Marketing
Don’t hunt attention; attract it
If anyone knows marketing’s future, it’s Seth Godin. The long-time guru of the subject and author of 19 books, including This Is Marketing — preaches a kind of invisible marketing. “The word marketing should mean ‘What do we call it when we make something people want?’” he says. That’ll become increasingly important as 2019 brings more digital noise. His challenge: Be relevant, not loud.
How will marketing continue to change in 2019?
Attention and trust are the two most valuable elements of our economy going forward, and big companies have a long history of just burning it, wasting it. The alternative is to be the kind of organisation that markets with people instead of at them.
What do you mean?
The mindset of pop-unders, pop-overs, spam, interruption, demographics, targeting — these are all hunting tactics. Like, We have something we want to sell and gosh darn it, we’re going to find someone to sell it to.
That stuff always makes me feel like the marketer is aware they’re unwanted.
Exactly. What we’re seeing over and over again is that the organisations that are succeeding don’t do that. They’re the ones that would be missed if they were gone. When you act in a way that helps the person achieve their dreams and goals and desires, then you don’t have to bully and elbow your way in. We’re entering this stage where everyone knows there’s no privacy left, everyone knows there’s no data security, everyone knows you can’t trust anyone. But when someone we can trust shows up, people go, “Oh, that person’s different. They’re one of us.”
Where does new technology fit into this? Entrepreneurs have a lot of tools available to them.
Online technology that’s free is generally working when you’re welcome, like emails people want to open or websites people want to visit. Online technologies you have to pay for, like programmatic advertising, snooping on people’s privacy, boosting things, are interactions that were invented to make social media money, not to help people who are making products that would be found anyway. It makes more sense not to worry about getting big but worry about being important — seeking out the smallest viable audience will demand you make something special. And if it is special, they’ll tell their friends.
That’s very back-to-basics.
Yeah; the basics of a century ago. And the reason this is hard is not because it’s scary. The tools of industrial marketing let the big companies off the hook. You just write a cheque and it’s not your fault anymore. But if you’re going to make it human, it means you’re going to put yourself out there and say, “I made this,” and someone is going to see it and say, “I don’t want it.” And it’s easy to hear that and say, “You don’t want me. I failed.” But that’s not the right answer. The right answer is, “Oh, I didn’t make this for you. I made it for someone like you who believes something different, who wants something different. Let me go find that person.”
Podcasting
Own your audience
Recently, the New York Times reported on a new layer of Facebook’s role in our current climate of toxicity. This same viral loop that catapulted Facebook into every corner of the earth is slowly turning the other way, towards its unwinding. Facebook isn’t going away tomorrow, but audiences are shifting their attention. When only 1% of your audience sees the content that you’re producing, it’s time for an alternative.
For us, that alternative was podcasting — a great way to own your audience. As a podcaster for the past three years, I’ve built a personal brand and a successful business brand without spending a cent on advertising. The lesson is simple: Own your audience. It’s no longer a viable strategy to rely on distribution sources such as Facebook when the economies underlying those platforms no longer make sense for content creators.
Instead, start looking at alternatives like podcasting to secure the attention of the audiences you’re trying to reach. Today, it’s all about attention. Consumers don’t want to know what products or services you offer. They want content that speaks to their needs and interests.
Podcasting is disrupting the distribution of mobile content. Simply open the app that’s preinstalled on an iPhone and off you go.
To illustrate the power of podcasting from a content creation and distribution perspective. we released an episode with Brent Tollman and within 60 minutes we generated a lead from a listener on the other side of the world — and it didn’t cost a cent.
The lesson is simple: Re-evaluate the mediums you use as an entrepreneur. Either choose a beach-head strategy where you focus on one medium only and monopolise it, putting all of your resources into creating the best execution of your brand and story, or the ‘be-everywhere’ strategy. Here you recycle your content from a podcast to create scale across social media platforms — but you must always own the attention of your audience. That is where the market for content creators is shifting.
To get started quickly and at no cost, download Anchor, an app for brands and entrepreneurs who want to start their own podcast. — Matt Brown, founder, Matt Brown Media
Networking
Building relationships is a two-way street
Growing your business network is about extending your access to great customers, employees, suppliers, mentors, investors, and other people who can help you grow your business. Start today by drawing up a list of the people you need to see and why, and allocate some time each week for networking.
Make use of your existing network to reach new contacts. A personal introduction or recommendation from a mutual acquaintance can be a powerful icebreaker. To make the most of each networking session, prepare an elevator pitch for your business — a 30-second description of who you are, what you do and how you can help the person you are meeting with.
Networking isn’t a one-way street. Where and when you can, act as a connector who introduces people to others who may share their goals and interests. This can place you in the centre of a growing business network. And don’t forget to follow up with people after the initial meetings to keep those relationships alive. — Andrew Wood, CEO, The Unlimited
Diversity
A collection of diverse people in a room drives performance
We often consider diversity in the workplace as a ‘nice to have’. It’s not. Science proves that there’s a business case for diversity.
Diverse teams that are inclusive are proven to be higher-performing teams. They have higher achievement of goals and better retention of staff, which can result in higher degrees of creativity, problem-solving and social intelligence. To make diverse teams work though, we need to understand why they also make us feel uncomfortable. Our brains feel under threat in diverse teams because we aren’t surrounded by people who are ‘just like us’. If we can consciously overcome this default wiring, we can leverage the performance power of diversity.
Be aware of unconscious biases at play, and allow your teams to feel challenged by each other, because challenged teams excel. Research has proven it: A diverse team may feel uncomfortable, but they look at issues from all angles and find innovative solutions together. They’re more productive and they perform better. — Rob Jardine, NeuroLeadership Institute
Talent
Hire the best and pay them what they’re worth if you want to drive growth
As a start-up, we needed to cut down on operational costs, and human resources was an obvious place to start. It was also a huge mistake. Initially, we built 80% of our team around intern graduates. We disregarded their fields of study and used empathy instead of logic. The more an intern fumbled during an interview, the better their chances of getting placed with us.
We ended up with a workforce that wasn’t driving our business growth, with far too much of the business’s day-to-day operations resting on our shoulders. We’ve had to learn the hard way that we’re not in the business of saving the world but making money, and we’ve become deliberate about it. HR is much more than hiring, firing and training. It’s a living, breathing organism that works inside the culture of our company, which directly impacts our success.
One of the best pieces of advice we’ve received is, ‘Hire people smarter than yourself’. By following this advice, we’ve become more selective in who we hire. You should also pay your employees what they’re worth. We now have extremely high-quality individuals working on our behalf, and we give them the freedom to play to their strengths. — Relebohile Moeng, founder, Afri-Berry