Cycling: 5 Branding and Social Media Lessons Learned

Cycling. Is. An. Obsession.

Cycling for me is a combination of exploring the nature, endurance training and creative thinking.  It is also about constantly pushing my physical and mental limits.

It started as casual riding on a hybrid bike.  Then it turned into a regular exercise.  It soon progressed into commuting, century and group rides, cyclocross and climbs.  I have ridden over 2,000 miles and climbed 35,000 feet so far this year.  

My cycling obsession got me actively working on myself and my bikes.  It is amazing how much the Web and social media can tell about brands.  Combine that with brick and mortar presence, and it is fairly easy to put together a realistic brand image.

Below are 5 key elements of telling a brand story online, engaging the target audience and growing the customer base with examples from my latest experiences with bike companies.


1.  Product Info On The Web.   In this day and age it is common for almost all companies to have at least a generic web site.  Majority of bike brands are no exception -- they seem to have decent web sites and product pages describing bike details and specifications.  At the surface, however, most of these bikes can look similar. Same frame materials (carbon, aluminum, steel and titanium) and same components (Shimano, SRAM and Campi).

This said, some brands find ways to differentiate themselves by telling a unique story behind a brand or a product.  Video is a great media for that.  For example, the following video from #Specialized tells an informative and credible story:

This story accomplishes a lot.  First, it comes from a product person that has a very similar profile with a target buyer.  He appears very straight forward, honest and passionate.  Second, the story covers everyday usage, feature descriptions and championship pedigree.  It is very down to earth and believable.


2.  Brand Story Over Social Media: Social Media is a great way to tell a brand or a model story.  For example, people that "like" a brand on Facebook are usually very interested in following the brand and finding out what's new on an ongoing basis.  One can't get a much more captive audience for telling a great story that Facebook page followers.  But there has to be a story to be told and it has to be interesting.

On the contrary, one of the worst things to do in that case is to post generic, quick sale-oriented, useless posts with images like this one from #RaleighUSA:

The problem with this post is that there is no story.  It is a blank and a lazy statement.

Raleigh makes decent bikes.  I own one and I like it a lot (photo on the left).  I am confident there are plenty of stories out there that can really connect with people that follow this brand.

For example, why not break down the  post above into a series of 5-10 real life stories about interesting people in these races, their achievements, their struggles, along with some engaging images?




Why not take a page from #Bianchi's book?

They posted a fun photo (on the left) that grabs attention, inspires re-posts and drives people to the brand.

It doesn't scream "buy me", it looks really cool and invites people to explore and experience new and cool things.













Here is another good post on Bianchi's Facebook page that tells a story:

3.  Social Media Posting Frequency and Timing.  It is important to find the right frequency of social media posts to avoid fatiguing the audience with too many of them or getting forgotten with too few.

Timing of the posts is critical as well.  There is only a small window of opportunity for the target audience to notice an entry and get engaged.  You can have the best content at the wrong time and it will be ineffective and may go unnoticed.

A/B testing is really useful in identifying days of the week and times of the day when the message is viewed most and when the audience is really engaged.


4.  Support Via Social Media.  This is a big one.  Once a brand has a social media channel that is open for anyone to post, it is important for the company behind that brand to stay on top of it.  Timely response and useful help is critical.  It can  influence a buying decision, elevate or damage the brand.

For example, Specialized does a fantastic job supporting its community.  Here is a screenshot captured by CanProve tool.

If you read the comments, you can see what an excellent job Specialized did responding to this thread.  BTW, they handled a problem I had with one of my bikes the same way.  This type of response instills confidence that the company stands behind its products and its customers.


Contrast that with a response from Cannondale.  Here is a link and a screenshot from their FB page:

Based on this (and other similar posts) and lack of any response from Cannondale on their own Facebook page, I would never buy a bike from them, especially an expensive one.

The math is simple here.  If Cannondale loses 1 customer per day due to their Facebook screw-ups, with an average bike price of $1,000, their loss is over $350K per year!!!  That number can grow into millions if you factor in the negative word of mouth this creates.


5.  Content Strategy & Company DNA

Like in many other industries, it is critical for bike brands to have a solid content strategy and content / social media manager that oversees online communities and serves as a customer ambassador.

It is a relatively easy task when the company DNA supports it.

However, it is almost an impossible task in a large corporation with many brands, yet no particular passion towards any single one of them, and a focus on revenue and margins only.

Most of people I know want to deal with brands that share their passion for bikes, companies that employ cyclists and are in sync with their customers.  Specialized is a great example of such a company.  Their products, employees and online communications tell a consistent story of excellence and great customer care.

With all this in mind, when the time comes for getting my next bike, Specialized (Roubaix SL4) is definitely going to be my choice:

It's all about content... and metrics

How important is content quality in your marketing efforts?  Lip service aside, many organizations treat it  secondary at best.  Yet, in the modern world of online marketing, content is one of the most important components of your success.

Let's take an example of email nurturing.  Last week we were planning an email campaign with a very strong article written by an expert and a decent landing page.

We wrote the email and were thinking about the subject line.  My team member had it as "7 ways to ..."  To me, it seemed a little too "fluffy."  So after some more brainstorming we came up with another line that was more informative (at least IMO), like "xx  xx failure rates."

The theory behind it was that the "email receiver" would click on it because it would appear to be more of an informative email vs. "push my products" one.  We spent about an hour on the subject line debate.  Most organizations I know would have considered this as wasted time.  Was it though?

We conducted A/B test during the next few days.  Same email, same call to action, same landing page.   Different subject lines.

Results:

Subject Line 1: "7 ways..."   Open rate: 4.4%, click through rate: 0.2%
Subject Line 2: "...rates"  Open rate: 7.0%, click through rate: 0.5%

As you can see, there is a huge difference in these rates, which translated to 12 (SL1) leads against 50+ (SL2).  This is one of the best demonstrations (supported by metrics) of the difference that content quality makes.

The next A/B test will be this week.  We are going to be testing the email text.  We tuned it on Friday.  Given we see interesting results, I will blog about it later.

8 Key Elements for SMB Marketing (Part 1)

Mysterious SMB market.  For many years, I have been hearing the same story, "SMB market is lucrative and really fragmented.  It represents a tremendous opportunity for us."   Yet, I have witnessed many companies enter this space over and over, just to fall short of their expectations.  So, what gives?

The challenge is that neither enterprise, nor consumer programs alone are effective in this market.  I spent last 1,5 years on finding effective approaches for marketing and selling IT products and services into SMB.  Here are my findings:

1. Market Definition.   First, how do you define SMB?  I break it down into 4 segments:
     
           a. Small Office / Home Office (1 - 5 employees)  Consumer-like buying behavior.
           b. Very Small Business (6-30 employees).  No dedicated IT.  Use of consultants.
           c. Small Business (31 - 250 employees).  1-3 IT employees.
           d. Medium Business (251 - 1,000 employees).  1-5 IT employees.  More sophisticated network / apps.  Elements of the enterprise IT.


2.  Analyzing Strengths.  If you already have presence in this space and analyze your historic sales, you probably will discover that sales have been coming from one or two of the sub-segments above.  This exercise will point to success in certain types of your activities or channels.  And, visa versa, you may see opportunities in sub-segments that are not performing well.  You can also define which of these sub-segments are best matched for your product / sales force / channel presence.  This is critical, because even if you have the best product, but lack the right sales force type, your efforts may stumble.


3. Different Target Audience.  IT folks in SMB find, purchase and consume products differently than their peers in large enterprises.  SMB IT employees are typically generalists.  Having to compete with much larger companies, IT departments with only a few people have to take care of everything from fixing computers to maintaining the network infrastructure and deploying applications.  This often means no time for a deep dive into any area.  This also means no time to read fancy white papers, or try every product feature, or attend industry IT mega shows.  These characteristics make enterprise-type marketing fairly ineffective.


4.  Product Approach.   Ease of use is the name of the game here.  I have seen many simple and easy-to-use cloud services beat out complex, difficult-to-use and deploy, yet feature-rich products.  When building a product or a service for SMB market, it is critical to keep ease of use in mind.  It is a somewhat difficult concept for enterprise software vendors, who customize products to the needs of very large customers.  For these vendors, it may make sense to have a simpler and cheaper offering with reduced functionality that is easy to use, fast to deploy and doesn't require lots of support.  That is one of the reasons behind success of many cloud services in SMB space.  It is a worthwhile exercise for product managers, especially the ones with little SMB experience, to hold several focus groups to understand the simplicity requirements.

5. Messaging.  Since simplicity is so important, most of the enterprise (complicated and long) messaging approaches won't work.  SMB IT folks have absolutely no time to translate complicated technology of fluffy marketing messages into benefits.  Product Marketing has to create a message that connects quickly and uses their target market's language.  The reward can be huge - quick decision-making process and faster time to revenue.  A successful example of such messaging is what we did for Panda Security: www.forgetsecurity.com


More... Not to bore you with too long of a post, I broke it down in two entries.  In the second part, I  discuss lead generation, lead sorting and nurturing, sales approach and channels, and marketing / sales tools.

8 Steps for Creating an Effective Main Message

 It's a familiar situation.  A company or division is formed.  It develops a product, then races to launch.  Somebody throws together an initial message and a web site.  Product launches.  Revenue starts flowing.

It's time to hire a marketing exec and build a team.  Founders emphasize leads and conversion rates.  Good things like SEO, lead nurturing, online marketing get implemented. But one fundamental is often missing.

Sin #1.  Positioning / Main message.  Let's look at the main message from two companies web sites:

-  Zoho

- Workday


Are these accurate and good in the eyes of these companies?  Probably.
Is this the way their customers think?                                      Probably not.
Do these miss a chance to communicate the true value?          Yes!

A strong main messages gives the best opportunity to grab prospect's attention... the right way. It also flows into the rest of messaging, impacting  PPC, SEO and the conversion rate.  In fact, vague main message  results in wasted money and ineffectiveness of marketing campaigns.  This is especially painful for startups with little brand recognition.

Here are examples of effective and clear messages from Pandora and AppAssure:







How do you develop a strong main message?  Here are some key principles:

1.  Grab attention.  It has to be unique enough to grab visitors attention and encourage further browsing.
2.  Differentiate.  Has to communicate at least one unique angle or a customer benefit.
3.  Specific. The benefit has to be specific.  Statements like having "all-in-one," "complete," "best" are often subjective and indicate vendor's point of view.  In the examples above, the word "complete" may have a very different meaning for target customers vs. the vendor.  It can discredit the message.  What I like about the message from AppAssure is that is specific.  "Recover in Minutes" sets a pretty specific expectation.
4.  Believable. It is important to keep the balance between reality and outrageous statements that prospects discount as zealous or exaggerated.
5.  Language.  The message has to be in the language used by target customers, which is often different from the vendor's language.  If your target customer is CIO, too technical of a message may be a mistake.  If you are targeting sysadmins, you may want to be fairly technical and specific.
6.  Easily understandable.  The prospect has to be able to quickly grasp the message.  Don't make them think too long - often people don't have time or desire to do that.  They will just leave the site.
7.  Customer tested.  It is critical to test the main message with a number of customers and prospects before going live.  You can start with a qualitative test via customer conversations.  Then, you can finish with an online survey.
8.  Not Perfect.  It doesn't have to be perfect.  You don't have to spend months on this.  It OK for some internal folks to struggle with it.  It can be work in progress, however you don't want to change it very often.  It just has to be effective.

To summarize, a strong main message could drastically increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and ROI of your marketing spending.  I will discuss the sin #2 in the next Hack Marketing blog entry.

Here is an example of a message that we developed about 6 months ago: www.forgetsecurity.com

6 Ways To Avoid Fluff in Your Marketing Materials

FLUFF is one of my pet peeves. Why use complicated words that add up into phrases that mean nothing?  Words like leverage, easy, flexible, scaleable, secure, ROI, TCO.   They demonstrate lack of subject knowledge and discourage the target audience from reading these documents / web sites / blogs.

Here is an example I just found on a web site of a well known vendor.  "...(product) is the foundation for the CIO's and IT leadership team's performance system. It features a cascaded optimization system, the industry's deepest and broadest insight into IT-controlled assets, and a secure, comprehensive, operational environment for a hybrid world."

What?  A "hybrid world?"  Wasted words.  I counted 19 words that are just fluff and mean nothing.  Wasted space.  Wasted time and budgets.  There are better and more practical ways of writing marketing materials that people understand and read.  My suggestions are below:

1.  Know your audience.  Understand who exactly is your audience.  Which industry?  What is the main function of your target reader?  What are their pressures and challenges?  What are their titles and reporting structures?  Their internal customers.  Demographics.  Internal politics, etc.

2.  Understand the lingo your audience uses.  Talk to your customers directly.  Ask how are they using your product.  Don't assume you know the words they use.  For example, you would fail if you used "IT words" with process engineers in Electric Power companies.  When marketing cyber security to Power and Energy, we had to change about 80% of our marketing materials.  But the results were amazing - almost every IT department we contacted, wanted to talk to us.  Even at the meetings, we were treated like peers rather than vendors.

3.  Simplify.  Read what you wrote out loud.  Pretend you are presenting in person to your target audience.  Keep on rewriting until the text flows easily and you would have no problem verbally presenting it.

4.  Be brief.  Less is more.  Remember, the goal of most marketing materials is not to close the deal, but rather get the prospect interested enough to contact sales or try the product.  Longer texts tend to discourage busy viewers from reading.

5.  Avoid fluff.  Avoid generic words, like flexible or leverage.  Try quantifying or using proof points.  For example, "the industry's deepest and broadest insight into IT-controlled assets" is fluff.  However, something like, "a system covering 95% of the industry's IT-controlled assets" is much more credible and easier to understand.

6.  Test.  Most of us, marketers, don't work in the functional area of our target buyers.  It may be a good idea to test the text with your target audience.  This can be a very revealing exercise.  In my experience, this step has revealed some gems that turned into new marketing tools and lead generation approaches that we never knew existed.  For example, from our customer conversations we discovered an IT community called Spiceworks, that turned out to be one of the best lead  generation sources for SMB markets.