Sunday, August 30, 2020

I am a digital marketer of 25 years. Now I audit campaigns for fraud.

I’ve said repeatedly, over the last 15 years, that marketers are using digital all wrong when they approach it with a “reach and frequency” mentality. They think that showing more ads to more people more often will increase sales. This worked well in the early days of TV advertising. But it doesn’t even work that well any more for TV ads because the market has changed and consumers have changed, due to the Internet. When consumers get ideas from seeing an ad, they tend to do more research online before they buy something. This is particularly true of bigger ticket items or more complex items. They research online to inform their own purchase decisions.

Digital is no different. If a prospective consumer gets inspired by seeing a banner ad or video ad, they don’t just go out and buy the product right away. (I realize that there are some impulse purchases). Consumers may not click the ad, but they tend to do a bit more research before actually buying — e.g. look up reviews, check for better prices, etc. Make a mental note of this — they see an ad, and they go online to do a bit more research before buying. Consumers are thus empowered. They don’t just take the advertisers’ word for it; they can actually do their own research. When they are able to find information that answers their own questions, they move closer to the purchase.

Marketers Are Doing Digital Wrong and Wasting 94% of Their Budgets

In recent articles, like The Cost-Performance Paradox Of Modern Digital Marketing and Behavioral Targeting is Not Worth the Premium, I’ve noted that advertisers are wasting up to 94% of every dollar pursuing large quantities of ad impressions, low prices, and behavioral targeting through programmatic digital advertising. Behavioral targeting is not nearly as effective as they think it is, because the data used for targeting is not accurate. For example, data accuracy for a single targeting parameter -- gender -- is 42%; and data accuracy for two parameters -- age + gender — drops down to 24%. Marketers are paying more for ad targeting, but are getting worse outcomes.

So what’s a marketer to do if all this targeting in digital does not work? Indeed, marketers are trying hard to get the right ad to the right person at the right time. Before we can answer this, we have to take a step back and see how consumers have changed, and therefore how advertising needs to change. CFOs should

From Push to Pull

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The concept of “targeting” ads to consumers is rooted in decades of “push” advertising in one-way channels like TV, print, and radio. These ads were broadcast outward (pushed) to consumers in hopes that they would see the ad and be inspired to purchase whatever was being advertised. “Targeting” ads to certain groups of people by selecting which TV shows or magazines to place the ads in, resulted in better business outcomes compared to no targeting at all. Targeting in these channels relied on basic demographics and interests (a handful of parameters).

In digital, however, targeting has come to mean microtargeting, hypertargeting or behavioral targeting which rely on hundreds if not thousands of parameters. The effectiveness of this kind of crazy targeting in digital is suspect because the quality of the data is suspect. We’ve all experienced this as creepy, crappy ads following us around the Internet even though we’ve already purchased the item or have no intention of ever buying it after researching it.

So the concepts of hypertargeting and push advertising in digital are sub-optimal or not applicable at all. This is because consumers are wary of ads. They also hate the overwhelming quantity of ads. And they are empowered by the “always-availableness” of information on the Internet, so they can do their own research, instead of just trusting what advertisers told them in ads. They pull the information they need, when they need it. In this new world, the marketers’ job is less about figuring out how to convince or trick the customer into buying their product (through ads), and more about figuring out what customers need in order to get to the purchase efficiently. In other words, the mentality should change from “push” advertising, to “pull,” where the customer is in charge.

Hat tip to Professor Bruce Clark of Northeastern University for pointing out: “Academic textbooks use “push” and “pull” differently — Push is usually defined as pushing intermediaries such as retailers to carry your product, often through a sales force. Pull is about getting consumers excited, regardless of whether that is through one-way or two-way communication.”

Customer Journey Spaghetti

Over the last ten years, I’ve witnessed marketers and advertisers attempting to do just that - by trying to figure out customer journeys. Business schools and marketing classes have been teaching marketers about customer journeys; and it even appears to make sense on the surface. If we could just figure out customers’ journeys and the touchpoints where we need to show them more ads, we could improve the outcomes of our advertising. But note how this is still about pushing ads at the consumer. Further note that figuring out customers’ journeys is really really hard, if not impossible. It’s kind of like figuring out spaghetti - there’s practically infinite ways spaghetti can twist and turn in a single bowl.

Customer journeys are no different. Every customer has a unique journey. Some need more touchpoints to get to the purchase; while others need very few. Usually bigger ticket items (from buying a home to buying a new computer) come with longer customer journeys, because modern consumers tend to do more research before making a large purchase. And smaller ticket items come with shorter journeys. But even these generalizations have exceptions. For example, a customer may decide to buy a $42,000 BMW with no further research, simply because their parents had always been BMW owners. Or another customer would do excruciating online research on a $1.99 jar of baby food, because they wanted to know if the ingredients were organic.

Further, the problem with figuring out complete journeys is practically impossible for most marketers because each marketer has very limited visibility and data — i.e. they can only see “slices” of journeys. For example, a marketer can observe the customer’s actions when they visit the marketer’s website; but they don’t have visibility when the customer is shopping in a store, or visiting other sites like google.com, amazon.com, or walmart.com. If the marketer only has piecemeal data, they can’t piece together a complete customer journey. So are we stuck again?

What Are Customers’ Missing Links?

What if I told you marketers can indeed target the right “ad” to the right person at the right time and help them along their individual customer journey efficiently? Wait, didn’t I just say above that this couldn’t be done? I did. But let’s change the frame of reference. Instead of trying to figure out customers’ journeys so you can figure out when and what ad to show, let’s focus on what customers tell you they need — their “missing links.”

Missing links are the bits of information users need as they make their way through their OWN purchase journeys. These are the questions they have in their mind, that need to get answered before they affirmatively decide to buy. These questions could be simple things like “what size battery fits in this digital camera?” or more complex things like “what do I do if my Tesla runs out of battery and I can’t find a charging station?”

Every customer has different questions; and some have a lot more questions than others. Trying to figure out all the “spaghetti” for each customer is an impossible task. But observing their missing links is eminently possible — by studying what they search for and what they ask about.

Missing Link Marketing

Let’s bring this all together now. Remember what I wrote above: “When customers are able to find information that answers their own questions, they move themselves closer to the purchase?” Customers are solving their own “missing links.” Every missing link they solve gets them closer to the purchase. Any link they cannot solve (broken link) means their journey towards the purchase is halted.

Some consumers have more missing links (questions) than others. But their habits are the same. When they get inspired by an ad, they go online to look up more information. When they have satisfied all of their own questions, they get to the purchase - completing all the links in their own “chain” gets them all the way to the purchase.

missing links are observable and addressable — AUGUSTINE FOU

These missing links are observable by the marketers. Marketers don’t need to know every customer’s entire journey; they just need to be able to help them at each missing link. This implies having the right content, online and indexed by search engines so potential customers can find it when they are looking. Remember above where I put the word “ad” in quotes? An ad is a tiny tidbit of information — often not enough info, and often perceived as trickery, or at least biased, because it came from the advertiser trying to sell them something. But useful content on a marketer’s website, or helpful reviews on Amazon, are perceived to be more objective and useful, when users are searching online.

If marketers can observe what customers are searching for or asking about (e.g. “customer questions” on Amazon), they can do something about it — i.e. take action. The actions I am talking about are NOT making more ads or doing more targeting (”push” mentality). The actions are creating more pieces of content to address customers’ missing links (”pull” mentality). Future customers are likely to have the same missing links, so every piece of content that addresses a missing link will continue to yield benefits to the advertiser long after it was created. Compare investing dollars on content versus on ad impressions, whose value disappears the moment after the ad is run. Every dollar invested in content delivers value continuously - because it helps any future customer that has the same missing link solve it quickly and move to the next step on their purchase journey.

Note, finally that marketers doing missing link marketing are no longer just pushing ads at customers trying to convince them to buy something. Instead, marketers understand that consumers are in charge; and the marketer’s role is to provide valuable information when the customer “pulls” (looks for) the information. Whichever marketer is more efficient at helping customers connect missing links, will help them get to the purchase faster and thus win the sale. This is how marketers get the right “info” (not necessarily an “ad”) to the right person at the right time. This is how marketers can use digital correctly and optimally (as opposed to the “reach and frequency” mentality of pushing more ads at them). This is what “digital” is ideally set up for and how the original promise of digital can be fulfilled.

I first wrote about Missing Link Marketing (tm) in 2007 - http://mktsci.com/missing-link-marketing-executive-brief.htm; updated in 2008 -http://www.mktsci.com/missing-link-marketing.htm and updated it in a slide deck in 2015 https://www.slideshare.net/augustinefou/missing-link-marketing-2015-update-augustine-fou

Customer centric and responsive sales & marketing during crisis

Article Link

The author writes that the pandemic requires marketing to upend every practice by rethinking everything- re-planning, rebranding, repositioning, rethinking the marketing communications and the media choices, re-pricing and reorganizing of the sales and distribution channels...

Marketing has always been the most dynamic among the organizational functions driving the top line and bottom line. Despite the ever-changing and progressive nature of marketing, the pandemic has shaken up the established sales and marketing practices. During the unprecedentedly challenging and desperate times of the global health crisis, businesses have been caught unaware in uncertainty. Unexpectedly, the marketing plans, sales forecasts and budgets have gone for a toss. In the entire evolution of marketing, probably this was the first time that the brand communications did not deliver. Personal selling became a definite no-no, mandating direct sales organizations to think of the alternative, impersonal channels. The sales promotions and trade marketing at the retail stores did not work.

Right now, consumers are sticking to buying only the essentials to satisfy their felt needs; nonessentials are not their immediate priority. There is an interconnectedness in the consumer and business markets. The business-to-consumer (B2C) markets comprising the end-users of nonessentials have their impact on the business-to-business (B2B) markets. The demand in B2B markets, which is primarily, a derived demand from the B2C markets, has plummeted. A study by Florida State University reviewed B2B sales conversations and shared some startling facts. 61% of the buyers opined that sellers lacked knowledge of their buying process. 68% complained about the inability of salespeople to adapt to buying situations. 90% said that the sales conversations were irrelevant (of no value) to them. As a result, the salespeople are missing opportunities, and it is hurting the deals. The unpreparedness of sales and marketing organizations to face the reality of sudden changes in the consumer buying patterns and evolving business models is costing them heavily. The solution is dynamic customer-centric marketing without an unnecessary obsession with the products.

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

What is brand experience (BX)?

Sam Mackisack

Oct 10, 2018 · 4 min read

The TL;DR version

BX is the link between what a brand uniquely stands for, and the interactions people have with that brand. It brings together two different ways of thinking (brand strategy and CX) to create something new. Done with purpose, it has the potential to create value for customers, organisations and society.

The longer version

Sometimes it’s handy to go back to the beginning of time. Well, maybe not the beginning of time, but at least the beginning of brands.

First, there were brands
They came about as a way for people (cattle farmers, to begin with), to indicate ownership of something. As marketing industrialised in the early 20th century, brands became more than just “marks” — they were a whole host of associations, feelings, words, and images that a company could lay claim to “owning”.

In brand thinking, being (or seeming) different from the competition is the most important thing.

Then, there was customer experience (CX)
Well, you could argue that customer experience has been around as long as there have been customers. But it really kickstarted in the 1980s with the emergence of Total Quality Management, which sought to create “a climate where employees continuously improve their ability to provide on-demand products and services that customers will find of particular value.”

And then, the internet happened
And for a while, these two different ways of thinking existed alongside each other in the same organisations — sometimes in friendly ways, sometimes not so much.

But now, both are under threat and revealing themselves as imperfect solutions in an increasingly competitive digital world.

Brands are becoming less controlled
In a pre-internet world, if you had the advertising budget, you controlled the message. This meant brands could be more neatly maintained and controlled. But the internet has empowered customers to tell your brand’s story for you — good or bad.

Adding to this, people are increasingly distrustful of advertising and institutions (like governments and corporations) in general. Usually for good reasons. Smart organisations realise that a good brand isn’t something you own, but something you earn. This has contributed to the rise of ‘purpose’, and organisations building value around why they exist, and the value they offer to the world beyond selling a product or service.

And experiences are becoming more generic
As CX has matured as a discipline and approach, and been embedded in most big organisations, it has become commoditised.

If you have four different phone companies, all selling the same product through the same channels, doing the same CX research, all with the same aim of quality experience — you’ll inevitably end up with similar outcomes. The difference relies on the quality of your people, and the degree to which your systems enable you to implement the experience. Both important factors, but expensive and hard to ‘own’.

As a customer, the reason to choose one over the other inevitably ends up being price.

A new way forward
Brand experience (BX) is a new way of thinking that brings together customer experience and brand to create a new result: a unique and compelling way for people to interact with our organisation.

It’s a collaboration between brand and CX to create something new; it doesn’t replace what they’re doing.

Great brand experiences should be:

Surprising, leading to engagement
Ownable, leading to differentiation
Cohesive, leading to equity
Loved, leading to advocacy
Feasible, leading to (appropriate) scale
Purposeful, creating a positive impact in society

Inspired by brand
From brand, it takes purpose and uniqueness. It aims to create signature experiences rather than generic ones. It’s not just about satisfying, it’s about surprising and being different.

Brands have colours or shapes they own; similarly, BX should ultimately be a common thread running through every interaction.

Built on CX
From CX, it takes a focus on services, products and experiences. BX is something you interact with, not something you’re interrupted by (like advertising).

It also takes a human-centred, iterative approach. BX is not something you do ‘to’ your customers. It’s something you do ‘with’ them.

BX vs CX
This will be a contentious one. Great brands should be experiential, and great CX should be unique. But the reality is, that’s not always true, especially in large, older organisations with a lot of legacy technology and business silos. The cohesion that brand demands is challenging. CX teams often spend their time dealing with pain points that existing systems have created, rather than generating new value. In these instances, BX becomes a useful tool for helping an organisation collaborate and find new frontiers.

BX/CX/UX
What’s with all of the Xs? Well, we live in an experience-driven economy, so it’s inevitable that it will be codified at different levels and from different perspectives. But to summarise:

UX is a user’s interactions with a specific product or experience. It focuses on usability.
CX is a customer’s interactions with a service across all channels and touchpoints. It focusses on desirability, viability and feasibility.
BX is the unique way our brand delivers both those sets of interactions and more. It’s focussed on a comprehensive and meaningful approach to differentiation: cohesion, ownability and connection to purpose.

Monday, August 24, 2020

Jeff Bezos Just Published a 4,000-Word Statement to Congress. It's a Master Class in Emotional Intelligence

Jeff Bezos Just Published a 4,000-Word Statement to Congress. It's a Master Class in Emotional IntelligenceEver wonder what emotional intelligence looks like in the real world? Bezos's letter is a perfect case study.

Original Article

BY JUSTIN BARISO, AUTHOR, EQ APPLIED

Today is a historic day for four CEOs of the most powerful companies in the world: Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Apple's Tim Cook, Facebook's Mark Zuckerburg, and Google's Sundar Pichai. Each of these men will be answering questions from U.S. lawmakers. And each will try to defend their companies' business practices.

In advance of the hearing, each executive was given the opportunity to present a written statement. Both Tim Cook's and Sundar Pichai's statements were a tad over 1,300 words long. Mark Zuckerberg's was more than double that, coming in just short of 2,800 words (complete with subheadings).

But Jeff Bezos's statement blows the others out of the water:

It's a whopping 4,540 words long.

Maybe it's because this is the first time Bezos is testifying. (Pichai, Zuckerberg, and Cook have all appeared before Congress previously.) Or maybe it's because Bezos has a special fondness for the written word.

But as I read Bezos's statement this morning, which he published on Amazon's official blog, I couldn't ignore the lessons it teaches in emotional intelligence--both for good and quite possibly for evil.

Here are some of the highlights, along with my comments.

It's a masterpiece in storytelling

Amazon's chief begins by telling the story of his mom, who gave birth to Bezos as "a 17-year-old high school student in Albuquerque." Bezos talks about his mom's determination to finish her education, attending night school with little baby Bezos in tow.

He follows with the story of his dad, Miguel, a Cuban immigrant who adopted Jeff when he was 4. "He didn't speak English and didn't have an easy path," writes Bezos. "What he did have was a lot of grit and determination." Bezos's father ended up studying in Albuquerque, where he met Bezos's mother.

Bezos then speaks of his grandparents, focusing on his grandfather--a civil servant and rancher who taught Bezos the lesson of self-reliance and resourcefulness. "When you're in the middle of nowhere, you don't pick up a phone and call somebody when something breaks," Bezos writes about his grandfather. "You fix it yourself."

Bezos tells of the many "seemingly unsolvable problems" his grandfather was able to resolve, from "restoring a broken-down Caterpillar bulldozer" to "doing his own veterinary work."

"[My] grandfather taught me that you can take on hard problems," writes Bezos. "When you have a setback, you get back up and try again. You can invent your way to a better place."

Each of these stories helps to humanize Bezos. They paint the picture, not of the person who would become the richest man in the world, but of a man with humble roots.

No regrets

Next, Bezos talks about the beginning of Amazon, an idea that began simply: "an online bookstore with millions of titles."

When Bezos told his boss at a New York City investment firm that he was leaving to pursue this dream, his boss responded: "You know what, Jeff, I think this is a good idea, but it would be a better idea for somebody who didn't already have a good job."

The boss persuaded Bezos to think things over for two days before making a decision. This was very emotionally intelligent advice: You don't want to make a permanent decision based on a temporary emotion. But, for Bezos, there would be no turning back.

"When I'm 80 and reflecting back," writes Bezos, "I want to have minimized the number of regrets that I have in my life. And most of our regrets are acts of omission--the things we didn't try, the paths untraveled. Those are the things that haunt us. And I decided that if I didn't at least give it my best shot, I was going to regret not trying to participate in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a big deal."

Grit and resilience

Bezos goes on to detail Amazon's many stumbles through the years. Cumulative losses of nearly $3 billion by the year 2001 (the first year Amazon produced a profitable quarter).

"At the pinnacle of the internet bubble," writes Bezos, "our stock price peaked at $116, and then, after the bubble burst, our stock went down to $6. Experts and pundits thought we were going out of business."

Bezos and company stuck with it, and Amazon eventually reached financial success.

But it took a lot of risk-taking to get there

"In addition to good luck and great people," writes Bezos, "we have been able to succeed as a company only because we have continued to take big risks. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment."

For example, analysts couldn't understand why a company known first as a bookseller would get into the business of selling digital storage and server capacity, the backbone of Amazon Web Services (AWS). And while AWS eventually turned out to be a smashing success, it was alongside the many risks that didn't work out. (Remember the Amazon Fire phone, anyone?)

"Amazon has made billions of dollars of failures," writes Bezos. "Failure inevitably comes along with invention and risk-taking, which is why we try to make Amazon the best place in the world to fail."

How to use empathy

One of the key reasons Amazon became such a powerhouse is the company's relentless focus on the customer.

"Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great," writes Bezos. "Even when they don't yet know it, customers want something better, and a constant desire to delight customers drives us to constantly invent on their behalf."

It was this focus, says Bezos, that inspired one of the company's most successful initiatives: Amazon Prime. "No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program," writes Bezos. "But it sure turns out they wanted it."

This extreme focus goes beyond what typical companies do; it's a real-life example of how to use empathy in the business world. Because if you can put yourself in the shoes of your customer, you can better understand them--and better satisfy them.

Business is about winning trust

"Customer trust is hard to win and easy to lose," writes Bezos. "When you let customers make your business what it is, then they will be loyal to you--right up to the second that someone else offers them better service."

Bezos continues, "You earn trust slowly, over time, by doing hard things well. Delivering on time; offering everyday low prices; making promises and keeping them; making principled decisions, even when they're unpopular; and giving customers more time to spend with their families by inventing more convenient ways of shopping, reading, and automating their homes."

In my book EQ Applied, I compare all relationships--including the one between business and customer--to a bridge. Any strong bridge must be built on a solid foundation--and for relationships, that foundation is trust.

Criticism is a gift--if you allow it to be

Bezos has long made it clear that Amazon makes decisions based on long-term value, not shortsighted gains. But that doesn't mean the company is always right.

"When we're criticized for those choices, we listen and look at ourselves in the mirror," writes Bezos. "When we think our critics are right, we change. When we make mistakes, we apologize. But when you look in the mirror, assess the criticism, and still believe you're doing the right thing, no force in the world should be able to move you."

The ability to assess and process all kinds of feedback--even negative feedback--is a mark of emotional intelligence.

I like to compare feedback to a freshly mined diamond. Although unattractive to the naked eye, the rock's value becomes obvious once it's cut and polished. Negative feedback is like that unpolished diamond: To the recipient, it's ugly. But it's often rooted in truth, providing insight you can use to grow.

And even if the feedback is off base, it's still valuable--because it can help you understand others' perspectives. Because if one person feels this way about your message, you can count on others feeling similar. Knowing this can help you clarify your message so that others understand it better, or help you to prepare yourself for future criticism.

Either way, much like a diamond cutter can take a raw diamond and turn it into a thing of beauty, you can turn criticism into a learning experience.

Using emotions to influence--for good or bad

It's here that Bezos's statement begins to take a turn.

Knowing that Congress is likely to challenge and criticize Amazon, Bezos attempts to show all the ways his company helps individuals, helps the U.S., and even helps the world. He knows that raw data won't accomplish that alone; so he combines data with storytelling to try to evoke an emotional response.

For example, throughout several paragraphs of his statement, Bezos highlights Amazon's:

Focus on providing jobs within local communities

Numerous company programs and employee benefits

Individual employees, including numerous personal names and stories

Direct and indirect investments into the American economy

Efforts regarding Covid-19

Relatively high minimum wage of $15 per hour

Contribution to shareholder wealth, including investors like fire, police, and school teacher pension funds, as well as 401(k) mutual funds and university endowments

Contributions to support initiatives focused on reversing climate change

Opening of Washington State's largest homeless shelter

To conclude, Bezos gets patriotic, in an effort to appeal to lawmakers' nationalism. He brings the story full circle, drawing on his father's immigrant background. He even compares the U.S. to Amazon itself, saying that it's "still Day One" for America, alluding to Amazon's philosophy of always thinking like a small company, always striving to keep itself from going out of business.

But it's here is where I urge readers to be careful. Because, while the use of emotions to persuade or influence others isn't always bad, it can be used to blind an audience to the truth.

I don't agree with everything in Bezos's statement. But I find it's an excellent case study of how emotional intelligence works in the real world.

And for that, it's extremely valuable. Because the more you can recognize what emotional intelligence looks like, the more you can build your own.

The Easiest Way to Build Your Personal Brand: 5 Simple Strategies

Link to article

Cleaning up your profiles wins half the battle

Nicolas Cole

Mar 6 · 10 min read

The single most valuable thing you can have in today’s digital world is a powerful personal brand.

It’s the thing that separates the unprofessional from the experts. It’s what makes someone excited to hop on a call with you or make the time for a coffee meeting. It’s the unspoken advantage every single industry leader has, and it’s the thing that separates you from the competition.

What Is a Personal Brand?

In the simplest way, building a personal brand on the internet is simply the act of being intentional with the way you present yourself.

I’d argue that all of us, inherently, have “personal brands.” We all have profiles and are essentially “judged” based on what people can assume based on what they see at a distance. The only difference is that some people are aware of the impact of their words, photos, etc., and others simply post whatever it is they’re feeling in that moment onto Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

However, that difference is a major one — and if executed correctly, it can drastically change the direction of your life and your business.

Most people don’t realize that the people they love to follow on social media are all masters of personal branding. That girl whose selfies seem so candidly perfect? A lot of work goes into making it seem that way. Or that guy who appears to be crushing it as an entrepreneur? He’s investing a lot of money in capturing that journey in a way that’s entertaining and enticing for people. And there is a very clear reason why these people believe the time, energy, and cost is worth it:

Attention Is Power

When you can hold people’s attention and can build a sense of community and loyalty around what you do, then you have something incredibly valuable. Why?

Attention (and a large audience) makes you the obvious choice as a speaker or special guest.
Attention makes it easier for you to drive traffic or customers to a product or service you’ve created.
Attention opens doors for collaboration that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.
Attention means you can share your message faster and farther.
Attention implies credibility, and credibility means more opportunities.

The list goes on and on…

Unfortunately, most people have absolutely no idea how to build a powerful personal brand online. They mistake posting poorly lit photos of their breakfast on Instagram with content that’s truly valuable and interesting to their target audience.

Here are five strategies for building the ultimate personal brand.

1. Clean Up All Your Profile Pictures and Bios

An easy “quick win” for you to execute immediately is for you to make sure your profile pictures look professional and your bios clearly state who you are, what you do, and the value you would provide someone following you.

For example, let me break down all the different goals that are being accomplished by my own profile on Twitter:

First, my profile picture is a professional headshot. My co-founder took that one afternoon. Quick win.

Second, we designed a header image that instantly positions me as an authority. This is visually communicated through a photo of me speaking, some of my most impressive writing stats, my personal and company logos, and a memorable phrase that encapsulates my entire philosophy on writing. If you or someone at your company can’t do this for you, pay a graphic designer to create something like this for you. It is such a low-cost effort that immediately positions you as someone worth talking to in your industry.

Third, my Twitter bio lists who I am, what I do (and some credibility-reinforcing numbers), and the name of my company.

Fourth, the tweet that I’ve pinned to the top of my profile is titled, How I Write 10,000 Words Per Day, Every Day. This is an article of mine that went viral and has a significant amount of social proof, but it also stands as a great introductory piece for someone new to my work (and reinforces credibility — because writing 10,000 words per day is a fairly uncommon thing).

All of these things can be fixed and executed in a matter of hours on a weekend. And yet, once you fix them, your profiles will continue to stand as a professional and impressive representation of who you are, at scale.

Don’t underestimate how valuable this can be.

2. Invest in a Clean Personal Website

One of the first things you should do when building your personal brand is to buy a domain for your name (or something close) and build a personal website.

The reason being, you want your name to start ranking on Google — and the easiest way for that to happen is to own as much “digital real estate” around the name people will be searching. When I first started building my own personal brand online years ago, there were tons of different people who came up when I searched “Nicolas Cole” on Google.

Today, I single-handedly own the first several pages. And my personal website is the number one search result.

This might not seem like the most important thing in the world, especially if you have a unique name. But imagine if your name was John Smith. If you just had an amazing coffee meeting with someone and they typed your name into Google (you know, to do a little due diligence), then you would want them to see you as the number one John Smith. Think about how that looks to the person searching your name. Of all the John Smiths in the world, the one they just had coffee with is the one who owns the entire first page of Google.

That immediately implies an immeasurable amount of credibility.

Now, if you don’t have a huge budget or the skills to hire a firm to create a personal website for you, then do the bare minimum and use a template from Squarespace or Wix. These templates are incredibly easy to implement, and they look clean and professional.

3. Choose One Social Media Platform to Build a Loyal Audience

One of the biggest mistakes people make when first starting to build their personal brand online is they try to be everywhere at once.

They sprint out the gate trying to create content on Facebook, write punchy copy on Twitter, post weekly videos on YouTube, share photos on Pinterest, and micro-vlog on Snapchat.

You’re wasting your time. I promise.

Especially when you’re first starting out, it’s so much more effective to master one platform, build a loyal audience, climb your way to the top, and then tell your followers, “You can also follow me over here…”

The key to choosing the right social platform to invest in has everything to do with what industry you’re in. For example, if you’re in fashion, food, clothing, etc., then Instagram is an obvious choice. That platform was built for industries and products that rely on visuals. However, as, say, a founder of a company, Instagram might be a bit more of a challenge for two reasons. First, the overwhelming audience on Instagram isn’t really there to “think deeply” about business insights, and second, entrepreneurship is such a mental game that it can really only be represented in so many ways visually.

As a writer and founder myself, I chose to start with a social platform built for written content: Quora.

Whenever I speak at conferences on the subject of personal branding, one of the questions I always get is, “But don’t you think video is becoming more popular?”

No, I don’t.

In fact, my personal belief is that you will always be more successful investing in what you are more naturally talented at. For example, I’m a writer. That’s what I do, that’s what I’m good at. So why would I make videos? Even if video content was (it’s not) 10x more “effective” than written content, I still believe I would be a more successful writer than I would a video maker — solely because I’m more naturally talented at writing, I enjoy it more, and thus, I’m more willing to stick with it over long, long periods of time (exponentially increasing the likelihood I’ll be successful at it).

So, choose a social platform that aligns with both your own interests and the interests of your target audience. For example, my company Digital Press works exclusively with founders, C-suite executives, investors, speakers, authors, etc., helping them build powerful personal brands online, and we focus only on creating written content on platforms like LinkedIn, Quora, and Medium.

Why?

Because that’s where people want to read, to think, and to learn.

Snapchat would be a poor choice.

4. Don’t Start and Then Stop. Long-Term Consistency Is the Key

Building a powerful personal brand online is like going to the gym.

If you buy a bunch of new flashy gym clothes, a membership to an expensive gym, and pay for a month of personal training, but then stop after 30 days, you honestly shouldn’t have even started in the first place.

The whole purpose of getting a gym membership and setting down that journey is to invest in a habit — not a destination. After all, what’s the point of spending six months getting fit and healthy if you’re just going to stop and let all your hard work become reversed?

The same goes for personal branding.

The purpose isn’t to spend a bunch of money and then stop. It’s to make sharing who you are and what you know a fundamental part of the way you build your business. It’s a long-term investment in the way you are perceived in your industry. And honestly, it’s the long-term consistency that earns a level of respect you can’t buy like you can a press feature. Half the reason I get the amazing opportunities I do (to speak, to work with incredibly successful clients, to appear on huge podcasts, etc.) is because I’ve been writing online for years. Not days. Not weeks. Not months. 5+ years.

But, here’s what consistency over long periods of time looks like.

After writing on Quora for about three years, I decided to start copy/pasting some of my most popular content over to Medium at the beginning of 2017.

Ninety-four views in a month isn’t very impressive — and this is where 99% of people give up.

Well, I decided to stick with the process.

And one year later, I was averaging almost 500,000 views per month on my Medium content alone.

People are incredibly impatient when it comes to building a following on social media, but as someone who is speaking from experience, I can promise you that no other variables are worth talking about unless you are being consistent. Not “growth hacks.” Not “the time of day you post.” All those are tactics that only matter once you’re in a cadence.

5. Build a Web of Content Surrounding Your Name, Your Company’s Name, and Keywords Related to What You Do

Building a personal brand isn’t about “going viral” (and this is coming from someone who has written over 50 viral articles and racked up tens of millions of views).

Personal branding is all about playing the long game, and the secret to success is to build a massive web of content that stretches all across the internet.

How you do this is all about linking and laddering up credibility.

This is a big part of our unique approach to content marketing we execute for our clients at Digital Press. Part of ensuring your name starts to “own” the first few pages of Google and that people who search your name come across your company (and vice versa) is all about getting high-quality content in dozens of different places.

For example, one of the things most people don’t know about Medium is how powerful Medium publications can be for SEO. In fact, even though my Quora account has about 5x more content than my Medium account, my Medium profile ranks higher on Google. Similarly, if you search “Nicolas Cole thought leadership” (my name + keywords I want to rank for related to my business), two of the top three results are Medium related — and the top search result is a Medium publication that republished one of my pieces.

Multiply this recipe by hundreds of pieces of content, across hundreds of different websites, and the chances someone searching within the realm of content marketing/personal branding/thought leadership and coming across my content is incredibly high.

Fun fact: nearly a third of our business at Digital Press is inbound through my own personal brand — and we have worked with over 75 founders and c-suite executives all across the world.

If that’s not a clear ROI, I’m not sure what is.

Ltap Research