Actionable Marketing Lesson of The Week

► How Events Build Community

Last week, Content Marketing World took place via a mix of in-person, recorded and social media interactions. While I only participated through social media conversations, I felt a deep connection with my peers in this amazing community.

Content Marketing World exemplifies the true meaning of community. Since it:

• Offers membership to like-minded individuals,
• Allows everyone in the community to influence one another,
• Recognizes and integrates shared needs and values, and
• Creates shared emotional connections and experiences. (Source: Definition of community based on Schneider, Gruman, & Coutts, 2012 via Penn State University)

Kudos to Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose for creating the foundation and platforms to nurture and support this special group of people who come from around the world.

Even more important, this content marketing-focused community is greater than just a business. It has continued to grow and evolve beyond the sale of Content Marketing Institute to UBM and through the uncertainty of the pandemic due to the hard work of Stephanie Stahl and her team.

An important element of the community's connective tissue is the weekly #CMWorld Twitter Chat on Tuesdays at noon EDT. This weekly virtual meeting is supported by the Content Marketing Institute team and continually welcomes new members into its ranks.

While members often meet online through social media, email and other means, they get to deepen their bonds with their virtual community in-person at Content Marketing World in Cleveland. In turn, these real life connections captured in photos and social media shares continue to grow over time.

Like a favorite rock band, the Content Marketing World community looks forward to meeting, listening to, and celebrating their heroes and stars such as Ann Handley, Jay Baer and Drew Davis.

In addition, they recognized the special people who go above and beyond to make the community better. This year Drew Davis was their #CMWorld Hero Award and Andi Robinson was their #CMWorld Community Champion 2021.

Actionable Marketing Tips:

• Go beyond building a marketing program. Serve the higher goals of your audience by creating and supporting an on-going community. In these low trust times, a strong community continues to create value for your business beyond profitable sales.
• Focus on the people in your audience for the long-term. It’s your customers, employees and others in your audience that determine the true value of your business. This is why people are one of the missing 4Ps.

Voice Notes

The use of voice-first functionality across devices continues to increase as represented by the growth in the number of voice assistants globally. (Source: Statista 2021)

But don’t let this number fool you--your audience uses a wide variety of different voice-enabled devices, most notably their smartphone.

And, while the pandemic caused the digital divide to disappear, most people across age groups aren’t going back to their past habits. (Source: Capgemni 2020) Click here for more voice usage data and charts!

What does this mean for your marketing?
Provide a quality aural experience when, where and how your audience wants it.

Because if you don’t you may lose visitors, prospects and customers to competitors who do.

► Want to learn more about Voice Marketing?

Join me on Friday, October 8th at 12pm EDT/9am PDT for Voice Lunch Marketing where we will be discussing Voice Marketing Challenges.

Voice Lunch Marketing meets every other Friday at 12pm ET/ 9am PT.

Get your FREE invite and reminders to attend Voice Lunch via Zoom.

Social Scene

► Facebook Goes Dark

On Monday, October 5th, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus went down around noon EDT and stayed down for about 6 hours due to a massive outage. In addition, the firm’s internal communications systems also didn’t work.

According to Facebook’s engineering team (via their blog):

“This outage was triggered by the system that manages our global backbone network capacity. The backbone is the network Facebook has built to connect all our computing facilities together, which consists of tens of thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables crossing the globe and linking all our data centers.”

From a marketing perspective, it’s ironic that the social media giant had to use their competitor, Twitter, to communicate with their addressable audience and the public.

That said, Facebook’s 6 hour technology outage underscores the problems that happen when businesses and individuals are dependent on a single company’s business contingency plans.

Actionable Social Media Marketing Lesson:

• Have a backup plan for communicating with internal teams and outside audiences in case of emergency.

NYC Marketing Marketing Minute

► CX Reaps Repeat Business

Last week was filled with personal archeology. I spent a lot of time dealing with stuff that had accumulated in our apartment. 

Despite the perfect opportunity COVID created to Marie Kondo our stuff, we never got motivated to do it. Instead post-Hurricane Ida, we were forced to clean out the apartment so we could renovate the floors damaged by the storm. 

Of interest to you as a marketer:
Who did the floor work for us?

Why?
Since many people have horror stories about their contractors.

So who did we use?
Our contractor who had worked for us many times before.

Also of interest to you as a marketer is how we found him:
He had done work for my father for 20+ years.

BTW, in his new book, The Ultimate Marketing Engine: 5 Steps to Ridiculously Consistent Growth, John Jantsch makes this point about building relationships with current customers so that they continue to talk about you and refer you to their family and friends.

Translation:
Positive past experience and word of mouth from satisfied customers increases business value.

What does this have to do with marketing and customer experience (aka: CX)?
We didn’t look for other contractor to do the work nor did we check his prices because we knew and trusted him.

As a result, the lifetime value of my father’s initial relationship with the contractor yielded economic benefits over time. This includes the work he’s done for us over the years as well as the people we have referred to him.

Actionable Marketing Tips:

• Build and deepen relationships with your existing customers. Because better onboarding and retention taps into your existing content and it costs less than investing in finding new customers.

Marketing Reads

New Posts on the Actionable Marketing Guide:

► Content Marketing World Authors Will Make You Smarter

Whether you attended Content Marketing World or not, you can still get a heaping serving of marketing smarts from the experts who presented there. 

► Author Interview: Felix Velarde, Scale At Speed: How To Triple The Size of Your Business and Build A Superstar Team 

Do you want to massively increase the size of your business, say make 2 or 3 times bigger?

Then read this interview with Felix Velarde (as well as his clear step-by-step book!)

Even if you don’t own your own company or aren’t part of an accelerated growth team, pay attention to what Velarde says. He shows you how to make your 3 year business strategy connect with your current business plans.

Here’s a one chart snapshot of Velarde’s message. BTW, for Velarde, both customers and employees matter! (As I explain in my Marketing Audience Definition. See the link below.)

Plan Ahead: Mark Your Calendar

Join me at these marketing events:

► October 8 - Voice Lunch Marketing, 12pm ET / 9am PT.
Sign up to get your Zoom invitation and reminders. This meeting will include a brief presentation followed by an open and unrecorded discussion. So please join us!

► October 13 and 14th - MarketingProfs B2B (In-person and Virtual). Ann Handley and her team pack this conference with more hijinks and fun than any other conference. I’m sorry I won’t be attending this year. But you can save $50 with the code: HEIDISENTME