For success today, take a page out of the Philadelphia Opera’s songbook
Business leaders can learn a few things from the professionals who manage performing arts organizations. I once suggested that website owners borrow a theater company strategy to boost visitors. You see, managers in the performing arts get immediate feedback on their successes and failures: How many rear ends were in the seats? Further, some are dealing with many of the same “generational” challenges legacy industries in all areas are facing. The classical performing arts – ballet, opera, symphonies – are struggling to find new, younger, audiences, as their traditional supporters age. The Met Opera, for example, has probably the most aggressive live movie theater broadcast program of any performance art group in the world. They broadcast a dozen or so operas each year to theaters around the world. The broadcasts are in HD video and feature behind-the-scenes look at each opera. Fans can sign up on the web to receive additional materials for each Met broadcast opera. This helps grow the Met’s base of subscribers and these people, of course, are asked to support the Met in exchange for various benefits. A recent article by Matthew Sigman in Opera News details how the Philadelphia Opera is aggressively innovating its approach to bringing opera to its city. The opera company’s approach to defining and reaching buyer “personas” is revealing. Business leaders in virtually every industry sector could take some inspiration from the approach they’re taking in the City of Brother Love. The way they break down or define their personas is based on several important consumer (audience member) attributes: retention, churn (there’s one every business owners can relate to!), demographics, psychographics, probabilities, preferences, and Net Promoter Score. From those attributes, the opera company has created buyer personas like these: Classic Buffs Mini Buffs Adventurous Buffs Omnivorous Buffs Attender wallflowers Attender bargain hunters Attender uncommitted As you see from this group, the opera has created two general categories – buffs and attenders – and then broken them down further. Let’s look at why this is important. Let me start with a question: Do you base projections and therefore business decisions on a customer lifetime value? You probably do, so let me ask one follow-up question: Do you think the customer lifetime value of all the personas identified in the above list from Philadelphia Opera are the same? The answer to the second question is obviously no. A related and important observation is that those groups would not be receptive to the same marketing materials. Marketing materials and offers should be created that target each of those groups. Sending the same materials and offers to every group would be a waste of time and money. Further, the opera will probably have to use different channels to reach some of those personas. A popular word in business today is “granular.” The Philadelphia Opera has taken a granular approach to defining its consumer personas and this allows it to take a granular approach to marketing itself. How granular is your marketing? Have you really drilled down far enough to truly understand your customers and potential customers? Leveraging the abundance of data today and the wide range of digital and legacy marketing channels is a prerequisite of continuing success. Businesses that don’t “think a little harder” and “reach a little further” than they did 10...
read moreHow to sell Millennials on a 15th-century Scottish game – and your product or service
In August 2014 I wrote an article titled, Can Millennial Golf Participation Get Out Of the Rough? It looks like I and many other observers were guilty of exaggerating the death of golf, to paraphrase the great Mark Twain. However, the statistics and trend didn’t look good. Participation was down and it was having a ripple effect through a wide swath of the economy. Not only golf courses were suffering, sporting goods stores were feeling the pinch. However, I recently heard PGA officials discussing a turnaround. Golf participation boomed when Tiger Woods made the scene many years ago, but today, Tiger is essentially out of the game. I suspect that when a lot of these new golfers think about Tiger’s driving, it’s not his success on the first tee at Augusta National that comes to mind, it’s his failure on Indian Creek Parkway, near his home in Jupiter, Florida that resulted in a DUI arrest. Getting up to par When I wrote the piece in 2014 I noted efforts the PGA and golf industry in general were making to position the sport to increase its appeal to Millennials. For example, they were starting to promote playing nine holes rather than a full round of 18 holes. If you watched the recent U.S. Open, you would have seen several ads for this campaign. It makes a lot of sense and is probably beginning to pay dividends. Another major development has been the growth of Topgolf – a golf-entertainment hybrid that was conceived by the Jolliffe brother back in 2000. They found themselves a bit bored by the typical driving range experience, so they started to brainstorm ways to make it more exciting. They eventually came up with an idea that combined the idea behind darts with microchip technology. Players hit these high tech balls toward targets to score points and compete against one another. That innovation allows players of all skill levels to compete and it gives players control over how long they want to play. But, those may not ultimately have been the most important innovations. What games are popular with Millennials? Answer: video games. And, video games are often played in living rooms where gamers can enjoy one another’s company while snacking and downing a few of their favorite beverages. Popup golf Topgolf has established venues that pull all of these elements together. They have created an experience around golf, and we know that young adults are experience buyers. Further, they are working hard to expose the entire country to the idea. Topgolf has conducted a “stadium tour” where they set up their system in ball parks – it’s the Topgolf version of a popup shop! When they pull into town the local media makes a big deal about it and millions of people are introduced to the idea. John Lombardo wrote a great article that details the benefits to both Topgolf and the local ball park when Topgolf setup shop at Seattle’s Safeco field. Above I mentioned the “ripple effect” that disinterest was having on the golf industry a few years ago. It seems that the growing popularity of Topgolf is having a positive ripple effect. In 2016, the number first time golfers on golf courses rose to an all-time high, beating out the previous record set...
read more5 crippling customer service non-calls
The most devastating customer service calls are the ones you don’t get. They are far more damaging to your business that the ones you get a chance to answer and respond to. When you have an irate, disappointed, or troubled customer on the line or in front of you, you have the opportunity to turn the situation around. When customers or clients don’t even bother to pick up the phone or head down to your location to talk to you, it officially becomes a “lost cause.” People have natural, built-in scales that are always either consciously or subconsciously weighing costs against benefits. For example, all of us, at one time or another, have hung up while on hold waiting for help from a customer service rep. In these cases, we have judged that our cost in time and frustration isn’t worth the benefit we would receive talking to someone at the company. Let’s start our list with this one: Waiting too long. There’s a legal maxim that says, “Justice delayed is justice denied.” A similar principle applies in business. When customers are left hanging on the phone, or go to a store to find the customer service line going out the door, they sense the delay and say to themselves, “My time is valuable, this just isn’t worth the bother.” There are other mistakes we make serving our customers that are related to this. Making customers repeat themselves. Customers perceive this as another attack on their time. And, let me make one thing really clear: when customers sense this, they conclude that you don’t value their time and this demonstrates that at your core, you don’t respect them. Once they feel that your attitude is one of disrespect, they will return the attitude. Make sure that situations can be corrected at the first customer service contact. Not delivering enough value. Let me go back to those internal scales I mentioned at the beginning. If the value of your product or service doesn’t outweigh the effort to go through your customer service system, customers will abandon you. They won’t even bother to give you the opportunity to make things right. If you have a “throwaway” product, you have a throwaway company. Competitors are outshining you. Let’s say you’re in the housecleaning business. Your service is adequate but you have a customer whose neighbors are really talking up their cleaning service. The neighbors related how their service “goes the extra mile.” Sooner or later your customer is going to say, “I need to try this company!” If your product or service isn’t the one commanding the word-of-mouth advertising (or Yelp reviews) you’re in trouble. Customers won’t call and tell you to up your game, they’ll just silently drop off your active list. The final straw. Do you, or anyone in your top management, get notified when customers have lodged more than one customer service inquiry or complaint? Customers get to a point when they give up on your ability to make things right, even if they think you’re giving it your best effort. It’s those internal scales again. They’ll decide they just don’t need you anymore. I suspect you’ve lost some customers for these reasons. Do you know who they are? The owners of successful companies follow up with the customers...
read moreThe five experts you meet in digital marketing heaven
Although it originated in an African proverb, Hillary Clinton can be credited with popularizing the phrase, “It takes a village,” when she published a book by that name back in the ’90s. But not only does it apply to raising children, in today’s complicated business environment, it applies to marketing and specifically digital marketing. It takes a “village” or team of experts in five areas to do a thorough job of marketing your business in the digital world. Is your team complete? Do you have any slots you need to fill? Review the lineup below and judge where you are. I fully understand that most small business owners can’t have all of these individuals on their full-time staff, so I offer some advice on how to fill those positions on an “as-needed basis.” Designer Digital media are visual media and you need a good designer for web pages and for other digital promotional materials. A mistake many small business owners make with design is to think it’s a “one and done” process. They believe that once they have a website up, they are set for life. Just as big city stores keep their window displays fresh, you need to occasionally freshen up your website. Also, web design aesthetics change over time; don’t let your site look “dated” – unless you’re going for a retro look that is “on trend” again, like the ’90s-style sites Steven Melendez talks about in this article, Oh Snap! ’90s Web Design is Hot Again. But here’s the kicker: While you need to keep things fresh, you also need to keep your look somewhat consistent and this conundrum creates a challenge for small business owners. If you could keep one designer on staff all the time, you could more safely assume that brand consistency would be maintained. However, small business owners will usually be giving the designer job to various freelancers or agencies over time. This means you need to create a style guide that defines colors, fonts, logo placement, and other graphic design elements that are important to maintaining the digital look and feel of your brand. If you use a good WordPress template for your website, some of these elements will be standardized. Copywriter In marketing, words and pictures go together like peanut butter and chocolate, so you need a wordsmith to work with your designer and with the other members of your digital marketing team. Even if you did well in high school and college English classes, don’t think that you can write marketing copy for your business. In fact, good school writing usually makes the worst marketing copy. I can’t tell you how many times business owners have sent guest posts to me that they would like me to publish and when I’ve read them, they sound like a high school English class theme. They might merit an “A” in school, but they would never hold an online reader’s attention. You can find experienced freelancers who are able to take your thoughts or the points you want to make and put them into words that will entertain, inform, and motivate your audience. As with your visual design, consider a style guide. You can also tell writers to use AP style and then add a couple of things to it, such as...
read moreTry this ‘secret’ strategy to build your email list
Over the years, we’ve gone into great depth on email list building. Of course, the use of popups and similar strategies continue to be the fundamental ways to build your list. There are other places you can encourage email list signups that are often overlooked by your competitors. They probably won’t tally as many signups as the more conventional strategies, but they have other advantages. I want you to consider encouraging email list signups on virtually all of your email correspondence. You should be using your branding graphics on your correspondence, but why not add something that directs people to an email signup landing page? Let me give you a few examples. If you do ecommerce and allow for guests to make purchases without registering, include something like this at the bottom of your confirmation email: Do you want to get advance notice on sales or Internet-only coupons? Sign up here! When your sales department receives inquiries, the questions probably give you great clues to the kinds of products and services they are interested in. Something like this would be good: Are you interested in underwater widgets? Get instantly notified when a new one is released or we have special limited-time offers available. Even general correspondence to your business can be an opportunity to establish or strengthen a relationship. How about something like this: Keep up with all the Widget-Co corporate news! Each “hook” like these can be linked to special landing pages designed to match the specific interest of the person. Further – and this is the important part – people who sign up on these landing pages should be immediately segmented or tagged for the area of interest they have ascribed to. Don’t spam these people with general interest emails. Take the time to create correspondence that specifically relates to the interests they...
read more3 brainstorming tactics for viral content inspiration
Eyeballs. Eyeballs are the most valuable commodity on the Internet. The only reason you can get free apps is because people are willing to give you the app in exchange for access to your eyeballs. Everyone is looking to get their social media posts and advertisements in front of as many eyeballs as possible. There’s only one thing that modifies this: When you’re in business, you want to get your content in front of as many of the right sets of eyeballs as possible. The dream is to create viral content – stick with me, I’m going to tweak that statement in a minute – and that is a hard dream to realize. Whenever I see a post that purports to tell you the secret to creating viral content, I skip it because there is no secret method that will allow you to automatically create viral content. I tried to avoid that in the title I gave this article. I want to show you a few ways to brainstorm for inspiration. I also want to point you in the right general direction – or at least away from some dead ends – regarding the type of content you need to create if you have your sights set on creating some viral content…and let’s start there. What gets shared Steve Rayson has written a lot about viral content over on Buzzsumo. One of his articles on “Lessons from the most shared content” is loaded with data-driven insights. For our purposes I want to pull out three important facts. Most of the “most-shared” content is: Emotional, Visual, and On topics of general interest: trending, health/fitness, cats/dogs, babies, longevity, and love. For content marketers who aspire to creating viral posts, this is generally bad news. A guy with a house cleaning service in Duluth is going to have a hard time hitting all of those targets. But all is not lost (and here’s the tweak I mentioned above): While you may not create truly viral content, the brainstorming tactics I’ll suggest for viral content inspiration will give you the power to make your content more shareable. In other words, you may not get a million hits, but maybe you can go from 10 shares to 75 shares on a given piece of content. A boost like that is no small thing, so let’s get down to the brainstorming tactics. Brainstorming tactic #1: Stay on top of trending topics Check Twitter each day to find trending topics. I’m writing this on a Wednesday and I see that #WednesdayWisdom is a trending Twitter hashtag. It may be too late to pull together something great for today, but there are plenty of Wednesdays coming up! I also see that there’s a new movie that’s trending. For example, an Entrepreneur article I wrote, What Small Business Can Learn from the Force of the Star Wars Marketing Blitz, received a good number of shares. Brainstorming tactic #2: Uncover viral content in your niche Don’t always be trying to reinvent the wheel. A wise king once said that “There is nothing new under the sun,” and he wrote that some 3,000 years ago. Virtually everything we create is at best a variation on something that has come before. The secret is to put enough of your own “secret sauce” on...
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