Canadian Small Business Women

Connection, Synergy, Community

Give Your Audience an Experience They’ll Remember

CHuntly

We’re all familiar with the major stunts that brands have pulled off. Whether it’s a guy free-falling from the edge of the atmosphere, a horror scene in a coffee shop, or an elevator with a false floor, the one thing all of these stunts have in common is that they leave a lasting impression on anyone who experiences or sees them. These public stunts, also called brand activations or experiential marketing, can result in a huge bump in your brand awareness growth.

The good news is that you can create an amazing experience at any budget.

Here are 6 things to consider when you are building experiential marketing into your overall marketing strategy:

  1. Clearly define your objectives: This goes for any strategy you build, however, it’s very easy to get carried away when you are doing experiential marketing. When any new idea comes up, you always have to ask yourself how it relates to your strategic objectives and if it helps you reach your overall business goals. If the answer is no, then the idea should be off the table.
  2. Budget: This should come up whenever you discuss strategy. Most small businesses are limited when it comes to budget, but that doesn’t mean your strategy has to have a small impact. It just means you have to plan carefully within your budget.
  3. Concept: This is the thematic idea that will tie everything together. Your concept should represent your brand and its values. This is the overall story that you will pitch to media, and it will shape the activities that happen on the day of the activation.
  4. Connection: Remember that you are creating an experience, so you should tap into all of the senses and emotions that will resonate with your audience. The idea is that when people remember the experience, they immediately associate it with your brand. The first step is making the experience memorable. They need to feel a connection with your brand, so any activities you do should make sense for your brand.
  5. Cross-channel integration: Utilize all of the resources you have available. This means integrating social media, media relations, influencer relations, and content creation into your planning. The event shouldn’t just live in one place. Why not stream it live or have attendees upload photos to Instagram?
  6. Continuity: What happens beyond the day of the activation? Many brands forget that it takes more than one event to put your brand on the map. You might generate a lot of social media buzz and maybe some media coverage, but what next? You have to keep thinking of ways to keep your story fresh and encourage people to keep talking about you.

Candace Huntly is the Founder and Principal at SongBird Marketing Communications, an award-winning agency working to take organizational and individual brands to the next level. With a passion for all things related to creativity and strategy, she specializes in business intelligence, marketing & branding, content strategy & development, media & influencer relations, and social media. Basically, if you need to put your brand, product, or cause in the public eye, she will find a way to do it, while making the approach unique to you.

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Multi-tasking: Are you an Addict?

Sheralyn

Hi, My name is Sheralyn and I’m a recovering addict.  They say the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. Yes, I am a former multitasking addict and I struggle daily with the constant urge to do more, more, more.  While I certainly don’t wish to make light of addiction, the reality is multitasking is a 21st Century affliction both epidemic in proportion and idealized as virtue. It’s time for a reality check.

When we multitask, we labour (literally) under the illusion that we are doing more, making better use of our time, increasing our efficiency and possibly even that we are saving ourselves or our companies, time, money or both. It has become a much prized value and “ability to multitask” a staple skill set to include on our résumé. Recent research suggests however that such a staple should perhaps not be so prized after all.

Multitasking, studies show, “doesn’t make us any more efficient………we actually perform tasks more slowly because brains need extra time to toggle between tasks.”  Additionally, there is an increasing body of evidence that concludes it is actually bad for us.  “How is it bad? It impedes short-term memory, decreases overall mental performance, and causes stress, hormonally triggering “a vicious cycle where we multi-task, take longer to get things done, then feel harried and compelled to multi-task more,” says journalist John Naish. And the brain-toggling that comes with ongoing multi-tasking shortens our attention, eventually addicting us through spurts of adrenaline continually being released. In the absence of multi-tasking, one study reported in The New York Times concluded, “people feel bored.” (1) That’s right – we’ve become so addicted to all this action and in the process so acclimatized to the “value” of multitasking that the new social norm involves conversations that are vehemently competitive as we seek to establish who is the busiest and can get the most done in the least amount of time. Gone are the Downton Abbey days of one staff to light the fires while another polishes the silver and a third helped dress the Dowager Countess – these days we are each of us individually expected to keep the homes fires lit, burn the candle at both ends at work, set out the silver for dinner while simultaneously cooking it and keep track of it all using our various social media devices. Plus dress the kids and drive them to school, sports or piano practice! (My kingdom for a Governess!)

What then is the alternative?  Drawing media attention (and in fact building momentum of late) is the discussion around the benefits of solo tasking.  It doesn’t require much research to know that having a single – minded focus will help you achieve a level of attention to detail that you simply can’t have while multi-tasking.  Solo tasking requires you to schedule appropriately, ensuring adequate amounts of both your time and resources are allocated to the task. In the scheduling, you will clearly think ahead to what your project entails and properly anticipate all requirements. You increase the odds significantly that you will complete the task during that time-frame because it is the only thing required of you. Distractions and time wasters are substantially reduced because you are not transitioning between various computer screens, running from office to office or scrolling through multiple search engines and then getting sidetracked by social media. (Face it you DO get sidetracked by social media.) In short, if you are polishing the silver you are doing a VERY god job of polishing the silver.  The fires can then be lit when darkness descends – a time more suited for that particular job.

There is such a value placed on the commodity of time now that we have become accustomed to making calls while we drive or sending emails from our laptops while eating lunch.  Hopefully you are using Bluetooth but what happens when the caller requests you to make a note of something? Do you pull over to write it down? Swerve madly all over the road as you attempt to talk, drive and write? And what of your laptop? How many times have you spilled (or come perilously close to spilling) your lunch or coffee all over the keyboard.  The “benefits” of multitasking are rapidly lost when you have an accident in either scenario.  Better for your physical and mental state to solo task.  If you’re driving a car, for Pete’s sake just drive and couldn’t we all use even 15 minutes break to eat and recharge our batteries? Your efficiencies will gain exponentially when you return, refocused and re-energized.

If you work in a creative field sometimes “ideas happen.”  They don’t always conform to a schedule, heck I’m sure you’ve even woken up in the night with a brilliant idea. Solo tasking doesn’t have to put an end to that  – keep a notepad handy and if an idea for another project does makes its way into your head don’t shut down the whole works – just jot the idea down in point form so you don’t lose your train of thought and then immediately return to what you were doing.  Make organizing your time (not juggling it) the virtue and valued skill set. A properly organized and prioritized workday, with single – minded focus and clarity of objectives, will ultimately make you more productive than trying to juggle a three – ring circus. Because unless you spent years of practicing to become a juggler – something is bound to get dropped!

 

(1)www.todayschristianwoman – march april 2013

 

As Owner and Principal partner of “Writing Right For You” Sheralyn is a Communications Strategist – working together with entrepreneurs to maximize profit through effective use of the written word. Looking for web content that works, blog articles that engage or communications strategies that help you get noticed?  Contact Sheralyn today. Sheralyn is also the mother of two children now entering the “terrible and terrific teens” and spends her free time volunteering for several non-profit organizations.

Sheralyn Roman B.A., B.Ed.

Writing Right For You

Communications Strategies that help you GET TO THE POINT!

416-420-9415 Cell/Business

writingrightforyou@gmail.com

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In Content Strategy, Your Customers are Users  

Arrow_Sign

In the second post in this series, I outlined why your governance model, or the “How do I do this?” part of your content strategy, is a good place to start planning. Over the next 4 weeks of this series, we’ll go through a full content strategy, and this week we’ll tackle the most important person in the content strategy room: your customer or as you will come to call him or her: Your User.

Content Strategy and User Experience Design

This week I attended a User Experience Design Conference, and I was struck by something that is important to consider as we embark on this month’s installment of your content strategy road map.  As the speakers at the conference described projects they had been working on and case studies of both successes and failures, I was struck by how there has been a real renaissance in the world of business over the last few years.  Now, so many businesses are taking a Design-Thinking approach to business planning and strategy.  And the lines between designing a business strategy, a content strategy, and a website are becoming very blurry.

Traditional business planning has often started with the product or the brand.  Now more and more businesses are taking a very customer-centric approach and taking pages from Design Thinking as they start their planning and strategy with the customer, or as we say in Design Thinking, with “Empathy for the User”.

Understanding the cares, context, capabilities and captivating factors of your User are the building blocks of a great business plan, and a great content strategy.

What is a “User”?

I am going to use the word “User” and not customer as I proceed to describe how we identify who they are, and create messages for them, in our content strategy.  Why do I use the word User and not customer?

It used to be that when we said “User” we meant only those customers who were going to your website.  But in his Book “Users Not Customers”, Aaron Shapiro makes the point that nowadays, every customer is a User, and thinking about them as Users allows us to always remember that they are coming to us for their own reasons, not ours:

“Users are defined as anyone who interacts with a company through digital media and technology.  There are lots of different types of users, and while they each have their own distinct interests and objectives, they all want digital tools to easily and quickly give them a leg up”, Shapiro says, “Today, a customer must be thought of in a new way: as one segment of users, one of the many types of people who interact with your company through the digital version of your organisation.  And they all want digital technologies to make their lives easier and better.”

Users aren’t just browsing, shopping, surfing.  Users are seeking value, utility, and help.  When we develop a content strategy based on empathy for that User, we need to understand who they are in a three dimensional portrait that we call a persona.

Personas: Not Just Demographics

Personas are detailed portraits of your users: usually you choose at most 3 or 4.  Personas are both an art and a science to create, because they are based both on facts or what your know about your Users AND they come from your imagination.  In order to create this three dimensional portrait of your User(s), you need to understand who they are across these 4 areas:

Care: What do they care about?  What are their pain points? What matters to them the most and what are the minimum expectations you’ll need to meet for them?

Context: In what context will they be when they find your website or social media?  This is not only a question of what device they might be using (for example, they might find you while using their smartphone on a crowded streetcar, or at their desktop computer in a cubicle at work) but also what time of day, what is their mood, their situation?

Capabilities: What are their technological capabilities? Are there any physical constraints they might have that will impact on how they are able to interact with you online (for example, are they older and therefore will very small text be hard to read, or might they have physical tremors that would make hitting very small buttons difficult?  Are they colour blind, as many men are?)

Captivate: This is the most elusive, but possible the most important area of focus.  What will really surprise and delight them? What are their secret desires that, if tapped into, will bring them un-matchable value and engage them in a real trust relationship with you?

How do I get to know my Users?

You can find out a lot about your users by looking at the analytics on your website, market research your company may have done, by speaking to your sales staff, or by examining competitor sites to “reverse engineer” who they are speaking to.

But to take a page from Design Thinking, the best way to get to know your Users is through observation: getting out there and meeting people, asking them questions and listening carefully to the questions that they ask you.

Can you observe your users using a competing product or even better your product?  Watching someone navigate your website is often a harrowing and eye opening experience.

And listen to what they say: jot down quotes and use their words, base your content strategy on their questions and their language.

Persona Templates

Having personas developed is not only critical for the development of your content strategy, you need them if you are going to have anyone else writing product pages or emails, blogging, or engaging in social media communications on behalf of your company.  Have them memorise the personas, and post the personas at their desk so they are always aware of who they are speaking to!

Here are a few sources for templates you can use to build your personas:

http://www.buyerpersona.com/buyer-persona-template

http://offers.hubspot.com/free-template-creating-buyer-personas

The Analytical Engine Persona Template

Your personas can be detailed or brief, but the main thing is that they are, for you, real: you want to have a clear picture in your head, and on paper, of who this person or these people are, because one of the biggest lessons to learn from the school of Design Thinking is: you are not your user!  You don’t want to design your content strategy for yourself, you want to design it for your users, to deliver value to them, to speak to them, to meet their needs at their level, and if you’re lucky and skilled, to surprise, delight, and captivate, and convert!

For more resources and information on Content Strategy and to download a detailed description of what content strategy entails, go to analyticalengine.ca/resources or download a Content Strategy Info graphic at http://bit.ly/1qY9tYp.

Christine McGlade is a Business Analyst, Content Strategist, and Usability Consultant.  With over 25 years experience in the media business, Christine helps small business, social enterprise, and Not for Profits how to leverage the power of the Internet to grow their business.  Learn more about Christine at analyticalengine.ca

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