Marketing

Your Media Control

Your Media Control

Garth Beyer

Media Control

You have media control. You know that, right?

I touched on it when I wrote you’re a marketer now.

Being a marketer and having media control. They go hand-in-hand.

You might consider your landing pad as the media you control. Or perhaps it’s your email signature.

If you’re letting someone else dictate your control, you’re holding yourself back from progress. If the small efforts you make on Twitter aren’t moving you forward, then control some other media where your tribe resonates more.

If the three minutes you spend on LinkedIn isn’t getting you closer to an end goal, put the three minutes elsewhere (perhaps just brainstorming a better place to spend them).

Is shooting off the 140-character-half-thought worth it? Do you have control of the TV or does TV control you? Where are you spending your time?

Sometimes media platforms do work against you, so it goes with any endeavor in work; where there is forward movement, there will always be friction. But most friction is self-inflicted. Media control is the exception of the don’t put your eggs in one basket adage. When you do, you increase the friction, you move forward slower, and you get burnt out.

 

Stay Positive & Build A Home Base Instead Of 100 Huts

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You’re A Marketer Now, Get It Right

You’re A Marketer Now, Get It Right

Garth Beyer

New Age Marketing

Marketers used to rent eye-balls, they used to take out a loan for a potential audience, they would buy media space to shotgun market. That was marketing at its most traditional. That was marketing when the masses mattered, when there were only 3 television networks, when developers hadn’t come up with a way to block pop-up ads yet.

When I write you’re a marketer now, I’m not knighting you a marketer, I’m reminding you that you’re a marketer now, as in, you’re a marketer in the 21st century, as in the post-renting, post-loaning, post-shotgun marketing world of it.

Now as a marketer you own eye-balls, you own an audience and you own media space in a niche location. The success of your marketing is dependent in how you find those looking for you, treat those who already find you, and provide for those who frequently visit your home; be it your blog, your catalogue, your YouTube account or some other space your tribe gathers.

Marketing involves ownership, and ownership is scary. The stakes are much higher for marketers than they were 10 years ago. You can’t blame the mass for not clicking your ads, you can’t blame the lack of newspaper circulation for the decreasing sales numbers, you can’t blame Facebook for preventing your video from going viral. If some effort of yours is unsuccessful, it’s your fault. More ad space, bigger banners, extra magazine inserts won’t help.

Getting marketing right involves taking care of what you own.

For many that starts with understanding that you have ownership of an audience and a space.

 

Stay Positive & Remember My Favorite Aspect Of Marketing: You Get To Choose What You Own

And here is some bill the cat for you.

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How To Not Burn Yourself Out (It’s Ironic)

Garth Beyer

Overworked

Spending hours on Pinterest or skipping lunch to continue working on your business plan is exhausting. To be an expert in social media, undo, marketing, guitar, writing greeting cards, anything, it takes tons of time.

Over and over I’ve watched others burn out from spending hours upon hours on something.

I’ve seen friends spend days learning cool Twitter marketing skills just to burn out and scrap their campaign idea.  Others have exhausted themselves from writing for 4 hours straight or playing a video game for 8 hours non-stop. (Ask anyone in my family or my close friends, I’m quite notorious for burning myself out too, and it’s taken a number of years to write this post with pure confidence.)

The best way I’ve learned to not burn myself out is to do a little bit of everything. To be a social media expert, don’t spend all your hours trying to leverage Twitter. Do something with Twitter once a day and move on to doing something with all the other social media outlets. Instead of going all in, go in on all.

It’s not about knowing a little bit about everything anymore. Now it’s about learning a little bit about everything continuously over a period of time until you’re an expert on a lot of things.

This also means to go out and run in the rain, to cook yourself a damn good meal, to email a family member you haven’t spoken to in a while. Everything in moderation.

 

Stay Positive & Emphasis On The Everything

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Where The Real Analysis Needs To Take Place

Where The Real Analysis Needs To Take Place

Garth Beyer

All Signs Point To

After someone makes a transaction, makes their purchase, opens the book, follows through with your call to action, it’s all tweaking at that point for you.

If you see most people don’t read blog posts longer than 2,000 words, that’s easy to tweak. If few people opened up your press release, the title is easy to tweak. If no one is sharing your YouTube video, making the share button more visible is easy to tweak.

The place analysis is most important is in the conversations leading up to the transaction. How did they get to your blog in the first place? How is their email on your list to begin with? Why would people want to share the video anyway?

No transaction is as simple as “this for that” anymore. There are conversations going on before every transaction. Conversations customers have with themselves. Conversations they have with you. Conversations they have with their friends.

Maybe the focus needs to be less on tweaking and more on reaching the right people to begin with.

If you don’t analyze the conversations before a transaction, you’ll be at the mercy of always tweaking, always making adjustments.

 

Stay Positive & Hard To Move In The Right Direction When You’re Moving In All Directions

Photo credit to my awesome friend Krista Ledbetter
Consider The Wildest Ideas

Consider The Wildest Ideas

Garth Beyer

Wild Idea

Are you open to it? Thinking about it? Considering the wildest idea others may have?

I tested a new interface of EatStreet‘s website earlier today with Rob, VP of marketing there. His last question for me was what my wildest idea is that could make the experience better, more remarkable? No boundaries, no wrong answers, no restrictions. It could be anything.

Really, though, he didn’t need to ask. He could have ended the trial without ever asking. The feedback up to that point was safe, it was logical, it was feedback that would benefit the mass number of users. But he didn’t stop there. He asked.

It’s great to think of where the wild ideas are. They represent forward thinking, they represent risk and potential failure, but also potentially wild success too.

 

Stay Positive & So, What’s Your Wildest Idea? Can It Work?

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The Big Sort And What It Means For Marketing

The Big Sort And What It Means For Marketing

Garth Beyer

Sorting Skittles

Funny how things come up again, but have a different meaning the second time around.

A tad over a year ago I wrote a short essay on the big sort. The big sort, according to Bill Bishop, is a political, geographical theory. Actually, theory might be too weak. It’s the truth. Americans are sorting themselves out. Moving to places where like-minded people live. Thing is, Bishop (author of the big sort) focuses on such a small part of the big sort and is far too pessimistic. The big sort couldn’t be better for marketers.

In terms of marketing, there’s no need to push anything down anyone’s throat, no need to shove a product into customers’ hands of which are already full, no need to create an ad that appeals to the masses anymore. We finally have a new (dare I say, better) way of reaching people, because that’s what they are now, people, not eyeballs, and they are gathering around other like-minded people, creating tribes.

Marketing is marvelous when the message is received by the right people at the right time. Now people are sorting themselves and as a result making each individual and each tribe more reachable. Best of all, the walls people had to put up from years of brute advertising are becoming more transparent.

When you look at it this way, marketing seems pretty easy. Then again, while it is easier to market, it’s ever more difficult to create a message that’s remarkable. Yin and yang. Ebb and flow. So it goes.

 

Stay Positive & Rainbow Chasers, In One Neat Place For You

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Well That’s Catchy

Garth Beyer

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There are a few awesome McDonald’s ads around the Madison area.

 

“There’s a cold front ahead.” – advertising their iscream

“Diversify your thirstfolio.” – advertising the variety of beverages they offer

 

My significant other loves the advertising (and she’s not one to care much about ads of any kind, so it’s a big deal if McDonalds can stand out to someone who never pays attention to ads).

McDonalds advertising, I must admit, is extremely catchy and sharable, as in, easy to describe to someone who has never seen it before. “There’s a line of different drinks from McDonalds on the billboard and it says ‘Diversify your thirstfolio.'” Catchy because the billboard is placed right between two college campuses.

The problem is… neither of us have gone to McDonalds for iscream or beverages, and we won’t go either. It’s not our thing.

As a result, I have trouble admitting the advertising is catchy because neither my SO or I have been caught.

Some may believe any publicity is good publicity, but most publicity doesn’t lead to increase in sales, customer conversion or general business success.

It’s one thing to be catchy, it’s a whole other thing to not need to be.

In McDonald’s defense, perhaps they use the billboards to maintain their lighthearted, intelligent but goofy personality. I suppose only the McDonalds marketing team knows. But is that a good thing that we don’t?

 

Stay Positive & What Are Your Thoughts?