On Target

 

by Ariella Brown

Two years ago I wrote a blog entitled Fixing What Ain’t Broken at Target that criticized the proposed change to the retailer's tagline. I remembered it today when I saw that Target is still showing its original tagline in its circulars. Either it read my blog or heard many others echo its sentiments before committing to a marketing mistake. 

What a slogan should not be

Forgetting the wisdom of if it's ain't broke, don't fix it, Target is replacing " “Expect More. Pay Less,” the tagline it has been using with great success since 1984 with “What we value most shouldn’t cost more.”

As I pointed out at the time, while that sentiment is very close to the original brand promise of value for less, it’s actually far weaker. It is neither making a promise for the brand to deliver, nor is it coming up with a clear solution.

I remembered this when I came across the Target virtual circular. I'm happy t to report tht the tagline it shows is still the original rather than the monstrosity suggested in 2021.

What a slogan should be

Slogans are meant to be short, to the point, and indicative of a call to action.

When Nike declares, “Just do it,” they’re using just three syllables to not only capture a feeling but direct customers to act on it. Apple’s “Think different” did the same thing.

Unoriginal though it may be, the original Target tagline captured its mission statement with a clear CTA to customers in just four short words. It’s now being replaced by something much longer that sounds more like a complaint than a solution.

Related:

Think Marathon Rather Than Sprint When Planning Content Marketing

Most Memorable Brand Slogans

Make Your Content as Accessible as Possible

What Edison Can Teach Us About SEO

7 Ways to Grab Customer Attention in Subject Lines

CRO is Like Basketball

Building Alone Doesn't Lead to Success

by Ariella Brown

 

"If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door."

That  adage is false.
In fact, you could even say that it's a trap.

If you believe it, you'll end up with a warehouse full of mouse traps but no revenue. To leverage your improvement into a source of income, you have to reach prove to them that your solution works better for people who are dealing with a mouse problem.

That's why you need good content that demonstrates an understanding of pain points and demonstrates how your product solves them. You also need to make sure to reach the people whose problems you will solve. There's not much point in marketing your offering to someone who has no need for it.

That's why you need to a marketing plan from day one. I wrote this on LinkedIn post earlier today, and this evening I came across Peter Thiel's expression of the same idea in Chapter 11 (p. 127) of Zero to One:

    In Silicon Valley, nerds are skeptical of advertising, marketing, and sale because they seem superficial and irrational. But advertising matters because it works. ... You may think that you're an exception; that your preferences are authentic, and advertising only works on other people. .... But advertising doesn't exist to make you buy a product right away; it exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later. Anyone who can't acknowledge its likely effect on himself is double  deceived."

Thiel ads this observation on p. 130: "If you've invented something new but you haven't invented an effective way to sell it, you have a a bad business -- no matter how good the product."  

In case you read the title as a reference to being alone, I have another blog on working alone  that goes in a different direction. 

Related: 

Don't just aim for different
Visualizing the customer journey

What makes content marketing effective
What the Little Prince teaches us about marketing

Think marathon rather than sprint

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Did Open AI Open Pandora's Box?

Pandora opening the box that releases  harm into the world. Image at: https://nypl.getarchive.net/media/pandora-opens-the-box-ca3915

OpenAI not only democratized access to AI but popularized it by inviting people to use it for free. Many of us have opened that box, but some of us have been dismayed at the results that speak as if they are objective truth without any accountability for sources of information or explanation for how ChatGPT arrives at its conclusion.

Relying on AI as an objective source of information ignores the fact that it reflects the bias embedded by its human programmers and can reinforce discriminatory effects. The consequences of that can range from biased beauty standards to reinforcing illegal discriminatory practices.  

Now that it just costs $20 a month or can even be available for free at off-peak times, everyone can -- and many are -- make use of ChatGPT instead of doing research in a variety of sources with documentation that offers at least some level of accountability that is essential for explainable AI. 

Read more here:  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/did-open-ai-pandoras-box-write-way-pro/?trackingId=E3yor3MrHAi2B2HwIdqlVQ%3D%3D

 Related:

An A/B Test of Generative AI

AI' s Got Some Explaining to Do

AI's early attempts at screenwriting

The Pros and Cons of Generative AI

11 Quotes About AI 

AI Informs Personalization for Starbucks

AI Accessibility: The Next Spreadsheet Revolution for Modern Business? 

 

http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-original-selection-of-11-ai-quotes.html

 

Put SEO in the picture

One aspect of putting SEO in the picture is thinking about the impact your pictures have on your site core vitals.

All content marketers know that it takes more than text to catch the eye. But those who are also aware of site loading issues realize that pictures can slow down a site.

Slow page loadings harm your core web vitals and your SEO.

So what should you do: give up the pictures or give up the better speed?

The answer is neither. You can have the best of both worlds -- attractively illustrated posts and good loading times when you optimize your pictures for web view.

In the past, I had to do this manually for each image, playing around a bit to find the size that would look good but does slow things down. I don't have to do that now.

I just discovered a great SaaS solution. Imagify optimizes your images for you in a snap. 

It enables you to fix all the ones you have on a page without having to upload them one by one. At the free level, you get up 200 images a month, though you have to be sure to download them within 24 hours.

I put it to the test with my site. As the screenshot here shows, it details how much memory space you can save for each compression.

For some of the pictures, the amount of memory gained was rather small, so I opted to skip those and only converted the ones for which the difference was more substantial. Imagify shows the amount of saved for all the compressed versions I selected in place of the original pictures.

While it's easy to use for any site, it's even easier if you use WordPress. You can use the Imagify plugin to automatically optimize the images and ensure that that they are not the cause of slow loading times on your site. Learn more about that by watching the video below.

Another aspect of SEO in the picture

Another way in which to consider SEO in the picture is labeling your pictures in a way that makes Google identify it with your topic and keywords. In addition to the SEO benefit, you would be  achieving ADA compliance(see Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA) in rendering your  pictures accessible to those who have to have content read to them because they can't view it themselves. 

The SEO boost of the labeling can sometimes manifest itself in surprising ways. I notice dthis wehn taking a closer look at Google Search Console on my Edison blog to prepare What Edison Can Teach Us About SEO. Some of the search queries were bringing up the caption I had on the picture that illustrates the blog as some people make a point of including Wikipedia in their query. 

So here's the general rule for thinking about SEO for pictures: you want to minimize the file size but maximize your label.

Related: 

Make Your Content as Accessible as Possible
7 Ways to Grab Customer Attention in Subject Lines
CRO is Like Basketball
Think Marathon Rather Than Sprint When Planning Content Marketing

What to expect from a content marketing strategy

 

                                   Content marketing strategy  photo by Kindel Media on Pexels.com

What makes content marketing distinct from other forms of marketing is that its primary goal is to engage your target audience’s interest rather than lead immediately to a call-to-action to buy. The content can take many forms, ranging from single pictures with captions on social media posts to extended articles, eBooks, and videos.

Part of planning an effective strategy is selecting the medium that is most likely to capture your audience’s attention. For a B2B that means showing awareness of business pain points and insights into what's happening in the industry now. For B2C, you want to connect with the consumers in your target market repeatedly by offering them helpful tips or engaging stories.

For example, a kitchenware seller may send out recipes or blogs that offer advice on healthy substitutions to make guilt-free desserts. It can also use video content effectively to demonstrate techniques in cooking or offer a downloadable app that converts cooking measurements from ounces to grams or milliliters.

​What all the approaches described above have in common is that they position the brand as a credible source of information within its own defined niche. Over time that leads to a deepened relationship with your audience.

Typically, you can expect 6-9 months of consistent content marketing posting to see an uplift in B2B sales. That's because B2B sales typically involve longer cycles, more approvals, and a lot more money than B2C.

 (One exception was a B2B blog I ghostwrote that brought in sales qualified lead the very next day).

As businesses don't tend to very receptive to cold calls and emails from businesses they have not heard of, the support of content marketing and demand gen leads to greater success in outbound sales efforts.

Related:

What makes content marketing effective

Make Your Content as Accessible as Possible 
What Edison Can Teach Us About SEO

Think Marathon Rather Than Sprint When Planning Content Marketing

What makes content marketing effective

 

Hairstylist spraying hair. Photo credit: Rene Asmussen on Pexels.com

 The hairstylist and the photographer

​Once upon a time (in the year 2005 ) I created a print magazine and managed both its content and ads. I brought the two together in what everyone today calls content marketing.  encouraged advertisers to write articles to give readers more context than an ad alone provided.
​
In one issue, I had articles from both a hairstylist-- who got it exactly right -- and a photographer - who got it totally wrong. What she did was offer tips that they could apply to their own hair. He, instead, opted to write about himself and his approach to photography with no takeaways of use to his readers. 

What was the result of the two approaches? The photographer admitted many people told him they saw his article, but they didn't contact him for his services. In contrast, the hairstylist reported that the article brought her more customers than any advertising had ever done. 

The moral of the story

The photographer failed to offer value to the audience  because he was solely focused on self-promotion.  The hairstylist, on the other hand, instinctively understood what content would appeal to her audience and was rewarded for giving it to them.  The key to successful content marketing is not to make it all about you but all about offering useful information for your audience that makes them trust you.  

​
Related: 

Make Your Content as Accessible as Possible 
What Edison Can Teach Us About SEO

Think Marathon Rather Than Sprint When Planning Content Marketing

AI's early attempts at screenwriting

OpenAI's ChatGPT has made everyone aware of the potential of generative AI. Well, some of us knew about this tech before it became trendy. As a writer reporting on AI, I wrote about one of the early attempts to use it for a film script. The results were not exactly typical entertainment.

"I'd Like to Thank the Algorithm that Made this Film Possible" was published on 7/11/2016 on All Analytics where it garnered 63 comments. I saved a PDF of the text that you can read here.

The film, "Sunspring" is still up on YouTube here:

In 2017, the film producers came put out "It's No Game," starring David Hasselhoff. It's not mentioned in the original blog that predated it. You can see the sequel here:

Generative AI has improved substantially since 2016. But is it ready to write a film that will keep people's interest as well as those written by human counterparts?

We already have a commercial made by AI that is rather strange -- some would say scary -- but sill very effective at driving human attention. I have nou doubt we'll be seeing more films in future.