The Digital Business

I recently watched an excellent webinar from BtoB Online called “From Caveman to Customer: What the Evolution of Storytelling Means to Marketers”. (Featuring Lynn Randall and Laura Lear.) This presentation talked about how our brains have adapted to our use of technology and how that has changed the way we respond to storytelling. There were a few points that I found very interesting and wanted to share. Understanding these changes in the way we think and behave is important to making sure you are creating the right kind of content for your audience.

In any form of communication, if something doesn’t grab our attention in the first 9 seconds, we opt out and stop paying attention. That amount of time used to be a higher number, but now that we have become accustomed to having constant access to technology, our brains have adapted. We now expect to receive information much quicker than we used to. We have also become more reliant on technology and people around us to remember information for us. We don’t hang onto information for as long as we used to, because we have the ability to quickly look things up on the go. For this reason, people seem to have an easier time remembering stories rather than information presented as facts and figures.

Another interesting point that was mentioned in the presentation is how people’s brains respond to online relationships compared to relationships that have developed in person. Many people would probably guess that online relationships would be slower to develop and would not be as deep as relationships that have been forged in person. However, this is not the case. Studies have shown that online relationships actually progress more quickly and become deeper than many in-person relationships. The chemical reactions that occur in the brain during the course of these interactions are the same whether you are communicating online or in person.

So what does this all have to do with marketing? Well, it tells us that your online marketing efforts are capable of reaching people in the same way as a face-to-face interaction. Any conversations you have online with customers or potential customers hold just as much weight as they would if they were standing right in front of you. What this means is that you need to really focus on what goes into your content marketing strategy. In order to reach people and be memorable, you can’t just throw information at your audience – you need to tell a story. Whether this story is through the use of infographics, images, blog posts or however you choose to present it, it needs to capture people’s attention quickly and it needs to engage them. Present your online content in a similar way to how you would present it in person, and you will get a better reaction.

Happy New Year, everyone! We’re back from vacation and are already hard at work on a bunch of really cool projects. Before we get too far into 2012, we thought it would be good to reflect on some of the things we learned and discussed in 2011. Here is a breakdown of our top 5 most popular blog posts of 2011.

1) How Cold Stone Creamery Made Money on Facebook
The fact that this post was our most popular post of the year makes sense. 2011 was the Year of Social Media, and people spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to use these channels effectively. So, of course people were interested in reading about how Cold Stone Creamery managed to not only use Facebook to get attention, but also figured out how to actually turn it into a revenue source.

2) Audi – A Lesson in Brand Investment
Our second most popular post of the year was about a company who managed to take a brand that had seen better days and turn it into a success. It’s not easy to change people’s perceptions of your brand, but Audi has proved that if you stick to your guns and target the right people, it can certainly be done.

3) The Importance of Having A Mobile Strategy
If the predictions are correct, in 2012 we will see a greater focus on mobile marketing. The use of smartphones is skyrocketing and mobile is quickly becoming something that can’t be ignored. If you don’t have some sort of mobile strategy, this is a must-read.

4) B2B Marketing – Does your brand creative have to be bland creative?
In 2011, we saw some big changes in the B2B marketing world. There’s a shift in thinking that is starting to happen and I think we’ll probably start to see many more examples of B2B companies starting to become more inventive with their websites, print marketing, and especially with video and social media.

5) A Visual Aid For Understanding Content Marketing
2011 was also a big year for content marketing. We talked about it a bit more in depth here, but this cool visual aid we came across (thanks to Social Media Explorer) explains the concept of content marketing in a way that’s really clear and easy to understand. Check it out.

So that’s a little taste of what we were talking about in 2011. Many of these trends will probably continue to grown in 2012, but we would like to hear your thoughts on this. What do you think will be the big marketing trends in 2012? Leave us a comment and share your predictions with us.

Setting your brand up on social media is a pretty quick and easy job. The tricky part is maintaining your presence. To do it the right way, it takes time. You need to take a chunk out of your day and dedicate it to monitoring, creating content and engaging with your audience. For many small business owners, it’s hard to find enough time to focus on social media and they can’t afford to pay someone else to take care of it for them. One possible (and popular) solution is marketing automation software.

What is marketing automation software? Basically, it gives you a voice on social media when you’re not actually there to provide it. It allows you to do things like create an auto response message that gets sent out any time someone sends you a direct message or an @reply on Twitter, auto follow when a user follows you, send auto posts to other social media sites when one is updated, and auto retweet any mentions of your brand on Twitter. Some software also performs your social media monitoring functions for you. It sounds like an awesome solution, right? Well, for some it can be, but there is one big potential problem with relying too much on marketing automation.

The key idea behind social media is that it is social interaction. Relying too heavily on automation can take away from human qualities of your interactions with other users. If your messages are all the same, your brand will be perceived as inauthentic, which, in the social media world, is the kiss of death. People enjoy interacting with brands that seem real and human. The moment you start to sound robotic, your audience will start to shut you out. Even if you think you’re being clever about it, people will notice if you are letting a robot do the talking for you and they will think your brand is awful. (Awful at social media marketing, anyways.)