Kevin’s 484 Blog

It is almost 2020. In less than a month we will have in front of us the promise and potential of an entirely new decade, brands must use that potential to grow and stay relevant or else they will falter and fade into irrelevancy. Managing your brands’ presence online is going to be incredibly important in the coming years and I’ll give you my number one tip on how to manage it and tell you why you really need to be doing this.

We live in a world where if a scandal becomes public your company can suffer incredible damage monetarily from distrust or anger from the general public. Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be a scandal, like when Zion Williamson’s shoe broke during one of his basketball games at Duke. The morning after that game Nike’s stock went down an entire percent, roughly $1.12 billion dollars. Nike had to be quick to jump on this issue to prevent further loss. The very next day Nike sent a team over to Duke, talked to zion about the shoe and then that same team on the same day, flew to one of Nike’s factories in China. That, is how you handle an issue, keep that in your head as an example of how to handle a crisis.

Hopefully, you won’t need to though, because you’ll be following my recommendation on how to better manage your brand online. Preventative maintenance. Try your hardest to not even let there be a scandal or problem that can damage your brand’s image. Moving the candle away from the paper curtains is a lot easier than putting out a fire. You may be thinking “most brands probably already do that”, and you’d be correct in some ways but very wrong in others. Brands are actually incredibly good at finding new ways to get themselves in trouble. Take the brand North Face, for example, earlier this year they replaced tons of images on popular Wikipedia pages with their own images featuring people in North Face gear. Manipulating the Wiki articles like this boosted these photos to the top of google image searches providing free exposure for their brand. The world probably wouldn’t have noticed for quite a while except North Face actually made an Ad boasting about this “advertising campaign”. That quickly managed to piss off quite a bit of people including Wikipedia themselves.

If a scandal or problem does arise with your company learn from Nike, get on it As Soon As Possible. You must make an informed decision and act as soon as possible. Apologize honestly and openly and assure people that this won’t happen again, and mean it when you say that. Depending on the magnitude of the scandal the public is generally willing to forgive you once. But do not test them a second time, you will not come back from breaking their trust twice. When it comes to preventative maintenance, learn from the North Face. Everybody from the CEO down needs to have a clear moral compass and honestly try their hardest to follow it, don’t cut corners and don’t betray people’s trust in you. The simplest way to solve a crisis is to try your hardest to make sure it never happens.

Here’s the thing, the internet is a VERY busy place nowadays. Look at the infographic above from visualcapitalist.com(full link will be below), there are literally millions of things happening every 60 seconds on the internet. If you don’t know how to stand out, attract new customers, or accurately target customers, you will get left behind. At this point, it’s simply the truth and there isn’t really a way around it. I believe that your products, services or skills already have the ability to stand out, marketing personas will help you better target, attract, and keep customers. They may very well be the thing that can save you from fading away into all the rest of the noise on the web.

1. What are they? Think of marketing personas as roles for your marketers to take on in the play of life. Marketing personas are basically tools to help your marketers understand the customers they are trying to attract and serve. Humans are typically very bad at simply knowing what other people want and need, mostly for the very simple reason that there is just simply a ton of different people in the world with different likes and dislikes. The more you can pinpoint general customers in your target market, the more you can track them and apply your products and marketing to them. If you’re doing everything right on your side this will make you more money and give you happy, repeat customers! Which is very much a win-win in today’s busy internet climate.
2. How do I make one? Making a marketing persona is a mix of incredibly easy, broad stroke assumptions backed by data and demographics, mixed with at times painstakingly minute details. A more basic summation is, find all of the data you can about your average customer groups and then make a profile for them as if you were on an in-depth online dating service. Let me explain, I promise it’ll make more sense in a second. After going through all the data on your site try and find some consistent groups that you end up marketing to or groups that end up on your page that you aren’t marketing to(don’t worry you will be shortly!). For example, if you’re running an arts and crafts blog, you’ll most likely have a notable percentage of your base will be women from the age of 30-45. Now comes the fun and slightly more difficult part, you have to design an entire person that doesn’t exist, based on either dozens or thousands of real people based on how big your reach is. Give the persona a name, a background, a career, figure out their demographics, figure out what drives them. Go as in-depth as you can, the more precise you are in this step the more precise you can be in targeting them for marketing, which will generate more clicks and more money.
3. How many do I need? Simply put, the more the better, within reason of course. If you can find a group of people that you’d be able to make a market for (or having an existing market for already), make one. Again, depending on your reach this could be one, five, or a dozen. After you make the first few you’ll begin getting the hang of it and can really begin nailing down the details and things that drive these personas. Elegant themes has an excellent paragraph on this to help you tailor the number of personas that best fits your business (link will be below).
4. What to do now that you’ve made one (or more than one). Once you’ve made your personas you can now use them to begin helping you market to these groups! As we said in #2, the more precise you were in creating the profiles, the more precise your marketing can be. Use the things that drive them, their careers, and their hobbies and interests to figure out what you can sell them and where you should be marketing those products and services!
5. Why they’re the future. Like it or not, the future of all services involving the internet is on a path that will lead to more and more accurate targeting, eventually it’ll be unnoticeable to the average person. Targeting will eventually be able to go past zip codes and neighborhoods and will be able to track individual people. I personally wouldn’t be surprised if within a decade or two you will receive targeted ads based on the place you stopped for lunch a couple weeks ago because of some minute detail you were unaware ever occurred. Yet somehow companies will know that this minute detail makes you statistically slightly more likely to want a pizza for lunch instead of a burger. Regardless, what it comes down to is the future is coming closer and closer, and targeted ads and marketing is going to be one of the main weapons in everybody’s arsenal. If you didn’t start dipping your toes in the water this last decade, I hope you’re ready to jump in now because quite a few companies are already swimming laps. Marketing Personas help you find and retain customers while keeping those very same customer’s values at the center of your marketing. If you decide this isn’t really for you, have fun on the back pages of a search engine.

Additional links

What Happens in an Internet Minute in 2019?

Personas: What They Are, How to Make Them, and How to Use Them in Marketing

The Hazard’s Of Our Bold New (Online) World. Danger around targeted marketing on the internet.

The internet is among mankind’s most brilliant innovations. In fact, it’s probably the single greatest. Just as our ability to control fire or grow crops led to change after radical change the world wide web has revolutionized the world. However, you can’t really distrust farming or fire. You can definitely distrust the internet it turns out. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how dangerous the internet really is and create a code of ethics for marketers who want to use the internet’s treasure trove of information.

There’s quite a bit of amazing things on the internet, so many amazing things in fact that according to a digitalinformationworld.com article (link will be below) nowadays the average person worldwide spends about 142 minutes a day on the internet. However, if you’re between the age of 16 and 24, then its closer to 181 minutes. All of these people, and all of this time on the internet you eventually have to ask, who oversees all of this? Are they watching me? How much do they know about me? The answers plainly put are as follows: governments and billion-dollar corporations, yes they are watching you, and they know a lot about you.

Depending on who you ask, how dangerous the current state of data mining and data collecting is on the internet can get a large array of responses. However, the overwhelming response is, no, the internet doesn’t protect my privacy very well. In another Digitalinformationworld.com article, only 7.5% of 5000 people surveyed said that they haven’t changed the way they use the internet since last year. That means in just 365 days over 90% of people have, partially due to the data breaches and online hacking sprees that seem to be happing more and more frequently these days. The most recent and troubling of these was, of course, the Cambridge Analytica case which revealed that 80 MILLION facebook users data was being sold off to third party websites and companies, such a big breach that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg found himself in a trial on capital hill in front of the entire US Senate. So not only is it clear that people don’t trust the internet, but it has also become increasingly clear that there will be punishments if people’s suspicions are confirmed.

On a 1 to five scale with 5 being “highly dangerous” and 1 being “not dangerous at all”, I’d say this is right in the middle at a 3. While there are definite issues, such as the Facebook scandal there is enough social awareness and people willing to make a change that crises on that level can be avoided in the future. With millennials being one of the generations with the most distrust of the internet coming into positions of power I truly think that while the internet is far too relaxed on regulations at the moment we will soon be going in the right direction.

Now as promised here is a list of about 10 ethical bullet points that you shouldn’t break. And if you do break them? Well, you might be the next CEO on top of capitol hill testifying in front of the senate.

1. Just be a decent person. I know this sounds stupidly simple but lots of times when you see somebody folding under the pressure of trial on tv or twitter you sometimes ask yourself “how could they ever have done this?”. The answers while complicated on a case by case basis often boil down to, they lost sight of what was important in life.
2. Just ask them. The straightforward approach has been thrown to the wayside in recent years and it really has begun to show with how many people are getting in trouble for selling data to third party companies.
3. Don’t rely on fine text. If all of your questions about allowing data to be distributed are in the fine text, that is generally a good sign that you’re hiding something. It’s almost 2020, you should know by now that hiding things from people will only work for so long and the consequences will probably just keep getting worse.
4. Tell people what you want from them. If you’re straight up with people you might not get as many people saying yes they’re willing to share but those who are will be able to give you much more accurate data. Remember, most times the age-old saying, “quality over quantity” holds true.
5. Look around and see what others are doing. Sometimes it’s good to be the first to do something, it can put you on the cutting edge of a brand new field and set you up for unrivaled dominance. Other times It’s going to get you in a lot of trouble. The EU has what I predict will end up as the baseline for data collecting guidelines already mostly in place. If your ideas seem wildly out of place next to theirs, might be best to rethink it.
6. Ask around and see what people think. Focus groups are one of the most tried and true methods of getting people’s thoughts on things. You can even use employees if you’re working with ideas that you don’t want to know about yet. Just get a random anonymous sample of your employees and see what they think.
7. Imagine if your “secret” got out. If your company was the one that was hacked and your new method of collecting data was released, would people be upset? Think of a few of your more “anti-technology” relatives you have, how would they react if they found out?
8. Remember there’s more to life than money. Facebook made over $11 billion on ad revenue in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg has a net worth of almost $70 billion dollars. Yet he just kept pushing for newer and newer ways to get money from people and just like all people who get too greedy, he got caught. Pair this last point with #1 on the list, just really sit back and think “Why am I doing this?” If the answer is for money or some reason that doesn’t rank too highly on a scale of niceness, probably hit the drawing board again.

Here’s the two articles mentioned in the text:

https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2019/01/how-much-time-do-people-spend-social-media-infographic.html

https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2019/03/users-trust-internet-privacy-facebook-survey.html