Planting seeds for seasonal marketing

How does your marketing grow? The core should always be made up of a plan for the long-term view with evergreen and perennial content. Annuals should only be added as needed to meet current trends.

That sales and marketing should be aligned is indisputable. But that the sales department should dictate marketing is definitely disputable. 

My experience an SaaS startup for eCommerce businesses crystalized that recognition for me.  Initially, I worked on content planned with the CEO and produced some solid, evergreen pieces. However, when  a VP of marketing whose background was in sales and not in marketing came in, she pushed everything into a short term perspective.

This was manifested in constantly pushing content around coupons and discount codes to drive customers to purchase. Pushing promotions is the ultimate short-term marketing effort designed for immediate sales alone.

While discounts are definitely a big part of retail sales, they should not be the sole strategy used by sellers who want to cultivate long term relationships with customers. The goal of marketing is not just to convert customers based on sales for the week or occasion but to win loyal customers with a high customer lifetime value (CLV) who have your brand top-of-mind when they're ready to purchase even without a coupon as part of the deal. 

Perennial vs. annual planting 

Building a relationship with customers on the basis of marketing is like planting a garden. You can go for the quick wins of instant color and results for the season by planting annuals. That's the marketing done from the perspective of people who come from sales who always favor immediate results. 

But for real value, you plan perennials, which will deliver blooms of color year after year. That's what a true marketing perspective takes into account.

 
A perennial perspective doesn't mean ignoring seasonal opportunities. On the contrary, it sees the value of planning for repeated returns in all seasons with marketing messages and content that are relevant for that time of year and that occasion that will recur. 

Yearly holiday vs. pandemic holiday

Notice that I referred to an occasion that will recur as forming the core of your marketing. That doesn't mean that you ignore current trends altogether but that you recognize that they are transient. That means they they won't deliver the same bang for your marketing bucks as the perennial marketing you plan.

 Nothing illustrates that better than the mistake many businesses made in going all-in on pandemic messaging while ignoring their need for evergreen content. 

This is particularly striking in the content of the content marketing that the startup I worked for decided to feature for Halloween. There was no pre-existing content for that holiday's importance to the world of eCommerce on the site, so I created an evergreen holiday piece on different  possible approaches to fall and Halloween marking. 

Thinking only of the short-term, though, the VP demanded a different piece that explicitly centered around the pandemic's impact on Halloween. That's what was put on the site, and that bit of annual color is of  no interest to anyone today. 

For a business that already had created core content, including standard seasonal and holiday content, it would have been a strategic move to some pieces that centered around the impact of the pandemic on the industry and its customers in 2020-2021. In fact, it would have been smart to use some of that to link to their more traditional content to point out the need to adapt to the times with new strategies and approaches.

However, for businesses that were just building out their content, devoting all resources to pandemic-centered content with only masked people shown on their site was a mistake. If they failed to move that content off the main pages of their sites in the past year or two they were showing their own failure to adapt to the changing needs of the time. 
 

You can't condemn someone for using emotional appeals

by Ariella Brown

This post was inspired by a LinkedIn post that, ironically enough, fell for a  logical fallacy while decrying a certain candidate for trying to win followers by appealing to their emotions. That such tactics can and have been abused by dictators doesn't prove that the one using them now is a dictator. All successful politicians, marketers, and salespeople use appeals to emotion. So long as they're not actually conning you into doing something bad for you, it's not something you can hold against them.

Effective human communication always involves some appeal to emotions. Would anyone argue otherwise?

Sure, you can and should use data to support your assertions, but you only sway people by playing to emotions. Isn't that the crucial difference between the lawyers who win cases in court and those who don't?

The same holds true for ALL branding and marketing, whether it's B2C, B2B, or political.

The impetus for this post was seeing someone attempt to put down a certain candidate by declaring the play on emotions is the sign of a dictator. Well, yes, dictators definitely used the power of persuasion, which involves some emotional manipulation. But so did great presidents like Abraham Lincoln.

Insurance companies definitely play on fear to sell you life and home insurance. They don't share the odd that their actuaries work through. They show you a story to have you envision what could happen to the family if the breadwinner dies or the family home burns down without any insurance to fall back on.

Their goal is to make money, obviously. However, that doesn't mean that people with families depending on them should avoid buying insurance. That emotions come into play doesn't erase the fact that financial planning includes insurance.

It's not the technique that makes you bad or good; it's the ends that are achieve with it.

All great speakers play to their audience's emotions. All great marketing does the same.

Maybe that will convince you to vote for the wrong person or spend more than you had to on insurance. We all have to be responsible for our own actions and take the steps needed to compare coverages and candidate credibility rather than to make our decision based on their campaigns alone.

However, human nature being what it is, it would likely take an emotional appeal to persuade them to do that.

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Uncommon Content: Know when to walk away

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walked away from a potential job. Admittedly, it wasn't a really good gig, given the combination of hours required and pay. But it wasn't the low pay that was my main turnoff; it was the delusions of the person in charge. For the purpose of this post, let's call him Irving.

a site that is forever frozen in 2008 like an extinct woolly mammoth in ice, never updating its approach or appearance or assumptions about effectively engaging an audience. The site itself and the the static cards crammed with hashtags and no images that are used across all their social media channels are stuck in the convention of nearly 20 years ago while the world has moved on.

However, Irving is not interested in crafting what will truly resonate with people. Nor is he interested in improving the social media outreach to potentially attract more viewers and subscribers.

Irving is only interested in having editors bring his vision to life, maintaining the delusion that this is the way, and it will become perfect. I pointed out that if it hasn't happened in over15 years

Read more here Uncommon Content: Know when to walk away 

What B2C and B2B marketers can learn from a viral post

"Unforgettable, that's what you are." That line describes what all marketers should strive for in their content. But they don't achieve it because they play it safe, repeating the same stock phrases everyone else uses -- especially in B2B that some have said should stand for Business to Boring.  Instead of captivating and converting your target market with such content, you bore your reader. 

I first wrote this blog a day before I saw the infographics shared by MagnaGlobal on B2B ad effectiveness supports it. While this makes perfect sense,  do bear in mind that that the 1773 LinkedIn users surveyed represent an exceedingly small sample size. To put it in perspective, I have over 4X as many connections on Linkedin profile, and many of my connections have far more followers than that. Though I find the results credible, I would really like to see this corroborated with a sample size of 50K or more.

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What does it take to fall into the minority percentage that doesn't bore the reader? 

It take something that is truly original and relatable. Mammoth Cave National Park pulled that off by veering off the well-worn path of describing attractions like that. See the post on that here: Uncommon Marketing Content

This refreshing break from hyperbolic language that repeats cliches andthe admission that not everyone is going to be wowed by what you offer can definitely be applied to both B2C and B2B marketing. For B2Cs, the deodorant  you're selling will not turn your whole life around.  A drink will not make you popular. The dinner mix will grow boring if you serve it every night for dinner. 

For B2Bs: Drop the jargon and stop calling everything a game-changer or a paradigm shift when it is really just an incremental improvement over what is available. People will likely be disappointed if they are expecting to be that impressed. If they are not expecting that much, they are much more inclined to be happy with the results. 

Yes, ads typically do  exaggerate all these things, and that's just why you should stop trying to be just like everyone else, which is to say, utterly forgettable.   

Oh, and if you want some help with that, it happens to be what I do. Check out my site. 

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Ouroboros, an apt symbol for AI model collapse

by Ariella Brown

AI hits the ouroboros (sometimes written uroboros) stage. You've likely seen it in the form of a snake in a circle, eating its own tail. The ancient symbol also sometimes showed dragons or a wyvern, so I chose this engraving by Lucas Jennis intended to represent mercury in the 1625 alchemical tract "De Lapide Philosophico," for my illustration instead of just going with something as prosaic as "model collapse"

To get a bit meta and bring generative AI into the picture (pun intended, I'm afraid) here's an ouroboros image
made with generative AI. ked Google

Model collapse is what the researchers who published their take on this in Nature called the phenomenon of large language models (LLMs) doing the equivalent of eating their own tails when ingesting LLM output for new generation. They insist that the models should be limited to"data collected about genuine human interactions."

From the abstract:
"Here we consider what may happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the text found online. We find that indiscriminate use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, in which tails of the original content distribution disappear. We refer to this effect as ‘model collapse’ and show that it can occur in LLMs as well as in variational autoencoders (VAEs) and Gaussian mixture models (GMMs). We build theoretical intuition behind the phenomenon and portray its ubiquity among all learned generative models. We demonstrate that it must be taken seriously if we are to sustain the benefits of training from large-scale data scraped from the web. Indeed, the value of data collected about genuine human interactions with systems will be increasingly valuable in the presence of LLM-generated content in data crawled from the Internet."

Shumailov, I., Shumaylov, Z., Zhao, Y. et al. AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data. Nature 631, 755–759 (2024).

Let me know in the comments which illustration you like more. 

How to increase traffic 16,500%: clickbait vs. reality

 

by Ariella Brown

I just attended an event with the title " Information Gain Content: How to Increase Traffic 16,500% by Going Above & Beyond with Bernard Huang." Did the session live up to its clickbait title?

Not at all. 

This wasn't necessarily Bernard Huang's fault. The presentation was hosted by the Top of the Funnel group that favors these types of large numbers that sound just specific enough that people may believe they are real.

Earlier this month, it offered "Social Copywriting Secrets: Building an Audience of 114,985 with Eddie Shleyner" I attended that one, too, and there was nothing in it that justified that number as the guaranteed result of some tactic you could apply. Shleyner just emphasized sticking to good, authentic storytelling to keep your audience engaged.

There were no easy-to-apply tricks in this session. If anything, it was about the reason the old tricks no longer work.  Huang explained that Google is currently applying its stated standard of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) in the context of its AI overview.

My main takeaway from this session was not that it's easy to increase your traffic on Google but that it simply has switched one set of algorithmic rules for another, now including its own AI reads on content and that this is not necessarily a good thing.

What bad about this? 

The bottom line is that Google is relying very heavily on consensus as well as pre-established authority. That means that it is very easy for the sites that have already built up big audiences and strong rankings on Google to leverage that to put out proclamations that will be accepted as true, especially when they are -- inevitably -- echoed by the wannabee followers and all those who pretend to be thought leaders by parroting what influencers already say.


In other words, truly original thoughts by those who are not just reinforcing group think will likely be buried. I did raise this question and wasn't wholly reassured by the answer. It was that, yes, Google expects all points of consensus on a particular topic to be represented. If they are not present, your content will be an outcast. The only way you have a chance to be noted is if you play the contrarian game by refuting the consensus views point by point. Not giving it that nod is SEO suicide.

And so we the current state of search is one that aims to homogenize information according to preset parameters from those already granted expert status where those who are not in line with the consensus will be buried in the obscurity of high number page results. 

This is truly the opposite of a democratic platform in which understanding of history and current events is allowed to rise or fall based solely on its own merit rather than the pre-established narrative. George Patton would be appalled. He's the one who said: "If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking."

Google's algorithms are designed to reward those who follow in the paths preset by others rather than really thinking for themselves. 

P.S. For the story behind the illustration above, see my LinkedIn post. 

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Follow Write Way Pro on LinkedIn and on Facebook.

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Headline check

By Ariella Brown

hashtag

I've never cared for the way commas are used in headlines set for AP style. Written text should correspond to the language we speak as much as possible. 

Substituting a comma for the word "and" in this instance actually slows the readers down as they have to consider that, though the standard formulation of a comma between two adjectives makes one assume they both apply to the same noun, that can't be the intent of the headline.

Really, why write "How younger, older B2B marketers differ" instead of "How younger and older B2B marketers differ"?

The latter is both clearer and flows better than the former. Saving those three keystrokes is an insignificant gain for a loss of clarity and rhythm. IMHO. Does that make it wrong? I decided to investigate.

As a grammar geek, I got very excited to discover that I am not alone in feeling these headlines mangle English. That very point is the subject of Stack Exchange discussion from a few years ago. The gist of the investigation amounts to these points:

1. The substitution of a comma for "and" is assumed to be motivated by a desire to save space or to sound punchier, though it's not something mandated by AP style. In other words, it's not incorrect to include the "and" in the title.
2. The suspicion that this practice is related to digital publications is not supported by evidence. There are examples of such headlines in print going back at least to 1990.
3. It's also not a practice peculiar to American outlets, a theory that may have arisen from those with some bias against American writing.

Now to return to the very first point here, I stick with my objection. For this particular formulation, the effect of dropping the "and" is not punchier, definitely not clearer, and seems to be an affectation of the writer or journalist who seems to believe that an"and" never belongs in a headline.

Whoever is responsible for blindly following this unfortunate trend has forgotten the one golden rule of writing that George Orwell proclaimed in his famous essay: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

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