Relationship Marketing: Focus On People Before Your Pitch

Are you feeling anxious to jump into social media and tell the world about your business? I have some bad news for you.

The hard truth? No one cares.

Many people believe that showing up is enough. They believe that crafting a great headline or selling a great product is enough to compel other people to care about it (or you) and buy. But it’s not.
If you expect the money to come rolling in the minute you tweet out your sales pitch, you’re going to be disappointed.
No one cares about your product unless you give them a reason to care. Your sales pitch won’t work without first building an audience who cares about it and/or your brand.
Taking the time to build relationships with your customers is a necessity. It’s also better for you and your business in the long-term.

The value of your network

Relationship marketing is not new, but, with the ongoing evolution of social media and inbound marketing, the way you attract and retain customers is.
By nature, the online world parallels real life. While the same principles of offline lead generation, sales, and customer service hold true online, your message and your brand are amplified, reaching a greater number of people in less time.
You might have a reach of 200 people in real life. At any given time, you are physically near only 2-4 of them. If you complain about the service at the coffee shop downstairs from your office, only those 2-4 people hear it.
On social media, however, you might have 2000-4000 followers. When you complain about the same coffee shop, you’re amplifying that message x 1000. Plus, if any of those followers share your message, it amplifies it to their network too.
Positive or negative, people will talk about you in their network. Create an exceptional customer experience, and people will tell their friends how great you are. Disappoint them, and they won’t hesitate to complain about you.
That’s why the relationship with your network and your customers is so important.

What do relationships have to do with sales?

The most powerful thing you can do in the online space is not making a sale. It’s building meaningful, lasting relationships with your customers. The amplification of your messaging and transparency of your brand online makes it that much more important to conduct business with honesty and integrity.
Beyond the benefits to your reputation, a network of prospects who know, like and trust you are also more likely to buy from you. And if you provide them with enough value, they will likely bring in referrals and repeat business after the initial sale.
How much of a difference does this really make? Just look at the age-old practice of cold calling.
Cold calling for leads can bring in some business, but it’s a high effort/ low reward activity. In our office, we break it down like this:
30 – thirty dials on cold leads
10 – to reach ten people
3 – three of those will meet with you
1 – one of those three will result in a sale
By comparison, here are the numbers for referrals and prospects you already know:
5 – five people referred to your product or service
2 – two of those five agree to meet with you
1 – one of those two will likely result in a sale
Using these numbers, the cold calling success ratio is 30:1. Sales from people who already know and like you averages 5:1. Less effort, more reward. Which would you rather do?
Online, the same logic holds true. According to Hubspot, 71% of people are more likely to purchase when referred by social media. The relationships you have with your prospects and customers make all the difference.

How to get Started

1. Change your perspective: People don’t like advertisements telling them what they should think, but they do like to feel understood. Stop treating your prospects like someone you need to sell. Instead, look at your business from their perspective. A little empathy goes a long way.
2. Start having conversations: Instead of broadcasting your message or sharing self-serving content, try having a conversation with your customers. Listen to what they say, and respond to their comments, questions and concerns. Find opportunities to reach out and engage with your customers and they will be more inclined to engage with you.
3. Bring value: Find ways to bring a tremendous amount of value to your customers. Providing them with an exceptional value in product (and the service behind it) is one of the key ways you can forge a strong relationship.
What additional steps have you taken to foster meaningful relationships with your customers?

Content Marketing: Can We Really Trust Your Brand?

“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least–at least I mean what I say–that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that “I see what I eat” is the same thing as “I eat what I see”!”
- Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Can your brand be trusted?

Of course your first answer is to assure me that, of course, I can trust your brand.  You’ve been around for X number of years. You have The Most Amazing Social Proof Ever in the perfectly optimized position on your website.  You’ve even have declared yourself an expert in your field. 

But I want to know whether I can trust your brand at a deeper level. And here’s what I mean.

What does your brand stand for?

You might have a mission or value statement.  You might support a charity.  You might have had a company retreat and talked about authenticity, for all I know.

But if something suddenly happened to your website and I couldn’t read those carefully crafted statements, well, then what? If I couldn’t find your web page and couldn’t read the content that talks about your brand’s passion for providing fresh water in impoverished areas or I couldn’t see your links to Seth Godin’s posts on authenticity, but I could see the rest of the content on your site and your social platforms, would I really be able to tell that those things matter?

I recently read a story about a little experiment done at a corporate retreat. A brand wanted to see if who they thought they were and how they were perceived online matched up.

It was a simple experiment, and you could easily harness the exact same tool this multi-billion dollar brand used and examine the authenticity of your own content marketing.

They took a representative example of their content and put it into a word cloud tool called Wordle. Many people see it as a great graphic tool to make artistic images of text communication.  And it is.
But it also helps you dig a little more deeply into your word choices and see what you’re talking about frequently – and what you’re not talking about at all.

For this company, it was stunning. They discovered that there was a pretty serious disconnect between what they were parading as the “important stuff” and what they were communicating online.
You might think that your followers don’t care about that level of detail. But even if they can’t exactly put their finger on it, that’s one of the ways they decide if you’re truly authentic and if they want to do business with you.

If your content isn’t aligned with who you say you are as an organization (and that counts for single person brands all the way up to large multinational corporations), you’re telling a story that is disjointed, unclear, and possibly even flat-out contradictory.  The bottom line is this: over time, your brand will appear less trustworthy. And when your potential clients have a choice, they’ll choose your competitor whose message is more clearly aligned.

How to Align Your Content With Your Brand’s Story

1. Know your purpose
2. Use your purpose to formulate the core message of your brand
3. Evaluate every piece of content against your core message and purpose

Is your content supporting your brand’s story or are you missing the mark?

Tips for Creating Pinnable Content

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Most marketers are aware that Pinterest can take a website from unknown to super successful with a single pin. However, up until now, finding the secret formula for content that will take off and go viral has been largely based on experiment. Marketers have been scrambling to find a way to reach the largest market possible using Pinterest as the medium.

While there’s no surefire method for finding Pinterest success, using the right combination of content, images and infographics seems to key. Follow the tips below to create pinnable content that meets or exceeds your expectations for the network while reaching the largest audience possible.

Content

Content marketing is important. It’s a way to increase search rankings and to be shared across multiple networks and social media platforms. It’s no different on Pinterest. But, just like old content cannot be relied upon to drive new traffic to a website, it can’t be relied upon to gain attention on Pinterest. If a site is not regularly updated, there’s nothing new to share on the network. This puts any company looking to maximize reach on Pinterest at a disadvantage.

Whether your brand creates and sells a single product or an entire line of retail goods or services, new content is a necessity. If a pin is not a success the first time, it can’t be relied upon over and over again. Instead, new content should be produced on an ongoing basis and regularly pinned to your brand’s account. Using searchable keywords and images that speak to the content that has been created are a must. Think of information that matters to your target market; what are they searching for? What questions do they ask? What news stories pertain to their interests? Use these as inspiration for content creation.

Think about lists and actionable ideas that Pinterest users may be interested in, like this list by CopyBlogger. In most cases, those who use Pinterest on a regular basis are looking for projects and recipes—you can provide these easily.

Images

Many Pinterest users have entire boards of images: images that speak to them, images that are dynamic, images that are humorous and so on. Visually appealing pieces of information attract users on all social networks, Pinterest operates in the same way, maybe even more so. This is also a great way to supplement content creation. Snapping a photo takes a few seconds and can have a huge impact in driving website traffic.

An image can come from a cell phone or digital camera, a novice or a professional. Just make sure it’s clear and in jpeg form for optimal Pinterest viewing.

Think of images that speak to your target audience. 12 Keys, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center, did this with their Pinterest image campaign that used controversial images of children with drinks and drugs and the caption “They Are More Like You Than You Think.” These images sparked just enough controversy to encourage pinning while speaking to viewers in a way that content alone could not. For marketers, Pinterest images are a necessity.

Infographics

Long live the infographic! This is just as true on Pinterest as any other social network. Infographics provide an easy way to break down complex pieces of information or statistics in a way that speaks to the visual side of the viewer’s brain. Because of this, these dynamic pieces of information are more easily shared than traditional content, especially on a site that operates on simplicity and visual appeal.

To create an infographic that is likely to be shared on Pinterest, think of something that your target audience could be instructed on, or a recent study that shares data and statistics that that audience would find interesting. Think of how you could break it down in a single image or “videographic” format. Use various font sizes and colors to make certain details stand out more than others depending on interest level.

An infographic entitled “The Cost of Providing Drugs to the World,” by Clarity Way does this in a memorable way. By comparing the cost of creating and consuming prescription drugs with their effectiveness and popularity based upon a recent FDA news item, the center broke down an otherwise forgettable piece of information into something that speaks to their target market while leaving a long term impression. This is exactly what an infographic should do; pieces like this are most likely to go viral on Pinterest.

In some ways, finding success on Pinterest is still somewhat hit or miss for marketers. But, because of the potential for posts to go viral, it should be a part of any strategic marketing campaign. Marketers looking to create pinnable content should focus on blog posts, images and infographics. It only takes one sharable piece of information to make an impact; don’t neglect this possibility.

5 Ways to Use Pictures to Tell Visual Stories With Social Media

Are you sharing your stories with your fans?

Do you use pictures in your social marketing?

People want pictures in their social channels.

When done right, these pictures become visual stories.

In this article, I’ll show you how five brands are using pictures to share their stories and why that’s important.

Great Marketers Are Great Storytellers

 

As a marketer, you know the importance of stories, but do you know how to tell a story with few or no words at all?

“We’ve now entered a phase in which visual communication is supplanting the written word,” says Bob Lisbonne, CEO of Luminate and former SVP of Netscape.” Some are now calling it the dawn of the Imagesphere.”

Our brains process pictures 60,000 times faster than text. When your brand shares a picture, your fans decide in a split second whether they want to see more.

People upload about 250 million photographs to Facebook every day, and Twitter has become more visual, showing photos and videos right in your feed.

The growth of other image-rich sites like Pinterest has been stratospheric, and apps such as Instagram, Vine and even Snapchat aren’t just for teenagers–savvy marketers are using them too.
These channels help you tell stories that create engagement, build communities and ultimately help nurture brand loyalty and long-term relationships with customers.

Below I’ll show you how five brands are using visual stories to engage their audiences.

#1: Give Life to Your Products

 

Stories don’t have to be history and they don’t have to be long. In fact, quick-moving social platforms encourage using fewer words. Twitter has always limited you to 140 characters, but now you can add a picture or video to your update to reinforce your message.

Whole Foods Market used this picture on Twitter to emphasize how their products fit into customers’ lifestyles:

Whole Foods Market connects with followers by sharing pictures of their products.

Over 3.5 million fans follow @WholeFoods, in part because the brand shares great ideas on how to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Whole Foods’ tastebud-worthy pictures aren’t just for show; they subtly reinforce that all of the ingredients to make a delicious meal are available at their stores.

Tip: Use high-quality images or videos to give a “lifestyle” angle to your marketing. Show your customers how they can use your product in their everyday lives.

#2: Tell Your Other Story

 

Whether you want to share your culture, show how you design a product or celebrate some of the unsung heroes of your business, photos tell a more eloquent story than any copy ever could.
Your fans know what you look like on the outside. If you want to make a deeper connection with them, show your brand’s human side with a peek into your everyday humdrum.

Letting your fans see an alternate perspective gives them a new, more personal way to connect with your brand.

ABC World News uses Instagram to show a lighter side of the network that truly connects with its audience. Sharing informal moments makes anchors, reporters and their teams appear more relatable.

A look behind the scenes helps your brand connect on a personal level.

ABC World News shares these personal glimpses across all of their social networks, but Instagram lends itself especially well to the in-the-moment, spontaneous fun.

Tip: Don’t just take photos of perfect “on-air” moments. Give depth to your brand by showing the real work that goes into researching, designing and marketing your products. Those pictures convey your passion far better than an oh-so-perfect photo shoot.

#3: Celebrate Your Community’s Passion

 

Why do your customers buy your products instead of your competitors’? What is the lifestyle that goes hand-in-hand with your brand? As a marketer, you know the answers to those questions and how they define your audience.

Too many brands only use Pinterest as a way to show off their products and services. But the most successful companies on Pinterest tell the story their customers want to hear.

For example, at Random House, Inc., they know that books aren’t a product, they are a way of life for their customers. They use images to capture the entire philosophy of books, reading and literary interests.

Random House, Inc.’s 1.5 million Pinterest followers appreciate that and are eager to follow boards like What Would Jane Austen Do?, Bookish Nooks and Literary Weddings.

Know your audience’s passions and give them the story they want.

Tip: Highlight the things your customers love, celebrate the communities where you live, share what causes are close to your heart and show what inspires you.

#4: Bring Your Brand to Life With Video

 

If you’re only using YouTube as a repository for your ‘official’ advertising, you’re missing the boat. You can do so much more with video—and give people a reason to subscribe to your channel.
Beloved tech brand Apple is a master at creating videos their fans want to watch, share and comment on.

For example, this video, which has over 3 million views, gives a tour of Apple’s new Touch ID fingerprint identity sensor—a tech development they know their fans are interested in.

Show off exclusive product features (and their stories) to wow your audience.

What sets Apple apart is that they don’t just show you the new feature, they show you the stories behind innovations; why they were necessary and how they make lives better. Fans identify with those stories because it’s their problems being solved.

Tip: Use videos to create a story around your product features. Share employee and customer passion to relate with your audience and let them know their interests are your driving force.

#5: Cater to an Individual Audience

 

Sometimes, when you try to reach everyone, you end up reaching no one. In those cases, it helps to set up channels for specific niche audiences and just tell the story that’s relevant to them.

If you’re trying to reach the elusive age 16-24 demographic, Tumblr is a perfect choice to show your visual journey, one photo at a time.

Target’s style blog on Tumblr is successful because it shares only the images that their younger, female, more fashion-conscious followers are interested in.

Under each image or set there’s a link back to the product page, which is a very clever way of selling without the hard sell.

Use social platforms geared toward the community you want to reach.

Tip: Don’t use a one-size-fits-all story. Focus on a specific niche by telling a story relevant to them. If you’re having fun with it, they will too, and they may be more likely to buy. Don’t forget to drive traffic back to particular sections of your website.

Over to You

Social media is a gift to storytellers: You can tell a story in more interesting ways than ever before and reach a much larger audience.

Using images and video to tell your story gives a new dimension to your brand and builds closer relationships with your fans, followers and subscribers.

What do you think? How have you used pictures to tell a bigger story? How has your community responded to your visual content? Share your experiences and thoughts in the comments below.

How Upworthy Won the Internet and You Can, Too [INFOGRAPHIC]

If you're in the content marketing space, you have undoubtedly drooled at the epic rise to fame of Upworthy. The little site that could – Upworthy - has mushroomed to be the fastest growing site in the history of the Internet.

Question is, how? Having talented content marketers that have been successful in their own right helped. Proper financial backing helped. But what really helped the site “go viral?”

Among other things, how they couch the content with clever titles. Can titles do all that? Nope, but it gets you off to a good start when you take a classic title and make it a more emotional two-line title.

Something you might not have realized – Upworthy makes at least 25 titles for everything that goes to print. When was the last time you worked on that kind of an opener for your own content?

The following infographic, courtesy of Marketo usefully illustrates how Upworthy's tactics have put them on top - and how you can use these tactics for your own brand's voice. Do you already do some of these tactics? Let us know in the comments.

How to Create Visual Social Media Content

Do you use images to boost engagement?

Are you looking for tools to create better visual content?

Creating compelling visuals for your social media marketing can be challenging.

In this article you’ll find just about every resource you need to create visual stories on all of the major social platforms.

The Big Picture

Visual content has become extremely important to marketers’ social tactics. That’s because of a growing consumer interest in images as evidenced by popular sites like Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat.

People connect more emotionally with images than they do with text. In fact, customers are more likely to take action or make a decision when prompted with an image.

That means brands using visual social media content to drive a stronger message to their audience will naturally cut through the noise and rise to the top.

Here’s a lot of important stuff you need to know about visual content for social media marketing.

#1: Making the Case for Visual Content in Social Media

The use of visual content in social media has exploded, partly because it’s so easy to create and share images and video with a smartphone, and partly because images are more persuasive than text content. Here are some important reasons why you should include visual stories in your social marketing tactics.

Why Use Visual Content in Social Media Marketing?: 

Over at the Marketing Tech Blog, Douglas Karr breaks it down for us with an infographic (of course) to explain why any social marketing should be dominated by visuals.

Read up on why your social media should have a visual focus over on the Marketing Tech Blog.

Visual Social Media: How Images Improve Your Social Media Marketing: 
In this Social Media Examiner podcast, visual marketing expert Donna Moritz explains the importance of visual content, and how you can use images to take your marketing to a whole new level.

The Facts and Figures on the Power of Visual Content Marketing: 
 Jeff Bullas takes it home with an explanation of why pictures have become so popular and why using them is smart. He reinforces his point with another amazing infographic that proves how powerful visual content is!

Jeff Bullas shares the facts on using visual content in your marketing.

#2: Exploring Types of Visual Content

There are different types of visual content, ranging from images and video to infographics and SlideShare presentations. Some are easy and cheap to create, while some might require a professional designer. For small businesses looking to get big results on a small budget, check out Fiverr for great deals. Here are some ideas for visual content that will help make your message more engaging.

Four Types of Visual Content That Cut Through the Noise: Ekaterina Walter (author of The Power of Visual Storytelling) shares four types of visual content that your brand should definitely be using to engage communities and customers.

Find 4 ways to use different visual media on Ekaterina Walter’s blog.

28 Ideas for Engaging Visual Content to Post on Social Media: Jennifer Kardell gives us 28 more ways (some simple, some outright genius) to use visual social media content to connect with buyers.

30 Compelling Examples of Visual Storytelling on the Web: For some great examples of visual content, check out these amazing illustrations shared by Jessica Moon on Digital Telepathy. They’ll definitely inspire your visual creativity.

Digital Telepathy explores 30 examples of visual content.

#3: Creating Visual Content

Creating powerful visual content can be challenging. Fortunately, with a little work and some tips from these articles, you should have no problem at all. Check them out:

26 Ways to Use Visuals in Your Social Media Marketing:
Strategy, strategy, strategy—that’s where it all starts. Social Media Examiner’s very own Debbie Hemley is a genius with her complete A–Z guide for getting started with a visual strategy. This might seem like a lot to digest, but once you have it down, you can execute these ideas across multiple social channels (including your blog).

10 Free Design Tools for Creating Stunning Visual Content:
HubSpot’s Ginny Soskey will blow your mind with these free tools for creating stunning visual content. Everything from infographic templates to tools for sprucing up images, it’s all in there.

HubSpot shows you 10 free tools to create visual content.

How to Make Visual Content for Social Media in 5 Minutes: Here’s yet another great post by Ginny! This time she shows you how to customize an image for social media in just five minutes! Don’t miss it.

5 Tips to Make Your Visual Content Pop: Fandom Marketing covers five secrets for designing images for the social web. These tips will not only make your visuals look great, they’ll grab your readers’ attention as well!

The 5 tips in Fandom’s deck will help you design visual content.

#4: Getting Your Visual Content Shared

Creating compelling visual content is only part of the equation. Now your audience needs to know it exists! Make sure you distribute your visual content far and wide via social media and encourage others to pass it along to their friends and peers. Here are some tips for sharing your images.

4 Tips for Making Visual Content Go Viral—and Benefit Your Business:
  Dan Tynski over at Content Marketing Institute shares a study that takes a look at the viral potential of visual content on Google+. Although the research only looked at Google+, the implications are intriguing and can be applied to other social platforms as well. This is fascinating stuff.

There’s an App for That: How to Get the Most From Your Visual Content:
In this post from Social Media Today, Erika LaChance shows us how to use some of the most popular apps (Instagram, Vine, Snapchat and Pinterest) to distribute your visual content and increase engagement with your brand.

Social Media Today has a list of apps to help you distribute your visual content.

#5: Learning the Rules for Using Online Images

If you’ve been blogging for a while, you know the risk of uploading and using Google images on your site. It’s really important to make sure you’re playing by the rules and getting permission for any online images you use. Here are some tips about the right (and wrong) ways to use online images.

Copyright, Fair Use and How it Works for Online Images: Sara Hawkins (a lawyer and blogger) cautions us about the right and wrong way to use online images. If you use Flickr, Photobucket and similar resources to get your blog images, make sure you have permission and give credit to the original creator of that work.

10 Do’s and Don’ts for Using Stock Photos in Your Marketing [SlideShare]: HubSpot’s Ginny Soskey shares a brilliant SlideShare presentation by Brittany Leaning that makes boring stock photos fun. In fact, her best tip is “Don’t assume all stock photos are cheesy.” Take a look and see what she means.

Make sure to follow these easy do’s and dont’s from HubSpot.

#6: Using Instagram

With Instagram, marketers have a potential audience of 100 million active users who take over 40 million photos per day. Take a look at these brilliant ideas for using Instagram to reach a broader customer base.

10 Creative Ways to Use Instagram for Business: Vanessa Au gives away some great content ideas for getting extra visibility for your brand images with the Instagram community! Very cool post.

16 Creative Uses of Instagram Video: In just 15 seconds, you can create visually compelling videos to share on Instagram. Check out these fun (and sometimes funny) videos from brands that clearly know how to engage. Max Knoblauch will have you rolling on the floor laughing and learning at the same time.

Mashable lists a number of examples to help you create your own visual content.

#7: Pinning on Pinterest

Pinterest has become a household name. It’s the fastest-growing social network with over 70 million users. But perhaps the most attractive feature about this platform is the massive web traffic referrals (66.5%) it generates for marketers. Here are some ways you can leverage Pinterest for your business.

21 Unexpected Ways Brands Can Use Pinterest: Courtney Seiter at Marketing Land is all about using Pinterest in interesting ways. Some of these you already know, but there are some well-kept secrets in there too!

Use these examples from Marketing Land to spur your visual content creativity.

10 Creative Ways to Use Pinterest for Marketing: Since direct sales content is not allowed on Pinterest, Susan Gunelius of Sprout Social talks about 10 ways to do indirect marketing.

#8: Leveraging Flickr

Flickr is probably the best place to put pictures on the Internet these days. Flickr users upload and share 1.4 million photos a day and their pictures don’t slide down to the bottom of their friends’ news feeds. Here are some tips for leveraging Flickr.

5 Tips to Increase Your Visibility With Flickr: Ann Smarty addresses some common misconceptions about Flickr and how to use the platform to raise overall visibility for your brand.

Ann Smarty shares visual content visibility tips for Flickr on Jeff Bullas’s blog.

More Than Photo Sharing: 5 Unique Uses for Flickr: Great post from Nancy Messieh that shows how to go beyond photo sharing to give your audience a more compelling visual experience.

Find visual content examples on MakeUseOf.

#9: Capitalizing on Visual Content

Visual content was already important in 2013. Going forward, an even greater emphasis will be placed on images and video as larger numbers of your target audience use mobile platforms and social channels. Here are some resources to inform your visual content strategy.

Visual Content Marketing: Capture and Engage Your Audience: If you have 58 minutes to sit in on this webinar, it’ll be well worth your time. In this presentation, the good folks at Marketo demonstrate how to leverage visual content to create a successful social media campaign.

6 Ways Social Media Marketers Should Capitalize on the Visual Content Revolution: And if you don’t have 58 minutes, check out how Pamela Vaughan breaks it down into six easy steps in this infographic.

This infographic on HubSpot shares some key campaign points.

Well, there you have it!

Pictures are in, text is out. With these tips from the experts, it should be no problem to create and implement visual stories into your social media marketing.

What do you think? What other visual content resources do you have? Link them up for us in the comment box below!