You And Your Newsletter

Coca Cola spends over 3 billion dollars a year on marketing.

While some of that is allocated to content creation, the vast majority is spent on ensuring people see what they come up with.

While they get to play with TV, billboards and sponsorships, what do we have?  Short lived social content with the lifespan of a fruit fly, blog posts that may not get seen, expensive Google ads or targeted Facebook ads that can do more harm than good.

Newsletters beat advertising

If there’s one thing I know to be true from working with business owners who have adopted a content strategy, it is that their email newsletter is the number one source of revenue.

Email trumps everything because it arrives in the customer’s inbox.  If you can consistently produce a good newsletter you’ll create more value around your brand than any of Coke’s multi-billion dollar campaigns.

Are you doing enough?

If you don’t have a newsletter, you should change that. 

If you do, take a moment to look at how you are promoting it.  I would suggest, for most businesses running a content strategy, your newsletter signup should take precedence over any other call to action on your website.

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Written while listening to: New Fazioli tracks by music2work2

Image credit: Pepsi-Coca-Cola Reversion by Graham Smith on Flickr

How Well Do You Know Your Brand?

Here’s a quick test to see if you have a good handle on yours.  

Take these statements and quickly write out the answers for your business or primary product:

• For (target customer)
• Who (statement of need or opportunity)
• The (product / business) is a (product category)
• That (statement of benefit or compelling reason to buy)
• Unlike (primary competitive alternative)
• It is (statement of differentiation)

Here’s what it looks like for this newsletter

For business owners who handle their own marketing, It’s Friday is a weekly newsletter that delivers insight into digital marketing and content strategy.  Unlike other marketing newsletters, it only takes 2 minutes to read and is generally pretty entertaining.

It’s not perfect and it doesn’t cover everybody and everything but it’s close enough and I was able to produce it in about 5 minutes.

What does it look like for you?

If you can’t quickly create something similar for your business or products, it’s an indication that you don’t have a clear enough understanding of your position in the market.  

That lack of clarity will have a detrimental impact on the efficacy of your marketing efforts. 

I’m doing a lot of branding work at the moment, if you’d like to talk about yours, get in touch.

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Written while listening to: One two three Playlist by music2work2

Image Credit: Brand ‘em (2 of 3) by Steve Corey on Flickr