Social media and email marketing compliment each other.

Back in October after reading a Wall Street Journal story about the demise of email, I asked the following:

Is the growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter slowly killing off email as an effective marketing tool?

“Death of email” articles like the one from the Journal assume that two methods of communication cannot coexist, each having a unique role to play. For decades now, television and radio have managed to survive — and even compliment each other — even though many media experts believed that TV would kill off the radio box. Likewise, the Internet was supposed to kill off everything — but it hasn’t (though I know some magazine and newspaper publishers who believe the Net gave them two shots in the hat).

Email and social media both have a specific utility. One does certain things better than the other — and that utility can and will change over time. Right now email works best for longer messages, communicating with more personalized, targeted audiences, and adding embedded content. Social networking offers greater immediacy, ease of use, a sense of personal empowerment, and potentially higher levels of frequency.

Email and social networking sites are used in different ways and communicate different kinds of information. One easily compliments the other. Like many of you, I tweet, participate on social networking sites, and send out and receive tons of email.  (I also blog, manage several web sites, and participate in various forums, but that’s another story!)  I don’t see the two as competing for my attention. I use them in the way that I need to and choose my tool according to the task I have in mind.

We’re also finding out that heavy social media users are also above-average users of email play. A Nielsen report back in September showed that social media use did not decrease email usage but actually increased it.

Says Nielsen’s Jon Gibs –

It’s perfectly logical that as people make connections though social media, they maintain those connections outside of the specific platform and may extend those connections to email, a phone conversation or even in-person meetings.

For marketers who worry that social media are making their email programs obsolete, nothing can be further from the truth. The strategy, as always, is to use media that mirror your target audience’s media behavior. In many cases, that means developing your presence in social networks and having a robust email marketing program.

Coaches Sing If I Had A Hammer.

You LOVE hammers!

You SELL hammers!

You know in your gut that hammers are cool, hip, and can change the world if given something to bang.

Everywhere you go you sell hammers. You want to sell me a hammer. You believe fervently, passionately that my situation would be vastly improved if I had a hammer. So you knuckle down, polish your pitch, and try over and over again to sell me a hammer.

The problem is that I have this screw that I am trying to attach to a piece of wood. What I really need — I figured this out on my own — is a screw driver, not a hammer. That is my situation: a man with a piece of wood, a screw, and no screw driver.

There’s an opportunity there for someone to sell me a screw driver because that’s what I need. But you don’t sell screw drivers, you sell hammers. So instead of offering me a screw driver, you persist in selling me a hammer because you are in love with hammers. That’s all you know — hammers.

“Well, you can always bang in the screw!” you shout at me, frustrated by my obvious ignorance about the virtues of hammers.

Since you refuse to acknowledge my obvious disinterest in hammers, I grab you by your shirt collar and throw you out the door.

Although I am baffled by my situation — the screw, the piece of wood, attaching the screw to the wood, etc. — I still know the difference between a nail and a screw, a hammer and a screw driver.

I am in need but I am not an idiot.

Abraham Maslow famously once said: “If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”

The concept is thus: individuals who are incomplete in their knowledge or training of solutions propose the same type of solution to every problem they encounter.   They opt for the more familiar solution to one that may be more effective yet with which they are unskilled.

The question you face is whether the coaching solutions you offer prospects are limited either by your training or by a predisposition to see problems in a certain way.  Looked at closely enough, there are ethical as well as practical issues here.  Not only might you be harming clients who might be better served with other solutions, you might find prospects more resistant than you expect to your marketing efforts.

Like the fellow with the screw and the piece of wood, they know the difference between a hammer and a screw driver.

Communicating Your Service Aura.

This presentation by Rory Sutherland humorously makes the case for selling the intangible benefits of our products and services.

Making the sale often depends on our ability to communicate product or brand benefits that transcend product utility. Marketers tend to think in terms of “solutions” to customer problems — customers are thirsty, so we give them soda pop, they are ambitious so we sell them on college degrees, they want to escape reality so we give them reality TV.

There is another dimension in which needs and wants exist. I call them higher order needs and wants. For those who have memorized Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, these are the social, esteem, and self-actualization levels. Whether or not a consumer believes that a product will actually fill those higher order needs is a matter of perception. It is not “inside” the product like an extra-powerful chemical in toothpaste that will make your teeth so white they glow!, but surrounds the product like an aura.

Making the aura real to prospects is the true challenge of service marketing and branding.

Nowhere is the necessity of communicating a service aura more important than in life and business coaching. It’s true that our prospects and clients have real problems that they need help resolving. It’s also true that we cannot expect to make the initial sale or develop a client relationship unless we help solve that problem. But if we think that is all we are doing, we are seriously mistaken.

There are thousands of coaches and marketing consultants who promise to help solve customer problems. However, the only thing that will compel prospects to choose you over all those other solution-providers is your ability to help them perceive the aura surrounding your service. Help them to experience that aura and they will demand that you — and no one else — become their coaching partner.

How are you going to do that?