Why Digital Marketing Matters

We all know digital marketing is the future. The Internet revolution has been slamming into legacy media with the force of Hurricane Katrina for more than a decade now.

But aside from the obvious fact that old media like newspapers and magazines are on the decline, why does digital marketing matter?

Because your customers are in the digital space. And they expect you to be there alongside them. Fortunately, that space provides a bounty of goodies that were unheard of in the past.

Dirt cheap ads. Digital ads are, or at least can be, cheaper than print ads. You can aim them precisely at your target demographic rather than using the spray-and-pray approach of traditional media that blasted your ads to the universe.

They’re also scaleable. Rather than paying full freight for a flat fee, you can cap your costs as low as you want to keep your campaigns under budget.

Everything is forever. Magazine ads are thrown into recycling bins after a month or even a week. Today’s newspaper ads are tomorrow’s fish wrap. Radio spots evaporate instantly, as if they weren’t even there.

Content you publish on your web site can linger forever if you want, and it costs virtually nothing.

Potential customers can and will find your content years after you’ve written it just by Googling. Two years from now, you can get paid thanks to work you did last year.

Two decades have passed since Bill Gates declared that content is king, and it’s still true. And Google agrees.

Your customers would hate you, of course, if you just dumped a bunch of keywords on your business web site and called it a day, but you wouldn’t have many customers anyway. They wouldn’t be able to find you. You’re dead to both Google and potential customers if you don’t produce authoritative, credible and relevant content.

It’s a requirement, yes, but it’s also an opportunity to turn your web site into a magazine for your products, your services, and your industry and start hoovering up some new prospects.

Reach customers everywhere. According to Smart Insights, technology users now spend more time on mobile devices than they do using desktop computers.

Almost everyone has a mobile device in their pocket except when they’re showering or asleep. That won’t change until we start wiring technology directly into our eyeballs and brains, and since that’s not happening any time soon, your marketing strategy had better be mobile.

Mobile is where you want to be, though. If someone tells you about an exciting new product or service that sounds interesting, odds are good that the first thing you’ll do is tap it into your phone. Your customers do the same thing. That’s where the conversion process begins.

Which brings us to:

Easy-peasy calls to action. Calls to action are always a long shot, but they were over the horizon back in the old days.

How many times have you seen an ad on TV for a product that looked interesting and followed it by actually calling the 1-800 number to buy it? Compare that to the number of times you found something awesome on Amazon and added it to your shopping cart.

Amazon makes it even easier now with one-click ordering. Returning customers can skip the whole shopping cart thing altogether. Just one click and, boom. They’re done.

You can’t built that functionality into a newspaper ad.

The Internet is still littered with struggling business sites without any buy buttons, which is like having empty shelves in a strip mall. But if you do everything right, your digital ads, your social media strategy, your content marketing and your buy buttons mean you can attract new customers and sell them your products while bypassing brick, mortar and legacy media entirely.

Search and Destroy Your Corporate Gobbledygook

Your corporate gobbledygook is killing your copywriting.

Mumbo jumbo. Bafflegab. Gibberish.

Those are great words. You know what’s not a great word? Solution. Not if you’re selling software. You want a better word than “solution” for software? Try “software.”

If you’re using words that normal people don’t use—or worse, if they have no idea what you’re talking about—you’re doing it wrong.

The same applies to novelists, by the way. Fiction writers should write with the words they use in their heads every day. That way they’ll be sure to use the words that everyone else uses in their heads every day. Novelists who consult a thesaurus for every second or third sentence to find words that aren’t in everyone’s heads barf up inpenetrable prose that gives the rest of us headaches.

Likewise, when corporate gobbledygook creeps into your copywriting, it’s time to go on a search and destroy mission.

Want a longer example? Here’s Sarah Mitchell over at Global Copywriting:

Are you a leading provider of innovative, cost-effective solutions with world-class service and a unique portfolio of robust products? Are you pleased to announce a next-generation partnership to become an industry leader in quality assurance to optimise customer satisfaction? Are you focused on flexibility, scalability and high-performance outcomes? I hope not. I really hope not.

Most of the words in that paragraph are gobbledygook.

“From a business perspective,” she adds, “they’re so overused they’ve ceased to have meaning.”

Our hat is off to Sarah for bringing this problem to everybody’s attention, but she accidentally did it herself.

That phrase. “From a business perspective.” It’s also corporate gobbledygook.

It means nothing and it’s structurally kludgy.

Here’s a new and improved sentence: “They’re so overused in business they’ve ceased to have meaning.”

Those of us in the business world have heard the phrase “from a [blank] perspective” so many times that we sometimes forget it means nothing. “From a business perspective.” “From a finance perspective.” “From an IT perspective.” “From a marketing perspective.”

Its awkwardness is so familiar we hardly even notice it anymore.

We forget it sounds awful and weird and forced and just…wrong to everyone else.

We don’t mean to pick on Sarah here. Really, we don’t. She just absorbed that cringe-worthy phrase like the rest of us. Using it is a habit, like saying “he was like” instead of “he said.”

It’s sort of okay if you talk that way (nothing bad will happen to anybody, at least), but for goodness sake don’t write that way.

The folks at Mule Design created what they call the Unsuck It tool that transforms sucky language into language everyday people can tolerate.

“Going forward” should be replaced with “in the future.”

In finance, “spend” should be replaced with “spending.” Spend is a verb, not a noun. Slang is okay in the office, but keep it out of your copywriting.

“Leverage technology” should be replaced with “use technology.”

We could do this all day. David Meerman Scott at Web Ink Now compiled a list of 325 examples of gobbledygook words and phrases that he found over and over again in 711,123 corporate press releases.

Maury Maverick coined the word “gobbledygook” in 1944 when he was a U.S. Representative in Texas. He wrote a mock-threatening memo banning nonsense language and declared that  “anyone using the words activation or implementation will be shot.”

We won’t shoot you if you write, “from a call center perspective, we’re trying to optimize customer satisfaction going forward,” but we guarantee that hardly anyone will read past that sentence.

So knock it off already. You’re only hurting yourself.

What are Facebook “Likes” Actually Worth?

Facebook “likes” by themselves are worth nothing.

There. We said it.

But how can that be true if you need a comprehensive social media marketing strategy to succeed in business these days?

Your Facebook page and other owned media gives you a chance to engage with your customers, to share useful information, and to build trust. That’s how you build and expand a loyal customer base.

It doesn’t matter how many “likes” you have if you’re not doing any of those things. If people “like” your page, but you aren’t regularly publishing and sharing relevant content, your posts won’t show up in their feeds and there won’t be much to actually like.

You might attract some new customers if they see that you have a huge number of “likes,” but if your new prospects don’t have a good first-time customer experience, they won’t be back.

Does your company magically get a dollar every time someone on Facebook clicks “like”? Nope.

Is a person who clicks “like” guaranteed to purchase one of your products or services? Nope.

Will customers learning about you for the first time line up outside your door because they saw that your Facebook page has hundreds of thousands of “likes”? Nope.

A large number of Facebook “likes” and Twitter followers can be a decent reflection of how much people like your company and your social media presence, but if you’re doing it right those figures are a by-product of your success. They should never be the objective.

Far better to have a small loyal customer base than a legion of people on the Internet who once clicked the “like” button but have moved on and forgotten all about you—or worse—in the meantime.

By all means, rack up those “likes.” Just remember that you can’t take them to the bank.

Social Media is Not a Fad

Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest may turn out to be ephemeral (remember MySpace?) but social media is as permanent as the Internet. Marketers who haven’t figured it out yet or who think it will go away when the kids find some new shiny objects to play with need to think again.

There is no shortage of newspapers, magazines, and corporate web sites on the Internet, but the majority of communication online takes place in the context of social media. That’s especially true for young people. You might still think Facebook and Twitter are newfangled, but as far as young people are concerned, email is the new landline.

Social media isn’t just a way to keep in touch with friends and to make new friends. It’s increasingly where people learn about new products and services. If you doubt this, just broaden your definition of social media slightly and you’ll see why this is true.

Look at Amazon. It started out as a bookstore, but today it sells almost everything now, from car stereos and video games to groceries and kitchen cleaning supplies. Just about the only things you can’t buy on Amazon are motor vehicles and real estate.

Every product on Amazon has a place for customer reviews, and only the newest and least-selling products have no reviews. Customer reviews are so ubiquitous there that you can learn something about a product even if it has not been reviewed. At the very least, you know it’s not selling.

Amazon isn’t exactly a social media site, but there’s no question that its vast customer review section is social media. It’s an online media space where individuals are given a microphone and a soap box to talk to a virtually limitless number of other people about nearly every conceivable product. Call it something other than social media if you want, but it certainly isn’t traditional media.

No one would dispute that Goodreads is a social media site. It’s where bibliophiles review books for each other. The exact same conversations take place on Amazon.

Nothing beats word of mouth marketing if you can earn it. Sticking with Amazon for now, consider that some of the best-selling books have launched to the top of the charts with no traditional marketing whatsoever. Hardly anyone had ever heard of science-fiction author Hugh Howey when he self-published a post-apocalyptic short story called Wool, but a handful of people stumbled upon it, loved it, told their friends it was great, and praised it in reader reviews. A slightly larger handful of people then found it, told their friends about it, and wrote more reader reviews. This continued in an ever-widening circle and convinced the author that he should expand his short story into a full-length book and then into a trilogy. It wasn’t long before Ridley Scott optioned the film and made Howey rich.

All thanks to word-of-mouth marketing on the Internet.

This kind of word-of-mouth marketing is everywhere on the Internet now. Amazon’s customers rely on it not only when deciding which books to read, but also which smartphone and which set of headphones to purchase.

Amazon is just one example. All kinds of local businesses are made or destroyed by customer reviews on sites like Angie’s List, Urban Spoon, Trip Advisor, and Yelp.

This is revolutionary.

Naturally occurring word-of-mouth marketing has been with us for thousands of years, but in the pre-Internet world we could only spread the word to friends, family members, and acquaintances. Today, however, one person can broadcast a message to hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of strangers.

If you’re still skeptical about social media marketing, let that sink in and reconsider web sites like Facebook and Twitter. They weren’t designed up to sell anything like Amazon, nor were they designed for word-of-mouth marketing like Trip Advisor and Yelp, but millions of people live online in these virtual spaces, and they talk about everything there, including, sometimes, which products and services they love, hate and why.

The Internet is simply where people talk to each other now, and since most of us don’t have a column in the New York Times, most of that talk is on social media sites. These places are the new office break rooms, the new corner coffee shops, the new sports bars, the new grocery store lines and the new community centers. They are the new billboards, the new classified ad pages, and the new bumper stickers. They are where almost all digital discourse takes place.

This will only go away if the Internet goes away, and that’s only likely to happen if a giant asteroid smashes into the planet.

So ask yourself: do you want to be part of those conversations or not?

How to Silence Your Inner Critic

Writer’s block is a myth, but writer’s paralysis isn’t.

Many years ago, when I was still a baby writer, I attended a regular writer’s workshop in Eugene, Oregon, taught by professionals.

The woman who ran it, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, then-editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, asked everyone in the room to raise their hands if they’d ever experienced writer’s block or something similar. A dozen or so people—half of us, myself included—raised their hands.

She then asked how many people are or were English majors in college. The exact same people—again, myself included—raised their hands.

Everyone in the room was stunned.

Every single person who had spent time in a university English Department suffered from “writer’s block” at least sometimes, yet no one else did.

What was going on? Was “writer’s block” somehow taught to people in college?

Yep.

Not on purpose, of course. Literature courses are all about criticizing what somebody else wrote. If you spend enough time criticizing other people’s work, and if you’ve internalized the fact that even Shakespeare and Milton are subject to criticism, your own inner critic can mushroom to Godzilla size and paralyze you even if you’re writing something that would never be confused with “literature,” such marketing copy or even blog posts.

You need the inner critic when you’re editing, but it should never be the size of Godzilla, and it needs to shut up entirely when you’re in creative mode.

Start with Draft Zero. There is no getting around it: you must produce a first draft, and your first draft will be sloppy. As Robert Graves said, there is no such thing as good writing. There is only good rewriting.

But even the most seasoned professionals can feel a bit of anxiety, trepidation, or paralysis while writing a rough draft.

One solution is extraordinarily simple. Think of the first draft as Draft Zero. Only after you’ve cleaned up that mess do you have a first draft. If you can internalize this idea, your inner critic will leave you alone and let you get started because it doesn’t matter if Draft Zero is littered with problems.

Pre-write. If that doesn’t work for you, try this instead: create a document on your computer for the sole purpose of pre-writing. This is not the first draft of your copywriting, content marketing, blog post, story or article. It’s just a warm-up. It’s practice. Just start typing whatever it is you’re going to write about later.

It’s going to suck. So what? You’re not writing yet. You’re just stretching.

Do this for ten, twenty, maybe thirty minutes. Then go have a cup of coffee and look at your warm-up again later.

You might be surprised to discover that you already have a serviceable draft

If not, who cares? Some of what you wrote during your warm-up will be worth preserving and copying and pasting into an actual draft. And you will have produced those parts without the inner critic sticking his nose in because you weren’t actually writing. You were just typing.

Dare to be bad. Best-selling author Dean Wesley Smith used to tape a hand-written note to his computer monitor that said, “Dare to be bad.” It was his way of shutting up his inner critic so he could get on with his work and clean up any messy parts later.

His subconscious—and yours—knows what it’s doing and can produce at least some decent material on the first go-around if it can be liberated from the need to be perfect.

Daring to be bad, pre-writing, and starting with a Draft Zero are just three different ways of hog tying your inner critic, putting duct tape over its mouth, and tossing it into the basement. You don’t want to kill your inner critic. You need it for editing and cleanup. But it will paralyze you if its reading over your shoulder as you type your first draft.

Especially if you majored in English.