Tag: Business

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Part 2 – Marketing in the times of Corona [Thought Leadership and PR]

PR and Thought Leadership_CoronaTimes

What #Marketing, #Sales, #BusinessDevelopment and #ChannelManagement teams can do in the times of #Corona #Lockout #Quarantine
(Part 2 of n – This is the first in the multi-part series on how business can thrive in these times)

In my earlier post on LinkedIn and ZMOTly, – Carpe Diem – Marketing in the times of Corona – I had shared how these times provide an extraordinary opportunity for marketing to lead the industry. Only the innovators with innovative marketing organisations will survive. The rest will perish and fall by; I spoke about 3 points earlier.

[1] Reset and recalibrate the internal marketing
[2] Reach out to currently engaged prospects
[3] CRM, Database clean up, and customer segmentation.
Here are the next three –

[4] Engage Senior Leadership Team in Marketing

As is usually the case in many organisations, there is an acute misalignment between the marketing team and various business units about the understanding of marketing and expectations from it.

  1. Alignment with Marketing: If you are a Senior Leadership Team member (SLT) or a CMO, this is an ideal time for you to rally the resources and brainpower within the company towards marketing. Your SLT will be, in all probability, be not ‘travelling’ though they are OOF 😊. They will, in all likelihood, be locked up at home with abundant energy and less busy than their usual selves. You use this opportunity to brief your SLT about the company’s marketing objectives and strategies. You can seek participative inputs from the leadership and seek specific feedback or buy-in. Your marketing team can gain insights into various business units and their challenges. That can help you to craft better marketing strategies. What more, you may even crawl some budget from different business units if you provide value.
  2. Management Team as Ambassadors: You can leverage SLT as social media influencers. You may educate some of them on the powers of Social Media and have a streamlined approach to social media. Your SLT is one of the best brand ambassadors inside and outside the company. Leverage them and their networks for writing blogs, social posts on LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook. That will amplify your company’s brand presence.

[5] Extend your online education for Free–

The magnitude and pace of disruption because of this pandemic is “unparalleled.” It has also opened immense possibilities for students (adults and children alike) to adopt remote learning. The physical classrooms have closed. There is massive adoption of online education through zoom sessions and the likes.

As a savvy marketer, you should seize the moment. You must ‘be there as this massive tectonic shift in learning paradigms are happening across the world. If you have online courses (non-confidential and value-led) built internally, they can be excellent ammunition today. You can use them and make a loyal following for your solution, product or industry; Some examples may be – Artificial Intelligence, Effective Delegation, Crucial Conversations, Financial Management, or Building Operational Excellence.

High-quality training content is of tremendous value to the receiver. As a marketer, you may not want to miss the opportunity to add value to society by enriching your lives. Marketing plays a vital role in building an emotional connection with the audience – your future customers, partners, vendors, influencers, or employees.

My suggestion would be to open it up to the audience for FREE and take the lead in your industry; Digital learning improves access and reduces the cost of continued education, and you would have been an innovator on that front in your industry and your customers and prospects.

[6] Organise Community Outreach and Seek and share personal stories

Your organisation or some individuals in your organisation are probably doing commendable work and community outreach.

If you are not, it is an excellent time to encourage doing such work by your teams and individuals. As a marketer, it is right down your sleeve to give wings to such an effort and gain internal and external recognition for such work. Share such work via your social media channels with pictures and videos. Do branding around such work. Get your PR engines to go full steam. Don’t worry – you can do this shamelessly. After all, that is the industry norm for successful companies and ‘philanthropists.’ All this would help you score better on your glass door raking and boost your brand significantly.

Let me know your thoughts, and I shall continue to build on these on my next posts in the series. You can also reach out to zmotly@futureshift.com.sg, and I will be glad if I can be of help

/Rajesh

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ZMOT.ly

5 Steps to Scaling your Startup – An open letter to entrepreneurs

Dear Entrepreneur:

Starting a business is easy. It requires courage. It requires an idea. It requires passion and commitment. You are one of the very few in this world who has taken that critical step.

You are even willing to make sacrifices and commit to hard work. Your next goal is to make your all this count. To make the business successful. To do that you have to scale and scale sustainably.

How would you do that? At Futureshift, our ZMOTly framework helps you to achieve your goal with a structured way to scale your business. Towards that end, our clients love this ZMOT.ly Smart Scaling Framework, they held them to look at incubation to mainstream under a very predictable model.

This model brings science to the art of business scaling. The more detailed you are with your plan using this framework the better you are set to reach your goal.

Why do some companies achieve things that ultimately exceed our expectations and defy all of our assumptions for what’s possible?

Would you startup be one of those unicorns?

Check it out! Take the plunge head-on with ZMOT.ly Smart Scaling Framework.

  1. Discovery: In this phase, you would Identify, define and prioritize opportunities that will deliver revenue/ growth. You may list all revenue/ growth model.
  2. Concept Development: In this concept development phase you would define the user, stakeholder partner value proposition and architect execution and revenue/ growth models for each revenue/ growth model.
  3. Proof of Concept: This is a very critical phase where you would validate the value proposition, revenue/ growth, and technical feasibility at a single location for each selected revenue/ growth model.
  4. Pilot; In this phase, you would test the complete model in multiple locations to validate scalability, for every scalable and sustainable model from POC. Many startups fail here.
  5. Scaled Deployment is all about focussed field execution to achieve stated goals and objectives. Here it is critical to achieving maximum revenue/ growth with minimum or administration.

Mainstream: This is no more a phase. At this stage, you have had a full adoption across all markets and integrate into core execution engines. This is business as usual and in all probability, you will have other competitors in the market. It is all about efficiency. But more importantly, this is the time to get focus to newer innovations and incubations.

Having said this, the idea of each of these models is suggestive. If a specific product or idea or a revenue model fails in any of the phases to achieve its desired objectives- you as founders and management team would need to have a real strong discussion on to do a Go-NoGo decision.

Hope this helps. Please feel free to reach out to zmotly@futureshift.com.sg if you need our help.

  • ZMOT.ly Team/ Futureshift
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Futureshift ZMOT.ly

9 PR rules shattered (2017)

 

#PR #Advertising #Marketing #CMO #PRO #Business #Entrepreneur
#PR #Advertising #Marketing #CMO #PRO #Business #Entrepreneur

If you are a professional, a businessman or an entrepreneur, ,you need PR to get visibility for your brand, product or service. The traditional rules of PR that helped well till a decade ago are is dead. The Web 2.0 has brought down the walls and unless you have adapted to the new world your PR strategy will not work in 2017.

#PR #Advertising #Marketing #CMO #PRO #Business #Entrepreneur

The 9 cardinal rules, shattered.

  1. Formal Media: The only way to get noticed was through formal media. The internet has changed all that. Today, you control your media. Your twitter, Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn – each of them with access to billions of users provide you a platform to get noticed. In fact, the so-called formal media has ended up picking news from these social platforms.
  2. Press Releases: Companies communicated to journalists through press releases. Press Releases are a passé. It is time to keep communicating as conversations with the public. You can share your idea, launch details, plans and seek feedback from your users directly.
  3. Exclusivity: Nobody other than a handful of reporters and editors Would see the Press Release. In fact, many demanded exclusivities. In today’s context – exclusivity is suicidal. The strategy should be rot reach your buyers through as many channels as you can. In fact, being accessible to your buyers at their point of interaction is the key.
  4. Significant News: Companies needed significant news before they could write a press release. Today, the rules are changed. The audience is looking for being engaged with you through your evolution. While significant news can still be leveraged to do some burst PR, the social media helps you to teach out to share the developments as they happen.
  5. Jargon: Jargon was okay because those specific journalists understood. Jargon is not okay. You audience needs to understand you and it must be simple. The lower your denominator for comprehension and understanding you higher are the changes of connecting with you and have meaningful engagement and conversations.
  6. Third party Quotes: Your press release included quotes from customers, analysts and experts to be complete. While all these would help, it is no more mandatory. Once your piece of blog or post hits the online media there will be a 360-degree feedback and that is more authentic. Today, users are looking at authenticity more than spin.
  7. Media as Gatekeeper: The only way buyers learnt about your product was when media wrote about it. Today, the barriers of media as a gate keeper are broken. In fact, organizations have started to completely bypass the formal media d have started engaging directly with the audience. So, you see artists launching anthem album via you tube or governments declaring their plans through tweets and media losing its gatekeeper status.
  8. Press Clips: The only way you measured 3effectiveness of press release was through ‘press clips’ that was maintained painstakingly each time media reported it. Today is measure being far simpler, it all measures what is the virality and click rate for your article. The more relevant and useful the content, the it is shared sand more is the visibility. In fact, main stream media has started writing articles from those 140-character tweets.
  9. Silos with Marketing: PR and marketing were separate silos and ruin by separate goals, strategies, measurements. Marketing is PR and PR is marketing. The walls are shattered. Both works in tandem to ensure maximum reach and engagement.

These were some of the things I have shared. There can be a few more. Please feel free to share your views.

The author is an entrepreneur with two decades of senior leadership experience in India and Asia-Pacific and now runs Futureshift, a boutique consulting outfit that helps businesses chart their digital marketing strategy with the @ZMOTly framework to achieve impactful outcomes. He is available at rajesh@futureshift.com.sg