Consistency and Frequency - Ingredients for Success in Social Media and Thought Leadership
This article is part confession and part lesson.
One of the greatest challenges of any marketing program, especially in companies that are not 'marketing organizations at heart' is keeping up the consistency and frequency while staying the course.
It seems that every week I have a conversation with an organization that's challenged with marketing consistently and with the right frequency, especially when it comes to adding social media marketing into the equation.
As a confession, I have the same challenges.
Yes, you know it...
In light of all this, I have a few thoughts on consistency & frequency and how to keep things on track.
Further, I'm always searching for ways to combine social media and thought leadership marketing.
These concepts are extremely important in both.
To be a thought leader, you need to be consistent and engage in constant relevant dialogue with your audience of customers & prospects.
That goes double for social media.
Sean D'Souza of the PsychoTactics? newsletter recently penned an article on consistency where he advocated putting together marketing communication plans that operate on fixed days until 2025.
The thinking here is that if you're going to commit to customer communication, your customers will come to expect that you communicate with them on regular intervals and that it's your responsibility to put yourself on a schedule to communicate with them until 2025.
I'm not sure that 2025 is the goal we all need to shoot for, but if you're not collecting ideas & committing to marketing communication for at least the next couple of years, you're missing an opportunity to gain significant mindshare and trust in the minds of your clients'.
Now, before you dismiss this as stuff you've heard before, let's look at what simple consistency as a core operating competency has done for an organization that you all know.
This comes from a recent article in Fortune magazine.
Geoffrey Colvin and Jessica Shambora wrote this about Johnson & Johnson in Fortune (5/4/09).
"The secret turns out to be not the rules but rather the company's extraordinary insistence on following them all the time.
" It's that kind of discipline that enabled Johnson & Johnson's sales to increase 4.
3 percent last year (during "12 solid months of economic decline in the U.
S.
"), and its profits to increase 22 percent while overall profits among the Fortune 500 dropped 85 percent.
" Consistently following the rules and consistently communicating with your customers on a schedule that they expect can win market share, raise profits and stimulate growth (heck, at least they won't forget about you!) J&J is a perfect example of what simple consistency can do for an organization.
Imagine if you turned on the morning drive-time radio show every day and you were confronted with different programming each day or new DJ's each morning.
You'd never stay tuned, you'd never look forward to or anticipate the show and the station would never build ratings, let alone sell ads or survive for long.
Your customers are expecting that same consistency from you.
They come to your website, subscribe to your newsletter, read your blog or attend your events and expect to see, hear and experience what you've told them to expect - frequency and consistency.
I'm as guilty as anyone for violating this rule of consistency, and I hear about it.
If I'm traveling and don't attend a regular networking event (someone was waiting to 'talk to me then' about a business opportunity), if my newsletter doesn't go out on time (I lost the last one and figured I'd be reminded to email you about our upcoming project when I got the next one) or if I don't blog for weeks at a time, people know, and it matters.
Your customers are not responsible for remembering you.
The responsibility is yours to look out for and remember them, deliver useful information to them and keep them in mind and respect their schedules.
All that said, this consistency thing, especially when we're trying to publish newsletters, post to our blog and run a business in the meantime.
Here are a few tactics that work for us and the clients we've worked with.
Getting to Consistency: 1.
Map out your activities.
You can use whatever tool you wish.
I prefer mindmaps that I keep in a binder that I refer to daily.
Daily, weekly, monthly and future activities are listed to ensure that I don't miss daily and weekly marketing objectives.
2.
Calendar it! I have a marketing calendar with most every activity on it, and if I don't have it on there yet, it's on the master mindmap with the year planned out.
I look at this every day...
3.
Raise your CPA.
Your Content Potential Awareness, that is.
Survey your business and look for the activities that create content and information that your customers may find very interesting.
Capture those lessons, insights and information for newsletters, blog posts, articles and whitepapers.
4.
Start writing your 2010 and 2011 plans now.
I've got files started in my favorite content capture device, GoogleDocs, for 2010 and 2011 marketing plans and ideas.
Even if they're just rough sketches for now, at least I won't forget any opportunities that I've outlined for the next couple of years.
One of the greatest challenges of any marketing program, especially in companies that are not 'marketing organizations at heart' is keeping up the consistency and frequency while staying the course.
It seems that every week I have a conversation with an organization that's challenged with marketing consistently and with the right frequency, especially when it comes to adding social media marketing into the equation.
As a confession, I have the same challenges.
Yes, you know it...
In light of all this, I have a few thoughts on consistency & frequency and how to keep things on track.
Further, I'm always searching for ways to combine social media and thought leadership marketing.
These concepts are extremely important in both.
To be a thought leader, you need to be consistent and engage in constant relevant dialogue with your audience of customers & prospects.
That goes double for social media.
Sean D'Souza of the PsychoTactics? newsletter recently penned an article on consistency where he advocated putting together marketing communication plans that operate on fixed days until 2025.
The thinking here is that if you're going to commit to customer communication, your customers will come to expect that you communicate with them on regular intervals and that it's your responsibility to put yourself on a schedule to communicate with them until 2025.
I'm not sure that 2025 is the goal we all need to shoot for, but if you're not collecting ideas & committing to marketing communication for at least the next couple of years, you're missing an opportunity to gain significant mindshare and trust in the minds of your clients'.
Now, before you dismiss this as stuff you've heard before, let's look at what simple consistency as a core operating competency has done for an organization that you all know.
This comes from a recent article in Fortune magazine.
Geoffrey Colvin and Jessica Shambora wrote this about Johnson & Johnson in Fortune (5/4/09).
"The secret turns out to be not the rules but rather the company's extraordinary insistence on following them all the time.
" It's that kind of discipline that enabled Johnson & Johnson's sales to increase 4.
3 percent last year (during "12 solid months of economic decline in the U.
S.
"), and its profits to increase 22 percent while overall profits among the Fortune 500 dropped 85 percent.
" Consistently following the rules and consistently communicating with your customers on a schedule that they expect can win market share, raise profits and stimulate growth (heck, at least they won't forget about you!) J&J is a perfect example of what simple consistency can do for an organization.
Imagine if you turned on the morning drive-time radio show every day and you were confronted with different programming each day or new DJ's each morning.
You'd never stay tuned, you'd never look forward to or anticipate the show and the station would never build ratings, let alone sell ads or survive for long.
Your customers are expecting that same consistency from you.
They come to your website, subscribe to your newsletter, read your blog or attend your events and expect to see, hear and experience what you've told them to expect - frequency and consistency.
I'm as guilty as anyone for violating this rule of consistency, and I hear about it.
If I'm traveling and don't attend a regular networking event (someone was waiting to 'talk to me then' about a business opportunity), if my newsletter doesn't go out on time (I lost the last one and figured I'd be reminded to email you about our upcoming project when I got the next one) or if I don't blog for weeks at a time, people know, and it matters.
Your customers are not responsible for remembering you.
The responsibility is yours to look out for and remember them, deliver useful information to them and keep them in mind and respect their schedules.
All that said, this consistency thing, especially when we're trying to publish newsletters, post to our blog and run a business in the meantime.
Here are a few tactics that work for us and the clients we've worked with.
Getting to Consistency: 1.
Map out your activities.
You can use whatever tool you wish.
I prefer mindmaps that I keep in a binder that I refer to daily.
Daily, weekly, monthly and future activities are listed to ensure that I don't miss daily and weekly marketing objectives.
2.
Calendar it! I have a marketing calendar with most every activity on it, and if I don't have it on there yet, it's on the master mindmap with the year planned out.
I look at this every day...
3.
Raise your CPA.
Your Content Potential Awareness, that is.
Survey your business and look for the activities that create content and information that your customers may find very interesting.
Capture those lessons, insights and information for newsletters, blog posts, articles and whitepapers.
4.
Start writing your 2010 and 2011 plans now.
I've got files started in my favorite content capture device, GoogleDocs, for 2010 and 2011 marketing plans and ideas.
Even if they're just rough sketches for now, at least I won't forget any opportunities that I've outlined for the next couple of years.