The three biggest shifts in B2B marketing include performance marketing and intention-based media.
Monday, 23 February 2015
Friday, 20 February 2015
Wednesday, 18 February 2015
Tuesday, 17 February 2015
There Is No More B2B or B2C: There Is Only Human to Human (H2H)
There Is No More B2B or B2C: There Is Only Human to Human (H2H)
It used to be that marketing was segmented into two categories; business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C). This was done (I assume), to separate specialties, audiences and segments in an effort to more highly target the groups of people who ultimately would consume a brand’s message.What it really did, however, was create an unnatural language for marketers – with words like “synergy” and “speeds and feeds” – to tell the stories of products to their buyers and partners. It’s become like one massive game of telephone, where by the time a message gets to the person actually buying the product, the things that make it special have been swallowed by marketing vernacular.
Consumers are confused. Why can’t we make it simple for them to understand what we’re selling, to share their experiences and the value they felt with others? More importantly, why is it that what we’re marketing most often does not align to actual consumer experiences?
The fact is that the lines are so far blurred now between the two marketing segments that it’s hard to differentiate between the two anymore. We all need to think like the consumers we are, putting ourselves in the mindset of the buyer instead of trying to speak such an intensely sophisticated language full of acronyms and big words, in order to sound smarter.
Marketing increasingly strives to become one-to-one, with solutions to collect and wrangle the big data about us to serve up more personalized offers and experiences. On the other hand, social has become a more public and vast medium, where the things we share skyrocket quickly to a “one-to-many” experience. The dichotomy between marketing and social has actually flipped… and it’s out of balance. Social and marketing need to work together to personalize individual conversations, as well as deliver shared global experiences that crowds of common values can benefit from. This is what our social and digital mediums have gifted us, and how humans interact and feel more compelled take action.
So, this is how I see it:
Businesses do not have emotion. People do.
People want to be a part of something bigger than themselves.
People want to feel something.
People want to be included.
People want to understand.
But people are also humans, and with that comes mistakes. Missteps. Failures. As humans, it’s in our nature to say the wrong thing, get embarrassed, and not realize the consequences of our actions. The rise of social media has given a digital platform to the dark side of anonymity, both as individuals and as crowds. I say it’s time to lay down the virtual pitchforks and torches and bring this behavior back into balance. The delightful side of humanity holds with it empathy, understanding, and forgiveness, and when remembered in our communication, it ties us together as a common group.
Communication shouldn’t be complicated. It should just be genuine and simple, with the humility and understanding that we’re all multi-dimensional humans, everyone of which has spent time in both the dark and delightful parts of life.
That’s human to human. That is #H2H.
KEY TAKEAWAY: Human beings are innately complex yet strive for simplicity. Our challenge as humans is to find, understand and explain the complex in its most simplistic form. This means you, marketers. Find the commonality in our humanity, and speak the language we’ve all been waiting for.
Monday, 16 February 2015
Wednesday, 11 February 2015
Growth Hacking: 4 Simple Tactics To Get In The Game
Growth Hacking: 4 Simple Tactics To Get In The Game
The term growth hacking was initially used by entrepreneur and angel investor Sean Ellis back in 2010, when he was hiring for his replacement. While he received many qualified marketing resumes, he felt one key area was missing from potential candidates: growth.
He then added the phrase “growth hacker” in his advertisement instead of “marketing” to explain the profile he’s looking for. The phrase has since been broadly used in the technology startup world and it’s perceived as a new phenomenon to promote and sell products.
Deploying Deep Discipline
The basic ingredients of growth hacking are based on a set of strong disciplines that uses testing and analysis to scale not just marketing promotion, but also product development. Companies like Twitter TWTR +2.49%, Facebook, Airbnb, YouTube, and LinkedIn LNKD -0.23% owe much of their success to hacking strategies. LinkedIn, for instance, grew from two million to more than 200 million users by simply implementing a growth hacking technique that allowed user profiles to show up in search engine results. What a phenomenal success!
Growth hacking is not limited to just small companies or start-ups as there are certain characteristics businesses can adopt to create growth. At SAP, the success of our cloud customers often comes from the simple desire to test, optimize and improve. Here are four, simple traits we recognized from them:
- • Adopt growth hacker mindset of continuous testing and improvement
- • Make your ideas shareable, accessible and addicting for users.
- • Push the boundaries and find ingenious technology based avenues for growth (think of the possibilities between people, machine and channels).
- • Drive creativity and sustainability. Growth hackers do not see the disciplines as temporary. The techniques are addictive and continuous.
If growth hacking can work without resources, imagine what it can accomplish with resources. I believe the key to sustainable growth and innovation is to cultivate creativity by allowing people to experiment and learn via the aforementioned growth hacking disciplines. People need to believe in transformative power of their imagination and the imagination of others. Isn’t that how creativity is born?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)