Author: Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert
A lifelong activist, profitability and marketing specialist Shel Horowitz’s mission is to fix crises like hunger, poverty, racism, war, and catastrophic climate change—by showing the business world how fixing them can make a profit. An author, international speaker, and TEDx Talker, his award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, lays out a blueprint for creating and MARKETING those profitable change-making products and services. He is happy to help you craft your messaging and develop profit strategies. Learn more (and download excerpts from the book) at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com
Like me, he sees a free press as an essential cornerstone of democracy, and he promises editiorial independence from the bean-counters. I personally have my doubts if mainstream media can regain its credibility in a world where so many media properties convey the message of their corporate masters. It will be refreshing if the papers in the Buffett group can really show their independence.
Whereas outbound marketing often provided consumers with fantasies (think of Budweiser commercials or luxury car ads,) inbound marketing provides consumers with facts. People aren’t researching and gathering information on what fantasy a company is trying to sell them on, they are researching the efficacy of their products, and (with ever-growing regularity) the social and environmental policies of specific brands.
If you’ve followed me for a while, you know that I’m a huge believer in pull marketing, in putting the consumer in the driver’s seat to actively seek out solutions and find you. All the way back in 1985, when I published my first marketing book, I talked about effective Yellow Pages presence. Yellow Pages was the web browser of its time, a way to seek out and compare all the providers of a service and make a decision based on who could serve you best. By the time I did my most recent (sixth) marketing book, the award-winning and category-best-selling Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, I devoted significant space to inbound/pull strategies, from social media to Internet discussion groups. This kind of marketing is not at all intrusive; in fact, it’s welcomed.
But the insight that the reason it works so well is that it’s based in fact rather than fantasy is something I’ve never articulated. And I find it particularly interesting because the common marketing wisdom is that emotions do the selling, and intellect serves only to justify the purchase to others. I’ve never believed that; I have said for years that the best selling uses both emotion and rationality, complementing each other. To put it another way, selling is much easier when the buyer has both the need and the desire. Either one by itself is rarely enough to close a purchase.
By coincidence, I’m reading a book right now that says businesses don’t need to advertise—but it makes a huge exception for directory listings (including Yellow Pages and search engine ads). I was having trouble with that differentiation, until I read this article. Now I finally understand what the authors are getting at: advertising = fantasy, while listings = fact.
I’m not sure I agree, but at least now I see where they’re coming from.
What do you think—and feel—about this? Please share below.
Fracking—a highly toxic method of extracting natural gas by filling rocks with poisonous chemicals and blowing them apart—has been linked to severe water pollution, among other problems.
This continues Vermont’s record of progressive legislation that includes forcing the owners of Vermont Yankee to abide by the end of its original licensing term (unfortunately overridden by a federal judge who, in my opinion and the opinion of many others, wildly overreached his authority) and providing universal health care.
Okay, I admit it. While I see catastrophic climate change as a deep and real danger, I do find some comfort in the short term.
It was great that I barely had to pick up the snow shovel last winter. And it’s great that we’re already gathering blueberries off our bush, about three weeks early. The irises were in almost a month early, bringing welcome color to our yard.
And the zucchini is flowering already; we’ll be eating it soon. That’s usually mid-July, here in Western Massachusetts.
I’m looking forward to a long and productive garden season, especially welcome because last year’s garden got destroyed halfway through the season by Hurricane Irene.
“Everything will be all right in the end. If it is not all right, then it is not yet the end.”
—Sonny (Dev Patel), in “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”
What a delight! The more you’ve traveled in developing countries, the more you will relate to this charming and yet deeply socially conscious movie (I have not been to India, but I found that my experiences in Latin America—and particularly Mexico—made it very easy to relate to the characters and their adventures.)
First off, it’s an excellent window on India—not the glitzy and modern upper-class Mumbai or Delhi of so many Bollywood movies, but the noisy, colorful, aromatic and yes, gritty reality of the working classes and poor of a less touristed Indian city (Jaipur). Yes, pretty much every one has a mobile phone, the hotel owner has a computer (a very ancient one), and three of the characters work at an Internet customer service company. Yet feels like an India pretty much unaffected by rapid technological change, and I found that quite charming.
Second, it’s another terrific performance by Dev Patel (you’ll recognize him; he played the lead in “Slumdog Millionaire”), this time as the eternally optimistic keeper of the decrepit rusk of a hotel that he’s trying to reinvent as “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for the Elderly & Beautiful.”
We get to follow his first group of guests, a diverse bunch of aging Brits with a big range of reasons for making the trip. Some wholeheartedly embrace the adventure, one hides from it, and one enters the tableaux as an anti-black, anti-Indian racist who only crossed continents to get a faster and much less expensive hip replacement. Love interests and friendships spring up all over the place, including one traveler’s search for his long-lost male lover from 40 years earlier.
Besides the exotic travel and romantic comedy aspects, the movie addresses many issues at play in both India and the West: untouchability, arranged marriages versus love relationships, the economic collapse, same-sex relationships, racism, poverty, the place of secrets versus sharing in a relationship, cultural immersion versus tourism, family dynamics, and rose-colored-glasses optimism versus “business reality.”
When making any marketing purchase, you want to know what it will bring you. Too many business owners forget that step, and buy blindly, wasting a ton of money.
This morning, I got a call from a promotional products salesman that illustrates this all-too-well. This a real conversation, as best as I can transcribe it from memory:
Me: I don’t do advertising specialties, because I don’t even meet most of my clients. I get them from my books, from online networking, from my speeches…
Salesman: Would you like more traffic to your website? We do these beautiful laser-engraved pens with your website URL.
Me: I already get about 50,000 visits a month to my site.
Salesman: Well, imagine hundreds of thousands more visitors.
Would you type in a URL from these pens?
Me: You think I’m going to get hundreds of thousands of visitors by giving out pens? Let me ask you—when was the last time you visited a website because someone gave you a pen with the URL?
Salesman: Most of the pens I’ve seen don’t have URLs.
Me: Well, I’ve seen plenty that do. I read every printed pen I get. And I can’t think of a single one that got me to type in the URL.
First of all, the guy is out of touch. URLs have been appearing on pens for years. I did a quick survey of ten random custom pens in my stash; half had a URL, and some of the others, like a pen from Hyatt hotels, didn’t really need one because the URL is obvious. If you’re going to do any kind of promotional product, you want your URL nice and prominent on it. And second, he was so completely clueless about the ROI for me. The ROI for him is obvious: a commission. But what’s the benefit to me? Zero.
Mind you, I’m not dissing the category of promotional items. I’ve seen examples that work well: an auto sunshade with huge block letters on both sides, promoting a mayoral candidate (she won)…a mug that stays on your desk as a reminder, month after month, a solar calculator promoting a solar energy consultant…lawn signs with the silhouette of the mountain a local environmental group was trying to save, along with both phone and URL (they won).
In fact, I’m actually planning to experiment with a small run of imprinted seed packages; I believe they will harmonize with my message of business growth through green principles. I’ll hand these out when I speak at green business conferences, and maybe throw a few out to the audience for answering questions correctly in general business conferences.
Promotional products make sense when there’s not only a good fit between the marketing vehicle and the brand, but also a good fit between the utility of the product and the visibility of the marketing message. On that last, it’s the difference between items like pens or worse, sunglasses, where the marketing message is hard to read and too small to do much branding anyway—and something that actually might be useful for marketing, say, a t-shirt or tote bag, where the message can easily attract attention.
What are some of the best and worst marketing purchases you’ve made (or seen), from an ROI perspective? Comment below.
Nina Amir and I have known each other online for a few years now; we finally got to meet at the BEA Bloggers conference last week in New York. But I had the post scheduled long before then, as part of Nina’s blog tour. It’s alo an example of the kind of great material you’ll find in the upcoming series of e-books I intend to pubish as part of a series called Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers.
Yes, I already have a single-volume book by that name. But as I’ve been updating and revising for the new edition, I decided it was a bit overwhelming to be just one book; there’s so much good new cool stuff on book marketing nowadays.
Nina’s expertise is blog-to-book—and interestingly both keynote talks at the BEA Bloggers day were from bloggers who had published books. And with that, I give her the floor.
—Shel
How to Write and Promote Your Book One Post at a Time By Nina Amir
If you want to create an author’s platform, a fan base, a tribe, a community, even a movement around your book, or around the idea upon which your book is based, the most effective or inexpensive tool you can use to achieve this goal is a blog. And if you want promote that book or idea from the moment you write the first word of your manuscript, you can do this quickly and efficiently by blogging your book. Simply write, publish and promote your book one post at a time on the Internet.
With a blogged book you write your book from scratch in post-sized bits and publish them in cyberspace. In the process, you promote your work and develop a fan base for your book (and for yourself).
To blog a book and create both a successful book, one that sells later to readers and to publishers (if you desire), and successful blog, one with a large or growing blog readership, follow these eight steps.
Choose your book topic carefully. Make sure the topic you plan to write interests you and interests a lot of other people but also is one about which you feel passionate.
Evaluate your book’s success potential. See your book through the eyes of an acquisitions editor. To do this, go through each section of a book proposal and accumulate the necessary information as an evaluation process.
Angle your topic: Consider if you need to angle your book differently to make it unique in both the book store and the blogosphere.
Create a content plan. A table of contents works for nonfiction. For fiction or memoir, map out your story arc or create a timeline. Include material that will not appear on your blog.
Write your book in post-sized bits. Blog posts are short–250-500. Break your nonfiction chapters into many subheadings or sections. For fiction or memoir, divide your story arc and time line into vignettes or scenes.
Blog 2-7 times per week. Write a short bit of your book (a post) in a word processing program to create a manuscript. Then copy and paste this into your blogging program, and publish it.
Share your posts on social networks. Include a link to your most recent blog post in your status updates on your social networks.
Edit your manuscript. Take the time to revise the first draft you created, and hire a professional editor to give it a final polish.
If your blog and book stem from your sense of passion and purpose, you have the opportunity to build something larger than a blog community. You can create a movement—inspire people not only to gather around your blog and buy your book but to go out into the world and take action. In this way, your fans promote for you by sharing your blog posts and by taking on your cause.
About the Author
Nina Amir, Inspiration-to-Creation Coach, inspires people to combine their purpose and passion so they Achieve More Inspired Results. She motivates both writers and non-writers to create publishable and published products, careers as authors and to achieve their goals and fulfill their purpose. She blogged her book, How to Blog a Book, Write, Publish and Promote Your Work One Post at a Time (Writer’s Digest Books), in five months. Find out more about her at www.ninaamir.com or www.copywrightcommunications.com.
I’ve said for years that industrial designers should have to live and work with their products for six to twelve months before they’re released to the market. It’s much easier to fix the bugs pre-release, but the designers don’t actually use the product, so they don’t see the bugs.
“I’m not a fish” is the one that too-often rules the design world. He shows slides of a culvert designed to transport fish—but designed so fish can’t use it. The industrial designer is unable to think like his or her “customer,” and the project fails.
Some of the others, among them “not my job” and “the world changed” lead to other types of stupidity. Most of them are actual real-life examples—but I’m hoping the photo of a sign that says “Caution: This sign has sharp edges. Do not touch the edges of this sign” in large, dramatic letters, and then in tiny letters, “also, the bridge is out ahead” is a joke.
The seventh item, “broken on purpose,” is about thinking differently—about making your project not only attractive to the right people, but unattractive to the wrong people. If you want to stimulate your brain toward genius, pay careful attention to that segment.
