#even if you unsubscribed for a month and came back you can still pop into your home to keep it since a sub is 30 days and demo is 45
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So many people in the game wish to own homes, and the housing districts are much like neighborhoods in real life. You can walk through them and see all the different houses - and enter them too if people don't have their house set to private. Only ENTERING a house is instanced, but the "district" isn't... So if you don't enter the house for 45 days (which Square Enix actually emails you to warn you that if you don't check on your house it will be demolished... they do this like... I think 3 times - so it's not like out of the blue, you know it's coming) your house gets demolished and the lot it was on is put back up on the market for someone else to try and get with the housing lottery system. They're still trying to implement more districts so more people can have houses. I mean, you can get an apartment and it never gets demolished unless you yourself wish to demolish it, but houses themselves are different... Especially since Free Companies and players can have houses... So you have Free Comapies (aka guilds) that have their own houses - and then each member of that Free Company is able to get an instanced room (apartment) WITHIN that house. They wanted to try and - in a sense - keep getting a home as close to the real thing as possible.
Most players gripe about housing - as they have a right to, honestly - and the devs keep trying to look into ways to make it better and easier for people to get and keep their houses.... A lot of times they put a hold on the demolishing... I think honestly they just started the demolishing process again after taking a break from it. But if you play FFXIV and own a home, it just becomes second nature to pop into your house whenever you pop online, even if its just zoning into it for a second and then porting somewhere else. But you can't just teleport into your house... you teleport to the front yard, then enter the door. I like that aspect.
The freedom you have with decorating is amazing though. You can place things literally/pretty much ANYWHERE you want, no specific spots with sizes or whatever, so people can create amazing inside get aways... Like in the basement of the Free Company I own is a beautiful Eastern Style baths that took me around 4 hours give or take a few extra to create. You also can set what music you get to hear in there too... so a lot of times you can weave a tale within. For some people, housing is end game stuff... or hell... some people even make their living in game off of decorating other people's houses. People will pay someone to decorate their house to look a certain way, and I'm talking these people will pay MILLIONS of gil for these decorator's time.
You have some places that are cafes, and work like cafes, they hire people to cook the food and serve it. You have some places that are night clubs that have live DJs that play. You have some places that become theaters and put on plays... It's endless.
And I've started rambling about it. Sorry. But yeah, 45 days of not being in a house will demolish it... You loose the house, but not the stuff INSIDE the house. All of that is put on a specific person you can go and gather your things from. But it's a real quick fix of just popping inside your home whenever you log on, and you're good for another 45 days. Free Company houses are a little different, because as long as 1 member of the Free Company pops into the house, it resets the timer... so as long as 1 person from your FC has a subscription and pops into the house, your FC house is good. Oh, and if you add someone to your home as a "tenant" so they have access to decorating/entering if you house is set to private, they TOO will also get the reminder emails from Square Enix so they can remind YOU to log in and enter the home. Because for a private home, the owner has to enter it, not a tenant. So Square Enix covers their butts with that.
#honestly I think its quite fair#even if you unsubscribed for a month and came back you can still pop into your home to keep it since a sub is 30 days and demo is 45#and lately they've been putting the demo on hold#like they'll bring it back for probably 2 rounds and then put it on pause again for like half a year#it seems to be the way of things#but they ALWAYS remind people when they're going to take the hold off again#and not just once... like they remind over and over again that hey we are going to be starting up the demo process again#remember to enter your homes so you don't start that timer#its just a way so that those that have stopped playing years ago aren't taking up a home that an active player COULD have#because we were running into that problem or whole districts being taking over#and people not having logged in for like 2 or 3 years#and the houses were still theirs and people were wanting houses#also... once you GET a home in game - which not everyone can honestly#it's rough to do... you don't WANT to loose it honestly.#like... to own a home... you have to have a certain rank with your grand company... you have to be a certain lvl...#be so far into the game for the district you want your house to be in... and then you have to enter the housing lottery on the lot you want#and yes... it is exactly like it sounds... a lottery. You put up your money - which ranges anywhere from 4 mil to up to 25 mil\#depending on house size and then you wait for the entry period to be over before they draw a number.#if your number is the winner you get the house if not you collect your money back
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Style Conversational: The Style Invitational Empress on obit poems
One way to do that is to look for offbeat subjects, rather than the celebrities who get the applause on the In Memoriam reel. Today’s inking entries include the guy who popularized paint-by-number kits; the guy who came up with the “Paul is dead” conspiracy theory; the guy who insisted that he was the sailor kissing the nurse in the famous V-J Day photo. Not to mention the last surviving snail of its species.
But there were also odes to more boldface names, some with a fair amount of scorn. Someone as odious on the air as “Imus in the Morning” host Don Imus was — he called the Rutgers University women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos,” and even dissed The Style Invitational — deserves the two jabs that ran today by Duncan Stevens (“for Imus not in mourning”) and Ken Kaufman (“gone to take his eternal nappy”). Just missed getting ink: Jesse Frankovich calling him a “crappy-headed host.”
Chris Doyle showed once again how he got to be by far the highest-scoring Invitational Loser of all time, with his elegantly funny verse about engineer George Laurer, who chose not to follow his bosses’ directives at IBM, and decided that a rectangle would work better than a target-style circle as a Universal Product Code. Chris doesn’t really talk about Laurer himself — and his punchline is about checkout lines in general — but that didn’t matter to me.
I had said that one of our general Invite rules is not to wish or predict that the decedent will go to hell. Runner-up Bill Dorner said only the most laudatory things about the late Rep. John Dingell, but he did slip in, discreetly and plausibly deniably enough for me, a little nasty about the congressman’s most conspicuous and crass critic. For that, Bill wins a toy monster that surprise-pops out of your shirt pocket.
Meanwhile, Melissa Balmain and Frank Osen supplemented the already monumental Invite Obit Anthologies with gobs of ink — three poems by Melissa, four for Frank, and each was still robbed of ink for poems that didn’t make the final cut. (Frank’s so good at obit poems that last year, one of his five blots of ink was for Southwest Airlines chief Herb Kelleher, who hadn’t even died in 2018, but on Jan. 3, 2019; Herb gets to be just dead two years in a row courtesy of a couplet this time around by Loser Dean Alterman. Continuing the tradition, someone submitted a poem about Qasem Soleimani, who died Jan. 3, 2020.)
What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood liked all this week’s top winners, and also especially, from this week’s honorable mentions, Chris Doyle’s amalgam of weird deaths, Ken Kaufman’s “eternal nappy” and Mike Gips’s self-effacing tribute to his father, Philip, creator of some of the most memorable movie posters of the last 50 years — although, it turns out, it was Mike’s mother who came up with the classic “Alien” tagline: “In space, no one can hear you scream.”
(“Bones Mots” in today’s headline was submitted as a headline for Week 1365 and would have gotten ink for Tom Witte had it not already run in Week 1180, when it got ink for Tom Witte. The almost 100 percent complete “All Invitational Text” file, in searchable plain text, is added to each week by Keeper of the Stats Elden Carnahan at the Losers’ website, NRARS.org.)
Our typo humor: The Week 1369 contest
I was totally strung along by the joke at the top of this week’s Invitational, shared in a more violent form by Loser Michelle Stupak in the Style Invitational Devotees group on Facebook. Whether similar jokes work as well one after another, well, we’ll see. I’m expecting to be pretty wide-ranging in what counts as a “typo” and in which forms of humor will fit the theme. It may very well be the variety of forms that keep the results from reading like one joke told 25 times. The constant reminder: Don’t tell me the best joke you ever heard; keep it to the best joke you’ve ever thought of.
Next Loser sighting: Ozzie’s Good Eats, Fairfax, Va., Feb. 16
This month’s Loser brunch was moved across the street from the Plan A restaurant Coastal Flats for a reason I forget. In any case, this one is a similar dependable national chain, featuring your typical American and Italian brunch/ lunch fare. As usual, the Loser brunch it’s on a Sunday at noon; RSVP to Elden Carnahan at NRARS.org (click on “Our Social Engorgements” to reply and to see a tentative calendar for the rest of the year). I had to miss the December brunch, so will try to make this one, especially to meet people who are new to the Loser Community. Let me know if you’re coming.
Good news on the newsletter front: Though two weeks from now, The Post will be discontinuing the weekly email I send out every Thursday afternoon that includes a link to the new Invitational and Conversational, I’ve found a way to easily send you the same thing on my own, to up to 5,000 subscribers. (The Post is trimming back its operation from about 60 to 40 newsletters for administrative reasons; the Invitational’s is one of the smaller ones, and readers tend it click on it less often than most of the other newsletters.) So all you have to do is sign up at tinyletter.com/TheEmpress, and you’ll get virtually the same email as before. And you can unsubscribe just as easily, if you’d like to hurt my feelings.
Though this new newsletter won’t start for two more weeks, it wouldn’t hoit if you signed up now, since not everybody on the old list can fit on the new one. (I don’t foresee a problem, to be honest, because most people on the current list aren’t opening their emails anyway, but think of the enveloping peace of mind it would grant you.) The signup asks you only for your email address, not your name. Also: You’ll have to click on a verification email after you sign up to be fully entered, so if you don’t see one promptly, check your spam filter.
Just as with the current email, the links to the Invite and Convo work only for Post subscribers. The Post is currently offering a really good online subscription promotion — $50 for a year — that truly is an enormous value for what The Post brings you 24 hours a day. Subscribe here. And then you can read the Invite over and over! Also, I understand that it covers various events that happen around the world.
Sahred From Source link Entertainment
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12 Marketing Experts Reveal How to Crush Your Competition in 2019
With the new year in full swing, my wonderful colleagues — the marketing experts here at Convince & Convert — came up with 23 ideas for making your marketing and customer experience AMAZING in 2019.
In no particular order, here are our favorite recommendations for making 2019 your best year yet. These are the things that not many companies are doing well, but if you do, you will be sure to crush your competition this year. Let’s go!
Jay Baer, Founder, Convince & Convert
1. Leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning as part of your content marketing.
2019 will be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their content marketing, using tools like Ceralytics and others.
2. Create experiences that are talkable to cost-effectively grow your business.
2019 will be the year that a meaningful number of companies truly embrace the notion that customer experience is the most powerful form of customer acquisition. Yes, you need to be good at content marketing and social media and all the rest. But if you deliver an experience that’s talkable, your customers become volunteer marketers, and word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective (and cost-effective) way to grow any business.
3. Boost your social media performance with artificial intelligence too.
2019 will also be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their organic and paid social, using tools like Pattern89 and others.
Zontee Hou, Senior Analyst
4. Perform consistency audits to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story.
In the high-paced digital world of 2019, your customers will scrutinize all of your touchpoints as part of their customer experience. Be sure that you’re performing consistency audits in the new year to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story that serves your audience. Your CX isn’t just the message though, it’s also the load time, the smoothness of hand-off, and the ease of use. Make sure that your team understands how your audience uses your products, so they can make them even better. For instance, web hosting service Bluehost’s pop-out help module actually activates a layer on top of their website to guide you step-by-step to the right tool, when you select a question. That’s forward-thinking customer experience.
5. Connect with your audience in social media with conversations and based on their interests.
Conversational marketing is going to impact customer expectations in social media. Yes, chatbots are going to continue to grow, but it’s also about social media marketing that responds to the customers. Do your ads retarget your customers based on their interests, not just their purchase history? Does your social customer care team use customers’ information to give them more thoughtful service? Best-in-class brands are already in these spaces. Are you?
Anna Hrach, Analyst
6. Create experiences that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
Stop thinking like a marketer. Instead, take a step back and look at customer experiences you genuinely appreciate or were pleasantly surprised by. Think about why it made an impact on you and how it made your experience with a brand better. Then, try to replicate those feelings and experiences by translating them in ways that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
7. Your content marketing should focus on doing more with less.
It’s time to do more with way less. Over the last 10 years, companies have been investing more and more in content marketing to create more and more. Instead of racking your brain for new ideas, spend time figuring out what you can reuse, repurpose or remix. Is there an old blog that has become relevant again? Republish it and bring it to the top, so new audiences can see it. Have an outdated ebook that still has some solid content? Refresh it with some light updates, instead of starting from scratch. Have a huge piece of content that took a ton of time and money? Break it up into smaller pieces, like an infographic, designed quote, webinar and more.
Jenny Magic, Analyst
8. There’s a goldmine of great marketing ideas and stories in your company — they just might not be in the marketing department.
2019 will be the year that we finally bring the ops teams into marketing — no longer just tapping our customer-facing employees for story ideas and inputs, but asking them to BE the story. Companies will begin looking to employees who are challenging scripts and breaking the mold in how they do their jobs and serve customers. These insights should be the fuel for innovations the CX and marketing teams scale.
9. Tap into your best influencers: your employees.
In 2019 companies will finally realize that their best influencers are right under their nose – their employees. Millennials already are the largest segment in the workplace. Within the next two years, 50% of the U.S. workforce is expected to be made up of Millennials. It will be 75% by 2030, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. These employees want to work somewhere they can make an impact (over 3/4 would take a pay cut to work somewhere that matches their values), and companies that can get their staff connected with their why and excited about the story will find an army of influencers willing to proudly do the word of mouth/influencer work they’ve had to beg for (or pay for) in years past.
Kelly Santina, Head of Operations & Media
10. Remember, customer experience starts with employee experience.
As we work with more and more brands and partners in the customer experience space, it has opened my eyes that the customer experience is very much influenced by the employee experience as the first step. Ensuring your organization is investing in the resources, tools and personal connections of your employees will in most cases do more for your customer experience than any other effort. At C&C, we are a virtual company, and we place extreme importance of personal relationships and through tools that help us stay connected across time zones. When our team is happy and satisfied, our client work exceeds expectations.
11. Social media success starts with planning and organization.
Invest the budget and training time into a great social media monitoring tool and a content calendar tool. Finding one that fits your organization and team is worth the investment in time and money, trust me!
Mary Nice, Senior Analyst
12. Get back to the roots of what makes your company remarkable.
2019 is going to bring people back to the roots of what makes hour company awesome. Take time to understand that your operation is what makes your organization awesome, and the experience is the one thing you can control. In turn, marketing and operations teams should become closer than ever.
13. Have your organic and paid social teams work together.
2019 is going to bring the integration of paid and organic social teams. As organic continues to decline, social marketers have to know paid and paid teams must know what content makes social advertising successful. These can no longer be done in a silo.
Anthony Helmstetter, Analyst
14. Get more email unsubscribes—really.
Yes, that’s counter-intuitive. But the truth is, list size is a false metric. (Yes, you may have to explain that to your boss.) The one exception would be businesses who derive revenue based on CPM advertising, but for most organizations, there are more important metrics, like engagement and corresponding KPIs.
A bloated list of disengaged subscribers messes up your email performance metrics. Those who are truly disengaged are just diluting the actual metrics you use to optimize your performance. Ten thousand disengaged subscribers will completely obfuscate the real learnings for the 100 that are engaged. If there has been no click-through in the prior 12 months, initiate a last-chance re-engagement campaign, and if still no response, purge and archive them
15. Your customers’ expectations are increasing. The most competitive companies will exceed them.
Tesla. If you are unfamiliar, this fledgling (15-years actually) automobile manufacturer does almost everything differently than their long-established competitors. Yes, their cars are all electric, they have no dealerships, and they want to own their customer relationship, start to finish. Between start and finish, there is service. Unlike the traditional auto dealership service and repair facilities, Tesla does not intend to make a profit from the servicing of their vehicles. It’s designed to NOT be a profit center on the books. Heresy, most experts would say.
Instead, Tesla provides a gambit of services at no cost to the owners, even out of warranty. They come to your house or business for a majority of service calls. Stop and read that again. For example, a Tesla Ranger (mobile service technician) comes to your house at a scheduled time to repair or replace some part that needs attention, and often, there is no cost to the owner.
Customers like that. And by raising that bar of customer service, we customers soon wonder—or even expect–other industries to behave in a similar fashion. Customer service is rapidly evolving from what is customary and convenient for the business, to what is convenient and expected by the customer. The businesses that most rapidly embrace this will have a competitive advantage over their competitors… for a while.
Donna Mostrom, Analyst
16. Show you’re present in real time and connect with your customers.
Use Instagram Stories to connect with your audience and customers. Sara Blakely’s account is an excellent example of how to do this well. She showed up in Stories on Cyber Monday, and she jumped on Spanx’s customer service online chat and recorded people’s reactions.
I bought a bunch of unplanned stuff from Spanx that day just so I could talk to her. It was incredible. If you can authentically show you’re present in real time doing things for your customers, it will make a positive impact on how they interact with you and your brand when you’re not there.
17. Turn unhappy customers into your best, loyal customers.
Focus on service recovery. (Jay calls this “hugging your haters“). You can’t always provide a stellar experience for your customers, though that should be your top priority. We live in a commoditized world full of substitutes, where it’s easy to lose a customer over one bad experience. And forgiveness from your customers is not easily won. Companies must have service recovery plans, combined with an employee empowerment culture to carry out those plans, to correct mistakes. Service recovery experience could then be turned into a talk trigger, too.
Lauren Teague, Analyst
18. Use nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns.
Sometimes we need to look to the past for inspiration. Millennials have a clear preference for experiential marketing. Tap into their memories of adolescence, just like Google did with Macaulay Culkin’s Home Alone Again advert for the Google Assistant product. The ad was seasonally relevant (launched at the holidays, like the original movie setting) and became a viral hit, earning over 70M views and being named the top holiday campaign of 2018. Using nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns, marketers can benefit from a long history of affinity for beloved memories from the past.
19. Commit your social strategy to the 3 C’s: clarity, content and connections.
Social media strategies need to commit to 3 C’s in 2019: clarity, content and connections. Is your approach to social media specific and clear to the audience (and internally, amongst your team)? Clarity allows you to be purposeful with the content produced and published. Content is the engine of all social media activity, paid and organic. When audiences understand the intent of a brand on social, and consume content that aligns with that purpose, they are more likely to Connect with the brand. Connections between your audience and brand can be in the form of reactions, conversation or opting in as a follower/subscriber.
Kim Corak, Head of Business Development
20. Activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey.
Many SaaS companies (and often B2B in general) have a difficult time standing out from their competitive set. Rather than trying to throw money or advertising at the problem, develop a strategy to help activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey. Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin, who quite literally wrote the book on this strategy, lay out exactly how to do this and why in their book Talk Triggers, as well as throughout various (and free!) ebooks and webinars throughout the site.
21. Invest in continuous training and education to stay up top of what works and what doesn’t.
It’s very hard for content teams to stay up to date on all things digital — channels, formats, tools, atomization etc. — so be sure to pepper education and training throughout the year. With the water hose of information available and changes occurring in the industry, ongoing education works better than a “one and done” approach. For snippets of a wide range of topics, attending a conference is great but to go deep on a certain area or heavily customize it for your team, onsite workshops or web-based training modalities work best.
Chris Anderson, Media & Partnerships
22. Meet your customer’s needs quickly with chatbots and other related technology.
2019 will see an increase in the usage of chatbots and other related technology to communicate with customers and meet their needs quickly. However, it’s mission critical to support the technology with the most human influence..
http://bit.ly/2VOcRHV
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12 Marketing Experts Reveal How to Crush Your Competition in 2019
With the new year in full swing, my wonderful colleagues — the marketing experts here at Convince & Convert — came up with 23 ideas for making your marketing and customer experience AMAZING in 2019.
In no particular order, here are our favorite recommendations for making 2019 your best year yet. These are the things that not many companies are doing well, but if you do, you will be sure to crush your competition this year. Let’s go!
Jay Baer, Founder, Convince & Convert
1. Leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning as part of your content marketing.
2019 will be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their content marketing, using tools like Ceralytics and others.
2. Create experiences that are talkable to cost-effectively grow your business.
2019 will be the year that a meaningful number of companies truly embrace the notion that customer experience is the most powerful form of customer acquisition. Yes, you need to be good at content marketing and social media and all the rest. But if you deliver an experience that’s talkable, your customers become volunteer marketers, and word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective (and cost-effective) way to grow any business.
3. Boost your social media performance with artificial intelligence too.
2019 will also be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their organic and paid social, using tools like Pattern89 and others.
Zontee Hou, Senior Analyst
4. Perform consistency audits to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story.
In the high-paced digital world of 2019, your customers will scrutinize all of your touchpoints as part of their customer experience. Be sure that you’re performing consistency audits in the new year to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story that serves your audience. Your CX isn’t just the message though, it’s also the load time, the smoothness of hand-off, and the ease of use. Make sure that your team understands how your audience uses your products, so they can make them even better. For instance, web hosting service Bluehost’s pop-out help module actually activates a layer on top of their website to guide you step-by-step to the right tool, when you select a question. That’s forward-thinking customer experience.
5. Connect with your audience in social media with conversations and based on their interests.
Conversational marketing is going to impact customer expectations in social media. Yes, chatbots are going to continue to grow, but it’s also about social media marketing that responds to the customers. Do your ads retarget your customers based on their interests, not just their purchase history? Does your social customer care team use customers’ information to give them more thoughtful service? Best-in-class brands are already in these spaces. Are you?
Anna Hrach, Analyst
6. Create experiences that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
Stop thinking like a marketer. Instead, take a step back and look at customer experiences you genuinely appreciate or were pleasantly surprised by. Think about why it made an impact on you and how it made your experience with a brand better. Then, try to replicate those feelings and experiences by translating them in ways that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
7. Your content marketing should focus on doing more with less.
It’s time to do more with way less. Over the last 10 years, companies have been investing more and more in content marketing to create more and more. Instead of racking your brain for new ideas, spend time figuring out what you can reuse, repurpose or remix. Is there an old blog that has become relevant again? Republish it and bring it to the top, so new audiences can see it. Have an outdated ebook that still has some solid content? Refresh it with some light updates, instead of starting from scratch. Have a huge piece of content that took a ton of time and money? Break it up into smaller pieces, like an infographic, designed quote, webinar and more.
Jenny Magic, Analyst
8. There’s a goldmine of great marketing ideas and stories in your company — they just might not be in the marketing department.
2019 will be the year that we finally bring the ops teams into marketing — no longer just tapping our customer-facing employees for story ideas and inputs, but asking them to BE the story. Companies will begin looking to employees who are challenging scripts and breaking the mold in how they do their jobs and serve customers. These insights should be the fuel for innovations the CX and marketing teams scale.
9. Tap into your best influencers: your employees.
In 2019 companies will finally realize that their best influencers are right under their nose – their employees. Millennials already are the largest segment in the workplace. Within the next two years, 50% of the U.S. workforce is expected to be made up of Millennials. It will be 75% by 2030, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. These employees want to work somewhere they can make an impact (over 3/4 would take a pay cut to work somewhere that matches their values), and companies that can get their staff connected with their why and excited about the story will find an army of influencers willing to proudly do the word of mouth/influencer work they’ve had to beg for (or pay for) in years past.
Kelly Santina, Head of Operations & Media
10. Remember, customer experience starts with employee experience.
As we work with more and more brands and partners in the customer experience space, it has opened my eyes that the customer experience is very much influenced by the employee experience as the first step. Ensuring your organization is investing in the resources, tools and personal connections of your employees will in most cases do more for your customer experience than any other effort. At C&C, we are a virtual company, and we place extreme importance of personal relationships and through tools that help us stay connected across time zones. When our team is happy and satisfied, our client work exceeds expectations.
11. Social media success starts with planning and organization.
Invest the budget and training time into a great social media monitoring tool and a content calendar tool. Finding one that fits your organization and team is worth the investment in time and money, trust me!
Mary Nice, Senior Analyst
12. Get back to the roots of what makes your company remarkable.
2019 is going to bring people back to the roots of what makes hour company awesome. Take time to understand that your operation is what makes your organization awesome, and the experience is the one thing you can control. In turn, marketing and operations teams should become closer than ever.
13. Have your organic and paid social teams work together.
2019 is going to bring the integration of paid and organic social teams. As organic continues to decline, social marketers have to know paid and paid teams must know what content makes social advertising successful. These can no longer be done in a silo.
Anthony Helmstetter, Analyst
14. Get more email unsubscribes—really.
Yes, that’s counter-intuitive. But the truth is, list size is a false metric. (Yes, you may have to explain that to your boss.) The one exception would be businesses who derive revenue based on CPM advertising, but for most organizations, there are more important metrics, like engagement and corresponding KPIs.
A bloated list of disengaged subscribers messes up your email performance metrics. Those who are truly disengaged are just diluting the actual metrics you use to optimize your performance. Ten thousand disengaged subscribers will completely obfuscate the real learnings for the 100 that are engaged. If there has been no click-through in the prior 12 months, initiate a last-chance re-engagement campaign, and if still no response, purge and archive them
15. Your customers’ expectations are increasing. The most competitive companies will exceed them.
Tesla. If you are unfamiliar, this fledgling (15-years actually) automobile manufacturer does almost everything differently than their long-established competitors. Yes, their cars are all electric, they have no dealerships, and they want to own their customer relationship, start to finish. Between start and finish, there is service. Unlike the traditional auto dealership service and repair facilities, Tesla does not intend to make a profit from the servicing of their vehicles. It’s designed to NOT be a profit center on the books. Heresy, most experts would say.
Instead, Tesla provides a gambit of services at no cost to the owners, even out of warranty. They come to your house or business for a majority of service calls. Stop and read that again. For example, a Tesla Ranger (mobile service technician) comes to your house at a scheduled time to repair or replace some part that needs attention, and often, there is no cost to the owner.
Customers like that. And by raising that bar of customer service, we customers soon wonder—or even expect–other industries to behave in a similar fashion. Customer service is rapidly evolving from what is customary and convenient for the business, to what is convenient and expected by the customer. The businesses that most rapidly embrace this will have a competitive advantage over their competitors… for a while.
Donna Mostrom, Analyst
16. Show you’re present in real time and connect with your customers.
Use Instagram Stories to connect with your audience and customers. Sara Blakely’s account is an excellent example of how to do this well. She showed up in Stories on Cyber Monday, and she jumped on Spanx’s customer service online chat and recorded people’s reactions.
I bought a bunch of unplanned stuff from Spanx that day just so I could talk to her. It was incredible. If you can authentically show you’re present in real time doing things for your customers, it will make a positive impact on how they interact with you and your brand when you’re not there.
17. Turn unhappy customers into your best, loyal customers.
Focus on service recovery. (Jay calls this “hugging your haters“). You can’t always provide a stellar experience for your customers, though that should be your top priority. We live in a commoditized world full of substitutes, where it’s easy to lose a customer over one bad experience. And forgiveness from your customers is not easily won. Companies must have service recovery plans, combined with an employee empowerment culture to carry out those plans, to correct mistakes. Service recovery experience could then be turned into a talk trigger, too.
Lauren Teague, Analyst
18. Use nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns.
Sometimes we need to look to the past for inspiration. Millennials have a clear preference for experiential marketing. Tap into their memories of adolescence, just like Google did with Macaulay Culkin’s Home Alone Again advert for the Google Assistant product. The ad was seasonally relevant (launched at the holidays, like the original movie setting) and became a viral hit, earning over 70M views and being named the top holiday campaign of 2018. Using nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns, marketers can benefit from a long history of affinity for beloved memories from the past.
19. Commit your social strategy to the 3 C’s: clarity, content and connections.
Social media strategies need to commit to 3 C’s in 2019: clarity, content and connections. Is your approach to social media specific and clear to the audience (and internally, amongst your team)? Clarity allows you to be purposeful with the content produced and published. Content is the engine of all social media activity, paid and organic. When audiences understand the intent of a brand on social, and consume content that aligns with that purpose, they are more likely to Connect with the brand. Connections between your audience and brand can be in the form of reactions, conversation or opting in as a follower/subscriber.
Kim Corak, Head of Business Development
20. Activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey.
Many SaaS companies (and often B2B in general) have a difficult time standing out from their competitive set. Rather than trying to throw money or advertising at the problem, develop a strategy to help activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey. Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin, who quite literally wrote the book on this strategy, lay out exactly how to do this and why in their book Talk Triggers, as well as throughout various (and free!) ebooks and webinars throughout the site.
21. Invest in continuous training and education to stay up top of what works and what doesn’t.
It’s very hard for content teams to stay up to date on all things digital — channels, formats, tools, atomization etc. — so be sure to pepper education and training throughout the year. With the water hose of information available and changes occurring in the industry, ongoing education works better than a “one and done” approach. For snippets of a wide range of topics, attending a conference is great but to go deep on a certain area or heavily customize it for your team, onsite workshops or web-based training modalities work best.
Chris Anderson, Media & Partnerships
22. Meet your customer’s needs quickly with chatbots and other related technology.
2019 will see an increase in the usage of chatbots and other related technology to communicate with customers and meet their needs quickly. However, it’s mission critical to support the technology with the most human influence..
http://bit.ly/2VOcRHV
0 notes
Text
12 Marketing Experts Reveal How to Crush Your Competition in 2019
With the new year in full swing, my wonderful colleagues — the marketing experts here at Convince & Convert — came up with 23 ideas for making your marketing and customer experience AMAZING in 2019.
In no particular order, here are our favorite recommendations for making 2019 your best year yet. These are the things that not many companies are doing well, but if you do, you will be sure to crush your competition this year. Let’s go!
Jay Baer, Founder, Convince & Convert
1. Leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning as part of your content marketing.
2019 will be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their content marketing, using tools like Ceralytics and others.
2. Create experiences that are talkable to cost-effectively grow your business.
2019 will be the year that a meaningful number of companies truly embrace the notion that customer experience is the most powerful form of customer acquisition. Yes, you need to be good at content marketing and social media and all the rest. But if you deliver an experience that’s talkable, your customers become volunteer marketers, and word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective (and cost-effective) way to grow any business.
3. Boost your social media performance with artificial intelligence too.
2019 will also be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their organic and paid social, using tools like Pattern89 and others.
Zontee Hou, Senior Analyst
4. Perform consistency audits to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story.
In the high-paced digital world of 2019, your customers will scrutinize all of your touchpoints as part of their customer experience. Be sure that you’re performing consistency audits in the new year to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story that serves your audience. Your CX isn’t just the message though, it’s also the load time, the smoothness of hand-off, and the ease of use. Make sure that your team understands how your audience uses your products, so they can make them even better. For instance, web hosting service Bluehost’s pop-out help module actually activates a layer on top of their website to guide you step-by-step to the right tool, when you select a question. That’s forward-thinking customer experience.
5. Connect with your audience in social media with conversations and based on their interests.
Conversational marketing is going to impact customer expectations in social media. Yes, chatbots are going to continue to grow, but it’s also about social media marketing that responds to the customers. Do your ads retarget your customers based on their interests, not just their purchase history? Does your social customer care team use customers’ information to give them more thoughtful service? Best-in-class brands are already in these spaces. Are you?
Anna Hrach, Analyst
6. Create experiences that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
Stop thinking like a marketer. Instead, take a step back and look at customer experiences you genuinely appreciate or were pleasantly surprised by. Think about why it made an impact on you and how it made your experience with a brand better. Then, try to replicate those feelings and experiences by translating them in ways that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
7. Your content marketing should focus on doing more with less.
It’s time to do more with way less. Over the last 10 years, companies have been investing more and more in content marketing to create more and more. Instead of racking your brain for new ideas, spend time figuring out what you can reuse, repurpose or remix. Is there an old blog that has become relevant again? Republish it and bring it to the top, so new audiences can see it. Have an outdated ebook that still has some solid content? Refresh it with some light updates, instead of starting from scratch. Have a huge piece of content that took a ton of time and money? Break it up into smaller pieces, like an infographic, designed quote, webinar and more.
Jenny Magic, Analyst
8. There’s a goldmine of great marketing ideas and stories in your company — they just might not be in the marketing department.
2019 will be the year that we finally bring the ops teams into marketing — no longer just tapping our customer-facing employees for story ideas and inputs, but asking them to BE the story. Companies will begin looking to employees who are challenging scripts and breaking the mold in how they do their jobs and serve customers. These insights should be the fuel for innovations the CX and marketing teams scale.
9. Tap into your best influencers: your employees.
In 2019 companies will finally realize that their best influencers are right under their nose – their employees. Millennials already are the largest segment in the workplace. Within the next two years, 50% of the U.S. workforce is expected to be made up of Millennials. It will be 75% by 2030, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. These employees want to work somewhere they can make an impact (over 3/4 would take a pay cut to work somewhere that matches their values), and companies that can get their staff connected with their why and excited about the story will find an army of influencers willing to proudly do the word of mouth/influencer work they’ve had to beg for (or pay for) in years past.
Kelly Santina, Head of Operations & Media
10. Remember, customer experience starts with employee experience.
As we work with more and more brands and partners in the customer experience space, it has opened my eyes that the customer experience is very much influenced by the employee experience as the first step. Ensuring your organization is investing in the resources, tools and personal connections of your employees will in most cases do more for your customer experience than any other effort. At C&C, we are a virtual company, and we place extreme importance of personal relationships and through tools that help us stay connected across time zones. When our team is happy and satisfied, our client work exceeds expectations.
11. Social media success starts with planning and organization.
Invest the budget and training time into a great social media monitoring tool and a content calendar tool. Finding one that fits your organization and team is worth the investment in time and money, trust me!
Mary Nice, Senior Analyst
12. Get back to the roots of what makes your company remarkable.
2019 is going to bring people back to the roots of what makes hour company awesome. Take time to understand that your operation is what makes your organization awesome, and the experience is the one thing you can control. In turn, marketing and operations teams should become closer than ever.
13. Have your organic and paid social teams work together.
2019 is going to bring the integration of paid and organic social teams. As organic continues to decline, social marketers have to know paid and paid teams must know what content makes social advertising successful. These can no longer be done in a silo.
Anthony Helmstetter, Analyst
14. Get more email unsubscribes—really.
Yes, that’s counter-intuitive. But the truth is, list size is a false metric. (Yes, you may have to explain that to your boss.) The one exception would be businesses who derive revenue based on CPM advertising, but for most organizations, there are more important metrics, like engagement and corresponding KPIs.
A bloated list of disengaged subscribers messes up your email performance metrics. Those who are truly disengaged are just diluting the actual metrics you use to optimize your performance. Ten thousand disengaged subscribers will completely obfuscate the real learnings for the 100 that are engaged. If there has been no click-through in the prior 12 months, initiate a last-chance re-engagement campaign, and if still no response, purge and archive them
15. Your customers’ expectations are increasing. The most competitive companies will exceed them.
Tesla. If you are unfamiliar, this fledgling (15-years actually) automobile manufacturer does almost everything differently than their long-established competitors. Yes, their cars are all electric, they have no dealerships, and they want to own their customer relationship, start to finish. Between start and finish, there is service. Unlike the traditional auto dealership service and repair facilities, Tesla does not intend to make a profit from the servicing of their vehicles. It’s designed to NOT be a profit center on the books. Heresy, most experts would say.
Instead, Tesla provides a gambit of services at no cost to the owners, even out of warranty. They come to your house or business for a majority of service calls. Stop and read that again. For example, a Tesla Ranger (mobile service technician) comes to your house at a scheduled time to repair or replace some part that needs attention, and often, there is no cost to the owner.
Customers like that. And by raising that bar of customer service, we customers soon wonder—or even expect–other industries to behave in a similar fashion. Customer service is rapidly evolving from what is customary and convenient for the business, to what is convenient and expected by the customer. The businesses that most rapidly embrace this will have a competitive advantage over their competitors… for a while.
Donna Mostrom, Analyst
16. Show you’re present in real time and connect with your customers.
Use Instagram Stories to connect with your audience and customers. Sara Blakely’s account is an excellent example of how to do this well. She showed up in Stories on Cyber Monday, and she jumped on Spanx’s customer service online chat and recorded people’s reactions.
I bought a bunch of unplanned stuff from Spanx that day just so I could talk to her. It was incredible. If you can authentically show you’re present in real time doing things for your customers, it will make a positive impact on how they interact with you and your brand when you’re not there.
17. Turn unhappy customers into your best, loyal customers.
Focus on service recovery. (Jay calls this “hugging your haters“). You can’t always provide a stellar experience for your customers, though that should be your top priority. We live in a commoditized world full of substitutes, where it’s easy to lose a customer over one bad experience. And forgiveness from your customers is not easily won. Companies must have service recovery plans, combined with an employee empowerment culture to carry out those plans, to correct mistakes. Service recovery experience could then be turned into a talk trigger, too.
Lauren Teague, Analyst
18. Use nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns.
Sometimes we need to look to the past for inspiration. Millennials have a clear preference for experiential marketing. Tap into their memories of adolescence, just like Google did with Macaulay Culkin’s Home Alone Again advert for the Google Assistant product. The ad was seasonally relevant (launched at the holidays, like the original movie setting) and became a viral hit, earning over 70M views and being named the top holiday campaign of 2018. Using nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns, marketers can benefit from a long history of affinity for beloved memories from the past.
19. Commit your social strategy to the 3 C’s: clarity, content and connections.
Social media strategies need to commit to 3 C’s in 2019: clarity, content and connections. Is your approach to social media specific and clear to the audience (and internally, amongst your team)? Clarity allows you to be purposeful with the content produced and published. Content is the engine of all social media activity, paid and organic. When audiences understand the intent of a brand on social, and consume content that aligns with that purpose, they are more likely to Connect with the brand. Connections between your audience and brand can be in the form of reactions, conversation or opting in as a follower/subscriber.
Kim Corak, Head of Business Development
20. Activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey.
Many SaaS companies (and often B2B in general) have a difficult time standing out from their competitive set. Rather than trying to throw money or advertising at the problem, develop a strategy to help activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey. Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin, who quite literally wrote the book on this strategy, lay out exactly how to do this and why in their book Talk Triggers, as well as throughout various (and free!) ebooks and webinars throughout the site.
21. Invest in continuous training and education to stay up top of what works and what doesn’t.
It’s very hard for content teams to stay up to date on all things digital — channels, formats, tools, atomization etc. — so be sure to pepper education and training throughout the year. With the water hose of information available and changes occurring in the industry, ongoing education works better than a “one and done” approach. For snippets of a wide range of topics, attending a conference is great but to go deep on a certain area or heavily customize it for your team, onsite workshops or web-based training modalities work best.
Chris Anderson, Media & Partnerships
22. Meet your customer’s needs quickly with chatbots and other related technology.
2019 will see an increase in the usage of chatbots and other related technology to communicate with customers and meet their needs quickly. However, it’s mission critical to support the technology with the most human influence..
http://bit.ly/2VOcRHV
0 notes
Text
12 Marketing Experts Reveal How to Crush Your Competition in 2019
With the new year in full swing, my wonderful colleagues — the marketing experts here at Convince & Convert — came up with 23 ideas for making your marketing and customer experience AMAZING in 2019.
In no particular order, here are our favorite recommendations for making 2019 your best year yet. These are the things that not many companies are doing well, but if you do, you will be sure to crush your competition this year. Let’s go!
Jay Baer, Founder, Convince & Convert
1. Leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning as part of your content marketing.
2019 will be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their content marketing, using tools like Ceralytics and others.
2. Create experiences that are talkable to cost-effectively grow your business.
2019 will be the year that a meaningful number of companies truly embrace the notion that customer experience is the most powerful form of customer acquisition. Yes, you need to be good at content marketing and social media and all the rest. But if you deliver an experience that’s talkable, your customers become volunteer marketers, and word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective (and cost-effective) way to grow any business.
3. Boost your social media performance with artificial intelligence too.
2019 will also be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their organic and paid social, using tools like Pattern89 and others.
Zontee Hou, Senior Analyst
4. Perform consistency audits to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story.
In the high-paced digital world of 2019, your customers will scrutinize all of your touchpoints as part of their customer experience. Be sure that you’re performing consistency audits in the new year to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story that serves your audience. Your CX isn’t just the message though, it’s also the load time, the smoothness of hand-off, and the ease of use. Make sure that your team understands how your audience uses your products, so they can make them even better. For instance, web hosting service Bluehost’s pop-out help module actually activates a layer on top of their website to guide you step-by-step to the right tool, when you select a question. That’s forward-thinking customer experience.
5. Connect with your audience in social media with conversations and based on their interests.
Conversational marketing is going to impact customer expectations in social media. Yes, chatbots are going to continue to grow, but it’s also about social media marketing that responds to the customers. Do your ads retarget your customers based on their interests, not just their purchase history? Does your social customer care team use customers’ information to give them more thoughtful service? Best-in-class brands are already in these spaces. Are you?
Anna Hrach, Analyst
6. Create experiences that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
Stop thinking like a marketer. Instead, take a step back and look at customer experiences you genuinely appreciate or were pleasantly surprised by. Think about why it made an impact on you and how it made your experience with a brand better. Then, try to replicate those feelings and experiences by translating them in ways that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
7. Your content marketing should focus on doing more with less.
It’s time to do more with way less. Over the last 10 years, companies have been investing more and more in content marketing to create more and more. Instead of racking your brain for new ideas, spend time figuring out what you can reuse, repurpose or remix. Is there an old blog that has become relevant again? Republish it and bring it to the top, so new audiences can see it. Have an outdated ebook that still has some solid content? Refresh it with some light updates, instead of starting from scratch. Have a huge piece of content that took a ton of time and money? Break it up into smaller pieces, like an infographic, designed quote, webinar and more.
Jenny Magic, Analyst
8. There’s a goldmine of great marketing ideas and stories in your company — they just might not be in the marketing department.
2019 will be the year that we finally bring the ops teams into marketing — no longer just tapping our customer-facing employees for story ideas and inputs, but asking them to BE the story. Companies will begin looking to employees who are challenging scripts and breaking the mold in how they do their jobs and serve customers. These insights should be the fuel for innovations the CX and marketing teams scale.
9. Tap into your best influencers: your employees.
In 2019 companies will finally realize that their best influencers are right under their nose – their employees. Millennials already are the largest segment in the workplace. Within the next two years, 50% of the U.S. workforce is expected to be made up of Millennials. It will be 75% by 2030, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. These employees want to work somewhere they can make an impact (over 3/4 would take a pay cut to work somewhere that matches their values), and companies that can get their staff connected with their why and excited about the story will find an army of influencers willing to proudly do the word of mouth/influencer work they’ve had to beg for (or pay for) in years past.
Kelly Santina, Head of Operations & Media
10. Remember, customer experience starts with employee experience.
As we work with more and more brands and partners in the customer experience space, it has opened my eyes that the customer experience is very much influenced by the employee experience as the first step. Ensuring your organization is investing in the resources, tools and personal connections of your employees will in most cases do more for your customer experience than any other effort. At C&C, we are a virtual company, and we place extreme importance of personal relationships and through tools that help us stay connected across time zones. When our team is happy and satisfied, our client work exceeds expectations.
11. Social media success starts with planning and organization.
Invest the budget and training time into a great social media monitoring tool and a content calendar tool. Finding one that fits your organization and team is worth the investment in time and money, trust me!
Mary Nice, Senior Analyst
12. Get back to the roots of what makes your company remarkable.
2019 is going to bring people back to the roots of what makes hour company awesome. Take time to understand that your operation is what makes your organization awesome, and the experience is the one thing you can control. In turn, marketing and operations teams should become closer than ever.
13. Have your organic and paid social teams work together.
2019 is going to bring the integration of paid and organic social teams. As organic continues to decline, social marketers have to know paid and paid teams must know what content makes social advertising successful. These can no longer be done in a silo.
Anthony Helmstetter, Analyst
14. Get more email unsubscribes—really.
Yes, that’s counter-intuitive. But the truth is, list size is a false metric. (Yes, you may have to explain that to your boss.) The one exception would be businesses who derive revenue based on CPM advertising, but for most organizations, there are more important metrics, like engagement and corresponding KPIs.
A bloated list of disengaged subscribers messes up your email performance metrics. Those who are truly disengaged are just diluting the actual metrics you use to optimize your performance. Ten thousand disengaged subscribers will completely obfuscate the real learnings for the 100 that are engaged. If there has been no click-through in the prior 12 months, initiate a last-chance re-engagement campaign, and if still no response, purge and archive them
15. Your customers’ expectations are increasing. The most competitive companies will exceed them.
Tesla. If you are unfamiliar, this fledgling (15-years actually) automobile manufacturer does almost everything differently than their long-established competitors. Yes, their cars are all electric, they have no dealerships, and they want to own their customer relationship, start to finish. Between start and finish, there is service. Unlike the traditional auto dealership service and repair facilities, Tesla does not intend to make a profit from the servicing of their vehicles. It’s designed to NOT be a profit center on the books. Heresy, most experts would say.
Instead, Tesla provides a gambit of services at no cost to the owners, even out of warranty. They come to your house or business for a majority of service calls. Stop and read that again. For example, a Tesla Ranger (mobile service technician) comes to your house at a scheduled time to repair or replace some part that needs attention, and often, there is no cost to the owner.
Customers like that. And by raising that bar of customer service, we customers soon wonder—or even expect–other industries to behave in a similar fashion. Customer service is rapidly evolving from what is customary and convenient for the business, to what is convenient and expected by the customer. The businesses that most rapidly embrace this will have a competitive advantage over their competitors… for a while.
Donna Mostrom, Analyst
16. Show you’re present in real time and connect with your customers.
Use Instagram Stories to connect with your audience and customers. Sara Blakely’s account is an excellent example of how to do this well. She showed up in Stories on Cyber Monday, and she jumped on Spanx’s customer service online chat and recorded people’s reactions.
I bought a bunch of unplanned stuff from Spanx that day just so I could talk to her. It was incredible. If you can authentically show you’re present in real time doing things for your customers, it will make a positive impact on how they interact with you and your brand when you’re not there.
17. Turn unhappy customers into your best, loyal customers.
Focus on service recovery. (Jay calls this “hugging your haters“). You can’t always provide a stellar experience for your customers, though that should be your top priority. We live in a commoditized world full of substitutes, where it’s easy to lose a customer over one bad experience. And forgiveness from your customers is not easily won. Companies must have service recovery plans, combined with an employee empowerment culture to carry out those plans, to correct mistakes. Service recovery experience could then be turned into a talk trigger, too.
Lauren Teague, Analyst
18. Use nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns.
Sometimes we need to look to the past for inspiration. Millennials have a clear preference for experiential marketing. Tap into their memories of adolescence, just like Google did with Macaulay Culkin’s Home Alone Again advert for the Google Assistant product. The ad was seasonally relevant (launched at the holidays, like the original movie setting) and became a viral hit, earning over 70M views and being named the top holiday campaign of 2018. Using nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns, marketers can benefit from a long history of affinity for beloved memories from the past.
19. Commit your social strategy to the 3 C’s: clarity, content and connections.
Social media strategies need to commit to 3 C’s in 2019: clarity, content and connections. Is your approach to social media specific and clear to the audience (and internally, amongst your team)? Clarity allows you to be purposeful with the content produced and published. Content is the engine of all social media activity, paid and organic. When audiences understand the intent of a brand on social, and consume content that aligns with that purpose, they are more likely to Connect with the brand. Connections between your audience and brand can be in the form of reactions, conversation or opting in as a follower/subscriber.
Kim Corak, Head of Business Development
20. Activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey.
Many SaaS companies (and often B2B in general) have a difficult time standing out from their competitive set. Rather than trying to throw money or advertising at the problem, develop a strategy to help activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey. Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin, who quite literally wrote the book on this strategy, lay out exactly how to do this and why in their book Talk Triggers, as well as throughout various (and free!) ebooks and webinars throughout the site.
21. Invest in continuous training and education to stay up top of what works and what doesn’t.
It’s very hard for content teams to stay up to date on all things digital — channels, formats, tools, atomization etc. — so be sure to pepper education and training throughout the year. With the water hose of information available and changes occurring in the industry, ongoing education works better than a “one and done” approach. For snippets of a wide range of topics, attending a conference is great but to go deep on a certain area or heavily customize it for your team, onsite workshops or web-based training modalities work best.
Chris Anderson, Media & Partnerships
22. Meet your customer’s needs quickly with chatbots and other related technology.
2019 will see an increase in the usage of chatbots and other related technology to communicate with customers and meet their needs quickly. However, it’s mission critical to support the technology with the most human influence..
http://bit.ly/2VOcRHV
0 notes
Text
12 Marketing Experts Reveal How to Crush Your Competition in 2019
With the new year in full swing, my wonderful colleagues — the marketing experts here at Convince & Convert — came up with 23 ideas for making your marketing and customer experience AMAZING in 2019.
In no particular order, here are our favorite recommendations for making 2019 your best year yet. These are the things that not many companies are doing well, but if you do, you will be sure to crush your competition this year. Let’s go!
Jay Baer, Founder, Convince & Convert
1. Leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning as part of your content marketing.
2019 will be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their content marketing, using tools like Ceralytics and others.
2. Create experiences that are talkable to cost-effectively grow your business.
2019 will be the year that a meaningful number of companies truly embrace the notion that customer experience is the most powerful form of customer acquisition. Yes, you need to be good at content marketing and social media and all the rest. But if you deliver an experience that’s talkable, your customers become volunteer marketers, and word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective (and cost-effective) way to grow any business.
3. Boost your social media performance with artificial intelligence too.
2019 will also be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their organic and paid social, using tools like Pattern89 and others.
Zontee Hou, Senior Analyst
4. Perform consistency audits to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story.
In the high-paced digital world of 2019, your customers will scrutinize all of your touchpoints as part of their customer experience. Be sure that you’re performing consistency audits in the new year to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story that serves your audience. Your CX isn’t just the message though, it’s also the load time, the smoothness of hand-off, and the ease of use. Make sure that your team understands how your audience uses your products, so they can make them even better. For instance, web hosting service Bluehost’s pop-out help module actually activates a layer on top of their website to guide you step-by-step to the right tool, when you select a question. That’s forward-thinking customer experience.
5. Connect with your audience in social media with conversations and based on their interests.
Conversational marketing is going to impact customer expectations in social media. Yes, chatbots are going to continue to grow, but it’s also about social media marketing that responds to the customers. Do your ads retarget your customers based on their interests, not just their purchase history? Does your social customer care team use customers’ information to give them more thoughtful service? Best-in-class brands are already in these spaces. Are you?
Anna Hrach, Analyst
6. Create experiences that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
Stop thinking like a marketer. Instead, take a step back and look at customer experiences you genuinely appreciate or were pleasantly surprised by. Think about why it made an impact on you and how it made your experience with a brand better. Then, try to replicate those feelings and experiences by translating them in ways that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
7. Your content marketing should focus on doing more with less.
It’s time to do more with way less. Over the last 10 years, companies have been investing more and more in content marketing to create more and more. Instead of racking your brain for new ideas, spend time figuring out what you can reuse, repurpose or remix. Is there an old blog that has become relevant again? Republish it and bring it to the top, so new audiences can see it. Have an outdated ebook that still has some solid content? Refresh it with some light updates, instead of starting from scratch. Have a huge piece of content that took a ton of time and money? Break it up into smaller pieces, like an infographic, designed quote, webinar and more.
Jenny Magic, Analyst
8. There’s a goldmine of great marketing ideas and stories in your company — they just might not be in the marketing department.
2019 will be the year that we finally bring the ops teams into marketing — no longer just tapping our customer-facing employees for story ideas and inputs, but asking them to BE the story. Companies will begin looking to employees who are challenging scripts and breaking the mold in how they do their jobs and serve customers. These insights should be the fuel for innovations the CX and marketing teams scale.
9. Tap into your best influencers: your employees.
In 2019 companies will finally realize that their best influencers are right under their nose – their employees. Millennials already are the largest segment in the workplace. Within the next two years, 50% of the U.S. workforce is expected to be made up of Millennials. It will be 75% by 2030, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. These employees want to work somewhere they can make an impact (over 3/4 would take a pay cut to work somewhere that matches their values), and companies that can get their staff connected with their why and excited about the story will find an army of influencers willing to proudly do the word of mouth/influencer work they’ve had to beg for (or pay for) in years past.
Kelly Santina, Head of Operations & Media
10. Remember, customer experience starts with employee experience.
As we work with more and more brands and partners in the customer experience space, it has opened my eyes that the customer experience is very much influenced by the employee experience as the first step. Ensuring your organization is investing in the resources, tools and personal connections of your employees will in most cases do more for your customer experience than any other effort. At C&C, we are a virtual company, and we place extreme importance of personal relationships and through tools that help us stay connected across time zones. When our team is happy and satisfied, our client work exceeds expectations.
11. Social media success starts with planning and organization.
Invest the budget and training time into a great social media monitoring tool and a content calendar tool. Finding one that fits your organization and team is worth the investment in time and money, trust me!
Mary Nice, Senior Analyst
12. Get back to the roots of what makes your company remarkable.
2019 is going to bring people back to the roots of what makes hour company awesome. Take time to understand that your operation is what makes your organization awesome, and the experience is the one thing you can control. In turn, marketing and operations teams should become closer than ever.
13. Have your organic and paid social teams work together.
2019 is going to bring the integration of paid and organic social teams. As organic continues to decline, social marketers have to know paid and paid teams must know what content makes social advertising successful. These can no longer be done in a silo.
Anthony Helmstetter, Analyst
14. Get more email unsubscribes—really.
Yes, that’s counter-intuitive. But the truth is, list size is a false metric. (Yes, you may have to explain that to your boss.) The one exception would be businesses who derive revenue based on CPM advertising, but for most organizations, there are more important metrics, like engagement and corresponding KPIs.
A bloated list of disengaged subscribers messes up your email performance metrics. Those who are truly disengaged are just diluting the actual metrics you use to optimize your performance. Ten thousand disengaged subscribers will completely obfuscate the real learnings for the 100 that are engaged. If there has been no click-through in the prior 12 months, initiate a last-chance re-engagement campaign, and if still no response, purge and archive them
15. Your customers’ expectations are increasing. The most competitive companies will exceed them.
Tesla. If you are unfamiliar, this fledgling (15-years actually) automobile manufacturer does almost everything differently than their long-established competitors. Yes, their cars are all electric, they have no dealerships, and they want to own their customer relationship, start to finish. Between start and finish, there is service. Unlike the traditional auto dealership service and repair facilities, Tesla does not intend to make a profit from the servicing of their vehicles. It’s designed to NOT be a profit center on the books. Heresy, most experts would say.
Instead, Tesla provides a gambit of services at no cost to the owners, even out of warranty. They come to your house or business for a majority of service calls. Stop and read that again. For example, a Tesla Ranger (mobile service technician) comes to your house at a scheduled time to repair or replace some part that needs attention, and often, there is no cost to the owner.
Customers like that. And by raising that bar of customer service, we customers soon wonder—or even expect–other industries to behave in a similar fashion. Customer service is rapidly evolving from what is customary and convenient for the business, to what is convenient and expected by the customer. The businesses that most rapidly embrace this will have a competitive advantage over their competitors… for a while.
Donna Mostrom, Analyst
16. Show you’re present in real time and connect with your customers.
Use Instagram Stories to connect with your audience and customers. Sara Blakely’s account is an excellent example of how to do this well. She showed up in Stories on Cyber Monday, and she jumped on Spanx’s customer service online chat and recorded people’s reactions.
I bought a bunch of unplanned stuff from Spanx that day just so I could talk to her. It was incredible. If you can authentically show you’re present in real time doing things for your customers, it will make a positive impact on how they interact with you and your brand when you’re not there.
17. Turn unhappy customers into your best, loyal customers.
Focus on service recovery. (Jay calls this “hugging your haters“). You can’t always provide a stellar experience for your customers, though that should be your top priority. We live in a commoditized world full of substitutes, where it’s easy to lose a customer over one bad experience. And forgiveness from your customers is not easily won. Companies must have service recovery plans, combined with an employee empowerment culture to carry out those plans, to correct mistakes. Service recovery experience could then be turned into a talk trigger, too.
Lauren Teague, Analyst
18. Use nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns.
Sometimes we need to look to the past for inspiration. Millennials have a clear preference for experiential marketing. Tap into their memories of adolescence, just like Google did with Macaulay Culkin’s Home Alone Again advert for the Google Assistant product. The ad was seasonally relevant (launched at the holidays, like the original movie setting) and became a viral hit, earning over 70M views and being named the top holiday campaign of 2018. Using nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns, marketers can benefit from a long history of affinity for beloved memories from the past.
19. Commit your social strategy to the 3 C’s: clarity, content and connections.
Social media strategies need to commit to 3 C’s in 2019: clarity, content and connections. Is your approach to social media specific and clear to the audience (and internally, amongst your team)? Clarity allows you to be purposeful with the content produced and published. Content is the engine of all social media activity, paid and organic. When audiences understand the intent of a brand on social, and consume content that aligns with that purpose, they are more likely to Connect with the brand. Connections between your audience and brand can be in the form of reactions, conversation or opting in as a follower/subscriber.
Kim Corak, Head of Business Development
20. Activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey.
Many SaaS companies (and often B2B in general) have a difficult time standing out from their competitive set. Rather than trying to throw money or advertising at the problem, develop a strategy to help activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey. Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin, who quite literally wrote the book on this strategy, lay out exactly how to do this and why in their book Talk Triggers, as well as throughout various (and free!) ebooks and webinars throughout the site.
21. Invest in continuous training and education to stay up top of what works and what doesn’t.
It’s very hard for content teams to stay up to date on all things digital — channels, formats, tools, atomization etc. — so be sure to pepper education and training throughout the year. With the water hose of information available and changes occurring in the industry, ongoing education works better than a “one and done” approach. For snippets of a wide range of topics, attending a conference is great but to go deep on a certain area or heavily customize it for your team, onsite workshops or web-based training modalities work best.
Chris Anderson, Media & Partnerships
22. Meet your customer’s needs quickly with chatbots and other related technology.
2019 will see an increase in the usage of chatbots and other related technology to communicate with customers and meet their needs quickly. However, it’s mission critical to support the technology with the most human influence..
http://bit.ly/2VOcRHV
0 notes
Text
12 Marketing Experts Reveal How to Crush Your Competition in 2019
With the new year in full swing, my wonderful colleagues — the marketing experts here at Convince & Convert — came up with 23 ideas for making your marketing and customer experience AMAZING in 2019.
In no particular order, here are our favorite recommendations for making 2019 your best year yet. These are the things that not many companies are doing well, but if you do, you will be sure to crush your competition this year. Let’s go!
Jay Baer, Founder, Convince & Convert
1. Leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning as part of your content marketing.
2019 will be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their content marketing, using tools like Ceralytics and others.
2. Create experiences that are talkable to cost-effectively grow your business.
2019 will be the year that a meaningful number of companies truly embrace the notion that customer experience is the most powerful form of customer acquisition. Yes, you need to be good at content marketing and social media and all the rest. But if you deliver an experience that’s talkable, your customers become volunteer marketers, and word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective (and cost-effective) way to grow any business.
3. Boost your social media performance with artificial intelligence too.
2019 will also be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their organic and paid social, using tools like Pattern89 and others.
Zontee Hou, Senior Analyst
4. Perform consistency audits to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story.
In the high-paced digital world of 2019, your customers will scrutinize all of your touchpoints as part of their customer experience. Be sure that you’re performing consistency audits in the new year to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story that serves your audience. Your CX isn’t just the message though, it’s also the load time, the smoothness of hand-off, and the ease of use. Make sure that your team understands how your audience uses your products, so they can make them even better. For instance, web hosting service Bluehost’s pop-out help module actually activates a layer on top of their website to guide you step-by-step to the right tool, when you select a question. That’s forward-thinking customer experience.
5. Connect with your audience in social media with conversations and based on their interests.
Conversational marketing is going to impact customer expectations in social media. Yes, chatbots are going to continue to grow, but it’s also about social media marketing that responds to the customers. Do your ads retarget your customers based on their interests, not just their purchase history? Does your social customer care team use customers’ information to give them more thoughtful service? Best-in-class brands are already in these spaces. Are you?
Anna Hrach, Analyst
6. Create experiences that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
Stop thinking like a marketer. Instead, take a step back and look at customer experiences you genuinely appreciate or were pleasantly surprised by. Think about why it made an impact on you and how it made your experience with a brand better. Then, try to replicate those feelings and experiences by translating them in ways that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
7. Your content marketing should focus on doing more with less.
It’s time to do more with way less. Over the last 10 years, companies have been investing more and more in content marketing to create more and more. Instead of racking your brain for new ideas, spend time figuring out what you can reuse, repurpose or remix. Is there an old blog that has become relevant again? Republish it and bring it to the top, so new audiences can see it. Have an outdated ebook that still has some solid content? Refresh it with some light updates, instead of starting from scratch. Have a huge piece of content that took a ton of time and money? Break it up into smaller pieces, like an infographic, designed quote, webinar and more.
Jenny Magic, Analyst
8. There’s a goldmine of great marketing ideas and stories in your company — they just might not be in the marketing department.
2019 will be the year that we finally bring the ops teams into marketing — no longer just tapping our customer-facing employees for story ideas and inputs, but asking them to BE the story. Companies will begin looking to employees who are challenging scripts and breaking the mold in how they do their jobs and serve customers. These insights should be the fuel for innovations the CX and marketing teams scale.
9. Tap into your best influencers: your employees.
In 2019 companies will finally realize that their best influencers are right under their nose – their employees. Millennials already are the largest segment in the workplace. Within the next two years, 50% of the U.S. workforce is expected to be made up of Millennials. It will be 75% by 2030, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. These employees want to work somewhere they can make an impact (over 3/4 would take a pay cut to work somewhere that matches their values), and companies that can get their staff connected with their why and excited about the story will find an army of influencers willing to proudly do the word of mouth/influencer work they’ve had to beg for (or pay for) in years past.
Kelly Santina, Head of Operations & Media
10. Remember, customer experience starts with employee experience.
As we work with more and more brands and partners in the customer experience space, it has opened my eyes that the customer experience is very much influenced by the employee experience as the first step. Ensuring your organization is investing in the resources, tools and personal connections of your employees will in most cases do more for your customer experience than any other effort. At C&C, we are a virtual company, and we place extreme importance of personal relationships and through tools that help us stay connected across time zones. When our team is happy and satisfied, our client work exceeds expectations.
11. Social media success starts with planning and organization.
Invest the budget and training time into a great social media monitoring tool and a content calendar tool. Finding one that fits your organization and team is worth the investment in time and money, trust me!
Mary Nice, Senior Analyst
12. Get back to the roots of what makes your company remarkable.
2019 is going to bring people back to the roots of what makes hour company awesome. Take time to understand that your operation is what makes your organization awesome, and the experience is the one thing you can control. In turn, marketing and operations teams should become closer than ever.
13. Have your organic and paid social teams work together.
2019 is going to bring the integration of paid and organic social teams. As organic continues to decline, social marketers have to know paid and paid teams must know what content makes social advertising successful. These can no longer be done in a silo.
Anthony Helmstetter, Analyst
14. Get more email unsubscribes—really.
Yes, that’s counter-intuitive. But the truth is, list size is a false metric. (Yes, you may have to explain that to your boss.) The one exception would be businesses who derive revenue based on CPM advertising, but for most organizations, there are more important metrics, like engagement and corresponding KPIs.
A bloated list of disengaged subscribers messes up your email performance metrics. Those who are truly disengaged are just diluting the actual metrics you use to optimize your performance. Ten thousand disengaged subscribers will completely obfuscate the real learnings for the 100 that are engaged. If there has been no click-through in the prior 12 months, initiate a last-chance re-engagement campaign, and if still no response, purge and archive them
15. Your customers’ expectations are increasing. The most competitive companies will exceed them.
Tesla. If you are unfamiliar, this fledgling (15-years actually) automobile manufacturer does almost everything differently than their long-established competitors. Yes, their cars are all electric, they have no dealerships, and they want to own their customer relationship, start to finish. Between start and finish, there is service. Unlike the traditional auto dealership service and repair facilities, Tesla does not intend to make a profit from the servicing of their vehicles. It’s designed to NOT be a profit center on the books. Heresy, most experts would say.
Instead, Tesla provides a gambit of services at no cost to the owners, even out of warranty. They come to your house or business for a majority of service calls. Stop and read that again. For example, a Tesla Ranger (mobile service technician) comes to your house at a scheduled time to repair or replace some part that needs attention, and often, there is no cost to the owner.
Customers like that. And by raising that bar of customer service, we customers soon wonder—or even expect–other industries to behave in a similar fashion. Customer service is rapidly evolving from what is customary and convenient for the business, to what is convenient and expected by the customer. The businesses that most rapidly embrace this will have a competitive advantage over their competitors… for a while.
Donna Mostrom, Analyst
16. Show you’re present in real time and connect with your customers.
Use Instagram Stories to connect with your audience and customers. Sara Blakely’s account is an excellent example of how to do this well. She showed up in Stories on Cyber Monday, and she jumped on Spanx’s customer service online chat and recorded people’s reactions.
I bought a bunch of unplanned stuff from Spanx that day just so I could talk to her. It was incredible. If you can authentically show you’re present in real time doing things for your customers, it will make a positive impact on how they interact with you and your brand when you’re not there.
17. Turn unhappy customers into your best, loyal customers.
Focus on service recovery. (Jay calls this “hugging your haters“). You can’t always provide a stellar experience for your customers, though that should be your top priority. We live in a commoditized world full of substitutes, where it’s easy to lose a customer over one bad experience. And forgiveness from your customers is not easily won. Companies must have service recovery plans, combined with an employee empowerment culture to carry out those plans, to correct mistakes. Service recovery experience could then be turned into a talk trigger, too.
Lauren Teague, Analyst
18. Use nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns.
Sometimes we need to look to the past for inspiration. Millennials have a clear preference for experiential marketing. Tap into their memories of adolescence, just like Google did with Macaulay Culkin’s Home Alone Again advert for the Google Assistant product. The ad was seasonally relevant (launched at the holidays, like the original movie setting) and became a viral hit, earning over 70M views and being named the top holiday campaign of 2018. Using nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns, marketers can benefit from a long history of affinity for beloved memories from the past.
19. Commit your social strategy to the 3 C’s: clarity, content and connections.
Social media strategies need to commit to 3 C’s in 2019: clarity, content and connections. Is your approach to social media specific and clear to the audience (and internally, amongst your team)? Clarity allows you to be purposeful with the content produced and published. Content is the engine of all social media activity, paid and organic. When audiences understand the intent of a brand on social, and consume content that aligns with that purpose, they are more likely to Connect with the brand. Connections between your audience and brand can be in the form of reactions, conversation or opting in as a follower/subscriber.
Kim Corak, Head of Business Development
20. Activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey.
Many SaaS companies (and often B2B in general) have a difficult time standing out from their competitive set. Rather than trying to throw money or advertising at the problem, develop a strategy to help activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey. Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin, who quite literally wrote the book on this strategy, lay out exactly how to do this and why in their book Talk Triggers, as well as throughout various (and free!) ebooks and webinars throughout the site.
21. Invest in continuous training and education to stay up top of what works and what doesn’t.
It’s very hard for content teams to stay up to date on all things digital — channels, formats, tools, atomization etc. — so be sure to pepper education and training throughout the year. With the water hose of information available and changes occurring in the industry, ongoing education works better than a “one and done” approach. For snippets of a wide range of topics, attending a conference is great but to go deep on a certain area or heavily customize it for your team, onsite workshops or web-based training modalities work best.
Chris Anderson, Media & Partnerships
22. Meet your customer’s needs quickly with chatbots and other related technology.
2019 will see an increase in the usage of chatbots and other related technology to communicate with customers and meet their needs quickly. However, it’s mission critical to support the technology with the most human influence..
http://bit.ly/2VOcRHV
0 notes
Text
12 Marketing Experts Reveal How to Crush Your Competition in 2019
With the new year in full swing, my wonderful colleagues — the marketing experts here at Convince & Convert — came up with 23 ideas for making your marketing and customer experience AMAZING in 2019.
In no particular order, here are our favorite recommendations for making 2019 your best year yet. These are the things that not many companies are doing well, but if you do, you will be sure to crush your competition this year. Let’s go!
Jay Baer, Founder, Convince & Convert
1. Leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning as part of your content marketing.
2019 will be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their content marketing, using tools like Ceralytics and others.
2. Create experiences that are talkable to cost-effectively grow your business.
2019 will be the year that a meaningful number of companies truly embrace the notion that customer experience is the most powerful form of customer acquisition. Yes, you need to be good at content marketing and social media and all the rest. But if you deliver an experience that’s talkable, your customers become volunteer marketers, and word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective (and cost-effective) way to grow any business.
3. Boost your social media performance with artificial intelligence too.
2019 will also be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their organic and paid social, using tools like Pattern89 and others.
Zontee Hou, Senior Analyst
4. Perform consistency audits to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story.
In the high-paced digital world of 2019, your customers will scrutinize all of your touchpoints as part of their customer experience. Be sure that you’re performing consistency audits in the new year to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story that serves your audience. Your CX isn’t just the message though, it’s also the load time, the smoothness of hand-off, and the ease of use. Make sure that your team understands how your audience uses your products, so they can make them even better. For instance, web hosting service Bluehost’s pop-out help module actually activates a layer on top of their website to guide you step-by-step to the right tool, when you select a question. That’s forward-thinking customer experience.
5. Connect with your audience in social media with conversations and based on their interests.
Conversational marketing is going to impact customer expectations in social media. Yes, chatbots are going to continue to grow, but it’s also about social media marketing that responds to the customers. Do your ads retarget your customers based on their interests, not just their purchase history? Does your social customer care team use customers’ information to give them more thoughtful service? Best-in-class brands are already in these spaces. Are you?
Anna Hrach, Analyst
6. Create experiences that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
Stop thinking like a marketer. Instead, take a step back and look at customer experiences you genuinely appreciate or were pleasantly surprised by. Think about why it made an impact on you and how it made your experience with a brand better. Then, try to replicate those feelings and experiences by translating them in ways that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
7. Your content marketing should focus on doing more with less.
It’s time to do more with way less. Over the last 10 years, companies have been investing more and more in content marketing to create more and more. Instead of racking your brain for new ideas, spend time figuring out what you can reuse, repurpose or remix. Is there an old blog that has become relevant again? Republish it and bring it to the top, so new audiences can see it. Have an outdated ebook that still has some solid content? Refresh it with some light updates, instead of starting from scratch. Have a huge piece of content that took a ton of time and money? Break it up into smaller pieces, like an infographic, designed quote, webinar and more.
Jenny Magic, Analyst
8. There’s a goldmine of great marketing ideas and stories in your company — they just might not be in the marketing department.
2019 will be the year that we finally bring the ops teams into marketing — no longer just tapping our customer-facing employees for story ideas and inputs, but asking them to BE the story. Companies will begin looking to employees who are challenging scripts and breaking the mold in how they do their jobs and serve customers. These insights should be the fuel for innovations the CX and marketing teams scale.
9. Tap into your best influencers: your employees.
In 2019 companies will finally realize that their best influencers are right under their nose – their employees. Millennials already are the largest segment in the workplace. Within the next two years, 50% of the U.S. workforce is expected to be made up of Millennials. It will be 75% by 2030, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. These employees want to work somewhere they can make an impact (over 3/4 would take a pay cut to work somewhere that matches their values), and companies that can get their staff connected with their why and excited about the story will find an army of influencers willing to proudly do the word of mouth/influencer work they’ve had to beg for (or pay for) in years past.
Kelly Santina, Head of Operations & Media
10. Remember, customer experience starts with employee experience.
As we work with more and more brands and partners in the customer experience space, it has opened my eyes that the customer experience is very much influenced by the employee experience as the first step. Ensuring your organization is investing in the resources, tools and personal connections of your employees will in most cases do more for your customer experience than any other effort. At C&C, we are a virtual company, and we place extreme importance of personal relationships and through tools that help us stay connected across time zones. When our team is happy and satisfied, our client work exceeds expectations.
11. Social media success starts with planning and organization.
Invest the budget and training time into a great social media monitoring tool and a content calendar tool. Finding one that fits your organization and team is worth the investment in time and money, trust me!
Mary Nice, Senior Analyst
12. Get back to the roots of what makes your company remarkable.
2019 is going to bring people back to the roots of what makes hour company awesome. Take time to understand that your operation is what makes your organization awesome, and the experience is the one thing you can control. In turn, marketing and operations teams should become closer than ever.
13. Have your organic and paid social teams work together.
2019 is going to bring the integration of paid and organic social teams. As organic continues to decline, social marketers have to know paid and paid teams must know what content makes social advertising successful. These can no longer be done in a silo.
Anthony Helmstetter, Analyst
14. Get more email unsubscribes—really.
Yes, that’s counter-intuitive. But the truth is, list size is a false metric. (Yes, you may have to explain that to your boss.) The one exception would be businesses who derive revenue based on CPM advertising, but for most organizations, there are more important metrics, like engagement and corresponding KPIs.
A bloated list of disengaged subscribers messes up your email performance metrics. Those who are truly disengaged are just diluting the actual metrics you use to optimize your performance. Ten thousand disengaged subscribers will completely obfuscate the real learnings for the 100 that are engaged. If there has been no click-through in the prior 12 months, initiate a last-chance re-engagement campaign, and if still no response, purge and archive them
15. Your customers’ expectations are increasing. The most competitive companies will exceed them.
Tesla. If you are unfamiliar, this fledgling (15-years actually) automobile manufacturer does almost everything differently than their long-established competitors. Yes, their cars are all electric, they have no dealerships, and they want to own their customer relationship, start to finish. Between start and finish, there is service. Unlike the traditional auto dealership service and repair facilities, Tesla does not intend to make a profit from the servicing of their vehicles. It’s designed to NOT be a profit center on the books. Heresy, most experts would say.
Instead, Tesla provides a gambit of services at no cost to the owners, even out of warranty. They come to your house or business for a majority of service calls. Stop and read that again. For example, a Tesla Ranger (mobile service technician) comes to your house at a scheduled time to repair or replace some part that needs attention, and often, there is no cost to the owner.
Customers like that. And by raising that bar of customer service, we customers soon wonder—or even expect–other industries to behave in a similar fashion. Customer service is rapidly evolving from what is customary and convenient for the business, to what is convenient and expected by the customer. The businesses that most rapidly embrace this will have a competitive advantage over their competitors… for a while.
Donna Mostrom, Analyst
16. Show you’re present in real time and connect with your customers.
Use Instagram Stories to connect with your audience and customers. Sara Blakely’s account is an excellent example of how to do this well. She showed up in Stories on Cyber Monday, and she jumped on Spanx’s customer service online chat and recorded people’s reactions.
I bought a bunch of unplanned stuff from Spanx that day just so I could talk to her. It was incredible. If you can authentically show you’re present in real time doing things for your customers, it will make a positive impact on how they interact with you and your brand when you’re not there.
17. Turn unhappy customers into your best, loyal customers.
Focus on service recovery. (Jay calls this “hugging your haters“). You can’t always provide a stellar experience for your customers, though that should be your top priority. We live in a commoditized world full of substitutes, where it’s easy to lose a customer over one bad experience. And forgiveness from your customers is not easily won. Companies must have service recovery plans, combined with an employee empowerment culture to carry out those plans, to correct mistakes. Service recovery experience could then be turned into a talk trigger, too.
Lauren Teague, Analyst
18. Use nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns.
Sometimes we need to look to the past for inspiration. Millennials have a clear preference for experiential marketing. Tap into their memories of adolescence, just like Google did with Macaulay Culkin’s Home Alone Again advert for the Google Assistant product. The ad was seasonally relevant (launched at the holidays, like the original movie setting) and became a viral hit, earning over 70M views and being named the top holiday campaign of 2018. Using nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns, marketers can benefit from a long history of affinity for beloved memories from the past.
19. Commit your social strategy to the 3 C’s: clarity, content and connections.
Social media strategies need to commit to 3 C’s in 2019: clarity, content and connections. Is your approach to social media specific and clear to the audience (and internally, amongst your team)? Clarity allows you to be purposeful with the content produced and published. Content is the engine of all social media activity, paid and organic. When audiences understand the intent of a brand on social, and consume content that aligns with that purpose, they are more likely to Connect with the brand. Connections between your audience and brand can be in the form of reactions, conversation or opting in as a follower/subscriber.
Kim Corak, Head of Business Development
20. Activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey.
Many SaaS companies (and often B2B in general) have a difficult time standing out from their competitive set. Rather than trying to throw money or advertising at the problem, develop a strategy to help activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey. Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin, who quite literally wrote the book on this strategy, lay out exactly how to do this and why in their book Talk Triggers, as well as throughout various (and free!) ebooks and webinars throughout the site.
21. Invest in continuous training and education to stay up top of what works and what doesn’t.
It’s very hard for content teams to stay up to date on all things digital — channels, formats, tools, atomization etc. — so be sure to pepper education and training throughout the year. With the water hose of information available and changes occurring in the industry, ongoing education works better than a “one and done” approach. For snippets of a wide range of topics, attending a conference is great but to go deep on a certain area or heavily customize it for your team, onsite workshops or web-based training modalities work best.
Chris Anderson, Media & Partnerships
22. Meet your customer’s needs quickly with chatbots and other related technology.
2019 will see an increase in the usage of chatbots and other related technology to communicate with customers and meet their needs quickly. However, it’s mission critical to support the technology with the most human influence..
http://bit.ly/2VOcRHV
0 notes
Text
12 Marketing Experts Reveal How to Crush Your Competition in 2019
With the new year in full swing, my wonderful colleagues — the marketing experts here at Convince & Convert — came up with 23 ideas for making your marketing and customer experience AMAZING in 2019.
In no particular order, here are our favorite recommendations for making 2019 your best year yet. These are the things that not many companies are doing well, but if you do, you will be sure to crush your competition this year. Let’s go!
Jay Baer, Founder, Convince & Convert
1. Leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning as part of your content marketing.
2019 will be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their content marketing, using tools like Ceralytics and others.
2. Create experiences that are talkable to cost-effectively grow your business.
2019 will be the year that a meaningful number of companies truly embrace the notion that customer experience is the most powerful form of customer acquisition. Yes, you need to be good at content marketing and social media and all the rest. But if you deliver an experience that’s talkable, your customers become volunteer marketers, and word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective (and cost-effective) way to grow any business.
3. Boost your social media performance with artificial intelligence too.
2019 will also be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their organic and paid social, using tools like Pattern89 and others.
Zontee Hou, Senior Analyst
4. Perform consistency audits to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story.
In the high-paced digital world of 2019, your customers will scrutinize all of your touchpoints as part of their customer experience. Be sure that you’re performing consistency audits in the new year to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story that serves your audience. Your CX isn’t just the message though, it’s also the load time, the smoothness of hand-off, and the ease of use. Make sure that your team understands how your audience uses your products, so they can make them even better. For instance, web hosting service Bluehost’s pop-out help module actually activates a layer on top of their website to guide you step-by-step to the right tool, when you select a question. That’s forward-thinking customer experience.
5. Connect with your audience in social media with conversations and based on their interests.
Conversational marketing is going to impact customer expectations in social media. Yes, chatbots are going to continue to grow, but it’s also about social media marketing that responds to the customers. Do your ads retarget your customers based on their interests, not just their purchase history? Does your social customer care team use customers’ information to give them more thoughtful service? Best-in-class brands are already in these spaces. Are you?
Anna Hrach, Analyst
6. Create experiences that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
Stop thinking like a marketer. Instead, take a step back and look at customer experiences you genuinely appreciate or were pleasantly surprised by. Think about why it made an impact on you and how it made your experience with a brand better. Then, try to replicate those feelings and experiences by translating them in ways that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
7. Your content marketing should focus on doing more with less.
It’s time to do more with way less. Over the last 10 years, companies have been investing more and more in content marketing to create more and more. Instead of racking your brain for new ideas, spend time figuring out what you can reuse, repurpose or remix. Is there an old blog that has become relevant again? Republish it and bring it to the top, so new audiences can see it. Have an outdated ebook that still has some solid content? Refresh it with some light updates, instead of starting from scratch. Have a huge piece of content that took a ton of time and money? Break it up into smaller pieces, like an infographic, designed quote, webinar and more.
Jenny Magic, Analyst
8. There’s a goldmine of great marketing ideas and stories in your company — they just might not be in the marketing department.
2019 will be the year that we finally bring the ops teams into marketing — no longer just tapping our customer-facing employees for story ideas and inputs, but asking them to BE the story. Companies will begin looking to employees who are challenging scripts and breaking the mold in how they do their jobs and serve customers. These insights should be the fuel for innovations the CX and marketing teams scale.
9. Tap into your best influencers: your employees.
In 2019 companies will finally realize that their best influencers are right under their nose – their employees. Millennials already are the largest segment in the workplace. Within the next two years, 50% of the U.S. workforce is expected to be made up of Millennials. It will be 75% by 2030, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. These employees want to work somewhere they can make an impact (over 3/4 would take a pay cut to work somewhere that matches their values), and companies that can get their staff connected with their why and excited about the story will find an army of influencers willing to proudly do the word of mouth/influencer work they’ve had to beg for (or pay for) in years past.
Kelly Santina, Head of Operations & Media
10. Remember, customer experience starts with employee experience.
As we work with more and more brands and partners in the customer experience space, it has opened my eyes that the customer experience is very much influenced by the employee experience as the first step. Ensuring your organization is investing in the resources, tools and personal connections of your employees will in most cases do more for your customer experience than any other effort. At C&C, we are a virtual company, and we place extreme importance of personal relationships and through tools that help us stay connected across time zones. When our team is happy and satisfied, our client work exceeds expectations.
11. Social media success starts with planning and organization.
Invest the budget and training time into a great social media monitoring tool and a content calendar tool. Finding one that fits your organization and team is worth the investment in time and money, trust me!
Mary Nice, Senior Analyst
12. Get back to the roots of what makes your company remarkable.
2019 is going to bring people back to the roots of what makes hour company awesome. Take time to understand that your operation is what makes your organization awesome, and the experience is the one thing you can control. In turn, marketing and operations teams should become closer than ever.
13. Have your organic and paid social teams work together.
2019 is going to bring the integration of paid and organic social teams. As organic continues to decline, social marketers have to know paid and paid teams must know what content makes social advertising successful. These can no longer be done in a silo.
Anthony Helmstetter, Analyst
14. Get more email unsubscribes—really.
Yes, that’s counter-intuitive. But the truth is, list size is a false metric. (Yes, you may have to explain that to your boss.) The one exception would be businesses who derive revenue based on CPM advertising, but for most organizations, there are more important metrics, like engagement and corresponding KPIs.
A bloated list of disengaged subscribers messes up your email performance metrics. Those who are truly disengaged are just diluting the actual metrics you use to optimize your performance. Ten thousand disengaged subscribers will completely obfuscate the real learnings for the 100 that are engaged. If there has been no click-through in the prior 12 months, initiate a last-chance re-engagement campaign, and if still no response, purge and archive them
15. Your customers’ expectations are increasing. The most competitive companies will exceed them.
Tesla. If you are unfamiliar, this fledgling (15-years actually) automobile manufacturer does almost everything differently than their long-established competitors. Yes, their cars are all electric, they have no dealerships, and they want to own their customer relationship, start to finish. Between start and finish, there is service. Unlike the traditional auto dealership service and repair facilities, Tesla does not intend to make a profit from the servicing of their vehicles. It’s designed to NOT be a profit center on the books. Heresy, most experts would say.
Instead, Tesla provides a gambit of services at no cost to the owners, even out of warranty. They come to your house or business for a majority of service calls. Stop and read that again. For example, a Tesla Ranger (mobile service technician) comes to your house at a scheduled time to repair or replace some part that needs attention, and often, there is no cost to the owner.
Customers like that. And by raising that bar of customer service, we customers soon wonder—or even expect–other industries to behave in a similar fashion. Customer service is rapidly evolving from what is customary and convenient for the business, to what is convenient and expected by the customer. The businesses that most rapidly embrace this will have a competitive advantage over their competitors… for a while.
Donna Mostrom, Analyst
16. Show you’re present in real time and connect with your customers.
Use Instagram Stories to connect with your audience and customers. Sara Blakely’s account is an excellent example of how to do this well. She showed up in Stories on Cyber Monday, and she jumped on Spanx’s customer service online chat and recorded people’s reactions.
I bought a bunch of unplanned stuff from Spanx that day just so I could talk to her. It was incredible. If you can authentically show you’re present in real time doing things for your customers, it will make a positive impact on how they interact with you and your brand when you’re not there.
17. Turn unhappy customers into your best, loyal customers.
Focus on service recovery. (Jay calls this “hugging your haters“). You can’t always provide a stellar experience for your customers, though that should be your top priority. We live in a commoditized world full of substitutes, where it’s easy to lose a customer over one bad experience. And forgiveness from your customers is not easily won. Companies must have service recovery plans, combined with an employee empowerment culture to carry out those plans, to correct mistakes. Service recovery experience could then be turned into a talk trigger, too.
Lauren Teague, Analyst
18. Use nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns.
Sometimes we need to look to the past for inspiration. Millennials have a clear preference for experiential marketing. Tap into their memories of adolescence, just like Google did with Macaulay Culkin’s Home Alone Again advert for the Google Assistant product. The ad was seasonally relevant (launched at the holidays, like the original movie setting) and became a viral hit, earning over 70M views and being named the top holiday campaign of 2018. Using nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns, marketers can benefit from a long history of affinity for beloved memories from the past.
19. Commit your social strategy to the 3 C’s: clarity, content and connections.
Social media strategies need to commit to 3 C’s in 2019: clarity, content and connections. Is your approach to social media specific and clear to the audience (and internally, amongst your team)? Clarity allows you to be purposeful with the content produced and published. Content is the engine of all social media activity, paid and organic. When audiences understand the intent of a brand on social, and consume content that aligns with that purpose, they are more likely to Connect with the brand. Connections between your audience and brand can be in the form of reactions, conversation or opting in as a follower/subscriber.
Kim Corak, Head of Business Development
20. Activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey.
Many SaaS companies (and often B2B in general) have a difficult time standing out from their competitive set. Rather than trying to throw money or advertising at the problem, develop a strategy to help activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey. Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin, who quite literally wrote the book on this strategy, lay out exactly how to do this and why in their book Talk Triggers, as well as throughout various (and free!) ebooks and webinars throughout the site.
21. Invest in continuous training and education to stay up top of what works and what doesn’t.
It’s very hard for content teams to stay up to date on all things digital — channels, formats, tools, atomization etc. — so be sure to pepper education and training throughout the year. With the water hose of information available and changes occurring in the industry, ongoing education works better than a “one and done” approach. For snippets of a wide range of topics, attending a conference is great but to go deep on a certain area or heavily customize it for your team, onsite workshops or web-based training modalities work best.
Chris Anderson, Media & Partnerships
22. Meet your customer’s needs quickly with chatbots and other related technology.
2019 will see an increase in the usage of chatbots and other related technology to communicate with customers and meet their needs quickly. However, it’s mission critical to support the technology with the most human influence..
http://bit.ly/2VOcRHV
0 notes
Text
12 Marketing Experts Reveal How to Crush Your Competition in 2019
With the new year in full swing, my wonderful colleagues — the marketing experts here at Convince & Convert — came up with 23 ideas for making your marketing and customer experience AMAZING in 2019.
In no particular order, here are our favorite recommendations for making 2019 your best year yet. These are the things that not many companies are doing well, but if you do, you will be sure to crush your competition this year. Let’s go!
Jay Baer, Founder, Convince & Convert
1. Leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning as part of your content marketing.
2019 will be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their content marketing, using tools like Ceralytics and others.
2. Create experiences that are talkable to cost-effectively grow your business.
2019 will be the year that a meaningful number of companies truly embrace the notion that customer experience is the most powerful form of customer acquisition. Yes, you need to be good at content marketing and social media and all the rest. But if you deliver an experience that’s talkable, your customers become volunteer marketers, and word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective (and cost-effective) way to grow any business.
3. Boost your social media performance with artificial intelligence too.
2019 will also be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their organic and paid social, using tools like Pattern89 and others.
Zontee Hou, Senior Analyst
4. Perform consistency audits to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story.
In the high-paced digital world of 2019, your customers will scrutinize all of your touchpoints as part of their customer experience. Be sure that you’re performing consistency audits in the new year to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story that serves your audience. Your CX isn’t just the message though, it’s also the load time, the smoothness of hand-off, and the ease of use. Make sure that your team understands how your audience uses your products, so they can make them even better. For instance, web hosting service Bluehost’s pop-out help module actually activates a layer on top of their website to guide you step-by-step to the right tool, when you select a question. That’s forward-thinking customer experience.
5. Connect with your audience in social media with conversations and based on their interests.
Conversational marketing is going to impact customer expectations in social media. Yes, chatbots are going to continue to grow, but it’s also about social media marketing that responds to the customers. Do your ads retarget your customers based on their interests, not just their purchase history? Does your social customer care team use customers’ information to give them more thoughtful service? Best-in-class brands are already in these spaces. Are you?
Anna Hrach, Analyst
6. Create experiences that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
Stop thinking like a marketer. Instead, take a step back and look at customer experiences you genuinely appreciate or were pleasantly surprised by. Think about why it made an impact on you and how it made your experience with a brand better. Then, try to replicate those feelings and experiences by translating them in ways that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
7. Your content marketing should focus on doing more with less.
It’s time to do more with way less. Over the last 10 years, companies have been investing more and more in content marketing to create more and more. Instead of racking your brain for new ideas, spend time figuring out what you can reuse, repurpose or remix. Is there an old blog that has become relevant again? Republish it and bring it to the top, so new audiences can see it. Have an outdated ebook that still has some solid content? Refresh it with some light updates, instead of starting from scratch. Have a huge piece of content that took a ton of time and money? Break it up into smaller pieces, like an infographic, designed quote, webinar and more.
Jenny Magic, Analyst
8. There’s a goldmine of great marketing ideas and stories in your company — they just might not be in the marketing department.
2019 will be the year that we finally bring the ops teams into marketing — no longer just tapping our customer-facing employees for story ideas and inputs, but asking them to BE the story. Companies will begin looking to employees who are challenging scripts and breaking the mold in how they do their jobs and serve customers. These insights should be the fuel for innovations the CX and marketing teams scale.
9. Tap into your best influencers: your employees.
In 2019 companies will finally realize that their best influencers are right under their nose – their employees. Millennials already are the largest segment in the workplace. Within the next two years, 50% of the U.S. workforce is expected to be made up of Millennials. It will be 75% by 2030, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. These employees want to work somewhere they can make an impact (over 3/4 would take a pay cut to work somewhere that matches their values), and companies that can get their staff connected with their why and excited about the story will find an army of influencers willing to proudly do the word of mouth/influencer work they’ve had to beg for (or pay for) in years past.
Kelly Santina, Head of Operations & Media
10. Remember, customer experience starts with employee experience.
As we work with more and more brands and partners in the customer experience space, it has opened my eyes that the customer experience is very much influenced by the employee experience as the first step. Ensuring your organization is investing in the resources, tools and personal connections of your employees will in most cases do more for your customer experience than any other effort. At C&C, we are a virtual company, and we place extreme importance of personal relationships and through tools that help us stay connected across time zones. When our team is happy and satisfied, our client work exceeds expectations.
11. Social media success starts with planning and organization.
Invest the budget and training time into a great social media monitoring tool and a content calendar tool. Finding one that fits your organization and team is worth the investment in time and money, trust me!
Mary Nice, Senior Analyst
12. Get back to the roots of what makes your company remarkable.
2019 is going to bring people back to the roots of what makes hour company awesome. Take time to understand that your operation is what makes your organization awesome, and the experience is the one thing you can control. In turn, marketing and operations teams should become closer than ever.
13. Have your organic and paid social teams work together.
2019 is going to bring the integration of paid and organic social teams. As organic continues to decline, social marketers have to know paid and paid teams must know what content makes social advertising successful. These can no longer be done in a silo.
Anthony Helmstetter, Analyst
14. Get more email unsubscribes—really.
Yes, that’s counter-intuitive. But the truth is, list size is a false metric. (Yes, you may have to explain that to your boss.) The one exception would be businesses who derive revenue based on CPM advertising, but for most organizations, there are more important metrics, like engagement and corresponding KPIs.
A bloated list of disengaged subscribers messes up your email performance metrics. Those who are truly disengaged are just diluting the actual metrics you use to optimize your performance. Ten thousand disengaged subscribers will completely obfuscate the real learnings for the 100 that are engaged. If there has been no click-through in the prior 12 months, initiate a last-chance re-engagement campaign, and if still no response, purge and archive them
15. Your customers’ expectations are increasing. The most competitive companies will exceed them.
Tesla. If you are unfamiliar, this fledgling (15-years actually) automobile manufacturer does almost everything differently than their long-established competitors. Yes, their cars are all electric, they have no dealerships, and they want to own their customer relationship, start to finish. Between start and finish, there is service. Unlike the traditional auto dealership service and repair facilities, Tesla does not intend to make a profit from the servicing of their vehicles. It’s designed to NOT be a profit center on the books. Heresy, most experts would say.
Instead, Tesla provides a gambit of services at no cost to the owners, even out of warranty. They come to your house or business for a majority of service calls. Stop and read that again. For example, a Tesla Ranger (mobile service technician) comes to your house at a scheduled time to repair or replace some part that needs attention, and often, there is no cost to the owner.
Customers like that. And by raising that bar of customer service, we customers soon wonder—or even expect–other industries to behave in a similar fashion. Customer service is rapidly evolving from what is customary and convenient for the business, to what is convenient and expected by the customer. The businesses that most rapidly embrace this will have a competitive advantage over their competitors… for a while.
Donna Mostrom, Analyst
16. Show you’re present in real time and connect with your customers.
Use Instagram Stories to connect with your audience and customers. Sara Blakely’s account is an excellent example of how to do this well. She showed up in Stories on Cyber Monday, and she jumped on Spanx’s customer service online chat and recorded people’s reactions.
I bought a bunch of unplanned stuff from Spanx that day just so I could talk to her. It was incredible. If you can authentically show you’re present in real time doing things for your customers, it will make a positive impact on how they interact with you and your brand when you’re not there.
17. Turn unhappy customers into your best, loyal customers.
Focus on service recovery. (Jay calls this “hugging your haters“). You can’t always provide a stellar experience for your customers, though that should be your top priority. We live in a commoditized world full of substitutes, where it’s easy to lose a customer over one bad experience. And forgiveness from your customers is not easily won. Companies must have service recovery plans, combined with an employee empowerment culture to carry out those plans, to correct mistakes. Service recovery experience could then be turned into a talk trigger, too.
Lauren Teague, Analyst
18. Use nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns.
Sometimes we need to look to the past for inspiration. Millennials have a clear preference for experiential marketing. Tap into their memories of adolescence, just like Google did with Macaulay Culkin’s Home Alone Again advert for the Google Assistant product. The ad was seasonally relevant (launched at the holidays, like the original movie setting) and became a viral hit, earning over 70M views and being named the top holiday campaign of 2018. Using nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns, marketers can benefit from a long history of affinity for beloved memories from the past.
19. Commit your social strategy to the 3 C’s: clarity, content and connections.
Social media strategies need to commit to 3 C’s in 2019: clarity, content and connections. Is your approach to social media specific and clear to the audience (and internally, amongst your team)? Clarity allows you to be purposeful with the content produced and published. Content is the engine of all social media activity, paid and organic. When audiences understand the intent of a brand on social, and consume content that aligns with that purpose, they are more likely to Connect with the brand. Connections between your audience and brand can be in the form of reactions, conversation or opting in as a follower/subscriber.
Kim Corak, Head of Business Development
20. Activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey.
Many SaaS companies (and often B2B in general) have a difficult time standing out from their competitive set. Rather than trying to throw money or advertising at the problem, develop a strategy to help activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey. Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin, who quite literally wrote the book on this strategy, lay out exactly how to do this and why in their book Talk Triggers, as well as throughout various (and free!) ebooks and webinars throughout the site.
21. Invest in continuous training and education to stay up top of what works and what doesn’t.
It’s very hard for content teams to stay up to date on all things digital — channels, formats, tools, atomization etc. — so be sure to pepper education and training throughout the year. With the water hose of information available and changes occurring in the industry, ongoing education works better than a “one and done” approach. For snippets of a wide range of topics, attending a conference is great but to go deep on a certain area or heavily customize it for your team, onsite workshops or web-based training modalities work best.
Chris Anderson, Media & Partnerships
22. Meet your customer’s needs quickly with chatbots and other related technology.
2019 will see an increase in the usage of chatbots and other related technology to communicate with customers and meet their needs quickly. However, it’s mission critical to support the technology with the most human influence..
http://bit.ly/2VOcRHV
0 notes
Text
12 Marketing Experts Reveal How to Crush Your Competition in 2019
With the new year in full swing, my wonderful colleagues — the marketing experts here at Convince & Convert — came up with 23 ideas for making your marketing and customer experience AMAZING in 2019.
In no particular order, here are our favorite recommendations for making 2019 your best year yet. These are the things that not many companies are doing well, but if you do, you will be sure to crush your competition this year. Let’s go!
Jay Baer, Founder, Convince & Convert
1. Leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning as part of your content marketing.
2019 will be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their content marketing, using tools like Ceralytics and others.
2. Create experiences that are talkable to cost-effectively grow your business.
2019 will be the year that a meaningful number of companies truly embrace the notion that customer experience is the most powerful form of customer acquisition. Yes, you need to be good at content marketing and social media and all the rest. But if you deliver an experience that’s talkable, your customers become volunteer marketers, and word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective (and cost-effective) way to grow any business.
3. Boost your social media performance with artificial intelligence too.
2019 will also be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their organic and paid social, using tools like Pattern89 and others.
Zontee Hou, Senior Analyst
4. Perform consistency audits to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story.
In the high-paced digital world of 2019, your customers will scrutinize all of your touchpoints as part of their customer experience. Be sure that you’re performing consistency audits in the new year to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story that serves your audience. Your CX isn’t just the message though, it’s also the load time, the smoothness of hand-off, and the ease of use. Make sure that your team understands how your audience uses your products, so they can make them even better. For instance, web hosting service Bluehost’s pop-out help module actually activates a layer on top of their website to guide you step-by-step to the right tool, when you select a question. That’s forward-thinking customer experience.
5. Connect with your audience in social media with conversations and based on their interests.
Conversational marketing is going to impact customer expectations in social media. Yes, chatbots are going to continue to grow, but it’s also about social media marketing that responds to the customers. Do your ads retarget your customers based on their interests, not just their purchase history? Does your social customer care team use customers’ information to give them more thoughtful service? Best-in-class brands are already in these spaces. Are you?
Anna Hrach, Analyst
6. Create experiences that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
Stop thinking like a marketer. Instead, take a step back and look at customer experiences you genuinely appreciate or were pleasantly surprised by. Think about why it made an impact on you and how it made your experience with a brand better. Then, try to replicate those feelings and experiences by translating them in ways that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
7. Your content marketing should focus on doing more with less.
It’s time to do more with way less. Over the last 10 years, companies have been investing more and more in content marketing to create more and more. Instead of racking your brain for new ideas, spend time figuring out what you can reuse, repurpose or remix. Is there an old blog that has become relevant again? Republish it and bring it to the top, so new audiences can see it. Have an outdated ebook that still has some solid content? Refresh it with some light updates, instead of starting from scratch. Have a huge piece of content that took a ton of time and money? Break it up into smaller pieces, like an infographic, designed quote, webinar and more.
Jenny Magic, Analyst
8. There’s a goldmine of great marketing ideas and stories in your company — they just might not be in the marketing department.
2019 will be the year that we finally bring the ops teams into marketing — no longer just tapping our customer-facing employees for story ideas and inputs, but asking them to BE the story. Companies will begin looking to employees who are challenging scripts and breaking the mold in how they do their jobs and serve customers. These insights should be the fuel for innovations the CX and marketing teams scale.
9. Tap into your best influencers: your employees.
In 2019 companies will finally realize that their best influencers are right under their nose – their employees. Millennials already are the largest segment in the workplace. Within the next two years, 50% of the U.S. workforce is expected to be made up of Millennials. It will be 75% by 2030, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. These employees want to work somewhere they can make an impact (over 3/4 would take a pay cut to work somewhere that matches their values), and companies that can get their staff connected with their why and excited about the story will find an army of influencers willing to proudly do the word of mouth/influencer work they’ve had to beg for (or pay for) in years past.
Kelly Santina, Head of Operations & Media
10. Remember, customer experience starts with employee experience.
As we work with more and more brands and partners in the customer experience space, it has opened my eyes that the customer experience is very much influenced by the employee experience as the first step. Ensuring your organization is investing in the resources, tools and personal connections of your employees will in most cases do more for your customer experience than any other effort. At C&C, we are a virtual company, and we place extreme importance of personal relationships and through tools that help us stay connected across time zones. When our team is happy and satisfied, our client work exceeds expectations.
11. Social media success starts with planning and organization.
Invest the budget and training time into a great social media monitoring tool and a content calendar tool. Finding one that fits your organization and team is worth the investment in time and money, trust me!
Mary Nice, Senior Analyst
12. Get back to the roots of what makes your company remarkable.
2019 is going to bring people back to the roots of what makes hour company awesome. Take time to understand that your operation is what makes your organization awesome, and the experience is the one thing you can control. In turn, marketing and operations teams should become closer than ever.
13. Have your organic and paid social teams work together.
2019 is going to bring the integration of paid and organic social teams. As organic continues to decline, social marketers have to know paid and paid teams must know what content makes social advertising successful. These can no longer be done in a silo.
Anthony Helmstetter, Analyst
14. Get more email unsubscribes—really.
Yes, that’s counter-intuitive. But the truth is, list size is a false metric. (Yes, you may have to explain that to your boss.) The one exception would be businesses who derive revenue based on CPM advertising, but for most organizations, there are more important metrics, like engagement and corresponding KPIs.
A bloated list of disengaged subscribers messes up your email performance metrics. Those who are truly disengaged are just diluting the actual metrics you use to optimize your performance. Ten thousand disengaged subscribers will completely obfuscate the real learnings for the 100 that are engaged. If there has been no click-through in the prior 12 months, initiate a last-chance re-engagement campaign, and if still no response, purge and archive them
15. Your customers’ expectations are increasing. The most competitive companies will exceed them.
Tesla. If you are unfamiliar, this fledgling (15-years actually) automobile manufacturer does almost everything differently than their long-established competitors. Yes, their cars are all electric, they have no dealerships, and they want to own their customer relationship, start to finish. Between start and finish, there is service. Unlike the traditional auto dealership service and repair facilities, Tesla does not intend to make a profit from the servicing of their vehicles. It’s designed to NOT be a profit center on the books. Heresy, most experts would say.
Instead, Tesla provides a gambit of services at no cost to the owners, even out of warranty. They come to your house or business for a majority of service calls. Stop and read that again. For example, a Tesla Ranger (mobile service technician) comes to your house at a scheduled time to repair or replace some part that needs attention, and often, there is no cost to the owner.
Customers like that. And by raising that bar of customer service, we customers soon wonder—or even expect–other industries to behave in a similar fashion. Customer service is rapidly evolving from what is customary and convenient for the business, to what is convenient and expected by the customer. The businesses that most rapidly embrace this will have a competitive advantage over their competitors… for a while.
Donna Mostrom, Analyst
16. Show you’re present in real time and connect with your customers.
Use Instagram Stories to connect with your audience and customers. Sara Blakely’s account is an excellent example of how to do this well. She showed up in Stories on Cyber Monday, and she jumped on Spanx’s customer service online chat and recorded people’s reactions.
I bought a bunch of unplanned stuff from Spanx that day just so I could talk to her. It was incredible. If you can authentically show you’re present in real time doing things for your customers, it will make a positive impact on how they interact with you and your brand when you’re not there.
17. Turn unhappy customers into your best, loyal customers.
Focus on service recovery. (Jay calls this “hugging your haters“). You can’t always provide a stellar experience for your customers, though that should be your top priority. We live in a commoditized world full of substitutes, where it’s easy to lose a customer over one bad experience. And forgiveness from your customers is not easily won. Companies must have service recovery plans, combined with an employee empowerment culture to carry out those plans, to correct mistakes. Service recovery experience could then be turned into a talk trigger, too.
Lauren Teague, Analyst
18. Use nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns.
Sometimes we need to look to the past for inspiration. Millennials have a clear preference for experiential marketing. Tap into their memories of adolescence, just like Google did with Macaulay Culkin’s Home Alone Again advert for the Google Assistant product. The ad was seasonally relevant (launched at the holidays, like the original movie setting) and became a viral hit, earning over 70M views and being named the top holiday campaign of 2018. Using nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns, marketers can benefit from a long history of affinity for beloved memories from the past.
19. Commit your social strategy to the 3 C’s: clarity, content and connections.
Social media strategies need to commit to 3 C’s in 2019: clarity, content and connections. Is your approach to social media specific and clear to the audience (and internally, amongst your team)? Clarity allows you to be purposeful with the content produced and published. Content is the engine of all social media activity, paid and organic. When audiences understand the intent of a brand on social, and consume content that aligns with that purpose, they are more likely to Connect with the brand. Connections between your audience and brand can be in the form of reactions, conversation or opting in as a follower/subscriber.
Kim Corak, Head of Business Development
20. Activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey.
Many SaaS companies (and often B2B in general) have a difficult time standing out from their competitive set. Rather than trying to throw money or advertising at the problem, develop a strategy to help activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey. Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin, who quite literally wrote the book on this strategy, lay out exactly how to do this and why in their book Talk Triggers, as well as throughout various (and free!) ebooks and webinars throughout the site.
21. Invest in continuous training and education to stay up top of what works and what doesn’t.
It’s very hard for content teams to stay up to date on all things digital — channels, formats, tools, atomization etc. — so be sure to pepper education and training throughout the year. With the water hose of information available and changes occurring in the industry, ongoing education works better than a “one and done” approach. For snippets of a wide range of topics, attending a conference is great but to go deep on a certain area or heavily customize it for your team, onsite workshops or web-based training modalities work best.
Chris Anderson, Media & Partnerships
22. Meet your customer’s needs quickly with chatbots and other related technology.
2019 will see an increase in the usage of chatbots and other related technology to communicate with customers and meet their needs quickly. However, it’s mission critical to support the technology with the most human influence..
http://bit.ly/2VOcRHV
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Text
12 Marketing Experts Reveal How to Crush Your Competition in 2019
With the new year in full swing, my wonderful colleagues — the marketing experts here at Convince & Convert — came up with 23 ideas for making your marketing and customer experience AMAZING in 2019.
In no particular order, here are our favorite recommendations for making 2019 your best year yet. These are the things that not many companies are doing well, but if you do, you will be sure to crush your competition this year. Let’s go!
Jay Baer, Founder, Convince & Convert
1. Leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning as part of your content marketing.
2019 will be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their content marketing, using tools like Ceralytics and others.
2. Create experiences that are talkable to cost-effectively grow your business.
2019 will be the year that a meaningful number of companies truly embrace the notion that customer experience is the most powerful form of customer acquisition. Yes, you need to be good at content marketing and social media and all the rest. But if you deliver an experience that’s talkable, your customers become volunteer marketers, and word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective (and cost-effective) way to grow any business.
3. Boost your social media performance with artificial intelligence too.
2019 will also be the year that artificial intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by a meaningful number of companies to reverse-engineer the success of their organic and paid social, using tools like Pattern89 and others.
Zontee Hou, Senior Analyst
4. Perform consistency audits to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story.
In the high-paced digital world of 2019, your customers will scrutinize all of your touchpoints as part of their customer experience. Be sure that you’re performing consistency audits in the new year to make sure that your entire digital ecosystem is telling a complete, compelling story that serves your audience. Your CX isn’t just the message though, it’s also the load time, the smoothness of hand-off, and the ease of use. Make sure that your team understands how your audience uses your products, so they can make them even better. For instance, web hosting service Bluehost’s pop-out help module actually activates a layer on top of their website to guide you step-by-step to the right tool, when you select a question. That’s forward-thinking customer experience.
5. Connect with your audience in social media with conversations and based on their interests.
Conversational marketing is going to impact customer expectations in social media. Yes, chatbots are going to continue to grow, but it’s also about social media marketing that responds to the customers. Do your ads retarget your customers based on their interests, not just their purchase history? Does your social customer care team use customers’ information to give them more thoughtful service? Best-in-class brands are already in these spaces. Are you?
Anna Hrach, Analyst
6. Create experiences that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
Stop thinking like a marketer. Instead, take a step back and look at customer experiences you genuinely appreciate or were pleasantly surprised by. Think about why it made an impact on you and how it made your experience with a brand better. Then, try to replicate those feelings and experiences by translating them in ways that will be meaningful across your own customers’ journeys.
7. Your content marketing should focus on doing more with less.
It’s time to do more with way less. Over the last 10 years, companies have been investing more and more in content marketing to create more and more. Instead of racking your brain for new ideas, spend time figuring out what you can reuse, repurpose or remix. Is there an old blog that has become relevant again? Republish it and bring it to the top, so new audiences can see it. Have an outdated ebook that still has some solid content? Refresh it with some light updates, instead of starting from scratch. Have a huge piece of content that took a ton of time and money? Break it up into smaller pieces, like an infographic, designed quote, webinar and more.
Jenny Magic, Analyst
8. There’s a goldmine of great marketing ideas and stories in your company — they just might not be in the marketing department.
2019 will be the year that we finally bring the ops teams into marketing — no longer just tapping our customer-facing employees for story ideas and inputs, but asking them to BE the story. Companies will begin looking to employees who are challenging scripts and breaking the mold in how they do their jobs and serve customers. These insights should be the fuel for innovations the CX and marketing teams scale.
9. Tap into your best influencers: your employees.
In 2019 companies will finally realize that their best influencers are right under their nose – their employees. Millennials already are the largest segment in the workplace. Within the next two years, 50% of the U.S. workforce is expected to be made up of Millennials. It will be 75% by 2030, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. These employees want to work somewhere they can make an impact (over 3/4 would take a pay cut to work somewhere that matches their values), and companies that can get their staff connected with their why and excited about the story will find an army of influencers willing to proudly do the word of mouth/influencer work they’ve had to beg for (or pay for) in years past.
Kelly Santina, Head of Operations & Media
10. Remember, customer experience starts with employee experience.
As we work with more and more brands and partners in the customer experience space, it has opened my eyes that the customer experience is very much influenced by the employee experience as the first step. Ensuring your organization is investing in the resources, tools and personal connections of your employees will in most cases do more for your customer experience than any other effort. At C&C, we are a virtual company, and we place extreme importance of personal relationships and through tools that help us stay connected across time zones. When our team is happy and satisfied, our client work exceeds expectations.
11. Social media success starts with planning and organization.
Invest the budget and training time into a great social media monitoring tool and a content calendar tool. Finding one that fits your organization and team is worth the investment in time and money, trust me!
Mary Nice, Senior Analyst
12. Get back to the roots of what makes your company remarkable.
2019 is going to bring people back to the roots of what makes hour company awesome. Take time to understand that your operation is what makes your organization awesome, and the experience is the one thing you can control. In turn, marketing and operations teams should become closer than ever.
13. Have your organic and paid social teams work together.
2019 is going to bring the integration of paid and organic social teams. As organic continues to decline, social marketers have to know paid and paid teams must know what content makes social advertising successful. These can no longer be done in a silo.
Anthony Helmstetter, Analyst
14. Get more email unsubscribes—really.
Yes, that’s counter-intuitive. But the truth is, list size is a false metric. (Yes, you may have to explain that to your boss.) The one exception would be businesses who derive revenue based on CPM advertising, but for most organizations, there are more important metrics, like engagement and corresponding KPIs.
A bloated list of disengaged subscribers messes up your email performance metrics. Those who are truly disengaged are just diluting the actual metrics you use to optimize your performance. Ten thousand disengaged subscribers will completely obfuscate the real learnings for the 100 that are engaged. If there has been no click-through in the prior 12 months, initiate a last-chance re-engagement campaign, and if still no response, purge and archive them
15. Your customers’ expectations are increasing. The most competitive companies will exceed them.
Tesla. If you are unfamiliar, this fledgling (15-years actually) automobile manufacturer does almost everything differently than their long-established competitors. Yes, their cars are all electric, they have no dealerships, and they want to own their customer relationship, start to finish. Between start and finish, there is service. Unlike the traditional auto dealership service and repair facilities, Tesla does not intend to make a profit from the servicing of their vehicles. It’s designed to NOT be a profit center on the books. Heresy, most experts would say.
Instead, Tesla provides a gambit of services at no cost to the owners, even out of warranty. They come to your house or business for a majority of service calls. Stop and read that again. For example, a Tesla Ranger (mobile service technician) comes to your house at a scheduled time to repair or replace some part that needs attention, and often, there is no cost to the owner.
Customers like that. And by raising that bar of customer service, we customers soon wonder—or even expect–other industries to behave in a similar fashion. Customer service is rapidly evolving from what is customary and convenient for the business, to what is convenient and expected by the customer. The businesses that most rapidly embrace this will have a competitive advantage over their competitors… for a while.
Donna Mostrom, Analyst
16. Show you’re present in real time and connect with your customers.
Use Instagram Stories to connect with your audience and customers. Sara Blakely’s account is an excellent example of how to do this well. She showed up in Stories on Cyber Monday, and she jumped on Spanx’s customer service online chat and recorded people’s reactions.
I bought a bunch of unplanned stuff from Spanx that day just so I could talk to her. It was incredible. If you can authentically show you’re present in real time doing things for your customers, it will make a positive impact on how they interact with you and your brand when you’re not there.
17. Turn unhappy customers into your best, loyal customers.
Focus on service recovery. (Jay calls this “hugging your haters“). You can’t always provide a stellar experience for your customers, though that should be your top priority. We live in a commoditized world full of substitutes, where it’s easy to lose a customer over one bad experience. And forgiveness from your customers is not easily won. Companies must have service recovery plans, combined with an employee empowerment culture to carry out those plans, to correct mistakes. Service recovery experience could then be turned into a talk trigger, too.
Lauren Teague, Analyst
18. Use nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns.
Sometimes we need to look to the past for inspiration. Millennials have a clear preference for experiential marketing. Tap into their memories of adolescence, just like Google did with Macaulay Culkin’s Home Alone Again advert for the Google Assistant product. The ad was seasonally relevant (launched at the holidays, like the original movie setting) and became a viral hit, earning over 70M views and being named the top holiday campaign of 2018. Using nostalgia to inspire content and campaigns, marketers can benefit from a long history of affinity for beloved memories from the past.
19. Commit your social strategy to the 3 C’s: clarity, content and connections.
Social media strategies need to commit to 3 C’s in 2019: clarity, content and connections. Is your approach to social media specific and clear to the audience (and internally, amongst your team)? Clarity allows you to be purposeful with the content produced and published. Content is the engine of all social media activity, paid and organic. When audiences understand the intent of a brand on social, and consume content that aligns with that purpose, they are more likely to Connect with the brand. Connections between your audience and brand can be in the form of reactions, conversation or opting in as a follower/subscriber.
Kim Corak, Head of Business Development
20. Activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey.
Many SaaS companies (and often B2B in general) have a difficult time standing out from their competitive set. Rather than trying to throw money or advertising at the problem, develop a strategy to help activate word of mouth during various points of the customer journey. Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin, who quite literally wrote the book on this strategy, lay out exactly how to do this and why in their book Talk Triggers, as well as throughout various (and free!) ebooks and webinars throughout the site.
21. Invest in continuous training and education to stay up top of what works and what doesn’t.
It’s very hard for content teams to stay up to date on all things digital — channels, formats, tools, atomization etc. — so be sure to pepper education and training throughout the year. With the water hose of information available and changes occurring in the industry, ongoing education works better than a “one and done” approach. For snippets of a wide range of topics, attending a conference is great but to go deep on a certain area or heavily customize it for your team, onsite workshops or web-based training modalities work best.
Chris Anderson, Media & Partnerships
22. Meet your customer’s needs quickly with chatbots and other related technology.
2019 will see an increase in the usage of chatbots and other related technology to communicate with customers and meet their needs quickly. However, it’s mission critical to support the technology with the most human influence..
http://bit.ly/2VOcRHV
0 notes
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LOADING INFORMATION ON NIGHTMARE’S MAIN VOCAL LEE EUNSOL ...
IDOL DETAILS
STAGENAME: n/a CURRENT AGE: 24 DEBUT AGE: 23 TRAINEE SINCE: 20 COMPANY: Koala.T SECONDARY SKILL: n/a
IDOL PROFILE
NICKNAME(S): peach INSPIRATION: an admiration for the arts and wanting to experience this as a career in a more modernized way. SPECIAL TALENTS:
has hypermobility, is double jointed (fingers, elbows)
can play the gayageum quite capably
NOTABLE FACTS:
has a degree in vocal and instrumental music from a high ranking university
was a small scale socialite, and it’s said that’s part of why koala.t made her a part of nightmare (due to the extra attention it might bring)
her father is a high standing ceo (essentially a chaebol)
has one sibling, an older brother, who is set to continue in the family’s business
is generally very active on social media
IDOL GOALS
SHORT-TERM GOALS:
in the short term, eunsol wants to see nightmare succeed past the “niche” label that often gets stuck onto them. the reason that she dove into this industry as a whole was to find notoriety, become a name synonymous with with something larger than life. that might stick to history longer than if she hadn’t. there’s that sense of wanting to be bigger than she is. of projecting her name out there into the ether and have it resonate in some continuous loop that you can’t shake. paired with a track that was heralded as famous. as loved. but that doesn’t really happen when your group is scraping the bottom of the barrel and trying to appeal to the fringes of the music-listening community.
LONG-TERM GOALS:
if she’s being honest, eunsol doesn’t really care about her group. not in the sense that she hates the members, or that she doesn’t like the music. but joining an idol group wasn’t done because she had wanted to be a part of that. because she had an undying love of pop music. she joined the group because she wanted the fame that often came with it. she loves music, she’s been pursuing music her entire life. her family is well-connected enough where she could have made a career out of it in a more classic, well-viewed sense. but playing in the orchestra doesn’t make one a household name. and that’s what eunsol wants. to be a household name. to get her face printed out across too many glossy-paged magazines. to develop a career that is seen as awe-inspiring. whether the rest of nightmare is there with her is something inconsequential. as long as eunsol makes it there herself, that’s all she cares about.
IDOL IMAGE
it was almost alarmingly clear why koala.t had reached out, offered her an opportunity at their company when eunsol showed interest in becoming an idol. connections often do more than talent. anyone in the business can tell you that. you just need that domino stack of people to knock down doors until you finally manage to hit the right one and they let you in. and that’s what happened. eunsol, with her father’s wealth and her small mass of social media followers and occasional appearances on popular blog posts or youtube v-loggers channels would of course seem like a grand marketing too. especially to a company trying to relaunch itself after spiraling into oblivion. what better way to try and jump-start a group than by putting in someone who already has a small corner of attention pulled around them?
and eunsol knows that. knows that’s why they signed her, put her into nightmare and prayed she’d help them take off (not that it’s even worked out spectacularly so far). and they borrowed from that pre-established persona she pushed under this half-baked socialite persona she’d been presenting for a handful of years. why recreate something that already seemed to be working, after all? so maybe eunsol technically had a little more input than many in the industry had. but that doesn’t mean her stage persona is genuine. it doesn’t mean it’s in any way a true reflection of who she is. after all, that’s not how get people to admire you. want to be you. not that eunsol can tell. and that’s the best way to steal away fame, isn’t it? all that adoration and bone-aching wanting?
so she’s cloaked in a still-accessible level of mystery. an enchantress, meant to lure attention toward her (the male gaze can be a lucrative business, after all). her looks drawn front and center, intentions held back enough that they can flirt with the idea of demure if push comes to shove. a look that’s reflective of her parents’ status. she’s the daughter of someone rich, and her style needs to meet it. something unattainable, but taken enough by everything scattered around her that it still makes people want to reach out. hope. something mixed with a dark edge, or dark in the world of idols. it usually means dark lipstick and a lot of black. hooded eyes and a smile painted red. otherworldly and inviting. eunsol’s entire job seems to be to provide exposure, or to bring more in. sometimes it feels like singing comes second. but considering her own end game, she doesn’t mind too much.
IDOL HISTORY
FROM: THE LEE FAMILY – we would like to welcome into the world lee eunsol, please accept this invitation to her first birthday party.
that golden spoon. it’s always looked at enviously, isn’t it? if only i’d been biting down on that metal. the kind of thoughts that collect inside people’s heads. a bitter, jealous buildup. an evisious desire to be a gold-toothed tycoon. eunsol grew up learning to roll her eyes at it. those sorts of people. learned how to take it all for granted. a second child, her father’s angel. raised spoiled from the moment she was born. what eunsol wanted, eunsol almost always got. and then more. money, connections, they go a long way. and with her brother set to run the business, eunsol essentially had the world laid open before her. she was free to pluck up whatever desire she had tucked away in that wicked mind of hers. but that was later. when she’d progressed from walking on uneasy toddler-legs, picked her own thoughts up off the floor and ironed them out into outfitted plans.
she was born into wealth, and that’s where she stayed. where she grew. where she learned to foster the opinions of the world around her. where she made her friends and cultivated her morals. or lack thereof.
TO THE PARENTS OF LEE EUNSOL – in one month’s time we will be having our musical showcase, we are expectant and proud of eunsol’s progress! please let us know ahead of time how many tickets you require. attached is an order form.
when eunsol talks about how much she loves music, how she’s always loved music in the middle of variety shows, she isn’t lying. she does. she had. she’d started off on more traditional footing. she’d declared that she wanted to learn an instrument, and so she was placed in rather exclusive lessons for the gayageum when she was fairly young. she took to it well. it was something wanted, not something forced. and, truth be told, when eunsol was praised for being good in something she had a tendency to stick to it. the moment she started to fall behind, couldn’t find a natural inclination toward something is when she’s threaten to quit. though, perhaps, that’s not too out of the ordinary for a child.
this instrument was where her love of music came from. and it’s something she still carries with her. if they shove it in front of her, she can reach out and play a song with trained fingers. has one tucked away in her dorm, as well as her parents’ apartment even now (truth be told, she often spends more time with them than she does at the dorm with the other girls). it was also what eventually pushed that split of interest in eunsol. of becoming preoccupied with modernity, of blending the old with the new. playing modern songs on the instrument and uploading them online was the start of her deciding she liked that taste of foreign attention. liked experimenting with more than just what her parents signed her up for.
DISCIPLINARIAN SLIP: VOIDED – please remove the write-up in lee eunsol’s file. see attached: a letter from yoon and jeon LLC.
there’s a lot you can get away with when you have a renowned lawyer on speed dial. maybe one of the reasons eunsol wasn’t as well prepared for idol life as she thought. it’s easier to ghost your way out of problems you create when there isn’t a magnifying glass pointed at you, at your past. at least most of hers was expunged before anyone had a chance to start digging. her schooling was always private. a hefty price tag attached. children who grew up in similar environments to herself. they liked to play dirty, and so did she. they were terrors, in all honesty. especially middle school, before the idea of assured self-confident seemed like something more real than mythological.
but eunsol learned it usually didn’t matter what she did, as long as she turned on the water works in front of her father. pouted in the right way. complained, wheedled, and outright lied. because if someone likes you, loves you. finds you charming or magnanimous – well, they honest to god want to believe you. it’s like a trick. one she’s kept to herself like a well-worn secret. it doesn’t really matter who it is in the right. all that matters is the personal bias of whoever it is you’re trying to convince. it’s gotten eunsol a lot further in life than algebra.
NEW FOLLOWER(S) ALERT! +529 ACCOUNTS HAVE FOLLOWED YOU TODAY! – this has been an automated email. to unsubscribe, please follow the link below.
there’s an appeal to pretty. to glamour. it’s why people like movies. like watching the adventures of people who look so dazzling march their way across a screen, fall in love. it’s why everyone gets wrapped up in the drama of upper-east siders when it’s pushed in front of them in a palatable, drama-filled past-time. and that’s the exact same reason that people follow the likes of eunsol. of her friends. why they comment on their instagram videos, or check into blog posts. buy up outfits they wore, or try to get into clubs that they visited. and there’s a thrill there. or, there was for eunsol. she liked the attention. there was something obsessive in watching those numbers climb up. she liked being the center of attention. liked people watching her with green-eyed envy. turning people into monsters. she liked regarding it all with a smile behind the lens of her phone’s camera. liked knowing that a cluster of people out there wanted to be like her. wanted to be her entirely. it’s a little exhilarating. and it’s probably what kickstarted eunsol into bridging her interest with music with her interest in getting enough attention that she could start calling herself famous.
WELCOME TO KOALA.T MUSIC EMAIL CCED TO: LEE SANGWOOK, YOON&JEON LLC – please scroll up to see full message … ATTACHMENTS [ updated_contract.pdf ]
with enough wheedling, eunsol eventually managed to get her father to network through a handful of people he knew. until eventually the right names were exchanged, and eventually eunsol was given an opportunity to audition for koala.t. while not necessarily the biggest name company (at least, not at the point when she was auditioning), it worked out in her favor. eunsol had always been a little sly. her father had money, could make donations. donations that a company like midas might not care about, but that one like koala.t might appreciate. that, and there was something eunsol liked about feeling wanted. even for all the wrong reasons. so she liked that they wanted her paltry attempt at pre-written fame. liked that they wanted her money, or her looks, or anything else other than her voice.
not that she would admit it. she was trained after all. she wanted that fame, and her intentions were never white as the driven snow brand of pure. but eunsol had always loved music. had loved singing. enough to major in it at the very highly regarded university she had gotten into based on connections, special admissions, and money. but that was, of course, hush hush.she was accepted into koala.t at twenty. she started training under hopes of being put in their upcoming girl group. shooting into stardom like some hellbent firecracker. of course, that didn’t happen. but she didn’t know that yet.
CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR GRADUATION. – as an alumna of the university, we hope you can provide financial support and guidance to those in the upcoming school year.
eunsol graduated from university a year after joining koala.t. it was part of her father allowing the situation at all – the stipulation that she had to stay in school. and eunsol hadn’t wanted to drop out regardless. so she finished her degree, a double major in vocal and instrumental music, gayageum focused. it took two more years before nightmare finally debuted. and in that time, eunsol did put in some amount of work toward her training. it didn’t hold that same desperate edge as some. after all, she had options to fall back on. this wasn’t her end all be all. it was just the avenue that she’d arbitrarily picked out for herself. so she trained, she spent time with her friends. kept up that same lifestyle that she would be reluctant to leave.
[ FATE PANN ALERT! ] KOALA.T’S TRAINEE IS LEE EUNSOL? – wow, i remember following her on insta way back when…i didn’t know she was becoming an idol? but i saw her teaser picture…is it just me, or are they wasting her visuals on this crazy concept? i guess she was always an attention seeker though, let’s be real ㅋ
and finally, nightmare debuts. it’s met with more critics than fanfare. but it’s something. something that puts her out there. her voice, her face. they’re on the edge, but pushing in enough that there are articles occasionally put out about them. nightmare are fringe enough that she can get away with just a little more. ghosts under the radar. but with each passing comeback they collect another set of eyes that box her in. eunsol switches between loving the attention and hating the lack of freedom. she’s used to getting what she wants. but now there are a whole set of new rules she needs to follow. the whims of boys she’d never give a second chance to that will get angry, chomp down on borrowed masculinity and pitch a fit, refuse to buy albums if she doesn’t present herself in just the right way. and she’d signed up for it. because she’d wanted all those eyes. had even considered the down side. but fiction and reality often don’t match up quite right, do they?
it’s probably for the best that eunsol really had been invested in the music. she probably would’ve broken contract and left a year in if she hadn’t.
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OTO 3: One on one coaching – Personal one on one email coaching from myself for 60 full days. Let me hold your hand and show you and help you getting this all set up
OTO 4: Results With Raj Newsletter – Recurring monthly membership of my private newsletter on exactly what goes on in my business every month. Blueprints on how REAL money is made, case studies and action plans.
Includes The Product :
The step by step P.O.P Formula Revealed (Learn this simple process and be able to generate thousands of subscribers and thousands of dollars in profit simultaneously)
The Phantom commissions method of making $186.89 per day from your list without even selling anything (By far the EASIEST hands free commissions method ever)
The S.A.B Model that can make you an easy $2,000-$5,000 a month (Use the same asset to build a very nice side business which can be easily scaled)
The secret online vault to find the best P.O.P offers available (this is my go to place to uncover the best offers that convert up to 85%)
The exact traffic source I used to build a list of 10,986 in 90 days (These are the BEST traffic sources for FAST RESULTS)
The REAL secret to why some people make $0 from their list and others make $1000s (Learn this secret and always make money when you build a list)
The No1 Mistake people make that shoots themselves in the foot (Avoid this like the plague, your list building is dead if you do this)
The 3 second task that instantly increases optin rates (Spend 3 seconds doing this and watch your conversion rate shoot up as much as 30%)
The proven 3 way formula to guarantee there is money to make in a niche with long term profits (choose the wrong niche and your dead in the water even before you begin, use my proven formula to find your guaranteed money making niche)
The 3 crucial elements of your most important webpage online (this 1 page is where it all begins get this right and you will get hoards of subscribers onto your list)
The ONLY thing you should be giving away on your squeeze page (Give a ______ to your new subscribers and they will love you for it, be wanting to hear more and will ensure you have a responsive list
Why the _________ converts better than anything I have ever tested (use this and you will be ahead of 95% of marketers online)
Include _____ in the first message you ever send to your subscribers to keep them super happy (Miss this and you will have very annoyed, unresponsive people who will unsubscribe faster than ever)
The lifeblood of your list building comes down to 2 types of ______(You got to do one or the other for it to work)
The BIG misconception about Traffic (You just need _____ and not _____ when it comes to traffic)
Why____ traffic gets you some of the most targeted visitors (this is a great traffic source if you know how to use it, use my 3 Indicator RULE to get it right)
Why “the money is in the list” statement is actually wrong (If it was correct I could buy an email list of 1 million email addresses and make millions right? Wrong. Discover where the money really is)
Stop your list becoming unresponsive and drying up by creating a ___________ (This is very important, this will determine if you build a long term sustainable business)
The Balance Rule, stick to this 80/20 principle to guarantee every email you send make you profits (Also makes sure you list is happy, creating good will and stay responsive)
THE POP FORMULA Testimony
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I purchased 30 Minute Commissions and found in the members area the report. I read through the simple report quite quickly and everything is explained very clearly and I did not hesitate to take action on it right away. There was one section that I needed abit of help on and after submitting a support ticket, Raj did come back to me and went above and beyond with a helpful answer to my problem. Quite rare to see someone take care of his customers as much as he did. All in all this is a great simple product and i would recommend anyone trying to make affiliate commissions online to get this. – Angela
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Are you actually making money with the list?
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THE POP FORMULA : FAQ
What is this about? This product is about how you can build a huge list (your number 1 asset) online while making money and commissions at the same time.
Is There A Guarantee? Yes, there is a 30 day money back guarantee. Just email us and you’ll receive a courteous and timely refund, no questions asked and you can keep the downloaded materials too.
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Are there any OTOs or Upsells after I order? Yes, there are some upgrade packages that we are offering. These are of course optional purchases – but we wanted to make them available to you so you can fast track your success.
When can I expect to see results? Like everything in life, you have to take action to get results. So the sooner you get in, take action the sooner you get results.
How can the P.O.P Formula benefit me? You are getting access to a proven simple blueprint that will allow you to build a huge list while making money at the same time. You will be building your number 1 asset online, the most important thing which will allow you to literally print money on demand just by sending emails to your list.
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POLITICO Playbook: TAX DEBATE scheduled to resume at 11 a.m.
Good Friday morning and welcome to December. THE SENATE IS SCHEDULED TO RESUME WORK ON THE TAX BILL this morning. Late yesterday, the process hit a snag.
SEUNG MIN KIM and COLIN WILHELM: “Multiple GOP senators leaving the chamber after a dramatic late afternoon vote said a key proposal for deficit hawks — a trigger to raise tax rates if sufficient economic growth did not materialize — would not pass procedural muster and would need to find something else to satisfy the bloc of deficit hawk holdouts, led by Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.).
Story Continued Below
“‘It doesn’t look like the trigger is going to work, according to the parliamentarian,’ Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said. ‘So we have an alternative, frankly: a tax increase we don’t want to do to try to address Sen. Corker’s concerns.’” http://politi.co/2iqAOpU
–– WAPO’S ERICA WERNER, MIKE DEBONIS and DAMIAN PALETTA: “Now, Republican leaders may have to brace for an intraparty battle over how far to go to accommodate deficit concerns. Other Republicans are arguing strongly against reducing the size of the bill’s tax cut, as may now be necessary to satisfy the deficit hawks. …
“Thursday evening, senators were eyeing a wide range of options to move legislation forward. They are discussing adding higher taxes on upper-income Americans and modestly rolling back the bill’s large corporate tax cut. But they did not have an obvious solution, given the need to add hundreds of billions of revenue back into the bill. …
“The debate is now expected to spill into Friday night. Corker and Flake are both retiring from the Senate and are not up for reelection, giving Republican leaders little leverage over them. And Johnson has pushed his challenge of GOP leaders, some of whom he believes abandoned him during his reelection effort last year.” http://wapo.st/2AKXE2N
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— WSJ’S RICH RUBIN, SIOBHAN HUGHES and KRISTINA PETERSON: “One possible outcome is that the corporate tax rate would start at 20% and rise in stair-step increments in later years. That move could shrink the size of the tax cut by at least $350 billion over a decade, making it about three-quarters of its previous size and potentially dampening some of the economic growth Republicans said they are trying to create.
“White House congressional liaison Marc Short, who was dashing between Republican leadership offices, said that Republicans were still on track and the legislation’s goals would remain the same. Referring to the possible change on corporate taxes, Mr. Short said, ‘Even if that happens, it provides record tax relief for the corporate side, and middle-income families.’” http://on.wsj.com/2Aii3v4
ALL EYES will be on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who still must convince the skeptical deficit hawks to vote for the bill. WHO TO WATCH — THE USUAL SUSPECTS: Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).
UNDER THE RADAR — “Tax bill could trigger historic spending cuts,” by Adam Cancryn and Sarah Ferris: “Republicans are on the verge of a massive tax overhaul that would hand President Donald Trump his first major legislative victory. But the $1.5 trillion tax package could trigger eye-popping cuts to a slew of federal programs, including Medicare. Unless Congress acts swiftly to stop it, as much as $150 billion per year would be cut from initiatives ranging from farm subsidies to student loans to support services for crime victims. Medicare alone could see cuts of $25 billion a year. And the specter of those cuts has thrust Congress into a high-stakes game of political chicken.
“With so much attention focused on the tax bill itself neither lawmakers nor many of the advocacy groups had paid as much attention to the depth and breadth of the cuts that will ensue unless the House and Senate come up with a bipartisan deal to stop them. Some groups had run Medicare ads, but they were largely overshadowed by the tax debate itself.” http://politi.co/2BvVzVz
A REMINDER of what’s on Washington’s radar this month: renewing a massive children’s health program, government funding, a rewrite of the country’s tax code, restoring subsidies for the health care law, working on a fix so hundreds of thousands of undocumented people do not get deported and a deal to lift spending caps.
ONE WEEK until the government runs out of money.
SHUTDOWN WATCH — “Trump tells confidants that a government shutdown might be good for him,” by WaPo’s Josh Dawsey, Sean Sullivan and Ed O’Keefe: “President Trump has told confidants that a government shutdown could be good for him politically and is focusing on his hard-line immigration stance as a way to win back supporters unhappy with his outreach to Democrats this fall, according to people who have spoken with him recently. Over the past 10 days, the president has also told advisers that it is important that he is seen as tough on immigration and getting money for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, according to two people who have spoken with him. He has asked friends about how a shutdown would affect him politically and has told several people he would put the blame on Democrats.” http://wapo.st/2j4xsFY
— YOU WON’T FIND many Republicans on Capitol Hill who think that a shutdown is good for them.
THE NEW BOSS AT LANGLEY? — “Cotton cements his rise under Trump: The Arkansas senator, under consideration as a potential successor to Mike Pompeo as CIA director, has chosen to shape the president rather than railing against him,” by Eliana Johnson and Ali Watkins: “Cotton’s appointment would cement his meteoric rise in Republican politics, the result of qualities that have taken him, in a matter of years, from freshman congressman to the youngest serving U.S. senator to, potentially, the youngest CIA director in American history: loyalty, brains and raw ambition.
“He also embodies one of the GOP’s responses to Trump. Having already shared some of the president’s populist leanings, he has worked to co-opt and shape the president rather than rail against him. An ideological conservative from the American heartland, Cotton came up through the Ivy League and was groomed by some of the country’s leading conservative thinkers, from the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol, one of Trump’s leading critics, to the acolytes of Leo Strauss at the Claremont Institute who have been far more supportive of the president.” http://politi.co/2zUjn8F
— “White House wanted to publicly shame Tillerson, source says,” by CNN’s Michelle Kosinski and Sara Murray: “Reports that the White House has a tentative plan to replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that emerged Thursday were an effort to express President Donald Trump’s deep displeasure and publicly shame his secretary of state, a source with direct knowledge of the White House’s thinking said Thursday. The hope from the White House, the source said, is to push out the plan to replace Tillerson and then ‘wait for him to punch out.’” http://cnn.it/2AK0WDn
— “We’ll take Pompeo over Tillerson, frustrated diplomats say: Even skeptics of the hawkish CIA director say they would welcome a change — and a solid Trump ally — at the helm of their beleaguered department,” by Nahal Toosi: http://politi.co/2jzwIYM
— NYT’S MARK LANDLER: “Replacing Tillerson With Pompeo Would Supplant a Moderate With a Hawk”: “For all his political and bureaucratic stumbles, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson has been a steady voice of moderation in how the Trump administration engages with the world.
“That voice will be lost if, as expected, President Trump replaces Mr. Tillerson at the State Department with Mike Pompeo, a hard-line former Republican congressman who has brought an avowedly political edge to the Central Intelligence Agency, where he is the director. Mr. Pompeo, a West Point graduate best known for savaging Hillary Clinton’s response to the deadly attack in Benghazi, Libya, when she was secretary of state, has called for the Iran nuclear agreement to be ripped up, played down talk of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and suggested that regime change in North Korea would be a welcome development.
“Those views have put him in good stead with Mr. Trump, whom White House aides said has come to value Mr. Pompeo’s pungent opinions and hard-charging style during his presidential daily briefings. Mr. Trump, by contrast, has publicly undermined Mr. Tillerson while the secretary of state has responded with thinly veiled contempt.” http://nyti.ms/2jzZatP
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TRUMP’S FRIDAY — Trump is meeting with Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj of Libya. He will have lunch with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis. This afternoon, he will give a speech at a White House Christmas reception.
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE — “Kate Steinle trial: Garcia Zarate acquitted in San Francisco pier killing,” by Vivian Ho: “A jury handed a stunning acquittal on murder and manslaughter charges to a homeless undocumented immigrant whose arrest in the killing of Kate Steinle on a San Francisco Bay pier intensified a national debate over sanctuary laws. … [T]he Superior Court jury … [found] credence in defense attorneys’ argument that the shot that ricocheted off the concrete ground before piercing Steinle’s heart was an accident, with the gun discharging after the defendant stumbled upon it on the waterfront on July 1, 2015.
“Garcia Zarate, a 45-year-old Mexican citizen who was released from County Jail before the killing despite a federal request that he be held for his sixth deportation, was convicted of a single lesser charge of being a felon in possession of a gun. He faces a sentence of 16 months, two years or three years in state prison. … U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions blamed the killing on San Francisco’s policy of refusing cooperation with immigration agents. Jim Steinle, who had been strolling on the pier with his daughter when she fell, told The Chronicle he was ‘saddened and shocked,’ adding, ‘Justice was rendered, but it was not served.’” http://bit.ly/2BATsQt
–@realDonaldTrump at 10:30 p.m.: “A disgraceful verdict in the Kate Steinle case! No wonder the people of our Country are so angry with Illegal Immigration.” … at 6:03 a.m.: “The Kate Steinle killer came back and back over the weakly protected Obama border, always committing crimes and being violent, and yet this info was not used in court. His exoneration is a complete travesty of justice. BUILD THE WALL!” … at 6:13 a.m.: “The jury was not told the killer of Kate was a 7 time felon. The Schumer/Pelosi Democrats are so weak on Crime that they will pay a big price in the 2018 and 2020 Elections.”
THE RUSSIA REPORT — “Trump Pressed Top Republicans to End Senate Russia Inquiry,” by NYT’s Jonathan Martin, Maggie Haberman and Alex Burns: “President Trump over the summer repeatedly urged senior Senate Republicans, including the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to end the panel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, according to a half dozen lawmakers and aides. Mr. Trump’s requests were a highly unusual intervention from a president into a legislative inquiry involving his family and close aides.
“Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the intelligence committee chairman, said in an interview this week that Mr. Trump told him that he was eager to see an investigation that has overshadowed much of the first year of his presidency come to an end.
“‘It was something along the lines of, ‘I hope you can conclude this as quickly as possible,’’ Mr. Burr said. He said he replied to Mr. Trump that ‘when we have exhausted everybody we need to talk to, we will finish.’ In addition, according to lawmakers and aides, Mr. Trump told Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, and Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri and a member of the intelligence committee, to end the investigation swiftly.” http://nyti.ms/2jz8vSF
— “Manafort strikes $11 million bail deal with prosecutors,” by Josh Gerstein and Darren Samuelsohn: “Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has reached an $11 million bail agreement with prosecutors that could clear the way for him to be released from the house arrest he’s been under for the past four weeks. In court filings released Thursday afternoon, Manafort’s defense attorneys revealed ‘an agreed-upon bail package’ with lawyers from special counsel Robert Mueller’s office, which obtained an indictment last month charging Manafort and business partner Rick Gates with money laundering and failing to register as foreign agents.” http://politi.co/2zTwwik
— “Russian trolls pushed graphic, racist tweets to American voters,” by NBC News’ Ben Popken: “A zealous band of Russian trolls flooded Twitter with hundreds of thousands of divisive posts in 2016 — accusing Democrats of satanic practices and supporting rape — in an attempt to influence the presidential election, according to a new analysis of a Twitter database by NBC News. The effort tricked thousands of users into spreading graphic racial epithets across social media, interweaving provocative content with disinformation and falsehoods. The tweets were uncovered in a database of over 202,000 deleted Russian troll tweets that NBC News compiled.” http://nbcnews.to/2AlUakw
— “Erik Prince details Seychelles meeting with Russian banker,” by CNN’s Manu Raju, Jeremy Herb and Marshall Cohen: “Blackwater founder Erik Prince testified to House lawmakers that he met the head of a Russian investment fund earlier this year — but he insisted it was not part of an effort to set up a Russian backchannel with the Trump administration, multiple sources told CNN. In private testimony Thursday, Prince informed the House Intelligence Committee that he met in the Seychelles with Kirill Dmitriev, who is the chief executive of the state-run Russian Direct Investment Fund, at the request of the United Arab Emirates to discuss business opportunities.
“The meeting on the island in the Indian Ocean, he said, lasted roughly 20 minutes after dinner over a beer. Prince insisted he did not have the meeting at the request of the Trump administration, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the situation. … But Prince downplayed his ties to the Trump’s team, merely saying he was a Trump donor and had met the President on only one occasion, the sources said.” http://cnn.it/2ApsLxV
— “Trump Associate Felix Sater Selling His $2.5M Long Island Manse,” by Realtor.com’s Becky Bracken: “Called one of the ‘most colorful characters’ in the ongoing Justice Department investigation into ties between President Donald Trump and Russia, real estate developer Felix Sater is now selling his home in Sands Point, NY, for just under $2.5 million. The four-bedroom, 3.5-bath, 3,600-square-foot home is surrounded by lush foliage, and walls of arborvitaes offer privacy for lounging by the pool. It’s a pristine Long Island property on nearly 2 acres that any family would love to call home.” With four pics http://bit.ly/2AoLZDX
SCOOP — “The Trump Administration Is Mulling A Pitch For A Private ‘Rendition’ And Spy Network,” by BuzzFeed’s Aram Roston: “The White House and CIA have been considering a package of secret proposals to allow former U.S. intelligence officers to run privatized covert actions, intelligence gathering, and propaganda missions, according to three sources who’ve been briefed on or have direct knowledge of the proposals. One of the proposals would involve hiring a private company, Amyntor Group, for millions of dollars to set up a large intelligence network and run counterterrorist propaganda efforts, according to the sources.
“Amyntor’s officials and employees include veterans of a variety of U.S. covert operations, ranging from the Reagan-era Iran–Contra affair to more recent actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. … Another proposal presented to U.S. officials would allow individuals affiliated with the company to help capture wanted terrorists on behalf of the United States. In keeping with that proposal, people close to the company are tracking two specific suspects in a Middle Eastern country, the sources said, for possible ‘rendition’ to the United States.” http://bzfd.it/2nkUfBR
WHAT RON DERMER IS READING — “Trump inches toward moving U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem: The president promised during the campaign to support the move from Tel Aviv, but delayed it in June amid efforts to revive the Middle East peace process,” by Andrew Restuccia and Eliana Johnson: “President Donald Trump and his senior aides are mulling a plan to eventually move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a decision that could derail Trump’s attempts to restart peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
“A leading option under consideration: temporarily keeping the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv while also outlining a longer-term strategy to begin the process of moving the embassy to Jerusalem, according to two administration officials. The plan is meant to strike a middle ground on the politically treacherous issue. One of the officials also said the administration is weighing whether to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.” http://politi.co/2zSjVeY
FIRST IN PLAYBOOK – WHAT JARED SAID LAST NIGHT — JARED KUSHNER spoke at a dinner hosted by Egyptian Ambassador Yasser Reda and Nahla Reda in the Kennedy Caucus Room in the Senate to commemorate the 40th anniversary of former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem. “Forty years ago, President Anwar Sadat stood before the Knesset in Jerusalem, where his very presence, less than five years after the 1973 War, was something of a miracle. … President Sadat demonstrated the courage that all great leaders need and too few possess. He took a risk for peace and earned a Nobel Prize for taking that risk. He also paid for that risk with his life. But the peace endures today, and the region is more stable and the opportunities for progress more plentiful as a result. Anwar Sadat understood that a country needed more than military strength to be great.
“His decision to chart Egypt on a course of peace and co-existence was an act of moral courage. … President Sadat’s dream — a peaceful, thriving Egypt — is a model for the world, but we should be under no illusions about the task facing us all as we continue to make that dream of peace and prosperity a reality. … It is an honor to be here tonight, with the Former First Lady Jehan Sadat and Ambassador Yasser Reda as we stand together with America’s close friend and partner in fighting terror. It is also great to have Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer here this evening … Tonight we remember a great man. His mission endures.”
SPOTTED: Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), Reps. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), Ed Royce (R-Calif.), and Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Sergio Gor, Andy Westberry, Ezra Friedlander, Jacob Olidort.
COMING ATTRACTIONS — “House GOP leaders preparing to bring gun measures to the floor,” by Kyle Cheney and John Bresnahan: “House Republican leaders are preparing to move ahead with a package of gun legislation that would sharply expand concealed-carry rights but also address policies that came into play during two recent mass shootings. The proposal is expected to come to the floor as soon as next week. GOP leaders conducted a full whip count of the plan Thursday and sensed enough support from colleagues to bring up the measure, a combination of three proposals that would include a major policy win for gun rights advocates but also seek to placate those clamoring for policy changes following two of the worst shooting massacres in American history — in Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs, Texas.” http://politi.co/2kbVVwt
PIC DU JOUR — @SteveRudinABC7: “The National Tree Lighting ceremony was beautiful this evening – but hard not to notice the empty seats. #Christmas #DMV #USA” http://bit.ly/2kdXIkI
YOU’RE INVITED — Our first live podcast taping next Thursday night (Dec. 7) at 7 p.m. at Sixth and I. Our inaugural guests: MICHAEL BARBARO, host of the New York Times’ hit podcast “The Daily,” DCCC EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR DAN SENA and NRCC EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR JOHN ROGERS. And a panel of POLITICO stars: RACHAEL BADE, SEUNG MIN KIM and ANNIE KARNI. Get your tickets now! http://bit.ly/2hWK7tF
PHOTO DU JOUR: The National Christmas Tree is lit at the White House Ellipse on Nov. 30. | Astrid Riecken/Getty Images
JOHN MCENTEE PROFILE — “The Trick-Shot QB Who Played His Way Into Trump’s Inner Circle,” by Nancy Cook and Ben Strauss: “At age 27, John McEntee, a former University of Connecticut quarterback and star of a viral YouTube trick-throw video, former low-level Fox News staffer and campaign official, now makes $115,000 a year as Trump’s personal aide and body man. How he rose to this level of prominence is in some respects the quintessential tale of success within Trump’s organization, where loyalty and looks often matter more than résumé. Athletically handsome and a sharp dresser—one former campaign official called him ‘so pretty’—McEntee arrived at Trump’s doorstep in August 2015 with no more qualifications than his determination to make the boss happy.
“[H]e has a conspicuously low profile — McEntee’s a ‘lock box,’ in the words of his father and one White House aide, who won’t even dish to his own family. ‘He literally loves the president. Not even to me, he would never say anything negative, not in a million years,’ his father, John, says. ‘He loves the president and that family. Jared and Ivanka, too.’” http://politi.co/2noAsBR
ALABAMA LATEST — “Bannon-backed group makes six-figure ad buy in last-minute push for Moore,” by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “With less than two weeks to go in a volatile special election that has been rocked by allegations of sexual assault against the Republican front-runner, the group, Great America Alliance, is purchasing $150,000 worth of television, radio and digital ads to hit Moore’s Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, for his positions on issues like abortion. … One of the commercials that Great America Alliance will run, which the group initially released online, calls Jones’ views on abortion ‘deceptive and dangerous.’” http://cnn.it/2jzN1F6 … The ad http://bit.ly/2BCoxDw
SEXUAL HARASSMENT FILES — “Conyers vs. Franken: Black lawmakers suggest double standard,” by Heather Caygle: “Black lawmakers are hearing growing calls for Rep. John Conyers to resign and wondering why Sen. Al Franken isn’t getting the same treatment. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus have been privately airing concerns about a double standard within Democrats’ ranks since sexual harassment allegations against Conyers, the longest serving House member and a founder of the CBC, first surfaced last week. Their concerns were thrust into the open Thursday when Conyers’ lawyer hinted that Conyers was being treated differently than Franken because of race.” http://politi.co/2AJ9udK
— “Congress secretly paid nearly $100,000 to settle harassment claims against disgraced congressman,” by ABC News’ Justin Fishel: “The Congressional Office of Compliance secretly paid close to $100,000 in taxpayer funds to settle sexual harassment claims from at least two young male staffers who worked for disgraced former Congressman Eric Massa, multiple sources with direct knowledge of the matter told ABC News. The claims were settled after Massa, a Democrat from upstate New York, resigned in 2010 amid a pending ethics investigation into allegations he groped and sexually harassed members of his staff.” http://abcn.ws/2j3MZWu
— ELANA SCHOR and HEATHER CAYGLE: “Lawmakers have carte blanche to cut secret harassment settlements” http://politi.co/2jAKiv2
****** A message from PhRMA: According to new analysis from the Moran Company, hospitals mark up medicine prices, on average, nearly 500 percent. The analysis of 20 medicines also found a hospital is paid 2.5 times what the biopharmaceutical company, who brought the medicine to market, receives. While hospital markups lead to higher costs for patients, employers and payers, these markups are often overlooked in conversations about medicine costs. As the provider market continues to become more concentrated and the number of medicines being administered in hospital-owned facilities is growing, the amount hospitals mark up medicine prices needs greater scrutiny. http://onphr.ma/2Ba0TOa ******
DRIP, DRIP, DRIP — “Matt Lauer’s lawyers trying to get him $30M payout after firing,” by N.Y. Post’s Emily Smith: “Sources close to the disgraced newsman say his team is working on a plan to get him paid through the remainder of his $20 million a year contract – which still has a year and a half to run. A source close to Lauer’s team said, ‘They are currently looking at his contract and determining whether the claims against him, which clearly would affect any moral clause in his contract and his ensuing termination would cut off his contractual rights to be paid through to the end of his contract.’ … [M]oral clauses are often included in TV contracts and specify that talent could be fired without pay if they bring the company into any disrepute.” http://pge.sx/2jBawgX
— “Vice fires three employees amid investigations into sexual harassment,” by CNN’s Brian Stelter: “Vice Media fired three employees on Thursday amid a probe into sexual harassment and improper workplace conduct, according to a memo obtained by CNNMoney. Vice did not name the employees. But the company said ‘the conduct of these employees ranged from verbal and sexual harassment to other behavior that is inconsistent with our policies, our values, and the way in which we believe colleagues should work together.’” http://cnnmon.ie/2j5MRG1
— BOSTON GLOBE: “Four men allege sexual misconduct by Senate president’s husband,” by Yvonne Abraham. http://bit.ly/2i8HHZ6
— “It’s Not Just the Matt Lauers and the Mark Halperins: The media’s testosterone-fueled culture is driving talented and dedicated women out of journalism. I should know—TV news’ sexist culture drove me away,” by Shannon Van Sant in POLITICO Magazine: http://politi.co/2AKNIqi
MEDIAWATCH — “White House extends special holiday-party welcome to behind-the-scenes CNN staffers,” by WaPo’s Erik Wemple: “CNN journalists, buffeted by brutal news cycles, are as festive as any other media types around this time of year. Yet the network decided that it wouldn’t be spreading the joy at this year’s White House Christmas party. … The White House, however, is showing some disdain for top-down holiday-party invitation rejections. According to a CNN source, White House deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters on Thursday afternoon sent the following appeal to a dozen-plus CNN staffers who work behind the scenes to produce the network’s coverage of news at the White House:
“‘Good Afternoon, The President wanted you to know that while the rest of CNN will not be attending the Christmas reception, if you’re able to he is still happy to have you – the cameramen, sound, and other technicians, who work so tirelessly behind the scenes – to come participate. You and your guest will be on the list at the entrance. Please note this invitation is nontransferable. Best, Lindsay.’” http://wapo.st/2BAIvyl
SPOTTED: Rick Perry in the Air France lounge yesterday at Dulles, sitting at the bar on the first class side. Jane Harman was separately in the lounge. Pic http://bit.ly/2jCgSwD … Donald Trump Jr. and his wife and kids leaving BLT Prime at the Trump Hotel. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) and Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.) were also in the lobby of the hotel last night. … actor Dean Cain, “Superman,” in the lobby bar of the Madison hotel yesterday. He and Kathie Lee Gifford later hosted the White House’s National Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony … Rep. Jim Renacci (R-Ohio) yesterday flying from DCA to Columbus on American Airlines.
SPOTTED at a pre-holiday party for the Senate Press Secretaries Association hosted by Playbook, Edelman and the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America: Doug Andres, Rob Rehg, Luke Bolar, Becca Steele, Julia Krieger, Alex Moe, Sarah Swinehart, Katie Waldman, David Lawder, Emily Teitelbaum, Peter Segall, Taylor Holgate, Patrick Temple-West, Ian Kullgren, Lynne Williams, Jillian Rogers, Alicia Amling, John Shinkle, Amy Harder, Steve Rebelliot, Todd Deutsch, Will Mauldin, Walter Suskind, Bennett Richardson, Sean Neary, Luke Bolar, Peter Cook, Alexa Papadopoulos, Katie Waldman, Jessica Brady, Olivia Beavers, Julia Manchester and Nihal Krishan.
SPOTTED at Hank’s on the Hill last night at a Blue Dogs party: Reps. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.), David Scott (D-Ga.), Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.), Jim Costa (D-Calif.), Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), Brad Schneider (D-Ill.), Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), Vicente Gonzalez (D-Ga.), Tom O’Halleran (D-Ariz.), Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) and Charlie Crist (D-Fla.).
FIRST IN PLAYBOOK –– AMY CHOZICK, who has been on book leave since February, will return to the New York Times today as a writer-at-large, doing features on business, politics, media and culture. Her memoir about covering both of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns is set to get published in the spring.
SUNDAY SO FAR –– CBS’ “Face the Nation”: Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Angus King (I-Maine) … OMB Director Mick Mulvaney. Political panel: Ron Brownstein, Ezra Klein, Julie Pace and Ramesh Ponnuru
— “Fox News Sunday”: Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster … Panel: Ret. Gen. Jack Keane, Michele Flournoy … Panel: Karl Rove, Jennifer Griffin, Jason Chaffetz, Juan Williams … Power Player: George Shultz
— ABC’s “This Week”: Panel: Jen Psaki, Megan Murphy, Charles Blow, Alex Castellanos, Chris Ruddy
— NBC’s “Meet the Press”: Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie. Panel: Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Doris Kearns Goodwin, Mike Murphy and Danielle Pletka
— CNN’s “State of the Union”: Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.)
— CNN’s “Inside Politics,” hosted by John King: Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Julie Pace, Sahil Kapur, Michael Warren
BIRTHDAY OF THE DAY: Karen Tumulty, WaPo national political correspondent. A fun fact about Karen: “When I was 16, I was crowned queen of the Alamo Trail Ride. Rhinestone tiara, satin sash, purple suede chaps, the whole outfit. (I’ve got pictures, if you don’t believe me.)” Read her Playbook Plus Q&A: http://politi.co/2Aguyr7
BIRTHDAYS: Natalie Wyeth Earnest, celebrating with dinner at Iron Gate and a “babysitter for the kids” (hubby tip: Josh) … Jason Maloni of JadeRoq, celebrating by attending a fundraiser at his kids’ pre-school … Jen Psaki, VP at the Carnegie Endowment and a CNN contributor … Florida Gov. Rick Scott is 65 … POLITICO Magazine’s Elizabeth Ralph … Politico’s Jacqueline Klimas and James Senkbeil … former CIA director Stansfield Turner is 94 … Joel Miller … Charlie Anderson, senior adviser for Sen. Michael Bennett … Kyle Lierman, founder and CEO of Civic Advisors … Wayne Ting … Raul Alvillar … Susan Stilts Collins … Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) is 59 … Jared Scott Small … Tim Purdon … Ani Toumajan, LA for Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) … Shin Inouye, director of communications and media relations at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights … Marylouise Oates, former journalist, novelist and wife of Bob Shrum (h/t Tammy Haddad) … Safra A. Catz, CEO of Oracle, is 56 …
… Natalie Ravitz, SVP of comms for the NFL … Josh Kraushaar, politics editor at National Journal, is 36 … Sean Higgins, press secretary for Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (h/t Mitchell Rivard) … Marty Chase is 77 … Bush WH alum Jenny Lynn Buntin … Bruce Kieloch is 52 … NPR’s Carrie Johnson … Yochi Dreazen, foreign editor at Vox … JS Kim of Credit Suisse … Berry Kurland … Jordan Lieberman of Audience Partners … Mona Salama … Brett Lieberman … Jeri Henson Dies … Reggie Smith … Ryan Bell … Hayley D’Antuono … Terri New, founder and president of Capital Strategies, a political and philanthropic fundraising firm based in LA (h/t Jordan Markwith) … Ed Fox … Bill Manger … Bruce Young … Charlie Anderson … Becky Weissman … Stephanie Yousef … Jake Kuitwaard … David Seldin, partner at Brunswick Group … Randy Bauer … Dan McGuire … Donnie Fowler … Jamie Domini (h/ts Teresa Vilmain)
****** A message from PhRMA: According to new analysis from the Moran Company, hospitals mark up medicine prices, on average, nearly 500 percent. The analysis of 20 medicines also found a hospital is paid 2.5 times what the biopharmaceutical company, who brought the medicine to market, receives. While hospital markups lead to higher costs for patients, employers and payers, these markups are often overlooked in conversations about medicine costs. As the provider market continues to become more concentrated and the number of medicines being administered in hospital-owned facilities is growing, the amount hospitals mark up medicine prices needs greater scrutiny. http://onphr.ma/2Ba0TOa ******
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