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February 20, 2020
This book actually started as web marketing on my blog more than a decade ago. I published an e-book called The New Rules of PR, 1 immediately generating remarkable enthusiasm (and much controversy) from marketers and businesspeople around the world.
I looked around for some personality on these sites and didn't find much, because the automaker websites portray their organizations as nameless, faceless corporations.
When I talk about the new rules and compare them to the old rules, I don't mean to suggest that all organizations should immediately drop their existing marketing and PR programs and use this book's ideas exclusively. Moreover, I'm not of the belief that the only marketing worth doing is on the web. If your newspaper advertisements, direct mail campaigns, telephone directory listings, media outreach, and other programs are working for you, that's great! Please keep going. There is room in many marketing and PR programs for traditional techniques.
In the old days, traditional, nontargeted advertising via newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and direct mail was the only way to go. But these media make it very difficult to target specific buyers with individualized content.
traditional advertising is generally so wide and broad that it is ineffective.
Under this system, advertising agency creative people sit in hip offices dreaming up ways to interrupt people so that they pay attention to a one-way message. Think about it: You're watching your favorite TV show, so the advertiser's job is to craft a commercial to get you to pay attention, when you'd really rather be doing something else, like quickly grabbing some ice cream before the show resumes.
Marketing simply meant advertising (and branding). Advertising needed to appeal to the masses. Advertising relied on interrupting people to get them to pay attention to a message. Advertising was one-way: company to consumer. Advertising was exclusively about selling products. Advertising was based on campaigns that had a limited life. Creativity was deemed the most important component of advertising. It was more important for the ad agency to win advertising awards than for the client to win new customers. Advertising and PR were separate disciplines run by different people with separate
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The Old Rules of PR The only way to get ink and airtime was through the media. Companies communicated to journalists via press releases. Nobody saw the actual press release except a handful of reporters and editors. Companies had to have significant news before they were allowed to write a press release. Jargon was okay because the journalists all understood it. You weren't supposed to send a release unless it included quotes from third parties, such as customers, analysts, and experts. The only way buyers would learn about the press release's content was if the media wrote a story about it.
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Here's how to tell if the new rules are right for you. Consider your goals for communicating via marketing and public relations. Are you buying that Super Bowl ad to score great tickets to the game? Are you designing a creative magazine ad to win an award for your agency? Do you hope to create a book of press clips from mainstream media outlets to show to your bosses? Does your CEO want to be on TV? If the answers to these questions are yes, then the new rules (and this book) are not for you.
However, if you're like millions of smart marketers and entrepreneurs whose goal is to communicate with buyers directly, then read on. If you're working to make your organization more visible online, then read on. If you want to drive people into your company's sales process so they actually buy something (or apply or donate or join or submit their names as leads), then read on. I wrote this book especially for you.
The theory of the long tail as popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name is that our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of major hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.
So, what about marketing? While Anderson's book focuses on product availability and selling models on the web, the concepts apply equally well to marketing. There's no doubt that there is a long-tail market for web content created by organizations of all kinds—corporations, nonprofits, churches, schools, individuals, rock bands—and used for directly reaching buyers—those who buy, donate, join, apply.
Marketers must shift their thinking away from the short head of the demand curve—mainstream marketing to the masses—and toward the long tail—a strategy of targeting vast numbers of underserved audiences via the web.
“The new rules of PR are that anybody who wants to be the leader has to have news coming out,” says Jim Peterson,
Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars per month on a media relations program that tries to convince a handful of reporters at select magazines, newspapers, and TV stations to cover us, we should be targeting the plugged-in bloggers, online news sites, micropublications, public speakers, analysts, and consultants who reach the targeted audiences who are looking for what we have to offer.
Marketing is more than just advertising. PR is for more than just a mainstream media audience. You are what you publish. People want authenticity, not spin. People want participation, not propaganda. Instead of causing one-way interruption, marketing is about delivering content at just the precise moment your audience needs it. Marketers must shift their thinking from mainstream marketing to the masses to a strategy of reaching vast numbers of underserved audiences via the web. PR is not about your boss seeing your company on TV. It's about your buyers seeing your company on the web. Marketing
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Let the World Know about Your Expertise All people and organizations possess the power to elevate themselves on the web to a position of importance.
Develop Information Your Buyers Want to Consume Companies with large budgets can't wait to spend the big bucks on slick TV advertisements. It's like commissioning artwork. TV ads make marketing people at larger companies feel good. But broadcast advertisements dating from the time of the TV-industrial complex don't work so well anymore.
Buyer Personas: The Basics Smart marketers understand buyers, and many build formal buyer personas for their target demographics.
what visitors really want is content that first describes the issues and problems they face and then provides details on how to solve those problems.
Hair Ties for Guys.
It's about tapping into a shared challenge and rallying the community around it.
The new publishing model on the web is not about hype and spin and messages. It is about delivering content when and where it is needed and, in the process, branding you or your organization as a leader. When you understand your audience—those people who will become your buyers (or those who will join, donate, subscribe, apply, volunteer, or vote)—you can craft an editorial and content strategy just for them. What works is a focus on your buyers and their problems. What fails is an egocentric display of your products and services.
Rather than living in isolation in marketing, marketers and business leaders benefit from real-time content and social networking. At forward-thinking organizations, salespeople curate real-time content, customer support offers real-time troubleshooting, and management uses real-time engagement metrics to inform business decisions.
The best way to think about social media is not in terms of the different technologies and tools but, rather, how those technologies and tools allow you to communicate directly with your buyers in places where they are congregating right now.
Social media is the superset and is how we refer to the various media that people use to communicate online in a social way. Social media include blogs, wikis, video and photo sharing, and much more. A subset of social media is social networking, a term I use to refer to how people interact on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and similar sites. Social networking occurs when people create a personal profile and interact to become part of a community of friends and like-minded people and to share information.
How do you act in a cocktail party situation? Do you go into a large gathering filled with a few acquaintances and tons of people you do not know and shout, “BUY MY PRODUCT!”? Do you go into a cocktail party and ask every single person you meet for a business card before you agree to speak with them? Do you try to meet every single person, or do you have a few great conversations? Do you listen more than you speak? Are you helpful, providing valuable information to people with no expectation of getting something tangible in return? Or do you avoid the social interaction of cocktail parties
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Something as simple as a Twitter feed can humanize a brand.
The New Rules of Job Search
The migration of audio and video from online backwaters to the forefront with valuable content happened because of sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and iTunes, with easy ways for people to view and listen.
If you create an interesting story, others will share it for you.
The “Air New Zealand—Crazy about Rugby—Safety Video” was released on YouTube and quickly generated nearly a million views. That's right: a million views for an airline safety video. So how did they do it?
The B2B marketers seem to forget that what all marketers need to do is communicate to people. People want to do business with people, and the B2B companies that understand that develop a following.
“My mind is blown every day by the success of Hack the Entrepreneur,” Nastor says. “I will stand on the highest mountaintop and preach the power of podcasting, because the reach you can get from your home or office is absolutely astounding. We have published over 300 episodes of HTE and the show has had over three million downloads to date with sponsorships booked out three months in advance. I get emails every day from people who have been touched in some way by what I'm doing. Nothing I've ever done in the past has ever had this reach so quickly.”
The idea of real time—of creating marketing or public relations initiatives as well as responding to customers right now, while the moment is ripe—delivers tremendous competitive advantage. You've got to operate quickly to succeed in this world. These ideas are the subject of my 2012 book, Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products That Grow Your Business Now. This chapter highlights some of the tactics that you can use to instantly engage your buyers when they are eager to hear from you. If you've read Real-Time Marketing & PR,
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In the emerging real-time business environment, size is no longer a decisive advantage. Speed and agility win the moment.
The real-time mind-set recognizes the importance of speed. It is an attitude to business (and to life) that emphasizes moving quickly when the time is right.
Because of the wealth of information on the web, the salesperson no longer controls the relationship between buyer and seller. Now, buyers are in charge. They can see what your CEO is saying on Twitter and LinkedIn. They can check out independent blogs to learn what it's really like to be a customer. Buyers actively go around salespeople, gathering information themselves and engaging a company representative only at the last possible moment. By then, they are armed with tons of information. In the old days, salespeople controlled the information. Now it's the buyers who have the leverage.
Marketing generates attention from the many people who make up a buyer persona. Sales content (and salespeople), on the other hand, communicates with one potential customer at a time, putting the buying process into context.
Reaching many people: The job of marketers is to understand buyer personas and communicate with these groups in a one-to-many approach.
Influencing one person at a time: The role of sales is completely different. The goal of a salesperson is to influence one buyer at a time, typically when the buyer is already close to making a purchase decision.
Let's start the chapter with some ideas for how you can build a website that walks buyers through the research process as they consider doing business with your organization and moves them toward the place where they are ready to buy (or donate, or join, or subscribe). Remember, that's the goal of all web content!
People don't go to the web looking for advertising; they are on a quest for content.
When buyers arrive at your site, you have an opportunity to deliver targeted information at the precise moment when they are looking for what you have to offer. By providing information when they need it, you can begin a long and profitable relationship with them. Editors and publishers obsess over maintaining readership. So should you.
To best leverage the power of content, you first need to help your site's visitors find what they need. When someone arrives for the first time, he or she receives a series of messages—whether you realize it or not. These messages are answering the questions that matter to the visitor. Does this organization care about me? Does it focus on the problems I face? Does it share my perspective or push its own on me?
That's why you must organize your site with content for each of your distinct buyer personas. How do your potential customers self-select? Is it based on their job function, on geography, or on the industry they work in? It's important to create a set of appropriate links based on a clear understanding of your buyers, so you can quickly move them from your homepage to pages built specifically for them.
It is important to create a distinct, consistent, and memorable site. The tone of voice of the content will contribute to that goal.
Both of these homepages work because the site personality is compatible with the company personality. Whatever your personality, the way to achieve consistency is to make certain that the written material, as well as the other content on the site, conforms to a defined tone that you've established from the start. A strong focus on site personality and character pays off.
Photographs in particular play an important role for many sites. Photos are powerful content when page visitors see that the images are an integrated component of the website. However, generic stock photographs (happy and good-looking multicultural models in a fake company meeting room) may actually have a negative effect.
Many people are so busy creating new content for their sites that they forget to ensure that existing content is still current.
