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ZMOT.ly

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

How To Make Your Employees Share Content?


How To Make Your Employees Double Up As Content Marketing Warriors?

What can you do about it to have them more engaged in your social media activities?

Do your employees want to share your corporate content on a social network? If so, what would they want to share? Also, why do they think that it is valuable to share this info in their social networks?

Every marketing team would want to have their tens, hundreds or thousands of non-C level employees to share the corporate posts and content on their personal social networks and build the brand. The question is how?

Not long ago, Trapit, a company that enables social network content sharing by employees, commissioned what it calls the first survey of rank and file employees about their thoughts on sharing company info on a social network. Takeaways from the study and what the results mean for companies looking to improve their staff advocacy on social suggest that employees see great value in sharing via a social network. Many companies must catch up to do to take benefit sentiment.

The Observation

When study asked about the benefits their company would receive from social sharing, a three in four respondents perceive an advantage, while ten per cent see no value. Notably, 43% say it would increase brand consciousness, 21% believe it would aid brand credibility, while only 11% say it would boost sales. – Employees are supportive of social network and acting on a social network on behalf of their companies.

Another observation is that 55% of employees think it best to share 3rd party content in addition to their company’s content advertising. Moreover, 34% say that they are more than likely to share news articles about their company via a social network. This study suggests that employees are calling for help on the content front. They want the content from the creator, so that they can be active on social, and still help build their individual brand while promoting the company. Your employees do not want to spend their whole day farming for content on their very own. Corporate white papers and promotional materials are not enough. Your employees want an expansive mix of content.

So, what should a company do?

Your employees are not charmed in just being a corporate volunteer on their social network. They would like to be intriguing and engaging in their network and be reliable. These are the six things that you should do.

  1. Provide them with a good selection of content that includes ‘promotional’ corporate assets, as well as high value-assets like, industry news analysis, research, thought leadership
  2. Help them round out their personal profiles and their personas on social.
  3. Help them get some authentic engagement going versus just relaying more advertorial
  4. Additionally, content created for sharing, give them insights or a dashboard on their social sharing activities.
  5. Help them see some personal Return on investment for their efforts, just as you would for your business.

It is simple – Businesses must help measure the impact of social sharing – be it for your marketing team or your employee.

If employee-led social selling and employee engagement are not essential initiatives for the sales and marketing teams but the entire company including Human Resources and Senior Management teams.

This article first appeared on April 12, 2019 in a Times of India Blog titled How to make your employees double up as content marketing warriors?

#ContentMarketing #DigitalMarketing #EmployeeEngagement #Marketing #SocialMedia #SocialMarketng #ContentWarriors #EmployeeLeverage #SmartMarketing

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Futureshift ZMOT.ly

ZMOT.ly – Your Zero Moment of Truth

ZMOT.ly (read zee-mot-lee) is all about ensuring impact at the zero-th moment of truth. This is about rapid demand creation and predictable revenue through right interventions and influencing the decision-making process even before the prospect visits your shelf (online or offline).

Unlike the  classic traditional model, where an engagement (with prospect) kicks in from the point of first interaction with your team (first moment of truth) and through the customer experience after purchase (Second Moment of Truth), ZMOT helps you actively influence the experience from inception and create a positive demand cycle for the product or service.
By taking advantage of though business insights and advanced technology skill-sets, our consultants will help architect the business impact solution – be it revenue or profit maximization or market expansion or operational efficiency. We will do it by developing solutions in our innovation labs that specialize in solutions in the cloud, mobile, social and analytics.
Reach out to us at Futureshift at zmotly@futureshift.com.sg, where our best of our brains will help you with a demonstrable impact in business.
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Futureshift

Futureshift, an evolutionary journey (2014)

Futureshift is an evolution, and we are excited to have you as part of this journey