actionable marketing guide

Dear ,

The holiday season is in full swing.

This year the major US holidays all coincide on December 25: Christmas, Chanukah and Kwanza.

For the marketers among you, your best efforts are out in the wild fighting for attention and, hopefully, profitable sales.

Now’s the time to consider how your marketing, content, blog posts, social media and promotions will stand out in 2017.

Audience attention is your core marketing challenge.

It doesn’t matter what you call it:

• Ad-blocking
• Content blindness
• Fake content

How will your marketing content break through and be important to your audience?

Last week, while I was knitting at my favorite LYS (aka: local yarn store), one of the regulars came in. She was angry at her smartphone. She couldn’t unlock it with her thumbprint.

She complained she had updated it earlier in the afternoon but now her hand was cold and it didn’t work. Further, it didn’t work if she put cream on her hands. (Really I get it—we all need our smartphones and virtual assistants to adapt to our personal habits and needs.)

Innocently I asked, “Is the information on your smartphone so critical it requires thumbprint identification?”

She responded, “My life is on this phone!” (BTW: She’s not a millennial.)

I probed, “Don’t you have additional passwords on your specific apps?”

“I want the best security possible.”

As you may know, I worked at Citibank in the pre-smartphone era. Banks are known for their high levels of customer information and needs for secure passwords.

Like every employee, I had to change my computer password every month. Further the new password couldn’t be a repetition of the last few passwords. This made passwords difficult to remember.

What did employees do?

They found an easy work-around. They put their password on a post-it stuck to their monitor in plain sight. (You’ve got to love the power of old technology!)

As a result, these passwords weren’t secure. Anyone could see them: A client, a colleague or the cleaning person!

What does this mean for your marketing?

• Is your content worth gating? Just because you gate content doesn’t mean prospects won’t find work-arounds. Or just unsubscribe once they download your big rock content.
  
  
• Is getting your content too complicated? Is it worth your audience’s hassle? Ask: Will we actually use the information we collect?  If so, will it contribute to more qualified leads or piss off respondents who'll unsubscribe or worse, complain?

Drift recently ungated all of their content. This move resulted in greater traffic and results. This is an extreme example. I don’t recommend it for everyone.

Instead make the content you gate worth your audience’s information exchange. This means providing top quality content that solves problems for your audience.

Why?

Otherwise your potential audience will either abandon your content, possibly for good, or fill your forms with garbage data.

Personally, I NEVER fill in phone number requests. Ever.  

I want the information but I don’t want the associated sales calls. The phone number I use is: 888-888-8888. (Using numbers in the right format rarely gets checked. It’s not worth the programming effort.)

Keep your goal in mind: You want to get into your audience’s content inner circle. You want them to look forward to and read your blog posts, emails and other content.

To this end, give them useful information.

Then, restrain yourself (and others in your company) from sending promotional push email after promotional push email.

Otherwise, you’ll slowly erode the value of your email list.

How do you plan to attract attention in 2017?

Happy Marketing
Heidi.

Heidi Cohen
Actionable Marketing Guide

5 Social Media Content Formats Your Business Needs

How to Deliver Content Your Employees Love to Share

An employee advocacy guide.

Your employees are your greatest asset. It makes perfect sense that companies would double down on their own talent, empowering them to be the voice of their brand.

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• Heidi Cohen was one of the 50+ experts who contributed to Mike Alton’s round up post, 52 Influencers Reveal the best and worst monetization secrets.
  
  
• Heidi Cohen was selected by OmniConvert as one of the top 50 bloggers who practice what they preach!​​​​​​​