How to Make ‘Thought Leadership’ Part of Your Marketing Mix
Now, the idea of thought leadership is not new. In fact, ‘thought leadership’ as a marketing strategy has been in vogue for a number of years now. The challenge is that many individuals and organizations, particularly smaller organizations, can find the concept of taking on thought leadership daunting, particularly in the face of many larger organizations or more tenured leaders out there leveraging their much more developed content machines to pump out a near-continuous stream of articles…
Marketing Your Negative Space
Through the lens of an organization working with a vulnerable population, marketing can seem at best difficult and at worst an insurmountable challenge; for how can you market the good your organization does when you cannot show the positive impact you have on the population you serve? How can you market the good without showing the good…
Why Every Professional Should Study Public Speaking
What this means is that, in order to ensure a successful interaction, our communication style must be curated to the person to whom we’re speaking and the environment we’re speaking in. The challenge is that often the communication style that we have developed over time is one that is built on a foundation of our comfort rather than its proven success with our audience, whoever that audience may be…
Developing Your Nonprofit Narrative
Storytelling to drive “giving” or donations can feel a little repetitive. A common example is the classic profile piece featuring someone whom the nonprofit has impacted. This is the written, video, or audio piece that introduces an individual, describes a barrier, and then states how the organization helped that person to overcome the barrier. It’s straightforward, it’s easy, and it’s a tempting format to gravitate towards. What this generates is a one-story-fits-all approach where the central…
Figuring Out Your Podcast’s Value-Add in 4 Steps
So I moved on from public speaking to think instead about a concept that, in many ways, is even more relevant to the world of podcasting: the customer experience. Today, the challenge in building a strong customer experience is significant. Why? Because customers across industry expect a connected customer journey where they’re able to build a long-term relationship with a brand, interacting and exchanging value on multiple levels…
Asking is Offering: A better way to reach out on Social
When it comes to email marketing, for instance, one step in your lead generation funnel may be to implement an email nurture sequence – a series of if-then statements where certain actions by a prospect (opening or clicking through an email) trigger certain pieces of content to be sent to that prospect. For example, if they only open my initial email then they are sent email(a). If they open my initial email and click on the link then they are sent email(b). If they don’t open the email at all then they are…
Starting a Podcast: 3 Lessons from the First 10 Episodes
So at this point, if you’re in the business world, the concept of starting a podcast has probably entered your orbit in some form or another. The benefits speak for themselves, content produced in an easily digestible format perfectly suited to the multitasking listener. One of the reasons why many prospective podcasters fail to launch, however, comes down to a perceived operational entry barrier that, having now gone through it, I’d like to take a moment to debunk…
Stop Marketing Problems, Start Marketing Outcomes
To be fair, this problem/solution statement formula works… so long as the audience you’re speaking to immediately connects with your problem statement. Across the board, for a person to take action on a given piece of communication (written or verbal) they need to connect with some part of the message in that communication. The challenge is, where a piece of communication relies wholly on the existence of a problem to explain the value of your solution, that communication fails the…
Leading Your Slides
The problem with this is that, as presentation has evolved, so too has our audience’s expectations of the speaker. They are no longer content with the stylistic break that we see in many speakers as they move from conversation, to stage, and back again. Instead, the concept of ‘authenticity’ in public speaking is the expectation that a speaker is the same person both on and off the stage…