I wrote the headline to a prospect who wasn’t returning my calls.
The goal was to provoke a response – I also left phone messages…several.
When you have new business pipeline deals to close, remember this one thing.
There are 3 possible answers – Yes, No and Maybe.
Go gettem!
When a business is struggling to acquire new clients or increase profits, creativity and innovation are the best tools to create a new reality. More accurately, in Nintendo’s case, an augmented reality.
On July 6th, the videogame giant launched Pokémon GO and took the lead of the download rankings on both iPhone’s App Store and Google Play by storm. Just a few days after its initial release in the US they added UK, Australia and New Zealand. Thanks to this bold move, Nintendo’s shares rose 56% in a week, setting Nintendo’s market value at unbelievable 34 billion dollars. Nintendo is also generating direct revenue by in-game microtransactions and will include adverts shortly.
If you don’t know what Pokémon GO is, let me explain it while you defrost from the cryogenics: it’s a free-to-play location-based mobile game where you can capture fantasy monsters and train them to challenge other players to a weirdly cute pit fight. Using augmented reality (mixing real-world and virtual elements) with the assistance of your smartphone’s GPS and camera, the player searches for creatures while actually walking around the local streets. He can then snatch it with a PokéBall, a special contraption built to hold these monsters.
Even though Nintendo is a “lovemark”, thanks to classic games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, the console war wasn’t gentle on the business for the past years. With the Japanese company losing a huge market share to Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox, many predicted that Nintendo was in a descending curve.
Of course it’s hard to create such a splash like Nintendo did with Pokemón GO, but just because you didn’t create the wave doesn’t mean you can’t surf it for a while. Several local businesses are experiencing an increase in sales thanks to the extra foot traffic around their shops, located close to PokéStops. A feature in the game, PokéStops are real locations in cities where players can collect rare Pokémons and items to improve their Pokémon GO accounts. PROTIP: You can request a PokéStop at your business location by filling this form. PROTIP 2: If your shop is already close to one of those sweet spots, you can buy an in-game item (remember the microtransactions I mentioned?) called “Lure Module” to attract lots of Pokémons to your location (and people eager to catch ’em all).
Sign outside a shop invites players to enter and play
But why rely on pure luck and sit on your bum waiting? Brands can also be more proactive, searching for the greatest Pokémon GO hotspots and give potential customers the opportunity to engage directly. Ads, brand ambassadors, promotional activities, you name it. Some quick thinkers are already making money by offering car rides to players in what seems to be the laziest safari hunt ever.
Now it’s up to you. Is your business going to take advantage of this massive opportunity? And what can you do to transform your local business and be the next Pokémon GO?
Indomitable Gauls make Romans wary
One of our clients has recently taken to creating videos to showcase their products on the company website. This of course includes uploading the videos to their new YouTube account to help promote the company and the products they are selling. In doing so, they noticed the previous owner of the company had created a YouTube account with a similar name (a variation of the company name). With a decent chunk of views having stacked up on the old channel, our client wanted to know if it was possible to bring the two accounts together, since, they were essentially the same business anyway.
There were a few complications at this point: our client had contacted the previous owner of the company about getting the videos from the old channel. Unfortunately, the previous owner had not used the account for quite some time. He didn’t know what the password was and having since sold the business, his email address had been deleted, leaving his YouTube account hanging in a state of limbo, unable to be logged in and edited for future access.
As it turns out, not being able to access the account doesn’t affect the outcome – YouTube simply do not allow accounts to be merged for any reason. That’s right, if you have millions of views locked away in an account you can no longer access, too bad. They’re lost!
If you were able get in to the account to grab the videos, the only way to get all of the videos on to the same account is by logging in, downloading the videos, and re-uploading them on the new channel. This resets the view count back to zero, erasing any clout you may have built up on the website with the older account.
Thankfully the videos in question were of lower quality, looked incredibly dated and the views weren’t substantial enough to cause any serious headaches.
Continue adding high quality content to the new channel, and ignore the old one.
A frustrating outcome, but a valuable lesson learned along the way.
If you want to migrate videos from one channel to another, ensure you have the video file itself is saved somewhere other than YouTube, set the channel up right the first time, so that you do not need to create a second one and use an email address that is unlikely to expire (hint: Gmail is YouTube’s best friend). With these points in mind, you should be able to rescue any valuable content, but sadly you will have to forget about bringing them together and leveraging the success of the old videos to promote the new ones.
A frustration we must all live with unless YouTube suddenly change their account settings. (Sigh).
Just been to a conference and got sent the self-congratulatory showreel wrap up of vox-pops from speakers and attendees. 2 minutes of my life wasted.
Take a contrast for Conferenz and Spark’s CIO summit – a slide deck which has real insights and learnings which I can take away as a non-attendee.
The only thing they’re missing is a sign-up form to encourage me to ask for more information and an invite for next year’s event……
To be fair, they had a show reel too…. so not yet a perfect performance!
Testimonials are self-evidently a great way to win new clients and grow your business profile. If you want to consider adding them to your tactical marketing armoury, there are some prior considerations to resolve.
If you aren’t a long-established business, then it will be more difficult to encourage spontaneous outpourings of delight and joy.
Never fear, we’ve got a plan for you.
Start with any existing documented positive feedback that you or your client can find. And plan
a page on your domain where you can drop in all the quotes from clients.
Make it easy to find e.g. www.yourdomain.co.nz/testimonials.
Make the most of the page so the viewer finds it a helpful resource, not a chore. Lay out the page so the most recent testimonial is at the top and the reader scrolls down to see others. If there are obvious different services or products which have received reviews, clearly separate them too. A series of embedded tabs can be a neat solution here.
Tabbed testimonials example
A different opportunity exists for businesses without any rave reviews. You may feel it’s hard to ask for favours, to ask for sales or to ask for testimonials. Let us help you make it easy.
Business “workflows” are a trendy catchphrase that is a way of describing ‘how-we-do-things-round-here’. Any marketing activity which you do more than once deserves a workflow process. The reason is that it becomes part of normal business life and is easier to reproduce if you do it frequently.
Think about how you are going to set up the business process to get new testimonials regularly from clients and customers.
Here’s ours.
Our marketing meeting has “Testimonials” as an agenda item. We review a list of recent clients and pick a couple to approach. The lead person who works on the client phones up and asks (using a pre-agreed script) if we can have a testimonial. Further, we ask for it in three places – spoken, on LinkedIn and on Google. The spoken one we write down as we chat and then send back to the client for approval.
What’s so easy about this is that the client doesn’t have to actually write anything – they just talk. Most people find that easier.
Then we upload the testimonial or ask the client to do it on social pages. Interestingly, almost 88% of sales are influenced by social media and 59% of consumers say Facebook is the most influential. We also link back to the client’s website (like we do on the Creative Agency Secrets Testimonials page). It’s nice to give them back some strong SEO link juice.
Task completed!
Ask for testimonials on your Google My Business page. Note, you have to have a gmail address in order to create these so it can be a challenge for some clients if they have to create an account. The great output from this is that your testimonials are visible in public search (alongside the search map) and when you have over 5 published, you get a star rating too. That makes you stand out even more from competitors.
Remember I suggested you get clients to ‘just talk’ and you write the testimonial? Well that chatting will almost certainly contain a lot of information. Take all your testimonials and copywrite a long and a short “sound bite” version of each. Put the short version on the website testimonials page. Copy the long version of each to a blog post – and link to it from the short version on the testimonials page. Creating on-site links is good (reduces bounce rate) and also helps show an expanded authentic “customer voice” to each one.
Inspired by Gabriel McIntyre’s “Getting Paid Faster with the Invoice Challenge”, we set about adapting it to suit our need for client testimonials. [Seriously, watch the video – it’s genius.]
Here’s the case study of the campaign we ran to get testimonials and support a good cause.
Now, where else can you get and share testimonials? We know they’re on Linked In, Facebook, Neighbourly (NZ local media), Yelp, Finda, Localist….. There are heaps of places – but don’t try to game the system. Just pick the site(s) you know your clients and prospects use.
Over to you to share your favourites.
This article was first written for publication in Marketing Online Magazine
What are the best ways to validate a B2B idea without spending a lot on product development first?
I currently run a B2C online service. I’m looking to pivot to B2B as a way of growing our business.
Creative Agency Secrets are very practical and tactical marketers so in this answer we will give you a series of steps to run through. You will need to run through them all several times – for example, if you do 1,2,3 and it’s not working, go back to 1 and start again, improving each time.
You will need to be very self-critical in order to improve and if you have not got experience in B2B, we strongly recommend you find a mentor or coach who can be objective and help shortcut the number of iterations.
That should give you a methodology. Now you will need very strong copywriting, CRM and sales skills. Buy or hire these for your support team.
Good luck and happy to help further.
Before starting – cramped text and hyperlink not embedded
A quick tutorial showing good practice to encourage click throughs.
We start with a quick look at the “before” scenario. The text is continuous and the url (hidden in the image) is not embedding correctly. The post gets no clicks or click throughs to the website.
Type the URL first and then Facebook allows you to select the image you want.
Inserting blank lines in the text spaces it out & forces the See More link to appear
Moving forward to some of the resolutions – each one is explained in the caption.
Corrected hyperlinks to See More and site link.
Self-education is important in life and particularly in digital marketing. So many people tell us they “don’t know where to start” or “am I getting good advice?”. And so we always say, go and research the topic. Find out as much information as you can and become informed.
One way to shortcut this research process is to buy training or coaching from an expert and today we’re giving you the opportunity to buy a stack of tutorials in our best value online marketing education offer.
Our friends at Blogging Concentrated, Dan Morris and Rachel Martin have pulled together the BC Stack. It’s a one-off promotion for 7 days with a large number of products all for sale together for a single price of US$27 (approx NZ$37). We have contributed the Proactive B2B New Biz Toolkit to the stack.
Conrado has reviewed the full product list and summarised them into categories so you can appraise the area of most interest to yourself. All the names in bold are personally known to the CAS team.
The BC Stack offer runs from 28th June NZT until 2nd July NZT
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