How Kris Kringle Invented Content Marketing

Was Santa a Marketing Innovator?

One could argue that when the Macy's Santa in Miracle on 34th Street pointed Macy's customers toward other department stores when Macy's didn't have the gifts they were seeking, the inbound or content marketing movement was born.

Inbound marketing or content marketing is a strategy that employs helpful online content to both get found by prospective customers and convert those website visitors into leads (and eventually customers). By helping customers, Santa significantly differentiated the Macy's brand and increased customer satisfaction.

It was revolutionary in the age of Mad Men, but it shouldn't be now. Providing insightful, original, and useful content to your market is how companies build brands in an era when customers control how they find information and when they are ready to engage your organization.

How Can You Market Like Santa?

This holiday season, keep in mind that your customer are going to need help during this next year. Identified the information that would be most useful to them - be it how to solve a problem or where to fine a red fire truck toy. Then, map out how you are going to create, optimize, and share this content to help your market.

How Good Product Management Makes Marketing Easier

When I have lead product management teams at technology companies, I made it clear to the rest of the marketing team that my job was to make a product that markets itself. I told the sales team that my job was to make them rich. This is a foreign concept to most market-facing divisions. How can product strategy decisions made earlier on translate into tangible sales and marketing wins?

They are used to fighting with product management executives feature by feature, then working independently to come up with ways to differentiate their solution in a crowded market. However, strong executive teams know that the most successful products and services have marketing baked into the product plan.

Apple Has Done It Again

The go-to example is Apple’s iPod, iPhone, and iPad products. While their technology and features are in line with competitors, their signature design and comfortable interface set them apart. Well, Apple has done it again. They have given themselves a big marketing boost, not by running more ads or through channel relationships, but through product management.

Consumer Reports, one of the most trusted authorities on B2C products, recently recalibrated its ratings of tablets after reviewing Apple’s new iPad. What does this mean? The new iPad is such a standout product that they had to create a new category for it. Since Consumer Reports could not create a category above “excellent,” they gave the “excellent” label to the iPad, while downgrading the rating of all of the previously “excellent” tablets to “very good.”

By creating a product that addressed the markets problems and the user-driven shortcomings of previous models, Apple has literally placed its tablet in a category by itself. For the short-term and possible the foreseeable future, consumers researching tablets will be drawn to Apple’s lone “excellent” rating in a sea of “very good” tablets. Through better product management, Apple is getting a significant marketing bump without spending an additional dime.

How can you plan your product or service to stand out among the competition and become recognized as setting a new benchmark for excellence without upping your marketing spend?

231+ Business and Technology Predictions for 2011

You have probably seen at least a few articles outlining business trends and predictions for 2011.

I'm not going to add to the noise by finding another way to rephrase 'cloud computing is going big this year'. However, I suspect that marketing and product management executives will find value in the trends in the predictions that business minds across the Internet have laid out.

Before Your Drive Into the 2011 Predictions

Just as product management professionals consume lots of data from multiple sources, marketing and strategy executives should review all of these trends before taking their business, product, or marketing in a new direction.

Why? In the same way, a product manager should not set the product roadmap based on one customer conversation, executives should not jump on a trend based on one or two articles (I've witnessed this and it is very sad for the entire company and takes years to correct). Just as the data coming from surveys and customer interviews is often conflicting, the following data is full on contradictions.

• Marketing automation will get a wake up call AND Marketing automation will see explosive growth
• Companies will put more money into social media AND Companies will cut their social media spend
• HTML 5 will overtake Flash AND HTML 5 will not be ready for prime time
• Content is king in 2011 AND Inbound marketing will remain the best kept secret in marketing

If you were getting your data from only a couple articles, you would miss the points and counter-points that lead to critical analysis. Find the patterns in these predictions and dig into the articles behind the relevant lists below. You'll find explanations, caveats, and supporting data that will help you make education strategic decisions about your 2011 product management and marketing plans.

Holiday Wish List: Business Books to Significantly Grow Your Business - Part 3

This is the third and final post of a three-part series about books that marketing and product management executives should internalize to create seriously successful products and services. If you have not read the first or second articles in the series, you can do so here.

Inbound Marketing
Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs

By Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah

How will these ideas help you?
What percentage of your purchases over the last year came from telemarketers, product email asking you to take a demo, or advertising? If you are like most business people and consumers, it is a relatively small percentage. You get your information from search engines, bloggers (or online journalist) that you trust, and recommendations shared by friends. For most organizations over the past 5 years, the facts support the notion that you are wasting your company's time and money by following the same interruption-based marketing plan that you and your competitors have spent your budgets on for years.

Inbound Marketing provides the rules and game plan to purposefully get found by qualified customers by consistently producing original, insightful, and helpful content that your target audiences will consume, follow, and share.

Example: Whole Foods Market's website gets thousands of views every day by the exact market they are trying to reach. Compare the website traffic of Whole Foods, whose inbound strategy positions them as a resource for their customers, with that of Trader Joe's, whose web site is built around their products. Though these two companies have a similar target customer profile and roughly the same about of stores across the country, Whole Foods Market receives double the traffic that Trader Joe's does.

By producing information of value for people interested in high-quality, low-processed, and natural meals, in the form of recipes, Whole Foods has greatly expanded their reach in their target market at a very low cost compared to traditional advertising.

Get a taste of Inbound Marketing online.

Put Ideas from Brilliant Business Books Into Action
Think about the approaches laid out in Blue Ocean Strategy, Purple Cow, and Inbound Marketing in terms of your business, your customers, your industry, and your competitors. Question the ideas and think about the them critically. Try to find examples in your career or current business that break the models in each book. Then, run with the ideas that you connect with. Translate them into a plan that you can test with your business. Finally, share your vision across the organization...starting with passing along these books.

You may have noticed that these are not new books. The most recently published book listed is Inbound Marketing, published in 2009. I intentionally did not include books published in 2010 for two reason:

1. None of the books I have come across this year have the ability to change the performance of businesses like the books I referenced.
2. I am still testing the strategies, processes, and tactics that I gleamed from the newer crop. 

Whether you are shopping for a busy executive or you are an executive flipping through the pages of Sky Mall to compile your wish list, these titles are sure to positively impact your business in 2011.

Which books would you add to this holiday wish list?

Holiday Wish List: 3 Business Books to Significantly Grow Sales - Part 2

This is the second part of a three-part series about three books that can help you significantly improve your business's performance. Read the first article.

Purple Cow
Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable

By Seth Godin

How will these ideas help you?

The world is full of boring products and "me too" marketing. Running a safe company with a very good product is bad in today's business environment. Think about the horse race that is the US car market. Manufacturers produce very good cars that sell approximately the same number of units each year as similar cars sold by competitors.  Margins are small because manufactures and dealerships compete on price, marketing/awareness, and the release of new models. 

Every once in a while, a car manufacturer releases a purple cow. When Volkswagen re-released the Beetle in 1998, you heard about it all year from friends and family. People pointed them out to others in the car when driving. Volkswagen's design team created a remarkable product that generated a lot of attention and awareness (and allowed them to charge a premium for this small car).

Defy your market by focusing on creating and selling something that is worthy of being talked about (note: this book is not about creating marketing campaigns that generate buzz, but products and services that inherently get your target audience talking about you to each other). The result is an idea or product that spreads across your market at relatively little marketing cost to you. 

If you have what it takes to develop and launch a remarkable offering, you'll find yourself atop a business that has more leads, customers, and media attention that you would have if you quadrupled your marketing budget. If your offering is not remarkable today, reevaluate (or retire) your product, rethink your strategy, or realign your marketing and product management team's methodologies to develop products that solve key problems in your market in a remark-worthy way. Be critical and don't kid yourself or whitewash your conclusion. If you don't take the risks involved in creating products and services that stand out, prepare for a long, expensive slog through years of slow growth and unnecessarily hard-fought sales.

Example: I recently read about the new Word Lens app for Apple's iPhone. It helps vacationers and business travelers translates signs and printed words from one language to another by pointing your iPhone's camera at the words. The translated text can then be seen ion your iPhone's screen.That evening, as my wife and I discussed our days, I included the discovery of this innovation in my rundown. 

The primary problem this app solves is not novel. Foreign language dictionaries and translation tools have been available since the month the iPhone App Store was launched. However, the way that Word Lens uses augmented reality to solve their market's problem is remarkable...a true purple cow (for the time being).

I have never noticed or commented on any type of language software in my career. There is a reason for this. They have all been "brown cows." If Word Lens were a boring "brown cow" app, you wouldn't be reading about it right now. The facts that I brought this purple cow up to my wife, I'll surely mention it to friends and colleagues who are traveling, and I'm writing about it now make this an excellent example of a purple cow, a product so different that I chose to remark on it to others at no cost to the company who developed the app.

Get a taste of Purple Cow online.

Which impactful books would you add to this holiday wish list?

Read the final article of this three-part series. Subscribe to this blog with your RSS reader or email (upper right corner), or follow me on Twitter to be notified of new posts.