at it. Use a systematic approach to nurture your community and determine how it impacts your business.
Are you ready to start building your online community? Here is 3 areas to think about:
1) Intent vs Outcome – Know why you’re doing this, what the community is about and be prepared to respond to unexpected outcomes. Create policies and define a clear purpose also helps to motivate members by giving meaning to participation and build collaborative work by providing a common focus. With clarity, members will define the purpose on a common ground to grow the community. Once trust and respect are earned from the community, members will be more incline to be loyal to your brand and what you stand for which should be beyond just a profit-making machine. It’s a commitment between the community and its members. Your reward as a business should be fueled by the appeal you have with the community.This is why a growing number of companies are investing in content marketing by publishing free resources to influence the perception of brand value and demonstrate expertise.
2) Communicate with Meaning and Authenticity - The key in building a meaningful community is to be authentic and stay true to you brand. If you ask your customers what your brand means and you don’t like the answer, perhaps you need to rethink your brand strategy, marketing communication and your corporate culture. Effective communities develop leadership teams, equip and deploy members for action, understand and engage with their community purpose to achieve impact. Besides, if you already have customers out there, they may be waiting for you to provide a platform to speak.
Companies are humanizing themselves and to be human is to have a personality. You must accept that you will make mistakes and not everyone is going to like your personality. However, you should be able to demonstrate expertise in whatever it is that you provide via free education and resources.
If you say what you mean and mean what you say, your community will be on your side.
3) Serve First, Sell Later – The perception of an expert is not only to have invaluable knowledge but a positive reputation. Focus on the needs of your members by making things as easy and frictionless as possible. It’s a team effort, the community as a whole never just about one person but a collective effort to keep the community going. The bottom line is community builds trust and it’s not related to making money.
Focusing on financial gain leads to short-term decisions based on cost that’s not sustainable for the future. A focus on the community (or the customer), on the other hand, can lead to happy customers, employees, and partners.
I thought this TEDtalk by Derek Silvers on “how to make a movement” was an interesting way to think about building a community for your brand and why leadership may be over glorified. The video is about 3 minutes long.
The take away: Brands have customers and when these customers have reasons beyond the product and services that they sell, there is a cause. That cause is what motivates people to connect and spread your brand’s idea. The greater the commitment to a cause the greater the commitment to the community. Like the great American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed. It is the only thing that ever has.”
Whether it’s in a social network or a weekly local meeting, ALL brands should consider fostering relationships through community building. For me, I have my blog and Facebook Page to build my community.
Do you have a platform to grow your community? Where should your customer go when they want to be part of what you do and what you believe in?
