You know how to get snow to stick to the ground really well?
Make it really, really cold. And keep it really cold for a long time.
Your sales and marketing tactics are like a snowstorm. No matter how ferocious your blizzard is, your strategy will not stick unless you’ve prepared the ground. You gotta keep it cold enough long enough so that your customer is willing enough to let your storm turn to beauty.
If you don’t prepare the ground, you’re wasting money with every flake that melts.
Here’s how to make it cold: Say the right things in the right ways. The “right things” are the things your customers care about. The “right ways” are ways that are a) surprising enough to get attention, and b) beautiful enough to earn credibility.
(Can you feel the B.S. meter going up these days?… it’s not just how you say it, it’s what you say.)
Here’s how to keep it cold: Say the right things in the right ways over and over and over again.
How do you know the right things to say? Ask. Ask your customers. Ask your sales people. Ask Wordswell to help you.
How do you know the right ways to say them? Ask. Ask your customers. Ask your sales people. Ask Wordswell to help you.
How do you say them over and over and over again? Strategize. Ask Wordswell to help you.
We define brand development as “telling the truth about who you are, faster.” But we should also add “…for the long haul.”
As soon as you change your set of promises, you start the freezing process over again. It’s ok to do that. Just be patient, like the last time.
brrrrrr.
brody
P.S. Wordswell loves to do brand assessments where we research your “stuff”. How good is your message and your media tools? What are your competitors doing? But really, all that only helps to assess the main questions:
Do your customers know the promises your making?
Do those promises matter to your customer?
Do your customers believe that you can deliver on those promises?
Ultimately, do your customers/members/donors/stakeholders know you? Trust you? Advocate for you?
If so, great! Let’s run with that. If not, great! Let’s fix that.
Prices start at various four-figure amounts. Start 2010 with a Wordswell Brand Assessment.
Sean Silverthorne wrote “Understanding Users of Social Networks” for the Harvard Business Review. He profiles the research of Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski who has years of online social media research under his belt.
Here’s our summary and comment:
•”Online social networks are most useful when they address real failures in the operation of offline networks” So says Piskorski. How do you know what lots of your friends are doing? How do lots of your friends know what you are doing? How can you search for real-time information on a topic? REMEMBER: Google is NOT real-time. How can you have a real relationship with someone without having to commit significant time or resources to make it valuable? There are TONS of ways social media allows us to leverage to achieve what was once impossible. This doesn’t mean that all those achievements are good things. But the more tools we have the better – we are only limited by our imagination and ethics.
Would you offer some more “How could you ________ without social media?” ideas in the comments?
•Pictures are huge in social media platforms. According to this study, 70% of actions in online social communities (except for Twitter) are related to looking at photos. So, reader, how are you going to get more photos associated with how people connect with your brand?
•Myspace? Yes, it still has 70 million folks logging in every month. But this is interesting: “MySpace has a PR problem because its users are in places where they don’t have much contact with people who create news that gets read by others. Other than that, there is really no difference between users of Facebook and MySpace, except they are poorer on MySpace.”
•Social Media must turn to Social Strategy. A couple quick points here. People don’t tend to click on many ads presented in social networks. Further, you shouldn’t expect folks to just use social networks as a way to find a way to click through to your website. What should your brand do in social media? It goes back to point 1: solve failures found in the “real” off-line social world. Do you have customer service issues? A tough time connecting with your clients? Following up after a sale? Market research?
This post is not a political endorsement. This presentation was created by Rahaf Harfoush, who is not affiliated with Wordswell. Let’s learn from the information presented here, though.
I would like to highlight slide 45 of this presentation that says, “Give up control. Empower brand ambassadors. Embrace co-creation. Let your brand evolve.”
Chances are you have some idea, message, business, or vision that needs to be heard.
But, chances are it’s not moving people. Sometimes it’s trapped because:
people haven’t heard you
they may have heard you, but your idea doesn’t mean anything to them
you know there’s technology out there, but you can’t get it to effectively tell your story
you don’t have the time, energy, or resources to get your message out there
Each of those is a closed door. Wordswell is here to help you kick them open.
The marriage of innovative strategy, clear writing, and potent ideas with polished design, sweet websites, and alluring media and technology (e.g. film, email newsletters, and social media) is how Wordswell makes your message grow legs and get running.
Top-to-bottom consistency makes Wordswell’s approach more effective than a “field of silos” marketing effort. A Wordswell project is infused with strategic, results-based, compelling, and practical solutions. We call it message creation.
Message creation when ideas matter. Here’s the fun part: it’s your ideas that matter. We’re here for you.
