It starts with the message
A strong media strategy is the basis to a strong social media strategy. I have been helping companies with the question "what should we talk about on social?" for years. It starts with your message. What do you care about? Why do you do what you do? For more on this, see see Simon Sinek. This needs to be the core of your content strategy, which is then the core of your media strategy, which is then the core of your social media strategy. In other words, it starts with your message -- everything else is about spreading the word. 

So what should your message be, and how do you make marketing that people care about? I have my own definition, but by chance I recently encountered a marketing services agency called Captains of Industry. They provide a perspective that is totally bang on. Here is a truncated version from their homepage.

All media is social media
Social media is the grid, we are all on it, and we cannot escape it. Social is ubiquitous so don't relegate it to a separate department. When it comes to content marketing, you need people to communicate on behalf of your company, people to communicate on behalf of your customers, and people to make stuff your customers will love. The less teams you maintain to do this the better because that reduces the communication overhead. These campaigns were not originated in the "social marketing" department, but they definitely had an impact everywhere in the organization and with their customers.

• Red Bull cares about extreme sports and high performance athletes, so they dropped a pilot from the stratosphere.
  
• Amazon cares about super efficient and stupid fast delivery, so they designed drones to deliver packages directly to your house.
  
• Tesla cares about sustainable locomotion for all, so they invented a better public transportation system and released their patents to the public.
  
• SOMA cares about proper hydration.
  
• Fernet cares about San Francisco because they know we drink more of their stuff than anyone else in the country.
  
• Notorious BIG cared about party & bullshit.
  

New technologies 
There are many great new and innovative technologies that can help you with content marketing. I have listed some below that I am familiar with, but this is definitely not exhaustive. Do your own research before you buy. 

HIRE WRITERS
http://www.iwriter.com/
http://scripted.com/
https://contently.com/ 

MANAGE CONTENT
http://percolate.com/
http://newscred.com/
http://www.skyword.com/

INFOGRAPHICS
http://piktochart.com/
http://infogr.am/
http://www.easel.ly/
http://visual.ly/
https://www.97thfloor.com/
http://infogr8.com/

SOCIAL MANAGEMENT
http://www.spredfast.com/
http://www.sprinklr.com/
http://www.tintup.com/
http://sproutsocial.com/
http://crowdbooster.com/
http://simplymeasured.com/
https://www.viralheat.com/
https://bufferapp.com/

Beyond the webpage
Content marketing starts with the message. The written word is the first step but obviously there can be much much more than that. It must be built for all media, not just social. Here's the thing... this isn't just marketing -- it's producing. To make stuff people want should be our primary imperative. Win hearts and minds and growth will follow. 

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I'm @yes, say hi sometime
Images credits: zach, felix, chair

Here are some of the best books I have read in the past year or so. You'll notice that most of these are not about marketing at all. This is because marketing is interdisciplinary and to master it you must be skilled in many fields.

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
This is considered a foundational book in the design community. The author is actually an engineer by trade and you can tell from his relentless detail and exacting explanations. This book is not filled with very many memorable sound bites or one liners, because that is not the point. This book will help you think and see the world like a designer. Norman's genius is his exploration of design through non technical, ubiquitous, everyday objects. A critical read if you care about design and user experience. 

Damn Good Advice by George Lois
George Lois is actually one of the original Mad Men, although he hates the comparison. (Too much booze and sex in the show according to him). He worked at one of the first proper advertising agencies in the 50s and founded another. He played a critical role in defining  the advertising and mass marketing industries. Although not a sales person by the proper definition, he is surely one of the most successful sales people of the 20th century. He just sells to the masses with marketing messages, imagery, and design. He is famous for the epic series of Esquire magazine covers in the 60s and 70s, the most memorable of which being Muhammad Ali shot with arrows. He does not consider that series of covers among his best work, though. It's interesting to note that he has not been able to repeat his massive successes in recent history. My personal take is the mass media world he specializes in is too different from world we live with tribes, niche products, and custom messages. Nonetheless, there are huge takeaways in this book that are still very true today. 

The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier
A brand is the feeling you get in your stomach when you think about a company, so goes Marty's thinking. This is a short but delightful read in how marketing, product, and design can work together to achieve business goals and growth. 

Trust Me I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday
I'll be honest, at first I avoided this book because it seemed like everyone in my world was talking about it. When something gets that much buzz so fast I tend to think I'm being had, but actually I was totally wrong. Say what you want about Ryan's tactics, they work. It's interesting to see how he meticulously breaks down our media infrastructure and identifies it's breaking points. Ignore the truth at your own risk. 

Propaganda by Edward Bernays
When a book about propaganda is written by Sigmund Freud's nephew, you know it's going to be good. Bernays wrote this in 1928 when radio and newspapers were the media du jour, and although we have 10x more mediums now, the basic mechanics of how you influence a population are the same. If this seems slightly diabolical to you, you are correct, it is. Think about how you can "pull" out demand in a market vs a direct "push". Propaganda is all about the pull.

Contagious by Jonah Berger
This is an examination of why ideas spread and how media goes viral, through the lens of statistical analysis and data. I can't say the book itself is that profound, but there are some really important conclusions. At the very least I can appreciate Jonah's academic rigor applied to the fields of digital and social media. 

Positioning and The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Jack Trout and Al Ries
The 22 Laws is a foundation in marketing and should be taught in schools. The book is a high level overview kind of read, but itself is a triumph of marketing because of the indelible mark it has made on me and so many others in the industry. Positioning is actually a better read and my favorite of the two. The basic concept of positioning is that your product (or perhaps "brand") cannot exist in a vacuum. Rather, it must exist in a relative space with respect to both the competitors in the marketplace and the ideas inside your prospects head. "Marketing is a battle of perceptions". 

Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins
The most notable praise of this book comes from David Ogilvy, "Nobody should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times. It changed the course of my life." It's written in 1928 and perfectly models not just offline direct response advertising, but the direct response advertising online as well. It is remarkably ahead of it's time, and it's also a great primer on sales copywriting.

The Fish That Ate The Whale by Richard Cohen
This is a chronicle of the banana industry in the early 20th century and it's biggest character, Samuel Zemurray. Sounds tame, but this industry is one of the most influential in history, and Zemurray is undoubtedly one of the most legendary entrepreneurs ever. The magic of this book is how Cohen tells such a compelling story, he literally keeps you glued.  This book is in the running for my favorite book of all time. 

I'm always on the lookout for great reads, so please tweet me @yes if you have any recommendations. 

image credits: esquire, radio, ogilvy

"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face" - Mike Tyson

One of my startup clients is building a digital content network of sorts. Their primary experience lives on their website (to be launched soon) and upcoming mobile app. We have some cool plans to grow the network, much of which is data intensive. So they asked me a simple question:  What should be doing to get our app ready and how do we start?

I gave them an answer via email, but I realized after the fact that this is actually a pretty decent template for anyone building an interactive web experience. So I have reposted my answer below (lightly edited to preserve their identity). Let me know if it's helpful for you. 

1) Break down the information architecture of the website. The goal is to understand on paper the different components of the website and how we intend them to relate to one another. Both for current and planned features.

2) Establish baseline key performance metrics. These are the important quantifiable things we measure and optimize in order to get the business to grow. Note: this is agnostic of any tool or software we use to measure.

3) Audit and implement analytics tools.  We need to figure out if what you are using right now is exactly right, although it is probably about half the way there. Then we need to improve upon our current tools or implement new ones to do the job that we need done.

4) Define and implement tests. We do this to figure out what actions have the highest correlation to acquisition, retention, and growth. The goal is to eliminate what does not work and double down on what does. 

5) Lifecycle and retention marketing. We need to figure out a plan of how to ramp users up over time and how to get them to keep coming back once they are active. There are many marketing communications tools that can help us with this.

6) Segmentation analysis. We do this to figure out the different kinds of users we have according to their attributes and the acquisition channel they came from.

7) UX optimizations.  Once we have a bigger audience we need to optimize the onboarding and retention according to everything we have learned. 

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you can catch me @yes

Two schools that fascinate me and that I have been lucky enough to be involved with are Design Thinking and Agile Development. These pieces, featured below, are perhaps a perfect representation of their practice at work.

The first, from Fast Company Labs, is an interview of Gentry Underwood, founder of Mailbox. Mailbox was acquired somewhat famously by Dropbox earlier this year. What is amazing about Mailbox to me is the fact that it is a. friggin. email. app. That they were able to create such a novel product, subsequent buzz, and nice acquisition is testament to the fact that there was some seriously brilliant problem solving going on behind the scenes. The method at work is Design Thinking, and Gentry leaves no doubt of it's influence over him and his work.

Mailbox's Gentry Underwood: What Hackers Should Know About Design Thinking
http://www.fastcolabs.com/3008886/open-company/mailboxs-gentry-underwood-what-hackers-should-know-about-design-thinking
 
 

The second is actually a radio show from NPR called Here's The Thing, hosted by Alec Baldwin. This episode is an interview with Lorne Michaels, executive producer and creator of Saturday Night Live, one of the most important and influential TV shows of all time. In this interview Lorne sheds some light into how they are consistenly able to deliver the laughs, week after week, year after year.  He doesn't use the word "Agile" once, and I can guarantee you he has never written one line of code in his life, but the parallels between the way he runs his show and Agile Development are uncanny.  

Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin: Lorne Michaels
http://www.wnyc.org/story/182698-lorne-michaels/

 
These interviews are not just super interesting but also sticky. I hope they can be as useful to you as they were to me.

image credits: Stanford Design School & Vanity Fair

Product building and product marketing used to be mutually exclusive. Eventually something funny happened. Some people who were in charge of marketing realized they could use methods from the engineering departments to do better marketing. Enter the Growth Hacker.

Just like marketing, the goal of Growth Hacking is to acquire and retain customers. But the Growth Hacker is empowered with marketing methods AS WELL AS engineering methods to get it done. (Disclaimer: I'm not including design in this discussion. This is because great design is critical to both engineering and marketing, so I take it as a given). 

The reason why Growth Hackers can be so effective is because 1) they are capable of using and understanding data in a way traditional marketers usually are not and 2) have the training to build better products themselves. It's not magic, it just makes good sense. 

Engineering and marketing are both broad fields. So to say Growth Hacking will replace marketing is as silly as saying Growth Hacking will replace engineering. HOWEVER, the implications of Growth Hacking are much much more significant for marketers. Let me edit the title of this post a bit.

The product and marketing worlds have collided. Well actually, they collided a long time ago, but the recent rise of the Growth Hacker is forcing marketing to evolve faster. This is a good thing. Marketers should be product makers. Marketing should be delightful and built into the products they are intended to serve. This is the implication of Growth Hacking. 

If you want to learn more about this you can watch my interview on Growth Hacker TV here.

It's really important to understand that Growth Hacking is not a singular job or study, rather it's a collection of disciplines used to pursue business growth. Here is a list of awesome Growth Hackers that have influenced me in some way.

Sean Ellis
Brian Balfour
Andrew Chen
Josh Elman
Lincoln Murphy
Sean Work
Mattan Griffel
Noah Kagan
Andy Johns
Neil Patel
Patrick Vlaskovits

For more Growth Hacking resources, check out
GrowthHackers.com
Growth Hacker TV 
Growth Hacker Marketing

One more thing...
Just like in marketing, one of the most basic goals of Growth Hacking is to figure out how to convince your prospects to do the thing that helps your business in some way. There are ethical consquences to influencing someone to do something.  Here's the catch: good and bad are magnified more quickly on the internet than anywhere else. So there are serious ethical considerations to Growth Hacking that perhaps do not exist in traditional marketing. Is all growth necessarily good? You need to calculate who bears the burden of your growth before you go after it. Here's a good rule of thumb -- make it delightful for everyone involved. 


#!+

thanks for reading, you can find me @yes
quote from Dick Costolo

In conventional economic theory, the price you charge and quantity you sell are a function of both the aggregate supply of and demand for your product in the market.  The rule is not supposed to be violated, and in our old economy this was the case much of the time.

For modern digital products and SAAS comapnies, however, this relationship breaks down in at least two places.

1) Perfectly Inelastic supply.  
Even the smallest startup has access to infinitely scalable infrastructure.  This means that the unique opportunity -- and challenge -- of selling a digital product is that you can theoretically produce infinite quantities.  The term to describe this is "perfectly inelastic supply" (where the Elasticity = 0 and the supply curves looks like a line going straight up and down).  I'm not sure a product with truly inelastic production capacity has ever existed before the internet.  

2) Unknown or 0 demand.
The most successful companies find huge unsatisfied vaccums of demand and fill it.  Now more than ever we can create products beyond the understanding of what is possible or what it is people may want.  Thus, completely unknown future demand. 

The point is, it used to be that supply and demand determined how you did business. But it seems now that the price you choose to charge and quantity you choose to satisfy will actually set the supply and demand in your market  -- if that market in fact exists.  The relationship, in other words, is completely opposite.  The power is in the hands of the marketer, not the market.  Here's the takeaway:  you have way more control over your price and quantities than ever before.  Now they are just numbers on your marketing materials rather than huge differences in operational capacity.

Quantities set prices and prices set market size. You can observe this relationship in action pretty easily.  Facebook and Twitter are social networks for everyone.  How much would you be willing to pay to use them? You are lying if said anything over $0.  Salesforce and Basecamp, however, are not for everyone.  They solve specific problems for particular kinds of businesses and directly charge good money for their products.   

Luckily there is plenty of opportunity on both sides of the continuum.  Your positioning on that scale is determined by marketing, not the market. 

Want more? Let me know

price elasticity of supply on Wikipedia
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Community Managers will become the most visible customer-facing people in your technology company, if they are not already.  It was just a few years ago where executives doubted their value altogether. Now I hear about Fortune 500 companies launching Community Managers for each product and each market.  It's strong move, but a wise one.  Community Mangers are the team captains of the internet because they ought to be a customer as much as they are an employee.  

Community Mangers bridge the company/customer gap in the same way team captains connect coaches and players.  Team captains are the players that coaches consult to understand the player perspective.  They are the person who can rally the other players to get behind one thing or against another.  They are usually the most famous and iconic player on their team.  Most important: team captains do not coach, they educate when appropriate.  Likewise, Community Managers need to have a total understanding of what the customer wants and how they are likely to behave. They represent the community because the community trusts them. And they never sell, they provide relevant content and products according to the unique needs of the conversations they are in.

Follow me @yes for more

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I first gave my definition of marketing on this blog two years ago. I still believe Marketing should be a Sales operation, and that effective marketing is sales at scale.  But there are a lot of kinds of marketing and all are important.  In general, Marketing serves these functions:

Define the Brand
Find the Audience
Deliver the Message
Build the Relationship
*test/optimize

I intentionally did not number them because I do not want to suggest an order. With new companies and new products the process would probably go in this order, but actually it can go in any order because every function should be iterative and ongoing.  That is why the last point gets an asterisk.  Stagnation is decline in disguise; success favors change. 

Ecosystems like Apple, Android, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are reaching unprecedented levels of ubiquity, so consumers have important decisions to make.

Add more personal access points into the ecosystem and it works better; you are happy.  But with every additional node it becomes exponentially harder to leave that ecosystem.

I like to be free -- ecosystem agnostic; but I also like to be happy -- ecosystem optimized. Will it be possible to have both?

To be an effective marketer you have to know what works, what doesn't, and allocate your resources accordingly.  But how can you determine the efficacy of your marketing?  It takes some math and analytics, but I promise it won't hurt.  Let's consider a simple base case:  you are marketing for an eCommerce company and your goal is to acquire sales through paid advertising.  Keep non-paid and organic marketing out of the model for now.

First, choose a time interval that is long enough to be meaningful but short enough to be evaluated regularly.  Let's say 24 hours.  Then establish your benchmark.  For each day, you are responsible for bringing in some number of sales.  This is your daily sales goal [G].  Divide [G] by your on-site conversion rate.  This is the number of new visits you need to your website per day.  Multiply this number of visits by your daily CPC, averaged over all the paid networks you are advertising on.  This is your daily spend [S]; what you have to spend each day to achieve your [G].

Now add up all the sales from the day you want to inspect.  This is your gross revenue, a direct result from your [S] for that day.  Multiply gross revenue by gross margin (as a percentage), this is your net revenue [R].  Now compare your spend vs revenue.  If [R] > [S] congrats, you have a positive ROI.  Take a moment to pat yourself on the back.  If [R] < [S] then you have a negative ROI, this might be okay for now but you probably want to make it positive as soon as possible. 

This exercise is what I call Efficacy Testing.  The goal of Efficacy Testing is to give you a quick way to determine if what you are doing is working.  Most businesses have more comprehensive models, but the logic is the same.  Don't forget that you manage what you measure, so do Efficacy Testing on your most important channels on a regular basis. 


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