market authority Archives by Mark Murnahan

Influence Marketing: Reach Your Market Through Their Influencers

I woke up to another Monday today. Monday is the day I ask myself the question again, “Are you reaching the right people?” It goes a bit deeper when I start asking “Are you reaching them with the right message?” If I can answer both of these with the affirmative, the next step is to repeat it and try to be sure the message continues to reach the right people, with the right message, and at the right time. Getting the right time means doing it again and again until their time is right. At the top of my list is reaching the right people.

How To Reach the Right People … The Influencers!

I think for a lot of people trying to reach a market, the question of how to reach the right people totally confounds them. It is actually a bit tricky and it takes some serious thought. It gets easier with training, experience, and research, but it is always a challenging part of marketing. Good marketing often means reaching the buyer themselves, but the best marketing often means reaching the people who influence the buyer. It is called influence marketing. Knowing who is an influencer and who is a buyer is an important step to knowing the right message to deliver. Getting it wrong means wasting a lot of time and money.

Car companies learned about this a long time ago. They realized that, statistically, men will be more appreciative of the 7.0L V8 engine and the 505 horsepower, while ladies will care more about the handy button to automatically move the power seat back to where she left it (before her gearhead husband got in and moved it). They segment their market and deliver a different message to reach the right person with the right message. By doing this, they are selling features to each party, but they also know that if I want that 7.0L V8 engine, I will use that silly seat button they told me about to influence my wife. Now that is how to get a car sold! Reaching the right person very often means knowing more than just them, but also who influences them, and how.

If I was selling wedding dresses, I would know that the bride is not always the only participant. There is another important point of influence. I need to reach her father with the message that his little darling will feel like the princess she wanted to be when she was five years old and that this is that moment she had planned for all those years. I need to reach the bridesmaids who will tell the bride how gorgeous that dress makes her look. I need to reach the influencers or the whole thing could be shot down and I have just another expensive dress on the rack.

For me, I consider who reads my work. Exactly who is attracted to a blog about marketing? Probably people who have a product or service to offer, right? The fact is that it is mostly people who would never in a million years consider paying me to help them build their market. This is just fine for me, because it helps me focus on being useful. If I am useful, people will come back. If I am even more useful, they will pass it along to others in their circle of influence. Because I know that most of my readers are not directly in the market to buy my services, the focus is a lot more on being helpful. Reaching the right people means reaching the influencers, and not just the buyers directly. Seriously, most CEOs and VPs are not looking for me. My job is to be sure they find me, but when the message is delivered by somebody influential to them, it is better than if I deliver it right to them. That is crazy back-door thinking, right? Not really. Just imagine the marketing assistant who says “I like this guy, boss. We should talk to him.” That influence will always go a lot further than just reaching the boss and explaining how great my offering is. The right message is that I am not the competition, but rather here to be useful. The right timing means that readers will subscribe to my blog and find me again when their timing is right.

If you want to reach the right people, you often must look far beyond the obvious target. Think about how you can better reach your market influencers. It is Monday, and it is a great way to start your week.

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Creative Marketing: How Important is Creativity in Marketing?

There is a lot of math and science in marketing, but just how important is creativity in marketing? Regardless what you may believe, creativity still holds much emphasis in successful marketing. If you look around the huge marketing arena of the Internet, you can see what I mean, illustrated in a squillion different ways.

You will see companies who believe that simply being listed at the top of a search engine result is all that matters. It matters, a lot, but without giving people something to rave about once they find you, and converting them into customers, fans, or something other than a ten second click, it is worthless.

If you doubt me, just question why you have heard of Nike, and not that other shoe and athletic apparel company who tried so hard to make you a customer. If you think it just comes down to massive amounts of money to spend, you surely forgot that Microsoft started in a garage. The founders knew what it meant to be creative, and they made that creativity clear in their market outreach. This can mean consumer marketing as well as marketing to investors, so make no mistake on that.

Marketing creativity is what makes things popular, and takes ideas to the next level. An example is the way Roche Applied Science, a company dealing in genome sequencing made something so geeky and scientific as apoptosis a fun topic. They knew who their market was, and reached them with their massively successful “Cell Death Tour” marketing campaign.

Marketing creativity is also what Matt Harding did for Stride Gum when he produced a video with 27,267,455 views and counting. It was creative enough that millions of people passed it along to their friends.

The list of examples is long, but I will try to keep this short by explaining that creative marketing often makes the difference between a ten second click and a massively successful market reach.

Creative Marketing Drags You by the Nose

You can try to ignore it, but what drags you by the nose to embrace a brand is the work of the creative marketer. Some may say that their market is more logic-based and that people are just looking at the numbers. Even if that is the case, they should really be looking at the explosion of numbers that happens with creative marketing that is perfectly crafted to reach the target.

Sure, marketing is a numbers game, and with enough numbers, anything can be a success. While many Internet marketers fight to be more visible, and with high-traffic to Websites being rewarded with unrealistic hopes, creative marketing is often neglected. I sometimes think that this is one of the top reasons so many people are getting the shaft from Internet marketers who make big promises about traffic, while having little idea what actually motivates a market.

Creative Marketing Does Not Just Mean Cute

When I say creative marketing, I do not just mean delivering a creative message, but also how to reach the right audience, and not just any audience. Reaching a lot of people is great. It allows the opportunity for people to share the message with the audience you seek. However, it also leaves a lot of chances that your marketing wheels are left spinning and stuck in the mud.

A Creative Marketing Proposal

As I was preparing a marketing proposal just yesterday, I was thinking about how to provide the best reach into the client’s target market. I had discussed the client’s marketing objectives enough to create a nine page well considered proposal. It dealt with many areas of math, geography, and demographics, but there was something more. While I was proofreading the proposal, I got to thinking about what makes marketers different. What is that key element that sets the great apart from the good in marketing? When I reached the portion of my marketing proposal dealing with cost where it explained that we do not breed elves, it struck me. Creative thinking is one area that truly sets marketers apart more than any other. I already knew this, but the tricky part is in expressing it.

Here is a portion of the marketing proposal, but I offer you this preface: Call me crazy if you like, but I am not a salesman. I give the facts, and I try to deliver it in a unique way. I will also add, as you may find here, that I do not seek everybody willing to drop a few dollars and dip their toe into the marketing pool to test the water. There are sharks in there, and I never want to see a client’s leg bit off by dipping their toe in. I want that diamond client that I was able to carefully carve out of the rough and polish with care. I want the one who is not afraid to be successful. I want the one who understands marketing creativity and the huge value it offers. When the client “gets it” I am ready to get to work. When they just want to follow the flock of sheep off the edge of the cliff, they call somebody else.

INVESTMENT IN YOUR BUSINESS

We see it all too often that price is the concern rather than wise investment in a company’s success. Our job is to increase the bottom line of your company. We don’t chase unicorns or offer elf breeding. Our work is based on real data, using real science that really works. This is not myth, and the return you receive will reflect the investment you make. In order to create massive success, you simply cannot do it with minimal investment, or with marginal marketing providers, as you have already witnessed.

In order to achieve both short-term and long-term results for your brand, we seek an initial budget of $25,000 with ongoing services to be recommended only following 30 day, 60 day, and 90 day benchmarking. We will not come back and ask for more money without a very good reason, and if we do, it is best that you spend it.

This initial budget will allow us to focus on the quality and quantity of your reach, and the creativity to achieve high conversion of your prospects into active customers and money in your pocket. It also provides the opportunity for proper benchmarking in order to make determinations of a performance-based opportunity between our companies.

The question of high quality and sustainable marketing should not include any questions of whether it is worth it. We will be pleased to provide enough quantitative data to show the value. The only question we allow room for is whether our clients care about their business enough to make a wise investment in its future.

Are you reaching your market with a voice of authority or are you at the mercy of a market that is not what you hoped for?

I find that many companies fail to bring a sense of authority to their marketing. It is time to improve that right now. Let us consider where marketing authority comes from, and why so many businesses are lacking it.

This world is made up of people … flawed people … every last one of them. Businesses are made up of one or more of these flawed people, so can you really expect perfection to come from that? Of course not, and those flaws often come through in the same ways in business as they do in the flawed people’s personal psychology. This makes perfect sense, right?

Lack of authority is a weakness for many people and it comes with insecurity, which often comes from lack of proper information. Fear is a strong emotion, and one that can wreck your hopes of bringing authority to your marketing. With all of the right facts and figures to draw from, it starts to look like science, and that makes it harder to deny. It also makes it much easier to have confidence and to market with authority!

How do we begin to repair that lack of authority and reach your market with confidence? I want to offer you some ideas.

Define Your Authority

If you are marketing pizza, and people tell you it is the best pizza, they offer you authority. Take it and use it! Stop being afraid. If enough people say that your pizza is the best in town, all of the sudden, guess what … it is! Testimony is a hugely important factor in court trials … even the court trials that get people hanged by the neck until dead. Shouldn’t your customers’ testimony be enough to give you authority, too?

Sales Volume Does Not Equal Authority

It is really easy for companies (flawed people) to perceive their authority to be diminished when sales are slumping. It begins a downward spiral. I will stick with pizza for this example. If you are marketing pizza and a Pizza Hut or other chain moves in and captures a piece of your market, does that mean your pizza is not still as good as it was? Sometimes this is the case, but as an after-effect, and not as the cause.

If you have good pizza to market, be sure to market it with the same authority that it deserves, and not based on the mood you awakened to on a given day. It is really easy to get this wrong, but a common and very inappropriate response to the marketplace. Remember that only because Pizza Hut sells a lot more pizza than you do it does not mean they take authority away from your brand.

Uphold your Authority

If you convey authority, there is an inherent responsibility to uphold that authority. I believe it is easy for people to forget all of the things that give them authority in their marketplace. This is especially true when their authority is questioned. Tragically, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when it is questioned from the inside.

You can see this all around you, if you look for it. Just consider how many companies you can find that beg for business instead of taking the time and effort to become an authority, and project that authority in their marketing.

I see this problem more often in smaller companies, but weak efforts and asking to be right are problems of companies in all sizes. It seems that it often comes with an uncertainty of how others perceive a business, rather than having a rock solid position that the company is better than the competition, and knowing why.

Are You an Authority?

Maybe you are already an authority in your field but you just don’t know why, or how to prove it. If you are not an authority, maybe it is your time to get there. The odds are pretty good that you are an authority at something. Come on … there has to be something. Start with that “something” and grow it! Lastly, don’t neglect to push your marketing “Go” button!