So, Let's Talk strategy! (Part 1)

"Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things." - Miyamoto Musashi (1584 - 1645), Japanese Swordsman

"The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do." - Michael Porter

NOTE: This is part one of this article, and parts 2 and 3 will eventually provide more detail.

Strategy Foundations
LJB and I had a super strategy session this morning...and I plan to share a specific info about it in the very near future...but first, I want to provide some foundational thoughts to strategy. At the end of the day, authors want to connect with people and share something of value with the them. In return, profit-oriented authors make money. So, how do we devise a strategy for your work to make money?

Betalkaboutable Strategy #1 - Know Your Freakin' Customer!
Aside from stealing or counterfeiting, the ONLY way to make money is to help people...and get paid for your product or service that helped them. So, you need to know how your work is helping your fellow human. If you've failed to figure this out, keep failing and don't stop...but make sure you learn from each failure! Know your customer better than they know themselves!



Betalkaboutable Strategy #2 - No Sucky Content!
There are a million things you can do to try and make money as "an author," but your content CANNOT SUCK! You have to have a great, talkaboutable product if you are an author (or an artist or musician for that matter). CC and Ann wrote contentrulesbook.com, and it covers a lot of this type of info about content. To disclose, CC is a friend, and he totally knows what he is talking about. Other than that book, I would study any other great authors and any good content out there on the internizzle...study it.



Now, I believe firmly in a concept (and am pretty sure I came up with the concept) called "Return on Content." This is based on the marketing operations measurement work I've done...for example, we invested in white papers at Siebel. Those papers took time/money to make...and some produced way more leads and business than others! The same rule applies to media companies who will shut off a TV show that doesn't have enough audience (as audience = ad dollars). Authors, marketers, media companies, and software companies create a TON of content...it's endless. Where do you focus? How do you maximize the return on the investment in content? Well, first...it really helps to think of your investment of time and/or money in content as something that needs to maximize a return. Then, you manufacture content, measure the return, and optimize it. So, that means you need to get a feedback loop in place ASAP...that way, you know when you are creating good content and you know what metrics you are moving the needle on. If you don't know where to start, you gotta start somewhere! Take a an educated risk.

betalkaboutable Strategy #3 - betalkaboutable!
This should be obvious, but if people don't want to talk about your content, it sucks. If people aren't talking about your content/media/work, refer to rule #1 and #2. In the world of social media, people are in a constant state of talking, liking, twitching, and talking about content as noted here. It's now part of human behavior...if you have great content, people will talk about it...and being talkaboutable leads to sales!

That's it for now! Feedback always appreciated!

Product Marketing Services

Product Marketing has two key goals 1) understanding customers deeply 2) growing product revenues by serving those customers better than the competition.

Product Marketing solves problems across the product life-cycle and across the customer experience. There are four key product marketing activities:

1. customer analysis: Understanding and defining the voice and psychology of the customer, customer profit and cost drivers, behavioral profiles and processes, needs and desires, thoughts and feelings, user experience and task analysis, segmentation, trends, satisfaction drivers, and, ultimately, whatever makes customers refer to you as something they liked buying, using, and would recommend to others.
2. messaging/customer interaction: Designing concise and impactful messages, customer experiences and information architectures that engage, ways to maximize "return on content," interactions that lead to revenue, and, ultimately, content and communications frameworks that work in sales AND marketing for BOTH traditional AND social channels.
3. sales enablement: Developing applications, scripts, tools, incentives, giveaways, infographics, videos, training, methodologies, events, relationships, business cases, calculators, presentations, process and funnel metrics, technology capabilities, and, ultimately, doing whatever is necessary to help the cash register ring and move the deal forward.
4. marketing: Reaching target customers to get attention, interest, and engagement in a world where prospects are addicted to search and social media but have a very short attention span...and, ultimately, doing it in a way that is talkaboutable across every marketing channel.

Market developments, another thing to write about soon: http://ping.fm/i3L6Y

Betalking or betalkaboutable?

there is "betalking" ...and...there is
"betalkaboutable" .
no matter what, you likely want the latter.