I can’t remember what movie recently featured the tagline ‘everything is connected’ but I’m co-opting it here to make my point about how you can spread your ideas incrementally across media. Take these three commonly used marketing pieces:
- Email newsletter
- Blog
- Book
Alone, each of these items is a finite vehicle for you and/or your company’s ideas. However, if you undertake the simple task of connecting them you can create a lean, mean marketing manifesto and quickly ensure the spread of your ideas.
How? I’m guessing, like so many out there, you collect customer email addresses and someone has said “we need to send out an email newsletter.” So every quarter/month you are scrambling around for relevant content for your e-newsletter so that you can dredge up something to say to your customers.
Fast forward a couple of years when blogs crop up and, again, someone at the marketing round table said “we need to get us one of those.” So now you’re blogging. You now have two content driven pieces struggling for relevant content.
But what if you take a step back and tie these two pieces together. Janine Popick, CEO of VerticalResponse, my favorite email ASP, does just that. Every month she sends a newsletter that has a teaser to one of her recent blog posts that links to the blog site. And, as we all know, once you click through and read her blog how likely are you stay on her site …?
Brilliant, right? So then you follow this thing through to it’s next logical conclusion and you take your best blog posts and assemble a book like Seth Godin is doing with his upcoming book Small Is the New Big. Really, previewing potential book content on a blog gives you great insight into what your audience wants to hear from you. If I’m not mistaken “Small Is the New Big” was Godin’s most popular blog post and is thus the central idea of his latest manifesto.
The Point? Connect your messaging dots. We spend so long searching for content for emails, blogs, books. Why not use one as a spring board to another and another. If you can get your message firing on all pistons, your ideas can build like a mighty snowball! I’d better get out of here before the metaphor police arrest me.
P.S. If you were really paying attention, I’m sure you noticed the key ingredient that I glazed over: the simple fact that you must have something relevant to say to your audience. This whole rant is null and void if you don’t have a message. So … uh, get one. Easier said than done. More on that later.
P.P.S. “Everything Is Connected” was Syriana’s tagline but since I can’t really connect this marketing riff to oil I’ll bow out gracefully.
