Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating. Facebook is not taking over the world (yet), but it is taking over the internet with their recent changes.

I’m not a Fan anymore…

In fact, nowadays, no one is. This was the first of the big Facebook changes. People are no longer ‘fans’ of your Facebook Page, but instead they ‘like’ it.

A lot of people are arguing that this devalues the relationship between the user and the Page. Really? Because that single click it took to become a fan carries so much more weight than the single click it takes to ‘like’ the page?

I don’t think so. At the Social Fresh conference a few weeks back, I was reminded that you can’t overvalue that one click. The emphasis should be on user engagement and loyalty- and that doesn’t change just because you change what you call the people who support your page.

Facebook is following you…. Everywhere

Facebook’s change from ‘fanning’ a page to ‘liking’ it made a whole lot more sense once they rolled out Open Graph at the F8 Developer Conference. Now, you can pretty much ‘like’ anything on the Internet. It started off with just a few partnered websites- CNN, Pandora, Levi’s, to name a few- but has quickly spread across the internet (all it takes to add the social plugins to your site is some simple coding).

What does this mean, exactly?

It means that your Facebook identity is following you everywhere. When you visit a site that has one of Facebook’s plugins, you will see a Like button that you can click to alert all of your Facebook friends via their newsfeeds that you like the page. But it gets way more in depth than that. Websites can also opt for more robust plugins that will show you how many of your friends like that page or even recommend other pages of the site you might like based on where your friends are.

Think information like that doesn’t matter? Well, I think you’re wrong. And so do 68% of Facebook users. According to a survey by market research and consulting firm Morpace, that‘s the percentage of consumers who say a positive referral from a Facebook friend makes them more likely to buy a specific product or visit a certain retailer.

“Google just found its nemesis” -Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus

Facebook’s recent developments are an effort ‘to make the web a more social place.’ Think about it: Now you aren’t just visiting a website. You are seeing which of your friends already like it and you are able to tell them that you like it too (all without leaving the confines of you desk… or putting down your cell phone).

As Charlie Witkowski of Social Studies Blog puts it, Facebook is paving the way for the web to move from an information-based platform to a social platform. Where Google’s emphasis is search, the emphasis with Facebook is interaction. Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, points out, “Instead of targeting people based on their click behavior or search behavior, it’s targeting based on their relationship to people and to brands and content.”

So, is Google in trouble?

I don’t think so. Sure, Facebook recently beat out the web giant as the most visited site in the U.S. and its user base is reaching a staggering 500 million users worldwide, but I think this just represents a shift in the way people are using the internet. Even the great Google has made efforts to add social components to their ever-expanding empire with Google Buzz.

‘Social media’ is a trendy topic for a reason.

People need to be social (I’m not making this up. It’s a tier in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs). Facebook and other sites with social networking aspects have flourished as people try to fulfill this need. Social media is working because people want that sense of community and belonging, even when it comes through the internet and not face-to-face interactions.

Danielle Hohmeier writes about marketing and design in the digital world for Atomicdust, with a focus on marketing convergence and social media.

Growing up, my parents placed a strong emphasis on education. Whether for the purpose of instilling a love of knowledge, or in an attempt to live vicariously through us the lives they dreamed of, I’m not sure. My guess is the latter.

Either way, they knew a good education would enable us to have the understanding necessary to make important decisions and to choose our own adventure in life.

The term “knowledge is power” is not new, however, it represents a concept that is often forgotten or abused in marketing.

I don’t know which is worse: content that is too top-level, giving the audience only fluffy, feel-good words that do nothing to develop a deeper, more actionable understanding, or bulleted lists of details that go on and on for days. There is a fine line to be walked between a preachy, marketing message and a specifications list that makes eyes’ cross, but when that balance is found, customers gain an education that is comforting and empowers decision making.

The majority of our clients operate in saturated healthcare and technology markets whose competitive landscapes are smeared with parity. When lots of companies with similar products and services are talking to the same people, they are typically trying to out-detail one another in an attempt to stand out. Millions of marketing dollars are spent as bullet points are reworded and reordered. Instead of finding compelling, digestible information, customers find themselves caught in the middle of a subtle battle of semantics.

It’s amazing how precious these details become to companies, when they do nothing to help customers distinguish one brand from the other.

This is where a good – and in many cases, bold – education makes or breaks a relationship. Customers get confused when you have “the most authoritative system” and your competitor has “the most trusted system.” What’s the difference? What does that even mean?

Unless you’re educating them on what your claim really means to you, and more importantly, what it really means to them, they’re likely to stay confused and neutral because they don’t have a clear reason to pick your brand over your competitor’s. Remember, when everyone says they’re the best, no one is the best, and details don’t make strong, emotional connections.

There are numerous ways to create education-driven marketing material. Start by thinking about what happens to the content once it’s left the hands of the sales and marketing teams. What will happen to it once it hits an inbox or loads on a screen? It’s on its own at that point…at least until it’s lined up next to the competition.

Here are some tips:

• You can start by nixing the bullet points (not these bullet points… These bullet points are for dramatic effect).
• Don’t be afraid to not sell. If the content that’s created is purely informative, it can be a more powerful sales tool than the most persuasive pile of marketing jargon. Establishing your company as a resource for helpful information creates a positive, low-pressure impression.
• Be honest, be human and be considerate of the attention span of your customer – education shouldn’t be work.

Combine these approaches with a unique centralized message, and you’ve got a memorable impression that people understand well enough to side with.

Remember that customers don’t want to be sold. They want help. They want something great. They want reassurance. They want know that they’re making a good decision. Knowledge really is power and, in this case, it may be the best sales tool you’ve got.

Jesse McGowan is Account Director at Atomicdust and works with clients to develop marketing strategy.

So often, marketing becomes nothing more than a battle of bullet points. Companies carefully craft PowerPoint presentations filled with details and buzzwords in attempts to beat their competitors. But is that really the most effective way to win customers?  

Read the full article →

Before I started writing this article, I did a few Google searches to come up with the number of marketing messages we see every day. There are quite a few differing opinions but the magic number seems to be around 3,000.

The cacophony of marketing and advertising messages eventually turns into white noise and is filtered out by our brains. We flip past the first ten pages of most magazines, Tivo our way through commercials and mostly ignore offers for free stuff in the margins of Facebook.

A strong position helps to increase awareness by piercing through competitors offerings and imprinting your brand firmly into the hearts and minds of potential customers.

Whether you realize it or not, your company is constantly creating a brand experience for customers. When they interact with you, whether it be with your products and services or with your employees, they form ideas about your brand. You need to craft this brand experience in a calculated and beneficial manner. You need to take steps to control every aspect of the messaging and interactions.

You can do this with your brand positioning.

The fourth law in Jack Trout and Al Ries’ 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing is that “Marketing is not a battle of products, it’s a battle of perceptions.” In other words, it’s not how well a product or service works that determines if consumers will buy or use it, but instead, it’s brand awareness and positioning that influences their decisions.

Developing this position is commonly referred to in business vernacular as a ‘Differentiation Strategy.’ By developing a unique product or service and positioning it as such, companies begin to eliminate competition.

Putting it simply—differentiate or die.

The goal is to be as different as possible while remaining as relevant as possible. Jonathan Ive, the guy who designed the iPod I listen to and the MacBook Pro I’m typing on, takes it a step further.

Ive says, “So many companies are competing against each other with similar agendas. Being superficially different is the goal of so many of the products we see. A preoccupation with differentiation is the concern of many corporations rather than trying to innovate and genuinely taking the time, investing the resources and caring enough to try and make something better.”

It’s essential that you start off by developing a position for your product or service—one that truly sets you apart from the crowd. Once you’ve accomplished that, use it as a measurement for all you do, making sure that everything from your marketing to product development falls neatly in line with that position.

Our Creative Director, Mike Spakowski, talks about messaging on the Atomicdust Blog.

So, how do organizations get their marketing on track? A great place to start is with a clear, central message.

A simple, easy to understand message brings focus to your company and makes it possible to communicate your purpose and why you’re different from the competition. It conveys who you are, what you do and why it will matter now and in the future. It roots marketing campaigns and sales promotions in deeper meaning. It can unify an organization and serve as a roadmap for a brand’s success. You need more that just a website, brochure, newsletter or whatever. You need a platform to grow on and a mantra to measure against.

To read the entire article click the link Start with a Message.

Mike Spakowski is Principal / Creative Director of Atomicdust and is involved with the day-to-day design strategy, art direction and studio management.

When I started outlining this post, I realized there were actually quite a few good reasons to blog for your business. So many, in fact, it would be overwhelming to include them all in a single post. I decided instead to present an abridged overview on each point, and then follow up on those points in detail in future posts.

While I don’t believe any of the information is superfluous, one purpose of blogging is to generate interest and create a following. Think of this post as a summary; a tool to spark your interest. Successive posts promise to explore each topic with more detailed information and thus, you, the reader, will be motivated to come back. Are my motives selfish? Perhaps. But hopefully I have taught you an important lesson in blogging- you’ve got to get your readers to come back for more.

As a quick primer, I’ll refer to Wikipedia’s definition of a blog.

“A blog (a contraction of the term “web log”)[1] is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.”

Now, let’s get on to why ‘regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other materials’ will help you in achieving your business goals.

Establish Expertise and Credibility

Blogging helps you gain expertise in your industry and adds credibility to your business. When you write a post on a topic your company deals with, it not only helps you learn more about the topic, but it also illustrates your knowledge to current and potential clients. Readers gain a deeper understanding of what it is you do and how it can potentially help them in their business endeavors.

For example, if someone is looking for assistance with health care billing and your blog contains fifteen different posts about your company’s experience in that field, the reader will be inspired to seek you out and assist in the buying process.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engines love content, especially when that content is fresh, on topic, and easy for them to find and index.

Blogging allows your business to constantly feed search engines information about your business. Let’s say you wrote three articles with titles such as ‘Health Care Billing Best Practices,’ ‘Health Care Billing for Small Practices’ and ‘Making Health Care Billing Easy.’ You then would have three potential search results for the key phrase ‘health care billing.’ Each new blog post becomes a potential search result and gets potential customers to your website.

Another SEO advantage is that most blogging software automatically creates XML site maps and pings the search engines when new content is generated. An XML site map has the page title, permalink, and publish date. This gets fed directly into the search engines and they send what’s known as a spider to read and index your page.

So when you publish your ‘Health Care Billing Best Practices’ post, your blog software updates the site map and sends a ping to the search engines notifying them of new content. They download your site map, find your URLs and page titles, crawl the page, and add your blog post to the index. All of this happens in about an hour for popular, well established blogs.

Rapport with Clients and Potential Customers

At Atomicdust, we work with a wide range of companies that provide their clients with member-based services. These companies are always looking for ways to foster strong relationships with their customers. Blogging allows you to establish and maintain rapport with both existing and potential customers.

Nowadays, it is easy to become just a phone number, an email address, or a business card. Blogging gives your company personality, or puts a ‘face’ on your brand. The trick here is to connect with your readers. You are already generating content that is important to them, but you also need to convey a tone that is relatable. Customers not only want to like your work, they want to like you.

Blogging gives you another opportunity to shine a light on your company and all that it has to offer.

Let’s assume that one of your current customers is searching for information on a new health care billing company because they are unsure if the service you’re currently offering is fulfilling their business needs. This search lands them back on your website where they find your blog. If your blog properly showcases your services and expertise, the customer will find yet another reason to stay with your company.

Blogging is another vessel to further showcase your talent and personality. It gives current and potential clients a clear picture of your company’s knowledge and reinforces their decision to stay with you or begin a relationship.

Social Media

Social media is the new marketing buzzword. It’s a complex topic, but the basis is simple- social media is the sharing of information and receiving feedback on that information.

A blog allows you to easily push your information through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other outlets. When someone reads your new post, they tweet it to their followers who in turn end up on your site and then retweet the information to their followers.

A single tweet has the potential to reach thousands of readers, but reaching the right ones are important. Since most people are fairly cliquish, they usually have folllowers with similar interests and needs to their own. It’s a good bet that the person who reads your health care post has peers who would also benefit from reading it.

If you can target influential readers, entice them with your posts, and get them to send out  your link in social media channels, you have successfully reached a new group of potential customers.

We’ve established four reasons blogging is good for your business- expertise, SEO, rapport, and social media. In future posts, I will explore each of these topics in more detail. So, bookmark this page, tweet it to your followers, and add our RSS feed to your reader so you can come back for more insights. If you’re already convinced that blogging can help your business, give us a call and we’ll see if we’re a good fit for helping your business achieve its online marketing goals.