The incredible brand awareness and bottom-line profits achievable through social media marketing require hustle, heart, sincerity, constant engagement, long-term commitment, and most of all, artful and strategic storytelling.
True success – financial, personal, and professional – lies above all in loving your family, working hard, and living your passion. In telling your story. In authenticity, hustle, and patience. In caring fiercely about the big and the small stuff. In valuing legacy over currency.
Social marketing is now a 24-7 job.
No matter who you are or what kind of company or organization you work for, your number-one job is to tell your story to the consumer wherever they are, and preferably at the moment they are deciding to make a purchase.
Social media is like crack-immediately gratifying and hugely addictive.
While companies were getting comfy cozy with the idea of being on social media platforms, social media transcended those platforms, and few businesses have followed.
The problem is, we’re all using social networks as distribution instead of native platforms to actually tell stories.
You can’t put out projects that you don’t use yourself.
Someone with less passion and talent and poorer content can totally beat you if they’re willing to work longer and harder than you are. Hustle is it.
Great marketing is all about telling your story in such a way that it compels people to buy what you are selling.
It took thirty-eight years before 50 million people gained access to radios. It took television thirteen years to earn an audience that size. It took Instagram a year and a half.
There is no sale without the story; no knockout without the setup.
Today, getting people to hear your story on social media, and then act on it, requires using a platform’s native language, paying attention to context, understanding the nuances and subtle differences that make each platform unique, and adapting your content to match.
One out of every five page views in the United States is on Facebook!
Your story needs to move people’s spirits and build their goodwill, so that when you finally do ask them to buy from you, they feel like you’ve given them so much it would be almost rude to refuse.
I think of customer service as an offense and not a defense.
Do what makes you happy. Keep it simple. Do the research. Work hard. Look ahead.
Use every customer point of contact to weave stories about who you are and what your brand stands for.
The skill sets it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, a successful marketer, or a relevant celebrity is a different skill set than you needed ten years ago, even though that was the skill set that mattered for decades.
You cannot underestimate the sharpness of people’s BS radar. They can spot a soulless, bureaucratic tactic a million miles away.