by Jean-Marc Saint Laurent | Jul 5, 2017 | Content Marketing
Perhaps my biggest pet-peeve of all time is when people cut in front of me while driving in the highway express lane. But not for the reason you think.
Here I am driving around 90 miles per hour, while coordinating my wrist, eyes and lower body just to stay inside the lane and avoid going splat into a wall when…
Some jerk cuts the positive space between us.
According to the Department of Transportation, “in addition to providing enough stopping time, proper [space] allows for more time to make good, well-planned decisions and…look far enough ahead.”
Over 7,000 large truck crashes are due to driving too closely to other vehicles.
“in addition to providing enough stopping time, proper [space] allows for more time to make good, well-planned decisions and…look far enough ahead.”
Compare that to the Project Time Off Coalition’s findings, expressed in infographic form, about how overwhelmed we feel at work and you’ll start to see we need positive space in our vocational lives as well.
In fact, I believe Marketing Managers, Marketing Directors, and VPs of Marketing experience their own “marketing overwhelm” evident in the nagging guilt they feel for not completing all their various strategic plans, social media posts, partnership conversations, and blog content in one simple swoop.
When you think of the speed of your working life, would you compare it to an enjoyable drive in the country where you’re wonderfully engaged and taking in the sights or a reckless bolt down the autobahn at breakneck speeds?
Whether considering the byway or the boardroom, spaces of nothing are essential for improving ourselves and helping us “make good, well-planned decisions and…look far enough ahead.”
Here are some reasons for why you should be doing less and creating some positive space in your work life.
HOW TO BE BETTER AT MARKETING (AND EVERYTHING ELSE) BY DOING LESS
Success is found working happier
We drive ourselves to work harder because we assume that putting in hard days at work will lead to a time when all is well: we achieve that elusive success and feel happier. We believe that one day we will sing in harmony with Florence and the Machine that “the dog days are over.”
However, according to research, detailed in Happiness Researcher Shawn Achor’s “the Happiness Advantage,” we’ve been mistaken for quite some time.
“For untold generations, we have been led to believe that happiness orbited around success. That if we worked hard enough, we would become successful, and only if we are successful will we become happy. Success was thought to be the fixed point of the work universe, with happiness revolving around it.
Now, thanks to breakthroughs in the burgeoning field of positive psychology, we are learning that the opposite is true: when we are happy, when our mindset and mood are positive, we are smarter, more motivated, and thus more successful. Happiness is the center, and success revolves around it.”
Success is not about working against competition
There are few things sadder than people obsessed with competition. Outside of all the other reasons that focusing on competition in our working lives is not helpful, it also happens to make us miserable.
Remember that linked infographic from the Project Time Off Coalition above? 21 percent of workers push themselves into overwhelm because “they are afraid they will lose their job or be seen as replaceable.”
Even Billionaire Investor and PayPal Co-Founder Peter Thiel, finds in his book “Zero to One” that competition doesn’t work for the future of business and entrepreneurship either.
“For example, U.S. airline companies serve millions of passengers and create hundreds of billions of dollars of value each year,” writes Thiel, while earning “only 37 cents per passenger trip.”
He continues:
“Compare them to Google, which creates less value but captures far more. Google brought in $50 billion in 2012 versus $160 billion for the airlines but it kept 21 percent of those revenues as profits more than 100 times the airline industry’s profit margin that year. Google makes so much money that it is now worth three times more than every U.S. airline combined.”
“The airlines compete with each other. But Google stands alone.”
In business, there will always be the temptation to gather focus extensively upon our competition:
“What promise is our competition making that we’re not?”
“Are we matching their amount of social media updates?”
“What media are they buying? We need to do the same!”
While there is arguable value in gathering competitive intelligence, let us also take the time to remember who we’re working for and why.
Yes, we desire to trounce our opposition in the workplace and in the marketplace—but even more we (hopefully) desire to be of service to others in an authentic way while creating value that can’t be easily imitated.
“We don’t tell a 17 year-old kid that Nike sucks, because the fact of the matter is, Nike doesn’t suck. They’re actually very good at what they do”
-Kevin Plank, Founder, CEO, and Chairman of UnderArmour
Success requires making space for thinking
If we’re looking to justify spending long hours at work separated from our loved ones and stuffed in our offices, we won’t find help from history’s heroes. Many household names spent as much time taking long walks, long lunches, and time to think as they did working diligently.
Writing in his piece, “Darwin Was a Slacker and You Should Be Too,” Alex Soojung-Kim Pang notes:
“Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus.
Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work. The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking. Their creativity and productivity, in other words, were not the result of endless hours of toil. Their towering creative achievements result from modest “working” hours.”
Common legend tells us about the power of taking the time to think about the knowledge we push ourselves to grasp. It was said that Albert Einstein discovered the theory of relativity as a result of thought experiments conducted on long walks and Sir Issac Newton stumbled upon the concept of gravity while resting under an apple tree.
Two world-altering ideas initiated in leisure? Not a bad argument to get some yourself.
The biggest successes are not working to beat competition: “The airlines compete with each other. But Google stands alone.”
Success means taking the time to listen
Many times we think we can solve our problems by keeping our ‘nose to the grindstone,’ that somehow if we kick up enough dust our problems will run away for fear of our resolve.
There are times for putting our shoulders to the plow just as there are times to watch the grass and see how it’s growing.
In his book, “Pour Your Heart Into It,” Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz explains how in the late 1980s while Starbucks seemed to be growing like gangbusters, they were still coming to a major impasse: whether or not to serve coffee with nonfat milk.
On one side, Schultz saw himself a purist with a strong desire to bring Italian coffee drinking habits to the U.S.—and that did not involve nonfat milk concoctions, while consumer advocates within the company led by Howard Behrar believed Starbucks should do whatever the customer wanted.
It was as if the siren famous in the coffee shop’s logo had ceased her singing.
Then as Schultz remembers it:
“One morning I woke up early, still wrestling with the idea after a restless night. I got dressed and drove to one of our Starbucks stores in a residential neighborhood of Seattle. I paid for a double espresso and took a seat at a table…I was reading the newspaper but also keeping my ears alert to hear what people ordered.”
A young woman ordered, “I’ll have a double tall latte, with nonfat milk.”
“’Sorry, we don’t have nonfat,’ the barista replied politely but firmly. ‘We only have whole milk.’
I could hear her sigh in frustration and then ask,
“Why not? I always get it at the place down the street.” The barista apologized, but she strode out of the store, apparently headed for a competitor.
A lost customer is the most powerful argument you can make to a retailer.”
ENCOURAGE POSITIVE SPACE IN YOUR WORK LIFE
When you think of the speed of your working life, would you compare it to an enjoyable drive in the country where you’re wonderfully engaged and taking in the sights or a reckless bolt down the autobahn at breakneck speeds?
It is within your ability to help change that.
The ability to creative positive space in your work life is a skill inherited over centuries of technological advancement. Our technology, the kind of which you probably have in your pocket at this moment, automatically handles more processes than advanced computers 60 years ago.
It makes sense then that you should be able to utilize this power, along with reasonable thinking, to create positive space in your own work life so that you may benefit from the ability to “make good, well-planned decisions and…look far enough ahead.”
by Jean-Marc Saint Laurent | Jul 5, 2017 | Content Marketing
It occurs to you one day while you’re at the office, a repetitive series of thoughts that go something like:
“I wonder how I’ll reach my yearly goals!”
And on it goes.
This should not be. You are a smart person with great ideas about leadership and customer service. Your aim has always been to go beyond what you’re competitors are doing.
So what gives? Why are you not seeing some positive results from your website, email, blog, white papers, etc?
Your marketing has gotten LAZY.
Now don’t misunderstand: You are NOT lazy, you’re marketing just:
L acks sales connection,
A lways changes, shows
Z ero buyer love, and
Y anks out conversation
Let’s talk about it
Why are you not seeing some positive results from your website, email, blog, white papers, etc?
Your marketing has gotten lazy.
HOW TO AVOID LAZY MARKETING IN ORDER TO BUILD AN ATTRACTIVE SALES MACHINE
L for lacks sales connection
Years back, when I first reared my head into the world of internet marketing, I had the quaint thought that I’d promote myself on Twitter, for it was hot.
I sat there over my laptop finding new ways to say “improve web traffic…ooh…boost your search rankings” over and over. Then I did a little search–only to find that thousands of people claimed they could do the same thing.
But what would be the purpose of all that traffic? Back in their minds, and probably yours, when managers want to improve traffic, what they’re really saying is: “I want to improve sales.”
Again. “I want to increase my web traffic” = “I want to improve my sales.”
“I want to improve my click through rate” = “I want more people to buy my services.”
Yet with so much pent-up aggression around sales, how often do marketers, marketing managers, and people who use some version of “marketing” in their official title make the connection between marketing and money? By what I see on the regular, not often enough.
If you want money, you want sales. And its connection with your marketing needs to be tighter than politicians and paid lobbyists.
Sales gets a bad rap. It can bring up images of slimy characters cold-calling doctors and garbage men Boiler Room style and beating people into submission with words. But that has changed. The internet has made it more of an equal playing field for buyers and sellers.
Instead of sellers hoarding information until (and only until) buyers pony up the cash, buyers are getting much of their information from these same folks free and (only) then choose to contact the sales department.
I’ve heard it said over and over these days, by the time buyers come to your door they’re nearly 70 percent sold.
Today’s salesperson has become an educator and consultant, which is really blurring the line between marketing and sales.
Hubspot calls it “Smarketing”—so let’s go with that term.
In smarketing, the marketing and sales teams are more like buddies in an open-concept office. They share ideas, strategies, and goals regularly; no walls between ‘em.
Because of this über transparency, marketing and sales have to come up with their own shared language, so they may understand each other.
This means that a hybrid smarketing team will have to decide specifically what a “prospect” and “lead” are. But generally, this is how the smarketing funnel would look.
Beyond that, the best smarketing teams work out a Sales and Marketing SLA (Service-Level-Agreement). This is a way for both sides of the team to know what is expected of them. Marketing gets to work out how many prospects/visitors, leads, and marketing-qualified leads they need to give sales so they can go about and make that money.
This keeps the marketing team focused on goals that actually matter (and allow people to keep their jobs).
This also serves to redirect marketing from efforts that sound good for awards committees today but won’t cut the money mustard tomorrow.
A for always changes
Marketing is like working out, you can’t expect anything to happen without a bit of consistency.
I once sat down with a respected marketing leader from a top firm and had the chance to ask him a few questions as to where marketing, as a field, was headed.
With over 20 years of experience at his disposal, he explained one of the biggest struggles we’re facing is obsession with the new shiny thing.
“You look around for the best tool to solve a problem—you find one and it solves it well. It’s new, so you learn how to use it and develop your product with it. Then the person you hand it to says,
‘Oh that’s old, here’s the new thing. Mind you, the service you used has only been around eight months!”
I understand the struggle, as you probably do.
Here’s what I’m saying:
This is not about slamming new and better tech, instead it’s all about accountability.
Often, you come across a client who wants to do something they believe will increase visits, then conversions, then revenue. And they want to start right away. In the past, I would hop-to, produce the materials for their envisioned campaign and run back breathlessly.
Inevitably, a week of this new direction would bore them (they aren’t seeing numbers skyrocket and hearing angels sing) and they set-up a meeting to talk change in direction.
Here is the trouble with that:
- We don’t know why the last campaign didn’t work: Was it me? Did we aim it using the wrong audience? Did we use the wrong channel?
- We will make the same dumb mistake again.
I call this “Entering through the Exit Door”:
Picture this: you’ve come up to your friendly department store, Penny Pete’s, and you try to enter from the first door you find.
It cracks open a bit and slams in your face. You do this a few more times and it’s just not working.
You peer through that store glass window and check out all the customers giving each other high-fives for finding deals of a lifetime, magical décor, and smiling faces eagerly waiting to greet you. So instead of trying one of the hundred doors available…
You go back to your car and say, “Screw this store!”
Doesn’t make sense, does it?
In marketing, we often find ourselves entering through the exit door. We have some great ideas then we get a helping of reality.
And what is this situation reality shouting at us? Use another door!
Don’t dump your entire content strategy just because you haven’t met your required page rank in two weeks. Instead of scrapping things and making humongous changes, think about how you can make things work a little better with small changes.
If you don’t, how can you ever say with confidence that you know what’s working and what isn’t?
Z for Zero Buyer Love
Many of us develop our marketing campaigns as if we weren’t interacting with people. We’ve all been guilty of it.
Tell me if this sounds familiar: you sit down with the task you have to complete at hand, your company narrative swirling around your brain –and it really inspires you. This marketing piece is going to kill: you’ve unearthed some related notes you swiped from a similar successful Fortune 500 endeavor, you know the color, font sizes, plus all the kick-ass slogans you’ll use. All the tools are ready for use.
But one thing is missing: one teeny-tiny bit you neglected to consider—the buyer. Where is the buyer love?
Now you might believe you aren’t ignoring buyers with your marketing. However, are they central to every piece you create?
I’m not talking about vague crappy ideas like “being human,” “making friendly jabs,” or “being real,” I’m talking about keeping your buyer’s persona and buyer’s journey at the core of your marketing strategy.
Your buyer persona:
You know this already, I’m sure. But with the plethora of crap we commit to with marketing, it’s easy to forget: when you develop a marketing piece of anything, you need to check it against your ideal buyer personas.
Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler, writing in their book, Predictable Revenue, lament that even accomplished business folk overlook this basic fact:
“If your sales or lead generation efforts are struggling, first look to yourself. How clear is your Ideal Customer Profile? Have you identified their core challenges? Are you marketing to and speaking to those ideal clients, or are you speaking to too broad an audience, and diluting your voice?”
Executives hate to do this because they feel like they are shrinking their market opportunity…”
Your buyers matter, so focusing on their needs first and foremost is the name of this game.
You remember how to build a buyer persona, you review your ideal customer’s
- Background
- Demographics
- Identifiers
- Challenges
- Common Objections
- Real Quotes
Then you ask
As an example, here’s one I recently created for a client:
Buyer Persona: Remote Worker Richard
Background:
- 4 year College-educated
- Mid-High level designer/marketer
- Slightly Skews single/unmarried
- Short stint in corporate world <2 years
Demographics:
- Skews male, 25 to 35
- Income: $40K to 80K
Indentifiers:
- Podcast listeners
- Into humor writing
- Reads Reddit
- Up to date on current internet memes
- DIY Attitude
- Not into small talk, likes purposeful talk
Challenges:
- Feeling left out, neglected
- Working different time zones from team mates, really early mornings
- Might be concerned about job security
How I can help:
- Flexible scheduling, any time of day, 24/7 access
- Provide connection to a team and community
- Help them build network to improve security
Common Objectives:
- Don’t want to pay monthly expenses (but companies pay for it)
- Don’t want to deal with hassle of parking/driving
- People want to project the image of a remote professional office
Real Quotes
“I have to travel a lot”
“Don’t see my team mates”
What to focus on:
We can’t focus on everything equally even though we’d like to, so we’ll need to prioritize. If you only have 50 seconds to draw something insightful from the buyer persona you’ve created, look at the challenges. For they always give you something to solve through your marketing materials.
Other than looking over your buyer persona, you’ll want to develop this piece of buyer love as well…
Your buyer journey:
Again, you probably know this, but your ideal buyers will not arrive to you in the same state. Think about visiting a hardware store for a moment. Depending upon the amount of reading done, personal experience, and aptitude, we each enter into hardware stores at different stages.
- Some of us enter with our hardhats and tool belts around our waists, ready to make a decision. We know exactly what we need and how much.
- Others are sure of our specific problem but not how to fix. We’re all about consideration and exploring solutions.
- Then there are us poor souls who know there’s something funny going on with our house but have no clue what or how to fix it. Here we have a general awareness of the problem.
Your buyers fall into these same categories:
- Awareness: “This situation’s not great. Why?”
- Consideration: “I know the problem. What now?”
- Decision: “I know the solution. I’m ready to act!”
When we forget that this buyer journey exists, we tend to favor one of the stages exclusively. If your focus is money (imagine that, in business!) we tend to create glorified ads and call them blog posts and content marketing.
If I got five dollars for every company that came to me with nothing but “Guess what? We’ve got a new product to buy!” posts, I’d be giving Peter Thiel a run for it.
Develop content for each stage of the buyer journey to help guide your customers to the logical conclusion of their journey: your solution.
Y for yanks out conversation:
There are 2 meanings to explore here.
1:
Ever been to a really bad talk or presentation? I’m sure the problem wasn’t the content or even the where the talk was held but the speaker’s ability to create a dialogue. No dialogue and people have no reason to engage. And if people have no reason to engage, what reason is there to care?
In order to get a marketing plan off the ground, there’s loads of planning to do (as you can see). So it’s understandable when marketers run campaigns with little room for feedback. What do buyers know?
Well buyers (presumably) know what they want to buy. And at the very least, they can tell you when your aim is terribly off. You’re likely familiar with common ways to receive feedback already: surveys, polls, and those plus-sign popups awkwardly placed on the page you’re browsing.
But Hotels.com recently did something interesting with email. I’m not into giving feedback on anything: my review are few. The main issue is I tend to see it as a waste of time. So how did Hotels.com get me to give my feedback?
They made it (seem) super-simple: I received a plain email with a smiley and frowny face. All I had to do was click on either picture to let them know I felt about my recent hotel experience.
On the pages that came up, they asked for details. And since I had already come that far, I gave in. Robert Cialdini would have said I fell into the consistency and commitment trap. I would say that I appreciated Hotels.com recognized the onus wasn’t all on me and that they could lubricate the process a bit. It’s obvious they’re marketing is a conversation with their buyers.
I, as a buyer, like being included in the marketing process. Don’t you?
It’s why some businesses and services seem to improve in time while others feel stuck in some warp. Also, this allows you to tie into the realm of using your service (what your business actually does or produces) as marketing. One of my inspirations, John Winsor, in his book “Baked In” essentially explains the best marketing is “baked” into the very products we use.
2:
Speaking of having conversations with your buyers, here’s a bold idea: why not talk to them every once in a while? I’m talking about getting them on the phone and hearing their elated or frustrated voices on the other end.
Why would I suggest such a thing?
When you look at businesses kicking butt in sales these days, they are including use of the telephone as part of their current sales strategy. This is not the 80s where Wolves of Wall Street call up unsuspecting folks to pressure them, this is your organization using the CRM technology to talk to folks ready to pull the trigger on your product.
In fact, Chris Smith, co-founder of Curaytor, the marketing and sales coaching company writes in The Conversion Code:
100X Rule:
If a company attempts phone contact within five minutes after lead submission, the odds that the lead is contacted are 100 times greater than if it is contacted 30 minutes after submission.
Some great material in this area includes The Conversion Code by Chris Smith and Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler.
KEEP YOUR MARKETING CONTENT FIT AND FOCUSED
As with most things, it’s easy to get discouraged with the practice of marketing and figure that it just doesn’t work–but that’s all it is—discouragement. Instead of planning how to drop away from marketing in general, why not get more specific about what you want it to do for you.
To see results you can be proud of, you’ll need marketing that:
- Connects to your sales (such as materials for waking up your pipeline)
- Remains fairly consistent for testing/experimenting purposes
- Loves on your buyers as much as you so and
- Keeps the buyer conversation alive
by Jean-Marc Saint Laurent | Jul 4, 2017 | Content Marketing
Whether small or large and bloated, your company is going to need to get into the marketing content game, especially when, according to Hubspot,
- 96% of B2B buyers want content with more input from industry thought leaders.
- 47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep.
- B2B companies that blogged 11+ times per month had almost 3X more traffic than those blogging 0-1 times per month.
With a reality like that you need to be producing content. But if you’ve ever tried, you know creating good marketing content is not as simple as assigning an intern to the task.
So just hire somebody. Duh, you say, but there a few challenges with that. You can actually screw up your own chances of getting a producer to give you her best when you insist on:
Speaking business-book-ese
Hiding your strategy map
Editing like a professor
Writing for your writer
Skipping cloud tools (Google Docs)
So let’s help you avoid these traps.
Speaking business-book-ese
“Leaders are people who do the right thing; managers are people who do things right.”
– Warren Bennis
The most interesting about this flub is it is an honest attempt at being an evolved human being.
As a writer, here’s what happens: you attend a client meeting in order to kick off your project. You want specifics on the client’s views, faux pas, and guidelines.
However, they have read the latest business books and probably even attended some interesting courses on collaboration and creativity. So the meeting gets packed with phrases like:
“We want you to have the freedom to…”
“When it comes to…we’re flexible…”
“We’re in this…together….”
As a writer, you’re getting really pumped, thinking to yourself, “Golly, these folks really want me to spread my wings and fly”—only to find out later they’d rather clip them.
You, as a writer, are then caught off guard by the comments like:
“This is not in keeping with our style standards.”
“We expected…precisely…”
“While working with our firm, we expect…”
In a world obsessed with messages about “compassionate CEOs,” “wisdom of crowds,” and “authenticity,” there can be a tendency to think we, as a global business culture, have arrived at this place where speaking from the heart matters more than Legal. It doesn’t. We haven’t.
Want to know what never goes out of style? Clear and specific communication.
If you know Legal or Operations gets their undies in a twist with every new marketing piece produced, then make it clear to the producer you’re working with.
Better to have them cautious on the project’s front end and ease up in time then to have start relaxed only to become restrained.
Hiding your strategy map
“Everyone has a plan ‘till they get punched in the mouth.”
-Mike Tyson
Every piece of content is not created equally, each one best serves a specific reader (or buyer) at a certain stage in the buyer process. Anyone producing your marketing content should be able to peek at your map on this.
It makes a difference. Depending on who the piece is speaking to and their place in the buyer’s journey, your messaging would have to change in levels of specificity (concerning the mention of your product in the content).
- When people are in the awareness phase and a bit unsure about why they’re in pain, it doesn’t make sense to whack them on the head with the latest features of your company’s new hit product The Whamo 5000. They don’t even know they have a problem yet.
- When people are in the consideration phase and have just gotten some clarity—meaning, they know what the problem is—it still doesn’t make sense to tout the many ways the Whamo 5000 can also work better, faster, and cheaper than the competition.
Just because you’re hungry doesn’t mean you’re ready to sign-up for a French Cooking Class. Likewise, just because problems become clear for your potential customers doesn’t mean they’re ready to pull the trigger yet.
- It’s only when people are in the decision phase, when:
- They know they have a problem.
- They specifically know what the problem is and how to solve it.
- Now they are ready to decide on the right solution.
When you can talk about Whamo 5000, how awesome it is, and its many remarkable qualities. At the point of decision, talking with buyers that way makes sense for their current phase of the buyer journey.
Editing like a professor
“I don’t know the rules of grammar… If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.”
– David Ogilvy
Oxford comma or not?
Healthcare or health care
Periods at the end of bullets
These are important, because they can disrupt your branding, and something you can easily take care of in your content style guide. The problem comes when company men and women take it upon themselves to correct innocuous parts of a message.
Thing like:
Can’t versus cannot
Using confusion versus chaos
These are less matters of brand and clarity and more matters of personal preference.
Writing for your writer
“Better to trust the man who is frequently in error than the one who is never in doubt.”
-Eric Sevareid
This one is fairly simple. Here’s a short story from Evernote CEO and Co-founder Phil Libin:
When I was just getting started as a CEO, I had a stupid way of thinking about employees. I thought that I was pretty good at doing a large number of things and I could do most of my employees’ jobs better than they could…
So I woke up. And I made a new rule.
Everyone who reports to me has to be much better at doing his or her job than I could ever be…This is a great way to manage, and it reduces a lot of stress.
If you went to the trouble of hiring this person to produce your marketing materials, it behooves you to let them do that.
This may seem common knowledge but every project seems to have one failed writer in it who cuts out entire sections of text, only to rewrite it in their own words.
You don’t have to be a writer–that’s the joy of bringing on one to offload some of your marketing materials. Learn to embrace delegation and enjoying being more hands-off for once.
Skipping cloud tools like Google Docs
“fear of change
is like standing under a hot shower
and knowing the moment you’ll turn it off
you’ll be freezing cold”
― Erik Tanghe
I was working with an advertising agency when I was first introduced to Google Docs, the Big G’s word processing cloud solution. I had no idea why they wanted to me to use this fancy thing and why people who did seemed to rave about it.
Then I learned.
How Google Docs helps with marketing content
The main reasons you’ll want to start using Google Docs for your marketing content:
- It automatically keeps track of updates
- It makes editing seamless
- It notifies you of requested changes and edits
- It removes the need for maintaining/locating files
As you get into producing lots of content pieces, it can be hard to keep track of everything: which is meant for what, who wrote it, and the necessary iterations it’ll need to go-through to stay on track until completion. With cloud tools such as Google Docs, many of these abilities are baked into the product.
Also, it really shines when it comes to editing. You get an email notification that someone has requested you make changes, then you click through to your document and proceed to accept or reject edits made by your colleague(s). Interestingly, this makes for a healthy back and forth during the content creating process.
PREPARE YOURSELF TO CREATE YOUR BEST CONTENT EVER
Surprise: we, as in the human race, are not perfect. That humble statement extends to you and your specific content producer as well. As straightforward and obvious as that sounds, many content producers, writers, project managers, and plain ol’ managers constantly forget it.
We expect our help to be tethered to their devices 24 hours a day, awaiting to execute our instructions within the second–and perfectly. This doesn’t happen.
Likewise, content producers and writers, somewhere deep inside, expect their work will be accepted like the Mona Lisa, an international treasure for the ages to behold. They imagine there won’t be a need to touchup their stuff, for it will be glorious. This doesn’t happen either.
Human processes require human solutions, which include:
- Humility
- Empathy
- Redirection
- Patience
You will have to apologize for giving incomplete (false) information at times as they will need to say sorry for missing the accurate (true) information you do send out. You will both be caught in meetings and other engagements where you would rather not respond.
But if you are both able to stay the course, powered by the melding of minds for purposes greater than yourselves, then great things can happen.
Remember these simple to follow when getting help producing content:
- Choose clear and specific information over speaking business-book-ese.
- Be clear on who you’re trying to reach and why. Stop hiding your strategy map.
- Remember clarity not editing like a professor is necessary for effective marketing.
- Writing for your writer is a misuse of his/her and your talent.
- Avoid skipping cloud tools like Google Docs to make editing and tracking document changes more seamless.
