Sell Them with a Story: How to Use Storytelling to Grow your Small Business Posted on October 28, 2015June 27, 2016 by Jonathan Herrick One of the most effective marketing strategies for your small business has been around since the beginning of time. Storytelling. Even before the modern digital era storytelling was used by ancient leaders to move crowds to action, preserve history and change nations. Storytelling is a powerful tool that you can use to market your brand and connect in a more real and personal way with your audience. The Power of Storytelling “We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.” – Jonathan Gottschall (@jonathangottsch), The Storytelling As a small business, cutting through the noise and getting more of your audience talking about you can leave you feeling like David in a match against Goliath. Lots of companies create content, and it’s getting crowded out there. Getting attention is tough, unless you can connect with people on a human level and tap into their emotions. Crafting a compelling, memorable story that shows why your business is unique is a powerful way to stamp your brand on the hearts and minds of your audience. Create a story worth sharing, and your audience will reward you by passing it on to their family, friends and colleagues. But does storytelling really work? The answer: It sure does. The reason storytelling is so effective is because the buying process is not just a rational decision backed by data points for your customers; it’s also an emotional one. In Chip and Dan Heath’s Book, “Made to Stick” they describe why some ideas stick and others don’t. Overwhelmingly the stats show that people remember a powerful story over cited statistics. Stats like the often regurgitated: “We grew revenue by 200 percent.” In fact, in one example, students at Stanford were asked to share facts with their classmates: 63% remembered the stories and only 5% remembered the actual statistics that were cited. I know what you’re thinking…if you’re anything like those Stanford students, you probably won’t remember that stat. So to illustrate, here is a great example of a business using storytelling. Subaru, as you know, is in the car business and like everyone else they could have talked about safety, gas mileage, etc. Instead they connected with their potential buyers and customers with a powerful story, Making Memories: Now I have to tell you I don’t own a Subaru, but as a dad (their ideal buyer) this pulled on my heartstrings in a way that no other car company has. I have shared this video and nearly 340K people have as well. But you are probably asking, so what? Is it driving results? Subaru is outpacing their competitors in growth and recent sales have been up as much as 28% as a result of their focus on leveraging storytelling to connect in a more human way. That’s huge. The Art of Storytelling You’re probably thinking, I don’t have a Subaru-sized budget. So how do you craft your own compelling story that captivates the attention of your small business audience? Start with the 6 Elements of a great story: Understand Your Purpose: Whether you sell a product or a service, don’t make the story about what you do, make it about “WHY” you do it. It is often said if you are in the shovel business you don’t sell shovels, you “Give them a better hole”. People gravitate towards the “why” not the “how” or “what.” Create the Conflict: If everything is running smoothly for your ideal buyer, what do they need you for? It’s human nature to be slow to embrace change, but a pain-point or point of conflict for your ideal buyer can be the catalyst they need to make a buying decision. Show your readers what problem your product/solution solves and what tension it relieves. Create the Character: Develop a character that your reader or audience can relate to and cheer for. Someone that experiences the same challenges and struggles your ideal customer goes through every day. Focus on WIFT: Your prospects and customers want to know what’s in it for them. The fact is, no one cares about your business’s sales and marketing goals. Believe it or not, your audience doesn’t wake up every day waiting to be a lead in your sales pipeline. They do, however love hearing and sharing a remarkable story about themselves! Keep it simple: We all suffer from overstimulation produced by too much content. Attention spans are short, and everyone reads in 140 character, bit-sized chunks. So, keep your story short, easy to digest and impactful. A great example of simplicity is Apple. Deliver a great ending-With a great story, you’ve got readers in the palm of your hand. While you have them engaged, don’t forget to include a clear call to action to help them take the next steps to happily ever after. Describe how doing business with you will improve their lives and emphasize why it’s worth the tradeoff of changing their behavior. Bonus-6.1 Share your story: Now, more than ever, you have a platform to spread your story. Social tools like Facebook, Twitter, Slideshare, and Instagram make it easy to connect with your prospects in customers in real-time and share an engaging story. Social media is also a great place to find elements to craft a great story for case studies, your blog and your website. We are moving into an era where “Personal” Brands will separate themselves from the pack by delivering on authentic and real messages. By using storytelling in your marketing, you give your prospects and customers a reason to care about your business. And to quote the great Mark Cuban: “When you’ve got 10,000 people trying to do the same thing, why would you want to be number 10,001?”
A Content Strategy Playbook for Your Small Business Posted on January 29, 2015June 1, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Imagine you’re Tom Brady suiting up in the locker room on Super Bowl Sunday. You wouldn’t walk out onto the field without a plan – that would be crazy! Instead, you’d feel prepared and confident with a solid playbook and defined strategy for defeating the Seahawks. If Deflate-Gate taught us anything, it’s that the best teams – forthright or not – definitely come to the game with a strategy to win. You should approach content creation the same way – prepared with a strategy instead of just winging it. In fact the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs reported on the small business content marketing trends, budgets and benchmarks for 2015. The report shows that 39% of companies who have a documented strategy are “more effective in nearly all aspects of content marketing than their peers who either have a verbal-only strategy or no strategy at all.” How To Build Your Content Marketing Playbook So how do you get your content strategy on paper? Start by tackling these steps: 1. Identify and Segment Your Audience You wouldn’t just slap together a bunch of plays and hope they work against your opponent – that would be crazy! Instead, you’d study game tape like a boss and uncover each specific rival’s weaknesses to prepare for game day. It’s the same in content marketing. Know who you are trying to attract, then pin-point their greatest challenges so you can serve up content that engages and appeals to your ideal buyer. According to CMI’s report, small businesses that have seen success with content marketing segment their audience. In fact, the average small business content strategy targets four segments. Don’t know where to begin when it comes to zeroing in on your ideal buyer segments? Check out: A Simple Introduction to Buyer Personas Buyer Persona Workbook 2. Generate Topic Ideas The great teams have great leaders who do more than just write up game-winning strategies. The best coaches are able to inspire their teams to victory with an emotional battle cry. We all know that “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose.” 58% of small businesses surveyed say that creating engaging content is the most challenging aspect of content marketing. It’s one thing to present the facts, but to build trust in your brand, you need to tap into your ideal buyer’s emotions. Now that you know who you’re targeting, it’s easier to determine the hot-button topics that hit an emotional chord with each segment of your audience. Brainstorming topics that appeal to your ideal buyer can also help you build your SEO keyword strategy, giving you ideas for new keywords to target throughout your website as well as any ad campaigns you may be running online. 3. Decide How to Deliver Every team has their own strengths. A hall-of fame quarterback and wide receiver combo. A defense that creates turnovers. An unstoppable running back. Successful execution means drawing-up plays that involve your core abilities. The same is true for the content tactics your team chooses to employ. According to the report, the average number of tactics small businesses use to create content is 12, including: Social Media Content (outside of blogs) Blogs eNewsletters Articles on Your Website Case Studies Videos In-person events Illustrations or Photos Online Presentations White Papers Infographics Webinars/Webcasts You don’t have to tackle each of these content avenues, but pick the ones that align most closely with your talent as well as with your ideal buyer. 4. Create Content You’ve identified your audience, uncovered engaging topics, and have decided how to deliver your content. Now it’s time to put your strategy to work on the field. Create content based on the topics you’ve outlined, tweaking pieces for each of your distribution channels. 5. Evaluate Success Did your content get the job done? In football, it’s simple to track points and declare a winner at the end of the game. You may not have a scoreboard, but determining upfront how you’ll score your content can make it just as easy to track the success of your content strategy. According to CMI, 87% of small businesses surveyed said that lead generation was a priority for their content strategy. If that’s the case for your business, you can track the lead source for each of your content channels to measure your success. Or, if brand awareness is a goal, track social media activity and web traffic. Set an end goal so you can measure and adjust your content strategy against it. Like a championship Super Bowl team, you’d never come to the game without a plan. So don’t try to just wing your content strategy. Identify your audience, brainstorm compelling topics, pin-point the right content channels, create your content and measure and repeat your way to content marketing success.
Marketing: Connecting People & Ideas Posted on December 3, 2014 by Travis Arnold A Guest Post by Eric McCarty of ITD Interactive Let’s whittle “marketing” down to its lowest common denominator. What is this marketing business about, at its core? Every marketing endeavor, regardless of which form it takes, is about connecting people and ideas. You have a product or service that makes another person’s life better. That is, in its purest form, an idea. In marketing, you need to plant that idea, that knowledge of a potentially improved life, into the mind of your prospect. How Thoughts Became Chicken Sandwiches The first best-selling “self help” book ever published (over 10 million copies) – Think And Grow Rich – had this message at its core: thoughts are things. They are real. Though you cannot touch them or hold them, they are capable of changing people’s lives and producing things that you can touch and hold. Ever enjoyed a Chic-Fil-A sandwich? You can thank, in part, Andrew Carnegie, the steel industry magnate who commissioned Napoleon Hill to interview the world’s leaders and write Think And Grow Rich. Truett Cathy read the book and said it influenced him to help build Chic-Fil-A. Carnegie’s thoughts influenced Hill’s thoughts which gave Cathy ideas and, voila, you enjoy a chicken sandwich. Thoughts turned into things. Notice that there were real people involved in this process. Truett Cathy read the book because of the people who were interviewed for it and because Carnegie commissioned it. He had trust in those names. Names Names Names Trust in people goes a long way in connecting people and ideas. That’s why you have names like Richard Petty and Johnny Bench endorsing Blue Emu (one of our clients). Blue Emu knows that people trust Richard and Johnny. They want to plant the idea of soothed sore muscles (without the stink) into your mind because you trust Richard and Johnny. Blue Emu is connecting people and ideas and turning thoughts into things. There’s something mysterious about names. Another famous Carnegie (Dale) wrote about the importance of names in How To Win Friends And Influence People. “Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” Have you ever noticed how you can skim a page of text and find your name instantly out of all the other characters on the screen? It’s your own name. It’s magical. It’s important because you are important. The most successful small-town newspaper publisher, Hoover Adams of the Dunn Daily Record in North Carolina, had a mantra of “names, names, names”. He told his reporters he would print the phone book if he could, just to get more local names in his paper. That principle guided the decisions of his editors and reporters and created incredible success. Think about the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. A major component of the success of that campaign was the use of names. In each video, the participant mentions three names. “I challenge Jessica Lunk, Erin Posey, and Lindsey Stroud.” If your name is used it gets your attention. Pete Frates, who started that campaign, understood the importance of names. That’s great, you say, but how can I use this knowledge to make my business better? I don’t know any celebrities who would want to endorse my ideas, products, or services, so what’s the point? Why Does It Matter To Me? Remembering that thoughts are things and that names are important can open doors you didn’t think you could open. I can prove it. We just published an infographic called Marketing Blog Writing Styles that got shared by six top marketing bloggers – David Meerman Scott, John Jantsch, Pat Flynn, Derek Halpern, Marcus Sheridan, and Spencer Haws. And only one of them had ever heard of us. Those were names that our prospects trust and we got a lot of traffic from it. How did we do it? We connected their names and ideas. The idea was to take information that is already out there, connect names to it, and turn it into actionable content. It’s about connecting people and ideas. I wondered if it was a trend to break paragraphs up often. I see that a lot of top marketing bloggers hit the enter key quite frequently. That is something that could be measured with real numbers and it was just sitting there, waiting to be analyzed. With a few simple tools, I was able to compare sentences per paragraph, words per sentence, words per post, and characters per word of 12 big-name bloggers in our industry and track their style changes over a 3-year period. Why is that important? Because these folks are successful and we would do well to see how they do things. One of the big takeaways is that nearly all of these guys use short paragraphs. The median was less than two sentences per paragraph. Is that actionable information? Yep. You may have noticed I’m averaging close to two sentences per paragraph in this post. I now think about it consciously. The median word count per post is nearly 1,000. Is that actionable information? Yep. This post is over 1200 words. “Epic” posts (1,000 words or more) tend to get more trust and shares. Let’s do epic posts. So I had names and ideas but how would I connect them to get lots of exposure? I knew two things. These guys would be interested in their own stats. They write for a living (partially) and probably have no idea how many words per sentence and sentences per paragraph they average. If I were them, I would be interested in that data. (Nearly all of them who tweeted the infographic used the word “interesting” in their tweets.) These guys would be interested to see where they stood in comparison to other folks they respect and admire. If my name was mentioned in connection with some other top bloggers, I would want to share it because it puts me in their league. We intentionally used some with huge followings and some with moderate followings. The guys with moderate followings would really like being included! (All of them are worth following, in my opinion.) With an infographic we had the opportunity to use not only names but faces and we didn’t have to ask them for their profile pictures. Those are public. Here’s what it looked like: Next we had to figure out how to let these guys know that we included them in our infographic and hope they would spread it around. Then, if it’s worthwhile, their followers would spread it further. We took the time to find out where these guys interact online and connect with them in that arena. Some specifically said email on their website, some said twitter, some didn’t say but we saw that they responded to blog comments or tweets. So we went wherever they hang out and dropped a note. The result was six of the twelve made tweets to their combined 300,000 twitter followers. And their followers tweeted as well. Connect People & Ideas Notice that I’ve included the names of 17 real people in this post. Hopefully that made it more interesting, more real, and built trust in the ideas I’m trying to convey. Understanding the mysterious power at the intersection of people and ideas can change your business and make the world a better place. Marketing is connecting people and ideas. Connect your ideas with people and think your way to success. About the Author Eric McCarty is Marketing Director for ITD Interactive. He has launched several online businesses and participated in and judged at several Start-Up Weekends. A proud husband and father, he enjoys reading, running, and learning.
The White Paper – A Cornerstone of Marketing Automation Posted on October 3, 2014June 18, 2018 by Jessica Lunk When it comes to marketing automation, content is key to attracting new prospects and nurturing them through the sales process. A white paper is one of the primary building blocks of your marketing automation strategy. Here’s how white papers fit into marketing automation, and how to build one: Attract New Prospects Marketing automation uses online forms to capture information about the leads that are visiting your website via search engines, online ads, and social media properties. However, most people don’t just offer up their name and email address online without getting something in return. Offering a white paper on your website creates a give/get scenario. You can give your audience a great white paper that will educate them on an challenge and it’s solution. In return, they’ll give up their credentials, like name, email address, title, company size and other information. You get a new lead. Nurture Prospects Leads generated through inbound marketing are extremely valuable. By downloading your resource, they’ve raised their hand and said, “Hey, I’ve got a problem you can help me with!” Once you’ve collected information about a contact through an online form submission for a white paper you’ve offered on your site, you have a fresh new lead. The worst thing to do would be to let that lead sit on the sidelines, waiting for them to come back to your site on their own, or putting them on your generic email blast list. Instead, marketing automation nurtures these leads with relevant content until they are ready to make a purchasing decision. With a white paper as a resource, you have a foundation of content for fueling marketing automation’s nurturing process. You’ve already put a significant amount of content in your white paper, and have it well organized. To get more milage out of it for the nurturing process you can extrapolate on the main ideas to create blog posts, infographics, guides, checklists, slideshares, and other types of content to fuel a hyper-relevant email campaign to follow the download. How to Build a Whitepaper So what does a good white paper look like? GOAL: The goal of a white paper is to be informative, educational and solution-oriented. It’s not meant to be a hard sell. Providing long-form information in an easily digested format is a doorway to building brand awareness among your audience and building trust in your brand. In addition, while you want to educate and provide value to your audience, you don’t need to write a text-book or dissertation. Make it simple for your reader to understand the problem and the solution. BRANDING: A white paper can demonstrate your thought leadership on a topic, and is a great opportunity to showcase your brand. The tone, look, and feel should match your branding and value proposition. For instance, at Hatchbuck, we provide simple marketing automation software to small businesses. It wouldn’t make sense for us to publish a complex white paper using overly-technical jargon. We keep our resources in line with our brand, not only following our visual brand guidelines, but also echoing our value proposition of simplicity by using simple language and organization to help small business owners be more effective at marketing. ORGANIZATION: Topic: choose a pain-point your audience has that you can address. Problem: empathize with your audience by outlining the problem. Solution: add value to your audience by outlining a course of action they can take to solve their problem. Awareness: reinforce your authority on the topic and introduce your audience to your business. A white paper is a cornerstone to your marketing automation strategy. Hit on an obstacle your audience is facing, and serve up a solution to drive new leads, and nurture them with relevant follow-up content until they convert.
Content Grid: What to Send and When to Send It Posted on May 8, 2014June 9, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Part of a great personalized email campaign is knowing what types of content to send throughout a campaign as your audience travels down the sales funnel. Here is a handy grid to help visualize what to send to your contacts, and when to send it. You don’t need every type of content on the grid, but working toward a good mix of content for each stage of the sales funnel will help you fuel email marketing campaigns that raise awareness of your brand, deliver resources to prospects, help opportunities evaluate your product or service, and keep customers engaged. (p.s. Don’t forget that you don’t have to create every piece of content on your own. Supplementing email campaigns with curated content can also add value to your audience.)
Best of Small Business – Week of March 3, 2014 Posted on March 7, 2014June 1, 2016 by Nicci Troiani Happy Friday, Hatchbuckers! We have our weekly roundup of great small business articles for you today that focus on keeping the customer front and center whether you need to refocus on customer service, create better content to educate your customers, or put the customer at the center of every business meeting. Check these out: 1. 40 Eye Opening Customer Service Quotes by Ekaterina Walter Keeping your customers happy and coming back is a high priority in all business, but even more so for small businesses. Here are some great, inspiring quotes about customer service to keep you motivated. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ekaterinawalter/2014/03/04/40-eye-opening-customer-service-quotes/ 2. 5 Business Goals of Content Marketing by John Hall Setting goals with your content marketing strategy is crucial for making it successful. Not only will these goals give you something to shoot for, but they are also a reminder that content marketing has boundaries and limitations, so don’t set lofty goals that you can’t reach. http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140303155824-86319010-5-business-goals-of-content-marketing?trk=cha-feed-art-title-214 3. The Man With the Folding Chair by Don Peppers I loved the concept behind this article. Asking yourself what your customers would think if they sat in your meetings is a great, eye opening way to always keep the customer in mind. http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140304160716-17102372-the-man-with-the-folding-chair?trk=cha-feed-art-title-204 Happy reading and have a great weekend!