Anne H. Janzer's Blog, page 19

Katie Martell and Cause-Based Marketing

Black History month has just wrapped up, and Women’s History Month (aka March) is upon us. Cue the well-intentioned marketing campaigns that align brands with social causes.

Brands do have the ability to influence cultural change. But cause-based marketing is challenging to do well. In a recent example from the world of publishing, Barnes and Noble thought it would be a good idea to reissue classics like Romeo and Juliet, Frankenstein, and Moby Dick with new cover art representing people of cover.

They quickly pulled the “Diverse Editions” campaign after the universe pointed out the obvious: Changing the cover doesn’t change the canon.

(Hear from author L.L. McKinney on NPR’s website.)

I can hardly wait to see what’s coming up for Women’s History Month.

That’s why it’s a perfect time to check in with Katie Martell, an unapologetic truth-teller about the marketing industry in which she works as a freelance consultant and speaker.

Katie helped me immeasurably with the chapter on values-based marketing in the third edition of Subscription Marketing. She is working on a book and documentary about the intersection of marketing and social movements.

Our conversation covered much more than can fit in that much-expanded chapter. Here are a few nuggets of wisdom from her interview for Subscription Marketing.

The explosion in social cause or values-based marketing

Anne: Several years ago, brands’ “social” or cause-based marketing campaigns were pretty safe. Businesses donated goods or money to unobjectionable causes like disaster relief and saving wildlife. Now we’re seeing many marketing campaigns lining up with larger social values. Why is that?

Katie: Brands adopt values-based marketing for many reasons. Competitive differentiation is one of the largest drivers today. When everything around you is a commodity, you could try to differentiate on values.

From a tactical perspective, taking a stand generates “earned media,” or press that you don’t have to buy. Over the years, Dove’s Real Women, Real Beauty campaign has generated way more media exposure than any paid advertising placement.

One of the important reasons is trust. Human beings make decisions emotionally, then justify them logically. Appealing to someone’s values accelerates that emotional connection. The brand becomes part of your personal set of values and identity in a meaningful way.

The Edelman Trust Barometer research suggests that few people know which companies to trust, and many distrust the marketing industry as a whole. In my opinion this is partly due to the lip-service that many companies are giving to social causes and broader purpose.

Lip service, pandering, or true alignment

Anne: Let’s talk about that lip-service, because one of the things you do is call brands out when their “marketing” values don’t match their actions. What kinds of values should brands align themselves with?

Katie: Global Strategy Group conducts an annual survey on business and politics, including questions in which people ranked their opinion of which issues businesses should get involved in.

At the top of the list are those issues that affect the core business, which may include fair labor standards, environmental issues, and industry-specific policies. For buyers, anything aligned with your core business is fair game.

At the bottom of the list, the ones that people are less tolerant of brands voicing an opinion on, you’ll find societal issues like the legalization of marijuana, transgender issues, and more.

I believe that brands cannot afford to be passive about the issues that they themselves can own and that their buyers care passionately about.

I’m not suggesting that every brand take a political stance. Values don’t have to be inherently controversial. Your values might be embedded in how you do business. For Salesforce, proclaiming “No software” was a stance. For Buffer, complete transparency is part of the brand value that they express in nearly every communication with customers.

Understanding the risks

Anne: What are the risks of aligning marketing with social movements?

Katie: The risks fall into two categories: risks to your brand, and risks to the movement you’re trying to support.

You could get called out for pandering by consumers, employees who are uneasy with the disconnect, or someone like me and journalists with broad reach. Even well-intentioned companies like Dove sometimes make moves that don’t align with the standards they set. That’s fine. But if you are hypocritical, profiting off the values, you will get called out.

You also risk alienating customers or prospects who don’t agree with you. That might be a risk worth taking. As Bill Bernbach once said, “If you stand for something, you will always find some people for you and some against you. If you stand for nothing, you will find nobody against you, and nobody for you.”

Anne: What do you mean by risks to the movement? Surely, it’s a good thing when brands weigh in on important topics like #MeToo?

Katie: I see brands trying to align with three movements that are part of the zeitgeist: women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and racial injustice. When brands jump on the bandwagon, they can do as much harm as good.

Each of those movements has been built on the backs of real people who have dedicated their time, resources, and sometimes their lives, to progress. When brands jump in without having participated in those campaigns, it’s not only inconsiderate, it shows a brazen disregard for the history of these movements. Any consumer who aligns with these social initiatives is right to be skeptical.

On the surface, it could seem like a good thing if brands elevate the discussion to a national level. Marketing is pervasive and carries enormous power to affect perception, start conversation, and change attitudes. The flip side is that these brand campaigns may create an “illusion of progress” or a sense of false normalcy. I could be watching a world on television that doesn’t reflect the reality I know to be true. The disconnect gets larger as more brands jump on the bandwagon, but the issues themselves aren’t addressed.

I believe profiting from these movements without also doing something tangible is not clever, it’s exploitation. If you’re going to run a feminist campaign on International Women’s Day on March 8th, first take a look at pay inequality in your own organization (for example.) In fact, I created a litmus test for brands considering a campaign like this. If the answers are mostly “no” you’re exposing yourself to the risk of hypocrisy:

Marketing is a tremendously powerful force. It can lift brands from unknown startups to industry leaders, but it also has power to influence change in the world. If this is the “new normal” of marketing, we need new rules of engagement.

Check out Katie’s “Pandermonium” roadshow coming up in Boston, Austin, and Chicago.

 

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More Marketing Advice for New Authors

Today’s guest post is by Karen Ferreira, an illustrator, owner of Get Your Book Illustrations, and the organizer of the  recent Children’s Book Mastery summit. This is based on the second part of a conversation she and I had about book marketing.

As a keynote speaker at our conference, Children’s Book Mastery, I interviewed Anne Janzer about the best ways for new writers to market affordably and effectively.

In this article, I share the highlights of the second part of our interview. (Read the first half here.)  In this part, we discussed:

Using free or discounted books to boost audience and book sales
Best practices for discounting books
Getting results with BookBub Featured Deals and ads

At the end I asked Anne about her top tip to help authors succeed. Make sure to read to the end so you don’t miss her answer!

Part Two of the Interview

Using free or discounts to boost audience and book sales

Karen: I wanted to ask you about how an author can use free or heavily discounted books. You already spoke about using free books to give sales a boost. How does it actually boost your audience to give the book away?

Anne: You can offer your book for free to specific individuals, but giving it away  free to the world at large hasn’t made as much sense for me. Free promotions may make sense if you have a series. You can give away the first book in a series and get readers for the rest.

I’ve done a lot of heavily discounted promotions, offering the book for 99 cents. If you see a $10 Kindle book, you might think about it or add it to your list. If it’s 99 cents, you may think, “This sounds good enough. I’ll give it a shot.” See what the price point mentally does to the buyer?

I believe its more beneficial to discount a book for a limited time to 99 cents rather than having it always at the low price. If it’s always 99 cents, that broadcasts: “This is a 99 cent book.” When it’s 99 cents for only two weeks, the discount is more motivating, and that gets book in more people’s hands. Remember what I said about your first thousand readers? The sale puts you closer to that. It gets you reviews from people who love the book.

Asking for reviews

Anne: As a side note, if anyone ever reaches out to you by email and says, “I love your book,”’ your first email back to them should be, “That’s so nice of you to tell me. Would you mind saying that in a quick review on Amazon, because it helps readers find the book.” Give them the why.

Karen: Yeah, I think a lot of authors might think, especially if you’ve been around for a little bit, that ‘everybody knows’ that reviews are important, but a lot of people have no idea how important they are.

Best practices for discounting books

Karen: What other best practices have you found when you’re using a discount to get the best results?

Anne: It’s not enough to simply set the price to 99 cents. You have to send a lot of people to the sale—they won’t find it just because it’s on a Kindle countdown deal.

I use a few paid discount promotion sites where you can list your book and they’ll promote it to people who like your genre. These are sites like Bargain Booksy (or Freebooksy for free books.) The granddaddy of these sites is BookBub, which can send a huge amount of traffic to your book sale.

If you have an email list, send them the news of the sale. If you have a friend who emails to people who are in your audience, ask them to share the news. Use social media. Try to send as many people as you possibly can to the book’s page while it’s on sale.

If you get sales over several days, Amazon algorithms will pay attention. If you have a one-day spike and then sales just drop off, Amazon’s algorithm thinks that’s a fluke and doesn’t change anything. If sales stay high for several days, the algorithm notices and jumps on it, because Amazon wants to sell books.

Karen: Okay, nice and I think it’s really good that you mentioned you have to aim for a few days at least, that’s really, really key.

Getting results with BookBub

Karen: I want to ask you about BookBub. You mentioned a couple of other sites as well, which I think is great. And I think definitely for everybody watching to go look for sites similar to BookBub. There are quite a few, as you say, and you can get the word out for free on a lot of these sites.

But BookBub, of course, is the mother of them, I would say. I know you’ve used it, and what is your advice to get the best results with that?

Anne: They will charge you a category-specific fee, which can be a large fee. They’re very selective about what books they take. Your book usually has to be published for a while and have some reviews before BookBub will feature it. BookBub wants to make sure that it’s promoting high-quality books to its users.

I have applied for all sorts of BookBub deals. I’m in the nonfiction world, and my books end up in the self-help category, which is not a perfect fit. I’ve only ever gotten international, non-US, English speaking markets. It still works for me. I’m totally great with that.

When you apply for a Featured deal, there’s a small area to add your own comments. I would make whatever pitch you have for your book in the form, because until I started doing that nothing happened. Say, “My book won this award” or, “This is going to be really timely in February for your readers, because there’s an event going on and people might be interested in this.” Add whatever pitch you can make to help them figure out why this is a good time that they should accept your book .

I’ve also used BookBub Ads. When I discount the price and get an International Featured Deal, I will then run ads on BookBub. These are not as effective as a BookBub Featured Deal, but they do move books.

There is a wonderful book about, running BookBub Ads, from David Gaughran. It’s a Kindle book, about five bucks. (BookBub Ads Expert.) You can build your skill set by reading the book, and do some experimentation. To run the ads you have to spend money, but it doesn’t have to be huge amounts. Think of it as an investment in your skills, more than an investment in the actual advertising costs.

Karen: That’s really good advice and I think it’s excellent advice about putting your little ‘story’—why they should accept your book. So, as you mentioned, do try to get reviews, etc. But I think it’s excellent what you’re saying, don’t take it as an end-all, take it as a learning experience, because I know some people have had fantastic success with BookBub, but obviously, it’s not guaranteed either.

Anne: Success is not guaranteed. Most people I’ve talked to have had at least a break-even success with BookBub. At least they’ve earned back, in royalties, the money that they spent on the investment. That has been my case with my BookBub feature deals, even in assorted international markets. But, learn from everything. Be curious about what’s working and what doesn’t. Figure out what works for you. That’s the most important thing. You have to understand your royalty per book on each platform, and how much is it going to pay off. There’s a little math involved, but the general idea of book marketing is that the money you invest should come back in royalties.

Karen: Thank you for that, I think that’s very useful, and it definitely gives a down to earth kind of viewpoint, which I think is really good to have.

Top tip for helping authors succeed

Karen: So then, what would be your top tip for helping children’s book authors succeed?

Anne: My top tip would be to indulge your creativity. You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing. You’re going to drive yourself insane if you just try to be like everyone else.

Be creative. Do the things that fit your skills, that you’re comfortable with. Think about what’s different about your book, about your audience. Where is your audience? Do you have a different, creative way of reaching out and finding them? Because that is your task–lining up your book with that audience. It’s not selling as many copies, it’s selling as many copies to the people who are going to love it. That’s your task.

That takes creativity, and learning. It’s a learning curve.

Karen Ferreira is an illustrator, award-winning creative director and owner of Get Your Book Illustrations. She helps self-publishing authors get amazing, affordable illustrations.

She has spent many hours learning about self-publishing and enjoys helping others succeed in this field.

 

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Hero Worship and the Writing Process

We love our heroes. They inspire and entertain us.

But we often ignore the broader lessons of how those heroes achieve their goals.

We read stories of visionary company founders, but don’t notice the founding team members who pull long hours and take career risks. Nor do we profile the angel investors, the early hires, and the pioneering customers who all are instrumental to the success of the endeavor.

We idolize the lead singer over the contribution of the band. We glorify the inventor or explorer but skip over the work they build on, the “giants” on whose shoulders they stand.

When we worship the hero and forget the team, we fail to learn the full lessons of the remarkable achievements we admire.

The writer as a hero

Writers are just as attracted to heroes as everyone else. Heck, we study Joseph Campbell’s description of the hero’s journey and try to apply it to our stories. And we turn that same filter onto our own work.

We are valiant writers, banging out works of brilliance in isolation, undertaking the heroic effort of putting words on paper.

Then we look at what we wrote, and the whole thing falls apart.

The first draft inevitably stinks. The higher your expectations, the worse the letdown. Experienced writers understand that the ugly first draft is merely fodder to create the final version, but even they can despair at work that doesn’t meet their expectations.

Without faith in a larger process, you’re more likely to abandon the heroic journey altogether.

Writing the draft is clearly the critical act. Without a draft, nothing else happens. But that first draft itself is rarely a heroic result.

The act of writing requires a larger support team, including:

Research and fact-checking
Revision for flow and style
Copyediting
Proofreading

(Revision is a silent, behind-the-scenes hero of nearly every piece of great writing.)

Whenever we neglect that support team (the larger writing process), the result suffers. It rarely rises above the ordinary and pedestrian.

Doing more of the same isn’t the path to glory

Businesses that use written content as a critical part of their marketing strategies fall prey to the same “hero worship” of the writing process. And it skews the way they plan for and invest in content creation.

A survey of business writers and content creators conducted by Typeset and Mantis Research bears out the seriousness of this problem in the business world.

The authors of the State of Writing 2020 report blame a focus on quantity over quality. In a blog post accompanying the results, they write, “Almost 6 in 10 business communicators plan to write more, but only 3 in 10 plan to increase budget. How do these professionals plan to make their writing more effective if they don’t put money behind it?”

Only 45 percent of the respondents felt that they were creating content that was effective to its purposes. The rest? They’re busy creating content, but don’t really think it’s working. And yet, they want to create more of it.

Not surprisingly, those who are not having success creating effective content are also less likely to edit and optimize the content. They are less likely to edit for grammar and spelling, logic and flow, subject matter, and accuracy.

From 2020 State of Business Writing Research

I think they’re making the mistake of conflating the drafting process with the writing process. They focus on the heroic journey of creation, rather than the hard work of support.

Great writing doesn’t happen in the first draft.

Beyond the metaphor

Let the hero inspire you to act. But to elevate your performance, learn from the entire team.

Set out on your hero’s journey to create a first draft. Then engage in the equally noble effort of making your work itself great.

The work is the star; give it the supporting team it needs to be remarkable.

Frodo needed his Sam. Your writing needs its supporting process, including strategy, revision, editing, and care.

Download the complete business writing research from this link: typesetcontent.com/blog/state-of-writing-research

For more advice on having faith in the process, read my book The Writer’s Process. For tips on business writing, see The Workplace Writer’s Process.

 

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Marketing Advice for New Authors (Part One)

Today’s guest post is by Karen Ferreira, an illustrator, owner of Get Your Book Illustrations, and the organizer of the  recent Children’s Book Mastery summit. She and I had a lively conversation about book marketing strategies as part of that summit, and she has contributed a two-part series of blog posts based on that conversation.

As a keynote speaker at our conference, Children’s Book Mastery, I interviewed Anne Janzer about the best ways for new writers to market affordably and effectively.

Anne gave such powerful insights and ways to change your fundamental outlook on promotion and marketing, I wanted her audience to benefit from it too. In this article, I share the highlights of our interview.

In the first part of our conversation, we covered the following:

Why you have more resources available to you than you thought
Ideas for low-cost ways to promote your books
One extremely powerful strategy to use as the basis for all your marketing

(Part two will contain the second half of our conversation, including Anne’s top tip to help authors succeed.)

Your Real Marketing Budget

Karen: New authors often don’t have a big budget or almost any budget for marketing and promotion. What are some of the best free or low-cost ways that they can promote their book?

Anne: Before we get into the actual ideas and tactics, which will vary for different authors, I want you to think differently about your budget. I want you to envision three buckets: time, money, and skills.

Money, Skills, and Time

Most of us focus on the money bucket. When you’re starting, this bucket may not have much in it.

But there are two other buckets. One contains your skills; and these are the things that you already know how to do or are good at doing. Think about what you have in your skills bucket right now.

The third bucket is your time—time you can invest in either marketing the book, or in building your skills so that you can market the book effectively.

Those are your three buckets. The best use of limited marketing dollars might be buying books on Kindle and learning a skill, then trying it out. That’s a small investment in money, and a larger investment in time, which will build skills for the future.

Your overall budget is larger than you think, because you need to account for your skills and your time.  A lot of marketing activities don’t take much money, but they take time. Contact your library to go give a talk, so you can work on your public speaking skills, for example.

No matter which bucket you’re investing from, whether you’re spending money or time or learning something new, try to do things that help you build your platform and capabilities.

Anne: One of my favorite, relatively low-cost marketing strategies is to give the book to the right people. Just give the book away. The cost to you is the cost of your book, plus possibly the cost of shipping. Simply give your book to someone with a handwritten letter. For a children’s book author, it might be: “I know you speak to fourth graders who are going through this situation. I’ve written a book about it. Here’s a copy, please let me know what you think.”

If you do that for 5 or 10 people who are really in the target zone for your readers, and a few of them come through, you can end up moving a lot of books over time and building a valuable relationship. That book marketing strategy has nothing to do with running ad campaigns and sending emails and all of that. Every indie author can do this.

Karen: Nice, yeah, I really like that, that’s actually a very different way to look at it, but it’s brilliant.

Abundance Mindset and Strategic Generosity

Karen: Then you have a couple of fantastic articles about having an abundance mindset and being generous and strategic. I think you’ve already started touching on it now, but can you kind of just explain that overarching concept?

Anne: This is so important to me because I talk to a lot of new authors, and I know that a lot of them come from a space of wanting to get as much as they can from the sales. They’ll say, “I don’t want my book going into the library because someone might check it out and then not buy it,” or “If they buy this other author’s books, then they won’t buy mine, so why would I promote that authors books?”

That’s what I call a scarcity mindset: the idea that there’s just a fixed number of book buyers in the world and when someone else succeeds, you lose.

It’s not like that. Books and ideas spread, and the more that you get your book and your ideas out into the world, the more success you’ll have. Your job in marketing your book is not to sell as many as you can and to get as much money as you can. Let’s reframe that concept.

Your job in marketing your book is to get your book in the hands of exactly those people who are going to love it the most—as many of those people as possible.

I have a belief, not grounded in any science but in personal experience, that when you sell your first thousand books, good things start happening. Now, a thousand seems like a big number. So the question is, how do you get as many copies out there as soon as you can?

That’s changing from the urgency of “I’ve got to cling on and grab every sale I can,” to, “How can I make my ideas, my stories, abundant out in the world, so people will find me, they will know me and it will grow?”

That’s what I’m trying to get at with the mindset of abundance versus scarcity.

I’ve been on this author path for about five years now and this is where I’ve ended up: My happy place with book marketing, is to be generous and strategic.

Every day or every week, I think ‘What can I do that is generous and strategic?’ If I’m generous without any strategy, I’m going to burn out. I will spend no time on my own work, and that’s not good. If I’m always strategic, it will start to feel like I’m using people. People sense when you’re always taking, and after a while they will get tired of you. They don’t want to always hear, “Will you buy my book?”

Be creative about finding ways to be both generous and strategic.

Free or Low-Cost Ways to Promote Your Books

Anne: Many  generous and strategic tactics don’t cost a lot of money. Let’s look at what some of them might be. I already gave the example of giving away a book, just to the right person. Another one, and this is one of my favorites, is reviewing other authors in your genre, in your niche.

If you’re a children’s book author, read other children’s books and write reviews of them. You can just write reviews on Amazon or if you want to increase the strategy, write a review on your blog.

If you really want to make an impact, do this for new books. If you can’t afford to buy new books all the time, there’s a site called Netgalley where you can sign up to be a reviewer of books. Writing reviews is generous to the author, who could end up being a friend or a companion who helps you. It is generous to your readers, if it helps them find other books that they love.

Important safety note: Don’t review a book if you don’t like the book. Don’t write scathing reviews!

Writing reviews is strategic as well, because now you have content that you can share across your social media platforms. If you’re doing social media, you’ve got things that send people to your blog that’s not just about your own books. You’re making an offer: “Hey, here’s another book you might enjoy.” You’re attracting and talking to the audience of people who are interested in the same kinds of books that you write. You’re building relationships with those people.

Another idea is writing guest blogs on other authors’ blogs or other blogs, or doing podcast interviews, which is so much fun.  Again, it’s generous for the podcast or the blogger. You help share the news about what they’re doing, and it’s strategic because it’s connecting you with possible readers or buyers of your book.

If you’re just getting started, start with a smaller podcast, with fewer listeners. You get your feet, you learn what feels comfortable, and then work your way up the list.

Also, consider joining a group of other authors in your genre, in your area, and helping them. What I’m doing right now is talking to you about book marketing. I don’t sell anything related to book marketing. I don’t sell book marketing services, I’m not trying to sell anybody anything. I want to help other authors, genuinely. I have another group of women authors that write in my genre and we are constantly helping and supporting each other. We ask each other about cover designers or editors, and share information about book launches. All of this builds relationships and ultimately those relationships can be hugely important to your book marketing, because these people then will step up to help you on their terms, when you need it.

The corollary to ‘be generous and strategic’ is this: when you need it, don’t be afraid to ask for help. That’s the hard part. We want to just do our thing and then put the book out and be done. It’s not enough.

Karen: Right. I guess you have to come to a point where you really do realize that doesn’t work.

Anne: It doesn’t work. Publishing a book so much bigger than one person and one book. When you approach book marketing the way that I just said, it is not scary, it is fun.

Be curious. Experiment. Ask yourself: “I wonder what would happen if I just called this business that makes something for my target readers and tell them I have this book. Maybe they want to offer it to all their customers.” I mean, think outside the box. What does that cost you? Nothing, except maybe shipping a book, and the discomfort of stretching your comfort zone. If it works, it has a big impact. Be creative and fearless, at least when it comes to your time and your effort.

Karen: Nice, be creative and fearless. I think that should be a slogan on someone’s wall.

Karen Ferreira is an illustrator, award-winning creative director and owner of Get Your Book Illustrations. She helps self-publishing authors get amazing, affordable illustrations.

She has spent many hours learning about self-publishing and enjoys helping others succeed in this field.

The post Marketing Advice for New Authors (Part One) appeared first on Anne Janzer.

What Do You Amplify?

Finding the time to write can be challenging. But writing isn’t the only way to share important thoughts and viewpoints.

We affect the world around us through the ideas we endorse and share, both online and in book form.

We signal our approval of content with likes or other online reactions.
We amplify posts by sharing them with our networks.
We add our personal spin by commenting on and curating posts and articles.
We spread the impact of books by reviewing them or recommending them to our friends

All of these activities have an impact in the online world. Through browsing and sharing, we contribute to the spread of ideas, memes, books, philosophies, and social norms. We create “thought leaders” and influencers, and amplify the voices of specific groups and individuals.

We may also, unintentionally, contribute to fear mongering, clickbait, fake news, and other unfortunate attributes of the modern world.

We have responsibilities as readers in an age of misinformation and information glut.

What content do you amplify? What are you supporting with your attention, approval, and reviews?

For example, when you click on a clickbait headline that makes a controversial statement or impossible claim, you’re reinforcing the practice of using those headlines or seeking to spread discord, alarm, or more. And when you share those posts, you’re extending their impact.

What’s good for clicks isn’t always good for truth.

What if we paid more attention to what we amplify?

How Will You Use Your Amplification Power?

In the Information Economy, you exercise power by sharing, reviewing, subscribing to, and commenting on content. So, consider the standards by which you lend your support to others’ voices.

For example, I tend to share online content that meet certain general attributes, including

The content isn’t based on spreading fear or manipulating opinion.
I know or admire the author of the content.
Even if I don’t agree with everything, I feel that the content contributes something important to the discussion.

 

Which ideas do you want to spread?

In addition to those filters, I try to amplify the thoughts and publications of the many smart women in my world. When working on Writing to Be Understood, I made sure that more than half of my expert interviews were women. And although I review a wide range of books about writing or marketing, again I make sure to represent many written by women.

This is my small contribution to quietly, slowly disrupting the unconscious bias that assumes that nonfiction authors or marketing experts default to men.

You might have different values. Perhaps you want to amplify the voices of people of color, or those with a strong commitment to the environment. The point is this: you can elevate those discussions that are otherwise getting lost in a world of clickbait.

You’re already amplifying and spreading ideas. Use that power with intention.

Related Posts

Writing and the Unseen Impact

The Misinformation Age: A Book Review

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Value Nurturing Defined

A Marketing Term You Should Know

Five years ago, I proposed that marketers add the term value nurturing to their vocabularies and their marketing plans.

Value nurturing is nothing more than enhancing the customer’s experience of value, after the conversion or the sale. It’s a critical marketing practice today because more businesses are basing their success on ongoing customer relations and subscriptions.

Defining a new term is a foolhardy task; no one wants to learn new vocabulary, much less take on new marketing tasks. But it was important enough that I gave it a shot, and for some people it has, indeed, stuck.

The book Subscription Marketing compiles a large number of value nurturing tactics and ideas that businesses of all types can employ. That book is now in its third edition. Value nurturing is taking hold, slowly, in the marketing mindset.

What follows is an excerpt from the chapter in that book defining value nurturing.

Beginning golfers are taught to work on their entire swing, including the follow-through. The follow-through on a golf swing affects where the ball goes once you hit it.

Value nurturing is like the follow-through for marketing and sales, ensuring that customers continue on the course you want them to travel.

Before the initial sale, you find prospects through thought leadership and lead generation. Lead-nurturing activities convince prospects of the potential value they can get from your solution. If you succeed, the prospect becomes a customer.

Value nurturing is the marketing follow-through for that activity.

Value nurturing is the act of supporting the customer’s experience of value.

Once the sale is complete, other parts of the organization come into play, but marketing still plays a significant role. Marketing can set customers on the path to achieving the functional or financial results they expected from signing up. Marketing can gently nudge customers to recognize that they are succeeding. And creative marketers add value outside the solution, through content, community, additional services, or the quality of the relationship experienced by the customer.

Value nurturing turns customers into loyal or repeat customers, and successful customers into advocates.

There’s nothing revolutionary about the idea of marketing to current customers. You might think that I’m stating the obvious. But in observing the practices of many businesses, I often feel that customers are neglected. Some marketing organizations treat “customer marketing” as a backwater, not where the creative and visible campaigns happen. This mindset must change.

Subscription customers deserve renewed marketing attention. For that reason, I suggest creating a new label—value nurturing—that identifies marketing activities after the sale as being of equal importance to generating and nurturing new leads.

Many business activities belong under the value-nurturing umbrella:

Customer success management: Today this term is associated with a function that lives either in support or sales, but rarely in marketing. Yet to scale up customer success efforts across tens of thousands of customers, you have to deploy marketing campaigns. Value nurturing is customer success executed at scale.
Customer retention: Most customer retention efforts focus on finding customers at risk of leaving and convincing them to stay. The term typically applies to solving problems rather than creating value.
Upselling and cross-selling: These are important results of successful value nurturing, but never mistake selling for creating value.

Value nurturing takes place after lead generation, lead nurturing, and customer conversion. It is the next logical step in marketing for a subscription-based business.

The word value has inherent ambiguity, which works well for our purposes. Consider common meanings of the word:

Value (verb): to consider something or someone as important or useful. (Shakespeare: “I was too young that time to value her, but now I know her.”)
Value (noun): a relative assessment of worth or importance. (“What’s the value of this painting?”)
Value (noun): a principle or standard of behavior. (Gandhi: “Your habits become your values, your values become your destiny.”)

Value nurturing can confirm the customer’s belief that the ongoing subscription is a smart economic decision. Marketing can also increase the customer’s perception of the relative value of a solution over time. These activities reinforce the first two definitions of value.

Last but not least, marketing may also align the solution with the customer’s personal values (definition #3). Many people are interested in doing business with organizations that share their core beliefs. This fact is spurring a growth in purpose-driven marketing related to social or environmental issues.

This third meaning, the alignment of principles or ideals, carries particular weight in the Subscription Economy because the customer maintains an ongoing relationship with the business, and shared values strengthen relationships.

Whose Value Is It, Anyway?

It’s tempting to associate value nurturing with monetary metrics such as customer lifetime value. How much money does the customer contribute to the business during their relationship? How can you optimize that?

Revenue growth is, of course, your objective. But if you approach value nurturing purely with the thought of getting more money from existing customers, you’re likely to get it wrong. We’ve all experienced a poorly executed upsell at least once in our lives and realize that it damages the customer relationship.

Your customers can tell when you’re interested in them only for the money, not the relationship.

Value nurturing is about increasing the customer’s perceived value from the solution, not wringing every dollar out of the customer. The better you are at making your customers successful, the more successful your business will be over the long run.

Revenue growth is the natural result of value nurturing done well.

For more on value nurturing and a large list of examples, see the 3rd edition of Subscription Marketing: Strategies for Nurturing Customers in a World of Churn.

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What Is Subscription Marketing, Anyway?

When I first published a book titled Subscription Marketing in 2015, many business marketers didn’t understand how it applied to them. They thought it was only about newspapers, or magazines, or perhaps email marketing.

Even people marketing cloud-based software didn’t see the connection with their own work.

Subscription marketing isn’t only about selling subscriptions. It’s about the practices of marketing when the customer relationship is an enduring one that constantly renews.

A Working Definition

As the years have passed, I’ve struggled to come up with a concise working definition of subscription marketing, partly because marketing itself is such a vague, misunderstood term.

(My mother is convinced it means “sales.”)

Then I heard Douglas Burdett interview Jill Soley on his excellent Marketing Book Podcast. Soley is a strategic product and marketing leader and coauthor of Beyond Product. What caught my attention was her definition of marketing as “two-way communication between your company and your customers.”

Brilliant!

So, with Jill’s permission, I’m using that as the heart of my definition of subscription marketing:

Subscription Marketing is two-way communication between your company and customers in a subscription relationship, with the purpose of sustaining the value of that relationship for both parties.

My book of the same name focuses primarily on marketing practices that need to happen after the sale (which I call value nurturing). But that’s only part of the story.

Subscription marketing is marketing with a long-term perspective. It’s changing your mindset to focus on the relationship rather than revenue alone. It’s looking beyond lead generation to cultivating both trust and value, before and after the point of conversion.

Subscription marketing resets fundamental ideas you may have about marketing. For example, as a subscription marketer:

Leads are fine. Relationships are better.
Large marketing budgets are helpful. Creativity is priceless.
Interrupt-driven tactics like advertising deliver inconsistent results. Adding value always works.
Chasing sales is exhausting. Creating value is energizing.

Subscription marketing doesn’t technically require a subscription revenue model—all you need is a shift in mindset. But if you have a subscription model and want to achieve long-term success, you need to adopt the practices of subscription marketing.

Related Content

Subscription Marketing, 3rd Edition is now available! Learn more.

Listen to me talk about Subscription Marketing on the Marketing Book Podcast here.

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You’ve Written Something. Now What?

Most of the posts on this blog focus on the process of writing: planning the work, putting the words together, and moving forward. But how do you approach the next step?

Writers face two kinds of existential anxiety.

Some writers worry about whether people will like their work.
Experienced writers worry about whether anyone will read it.

Obscurity is our largest challenge, whether we’re writing books, blog posts, or articles.

For authors, this post by Mike Shatzkin describes the reality of publishing books when there are more than 15 million books in Ingram’s main catalog. Even traditionally published books struggle to find an audience.

Shatzkin writes, “Today it is not uncommon for titles on a major publisher’s list to sell almost nothing, low hundreds of copies or even less.”

If you’re a blogger, your content competes with a vast ocean for readers’ attention. WordPress.com, a popular blogging platform, reports that its users publish 70 million blog posts a month. That’s just a fraction of the overall blogging traffic. (See the WordPress.com stats here.)

The magnitude of the challenge might deter you from writing anything for external consumption.

What if you write something and no one reads it?

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there, does it make a sound?

Like the tree in the forest, your writing needs a reader. Writing is, in essence, an act of communication—of being present with another, of synching your thoughts with someone else’s mind. In many senses, your writing is incomplete until the point at which someone else reads it.

Like that tree, you only need a single listener to make an impact. The size of the audience isn’t the key thing.

Find the people in your forest.

Have you ever had a friend recommend a book to you, only to discover that you really dislike it?

The book may not be bad—you’re simply not the right audience. This is true of movies and television shows as well.

Every piece of writing has its ideal audience of the people who will find the most value from it. Your objective is to get your writing in front of them–whether that’s a book, a blog post, an article, a poem, a song, a screenplay, or anything else creative.

Even if you believe your writing has broad appeal, focus on the sweet spot audience. If you’re successful, those people will help you spread the word.

Future posts will cover ways to find and connect with that audience. For now, remember: if an audience values your writing,  it’s worth doing.

Related Posts

Writing and the Unseen Impact

One Question to Ask Before You Write

Writing for Resonance

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Finding Your Writing Pace

Are You a Sprinter or a Marathoner?

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people try their hands at writing 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November, as part of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).

The success and popularity of NaNoWriMo is a testament to the power of the writing sprint. You can accomplish a great deal when you focus on a single writing task and work to a major deadline.

But how do you translate this success into a sustained writing life? A former NaNoWriMo participant, Amber, sent me this email:

I wrote 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo in 19 days, but I was toast for a week after I finished. I want to finish my next first draft and I know that a steady pace is key, but I have a problem being consistent. As much fun as those fits of inspiration are, the rest of the world falls away when I get to writing like that and some of my other priorities get left by the wayside.

How do I utilize that inspiration to make progress on my drafts without neglecting the rest of my responsibilities? And how do I consistently update even when I feel tapped out?

Amber makes a great point: We cannot live by sprints alone. If you want to be a writer and also remain sane or maintain a day job, you need a different approach. The demands of everyday life can drain our enthusiasm for the big writing project.

May I suggest something that works for me?

Writing as Interval Training

In exercise, interval training is the practice of doing short bursts of heavy work, alternated with longer periods of steady exertion. You might jog for two minutes and run for one, for example. Apparently, it’s a great way to maintain fitness: you push yourself, but not to exhaustion.

Consider doing short bursts

In writing, I’m a firm believer in daily practice, and a steady pace. But as a nonfiction writer, I’m not always working on a book manuscript. Often I’m researching, or incubating ideas, or blogging. I’ll continue at a steady pace through outlining and early drafting.

At some point, I need to commit to intense work to finish a complete draft. I sprint.

My writing life looks like a kind of interval training: months of steady work and research, then a month-long sprint completing the first draft. Steady work, then immersion, then steady work again.

What would interval writing look like for you?

If you’re struggling to find your writing pace, consider using intervals.

For example, commit to a short session on your draft every day, say 30-45 minutes, six days a week. This keeps your mind working on the book, but also lets you lead a normal life.

Then schedule concentrated bursts to make serious progress. Take one afternoon a week or weekend a month to do nothing but write. Maybe, like me, you’ll have longer sprint intervals, more widely spaced.

The interval approach gives you the best of both worlds:

The steady feeding of the Muse through daily practice
The motivation and progress that comes from an imminent deadline

Have a Writing Challenge of Your Own?

This blog post originated from a writing challenge that a subscriber sent me. (Thanks, Amber!)  Have a writing challenge of your own? Send it to me by email, in the comments, or using the Contact form.

Find insight on scheduling work and juggling different projects in The Writer’s Process.
Watch the writing challenge videos.

 

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Fanocracy: A Book Review

Reading Fanocracy by David Meerman Scott and Reiko Scott will change the way you think about being a fan in your own life and cultivating fans for your business. Marketers everywhere should read this book to transform the way they think about supporting customers.

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The Full Review

One thing I enjoy about David Meerman Scott’s writing is how he observes from the world around him and then synthesizes its lessons for business and marketing. In his latest book, Fanocracy, that perspective is expanded by that of his daughter, Rieko. In addition to being a physician by training, she appears to be observant and thoughtful—and a skilled writer.

The book looks at fandom from both sides: the experiences of the fans themselves, and the practices of those businesses, institutions, and artists that develop and nurture their fans—fanocracies in the book’s terminology.

The Scott’s define a fanocracy as “an organization or person that honors fans and consciously fosters meaningful connection among them.”

The fan’s perspective

The multi-generational perspective from the father-daughter author team makes the book particularly useful as it explores what it means to be a fan, and its importance in our lives. The book includes examples from the world of medicine, cosplay, fan fiction, live music, professional sports, and much more.

Fandom forges connections, helping us create shared identities with people who would otherwise be strangers or colleagues we know only in passing. It brings us together in times of alienation and division.

In other words, fandom connects and unites us in healthy and productive ways. This book made me realize the importance and joy of being an unabashed fan of something.

The business perspective

In this light, building a “fanocracy” business isn’t just about getting more sales or dominating your competition. Those things may happen, but as a side effect of nurturing fandom.

Creating a fanocracy is about adding value to your product or service through a sense of community, involvement, and identity. The Scotts write:

People are going to be most invested in that which creates a sense of intimacy, warmth, and shared meaning in a world that would otherwise relegate them to a statistic.”

Turning your business into a fanocracy isn’t necessarily easy. Part Two of the book includes nine steps for building a fanocracy, including:

Getting closer to your customers
Letting go of control of your creations
Giving more than you have to

The book includes a wide range of examples from traditional fan domains as well as businesses. A few of my favorites include MeUndies (subscription underwear!) and Grain Surfboards.

The book will get you thinking:

What are you a fan of?
How does that experience enrich your personal life?
How can you encourage these kinds of feelings in your most loyal customers?

Building a fanocracy isn’t necessarily easy, but it’s generous and meaningful. And in a world filled with big data, artificial intelligence, and subscription fatigue, cultivating and nurturing true fans is a great business strategy.

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