So Here’s Your Challenge

Have you ever felt that each year, there is yet another set of marketing buzzwords that you need to learn? Service marketing, value marketing, values-based marketing, content marketing, Social Media marketing, and the list goes on. What these terms all have in common is the connection between your organization and its target prospects: the relationship.
While much has already been written about relationship marketing, sometimes unpacking the term in a different way will yield some different (and valuable) insights. Consider, the four Rs of Growth:  Recruitment, Retention, Referral, and Recovery.
 

How long is your attention span?  How long is the attention span of your clients, colleagues, or kids?  The conventional wisdom is that it is very short – 30 seconds – the length of a typical TV commercial.  Supposedly, the attention span of a Gen-Xer is even shorter.
Thankfully, both of these urban legends are wrong – very wrong.  The attention span is highly variable, but is dependent on two key factors, both of which are under your control.

There is an eerie parallel between marketing automation today, and desktop publishing in the mid-late 1980’s.  Back then, the newfound ability to choose between so many fonts/sizes/styles gave the writer incredible power when it came to formatting and layout.  Some of what was produced was brilliant – but most was a disaster.  Today, marketers have been given similar superpowers: some superpowers are being used brilliantly, and some… not so much so.  (And some marketers don’t even know what these marketing automation superpowers actually are.)  
 

In the olden days, domain names were easy.  Take your brand, add dot com and you’re done.  Those of us who didn’t want to fight the squatters also registered the dot net and dot org versions.  But with 100's of domains available, how many is too many?

The biggest risk in email fraud isn’t clumsy emails of this nature, but when a hacker gets access to your email account, and actually sends their requests directly from the account itself.  

The world is changing: it’s getting smaller. Ironically though, the smaller it gets, the more choice there seems to be.
So much choice means that we need to know what we are looking for, and why, before we begin our expedition of discovery.

Whenever there is uncertainty, we look for answers. We investigate alternatives, and then choose a course of action. Often, however, we are unsatisfied with the results, or have a sinking feeling that we’ve missed a key piece of information along the way.
 

There is absolutely nothing wrong with incremental improvement: in fact, it should be part of the day-to-day processes.  But when there is an inflection point – new year, new strategy, new staff in the role, new senior leadership, etc – it is a shame to squander the opportunity to make substantive, and possibly transformational, improvements.
 

Have you ever listened to a presentation, and felt the signal-to-noise ratio could have been improved?  Or have you ever delivered a critical presentation, and felt that you could have done better… but you were not precisely sure how?
Too often we add debris into our presentations.  These are those filler words, unrelated sidebars, and administrative notes that we unwittingly slip in.  They get in the way: debris obscures your point, distracts the listener, and extends the amount of time required to deliver your message.

Most first impressions are formed within the first 10 seconds of conversation. Most hiring managers will take only 20-40 seconds to screen a resume. Most prospects will tune out a sales presentations in the same amount of time. What is the key to forming that first great impression?