How to Craft a Marketing Story that People Embrace and Share

You’re telling a story.

Whether you know it or not, or intend to or not … you absolutely are.

Everything you do to market your business is another paragraph, page, or chapter in the story people hear from you. And the story people hear is the one they act (or don’t act) on, and repeat (or don’t repeat) to others.

Now, it’s not necessarily fatal if you’re not aware you’re telling a story, and you’ll never completely control your story anyway. But purposeful storytelling is the mark of the great novelist, screenwriter, and playwright — and purposeful marketing stories are a sure sign of a great content marketer.

So why not tell your story on purpose? Here’s how.

1. Know your audience

The battle is won or lost, right here. Put me up against the greatest writer in the world, and if I understand the audience better, I will kick his or her ass every time when it comes to connection, engagement, and conversion.

What do you need to know? You need to know whom they admire, and what they aspire to, despise, fear, and cherish.

Instead of sitting around dreaming up content you guess people might react favorably to, you tell an educated story based on one or more archetypal individuals who represent the whole.

Understanding your audience at such an intimate level makes creating buyer personas important. It also helps you be a part of the market you’re speaking to, which results in a more authentic story and easier leadership of the community you form.

Research doesn’t sound sexy, but it’s the foundation of any smart marketing plan. The more time you spend understanding the people you’re talking to, the better story you’ll tell them.

2. Select your frame

When you know your audience well, what you’re really tuning in to is the way your people view the world. And when you understand the worldview your prospects share — the things they believe — you can frame your story in a way that resonates so strongly with them that you enjoy an “unfair” advantage over your competition.

Consider these competing worldviews, framed differently by simple word choice:

• Fitness Enthusiast vs. Gym Rat
• Progressive vs. Moonbat
• Businessman vs. The Man

These are extreme examples, and you can cater to audience beliefs and worldviews without resorting to name-calling. For example, the simple word “green” can provoke visceral reactions at the far sides of the environmental worldview spectrum, while also prompting less-intense emotions in the vast middle.

Framing your story against a polar opposite, by definition, will make some love you and others ignore or even despise you. That’s not only okay, it’s necessary.

You’ll likely never convert those at the other end of the spectrum, but your core base will share your content and help you penetrate the vast group in the middle — and that’s where growth comes from.

3. Choose your premise

The premise is the way you choose to tell the story so that you get the conclusion you desire. It’s the delivery of the framed message with dramatic tension and one or more relatable heroes so that your goals are achieved.

• It’s the hook, the angle, the purple cow.
• It’s the difference between a good story and an ignored story.
• It’s the clear path between attention and action.

It’s important to understand the difference between the beliefs or worldview of your audience (the frame) and the expression of that belief or worldview back to them.

Think about your favorite novel or film … the same information could have been transmitted another way, but just not as well. In fact, stories have been retold over and over throughout the ages — some are just better told than others.

The premise is essentially the difference between success and failure (or good and great) when it comes to copywriting and storytelling.

Content marketing as storytelling

“Marketing succeeds when enough people with similar worldviews come together in a way that allows marketers to reach them cost-effectively.” – Seth Godin

That’s exactly what content marketing allows you to do. In fact, it’s the most cost-effective (and just plain ol’ effective) online marketing method ever devised when done properly.

Even better, people aren’t just coming together. They’re coming together around you.

You’re telling a story.

Why not make it remarkable?


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Dominate Social Media With 3 Killer Metrics

DO YOU remember when metrics were all about hard data? You looked at spreadsheets that contained inbound searches, conversions, and other numbers, then used those numbers to determine how well your campaign was performing. That wasn’t a lot of fun, but at the time, it was effective.

Luckily, social media has managed to move metrics beyond hard data. You already know that you need to pay attention to “Likes,” referral traffic, and other common social media metrics. What you may not realize is that there are other important metrics that brands often forget about.

These metrics go beyond “Likes” – they let you see what is really going on with your customer base and stay on top of your social media presence. Now you have the opportunity to gauge how people feel about you – allowing you to see the people behind the numbers.

Suddenly, you see “Joe” and “Sue” instead of “Customer X” and “Customer Y.”

Brand Sentiment

Brand sentiment is one of the best ways to find out what Joe, Sue, and the gang have to say.

First, though, let’s take a closer look at this metric.

Brand sentiment refers to the emotion that people display when they mention your brand. Most people are emotional on social media, so with brand sentiment, you can measure happiness, annoyance, excitement, anger and more to get a better idea of how people view your company.

In fact, studies have shown that messages online could influence emotions offline, allowing you to really tap into a positive emotional state and link that – in a productive way – to your brand.

This emotional aspect goes beyond simply looking at mentions, and gives you insight into how people truly feel when they interact with you, or are exposed to your content on social media.

Measuring Brand Sentiment & Using the Results

As much as you may want to make your least favorite employee measure every social media mention, there is a better way to assess brand sentiment.

Social Mention is one of the best tools out there. Type the name of your brand into the site’s search bar and you will get sentiment statistics across various networks. You will see the number of positive, neutral, and negative mentions and get a sentiment ratio.

Hootsuite Insights is another great option. You can get a report for overall sentiment and then break it down by location, gender, and language. That way, you can determine whether your sentiment is solid across the board or if you have weak spots that you need to address.

You’ll need to gauge your brand sentiment on a daily basis, checking for any positive or negative changes. If you notice a drop in sentiment, you should determine what caused the decline.

A drop may have to do with something in your industry, or it may be brand specific. Either way, you need to address the problem so your brand sentiment doesn’t continue to slide.

This is obviously going to take some trial and error, but if you catch the issue quickly by monitoring your results, you’ll be in much better shape.

Plus, once you get the hang of it and start taking the right action to get things back on track – your public perception will be back on the upswing. Let’s face it – Brand Sentiment is really like a popularity contest, and you always want to come in first!

Customer Response Rates

Brand sentiment is just one piece of the puzzle. Put another piece in by measuring your customer response rates.

According to a social media industry report by Sprout Social, 43 percent of the messages people send to brands on social networks require a response. That is a huge increase from the 15 percent that required a response in Quarter 3 of 2013.

Unfortunately, a lot of brands haven’t made the adjustment to this change. They either don’t check their social media inboxes on a regular basis, or check them but treat the platform the same way they treat email. They will get to it when they get to it. It might be a day, or it might be a week.

If you find yourself getting lazy about responses, it could cost you some customers. While you might want to wait until tomorrow, it’s a good idea to take action today.

If you fail to message people back in the timeframe they want, you can expect to experience a fall out. Sixty percent of people say they dish out some type of negative consequence when they don’t receive a timely response, including telling their friends and family, escalating the concern, or buying less from the company in the future.

So, without adequate follow up, you could be setting yourself up for a negative – and public – response from over HALF of the customers who reach out to you!

Let’s look at how to avoid that, shall we?

Measuring Response Rates & Using the Results

Use an analytics tool like Sprout Social to track response rates and streamline replies. Once you have your rates in hand, work on improving them to really optimize your customer relations.

Need some hard quantifiers to get started? Aim to keep your response rate within an hour or two to really maintain customer happiness.

According to Search Engine Watch, 65 percent of Twitter users expect a response within two hours when they send a message to a brand. The percentage goes up when people send complaints to brands. In fact, 72 percent of people expect the brand to message them back within an hour when they submit a complaint.

You can always get faster, whether you need to hire a team dedicated to responding to messages or provide around-the-clock service.

Share of Voice

So far, you have looked at metrics that focus on your brand. Now, it’s time to switch gears and look at a metric that focuses on your competitors.

You need to see how you stack up against the competition, which is why the share of voice metric is critical.

Share of voice (SOV) refers to the number of mentions your brand receives when compared to the number of mentions that your competition receives. For example, if brands within your industry receive 100 mentions, and you end up with 50 of those mentions, your SOV is 50 percent. That is fantastic and really shows the influence of your brand within your target group AND niche.

On the other hand, if you only have 5 mentions, your share is at 5 percent. That means you need to roll up your sleeves and get to work to improve it.

Share of voice is about more than just dominating the conversation. It can also help you increase your market share. According to the Nielsen Company, if your share of voice is larger than your share of market, your market share will grow. The research company states that if your SOV is 10 points higher than your share of the market, your market share will grow half a percent. The percentage continues to go up as your SOV increases.

Measuring Share of Voice & Using the Results

Analytics programs make measuring your share of voice a snap. You can compare keywords to see which brand is dominating the market. You just need to run a report comparing the keywords to determine how you fare against the competition.

For some quick tips on breaking down your own personal results, be sure you have a Social Mention search ready to go, and then take a look at this quick article on creating a Share of Voice Report by Convince & Convert.

This quick analysis will really help you know where you stand. This is a great – and useful – way of levelling the playing field, simply by being in-the-know.

From there, you can up your game, and increase your SOV accordingly. Simply spend some time looking at what your top competition is doing, and take some notes about where you can improve:

• Does your competition have consistently active viewers due to really engaging posts?
• Is their content upbeat and positive, increasing their brand sentiment?
• Do they reply quickly to customer mentions, which results in a great customer response rate?

See how quickly each of these killer metrics become interwoven, and how they are all so important?

Coming Full Circle

When it comes to analytics, a lot of the most important metrics get ignored. But, being aware of the impact certain stats can have – and how they influence each other – may really help you hone in on the best marketing plan for your social media efforts.

Brand sentiment, response rate and share of voice can each provide a snapshot of how your strategy resonates with your viewers. All together, they become a powerful assessment of your overall performance and reputation on social media.

Get started now: add these analytics to your marketing strategy so you can improve your customer experience and your bottom line.

While you’re at it, take a quick look at these ways to boost your social media efficiency and really up your social media game!

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Getting Smart With Email Marketing Segmentation

There is a fierce competition for attention in your subscribers’ inbox. Now! is the perfect time to make your emails effectively deliver more value.

Segmentation is a seemingly simple but extremely powerful mechanism. Many are already segmenting to some extent, but how about taking advantage of more advanced email segmentation?

Email marketing segmentation: The art of thinking in groups

Email marketing segmentation is the art of thinking in groups. You have to realize that your email list consists of different kind of people, with different behavior, profiles, and interests. But if your subscribers are so different, why treat them all the same? The solution is splitting your email list into groups that are alike (let’s call them segments).

Now we can approach each email segment in a way that is right for them. An insurance company, for instance, would have very different emails already only based on age, family composition, and car ownership. Each group deserves a different email stream, with proper content and offers. No need to talk about car insurance if you don’t own a car. That is what basic segmentation allows you to do, as long as you have the groups identified.

So far, so good; Email marketing segmentation is emailing to groups.

Better email marketing segmentation means that you look beyond what you think is obvious. For example, instead of making the emails fit with the current place of your subscriber in the customer lifecycle and what they are currently buying, it can also be made to appeal to their future or aspirational self; the person they want to be seen as – a tactic that has shown big success for many Luxury brands. Another example is using negative data, a preference in Brand or topic X that indicates a disinterest in Y.

The main business drivers behind segmentation

So what are the main drivers to start with smarter segmentation? Of course, subscribers appreciate getting better targetted and tailored emails. If an email is relevant, it makes for a better customer experience. But we also want to see business goals being met. More profit!

Segmented campaigns perform better. According to DMA, marketers have found a 760% increase in email revenue from segmented campaigns. This makes perfect sense: The more relevant the message, the more likely your subscriber is to act on it.

So, segmented and targeted email campaigns generate a much higher uplift compared to the results of a blanket, spray-and-pray email campaigns. This image from a research by Optimove shows how that works. Imagine segmenting and targeting all customers and then calculating the average customer value.

The segmented group had an average of $42 per customer, compared to $28 when unsegmented. What you see in this overview of (RFM) segmented groups is that the group VIPs is the most profitable with $150, very different than the “recently churned” group with $3. Not all groups are created equal. By naming the groups you understand that it is pretty silly to send everyone the same campaigns.

Because of email marketing segmentation, the average value per customer goes up. This results in a far more successful email marketing program. The research from Optimove found that the smaller the target group, the larger the uplift. For example, targetted campaign to groups with up to 150 customers had at least a $1.90 uplift per customer, while target groups of 1,500+ had an uplift of at most $0.50 (almost a 4:1 ratio). This makes me eager to Shrink my Segments, the ultimate goal of the elusive “segment of one”.

Look beyond segmentation for increased results

There is an overwhelming number of ways you can segment your list. Still, it is not only the segmentation that is going make the impact. If your marketing messages are highly segemented but badly executed, they will end up being highly segmented highly targeted lousy emails.

Segmentation Model x Execution = Combined Impact

Making your email segmentation more sophisticated is one of the ways to make a better match between your email campaigns and your subscribers. Crafting a sharper email or better use of the segmentation data (for instance more creatively) can be another. The end goal is to bring a plus to the bottom line, while retaining ROI. So the segmentation model needs to have enough impact and represent viable groups of sufficient size.

Pillars of Segmentation: Layered email marketing Segmentation Models

Email marketing segmentation doesn’t stop at selecting group A or B. Once you start layering segmentation criteria, the possibilities are almost endless. It is only limited by the available data. That is why we create segmentation models. All the data in your database – or even combined, derived or external data – can be used to create these segmentation models. There are what I like to call the Pillars of Segmentation – these describe the types of Data and Segmentation that can be used and then combined to create your models.

Segmentations can be based on all types of data, including:

Geographics (Location and related data)
Demographics and Profile (age, gender, social status)
Psychographics (lifestyle and AIO, meaning Attitudes, Interests, and Opinions)
Behavioural (Purchases, opens, clicks, website browsing, etc)

Attention all email marketers: If you have behavioral data available, it is extremely important not to let this go to waste. It might be a bit harder to get that data prepped for marketing purposes, but once it is set-up it can be a great indicator for future interests and behavior. By sorting past orders and purchases by category, price range, etc a whole new plethora of segmentation options opens up.

7000% increase in email marketing revenues

An example of huge increases in revenue by segmentation comes from Totes Isotoner Corp. They noticed that a lot of online shoppers repeatedly visited just a single product category: umbrellas, gloves, or boots. They decided to pitch these consumers with segmented email marketing campaigns focussed on the categories that were visited. The email offers brought many of the “lookers” actively clicking and buying.

Data can be combined or layered to achieve the level of targeting needed. For instance sending an invitation for a popconcert, we select the people that live close to the location and have indicated that they like that type of music. We add a focus on one of the artist that is performing at the concert if they bought a song or browsed the artist’s page recently. Of course we send a very different promotion to the group that is more interested in very different type of music.

Advanced email segmentation

More advanced email segmentation campaigns make use of combined or derived  data to go a step further. For instance segmentation on Customer Lifetime Value, crafting Buyer Personas or propensity modeling.

Segmenting on Customer lifetime value

For instance the customer lifetime value can be a segmentation criteria. It takes multiple pieces of purchase, costs and profile data to make such a calculation. But after you have calculated customer lifetime value it is possible to target your best customers, exclude your worst customers or craft specific campaigns for the part of the email list with the highest potential for growth.

Buyer Persona’s and customer behavior
There are different types of clients. Sometimes these buyer types are typecast as personas, but it can on a different (more practical) level too. By selecting the people that were high spenders and have seen a decline in spending the last months, you are looking to spending patterns. Looking back at previous behavior it is possible to identify and craft your messages to fit this group.

Predicting future behavior with propensity models

A group of statistical methods and scorecards that is used to predict future behaviour of customers. This behaviour includes the likeliness to respond to different types of offers, risk of churn, cross and upsell possibilities, etc. Now you might be thinking: how advanced and sophisticated should I make my segmentation? This differs from case to case. Let me give you an example.

An example of email marketing segmentation

An online fashion retailer for instance, can get great results segmenting on gender. Showing the men’s items to men and women’s’ items to women. But if they combine it with size and style preferences they can level up to even better results. Offering the right sizes on the landing pages and excluding sizes not in stock. Offering casual, business, and other styles the recipient is most likely to buy.

Adding the amount someone is likely to spend can furthermore increase results. Send sales emails to coupon clippers and VIP invites to exclusive high end shoppers.

Excluding the ones that just recently purchased and offering them an alternative makes those email more effective for that group.

Choose your segmentation model based on impact

Now which of those (or combination) has the highest impact per recipient effected? And which has the biggest impact on bottom line total revenue? Yes, some segmentations can be very costly to realise.  If you are playing around with segmentation models, try creating grid of segmentation options, costs versus their impact to find the “Quick win” and “build upon” segmentation models. Then test and improve upon it before making it your base and your running further segmented campaigns.

Segmentation as a part of the email marketing plan

Every time you select a group from your email database, it’s email marketing segmentation. This is a seemingly simple but extremely powerful mechanism. An email marketer can slice and dice his list and craft messages that fit the segments, ultimately lifting results. Segmentation should therefore be a part of every healthy email marketing strategy.

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