Digital Series Speaker Profile: Marty Weintraub

Marty Weintraub

Author of "Killer Facebook Ads" and CEO of aimClear®

Marty kicks off another exciting MN AMA Digital Series with his keynote presentation "36 Ways to Make more Social Media Friends Who Matter" on 10/24 at Rojo Mexican Grill.

What is most exciting to you about the field of marketing today?
I love emergent technologies that allow marketers to target users based on their intrinsic characteristics. From deeply rooted predictions to the music people prefer, platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Twitter, blogs and forums make it possible to identify users based on documented engagement, and target them by paid and organic methods. My fascination culminated with a Wiley Sybex book book about Facebook Ads.

"Paid" means Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Paid Stumbles, YouTube ads and other channels' advertising programs. "Organic" means community management, reaching out and the systematic identification of authority users to target for engagement by various models.  Either way, it's a brave new world where cool marketers make forever-friends by giving and...actually being friendly.
Who or what has been the biggest influence on your career?
So far as the "who" goes, my favorite industry sage is Chris Sherman. He's a true futurist and one of the wheels behind SMX conferences. If you ever get a chance to attend and SMX conference, don't miss it. Danny Sullivan (Executive Editor of SearchEngineLand.con), Rand Fishkin (Braintrust and founder of SEOmoz), and Barry Schwartz (SearchEngineRoundTable.com) are my favorite bloggers in the business. My mom and dad were huge influences, as well.

So far as the "what" goes, my time at Berklee college of music was a huge deal for me. Though the first 25 years of my career were as a musician, the impact of my Berklee education looms large every day.
What are the top 3 resources you turn to for information to keeps you current in your field of marketing?
I read the DailySearchCap in SearchEngineLand every day, without fail and have for years.  Barry Schwartz is Executive News Editor of SEL and does a bang up job. Twitter is an awesome resource for staying current. Check out my Twitter profile and follow who I do. You can't go wrong. I go to a lot of conferences. I love SES, SMX, MediaPost SearchInsiderSummit, International Search Summit, and a numberof others.
What book are you reading now?
A Lapsed Anarchist's Approach to Building a Great Business, These management principles are from Zingerman's, a flagship Ann Arbor deli that does about 30 million a year between their businesses. The book includes an explanation of the “Twelve Natural Laws of Building a Great Business” and Writing and Using Guiding Principles” Zingerman’s co-founder Ari Weinzweig offers up eighteen fascinating "secrets" that help companies like aimClear grow. I am again listening to the audio book, "Good To Great" by Jim Collins. I love this book and revisit it every couple of years.
What do you think is the biggest challenge facing marketers today?
It's challenge that things move so quickly. It  takes me between 1-2 hours every night to study the trades' to stay current. If not aimClear could lose its edge. Fortunately now we have a staff of research artists to keep us current. Still, I study every night...and I mean every night.
What do you like to do in your free time?
Wine and food. Then I switch to food and wine. I also love canoeing in the BWCA, fishing, hiking and working out. 

How to stop looking stupid on sales calls

Mark Price

Over and over, we all share the same experience.  Some salesperson calls you on the phone, and immediately launches into a laundry list of all the amazing things that their product does, after barely saying “hello.”  It is as if they are on a game show, trying to get the right answer by dumping enough words into the call, hoping that some chance phrase lights your interest before you hang up.

Salespeople call me anywhere from 4-8 times daily, all with some variation on the same pitch.

And they wonder why they have such little success.

Most companies, including some of the largest sales organizations in the country, follow the same approach:  Call, describe your product and ask if they are interested in purchasing.  If not, then hang up and go to the next name on the list.  The goal is to move through the list and find any opportunities you can in the shortest amount of time.

While they may achieve some short-term sales wins, the net effect of such a sales approach is to alienate a larger and larger share of your prospect pool.  That share by the way, includes a valuable group –prospects who may be willing to buy later, but lack the information and clear benefit to make the switch at this moment.

When you try to force a sale on those prospects and then repeat the same process over and over again, you create three impacts.  Your prospects learn that:

1. You are less interested in them than you are in yourself

2.  You are not to be trusted

3. You do not care for them as individuals

The net result is not only do you fall out of the “circle of trust” with prospects, you also make it more unlikely that the prospect will make any decision at all.  In a world where there is no trust, who can you believe in?

But there is another way.

The top business development efforts today combine the best of database marketing, publishing and sales in order to build relationships with key prospects, nurturing them and building trust until they are ready to make a sale.  The process is called Content Based Selling (CBS), and it hold potential to reinvent relationships with prospects and lead gen from now on.

I will write in more detail about CBS in my next post, but the high-level approach is to determine NOT whether a prospect is ready to buy, but instead, what information they need to have to be ready to make a decision – what questions, what concerns, what objections do they need to overcome in the process of making a decision.  By providing impartial information to prospects based on those specific needs, you can build trust and relationships over time – critical ingredients in building a stable, growing pipeline of business.

Follow Content Based Selling and you will be able to:

• Stop cold calling in your firm
• Build an accurate, predictable sales pipeline
• Drive insights from prospect needs to improve your marketing and customer service experience as well as sales process
• Enjoy your work more every day while you consistently surpass your goals

In my next post, I will tell you what to do so Content Based Sales can revolutionize your business and your career.

Mark Price is Managing Partner of M Squared Group, a consulting firm focused on understanding and building customer relationships, and the author of the blog “Cultivating Your Customers,” where he writes about practical approaches to improve customer retention and overall customer value. 

Member of the Month

Welcome to the MN AMA’s new feature--Member of the Month!

Member of the Month is designed to show appreciation for and recognize MN AMA members for their membership. Member of the Month is also a great way for other members to get to know each other. Once a month a member will be chosen at random at the end of the month and receive a congratulations email at the beginning of their month asking them for an interview.

Member of the Month receives:

•                Recognition on the MN AMA website, all social media outlets and at all monthly events

•                Free attendance at all events (mixers/programming events) that month (minus Annual Conference).

•                Thank you card from VP of Membership and President

•                Personal Phone call from VP of Membership

October Member of the Month

1.        

         What’s your name?

Jessica Berg

2.        

         Where do you work? What is your role?

Fredrikson & Byron, P.A., Marketing & Business Development Assistant

3.        

         When did you join the AMA?

August 2011

4.         

     Why did you join the AMA?

I joined the AMA for professional development.

5.       

         What have you learned or do you hope to learn from the MN AMA?

I hope to learn more about how different industries are marketing in the post-recession era and how tactics are changing to meet the values of a new consumer.

6.        

         What is one piece of career/marketing advice you have for other MN AMA Members?

Allow yourself a few misses and mistakes. Most times I’d rather stay in my comfort zone, but I’ve learned more from mistakes and projects that needed a ‘Plan B’ or ‘Plan C’ solution. If something is easy, then I need to push myself further.

Marketing challenge: What could be smarter than a Smartphone?

 Marc Sokol


Summer break is over, the kids are back in school, and it’s time to put your marketing brain back to work!

If you have teens, as we do in my family, everyone has some version of a smartphone, with multiple functions, capabilities, and in different colors.  Surely you have noticed that almost all teens use their smartphones in a vastly different way than do their parents.  Raised in a telephone and cellphone generation, for me it’s primarily a phone with the added value of email, texting, and all those wonderful apps, many of which I never seem to use.

For my teens, however, it’s not much of a cellphone at all; it’s a texting device.  My nephew even has a voice message that says, “Don’t leave me a voice message, because I don’t pick them up. If you want to reach me, send a text message.”  No apology, just a statement of fact.

Which brings me to the point of this post:  why still call it a smartphone when the phone is largely inconsequential to a growing generation of consumers?

Years back I had a Palm Pilot.  I liked the term, PDA, for Personal Digital Assistant, because that what it was for my different needs.  Droid, short for Android, a referral to having your own robot-like device, also seems an appealing label for a multifunction personal device: one syllable, implying ‘intelligent but at your service’, and not like other words we commonly use.

Remember how iPod replaced the label MP3?  Have you noticed how iPad, Zoom and other words are jockeying to capture colloquial mindshare in the category of Tablet devices?

Is it still a Smartphone if you don’t use the phone?

What would you prefer to call it?  A smarter label defines the category, goes on to shape our thinking and, in turn, our consumer behavior.

• If just a cell phone or an enhanced cell phone (building off one primary function), then ‘Smartphone’ continues to win.
• If you successfully brand the product by its look and feel, then ‘tablet’ should remain the defining label in the future.  But notice if people call your non-Apple tablet device an iPad or if they call your iPad a tablet PC. 
• If you succeed in branding to inspire aspiration and emotional appeal, then you’ll see ‘Droid’ (my Android, my robot) and ‘iPad’ (or my pad) continue to battle for the language of consumer behavior. 

So what do you call a mobile phone that isn’t used for mobile phone calls?  Surely a creative mind like yours can do better than “mobile device”.

Put your thinking caps on. You could be shaping the future!

Marc Sokol is an organizational psychologist with an eye for how people and teams can be more effective, even in a dysfunctional company. He is part of M Squared Group, a data-driven marketing consultancy. 

Using Social Media for Recruitment

Ashley Haugen

The face of job recruiting has changed—and it’s not just a little Botox and brow work, either. While newspaper classifieds and employment websites used to be the go-to resources for recruiting, social media outlets have also become key players.

Traditional media can still prove to be a fruitful form of recruitment, however employers are increasingly turning to social media to find new hires. According to a recent research report by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), 76% of companies said that they do use or are planning to use social media sites for recruiting. More than half of the employers responding said that social networking sites are an efficient way to recruit candidates. 

There are many benefits to using social media for recruitment. Messages sent over social media channels may be perceived as being more authentic or have a higher level of credibility and believability than traditional corporate mechanisms. Also, the relatively low cost of sending messages over social networks may allow your firm to increase the number of messages that it can afford to send. Together, these two factors may result in more effective messages that directly increase quality applications.

Candidate quality is also a benefit of social media recruitment. Those who frequently use social networks may be the highly desirable “early adopter.” These people are engaged and in-tune with the latest trends, are not afraid to learn new programs, and are more technically savvy (increasingly important in our digital world) than other candidates.

Another draw is the link-ability and sharing capabilities of social media sites. It’s super easy for friends to see a job opening post and share it with family and friends quickly. Additionally, presenting your job openings in a creative way allows companies to show more about their personalities as organizations, which in turn helps potential candidates get a feel for whether or not the culture is likely to be a good fit. 

A more honest conversation, company exposure, and attracting certain types of people are all possible when utilizing social media. However there are a few tips to know before jumping in and tweeting your heart out. First, it’s important to recognize and understand the three main social media outlets that are most conducive for recruitment. These sites include LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Secondly, it is important to understand the unique audience of these sites, and what to look for when evaluating candidates on social media sites.

The Main Sites of Social Media Recruitment

Twitter

The easiest way to recruit is to tweet jobs you have available.  That being said, it’s also easy for those tweets to fall through the cracks of the incessant Twitter-chatter. To make your job posting tweets standout you can use hashtags (#). Hashtags are a way to filter, search and find information on Twitter. For example, if you posted “Company X is #hiring! We’re looking for smart #interns,” then someone can search #hiring and #interns on twitter, and you’re company will show up in the results. 

When you find a potential candidate on Twitter, it’s important to evaluate their Twitter skills. Especially if recruiting for a social media-related position, it’s important that the candidate is familiar and utilizes the site effectively. Rather than reading their skill on a resume or cover letter, recruiting on Twitter allows you to see their real-world skill. You can evaluate their activity to see how often they tweet, if there is a good balance between following and followers, how big their network is, and their quality of tweets.

Facebook

If your company has a Facebook, make sure that it is up to date and relevant first. You can then post job openings for your fans to see on your company page. This is free and gives your fans an exclusive chance to apply. This is a good thing as your Facebook fans are most likely passionate about your company (otherwise why would they be your friend?). What better pool to choose from then a group of brand fanatics and agency supporters?

LinkedIn

You can post a job on LinkedIn, although there is a fee associated with this. I would recommend using your network activity box (also known as the status box) to broadcast you’re hiring. It’s free and simple. It works similar to a Facebook status update; “New opening for project manager.  Contact me for details.” When you find someone that peaks your interest, evaluate their LinkedIn profile. How complete is this persons profile? Does it look neglected or incomplete? Do they have recommendations from peers, managers and colleagues? Are they members of relevant groups? Do you have any connections with this person? You want an “expert” in the field, and this is an easy way to tell how engaged they are.

In conclusion, recruiters are increasingly reaping the benefits of utilizing social media sites to fill job openings. And it’s no wonder, when you can gain brand exposure, create buzz, source candidates and evaluate their potential and real-world applicability with social recruitment. 

Ashley Haugen is a Gustavus Adolphus College alumna. She has had Marketing experience working with such organizations as the LOFT Literary Center, the Gustavus Marketing Department and the Ordway Center for Performing Arts. She currently is a PR associate at Axiom Marketing Communications.