Last December I attended a webinar with Main Street America where Lindsey Wallace spoke about her organization’s approach to community transformation based on four pillars:
1. Organization
2. Economic Vitality
3. Design
4. Promotion
As we juggle multiple crises from health care to economic prosperity, climate change, and inequality, I believe this is a model that can lead to a sustainable future for communities that can rally together behind some common purpose.
The first pillar Organization calls for strong leadership and broad community engagement to identify priorities and forge partnerships across sectors.
Economic Vitality invites a diverse economic base, and smart investments that contribute to a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Design plays a critical role in creating an inviting and inclusive atmosphere that incorporates historic preservation, energy efficiency, and accessibility.
And Promotion is all about marketing the community’s defining assets and unique attributes while supporting “buy local”.
Business trends that will continue to shape our communities are the expansion of broadband, remote work, e-commerce, and lifestyle changes that are here to stay like for instance slowing down, investing in self-care, and developing contingency plans.
Trust is essential in ensuring a peaceful and prosperous society. The pandemic has broken the patterns of trust that we have grown accustomed to in order to make decisions. The Edelman Trust Institute has published a collection of essays addressing the multitude of challenges we currently face to balance health care, economic prosperity and personal freedoms as we strive to rebuild for a post-pandemic world.
Main take-aways:
Have a clear mission and set of values
What you say and what you do ought to be aligned
Consistency matters
Transparency matters
Incompetence is a trust destroyer
Be honest about your limitations
Prioritize collaborations with others
Good companies invest in good employees
Emotional intelligence matters
Inclusion matters
Climate change pledges matter
Fighting disinformation is more important than ever
It takes time to build trust
Trust is built when promises are kept
Highlighting solutions not just problems makes for a better world
According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, businesses are currently the most trusted institutions in our society. Laszlo Bock, the CEO of Humu, advises though that as employees return to office, employers ought to relax performance standards and allow the employees to re-set their roles in a welcoming environment to avoid burn-out and ensure long-term retention and satisfaction. Employees are looking for confident, competent, and compassionate leaders.
Regarding the crisis in governance, Juha Leppänen from Demos believes that “leadership in the 21st century is not about having all the right answers, but about continuously learning and collaborating rigorously in inventive new ways.” Leppänen believes that by embracing humility governments can cultivate stronger relationships with stakeholders and generate more trust. His advice is to incentivize collaboration and participation.
Ogilvy released a report called “Hope Creates Impact: Six Shifts from the Intersection of Culture and Commerce” that analyzes the shifts and the brands’ response to them in making the world a better place. As a backdrop, the company highlights the intersection of “Apocalypse Now” and “Hope for Tomorrow”, two co-existing and competing trends defining our current time.
As detailed in the report, the shifts were identified after months of tracking the intersection of culture and commerce and discovering what has made an impact. Fashion, movies, art, music, advertisements, new product launches, business, gossip, and news – they were all analyzed to uncover ways in which human behaviors, desires, and motivators have shifted during these tumultuous times.
Six key shifts were identified:
1. Beta-Testing Self 2. Kind Connection 3. Slow Down 4. Net Positive 5. Heal Yourself 6. Feel Alive Again
Beta-Testing Self is a shift in how people approach life choices, including career opportunities – we are all now in a state of permanent beta-testing, exploring new things and new avenues. Brands are capitalizing on this trend and enabling self-making and adaptability.
Kind Connection is a shift in how people view relationships. To quote from the Ogilvy report, “The pandemic was a big driver of this trend, as it equated solitude with safety. But more than that, the lockdown brought clarity and fresh perspective to our relationships. We realized who our true friends were, and we deepened our connection with them.” A manifestation of this trend is what Ogilvy calls “COVID weddings” – the ballroom ceremonies were swiftly replaced with intimate affairs that only included a handful of guests.
Slow Down is a shift that, once imposed by the pandemic lockdown, has forced us to re-assess the cost of the old way of doing things. Moving to the country, embracing remote work, and other lifestyle choices are here to stay. Intimate, outdoor, and mindful experiences are what people are looking for, and brands are capitalizing on that.
Net Positive is a way of doing business which puts back more into society, the environment and the global economy than it takes out. The pandemic has accelerated this trend. According to the Ogilvy report, “ninety percent of consumers believe that companies have a responsibility to take care of the planet and its people.” That is something that brands cannot ignore.
Heal Yourself is a shift caused by the pandemic that has led people to consider their health as something crucial to protect. People are making lifestyle choices and are also creating contingency plans like never before. And brands are called upon to enable meaningful changes.
Feel Alive Again is a shift emerging as we come out of the pandemic lockdown, and once again seek excitement and experiencing life to its fullest extent. The Ogilvy report mentions The Immersive Van Gogh Experience in Chicago and New York City as one such new way of feeling alive in a post-pandemic world. It is estimated that the experience economy will be worth $12B or more by 2023.
Content marketing is a critical component of digital marketing given its effectiveness in increasing brand awareness, engaging online communities, generating new leads, and increasing sales.
Content Marketing Class for the Greater Roxbury Business Association
What makes content marketing effective is that people trust editorials more than they trust advertorials. In essence, content marketing is a form of marketing that focuses on creating, publishing and distributing creative content for a targeted audience to generate leads and sales while informing and entertaining. Traditional marketing focuses on pitching products and services, while content marketing focuses on publishing engaging content.
Although content marketing gained traction during the digital age, the practice is nothing new. In 1895 John Deere founded The Furrow, a magazine designed to educate farmers about the latest advancement in the field, and help them find solutions to their problems. The magazine continues to exist today, not just in print but in digital format as well; it has a large social media platform, and is published in several languages around the world. The magazine helped crystallize the John Deere brand, and grow its market.
Forms of content marketing include: how to guides, white papers, newsletters, presentations, blog posts, social media posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, product descriptions, reviews, testimonials, and others.
#GEInstaWalk is a clever example of content marketing which allows the company’s Instagram followers to take a peek into GE’s facilities where cutting-edge technology is being manufactured. Amazon’s Building Your Book for Kindle free e-book is another clever example designed as a free guide to creating and publishing e-books. This is a great tutorial during the consideration phase when aspiring authors are weighing in their options. An example you might be familiar with is the Phyllo Shells recipes on the back of the package – the recipe itself might be enticing enough to make one buy the product, or vice versa. This isn’t something unique to Phyllo Shells however; there are plenty of food brands that offer recipes on the back of their package. It’s an ingenious form of content marketing.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s Room at The Roxbury Motel (Source: Facebook)
Two local examples that stand out are the Catskill Dream Team’s real estate blog, and The Roxbury Motel’s whimsical themed rooms as featured on social media. How to Buy a Home in One Year: A Step-by-Step Guide, for instance, educates prospective buyers, but it also builds expectations of a lifestyle, and that’s exactly what a real estate blog is about. The Roxbury Motel’s internationally renowned themed rooms also have stories to tell. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, for instance, designed as a tribute to Audrey Hepburn, has the walls stained to match Tiffany’s flagship store on 5th Avenue. The chandelier that hangs above the bed matches the mini chandelier in the Tiffany window at the opening of the movie when Audrey is eating a croissant and staring in the window. The owners of the motel confess that in their twenties they would go around Manhattan re-enacting scenes from the movie. The following Audrey/Truman Capote quote guided the design of the room: “Tiffany’s! Calms me down right away. The quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there. If I could find a real-life place that’d make me feel like Tiffany’s, then – then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name.” These fun facts shared on social media are bold examples of clever content marketing.
Moz identified four phases of content marketing, which one of them carrying out distinctive goals and types of content to pursue:
Type of Content (educational): blog posts, webinars, guides, videos, newsletters, presentations, tours
II. CONSIDERATION PHASE
Goals: direct customer acquisition
Type of Content (solutions): case studies, how to guides, demo videos, product descriptions, data sheets, recipes
III. CONVERSION PHASE
Goals: customer transactions
Type of Content (unique value proposition): product descriptions, reviews, testimonials, comparison charts, direct sales pitch, streamlined sales process
IV. RETENTION PHASE
Goals: retention of existing customers
Type of Content (help, support, advocacy): customer support, help documentation, insider tutorials, special offers, follow-ups
Here are a few steps to help you design your content strategy:
Clarify your vision (three – five year plan)
Define your audience (i.e., demographics, media consumption preferences, channels, what are they looking for, who do they follow, what are their wants and needs, etc.)
Align your content style, tone and voice with your brand’s personality (set up guidelines)
Documentation (governance rules and workflow)
Content ideation, creation, promotion and distribution (team, tools and infrastructure)
Analytics (metrics to evaluate success)
Depending on the size of your project, building an adequate infrastructure will help carry out the tactics and the execution of your content strategy, both creation and distribution. Often enough the work is outsourced to content strategists, writers, editors, and coordinators equipped with tools to designing and implementing an effective strategy.
In sum, content marketing works because:
It provides valuable information;
It provides entertainment;
It sparks conversations that bring people together;
It forms communities;
It converts potential customers into actual customers;
Sophie McNeill from Penguin Random House summarized the five key trends in the book market in 2015, which reveal that:
Print remains the most popular reading format with 63 percent of Americans reporting that they read a print book in the past year compared to 27 percent who reported they read an ebook in the past twelve months (data from the Pew Research Center).
Young adults are more likely than their elderly to have read a book in the past twelve months – McNeill points out that the range of successful movies based on young adult books may explain the age gap (which came as a surprise to me). Also, women are more likely to read books than men (the average woman reader reads fourteen books per year compared to nine books read by the average man reader).
In the first half of 2015 the trade book market when it comes to adult fiction, children’s and young adult literature, and religious presses was down 1.4% compared to the first half of 2014: $3 billion compared to $3.13. This statistic is from the American Association of Publishers, which only looks at traditional publishers, and does not include self-publishing. Children’s and young adult literature recorded the sharpest decline (12.3%).
According to the American Booksellers Association independent bookstores are coming back: according to the ABA the number of independent bookstores increased 20 percent from 2009 to 2014 (from 1,651 in 2009 to 2,094 in 2014).
50 percent of Americans own a tablet or an ereader for reading digital content. It is expected that more and more Americans will shift from tablets to smartphones in the coming years. Read more about these findings here.
Mark Coker from Smashwords released his predictions for 2016, and these include:
Independent (in other words self-published) ebook authors will continue to gain market share at the expense of large publishers because indie titles are priced lower, and because indie authors move faster, and are creative when it comes to marketing and distributing their titles, among other reasons. According to Coker, “every year readers are spending more hours reading books from indie authors.” Also, according to Coker “more traditionally published authors will continue to experiment with self-publishing.”
Amazon Kindle Unlimited and KDP Select programs have trained readers to expect free ebook downloads, and this will have long-term ramifications not just for the self-published authors, but according to Coker for traditional publishers and traditionally published authors as well, and of course for the Amazon’s retail competitors.
According to Coker, the overall market for ebooks will shrink in terms of dollars, but will increase in terms of units.
Print won’t go away. Print books represent approximately 70 percent of the market today. Coker says that “for many readers, print is the gateway to digital.” He also writes about the importance of brick-and-mortar bookstores, and about Amazon’s plans to open a brick-and-mortar bookstore in Seattle.
Preorder usage will dramatically increase in 2016, according to Coker. Read full article here.
As mentioned in Coker’s article, Amazon did indeed open its first brick-and-mortar bookstore in Seattle back in November. The store, called Amazon Books, is located in University Village. Read article here. Amazon Books plans to use its huge database to stock its shelves; it will look at reviews from millions of readers, but also at staff-favorites, among other sources. Thomas De Monchaux wrote about Amazon Books for the New Yorker.
Amazon is not only the world’s largest bookseller, it’s also an important publisher. Launched in 2009, Amazon Publishing owns 14 imprints, and publishes both fiction and non-fiction books. Through AmazonCrossing, launched in 2010, the company publishes translated books. AmazonCrossing committed $10 million over the next five years to works in translation. Read more about Amazon Publishing here. Read more about AmazonCrossing in this article published by Alex Shephard in the New Republic.
Simona David Consulting 