As I write this, throngs of stay-at-home mom’s, angst-filled teenagers, and self-proclaimed social media gurus are running around in circles with their hair on fire sacrificing calves to the Internet gods.
Well, maybe they aren’t… but that’s what I’m picturing in my head…
Why?
Don’t ya know that Facebook’s doooownnn! Doooowwwnn, dooowwwnn! (Sung to the tune of “Down” by Jay Sean – my 2-year-old’s favorite song of the moment.)
Hey, I’m feeling the pain myself. I’ve got Farmville crops to harvest, ya know. 
But the even bigger pain as a business owner is that one of my marketing outlets is kaput.
While the possibility isn’t usually “front of mind” for most until it happens, Facebook’s little outage serves as a reminder that just like you need earthquake insurance if you live in Southern California, you need a way to insure your marketing methods.
The best way to do this is by first cultivating MULTIPLE methods to deliver your marketing message to your audience
Secondly, you also want to “cross-pollinate” them.
If your target market is on Facebook, don’t just interact with them there. Get them to sign on to your email list also.
If you’re primarily using the internet to communicate with your customers, go ahead and use “offline” methods like direct mail and telemarketing as well (provided there’s adequate ROI).
If you’ve been a purely one-on-one, belly-to-belly business, think of how you can incorporate ways to interact with larger groups to share your message.
I’m not sure if you can relate to this following scenario…
On Facebook I’ve got my different “groups” of friends: college, high school, family, people I’ve met at different events. For the most part, my interaction with them stays within the context of those groups.
Yet there are some “super friends” (sans the red cape and tights) that span across multiple groups. These people I have much stronger ties with because I have a wider range of experience with them.
Cross-pollinating your marketing efforts not only insulates you from bumps like website (and other media) downtime; it also strengthens your relationship with your customer by increasing the frequency of interaction and expands the range of environments through which you can interact with them.
So how will you start making like the bees in your business?
I’m a big fan of jazz.
One of my favorite things to hear is a jam session, where the band members play their own improvisational version of a chosen theme.
There’s no sheet music, no practice… they just jam.
If it comes together, great. If not, great.
They just have a good time doing what they love.
A few months back during a mastermind session with some marketing buddies, I really felt the same thing going on with us.
We’d talk about a particular topic, and each would contribute his thoughts and ideas.
Some of the stuff we came up with was complete crap.
But most of it was actually really good stuff.
I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to have others listen in and benefit from hearing all these different ideas.”
So I decided to start recording my own marketing jam sessions and sharing them with the world.
In this session, one of my close friends and colleagues Tom Osypian of Ideation Consulting and I discuss our thoughts on headlines.
- The various “forms” of headlines
- Direct response advertising vs. traditional advertising
- What we REALLY think of “branding”
- Our “go to” headline formulas
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At the end of the session, Tom graciously offered a copy of an eBook “7 Quick & Easy Headline Formulas” to listeners.
http://www.ideationconsulting.com/jamsession/
I’m not sure if you can relate to this story or not…
Late last week I took a quick jog around my neighborhood.
About halfway through my 3 mile route a car pulled up beside me and flagged me down.
“Excuse me,” said a young mother with her 2 toddlers in the back seat. “Can you tell me how to get to Horsethief Canyon Park? We’re late for a birthday party.”
I take my two beagles to the dog park near there quite often, so I knew it well.
Now, in the seconds before I actually gave her the directions, I was reminded of a fact that I had learned in my PSY101 class regarding how people tend to give and accept directions.
Research had shown that men have a tendency to give, and prefer receiving, directions using distance and cardinal references (i.e., north, south, etc.). Women, on the other hand, prefer to give and receive directions using landmarks and right or left turns.
Neither method is in itself “correct” or “incorrect” as each method CAN work to help someone get from point A to point B; and yet it’s useful to know if my goal is to get her to the park in the most efficient way possible.
So I told her, “Just go down the street here. At the second stop sign, turn left. Keep going straight, past the first stop light. Take your first left and follow the signs to the park.”
Simple, straight to the point.
Nothing really remarkable, until you consider that I could have added all kinds of intricate and irrelevant details like steering around the big dip in the road ahead, the baby Rottweiler that barks and how his master takes him for a walk every day at 4pm, that if she turned south there’s an empty lot where a good burger joint used to be, and on and on and on…
Could you imagine what she would have done if I had told her all of that?
I’m going to take a guess that you’d think I would have been a COMPLETE MORON (or at the very least, someone that just LOVES to talk and show off all that I know) to give all those details, and that I was right to keep it simple.
If that’s the case, then I want you to ask yourself the following question:
“How do I help my own customers and prospects navigate properly to get from where they are to actually buying from me?”
Do you give them easy ways to respond? Do you inundate them with all kinds of noise about you and your company that they absolutely could care less about? Are you speaking their “language” when you’re giving them directions?
When I first went to an IKEA store, one of the best things about my visit was on the floor: big blue arrows pointing me in the direction to navigate the enormous maze of furniture and household goods.
You know what?
All the arrows at IKEA lead to their cash registers.
