What Keeps Magic Johnson Awake at Night?

by John San Filippo, jmsb@johnsanfilippo.com

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Yes, I was that close.

I had decided weeks ago to stop ranting about brand. I really did. Give your readers a break, I told myself. Don’t sound like a crazy, old man who keeps yammering about the same thing week after week.

And I did it, too. I spent a couple of weeks talking about content marketing. This week, I had every intention of launching a “back to basics” series. The first one was going to be on tips for writing an effective press release.

Then I hung out for an hour or so with my new BFF, Earvin “Magic” Johnson.

Ok, in truth it was more like 700 of us at the CCUL/NCUL REACH conference hung out with our new BFF, Magic Johnson. To say that he was the warmest, most engaging, most genuine speaker I’ve ever seen would be an understatement.

During the course of his presentation, he mentioned a couple of times the importance of performing a SWOT analysis. He said he performs one semi-annually and that they’re invaluable to keeping his many enterprises on track.

He never explained what SWOT stood for, so during the Q&A portion, a woman who wasn’t familiar with the term asked him to elaborate.

Magic explained that SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. He told the audience that his organization’s strengths lie in delivering the best customer service – taking care of their clients. He said he’s able to deliver a profit not only to his own company, but to his business partners as well. He noted his top-notch employees as a strength.

He went on to say that last year when he performed a SWOT analysis, he realized that although his company had landed some major deals, he didn’t have a big enough executive team to manage all of them. Thanks to the SWOT analysis, he identified and addressed the issue before it had become a real problem. “That SWOT saved me,” he told the group.

When you’re an NBA hall-of-famer, a major-league baseball owner, and the most successful African-American businessman in America, there seems to be no shortage of opportunities. Magic told us that he recently entered the healthcare space and is now evaluating about a half dozen proposals that would put him in the technology biz.

And then he got to threats. What keeps Magic Johnson awake at night? You’ve put up with all my drivel just to have that question answered.

“Keeping my brand safe,” said Magic. “That’s the biggest threat for me right now. Making sure I don’t damage my brand. Making sure I don’t partner with the wrong companies, because that could hurt my brand quick. That’s what keeps me up at night.”

So there you have it. One of the most successful entrepreneurs in the country says the thing that worries him most is possible damage to his brand. Could it be that’s exactly why he’s one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the country? You bet your sweet bippy.

That is all.

3 Content Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

by John San Filippo, jmsb@johnsanfilippo.com 
Subscribe: www.tinyurl.com/jmsbblog

Just as with any other form of marketing, there are plenty of mistakes to be made with your content marketing initiatives. Here are three that I believe are the most common based on my own personal observation.

It’s Not a Sin to Write Strategically

Content marketing is all about providing useful information to people in order to strengthen your brand, which, so the thinking goes, will increase the likelihood of those people buying from you down the road. And it works. That much is clear.

However, some purists will tell you that you should take a very altruistic approach to developing your content. In other words, you don’t want to appear to have a hidden agenda – which, of course, you really do have. You want your efforts to result in increased sales. You’re not creating all this great content as an act of charity.

The altruistic approach to content marketing might work for well-known consumer brands like Coca-Cola or Proctor & Gamble, but I believe it’s inappropriate for financial technology. After all, the value proposition for a can of soda pop is pretty straightforward. On the other hand, when you’re marketing, for example, IT automation software, the value proposition is a little more complex.

My point is, in a B2B setting, I don’t think you have to choose between giving your audience the information they think they want and giving them the information you know they need. With effective writing, you can do both. You can provide useful information while still offering a message that supports your brand. You just need to make the effort.

What We Have Here Is a Failure to Promote

It goes without saying that once you publish great content, you need to spread the word so that your content actually reaches your audience. However, there are two potential pitfalls here:

1. Not taking advantage of all the communication channels at your disposal.
2. Not crafting an appropriate message for each channel you use.

Make sure you consider all the possible ways you can get the word out. Of course, you’re going to tweet it, post it on LinkedIn and mention it on your Facebook page. But don’t forget the old classics either, like sending out a press release or putting a hyperlink in your email signature. Every person in your opt-in email list should know about your new content the same day it’s published. You can never think of too many ways to promote your content.

Don't be lazy in this effort, either. For example, you can set up Twitter to post your tweets to LinkedIn and Facebook on your behalf. This may be a tempting shortcut, but trust me, it’s a stupid idea.

For starters, Twitter is limited to 140 characters. Why would you want to limit your LinkedIn and Facebook posts to 140 characters?

More important, though, each e-distribution channel has it’s own personality – it’s own tone, if you will. Due to their limited length, tweets must be super concise, to the point of being somewhat cryptic now and then. This is okay; Twitter followers expect this.

Facebook is a much more casual medium than LinkedIn. Thus your Facebook post should have a more casual tone, while your LinkedIn post should be written with business professionals in mind. Invest the time and money to do this right, or don’t bother doing it at all.

To Gate or Not to Gate?

In the world of content marketing, gating refers to the practice of requiring a user to provide some amount of contact information in order to access or download your content. If your content is ungated, users can download it anonymously. Which is a better approach? There are two schools of thought.

I recently read a book called Epic Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi. Pulizzi is considered by many to be the capo di tutti capi of content marketing. In his book, he makes the case for ungated content, rightly claiming that ungated content is downloaded more, which means it’s shared more by those downloaders. In other words, ungated content reaches a wider audience.

In a hypothetical scenario, Pulizzi compares the value of putting your content in the hands of 20,000 anonymous users to putting it in the hands of 2,000 identified users. According to Pulizzi, more is always better.

Frankly, I’d much rather have the 2,000 identified users. These are people that I can reach out to in various ways, who I can monitor and nurture. This is especially important in a B2B environment, and even more important for fintech providers. Plus, gating your content gives your competitors at least a modicum of incentive to keep away.

Obviously I’m not talking about gating your blog, for example. I’m talking about major pieces like white papers, e-books, and case studies. Collect at least an email address from each user or you’ll be blowing a big opportunity, IMHO.

In the End

If you have any questions or just think I’m full of baloney, feel free to leave a comment below or drop me an email. But no matter what, I urge you to take your content marketing efforts very seriously.

That is all.

Content Marketing Demystified: It Ain’t Rocket Surgery

by John San Filippo, jmsb@johnsanfilippo.com
www.johnsanfilippo.com

Content marketing is the hot topic in marketing today. In fact, 83 percent of the B2B companies recently surveyed by the Content Marketing Institute have some sort of content marketing strategy in place. Keep in mind, this is a group that specializes in content marketing, so I suspect their survey respondents may not be representative of the entire B2B universe. Nevertheless, there’s no denying that content marketing is beginning to snowball.

Maybe you’re considering a content marketing strategy. Or maybe you’re considering whether you should consider a content marketing strategy. Or maybe you’re even considering whether you should try to figure out what content marketing is all about. I’m here to help.

Content marketing is really nothing new. I see it as the evolution of what we used to call white paper marketing. White paper marketing has long been a favorite in the B2B technology marketing arsenal. Here’s an example from my days running marketing at Symitar.

For a fee, CUNA (the Credit Union National Association) will send out an email blast to its subscribers filled with content you provide. In the early days of this program, CUNA would only send one vendor email per month, which made it very exclusive. In other words, by locking all of these down a year or longer in advance, I could a) have access to a very attractive audience, and b) keep Fiserv, FIS, HFS and all the others away from this same audience.

This seemed like the perfect opportunity to launch a white paper marketing program. The process was simple. We’d write a compelling white paper – e.g., one on how to run a successful data processing conversion – and promote it through a CUNA eblast. The eblast linked the reader to a landing page designed just for that white paper. The reader was required to provide contact information to download the white paper, and that information was entered into our system as a lead.

This was a very effective program. Every white paper we published was typically downloaded hundreds of times (not bad for the relatively small credit union space), and a good number of closed core deals originated with a white paper download. In short, the program paid for itself many times over.

So why has something as simple as white paper marketing morphed into this beast we call content marketing? Simply stated, everything has gotten bigger. First of all, the list of content types one might produce has exploded. In addition to white papers, you can generate:

• Blogs (Yes, you are being content-marketed to at this very moment.)
• E-newsletters
• Articles
• E-books
• Case studies
• Webinars
• Podcasts
• Videos

I’m sure I left something off this list.

Also, thanks to the near-ubiquitous presence of social media, there are now many more ways to promote your content once it’s ready for public consumption. Lastly – and this may be the most important point of all – there is now fantastic technology available to help you track, monitor, guide, and engage people once they’ve accessed your content. Done right, content marketing really is an end-to-end solution.

I’ll probably spend at least a couple more weeks on content marketing, but for now, I’ll leave you with this. Content marketing is soft marketing. It’s not about pitching product; it’s about establishing brand presence and thought leadership. The urge to pitch product at every possible juncture is strong for most marketers. Resist this temptation in your content marketing efforts or you will fail.

That is all.

NFL, UAL and the Psychology of Punishing Your Customers

by John San Filippo, jmsb@johnsanfilippo.com
www.johnsanfilippo.com

It didn't take Roger Goodell's handling of the Ray Rice fiasco to convince me that NFL folk aren't the sharpest tools in the shed. That's because I'm a Charger fan -- have been for decades -- even when Norv Turner was the head coach. And that means I've supported some pretty crappy Charger teams. That also means I've missed plenty of home games that were blacked out on local television. Yes, the NFL punished me a number of times for supporting my then-lousy Chargers.

Thankfully, the FCC recently woke and abolished government-sanctioned NFL blackouts forever. And the NFL objected. Of course the NFL objected. Why wouldn't they? They're idiots. If they weren't idiots, they wouldn't need the FCC to tell them that blackouts are a dumb idea.

Let's look more closely at NFL blackouts and you'll see what I mean.

Why do NFL games get blacked out? Because not enough people buy tickets to the game. Why in the world would that happen? Because the team in question isn't doing very well. Or put another way, people don't buy whatever you're selling (tickets) if you're putting out an inferior product (a bad team). How many times was I penalized by the NFL because the Spanos boys thought it was a smart idea to hire a losing head coach?

When games are blacked out, at least in San Diego, it seems like it's always by a margin of about 5,000 or so tickets. There are millions of people in the greater San Diego area, and while I'd never claim that they're all Charger fans, I know a lot more than 5,000 are. I'm likewise pretty sure that many of them will never go to a Charger game.

Are these bad fans? Far from it. Mostly they're just fans who can't afford to spend a good $300 for an afternoon at Qualcomm Stadium. I'm sure the NFL still makes good money off of these fans. They deserve to see their team play.

Then there's the totally ridiculous blackout of preseason games. Games that don't even matter. Games that many of the biggest stars don't play in. Games that the NFL should be using to get people excited about the coming season instead of pissing them off!

To the demise of NFL blackouts I can only say, "It's about time."

As I type this, I'm on a less-than-half-full flight to New Orleans, flying United. Right in front of me are 12 empty exit row seats. Why are they still empty when we're halfway to New Orleans? Because even on an empty United flight, you have to pay extra to sit in an exit row. I know because I asked. At least I saved myself the embarrassment and asked first. One guy who foolishly assumed he could take an empty seat in an empty row got told to go back where he came from.

Let's examine possible outcomes here. If United let me sit in one of those seats without paying extra for it, one of two things would happen: Either the experience would confirm my original assessment that an exit row isn't worth an extra $85, or I'd like it so much that I'd spring for the extra $85 next time. In other words, UAL would either break even or win -- they couldn't lose.

However, the two possible results of their current policy are very different. When I'm denied access to a perfectly good empty seat, I'm either going to feel neutral about it, or I'm going to be ticked that United is so petty and short-sighted. Guess which one I'm feeling right now? UAL can only break ever or lose.

What the NFL and UAL seem unable to grasp is that more and more, success in business isn't about nickel-and-diming your customers to death. It's about building long-term relationships that generate recurring revenue for years and years to come. It's about developing brand loyalty in your customer base.

Call me stubborn. I'd never go to a game just because it's blacked out, because I refuse to be bullied by the NFL. And given the choice of UAL or, say, American, I'll choose American because I've always been treated well there. I assume (perhaps as foolishly as the guy who tried to get a free "upgrade") there are others like me.

The lesson? It's simple. If for whatever reason, you find yourself unable to fill your stadium or fill your airplane, don't take it out on your customers. Make them feel good today and they'll stand by you through whatever comes tomorrow.

That is all.