Читать книгу The New Rules of Marketing and PR - Scott David Meerman - Страница 9

My wife, Yukari, was checking out her Twitter stream one day and noticed that someone she follows tweeted about Hotel & Igloo Village Kakslauttanen.7 Yukari clicked the link and learned that the resort is located in the Saariselkä fell area of Lapland in northern Finland. In winter, you can stay there in a private glass igloo, which means that from bed you can check out the stars (or, if you are lucky, the aurora borealis). She found this terribly exciting, so she tweeted a response from her Twitter ID, @yukariwatanabe: “I want to go there!”

We discussed the resort that evening over dinner. Why not go? Our daughter was off to university, so we had the time. The next day we booked the trip for several months later. Done deal.

Now, I know that a winter vacation above the Arctic Circle might seem like a punch line to a bad joke. Heck, the sun didn't even rise when we were there in mid-December (the “day” consists of just four hours of twilight at that time of year). But for us it seemed perfect, because we've traveled all over the world and are always looking for unusual adventures.

How did we know that we wanted to go? By the resort's website, of course. The site lists all sorts of winter activities for guests. When I saw “Husky Sledding Safari,” I was ready to pack my bags (bucket list…). But Yukari wanted to do a little more checking, so she Googled the resort, looked at the reviews on TripAdvisor, and also read about it in a New York Times article.

Everybody I know has a story like this. Somebody makes a comment via a social network site. It leads someone else to a website where the content educates and informs. And that person ends up becoming a customer of a company that he or she had never heard of moments before. We're living in a new world of marketing and PR.

If you are the seller in this transaction, it all comes down to content: What are you creating, compared to what are others saying about you?

You're in control. You create the content. You bring in the business.

Our time in Lapland was amazing. We had all kinds of wonderful adventures. The dogsledding was especially fun, because I got to drive (well, more like hang on). And we never would have had this amazing experience if the Hotel & Igloo Village Kakslauttanen only marketed their property using the old rules. We never would have heard about it.

The Most Important Communications Revolution in Human History

I'd like to step way back and look at the big picture. This is not a view, to use the cliché, from 30,000 feet. It's more like the view from the moon. The new rules of marketing and public relations are part of the much bigger and more important communications revolution we're currently living through – the most important communications revolution in human history.

Johannes Gutenberg's invention of printing with mechanical movable type (circa 1439) was the second most important communications breakthrough in history. It meant books could be mass-produced, rather than painstakingly copied by hand. It meant ordinary people could refer to things in books, like laws. These used to have to be committed to memory.

The printing press created the first important communications revolution by freeing people's minds from memorization and allowing them to use that extra brainpower to be creative. At the same time, this first communications revolution (which took many decades) helped large numbers of people become literate and raised living standards along the way. It brought humanity out of the medieval period and into the Renaissance.

Some 556 years later, in 1995, an even more important communications revolution began. I choose 1995 because it was the year that Netscape went public on the success of Netscape Navigator, the first popular product to allow easy Internet connection and web browsing.

We're fortunate to be living in this time in history, the time of another important communications revolution. I figure we're about halfway through it. The first 20 years or so were fast-paced, and things changed very quickly. Usage went from a few million people online to billions. But many organizations still aren't communicating in real time on the web.

The next few decades will bring a continuation of the revolution. The pace of that change means that I need to update this book every two years. Soon, this sixth edition will be replaced by the seventh. And then the eighth. We need to be constantly learning and updating our skills to reach buyers as they're looking for the products and services we sell.

Are you one of the revolutionaries? Or do you support the old regime? Are you marketing your product or service like Hotel & Igloo Village Kakslauttanen? Or are you failing to produce content that will do well in the search engines and social networks? For your sake, I hope it's the former – or soon will be with the help of this book.

Open for Business

Gerard Vroomen will tell you that he is an engineer, not a marketer. He will tell you that the companies he co-founded, Cervélo Cycles8 and Open Cycle9 (aka OPEN), do not have any marketing experts. But Vroomen is wrong. Why? Because he is obsessed with the buyers of racing bikes from Cervélo and mountain bikes from OPEN. And he's obsessed with the engineering-driven products he offers them.

Cervélo Cycles, which Vroomen sold in 2011 but for which he remains an advisor, is a Canadian manufacturer of racing bicycle frames. He focused Cervélo to help his customers win races – and they do. In the 2005 Tour de France, David Zabriskie rode the fastest time trial in the race's history on a Cervélo P3C at an average speed of 54.676 kph (33.954 mph). The winner of the 2008 Tour de France, Carlos Sastre, did so on a Cervélo. And at the three most recent Olympics, Cervélo bikes were ridden by dozens of athletes, resulting in multiple gold, silver, and bronze medals. Besides building excellent bikes, Vroomen also excels at using the web to tell cycling enthusiasts compelling stories, to educate them, to engage them in conversation, and to entertain them. Vroomen is a terrific marketer because he uses web content in interesting ways and sells a bunch of bikes in the process.

“In marketing, if the point is for our company to get noticed, we can't do it the same as everybody else,” Vroomen says. “A big part of that is to do something unexpected and being remarkable. For example, we were the first to blog at the Tour de France and the first to do video there.”

The Cervélo site works extremely well because it includes perfect content for visitors who are ready to buy a bike and also for people who are just browsing. The content is valuable and authentic compared to the marketing messages that appear on so many other sites. “Our goal is education,” Vroomen says. “We have a technical product, and we're the most engineering-driven company in the industry. Most bike companies don't employ a single engineer, and Cervélo has eight. So we want to have that engineering focus stand out with the content on the site. We don't sell on the newest paint job. So on the site, we're not spending our time creating fluff. Instead, we have a good set of content.”

Ryan Patch is an amateur triathlon competitor on the Vortex Racing team – just the sort of customer Cervélo wants to reach. “On the Cervélo site, I learned that Bobby Julich rides the same bike that is available to me,” Patch says. “And it's not just that they are riding, but they are doing really well. I can see how someone won the Giro de Italia on a Cervélo. That's mind-blowing, that I can get the same bike that the pros are riding. I can ride the same gear. Cervélo has as much street cred as you can have with shaved legs.”

Patch says that if you're looking to buy a new bike, if you are a hard-core consumer, then there is a great deal of detailed information on the Cervélo site about the bikes' technology, construction, and specs. “What I really like about this website is how it gives off the aura of legitimacy, being based in fact, not fluff,” he says.

Search engine marketing is important for Cervélo. Because of the keyword-rich cycling content available on the site, Vroomen says, Cervélo gets the same amount of search engine traffic as many sites for bike companies that are 10 times larger. As a result, Cervélo has grown quickly into one of the most important bike companies in the world.

In 2011, Vroomen shifted gears and now spends the majority of his time at Open Cycle, the mountain bike company he co-founded with Andy Kessler and launched in mid-2012. Now OPEN sells via 139 stores in 32 countries, its own office/showroom in Basel, and an online store. He took to heart what he learned at Cervélo, making every aspect of the company “open” to customers. Right from the start, OPEN focused on social engagement throughout the site, with community aspects and social networking links. Anyone can comment on anything.

The OPEN site also features a blog.10 What's interesting is that Vroomen and Kessler had been blogging for a year as they secretly developed the technology for their new bike, but the blog posts went unpublished until launch. “We talk not only about the product but also about how we're running the company,” Vroomen says. “So a part of that was publishing that blog after we launched, so people could see what we'd been doing the year leading up to us becoming visible.”

Vroomen is committed to having the community of enthusiasts help them, and that's a big reason why they chose the name Open Cycle. “Every page on the site has a question and answer section at the bottom,” he says. “So it's very easy, as soon as you've read something, to say, ‘Hey, I don't quite understand this.’ We answer all of those as soon as we can, time zone permitting, but certainly within a day, usually sooner. People see that when they ask something, they actually get a response. But the crazy part is that consumers don't expect it. So we said, ‘How about if we ask people to talk to us, and we respond?’ That's the basic premise of OPEN.”

The company's use of questions and answers on every page of the OPEN site, the comment feature on the OPEN blog, and social networks like Twitter (@gerardvroomen has 13,000+ followers) serve as terrific ways to market the new company. “I don't think of it as marketing,” Vroomen says. “It feels simply like talking to people. And networks like Facebook, Twitter, et al. have given us some interesting ways to do that. They turn companies such as Open Cycle into the global version of the village baker of yesteryear. You know your customers and they know you, so you want to treat them well. You want to give them good quality, and they tell their neighbors. That's the opposite of what's happening at many companies today. And, of course, the flip side is that if you don't treat them well they'll tell the rest of the village.”

All signs point to OPEN being on a trajectory to replicate the tremendous success of Cervélo – with the site, the blog, and social networking leading the way forward. And that's no coincidence. As Vroomen would tell you, the ideas you'll read about in this book work.

“This is the future for companies like us,” Vroomen says. “You can be very small and occupy a niche and still sell your products all over the world. It's amazing, when we go into a new country, the amount of name recognition we have. The Internet gives you opportunities you never had before. And it's not rocket science. It's pretty easy to figure out.”

The Long Tail of Marketing

The theory of the long tail as popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name is that our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of major hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.11

Some of today's most successful Internet businesses leverage the long tail to reach underserved customers and satisfy demand for products not found in traditional physical stores. Examples include Amazon, which makes available at the click of a mouse hundreds of thousands of books and other products not stocked in local chain stores; iTunes, a service that legally brings niche music not found in record stores to people who crave artists outside the mainstream; and Netflix, which exploited the long tail of demand for movie rentals beyond the blockbuster hits found at the local DVD rental shop. The business implications of the long tail are profound and illustrate that there's much money to be made by creating and distributing at the long end of the tail. Yes, big hits are still important. But as these businesses have shown, there's a huge market beyond the latest Batman movie, U2, Taylor Swift, and Top Gear.

So, what about marketing? While Anderson's book focuses on product availability and selling models on the web, the concepts apply equally well to marketing. There's no doubt that there is a long-tail market for web content created by organizations of all kinds – corporations, nonprofits, churches, schools, individuals, rock bands – and used for directly reaching buyers – those who buy, donate, join, apply. As consumers search the Internet for answers to their problems, as they browse blogs and chat rooms and websites for ideas, they are searching for what organizations like yours have to offer. Unlike in the days of the old rules of interruption marketing with a mainstream message, today's consumers are looking for just the right product or service to satisfy their unique desires at the precise moment they are online. People are looking for what you have to offer right now.

Marketers must shift their thinking away from the short head of the demand curve – mainstream marketing to the masses – and toward the long tail – a strategy of targeting vast numbers of underserved audiences via the web.

As marketers understand the web as a place to reach millions of micromarkets with precise messages just at the point of consumption, the way they create web content changes dramatically. Instead of a one-size-fits-all website with a mass-market message, we need to create just-right content – each aimed at a narrow target constituency. As marketing case studies, the examples of Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes are also fascinating. The techniques pioneered by the leaders of long-tail retail for reaching customers with niche interests are examples of marketing genius.

Tell Me Something I Don't Know, Please

Amazon.com has been optimized for browsing. At a broad level, there are just two ways that people interact with web content: They search and they browse. Most organizations optimize sites for searching, which helps people answer their questions but doesn't encourage them to browse. But people also want a site to tell them something they didn't think to ask. The marketers at Amazon understand that when people browse the site, they may have a general idea of what they want (in my case, perhaps a book for my daughter about surfing) but not the particular title. So if I start with a search on Amazon for the phrase “surfing for beginners,” I get 99 titles in the search results. With this list as a starting point, I shift into browse mode, which is where Amazon excels. Each title has a customer ranking where I instantly see how other customers rated the book. I see reader-generated reviews, together with reviews from other media. I can see “Customers who bought this item also bought” lists and also rankings of “What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?” I can poke around the contents of the book itself. After I purchase the perfect book for my daughter (The Girl's Guide to Surfing), I might get an email from Amazon weeks or months later, suggesting, based on this purchase, another book that I might find useful. This is brilliant stuff.

The site is designed to work for a major and often-ignored audience: people who do their own research and consider a decision over a period of time before making a commitment. Smart marketers, like the folks at Amazon and Cervélo, unlike those at the Big Three automakers we saw in Chapter 1, know that the most effective web strategies anticipate needs and provide content to meet them, even before people know to ask.

Marketing on the web is not about generic banner ads designed to trick people with neon color or wacky movement. It is about understanding the keywords and phrases that our buyers are using, and creating the content that they seek.

Bricks-and-Mortar News

The new rules are just as important for public relations. In fact, I think that online content in all of its forms is causing a convergence of marketing and PR that does not really exist offline. When your buyer is on the web browsing for something, content is content in all of its manifestations. And in an interconnected web world, content drives action.

I often hear people claim that online content such as blogs, photos, and infographics doesn't work as a marketing strategy for traditional bricks-and-mortar industries. But I've always disagreed. Great content brands an organization as a trusted resource and calls people to action – to buy, subscribe, apply, or donate. And great content means that interested people return again and again. As a result, the organization succeeds, achieving goals such as adding revenue, building traffic, gaining donations, or generating sales leads.

For instance, The Concrete Network12 provides information about residential concrete products and services and helps buyers and sellers connect with each other. The company targets consumers and builders who might want to plan and build a concrete patio, pool deck, or driveway – this audience makes up the business-to-consumer (B2C) component of The Concrete Network – as well as the concrete contractors who make up the business-to-business (B2B) component. The Concrete Network's Find a Contractor13 service links homeowners and builders who need a project done with contractors who specialize in several dozen different services located in hundreds of metropolitan areas in the United States, Canada, and Australia. The company's web content drives business for The Concrete Network. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, web content sells concrete! (You can't get any more bricks-and-mortar than, well, mortar.)

“The new rules of PR are that anybody who wants to be the leader has to have news coming out,” says Jim Peterson, president of The Concrete Network. The company's ongoing marketing and PR program includes a series of articles on the site; free online catalogs for categories such as countertops, pool decks, patios, and driveways; and photo galleries for potential customers to check out what is available. As a result of all of the terrific content, The Concrete Network gets more than 10 times the traffic of any other site in the concrete industry, according to Peterson. An important component of the site's content is the beautiful photos drawn from “Earth's largest collection of decorative concrete photos.” For example, there are dozens of photos of just concrete patios.14

As president of The Concrete Network, Peterson is that rare executive who understands the power of content marketing, search engine optimization, and images to reach buyers directly and drive business. What is his advice to other company presidents and CEOs? “Every business has information that can contribute to the education of the marketplace. You need to ask yourself, ‘How can I get that information out there?’ You have to have a bit longer view and have a sense of how your business will be better down the line. For example, we created an entire series of buyer guides, because we knew that they would be valuable to the market. You need to think about how it will benefit your business and then commit to it, understanding that nothing is an overnight thing.”

Peterson also suggests getting help from an expert to get started with a program. “Don't sit there and leave this [as] just a part of your list of good intentions,” he says. “Businesses will live or die on original content. If you are creating truly useful content for customers, you're going to be seen in a great light and with a great spirit – you're setting the table for new business. But the vast majority of businesses don't seem to care. At The Concrete Network, we're on a mission. Get down to the essence of what your product solves and write good stories about that and publish them online.”

You've got to love it. If content sells concrete, content can sell what you have to offer, too!

The Long Tail of PR

In PR, it's not about clip books. It's about reaching our buyers.

I was vice president of marketing and PR for two publicly traded companies, and I've done it the old way. It doesn't work anymore. But the new rules do work – really well.

Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars per month on a media relations program that tries to convince a handful of reporters at select magazines, newspapers, and TV stations to cover us, we should be targeting the plugged-in bloggers, online news sites, micropublications, public speakers, analysts, and consultants who reach the targeted audiences who are looking for what we have to offer. Better yet, we no longer even need to wait for someone with a media voice to write about us at all. With social media, we communicate directly with our audience, bypassing the media filter completely. We have the power to create our own media brand in the niche of our own choosing. It's about being found on Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and niche content sites. Instead of writing press releases only when we have big news – releases that reach just a handful of journalists – we should be using techniques like newsjacking that highlight our expert ideas and stories. You will learn about newsjacking in Chapter 21.

To succeed in long-tail marketing and PR, we need to adopt different criteria for success. In the book world, everyone used to say, “If I can only get on Oprah, I'll be a success.” Sure, I would have liked to be on The Oprah Winfrey Show, too. But instead of focusing countless (and probably fruitless) hours on a potential blockbuster of a TV appearance, wouldn't it be a better strategy to have lots of people reviewing your book in smaller publications that reach the specific audiences who buy books like yours? Oprah was a long shot, but right now bloggers would love to hear from you. Oprah ignored 100 books a day, but bloggers run to their mailboxes to see what interesting things might be in there. Sure, it would be great to have your business profiled in Fortune or the Financial Times. But instead of putting all of your public relations efforts into a mention in the major business press, wouldn't it be better to get dozens of the most influential bloggers and analysts to tell your story directly to the niche markets that are looking for what you have to offer?

The New Rules of Marketing and PR

If you've been nodding your head excitedly while reading about what some of these companies are up to, then the new rules are for you. In the next chapter, I offer interesting case studies of companies that have been successful with the new rules. In each case example, I've interviewed a particular person from that organization so we can learn directly from them. Following are chapters on specific areas of online content (such as blogging, online video, and social networking) and then more detailed how-to chapters. But before we move on, let me explicitly state the new rules of marketing and PR that we'll discuss throughout the rest of the book:

• Marketing is more than just advertising.

• PR is for more than just a mainstream media audience.

• You are what you publish.

• People want authenticity, not spin.

• People want participation, not propaganda.

• Instead of causing one-way interruption, marketing is about delivering content at just the precise moment your audience needs it.

• Marketers must shift their thinking from mainstream marketing to the masses to a strategy of reaching vast numbers of underserved audiences via the web.

• PR is not about your boss seeing your company on TV. It's about your buyers seeing your company on the web.

• Marketing is not about your agency winning awards. It's about your organization winning business.

• The Internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media.