Marketing is best dissected into two easily digestible states, as the dichotomy of these states, static marketing and active marketing, form the clearest view of the failures many marketers make. Some of these mistakes may seem minor, but at scale, they make for tectonic marketing failure, as I will discuss in more detail in this post.
Static Marketing
Static marketing is all marketing that occurs without effort, and as such, requires only a sunk cost to occur thereforth – until forever, or the collapse of externally hosted marketing tools, whichever comes first. Active marketing is any marketing effort that requires continual manpower or assets to maintain. Examples of this are the creation of content, advertising, PPC, SEO, etc. All of these require constant inputs to return a near-infinite output, even if minor.
The reason static marketing is so important is because it acts as a force multiplier of future active marketing efforts. The size of each multiplier varies depending on the implementation, size and subsequent effectiveness of the static marketing effort, but, undoubtedly, all of these static efforts, when implemented, multiply the likelihood of your active marketing campaigns’ effectiveness. This can be as small as a 1.0002 improvement on your efficiency, but the beauty of static marketing is that the sunk costs of these implementations are minor, and for many things – like personal brand – which will exist in perpetuity, a 1.0002x multiplier is something that, at scale, can create a large, large impact. And for those things with more impactful residuals on your marketing efforts – such as a Tweetmeme or Facebook Like button at the end of blog posts – the impact of effectively, comprehensively implemented static marketing efforts might just make the difference between you listing “social media guru” in your Twitter profile and you being Chris Brogan.
An Internet Phenomenon
Static Marketing is a relatively new phenomenon, as its impact was relatively unfelt until scalability, and the internet, came into effect. In the infancy of the internet and previous to the current period where data is stored concretely in the cloud, the best “static marketing” a company could do was plop a prominent logo on the side of a New York skyscraper. Few other efforts were possible that match the description of static marketing I describe – an initial sunk cost that creates an eternal, residual impact on our marketing efforts – without any measurable future cost. This is because static marketing often takes on the form of a tattoo on our arm, the only reoccurring, near-eternal brand impression we could once make without constant maintenance or reoccurring costs.
The internet has now allowed us many tattoos, and without the social taboos or limited skin space we once had to implement them.
Naming Conventions
Now that we can properly discern the differences between static and non-static marketing efforts, we can begin to shore up the areas where we are bleeding potential marketing force multipliers every time we create a piece of content, spend a dollar on PPC, make a conversion, or send an e-mail. The first potential implementation of effective static marketing occurs with your naming conventions on social accounts. If you have a brand or personal account, you must create profiles with your full name. I am @RossHudgens on Twitter. My e-mail is my full name. My account on SEOMoz is RossHudgens. Every time I send an e-mail, make a comment or send a tweet, I am creating personal brand impressions on whoever sees my content. If my Twitter name was LinkBuilder22, I would be doing the converse, creating content and potentially building community, but also losing brand identity and reducing the likelihood that an external source could identify with my full name in the future, or recall it at whim.And I don’t mean rosshudgens, either. I mean RossHudgens. The mind will very often sparse the natural end and beginning of the first and last name, but if you choose to leave your name uncapitalized, you make discerning it more difficult. As it comes to grabbing mindshare from influencers, it’s important that you can have as many differentiable qualities as possible, and make that blip in their stream as memorable as it can be.
I understand that creating these identities is not always possible for all people – there are many Robert Smiths who are not so lucky as to be the original owner of many of their social accounts. Also, some brands can grab a domain name but do not have the potential to seize accounts on Twitter, Facebook or whatever else is equally impactful in their future. For these people, dramatic change may be necessary, or large branding damage may have already been done. As it comes to branding and naming conventions in general, I offer the following suggestions:
- Evaluate Twitter accounts with near-equal importance as domain name in the initial stages of brand formulation. In the startup implementation stage, many founders will brood around GoDaddy or some other hosting service and plug in domain names, hoping that the perfect brand is available. However, not as many consider Twitter or other social accounts when evaluating the availability of a brand name – and they shouldn’t put it past the process. I have found myself irritated on multiple occasions that the beautiful flight search service Hipmunk.com uses @TheHipmunk as their Twitter account, because Hipmunk had already been used – and this is only one example. Services like KnowEm provide the ability to register brand names across several accounts, and should be a stage A research source for websites with social needs.
- Use a consistent iteration of your name. Rand is constantly known as Randfish. This is his social account everywhere. He is known thusly – and the consistency makes it OK. I do not recommend this, and I would recommend that Rand, if he could go back in time, might seriously consider taking all RandFishkin accounts as opposed to Randfish. Although it doesn’t have the same ring to it as RandFish, there has been some continuous, even if minor, confusion and lack of name retainment that occurs when he brands himself constantly at conferences, blog posts and etc as Rand Fishkin – and on social accounts as randfish. Rand’s name might be the perfect storm as it comes to personal branding, as it’s close enough to his actual name and also has a ring to it, so the branding push might make it negligible or a only a near loss – but that it’s even worth considering shows why having your full name in almost every other instance is the best way to go.
- Use a stage name. This is something that people with aims to make impressions in social media, blogs and SEO should begin taking very seriously. More and more people are becoming aware of the power of personal branding and also, the SERPs are becoming more mature by the day, making grabbing your first and last name – and ranking for it – more and more difficult. There’s a reason Hollywood stars often use stage names, and it’s not just because Robert Smith is a boring iteration – it’s for marketing. Treat your real name no different from what you’d treat a business name – short, unique, & memorable. When “personal brand” became a part of the standard internet lexicon, it became inevitable that we would one day have to start treating the “personal” part with the same characteristics that we have forever given the “brand” part. If you choose to push forward with the name “Robert Smith” in an SEO-heavy landscape, you risk undertaking a similar challenge that a liquor store, named “Liquor”, has in becoming a nationally recognized company.
- Create a URL Shortener. Probably the least taken advantage of static marketing technique you will see in this post, URL shorteners have lasting brand effects that can be impactful as it comes to company or personal brand recollection. Given the multitude of TLDs now available, you can create a brand name semantically close to your personal or business brand name than ever before, and the cost of implementation is relatively small. If you’re an enterprise size content machine such as the New York Times, you need a root domain redirect that will auto-create a shortened URL every time your content is pasted in Twitter. But that costs $995/month on Bit.ly – if you’re most of the world, you can at least get your own shortener that you’ll use personally – the price, after the sunk costs (and yearly hosting), is almost nothing.
Aesthetic Impression
There are two pieces of static marketing that apply to brand – reoccurring language characters (naming conventions), and right nearby, overall aesthetic impression. Naming conventions are actually a piece of overall aesthetic impression, as your domain name has visual characteristics beyond its linguistic representation – but the impact is minor relative to the other aesthetic impacts “brand” has, especially as it comes to static marketing and its implementation.
Persona – This is your avatar, which should be cross-referenced across all social networks. Avatars should have a few qualities that are very important to maximize the “force multiplier” aesthetic recognition will allow. For personal brands, it must be a picture of you, and not a picture of a candy bar or a deer or an elephant. Secondly, this picture should look like REAL LIFE you, and not what was once effectively known as a “Myspace picture” – a picture distorted to mask the real representation of self. “Myspace pictures” are different from “good pictures” – your profile should be a good picture of you, but it should also be a recognizable one – because people would prefer to follow – even unconsciously – someone who does not look like a bum.
The reason why it’s important that it “actually” looks like you is because you are building personal brand – one that should eventually exist outside the virtual world. If you’ve done a good job of building your brand online, when you walk into a conference hall of fellow peers, they should be able to recognize you. Time is short – what if someone very important would have stopped to say something to the perceived you but does not because you created a Myspace version of you – you’ve lost the “force multiplier” a profile picture can supply. This disconnect can also create a lack of trust when you do meet someone – because you are projecting an outward version of you that does not actually exist. Similarly, if it’s not an image of you at all, the same inability to be recognized at conferences – or anywhere else – occurs. And the in-person networking that happens as a result of your online marketing is the most powerful of all.
Even if you stay online, having a picture of you – as a human being – is something people will most identify with, and having a consistent image across all social profiles will allow that multiplier to grow biggest. The two external brand properties, name and avatar – outside your own stuff – must sync together to maximize benefit. If your “persona” is that of a brand, and you’re creating brand accounts, your avatar should be an extremely close representation of your brand image. This brand association is just as important, if not more, than the personal brand avatar being a (representative) picture of you and not a hawk or a duck or a box of Cracker Jacks.
Content Host Aesthetics
The next part of static marketing as it applies is aesthetics is the place where your content, in aggregate, is hosted. Every business or personal brand should have a custom aesthetic that cross references across every area where their content is hosted en masse (and is at all customizable). The most obvious example of this is your website or blog – personal or business. This aesthetic should be of high quality and representative of your brand identity. If you use a template, you lose the multiplier – and this multiplier, as it applies to your own website, is the strongest multiplier of all. The secondary area where brand content host aesthetics are most frequently ignored is on your Twitter background. Your Twitter image should be a close iteration to whatever your main content host is, so there is brand residual every time someone observes both properties. So, if your main goal is to promote your personal brand, it should be representative of your personal blog. If your main goal is to promote your business, it should be representative of your website aesthetic.
I have seen enough Distilled Twitter profiles in my day to carry that background image to my grave – because they’ve done a great job of maximizing that residual force multiplier.
It’s also important to leverage both the brand aesthetic AND the ability to use the background to create a secondary call to action that your bio and website URL can’t. For example, if I worked for a service industry and also wanted to build my personal brand (such as the employees of Distilled) I would leverage this background to list both Distilled’s URL and also that of my personal blog, so those interested could direct themselves to my blog as well, should they have the interest. If the background is solely a mirror of your content host aesthetic, you lose some additional potential you’d add on with that inclusion. The URL shortener you use on Twitter should match the target of your background – hybridizing these will create a non-harmonious voice and reduce the positive brand impression having a synchronous voice creates.
(By this point, you may notice that I don’t have all of these static marketing initiatives in place on my own personal homes. I am human, and I didn’t write this post a year ago for a reason – so be sure that I am working on every one, and already have many in place. Check back on my stuff in a month and throw rocks at me if I don’t have it completely implemented. 😉 )
Naming Conventions
Having a call to action is not enough, and I’m sure you’ve all heard that sanctimonious term one or two times in your life. Calls to Action that fulfill your Static Marketing potential create CTAs in every possible area, to the point where creating additional CTAs creates diminishing returns/impairs user experience.
For blogs, I point them continuously towards Neil Patel’s post on how he increased his RSS feed count by 243%. This is because Neil’s post details many additional ways – past a Facebook like button and a Twitter reweet button – that one can create additional force multipliers for their business and/or blog. Many of his tips are below. I have also included every additional post-event CTA I can think of that you should implement.
- Offer a free whitepaper and/or plugin in exchange for an e-mail address, which you then automatically add to an e-mail newsletter. By creating a piece of content that has an e-mail barrier wall to access, you gain an additional, constantly increasing market to push your content to in the future.
- Create an aesthetically-grabbing RSS or e-mail newsletter CTA at the end of every post. Neil’s “unveiling” of the RSS feed is impossible to miss, and difficult to ignore. As such, it has boosted his RSS feed count considerably.
- Use a pop-up to distribute the whitepaper and grab more RSS or e-mail newsletter subscribers. This can be annoying to some, but if you make the pop-up aesthetically pleasing (with clearly strong content behind it), it is unlikely to create bounces – especially if you design it to appear only once. This will be another way to pick up subscribers. This isn’t as valuable for businesses who may fear that applying this may be disingenuous and disable the trust of their users – in example, I feel as though it wouldn’t “fit” here at SEOMoz, and might turn a blog that seems like it only cares about helping us into something that only cares about taking our money. Make sure this content is “evergreen” – meaning that it will have use until your business dies, and isn’t time sensitive – or it isn’t static marketing in the truest sense of the word – because it will require you update it in the future.
- Create social buttons. Retweet and Facebook Like buttons are the givens, and if you don’t have those implemented, you might want to invest in a marketing 101 course. However, I also extremely recommend a Stumbleupon button – but done right. I absolutely love the way SEOMoz does this below, and will be implementing it myself as soon as possible. Remember, this is to a point of diminishing returns – having the ultimate list of 500 social networks will do a pretty good job of getting you submitted to none – so get a designer to implement an important three or four that are important to your market in a minimalistic, but effective, fashion.
- In purchase confirmation e-mails, create social account and product review CTAs. For businesses, after someone has bought a product, you’d be crazy not to immediately point them to review your business, like you on Facebook, follow you on Twitter, and/or link to you in your e-mail confirmation. Rand detailed this in one of his headsmacking tips on SEOMoz – and it’s an often-wasted CTA event.
- For offline businesses, have prominent Twitter and Facebook logos in areas with a large amount of foot-traffic at your physical storefronts. Run a bar? Why isn’t there a prominent “like us on Facebook!” image somewhere near the beers on tap? Run a retail store? When someone is signing a receipt or entering their pin, why not have a “Follow us on Twitter!” CTA on that armrest? Not only will it have a high likliehood of being noticed, it will also get noticed closest to the exit, and thus closer to the point where they can act on the CTA and follow or like you on Facebook. Neither of these force multiplier examples are invasive, but they both are very effective in creating a snowball effect for your content efforts.
- On Facebook accounts, create a landing page with a strong CTA. There’s plenty of posts on creating a Facebook landing page to increase the amount of likes your apge gets – but again, an aesthetically pleasing (and brand identifiable) landing page can skyrocket the number of likes you receive.
- Maximize CTAs and brand impressions in your e-mail signature. Every e-mail signature should have the address to your Twitter account, and at least one other address, whether it be your Facebook page, actual website, or LinkedIn account. Include your position at your business with the name of the business included – sapping out every bit of brand impression possible.
- Use your Twitter bio to maximize followers. Dan Zarrella did a study on which Twitter bios were most followed – official, founder, speaker, expert, guru and author were the most followed, in that order. If any of these describe you, include them in your bio. People will follow you more often. I love what Wil Reynolds of SEER Interactive does – he includes “founder” in his bio, and his picture is actually of him speaking. As far as respect and follow-inducing profile pictures go, a picture of you speaking, if possible, has to be at the top of the mountain.
- Have a physical address? Put a prominent logo on the building! Headsmacking, I know. If you have a business, even a cubefarm, your logo should be prominently placed on the exterior. Grab that mindshare opportunity and run with it.
Achieving an Optimal Static Marketing Strategy
The way each piece of the puzzle fits into your specific strategy will vary, but if we think about it in more general terms that we can apply more broadly, we can narrow it down thusly:
- Create a brand identity that is synchronized across all marketing channels
- Place Twitter/high importance social platforms at near-equal value as domain names when choosing a brand identity
- Use consistent, case sensitive usernames on social accounts/domain names
- Maximize brand signals in all locations
- Twitter background
- URL shortener
- Customized website design
- Prominent logo on office building
- Maximize CTAs to the point that they don’t impair UX
- Pop-ups
- Generate evergreen, high-quality giveaway whitepapers/software to capture e-mails
- 3-4 strong social CTAs post-content
- 2-3 strong social CTAs above the fold
- Create a brand-identifiable landing page on Facebook
- Add a second/third website to your Twitter background if applicable
- Create post-conversion CTAs in e-mails
- Add social CTAs in physical storefronts in areas with high traffic/chances of retaining mindshare (store exits/cashiers)
- Create an e-mail signature with brand impressions/social CTAs
- Modify Twitter bio to maximize account follows
Hopefully you can find a few holes in your static marketing strategy by reading this post. And certainly, this isn’t the start all-end all as it comes to this strategy. Are there more static marketing/content force multiplier ideas that I might have missed? Suggest them in the comments! Also, if you’d like to harass me for not implementing 100% of these tactics by the time you read this, feel free to follow me on Twitter here or better yet, troll me on my SEO blog.
