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Leadership Skills: 8 Leader Lessons from the Spirit of Saint Nicholas
We like to write blogs that reflect the season. In this blog, our objective is to find leadership skills from the Spirit of Saint Nicholas.
Upon researching Christmas and Saint Nicholas, we made an unexpected discovery. We had thought that we would find that Santa had his origins in pagan mythology somewhere in the distant past.
Instead, the trail led us back to the fourth century, to an actual Christian pastor, the Bishop of Myra.
Bishop Nicholas was a kind man who cared for the people not only in his congregation but the wider community.
He began to link up those people with an excess of material goods with those who had too little.
But Nicholas did it in a surprising way: he maintained a double-blind. In other words, the giver never knew who received the gift, and the recipient never knew who gave it.
This marvelous arrangement made it possible for people to escape the conditions usually attached to gifts. What a great idea!
Building on this discovery, these are the leadership lessons we draw from our research:
Take great joying in giving without thoughts of receiving
Put your focus on making those around you happy and successful.
Be your authentic self
You must know who you are and who you are not.
Build on the power of your team
Your success depends as much on others than yourself. Build effective leadership skills.
Don’t take yourself too seriously
Always keep yourself in smiles and laughter.
Don’t pout
Remove all negative thoughts.
Always remember who’s naughty and nice
Always help everyone with priority on those who need it the most.
Do things that encourage people to believe in you
You must believe in yourself or no one will. Use all types of leadership skills.
Reward good behavior and performance
No punishment allowed, focus on more carrots for the best results.
Leaders like Saint Nicholas have, throughout history, conquered adversity and struggled to overcome obstacles, to become the great people we know today.
We all can learn from their stories and how they used their leadership abilities to succeed, and in turn, develop our effective leadership strategies to deal with adversity in society.
There are two types of time in our lives: dead time, when people are passive and waiting, and alive time when people are learning and acting and utilizing every second.
Every moment of failure, every moment or situation that we did not deliberately choose or control, presents this choice:
Alive time. Dead time. Which will it be?
Think of what you have been putting off. Issues you declined to deal with. Systemic problems that felt too overwhelming to address.
Dead time is revived when we use it as an opportunity to do what we’ve long needed to do.
Any fool can learn from experience. The trick is to learn from other people’s experience.
Remember, history happens when you least expect it!
Please share a leadership story or experience with this community.
Need some help in capturing more improvements for your staff’s leadership, teamwork, and collaboration? Creative ideas in running or facilitating a team or leadership workshop?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More leadership material from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Build an Effective Team by Being a Talent Hound
Success Enablers of Highly Creative Leaders
Secrets to Becoming a Remarkably Mindful Leader
Leadership Characteristics That Improve Influence |
Culture Design: The Best Ever Solution for Influencing Your Business
Awesome culture design influence on employees can be way beyond what you imagined them to be.
You aren’t in the coffee business serving people. You’re in the people business serving coffee.
– Howard Schultz, Starbucks
David Freemantle and Howard Schultz certainly appreciate how to build awesome culture designs, don’t they? One that has a large influence on your business. Creating such a culture is occupying the minds and activities of a lot of companies that we’re talking about lately.
Check out our thoughts on team leverage.
Here is an example:
I recently was on the phone with an incredibly chipper call center rep at a telecommunications company. He didn’t answer either of the two questions that I had, yet remained friendly throughout the call. As the call ended, he said: “We aim not just to meet your expectations, but exceed them. Have I done that for you today?”.
A more customer-centric response is: “I’m sorry that I can’t answer your questions. Let me find someone who can. Would you like to hold or can I call you back?”
Don’t get us wrong: Company intentions are important. Before we get into the culture part, we always step back with clients and ask “what kind of culture?”
Culture. It’s a word you often hear if you follow blogs on entrepreneurship or read articles on business and management. But what is it exactly?
According to Frances Frei and Anne Morriss at Harvard Business Review:
Culture guides discretionary behavior, and it picks up where the employee handbook leaves off. Culture tells us how to respond to an unusual service request. It says whether to risk telling our bosses about our new ideas, and whether to surface or hide problems. Employees make hundreds of decisions on their own every day, and culture is our guide.
Each culture has different tactics and unique qualities. But, universally, culture is about the employees and making sure they have a fun and productive working environment.
Let’s dive in to learn more about this important subject.
Culture design … why care about culture?
The workplace should not be something that people dread every day. Employees should look forward to going to their jobs. In fact, they should have a hard time leaving because they enjoy the challenges, their co-workers, and the atmosphere. Jobs shouldn’t provoke stress in employees. While the work may be challenging, the culture shouldn’t add to the stress of the work. On the contrary, the culture should be designed to alleviate work-related stress.
This is why culture matters. Culture sustains employee enthusiasm and helps build passion.
You want happy employees because happiness makes for better productivity. And when a business is more productive, that means it is working faster; and when it works faster, it can get a leg up on the competition. So it’s worth the investment for companies to build and nourish their culture.
When you put a focus on culture, you’ll have guiding principles. People will know you for this. Employees will live by it. It’ll help get you through difficult times. You’ll base hiring and firing decisions on the principles. It’ll help get all employees working on the same company mission. In some sense, it’s the glue that keeps the company together.
Here are some of the best cultural elements we use in team workshops with our clients:
Employee empowerment
Train your staff and then empower them and turn them loose. Minimize rules. Let them know that you want them to do what is right and be the customer’s advocate. The simple thought is that while the client is not always right, they always have the right to choose.
Hiring people who fit your culture
Tech Journalist Robert Scoble meets with a lot of CEOs. And when talking about hiring decisions, they always try to make sure they don’t hire jerks. It’s for this reason that companies have such a rigorous hiring process. Some companies like to bring potential hires into work before a final decision. They give the candidates a project and see how they collaborate and how they work with others.
In a post on Harvard Business Review, Eric Sinoway breaks down types of employees and how they impact company culture. The high-performing employees who don’t fit into your culture are known as vampires. These vampires must be terminated because, while performance is solid, their attitude is detrimental to company culture, which is harmful to business.
Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, one of the strongest advocates of high culture, makes an excellent point when he notes that the people you hire represent your company even outside of work. If you meet someone and they tell you where they work, your perception of that place will change based on your opinion of the person. If they’re nice, you’ll view the company in a positive light. If they’re a jerk, you won’t see the company favorably.
This effect can be even greater when it’s a company you’ve never heard of and didn’t previously have any opinion of. If the person is helpful, you’ll view the company as helpful. This is why it’s important to hire individuals who share your business values.
Design culture meaning … total team involvement
Remember in marketing as well as service, everything and everybody is a service provider. Make it a total team effort and culture. Customer service is everyone in the company’s business. Unless every employee assumes responsibility for customer experience and service, you will be missing improvement opportunities.
Do it, don’t procrastinate
We feel the words of Martin Luther King Junior spoken about a half a lifetime ago, apply well as an essential element of culture:
“We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood — it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.”
Good decisions come from anywhere
No one has all the answers. A company where only management makes decisions is a surefire way to send A and B players away to other businesses.
As some companies get bigger, they tend to limit employee freedom. The employees are less and less involved in critical decisions, and their impact on the business is drowned out. It becomes a part of the culture. Employees go to work, do what they’re told, and just help someone else achieve their dream. The worker’s impact on the business is minimal, and they become “just another employee at just another company.”
But this is not what the best employees want.
They want to have a voice and a meaningful impact on the company and its direction. They know that anyone can win a debate with the most senior person at a company. They also know they can create tools for the business without the need for management approval.
Companies have greater success when employees are given the type of freedom that isn’t ruled by a hierarchy, assuming they’re talented employees who fit the culture. Knowing that the right decision can come from anywhere and expanding employee freedom are cornerstones of attracting talented individuals who will fit into the culture if you let them.
Invest in talent and training
Regarding hiring, companies like Whole Foods focus on getting the right people in the door to start with, so that their socialization builds on fueling a fire that’s already there.
Volution (a software company) infuses job announcements with its customer-centric values, and KeyBank tests applicants for natural approaches to customer issues that align with the company’s values.
The bottom line
The lessons of a true culture remain to inspire everyone to do the same. One act of friendliness stands out as a beacon for others to follow.
It’s up to you to keep improving your ability to create a customer-friendly culture.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to each of these steps to improving the elements of a healthy culture?
Have you found additional ways to focus and motivate a true culture in your business?
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is entirely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving your business culture. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on business processes from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Change Management Case Study… 7 Volatile Challenges to Overcome
Business Blog … Learning from the Best Examples
The Business Intelligence Process Part 4 SWOT Analysis
13 Secrets to Making Your Email Websites Marketing Effective
The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think. The task of marketing isn’t easy, is it? It seems to go on forever, and in reality it does. Like in making your email websites marketing secrets work effectively. And getting potential customers to think about you and what you have to say.
Because email is 40 times more effective than social media in customer acquisition, it can’t be ignored. And that is not going to change anytime soon. Email is a technology that has been with us for over 44 years. The first email was sent in 1971 but the concept was explored at MIT as early as 1965 which is 50 years ago. Here are some other email facts in another excerpt from an infographic at sociallystacked.com.
Related post: Visual Content … 13 Remarkable Marketing Examples to Study
In order to do that, you need your subscribers to not just tolerate your emails but to actually get excited about the next email you send them. But your work doesn’t stop there either. You need to cultivate a relationship with your subscribers if you want them to ever buy from you.
The average email open rate depends on the industry, but typically it ranges from 15-25%. That’s a statistic that always surprises me. It is not terrible, but it certainly isn’t good.
Here are some tips to ponder as you try and make a significant improvement to your email websites numbers:
Email websites … value opinions
Do you value the opinions of your customers? I really hope you answered yes. Now, I think most people answer yes to that question, which is great. So why is it that most email lists feel like transmit and receive conversations? That is certainly the wrong way to approach it.
So, what’s the solution? Get your readers involved.
Move email marketing to real-time
The promise of real-time marketing is to meet the needs of consumers with the right message … in the right place … at the right time. There are several challenges to delivering on the promise of real-time marketing, including the personalization of messages, measuring the effectiveness of the marketing efforts, leveraging the data available, and coordinating communications.
Be sure and keep all of these in mind.
Free email accounts … automate and integrate
Deploying multiple campaigns every month can be taxing for any marketing team and can consume a lot of time and effort. Automating certain processes will leave you more time for developing strategy, identifying opportunities, and understanding your email ROI.
Integration is the flip side of automation. By integrating processes around email, your entire marketing program becomes more agile and responsive to market opportunities.
Email marketing evolution
Email continues to be a highly effective digital channel to engage consumers. But the consumer is changing the way they read and react to email, so marketers must respond accordingly.
Consumers take email with them as they move from their desktop to their mobile and laptop or tablet devices. While consumers may be able to open and view email on all devices, they aren’t always taking action – which presents a different challenge.
Still, every customer interaction is a moment of opportunity for marketers to better understand the value created by the engagement and the experience the customer has.
Types of email accounts … compelling subject line
Once you’ve laid the groundwork, it’s time to start working on crafting future emails that your subscribers can’t help but open.
It always starts with writing a great subject line.
The subject line should be written a lot like the headline of a blog post although you have a little more freedom with it.
Focus on the benefit
With this strategy, you focus on the end result from your reader wants most. Answer their question: “What’s in it for me?”
Composing a good email subject line is akin to writing a great headline. If you’re cold-emailing someone you’ve never met, it’s important to strike a balance between being direct and being interesting.
Keep in mind that while it’s always good to be clear, you also don’t want to give anyone a reason to dismiss your email before reading it. For that reason, you’ll want to avoid the stock or cookie-cutter phrases that might get your email lumped in (and glossed over) with others.
Establish your credibility
“Why should I care?” is the tacit question hovering in most people’s minds every time they see an email from someone they don’t know well. This is why establishing your credibility is crucial. Tell your reader why you are different, why you are accomplished, and why they should pay attention to you.
All about value
Think about why new subscribers might open that first email: it’s to get something. At this point, you’re not a friend. You’re not even an acquaintance.
But make sure you have something they want, whether it’s knowledge or a tool.
Related material: Some Great Story and Storytelling Examples to Study
Email websites … trust takes time
You have to earn trust by giving away value, time after time. Once a subscriber realizes that you’re not just trying to make a quick buck off them and that your work is actually making a difference in their lives, they will start to trust you.
Share interesting personal stories
One of the best ways for someone to get to know you and get a glimpse of your life is for you to share personal stories with them. You can do this in your blog posts, but email is another great time to do it. After all, when friends want to tell us a story, they don’t write us a blog post. They send us an email.
Be direct
Never assume that someone is going to read your entire email. You should make it clear from the get-go exactly what you are asking for. That means clarifying why you’re reaching out in the first sentence or two, and no later. Short and sweet is the topic strategy.
Coordinate email & social media
Although powerful email and social media are in their own right, there are still some shortcomings that each one suffers from. Email marketing is totally dependent on the number of users who choose to open the email and click through to the content. It’s also not an immediate response tool.
Social media, on the other hand, is unable to educate users about the wide variety of topics that can be handled in a single email. By its inherent nature, social media ends up scratching the surface of whichever topic it touches.
By syncing email and social media, your brand can make up for the shortcomings of each. Use social media for real-time interaction with your email customers, and deploy emails for in-depth analysis, insights, and conversations with social fans.
Reengage inactive subscribers
Inactive customers typically account for about 60% of a business’s total subscriber base. But, unfortunately, there’s only so much you can do to encourage them to interact with your website or product — someone who’s stopped buying from you usually has reasons for this change in behavior that are impossible to fix via a one-way marketing campaign.
On the other hand, the two-way nature of email communication makes it the perfect, personalized medium for reaching out to inactive users.
Related post: 7 Secrets to the Lego Blog Marketing Campaigns … Effective Marketing?
Through email, you can:
1) understand why they stopped buying from how (and how you can fix it);
2) offer them immediately and sustained incentives to revive their association with your brand (by way of special one-time discounts, coupons, or exclusive service options designed expressly for this purpose).
For example, Dell reaches out to its inactive subscribers to understand the reasons for their prolonged silence, so the folks over there can take corrective measures.
The bottom line
Email marketing is the most effective type of marketing there is by a wide margin. It’s not going away anytime soon.
When you’re attempting to apply these 13 tips to your future emails, remember that they are guidelines, not rules.
If you read this post carefully (maybe even re-read it a few times if you like it), you’ll have a deeper understanding of these principles. At first, they will help a bit. But over time, as you gain experience, there’s no reason you can’t achieve consistent 50+% open rates and record profits.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of word-of-mouth marketing created by remarkable customer service. And put it to good use.
It’s up to you to keep improving your creative marketing strategies. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improve your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
13 Extraordinary Marketing Lessons from Taylor Swift
Learning from 2 of the Best Marketing Strategy Case Studies
14 Jaw-Dropping Guerilla Marketing Lessons and Examples
15 Social Media Marketing Tips To Skyrocket your Marketing Results
If you wanted to learn more about building the best advertisements, how would you go about it? For us, the answer is pretty simple. We learn best by studying and analyzing impressive social media marketing tips and design examples. In this blog, we will define 13 essential marketing tips and design elements we rely on to create effective advertisement messages. We also illustrate with the best examples of each that we could find.
Check out our thoughts on creative marketing.
It is an excellent way to learn and stimulate design ideas. Let’s get started:
Generate fan togetherness
Biltwell makes motorcycle accessories, and they also make great engagement happen on their Facebook page with some fantastic helmet art. Check out this example of the fan helmet art they routinely highlight, which encourages fan submissions and generates a feeling of togetherness around the brand. It seems to be an ongoing campaign of Biltwell’s.
Grab and hold the attention
Did you see Nike’s Re2pect … a Tribute to Yankee Shortstop Derek Jeter? As most of us know, future Baseball Hall of Famer Derek Jeter recently retired. So, one of Jeter’s long-time sponsors, Nike, released a commercial paying tribute to him. The ad’s name “ RE2PECT” is a tip of the cap to Jeter’s jersey number – and a host of athletes and celebrities can be seen paying tribute to the Yankees captain.
Use extraordinary prizes
I think tickets to the World Cup are the single best title that marketers could offer this year, how about you? Hyundai teamed up with YouTube channel Copa90 for a contest with the World Cup of prizes. Check out their video.
Emotional influence
The Zillow real estate company has built an entire marketing campaign on changing home buyers with emotional impact. Have you seen any of them? We like them so much that we have searched for them on YouTube frequently.
“Homecoming” is Zillow’s sixth TV spot, the latest in the company’s highly successful national advertising campaign. You cannot beat these ads. There are no better means of influence or the power of persuasion than emotion. Hands down the best, in our opinion.
Experiences that trigger our emotions are saved and consolidated in lasting memory because the emotions generated by the experiences signal our brains that the skills are important to remember.
The homecoming commercial ending message says it all:
You are not just looking for a house; you are looking for a place for your life to happen.
This commercial focuses on emotional appeal in grand fashion. It is the secret of this business’s success. It creates strong persuasion in our opinion. An excellent example of a successful advertisement design.
Photo contests
If you are going to compete in a picture contest, why not compete in a grand way? National Geography launched a competition on Facebook where fans can experience the thrill of having their photo on a National Geographic magazine cover. Wow, now that is a great incentive, yes? Fans just upload their photos to Facebook, caption it, and they are entered to win a travel package. It seems like a great image generator that fans will also want to share on their Facebook pages.
Social media marketing tips … Four Seasons’ company page
One in three professionals online is on LinkedIn. How many of those are making hotel reservations around the world and spending company money? Plenty. That’s why it’s so smart for Four Seasons to build a helpful, engaging LinkedIn presence.
They feature great videos and graphic content, and they also post job listings. It’s a great example of a LinkedIn company page done well (and they were also selected as one of LinkedIn’s top company pages of 2013).
Social media marketing tips … customer end state needs
Focus on client needs end state and not the means. The end state is the only priority.
A good example of this is this Prudential’s billboard ad. This commercial considers the end state needs of its customers … the retirement needs of target customers are the business’s objective. An excellent interactive graphics drives home the purpose.
Simple messages
Make the message as clean and straightforward as possible. You cannot overachieve on the simplicity of the message. A message that the reader will quickly understand. Keep in mind that pictures are far more valuable than words.
This Guinness “Empty Chair” commercial salutes the character of a community as they honor one of their own who is out of sight, but not out of mind. The choices we make reveal the true nature of our character. Guinness proudly raises a glass to those who are #MadeOfMore.
Social media tips and tricks … relevant to your target market
Misty Copeland is only the third African American female soloist ever to dance for the American Ballet Theatre. But her route to the top was anything but an easy one. She only danced ballet for the first time at the age of 13, a full eight years later than most dance pros start training. And when she began to grow into a woman, she developed muscle tone, large breasts, and big feet – not exactly the accepted shape for a ballerina.
However, her refusal to give up on her dream is celebrated in this impressive new campaign for sports brand Under Armour, called ‘I Will What I Want.’
Have you seen this commercial? If not, take the 60 seconds to review it. It will indeed create a topic of discussion for you and your friends. That is certainly Under Armour’s objective, isn’t it?
Build a Best Vine Challenge
Easter social media contests are tricky. There’s only so many bunny or chocolate references that consumers can withstand. I enjoyed how Mashable brought Easter to Vine with this creativity-inspiring campaign. They explain: “In many countries around the world, decorating Easter eggs is an annual spring tradition. So for this week’s Mashable Vine Challenge, we want you to fire up your imagination, and decorate your own.”
Social media design examples … visual elements
Use pictures/visuals to convey the message much better than words. “Seeing is believing” and “actions speak louder than words” are two common sayings that reflect a bias and preference for visual presentation.
Here is a four minute Samsung ad with 15-20 new features shown for their iPhone. No talking. And so simple that you quickly grasp the features and don’t lose interest. And the coordinated music has a way to keep you tied in emotionally. Creating customer interest doesn’t get any simpler than this, does it? A very simple, yet entertaining design, don’t you think?
Letting the visuals totally carry the messages.
Microsoft’s company page
Sometimes overlooked as one of the big social media channels, LinkedIn is actually the third most popular alongside Facebook and Twitter, according to recent research. If you’re looking for ideas on how to kickstart your LinkedIn efforts for marketing, take a page out of Microsoft’s book. They include behind the scenes looks at the company; question-and-answer posts; blogs and thought leadership; and more.
Storytelling
Have you seen the remarkable branding video design from this South African business? The Bell’s TV commercial features a father whose intrepid spirit demonstrates just what it takes to be a true man of character. The video was created to market and build the brand. It is a very simple story.
It advocates learning to read no matter your age or status in society. To us, it creates pure magic with the story, the visuals, the music and the emotion. It certainly finds emotional triggers
If you haven’t seen it, watch it now, it is only 2 minutes and it will inspire you. It is certainly easier in our top 5 of all time.
Social media design examples … authentic
What do you feel is the single most significant factor in the design of an advertisement? Being the most authentic advertisement design is probably not the top factor, but it is certainly in the top 5, don’t you think? It certainly influences the action taken considerably.
We like to examine advertisements to learn what drives the best ones to be the best and the terrible ones to be that bad. Today we will examine one of the best we have seen in a while. Perhaps one that is the most authentic we have ever seen.
Here is the commercial for you to judge for yourself:
Terry Bradshaw Talks Shingles
Integrated campaign
Your ads should be integrated components of an integrated marketing campaign. Remember; stop interrupting what people interested in, and be what people are interested in.
It was in early 2009 when IBM began its Smarter Planet marketing campaign strategy. At the time, the strategy seemed very ambitious … maybe even a bit risky, even for IBM. But their success was based on a strategy to build out a long-term campaign.
To do this they defined a theme around their vision (Smarter Planet). They used the theme to craft a marketing strategy connecting and integrating many smaller marketing objectives and tactics as they could. They also linked their core competencies to this theme, vision and challenge.
This very successful campaign continues today, 6 years later.
The bottom line
Building a positive social media community engagement is very similar to making friends. Keep it simple and be genuine.
Being social with a great positive engagement isn’t a new way of marketing; it’s a way of doing business. Follow these simple initiative examples and you will be leading the way.
Remember, it is not what advertising does with the consumer; it is what the consumer does after reading the advertisement. After looking over these enablers and Allstate’s mayhem ads … how do you think they did?
What are some of your experiences with advertising as a component of an integrated marketing campaign?
Do you have an advertising design experience to share with this community?
Need some help in capturing more customers from your advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy improving your advertising design?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
More reading on social media lessons from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
KPI Metrics … The Website Performance Indicators You Must Avoid
13 Social Media Marketing Trends Sure to Reduce Business
17 Cardinal Sins to Avoid in a Social Response Strategy
Social Media Next Best Practices … 3 Examples to Study
This concept of changing people’s behavior is the basis of this section, and of social marketing as a whole. We will talk about what social marketing is, and why it can be of use to you in your organization for the next best practices.
Then, we’ll go into more depth on marketing, and discuss what is known as the “4 Ps”–the four elements around which all types of marketing, social or profit-oriented, are centered.
Finally, we’ll finish with an overview of the stages someone will go through if their effort is successful.
Feelings have a critical role in the way customers are influenced.
-David Freemantle
It’s a lot of information, and much of it is more conceptual in nature than many other sections of the ToolBox. The next three sections of this chapter, then, will try to ground these ideas more thoroughly, so they can be used in your day-to-day work.
WHAT IS SOCIAL MARKETING?
So what, exactly, is social marketing? In Social Marketing Report, it’s defined as, “the application of commercial marketing techniques to social problems.” It means to take the same principles used in selling goods–such as shoes, television shows, or pizza–to convince people to change their behavior.
What does that mean? Well, instead of selling hamburgers, you’re selling a life without heart attacks. Instead of convincing teenagers to buy blue jeans, you’re convincing them to buy the advantages of postponing pregnancy.
Of course, if you are selling blue jeans, you’re still trying to influence behavior–you’re convincing people they need to wear your jeans–either for comfort, or for style, or value. So then, what is the difference between social marketing and commercial marketing?
It’s really summed up in one key point: commercial marketing tries to change people’s behavior for the benefit of the marketer; social marketing tries to change people’s behavior for the benefit of the consumer, or of society as a whole.
“I’m not a doctor,” runs the joke. “I just play one on T.V.” Television and other forms of mass media, it seems, are often highly adept at making complicated tasks look simple.
This is especially true when it comes to marketing. The thirty-second ad for toothpaste will seem incredibly simple, even a bit silly–yet we’ll find ourselves humming the jingle in the car on the way home. When we stop by the grocery store a week later, we might pick up that toothpaste, caught by its colorful box and placement on the shelves.
We’ve been grabbed by a successful marketing campaign. It might seem so simple, that we’re barely aware of it–but it really represents a huge amount of research, design, and testing done by the toothpaste corporation.
Social marketing is based on the same principles used to sell that tube of toothpaste. It means using commercial marketing techniques to try and improve social problems. A social marketing campaign might be used, for example, to try to reduce violence against women, or to increase the number of people who sign up as donors for the national bone marrow registry.
Managing a social marketing campaign might look fairly simple–like you’re just putting up more posters to raise awareness of the lead poisoning problem in your community, for example. In reality, however, it’s much more than that. Social marketing is no less than a shift in how you view and run your program or organization. It can be a very effective approach, but it’s one with many details to consider.
On the following few screens, we’ll try to make concrete how you can accomplish many of these details. We’ll start by touching briefly on the importance of social marketing and when might be a sensible time for your group to draw up a social marketing campaign.
Then, we’ll dive into the details of how to manage a social marketing program. We’ll include how to separate consumers into individual groups and how to find out what those groups want (and how you can give it to them). Then, we’ll discuss designing the message, choosing the medium, and finally, implementing and evaluating your work.
WHY SHOULD YOU USE A SOCIAL MARKETING APPROACH?
Social marketing is an approach with a lot of advantages. Perhaps the two most pointed benefits are:
It helps you reach your target audience. Social marketing makes you look at whom you want to influence, and how to sway these people most effectively. And, for this reason,
It works. If creative, thorough marketing has helped numerous companies make millions of dollars, there is no reason, that well-run social marketing campaigns can’t be even more effective, in changing people’s behavior. After all, the benefits of good health (or a clean environment, or an end to date rape) are surely more evident than the benefits of a pair of running shoes.
WHEN SHOULD YOU RUN A SOCIAL MARKETING CAMPAIGN?
So when is the proper time to run a social marketing campaign?
It will depend quite a bit on your program or organization, of course, but generally speaking…
When you are trying to change the behavior of a large number of people. If the number of people who you are trying to reach is small enough that they can be spoken with individually, or in a group, the time is probably not ripe for social marketing. For example, if you are interested in asking students at Pleasant Valley High School to volunteer at the upcoming spring fair, you might speak to them at an assembly, or visit individual classrooms. The development of a social marketing plan is more than is necessary. If, however, you want to increase volunteerism among everyone who lives in Pleasant Valley, a social marketing plan might be just what’s called for.
When you are trying to change behavior over a long period of time. Social marketing plans tend to be for long-term projects, when you are trying to change people’s behavior permanently, or over a long period of time. Generally speaking, if you are asking people to perform a particular action once, efforts to convince them to do so wouldn’t use a social marketing campaign. This is a bit tricky because some of the same principles might be used, or such an action might be a part of a social marketing campaign.
For example, asking people to give blood once at their office wouldn’t be social marketing. However, a concerted effort by the blood bank to try to increase the number of people who donate blood regularly might use office blood drives as a part of the campaign. That effort as a whole might be a social marketing campaign, provided it used the marketing principles we have talked about.
When you have the resources necessary to manage a comprehensive effort. As we’ve seen in the previous two bullets, running a social marketing campaign is not a short-term idea. It’s more of a philosophy that will direct how you approach your work as a whole. Therefore, a social marketing campaign should only be undertaken when you’re ready to use the time and resources it will take to make that shift.
This doesn’t mean your organization or program has to have a lot of money to use a social marketing approach. Excellent social marketing can be done on a shoestring budget if people are excited and willing to put a lot of effort into making it work.
With a dizzying array of new mobile apps created every day, it can be hard to decide where to invest your digital marketing dollars. But certain platforms have become canonical social media marketing tools. Facebook, Twitter, and more recently Instagram and Pinterest are being seen as essential to the digital arm of any campaign.
But being a whiz on one platform doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll be a whiz on the next. A campaign that works on Facebook may not be fair as well on Twitter. It’s important to appreciate the nuance of each platform.
With that in mind, here are three beautifully executed social marketing campaigns.
Ford
Ford decided to market its C-Max hybrid with a cutting-edge campaign that integrated customer Instagram photos into a C-Max commercial. For those who have been sleeping under a rock for the last year, Instagram is a social photography app that lets users capture, modify and share compelling photos with their friends. The social and visual nature of the app makes it a prime target for marketers.
The core of the idea is to use Instagram to create one of the first collaborative stop motion animations. First, a 30-second animation was created and individual frames were stripped out of it to create 98 billboards that are going up all across the country.
Anyone can stand in front of one of these billboards, take a picture, and hashtag it #CMAX. A backend system was built to scrape Instagram for these pics and sequentially order them using image recognition software.
What you get is a collaborative animation that is constantly changing as new people upload their pictures. If you live in a big city, there might just be a board near you!
Check out the campaign here.
Nike
Nike has been reinventing consumer choice with NikeiD, a program that lets users design their own Nike sneakers.
Nike PHOTOiD goes one step further and socializes the whole process. Users are invented to submit Instagram photos from which Nike’s software will automatically design a sneaker based on the photo’s dominant colors. Users can then either purchase the sneaker or share their creations with friends.
Check out the campaign here.
Taco Bell
Every year, South By South West (commonly called SXSW) attracts tens of thousands of music fans to Austin, Texas. Taco Bell targeted this young audience by making them the focal point of its Feed the Beat“rockumentary.” Fans were encouraged to tweet with the hashtag #feedthebeat images and videos of a show. All the footage and images were compiled by a documentarian. The final project yielded 500,000 views.
See the campaign here.
These are just three examples of innovative social media campaigns. Have any of your own? Let us know in the comments
Community Engagement: 15 Unforgettable Ways to Build a Community
We don’t have an attention shortage; we have an attention shortage. Seth certainly has nailed this statement, hasn’t he? With the amount of information doubling every two years, the amount of competition for your thoughts is enormous. So, if you are a blogger like me or a media expert, you quickly recognize you need to build community engagement.
Check out our thoughts on customer focus.
Why does some people’s work draw great attention while your work stays persistently underrated? You may be missing the most powerful user attractions of all – an engaging headline and an awesome lead-in paragraph.
Related: Improve Telling Stories by Employing These Remarkable Examples
Interesting information, well presented, showing emotion, always grabs and holds attention, yes? Keep in mind that people don’t watch ads … they watch what interests them. Your messages must be interesting to your target communities.
“Ever read a testimonial on a website and wonder if the person actually said that? The most powerful video we have ever published has been a video testimonial from one of our customers. Seeing is believing, and having a testimonial on camera makes it that much more credible and personal. Our video was planned, filmed and edited by a professional firm. It was worth every penny.” ~ Andrew Hoeft, Pinpoint Software, Inc.
Here are some awesome ways to make it easier to attract and build a community:
Community engagement … get emotional
Don’t be afraid to talk about your feelings. Feelings are the energy of your material, and if you don’t use them, your article can’t move forward. People can relate to a feeling while they don’t necessary relate to a number, statistic, or even logic. Emotions are the connecting threads of all humans regardless of the arena, use them. If you are struggling to find the emotion behind your story, then you aren’t telling the right story.
There are no better means of influence or persuasion than emotion. Hands down the best, in our opinion. The higher degree of emotion creates the more differentiation and makes it easier for your brand to project uniqueness and its word of mouth messages. Emotion is the secret language of the brain … many brands know that working on emotion will improve their persuasion or influence.
Images and multimedia
A photo can often mean the difference between your work being popular vs. being just so-so. A photo helps explain the story and can draw the eye of those scanning the page.
Make sure your multimedia is high-quality; always provide digital photos in high resolution (300 dpi) and, if possible, have them shot by a professional. A bad photo will reflect on the quality of your work.
Community engagement examples … surprise
Surprises in headlines or lead-in paragraphs work because human brains like a novelty. Compared to expected pleasant events, unpredicted pleasant things “turn on” the pleasure centers in our brains even more.
Thus, surprises prove to be far more stimulating and grab our attention much quicker than things we know well and even really like. This explains why people can subconsciously prefer an unexpected experience over something they want.
Personalize … talk to each person
You have to talk directly to someone in order for them to commit their attention. You can’t craft your message for the masses; craft it for one person and the masses will respond. I had told the story before about how I used to hate to write. I hated it because I thought there are all these rules. When I forgot about the rules and just wrote as if I was talking to someone, I found my love of writing.
And people began to respond. In fact, many of my blog posts come from conversations I have with clients. Just write like you are talking to a customer and talk to your customer’s like they are the only one that matters. Because they are.
Referencing your community means using “you” in your writing. Seeing it, the reader immediately feels known and named. The construction gains attention because our brains are focused on solving problems. Actively searching for solutions to problems is part of our survival instinct. That’s why when a reader is in the precise target community, he thinks, “That’s for me!”
This tip also feeds into people’s self-interest. In other words, when you speak to your readers’ needs, desires, and emotions, you answer the main question in their minds: “What’s in it for me?”
Questions
Questions that prime our curiosity are powerful brain influencers. Whereas, if we already know from the headline what we are getting next, our curiosity may be over before it begins.
The best questions are about something readers can relate to or want to know about.
Community engagement marketing … use stories and storytelling
Stories are the connecting threads of all humans regardless of the arena, so put them to good use. If you are struggling to find the emotion behind your story, then you aren’t telling the right story.
The ability to influence is very difficult without a contextual story. Don’t tell facts to influence, tell stories. The more you improve storytelling, the more your influence … it is as simple as that.
Stories make it easier for people to understand. They are the best way, by far, to spread your ideas and ability to influence.
Research lead by Melanie Green and Timothy Brock reveals that trying to persuade people by telling them stories works extremely well. While we are all often resistant to the idea of being told what to do, we are very susceptible to agreeing with the ‘moral of the story’ and its influence due to how it is presented to us. Great stories and storytelling can do this for us all.
Bring the community into the story
Your community has to see themselves in the story. They have to imagine themselves using your product, your service, or your advice. If they can’t picture that, then you aren’t telling your story to them. Tell the story and make them the hero.
Your job is to get them to believe they are Rocky at the top of the steps pumping their fists in the air. Remember how that made you feel when you watched the movie? You can hear the music, right?
Try to give that feeling to your audience with your stories.
Curiosity
There’s a psychological phenomenon you can use effectively called the curiosity gap. This is the gap between something a person knows and something he or she wants to know. People start to feel a kind of deprivation when they notice a gap in their knowledge.
It’s possible to provoke that feeling by providing just a bit of information. Once a person knows a little, they will want to find out more and fill in the missing information so they can feel better.
With this in mind, try to “prime the pump” by giving readers some intriguing (though incomplete) information in your headline, telling them enough to spark their curiosity but not so much that you give your story away.
Attract an engaging community … simple messages
Superb messages and visuals need to be so simple that you quickly grasp them and don’t lose interest. Keep in mind that pictures are far more valuable than words. And often the use of music has a way to keep the community tied in. Creating customer interest does get any simpler than this, does it?
Avoid sameness at all costs
People want to join a community for a variety of reasons. But one of the most important reasons is the originality of thought within the community. They will avoid being a part of a community of sameness. So work ever so hard at creating new and original thinking. And remember all new ideas begin in a non-conforming mind that questions some tenet of the conventional wisdom.
Community engagement examples … using quotes
A quote can lend authority to an article, introduce an expert, and further advance the story. Most important, quotes can introduce personal feelings, comments, and opinion, so this is where you want to use superlatives and emotive language (without sounding like hype). Be sure quotes are in a conversational style, and don’t merely cite facts or figures–no real person speaks only in data.
Community engagement strategies … specificity
Quantifiable concrete facts, especially those that form images in our heads, can create intense interest. Figures imply research and add to the writer’s legitimacy. Any specificity works: digits, names, examples, projections, descriptions, titles, results, etc. Specificity in the headline demonstrates your article is in-depth.
Also, when you are specific, it provides clarity and assurance to readers about what they will be getting into if they click.
Conclusion
When employing these ways to attract and build a community, you may find that one technique works well for a while but then starts delivering diminishing returns. Don’t worry. Just try another, and keep looking for new ways to engage your community. Be experimental and playful toward what you are writing and ruthless about testing.
It’s up to you to keep improving your creative marketing efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
More reading on social media marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Improve Telling Stories by Employing These Remarkable Examples
Find your Content Marketing Creative Ideas
Creative Ideas Can Add to Publix Social Media Marketing
Social Media Campaigns to Stimulate Learning
Like this short blog? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.
Common SEO Mistakes You Absolutely Must Know and Avoid
SEO is only one way to get your content found, but it’s essential for content marketers to understand its basic principles. During Content Marketing World, Stephan Spencer, co-author of The Art of SEO, shared nine common SEO mistakes you should avoid.
Please note that all of these suggestions are intended to help you maximize your SEO potential. Some of the tips below are things that do work well in social, but they aren’t necessarily best practices when it comes to SEO. There is often no downside to applying the principles if you are focused on SEO.
Content doesn’t go to a source
Don’t think that social media sites are good homes for content. They can be great places to promote the content, but that content usually doesn’t appear on the page’s HTML source code, which is what search engines monitor.
Remarkable content needs a home where it appears in the source code. For example, a blog hosted on the company’s main domain will boost SEO because the content appears in the page’s searchable code. An added benefit? Being hosted on the home site, the blog draws attention to other content on the page. “A rising tide lifts all boats,” Spencer says.
One other tip – don’t think the content in the actual videos on YouTube moves your Google rankings higher. The search influencers in YouTube are the titles and keywords – the actual text.
Example of what NOT to do:
BuzzFeed may seem like a great home for your content to help boost SEO, but it isn’t. Examine the post, “12 Things Women Do Every Day That are Fearless,” authored by Victoria’s Secret. When you check the article’s HTML source code, BuzzFeed does not include the words “Victoria’s Secret.” If you click on the author’s page, the source code includes Victoria’s Secret but few will visit the page and it won’t do much to help SEO. “Post where you’re going to get the most (SEO) juice,” Spencer advises.
You go for likes, not links
“It’s not a social media strategy if it’s not underpinned by SEO,” Spencer says. “Otherwise you’re making a lot of noise without going after a goal.” Viral social traffic is helpful as an intermediary step because the content is more likely to reach bloggers or influencers who can share the content, which would then be tracked by Google, but make sure to include at least one link in the text of your social content so users can read AND click.
Example of what NOT to do: The Flattering Man by Old Spice is a likable and shareable campaign that promotes a faux product – the push-up muscle shirt (clothing that squeezes fat into muscles) — then interrupts the “ad” with a red-flashing screen before the hot Old Spice model appears and tries to dissuade viewers from buying the shirt in favor of Old Spice body spray.
The SEO mistake? The words “Old Spice” never appear in the page’s HTML source, which also means there is no link to the Old Spice website. The Flattering Man site may be receiving flattery (shares and likes), but that does nothing to make Old Spice attractive to search engines nor does it drive traffic to Old Spice’s site.
You use the wrong (or no) words
Research the words your targets are using with tools such as Google Trends. Or, just start by typing words into the Google search box to see what suggestions are automatically populated below it. Spencer says another free tool, Soovle.com, allows you to enter a word and see the autocomplete results from multiple search engines, including Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, and Wikipedia.
Examples of what NOT to do:
Spencer shared how one company’s legal department mandated the use of “home loans” on its website rather than the more searchable term, “mortgage.” Another company opted to use “kitchen electrics” rather than words like blenders, mixers, and toasters. The SEO results weren’t surprising. When the technical terms were used, the site tracked low and flat.
You are targeting the wrong audience
“You might be writing content for your customer base and it gets really great reviews from your customers … but from an SEO standpoint, you blew it,” Spencer says. If you want to boost your SEO rankings, then content needs to be created for and attractive to the “Linkerati” — users that have authority in the eye of Google. He offers MozRank, Majestic’s Citation Flow and Trust Flow, and CEMPTER Power*Trust as tools to identify link authorities.
You don’t enlist help from someone with a lot of SEO influence
Power users plant the seeds in social media. They promote your content to their subscribers and fan base. Spencer advises content marketers to build rapport and relationships with power users in their industry and then provide them with remarkable content worth pushing to their audiences. He offers more how-to insight in his “The Social Media Underground” article.
Example of what TO do: Spencer’s client, Overnight Prints, partnered with web entrepreneur Jeremy Schoemaker to create a contest to design Schoemaker’s new business card (the winning prize was free business cards for life). Shoemaker’s involvement influenced search because he promoted the contest and Overnight Prints on his highly visited websites, blog, and social media, and included links to the Overnight Prints-hosted contest page. Prior to the online campaign, Overnight Prints were nowhere to be found on searches for “business cards.” During the campaign, it ranked second and stayed there for months.
You buy into SEO myths
Thinking meta keywords or descriptions will help your SEO? Stop. It’s a myth — they never count in Google’s algorithm. As for country-specific sites creating duplicate-content issues in Google? It’s a myth too. SEO is an experimental science that you can reverse engineer, and you don’t need to buy into the myths, Spencer says. He has heard so much wrong information that he came up with more than 70 incorrect notions – 36 myths.
You break your site
When you redesign or create a new website, don’t dismiss the old website pages. If you kill the site, you kill the rankings, Spencer says. Old pages that have boosted SEO should never be deleted; instead, you should be using 302 redirects to keep those pages in play and current. Also, ensure all the images and links are properly reconnected so they continue to appear in a website redesign or page upgrades.
Examples of what NOT to do:
Mentos created a killer campaign and a wildly successful SEO-optimized site, Mentosintern.com. The concept was simple — an intern sat in front of a webcam for the summer and would execute consumer requests. But Mentos didn’t keep the site up after the campaign was completed — it’s not broken, it’s dead, and so is the impact on Mentos’ SEO.
TurboTax hosted a rapid music video contest with the winner of “The Tax Rap” receiving $25,000. “They nailed it,” Spencer says. But when TurboTax redesigned its site, the rap’s new page had a broken link to the image. “Google doesn’t trust sites with broken links,” he notes.
You don’t have a plan for systematic outreach
To scale your outreach to Linkerati and influencers, create processes. Spencer advocates creating systems for prospecting, leveraging your CRM, distributing templates with personalization, moderating, following up, and creating a pipeline. Spencer goes into detail in this article, “Scaling and Systemizing Your Link Building.” He also suggests using a tool like Pitchbox.com to facilitate the process.
You don’t gather intel
Know what keywords work well for your site and your competitors’ sites. Establish baselines and track your keyword success. Spencer offers these platform-specific analytic tools:
- Authority Labs provides daily search-engine ranking reports.
- Voot tracks and trends YouTube video performance, engagement data, video comments, and even search.
- Google Webmaster Tools, Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, and Ahrefs quantify and qualify inbound links (who is linking to your site/page) and some will show how to compare your inbound link statistics to other URLs.
The bottom line
Now that you know what not to do, you know what to do to boost your SEO. Spencer cautions content marketers not to be overwhelmed by the SEO process. He suggests that you pick out three of the lessons learned and get started today.
As you gain ground in knowledge and success, add another actionable tip to push your content up the ladder of SEO success.
Extremely Creative People Have Many Unusual Habits
When you have an idea, you’re driven by an inner force. Creative people get into their own world, and we don’t know what happens in their heads. What we do know, however, is that creativity means nothing without persistence and effort. Plus, some habits. Creatives have specific habits that help them turn creativity into a daily routine.
Are you continuously trying to create new social media posts, Instagram photos, blog posts, articles, press releases, and promotional strategies? Have you paid attention to your creative process when creating these things?
Here are 18 habits of creative people. They can inspire you to do things differently and find a way to keep the creative process going.
Risk
An idea may seem silly at the beginning. When you first tell it to someone, they may laugh at you. Do you think that Jack Dorsey and his team had it easy when they got the idea of Twitter? Of course not! It was new. It was risky. Fortunately, they took the risk.
Collaboration
Maybe a painter could work alone, but even they need to get inspired by other people. There’s no great novelist who didn’t rely on an editor and publisher. Jack Dorsey didn’t create Twitter alone. For a modern creative business, you need to get an outside perspective, which might shift or support ideas.
Me time
“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
– Aldous Huxley
When you want to understand your ideas and get deep into your mind to test them, you’ll naturally gravitate towards solitude. Does this mean you have to be an introvert to be as creative as you possibly could? No. Extroverts can be just as creative as introverts. The key to success is in the balance.
Creatives need both socializing and solitude at different times. They depend on the surroundings if they want to get better ideas, but they also need their time to reconsider their own opinions and dig deep into their creative hub.
Preparation
If you thought that the most creative people could start creating in a matter of seconds after getting an idea, you were wrong. Dan Pearce, a resume writer at Careers Booster, explains that a creative project needs systematic work.
“When we have an idea, we have to find the existing thoughts and patterns that led to it. When I write a new project, I have to connect the dots in my own mind, and then connect them with the ideas of the client. That process takes time and effort. Most of all, it takes planning to bring everything together,”
– Dan Pearce.
Conservation of ideas
Sometimes you get an idea in the middle of the night. You think: “This is great; I should start doing something about it.” In the morning, you start your usual day and continue with the current project. Later, you’ll be left only with the impression of your idea. You know you had something, but you lost a particular element that was very important: the excitement.
That’s why creative people write down their ideas. Every single one of them. Have you seen Dostoevsky’s notes and doodles? The writer used to write down all ideas before transforming them into the novels we still read and love.
Movement
Yes, it’s a habit. Haruki Murakami, one of the most appreciated and inventive novelists of our time, commits to an intense running schedule. This is what he said in an interview for the Paris Review when asked about the structure of a typical workday:
“When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4 a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9 p.m.”
You need physical strength to carry the burden of creativity. When an idea tortures you, you’ll spend many hours and days working on it. Just like Murakami, you need a habit that brings you to a healthy, energized body.
Routine
“I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism,” “I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”
– Murakami continued in the same interview
Routines are not as bad as we think they are. They are not killing our creativity; they are supporting it.
Flexibility
Creativity is not a 9-to-5 job. Let’s take Murakami’s routine as an example again. Did you notice something unusual there? He wakes up at 4 a.m. and works in the very early morning. He probably experimented a bit and found that his mind works best in that chunk of the day.
Analyze your own circadian rhythm to find out how you function in different parts of the night and day. Then, follow the lead and create when you’re most inspired.
Wondering
“People love Facebook. Hmm, I wonder why. I wonder how I could use their love for social media to create something new for them.”
Do you see the point in this mental concept? Curiosity is what drives ideas.
Creative people have a habit of intense conversations with themselves. They wonder, and they try to find the answers within.
Observing
The world is your greatest inspiration. Marcel Proust’s incredible memory was triggered by a madeleine.
“I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.”
This was no ordinary cake. Nothing is ordinary in this world! A single ray of light can inspire you to create something beautiful; you just need to notice it. Observe!
Reflection
Whenever you see something interesting, you should wonder if you could apply it to what you’re doing. If you’re in the marketing niche, you can get inspired by novels, paintings, nature… anything. Reflect on your impressions and think about how you can accumulate new ideas from them. Then, write those ideas down.
Daydreaming
What’s creation without imagination? Routines are good, and commitment is even better. But, sometimes you need to unleash your mind, so you can observe how it works when you don’t control it. You may find beautiful ideas hidden there.
Embracing obstacles
Have you heard about posttraumatic growth? All people suffer, but some of them find ways to express the experience of trauma through beautiful creations.
Posttraumatic growth is characterized by greater personal strength and the identification of new possibilities. When you’re at a low point in your life, try to find those new possibilities. Turn the struggles into a foundation for growth.
Traveling
Hemingway used to live in different countries throughout his life. He needed to meet different people and explore their culture and drinks, lots of drinks.
Traveling opens your viewpoint. It makes you see, explore, experience, wonder! That’s what creativity is all about, isn’t it?
Accepting Failure
Resilience is an important personal strength that keeps creatives going. The creative process often comes with repeated failures. You need to test different approaches, and many of them will be total failures. Then, you’ll find the one that works.
Self-expression
What is creativity, anyway? It’s a form of self-expression.
Take Allen Ginsberg’s tip: “Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.”
You get opportunities to express your unique ideas, desires, and character through every single project you work on. Use it!
Losing track of time
Have you had a creative moment so great that you couldn’t sleep, eat, or do anything else for days? You lost track of time and simply followed the flow. Yes, creativity can do that to you. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi gave an inspiring TED talk on that flow.
“There’s this focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get immediate feedback. You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though, difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger. And once the conditions are present, what you are doing becomes worth doing for its own sake.”
Mindfulness
We don’t know exactly when meditation originated, but we can assume that people had that ability and need to work with their own minds since… forever. Today, we have scientific proof that meditation helps us learn and remember, but it also makes us introspective and self-aware. Do you notice the connection with creativity?
A great number of Fortune 500 companies, including Apple and Google, offer mindfulness and meditation classes for their employees. Why?
Because meditation supports the creative process. It brings you to a place where you’re alone with your thoughts, and you can finally understand yourself. The process of such achievement is long and needs hard work. That’s why you need to turn this into a habit.
The bottom line
Creativity is a blessing, but it can also become torture if you don’t know how to express it. When you adopt certain habits, you’ll be able to support the process and find the best way to bring it to action. Hopefully, adopting the habits of creative people from this article will lead you to a better, more creative state of being and working.
Fool-Proof Tactics to Find More Growth Sweet Spots
Many successful small businesses were started by entrepreneurs with an ability to find growth sweet spots. They were able to take their insight and capitalize on it in a new and creative way. Businesses from Uber and Lyft to Airbnb and HomeAway are just some of the most recent examples of entrepreneurs benefiting from emerging trends.
But just because it’s been done before doesn’t mean it is easy to find more growth sweet spots and capitalize on them.
Smart entrepreneurs are always looking for an edge. They want to know how they can identify trends and how they can use that skill to build and grow a business. Fortunately, there are steps you can take develop this skill yourself.
What are consumer growth trends?
A new behavior. A new attitude or opinion. A new expectation. Any of these can form the basis of a consumer trend. Underneath our definition lies a model that juxtaposes multiple dimensions of external change against human nature, which, at its most fundamental, doesn’t change.
Basic needs such us status, creativity, self-improvement don’t change. The way we address these needs through new products and services changes and forms the basis of a new trend.
Can you give an example of a fundamental trend that doesn’t change? – The trend changes. Basic needs stay the same.
But it’s not enough to simply understand a trend. You want to know where and how trends will emerge and crucially, which opportunities they will present to you.
The fundamental growth elements
There are three fundamental elements that drive all trends:
- Basic Needs
- Drivers of Change
- Innovations
The secret ingredient of trends however isn’t actually any of one of these elements. Rather, it’s the tension created as the three elements interact with one another.
This tension can best be identified by understanding customer expectations and by looking for gaps between what customers want – both now and in the future – and what they are currently being offered.
Understanding this enables you to hit the sweet spot of trend-driven innovation with your new offering – when you beat customers’ expectations and resolve this tension.
Think about how Airbnb changed our expectation from travel towards a more authentic experience, how Uber changed the way we expect to move through the city or Tesla! Who would have thought an electric car can also be sexy to drive?
Here are ten keys to find growth sweet spots:
Anticipate change
I frequently remind coaching clients that the only constant changes. Believe it. Assume that change is coming and look for it.
Change can be either social — as in the rise of socially responsible business — or technological, as exemplified by the growth of mobile commerce. Sometimes change can be both. Social media is a great example of that.
The basic tools of the growth trend tracker are seeing, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. In other words, every sense that can be used to get information about the world should be employed in looking for upcoming changes.
Start by reading and watching everything you can. That should include general interest news outlets, trade publications, blogs, government reports, and casual conversations overheard in elevators. Be especially alert for problems people are talking about.
Consider using trend-tracking tools like Google Trends, Topsy, and Trendhunter to help you zero-in on trends that are worth investigating further. You won’t be the only entrepreneur looking for business ideas on these platforms, but you can use them to dig deeper to validate hunches.
Listen and observe
