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In Your Ear

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Communications and marketing and computing in general is moving beyond the keyboard and text faster and faster. PC and laptop sales continue to decline EXCEPT for 2-in-1s (those laptops that fold into tablets) and hybrids (Microsoft Surface tablets, ipads with keyboards). What’s coming in their place?

In the home, Amazon’s Echo platform (Alexa!) has audio and video models. Google Home does, as well. Facebook is rolling out Portal. All of these respond to your voice.

Mobile phones are VERY close to rolling out foldable phones (think of a book opening) that will usher in a different kind of visual platform. Samsung’s model was briefly demonstrated recently:

In light of this, companies like Snap (makers of Snapchat, which I tend to say bad things about in general) are rethinking their “vertical only” requirements, just like Instagram did a year or two ago, switching from “square only” to “okay, whatever works.”

But with a LOT more voice-controlled systems and keyboard-less interaction and TONS of video seeking to replace text (like this blog post), one concern people keep voicing (and it’s valid) is that we don’t really want to watch video if the sound will bother the people around us. (Okay, yes, there are often jerks who ignore this and play videos anyway, but I don’t mean them).

In Your Ear

Just like Altoids brought a new category to light with “premium mints” because of the rise of Starbucks, I believe that bluetooth earbuds (like the Apple airpod) are going to be a LOT more ubiquitous. I have Google Pixel buds (I don’t recommend them). I found these affordable earbuds with lots of great ratings. I think a lot of the future will be in your ear.

But this means something else.

You know how podcasts seem to be going through their second Renaissance? I think it’ll happen even more. I believe that the audio form AND the video form will thrive. If we evolve our use cases to have a more visual device and personalized speakers, it means we’ll have more audio as well.

The future might well be in your ear.

What Will Suffer?

Text.

“Oh nonsense, Chris. I *love* to read.”

You do. You.

The stats say people (in the US, at least) are reading a TOTAL of 19 minutes a day between email/texts/websites and so on. At the same time, we are consuming digital media on an average of 6 hours a day. If we’re online for 6 hours but only 19 minutes on average is reading… uh, where is everyone?

Video. And audio.

You Want to Reach People? Get In Their Ear

It’s just not really an option any longer. That’s where it’s at. Sorry.

Okay, books are a different matter. In fact, PHYSICAL books are outpacing digital books in sales numbers lately. But don’t think of blogs as books. Don’t think that the platform matters. Medium is seeing a lot of attention right now. LinkedIn is cool. Blah blah blah. OVERALL, the larger world not just us nerds… it’s in the ear.

Get there. 🙂

Earn Your Place in the Inbox

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I just deleted an email without reading it (like you do). The subject line was “Not your typical Monday email.” I deleted it because I knew without a doubt that it would definitely be a typical email. (I just fished it out of the trash. It was a sales offer. Pretty typical. No?)

I’m told by so many people that email marketing is dead or that they have low open rates or that no one cares about email any more. I’m also told that no one reads email any more.

None of this is true. But there’s a massive catch. You have to actually earn your place in the inbox.

Earn Your Place in the Inbox

What gets someone to open your mail?

First, we have to discount the types of mail you really want to receive. If you LOVE fly fishing and “Fly Fishing Weekly” shows up in the inbox, of course you’ll open it. We can’t talk much about that. There’s no lesson learned by trying to copy something beloved.

But what makes you choose to open those letters that aren’t your top passion?

To earn your place in the inbox, your efforts have to touch on at least a few of these important details and points:

A Great Subject Line Helps

I subscribe to the Lefsetz letter about the music industry and culture in general. What makes me open his emails? The subject line. We are a world of browsing-swipe-right-Netflix people now. If the subject line doesn’t catch us, who’s going to open the letter?

The key to a great subject line is the act of promising something of value will be contained within. OR, if you’re clever and tricky, sometimes a clever subject line will get people in. Here are a few samples of recent subject lines I’ve sent out:

  • Connectivity Drives Repeat Business
  • The Simple Mechanism of Marketing
  • What I Told the Rockstar
  • What to Do When Everything Sucks
  • People Want a Guide

None of the subject lines are especially amazing. They’re all kind of “working class.” That’s an aesthetic I really love and push here. You’re welcome to be a bit more fabulous if you want. But the point is the same. Make sure the subject line earns your way in. Boring subject lines equal easy deletes.

What comes next?

Teach me Something

Whether or not you’re selling something, make sure you teach me something. I asked my fiance Jac what makes her choose which newsletters to open and read and she had three main points: newsletters that give her steps to follow, useful takeaways, or some deep research. Those are her top three reasons to read a newsletter. This makes sense when you see the quality of her Maria & Jane newsletter, covering women in the cannabis business world.

Education in a newsletter is a powerful tool.

Make It Human

For years and years, this has been my battle cry. So many people write newsletters as if they’re sending out a web page. They heavily HTML format the newsletter so that it’s very graphically appealing, and there’s barely a touch of humanity in the letter itself. It feels written by slaves chained to desks in a sweatshop. Here’s a hint: if you hate sending it out, no one’s going to love receiving it.

The best way to make a newsletter human is to write as if you have something to tell to a person who matters a great deal to you. Write the letter to be helpful, informative, and dare I risk it, entertaining.

Lead Somewhere

It’s amazing how many newsletters and emails are sent with not much of a sense of what you want the reader to do afterwards. They’ve read the letter. Now what? For my personal newsletter, I just invite people to hit reply. Unless I’m selling something. Then I invite them to click the purchase link OR hit reply.

But letters that end quickly, abruptly, and with no sense of a next step are a wasted opportunity. Give people a chance to go further with you. It makes a world of difference.

Summary: Earn Your Spot

The inbox is still a very powerful place to earn customers. Much better than any specific social media, that’s for sure. People still do go to their inbox. They do still open, click, reply and the like. But only if you make your work worth it to them. Hopefully this helps a bit.

(And if you want to sample my newsletter, sign up here and check out the process for yourself!)

Use Your Voice

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The biggest opportunity all this technology has afforded us is the chance to share what we find interesting and to potentially connect with others we can help or who can enrich our lives or businesses. Formally or otherwise, we have the most opportunity ever, in the history of humans, to connect with people who are into what you are into. It’s baffling how few people choose to take advantage of this.

Use Your Voice

On the lighter side, if you really love recreating junk food in your kitchen, you could start the “Not Twinkies” website. If you are a LEGO minifig modifier who takes existing sets to create your own masterpieces, I know for sure there are others who love what you do. There’s a bunch of people out there, no matter what, who want to talk about what you want to talk about.

Causes and nonprofits know this. People with medical challenges know this (or should). There’s a group or a few strong voices out there speaking about whatever it is you’re into.

And you can be very specific. If you’re ONLY interested in talking with other female accordion players, there’s definitely someone out there waiting for you to gather up ideas and share. If you grew up identifying ramen noodle packs by their colors, not their intended “flavors,” there’s a group that loves to talk about how orange is the only one to eat uncooked. (My Lyft driver says she snacks on the contents of the orange ramen pack UNCOOKED. “Like chips,” she said.)

There Are Only Three Rules

Companies and people alike need to recognize that there are three important rules to this opportunity to interact and to build relationships with others:

  1. Speak to the buyer’s story
  2. Invite interaction
  3. Build to serve

If you want to find these other people with your voice, you have to write (or make video or audio or all the above) in ways that make the person you’re trying to reach the hero of the story, or at least make what you’re sharing feel very accessible.

Blathering AT people without making it easy to connect and interact beyond what you share isn’t all that helpful. I find that I have great conversations with people from all walks of life on Twitter or through email, and in all cases, because I’ve made it easy to connect with me, people feel that they can reach out and ask whatever they want to ask.

When I say “build to serve,” the point of creating any media whatsoever should be to serve others. If you’re writing about insomnia strategies, make it so that others might learn how to get a better night’s sleep. If you’re selling cloud storage solutions, share information that will help your buyers thrive. If you’re going to build content, and use your voice, use it to serve others.

Don’t Worry and Be Self-Conscious

The beauty of this time in our lives is that you don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be honest about the interaction. If you’re a marketing student looking to meet others in your future field, just say that. If you deal with depression and want to know how others tackle the black dog, just say it. It’s an unprecedented time to reach out. Yes, some people might fight back against what you want to talk about, but you’ll also find those who want to share what you’re into.

How will they find you? The way I would find you: google. Search. YouTube. I find you because if you publish your words and videos and thoughts and ideas, I’ll find your voice on the internet somewhere.

That’s the big point. So? Get sharing!

Join me for free and get valuable insights that go beyond the articles posted here.

Your privacy and email address are safe with us.

And thanks so much for your support.

–Chris…

The Myth of Solid Ground

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https://www.flickr.com/photos/perspective/26160548319 Robots already vacuum the floors in lots of people’s homes. They mow lawns. They deliver things in some cities. It looks weird and futuristic until it somehow looks normal and commonplace. We rarely see the “future” when it’s already here.

We Make the Future Invisible Because We Want Solid Ground

I’ve spent a lot of my career on the other side of the hill from where most people are doing business. When people were just getting comfortable with fax orders, I was seeing that this web thing might be more important. When people built their first websites, I saw that tools like Twitter would be a powerful opportunity to reach out and connect with people in a better way. It’s not at ALL that I’m smarter. It’s that I’m willing (maybe even primed) to see how to slot “what’s next” into “what we do right now.” In some ways, that’s because I’m willing to throw away what I have right now in any aspect of my business.

The Myth of Solid Ground

The number one professional “complaint” I hear right now when advocating for a new strategy or the adoption of a new technology is this: “But I just got good at doing X.” It’s at this moment as a business advisor that I often have to gently say, “Doing X isn’t your core business. It’s a tool to earn you more customers. Be willing to throw it out.”

Ooh that bugs people.

We humans love to absorb something new, process it, and then forget about it. We love to master skills and then do nothing more with that skill. It’s like there’s a yellow “unprocessed” status, then a “green” status when we figure something out, and then we set it to “grey” and “this is how it will always be” status. Does that resonate with you? But, that’s the challenge.

Everything changes. That’s the big issue. The definition for “LIFE” even says “…including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.”

Continual change IS PART OF THE DEFINITION OF LIFE!

Movement is Life. Nothing is Permanent. There is No Solid Ground.

Accept that robots are here. Accept that people are shifting from desktops to laptops to mobile to possibly “computerless” interactions. (Things like Alexa, Google Home, etc.)

Be open to the perception that almost every job that exists today might likely shift with the advent of artificial intelligence, and before that, simply from changes that technology and tools bring to the world around us.

Self-driving cars mean that people won’t make as many impulse stops, but it also means they’ll increase their browsing/screen/entertainment/learning/shopping time even more than now (which is at 6 hours a day).

Hold Onto ONLY The “Thing”

Whatever it is that constitutes your primary pursuit, that’s how you need to keep aligning your business efforts. The “how” of this will likely change a lot. Even the “what.” If anything, focus mostly on the “who.” Who are you serving? What do they need right now? What else do they need? What’s coming along that will make what I do for them unnecessary? Is there something else I can learn to do to replace that?

It’s not scary, the lack of solid ground. It’s just we need a shift in YOUR efforts. From “mastery” to “continual learning.” People will need people for quite some time to come. You have a role in helping others. It’s just the mechanics and other details that will likely change a lot in the coming years. (It’s already happening, but change is so hard to perceive until it’s fully in place.)

Where are you holding on a little too tightly to your “solid ground?”

Join me for free and get valuable insights that go beyond the articles posted here.

Your privacy and email address are safe with us.

And thanks so much for your support.

–Chris…

Customers Don't Want Content – They Want a Better Path

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I’m in the business of helping companies use tech to drive better customer interactions. I help companies earn more customers. The most common way people employ me is to help them build content marketing projects, expand their existing ones, or in general, turn their marketing, sales, and communications efforts into something more effective.

Well guess what?

Customer’s Don’t Want Content – They Want a Better Path

The reason I’m so bullish on AI, blockchain, chatbots, IoT, and video media for the future of business is that in all cases, these technologies can be applied to improve the success of a customer’s journey from prospect to so-happy-they-refer-people levels.

Here’s a simple one. Parking lots. The Logan Airport central parking lot in Boston is a zoo. It’s really hard to find a space, even when you pay extra for “Logan Express.” And yet, my son and I went to a sensor-filled parking lot in Braintree that told me at every level how many spaces I might find. This was updated in real time. How? Sensors. Easy. A few dollars per sensor and maybe $100,000 total for the project, including the software. (That sounds like a lot, but if it improves commerce and satisfaction, isn’t it worth it?)

That project isn’t content. It’s really grindy-basic technology. And yet, a customer would be MUCH happier with something like that installed.

Content is Useful Only When It’s Useful

I’m typing this at a Dunkin Donuts at the airport. I wondered to myself which content a customer would actually want in association with coffee, donuts, and whatever else they sell. My thoughts were “A guide to sneaking in Dunkins while you’re on a diet.” I figured that would be fun. Video plus a downloadable PDF would be fun. Right?

But sometimes, a customer doesn’t need content. They need a solution. They need something to work better/faster/clearer. They OFTEN need more communication. They OFTEN need more support. They OFTEN need a better sense of how to navigate something unnatural to them.

Content is JUST ONE of the Marketing Tools a Company Needs

I do think there’s a benefit to content. But I think there’s a massive opportunity to make the customer experience so much better with content *AND* some of these emerging technologies. A really well executed chatbot could change customer interactions immensely. Voice interface is here whether or not you’re using it, and it opens up a lot of new potential use cases for you. Blockchain mixed with the Internet of Things and all those delicious sensors means that you can build some amazing new customer interactions that are fast, with less friction, and that serve everyone involved in better ways.

Sure, make a great piece of content that turns someone on and educates them and makes them feel smarter. But the time is now to look beyond content marketing, digital marketing, social media marketing, and *just* marketing as a way to drive more sales and retain more customers.

What’s next is here now, and it’s your job to make it work. Dig in and start learning, start drawing your customer experience paths, and you know, if you get stuck, drop me a line. I can help.

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