marketing Archives - Page 5 of 9

Soulati Media On The Street With Millennial Entrepreneur

10/24/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Chris Craft

A young up-and-comer is impressing the heck out of the social media marketing sector, and you need to know him.

My distinct pleasure this morning is to introduce you to Christopher Craft, @ChrisQueso, with whom I spent oodles of hours at ConvergeSouth where we both spoke and had the same flight back.

What makes my head spin is everything he’s doing and so much more. He’s an entrepreneur managing his youthful firm, he blogs here and also doing a full-time gig for another employer. As a daddy to two (listen for what I caught him saying in the wee hours pre-conference!), he’s way on the run with three smartphones he totes for each job and the wife.

Did I say he is also a published author of O.P.E.N. Routine, a personal branding book?

Please meet Chris and follow him in all those places. Thanks, Friend!

The Future Of PR Is A Marketing Smoothie

10/21/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Back in the day, public relations, advertising and marketing were firmly divided in their respective silos and disciplines. We in public relations were often referred to for real in jest as the “bastard step children” of marketing.

Often we’d sit in an integrated meeting of the disciplines and keep our traps shut until we tossed out a bit of value-added strategy into the mix while our peers across the aisle glared nicely.

Today, the blended nature of marketing has public relations professionals up in arms. Some are balking at the integration of PR so cohesively into marketing. In short, these people are having an identity crisis.

They don’t want to be a marketing smoothie. I get it; nor do I, BUT,the nature of marketing today is quite different than the isolated and unintegrated way we worked in the past (as recently as six years ago).

Marketing in its broadest and most inclusive sense now requires every single communications disciple to integrate and blend while learning others’ expertise. For people in public relations, that’s called hybrid PR. For people in marketing, that’s called integrated marketing – the blended whole.

If you don’t do either or both, you die. Purely and simply, you become antiquated.

Change is now; change is always the future. Change makes some people uncomfortable and others squiggle with glee (that’s me). The changes you make as a professional can be methodical or they can be all-in. Regardless of how you change ensure you’re changing to innovate and not merely to keep up with the Joneses.

What’s a Marketing Smoothie?

I know you’ve made a smoothie in your day with all the good, healthy and nutritious ingredients stacked up looking all colorful. Then, what happened? You clicked the “on” button and voila! A blended smoothie chock full of nutritious wholesomeness.

Marketing has become that – a blended beverage with the smarts and nutrition of a plethora of disciplines feeding into and around the other for the benefit of the user, customer, prospect, etc.

Public relations is a powerhouse in that smoothie; it’s the energizer and protein that packs punch. It brings integrated value few other disciplines can brag on. We in public relations do this for every marketing smoothie you’ll ever drink:

• Put the core business goals front and center into strategy
• Build communications strategy against the business with results-driven comprehensive and inclusive programs
• Message map the core outbound and external messages for the C-suite and spokespeople and train them to be on top of such messages
• Build and create content against the business goals (content marketing)
• Optimize that content for on-page performance (search marketing) and toss in a bunch of optimized online news releases every campaign benefits from
• Write the landing pages and title the calls to action to drive traffic to sites and generate leads (digital marketing)
• Write and optimize the online newsletter that ties into the digital strategy using the core messages from the message map (email marketing)
• Create and execute blogger relations, influencer campaigns, thought leadership, industry analyst relations, investor relations, and internal communications, to name several

And, yet, all that goodness listed above is not done alone. Some may believe it is and tell you so, but don’t be fooled. An expert public relations practitioner needs her sisters to fully develop and deliver a solidly trackable and measurable campaign with every single ingredient to create the best-tasting smoothie marketing has to offer.

(This post originally appeared on Steamfeed.)

Who’s Monetizing Online?

09/23/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Every day another someone from a really cool company, blog, blogging community, organization, or other network asks me to write for them, speak to them, brainstorm about the exchange of content, consider paying a fee to join a network, or hawk a product pitched from the far reaches of Russia and India.

And, I rarely say no because who knows what doors may open as a result of that opportunity?

What’s happening is my stretch is thinning dangerously. The offers are ubiquitous, and as a starter, I’m jazzed about what’s new and next. They say a sucker is born every minute; perhaps you’re reading one right now.

But, I can’t think like that. What I’m doing by accommodating most everyone’s requests is building a brand that appears to be #RockHot solid, so I’m told. It feels that way to me, as well. And, here’s the elusive question:

Who’s Monetizing?

The answer is…few.

My friend Tim Bonner, a UK stay-at-home dad, informed me recently he made $300 on his niche site. Not sure what he’s hawking, but I informed him in a tweet I was envious. I’ve also watched his meteoric rise from being a sometime daddy blogger to a snappy smart tech geek blogger who experiments with Google do-not-follow links and writes about it. Awesome.

I know my friend Jon Buscall, CEO of Jontus Media in Sweden, is an extraordinarily busy podcaster and dad to a gazillion Basset hounds. He has earned cash recommending podcasting equipment and selling it via an Amazon affiliate program.

In that same program, I made about $10 once, and I also was pitched to run a blog post on another blog for $75. My first book, Writing with Verve on the Blogging Journey (you can buy it on Kindle for $3.95), is a collection of blog posts about my favorite topic of blogging brought in $85 from the publisher (who took a cut after Amazon took a cut). That’s truly the extent of my monetization.

I know that SpinSucks Pro requires membership, and really good content is sold to folks on SpinSucks. People can register or buy into a webinar for $50 to hear professional speakers on professional topics. Good on them.

But, I want to know who’s truly monetizing huge?

All of the peeps above come from the content/traditional marketing and PR realm. The ability to monetize takes knowledge of API and back ends, building and programming of websites, addition of shopping carts and management of digital marketing calls to action, forms and landing pages.

Do you have all that knowledge under your hat?

Nope, didn’t think so.

The Conundrum of Monetization

That’s the conundrum of late. We who can develop the substance and slap a price tag on it need the techies to join the team and figure out the platform on which to sell the products. Recall I said Tim Bonner earned money on his “niche” site.

What that means is Tim found a specialty topic or product, developed a new site oriented to that product and began to sell. His earning potential is in its earliest stages; however, he’s found the methodology and hopefully the product to keep on with residual income.

Digital Marketing Is An Answer

I see many of these passive income bloggers who started way early building an email list. Their lists are massive of trusting individuals who came to their site for some reason or another. When another product is hawked, that list of trustworthy and hopefully loyal community members are more inclined to make a second purchase. All of a sudden, that network of thousands is buying everything hawked by that trusted figurehead.

To make this happen, you need knowledge of digital marketing; inbound marketing as HubSpot calls it. I’ve been in HubSpot school all year. As a solopreneur, the ability to do it all is daunting; the time and knowledge and effort it takes to learn new things is terribly exciting, however extremely fatal to making a living the traditional way – with a handshake and results-driven pure work on behalf of a client.

Monetization Requires A Team

I’ve come to realize I don’t have what it takes to monetize alone. I need to build a team with a tech pro who can help program a site (a simple WordPress site is all we need), a digital marketer who can manage and nurture the list, design the calls to action and add them as widgets in the sidebar of the site, write the landing pages, and consult on that back-end of the site.

The most critical part of the team is one who builds the products and content to bring in the cash. That’s me. If I could free myself up to truly concentrate on product development and trust my team was standing by to facilitate their ends of the triangle, we’d be golden.

So, who’s on board?

Service Experts Gets A+ For HVAC Customer Service

09/18/2013 By Jayme Soulati

We each are consumers of heating and air conditioning. Most every homeowner is subjected to the rigors of natural disasters that cause the electrical grid to weaken and shut down and bring the comfort of home environments to a standstill.

Who’d know there would be so many marketing lessons in a customer experience about heating and air conditioning? This story has oodles, and I have to share my experience with Service Experts Heating and Air Conditioning, a national HVAC company also known as Stevenson in Southwest Ohio.

About Service Experts Heating & Air Conditioning

A well-done direct marketing letter arrived from Service Experts, a company I had not heard of in spite of the fact it has been around for 120+ years. The letter was touting the local high school football rivalry, a two-for-one special, and $50 off plumbing if I was one of the first 50 callers. So, I called within two days; do you think I was one of the first 50 callers? (I still don’t know after two weeks, although I asked every technician who came to my house over 10 days.)

When I called to schedule my maintenance and informed the scheduler about the offer, he had no idea about the price point in the letter and didn’t know what I was talking about. (Mistake #1)

Mistake #2 was that the first technician to the job had never seen the marketing letter either, so I showed it to him. I made a copy of the letter to ensure I got the price point advertised (and I’m still going after my $50 off coupon for plumbing when the time comes!) The technician promised he would take the letter to his morning meeting and inform marketing that frontline customer service has to know about new marketing programs.

We talked at length about that disconnect; from the new customer standpoint, the letter worked even though marketing did not inform frontline customer service or the call center about the direct marketing campaign.

There were about 22 touches I had with this company; 11 of them were in person, one was via correspondence and 10 were via phone. The in-person experiences ranged from heating and air conditioning maintenance, two sales guys, one plumbing inspection guy, two HVAC installers, one air conditioner technician, two thermostat installers, and one senior technician after installation about the thermostat and wiring. The air duct cleaning crew is scheduled this week, and today I saw the plumber.

22 Customer Touches in 10 Days

In a routine maintenance for my fall furnace inspection with Service Experts/Stevenson, my 17-year-old Lennox furnace was doing OK, but nearing its 20-year life span.

During this inspection, my 7-year-old thermostat was on the fritz, and I mentioned to the technician I wanted a Nest (the coolest product with the highest marketing budget ever). I was unaware that Service Experts sold an I Comfort thermostat that is higher quality and easier to use. Frontline customer service was not selling the company’s smaller products. Mistake #3

During this experience, Craig (a great technician) suggested I look into pricing a new HVAC unit although I wasn’t in the market. The sales guy came over and gave me prices of $10,000 to $14,000 (yikes). What I didn’t know was that Lennox sold a lower level HVAC unit at 93% efficiency instead of the 96% efficiency unit that was priced. The first sales guy gave a lackluster presentation and didn’t try to work within my budget at all; nor did he inform me there was a lower grade of equipment that would work equally well. (Mistake #3)

I bought my Nest and had the guys come back to install. I was lucky to get Craig again who was wonderful. During the time he spent with me that day, he suggested I look into a cheaper HVAC unit and would I be interested in speaking with Jim? Jim came by and we did the deal on a Friday afternoon within my budget parameter. The guys wanted to install the unit over the weekend, but I was traveling Monday and Tuesday; so we
scheduled it for Wednesday.

Over the weekend on Sunday night, my current air conditioner died. I called the company back and they sent a technician to see if he could repair the old unit just for 2 days. Nada. The temperatures were to be 93 degrees for four days, and it was. My kidlet had to stay at her grandparents and everything was disrupted (at least I had a clean house). The temperature soared to 95 upstairs in the house.

When I returned from travels, I drove directly to my folks to spend the night and returned to have the HVAC team arrive on Wednesday morning. The good news was they upgraded me to the higher efficiency unit for free. What an amazing surprise, and what amazing customer service.

The guys could not get my new Nest to work with the new HVAC unit; they installed a Honeywell thermostat (a basic model). My house cooled 1 degree in four hours. I called the company and the technicians were all on call; it was the hottest stretch of the summer. I collected kidlet and off we rolled to my folks house again to sleep, 25 minutes away.

The next day, Steve came over to check out my Nest. He called the company, and the company said we needed to plug the Nest into my computer and I searched high and low for the right connector tips. Luckily, I had it, but wasted time finding it. Once we plugged the Nest into both the iMac and the Windows laptop, nothing happened. Steve was in the house for hours trying everything. When he finally asked me about the house’s wiring, I told him it was a DIY house and the wiring was old and faulty. That’s when his light bulb went on; he said he wanted to rewire the thermostat and recommended Service Expert’s I Comfort instead of the Nest.

Steve is not a fan of the Nest although consumers haven’t a clue that the equipment isn’t the best technology. That’s the beauty of marketing; we see something cool and we want to buy it. Consumers have no concept of a thermostat and why it’s important to purchase a high-end product with features that address humidity, blower speed, outside temperatures, programs, holidays, filters, alarms, and maintenance.

Luckily, the temperatures outside cooled to 60 and 70 degrees (naturally) and we didn’t need to run the air conditioning. Steve returned with his crew of two within two days, and they fully rewired and programmed my new I Comfort thermostat and trained me at the same time.

Service Experts Customer Service

Within 10 days, I experienced every aspect of frontline touches and call center inbound and outbound scheduling that is possible in a company.

Today, the plumbing inspection guy came and reviewed water issues. Tomorrow the air duct cleaner guys are coming and will spend three to four hours cleaning all the ducts and vents.

The gentlemen who came into my home were:

Dressed in uniform
Professional with boot covers in and out
Personable, reliable, arrived on time, called before they were to arrive
Fixed what was broken, stood by their work, and ensured I was ultra-satisfied during my entire ordeal.

I don’t think I have ever had this much experience with a company the way I have with Service Experts/Stevenson. There’s absolutely no way I would change to any other company after investing so much time and financial investment in this company as a brand new customer.

Hire Jayme Soulati

I want to teach workshops to the frontline sales technicians.
I want to sit in front of marketing and inform that person his letter was great; I picked up the phone after one touch, but he didn’t inform his sales or service teams.
I want to reach out to the CEO of Service Experts and ask for work with his company.
I want to help them with content oriented to customer education about thermostats and how to buy a furnace and what size of house needs what size of air conditioner.
I want to be that female homeowner role model for Service Experts who doesn’t know anything but knows enough to make the right choice.
I want to help Service Experts become an authority in this sector and earn the trust of customers. Will you hire me Service Experts?

Satisfied Customer

I tell this story because every single homeowner is eventually going to purchase HVAC units for their aging equipment. I highly recommend Service Experts in your region, and I commend each technician and scheduler and for being professional and doing the job to the best of their knowledge and ability. Had everyone known about the wiring in the house being faulty, perhaps the process would’ve been more efficient, but there are lessons to learn in every experience we have.

Jayme Soulati is a highly satisfied customer, Service Experts. Your Net Promoter Score is 10.

Serendipity And The Social Web

09/05/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Spoiler alert: the secret to making people like you on social media is to stop trying to make them like you on social media. Letting go of that desire can cause some amazing things to happen. I was reminded of this principle recently.

One morning I started my day doing two things I do not do enough.

The first was to look through my Twitter stream. Usually I see links to the same articles I find on Triberr, my RSS feed and other content discovery sources. This time was different.

Immediately I spotted a tweet from Jayme with a link to a new post: “Thoughts On Love In Business.” It’s a topic I have blogged about, and I was thinking about it again for another post.

Clicks And Comments

I clicked the link that led to this blog. That’s when I did the second thing I do not do enough.

I left a comment. Just a quick response to the question posed and a “thank you” for opening the discussion. Those two things, a Twitter discovery and a comment, triggered a series of unexpected events that amazed me.

First, Jayme replied to my comment asking me to leave links to the articles I’ve written. Then a chain reaction:

• She read my posts and liked them. A lot.
• She left comments.
• She shared them on Twitter and Facebook.
• We connected on LinkedIn and Facebook.
• She encouraged her community to visit my blog.
• Some community members left comments and subscribed.
• We had an awesome phone conversation the next day.

All of that happened within 24 hours of my leaving that comment. Jayme asked if I’d be interested in writing a guest post about this experience. And so here we are.

Social Media Serendipity

Some would describe this chain of events as the law of attraction at work. Some would call it good Karma. Others would use the word “grace.” Whatever your orientation, the common idea is serendipity.

Serendipity is most commonly defined as luck or good fortune and the aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident. But when I looked it up, I found a new wrinkle to its meaning.

The word originates from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip whose heroes had a gift for making accidental discoveries of things they were not in a quest for.

Which brings me back to the beginning.

What I learned from this experience is that ‘happy accidents’ can happen on social media when you are not trying too hard to make them happen. When I started the day, I wasn’t on a quest to make power connections or drive traffic to my blog. I didn’t even leave a link in my comment until being asked.

You could argue that is not savvy marketing. But in that moment I was not in a self-promote mindset. I was just following a discovery I stumbled into by accident.

And wow. At the end of the day I got a wonderful lesson on the power of a tweet and a comment to open up serendipitous opportunities on social media.

Thank you Jayme and community.

About The Author

John Gregory Olson is a B2B marketing consultant and freelance copywriter. He writes about marketing strategy and leadership on his blog. Follow him on Twitter @John_G_Olson .