The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

The movie Chef, starring Jon Favreau, John Leguizamo, and Sofia Vergara was in the theaters last year, and is now available on Netflix and for rental.

Some called it “the feel-good movie of the year” — and I agree — but it’s also a GREAT way to get up to speed on Social Media!

As Social Media continues to mature, they continue to search for new ways to engage consumers and drive revenue. Two weeks ago, Pinterest and Instagram introduced similar features aimed at accomplishing both goals and these new options could be game changers for businesses and consumers.

The first "buy now" button is the Buyable Pin that was introduced by Pinterest on June 2nd. The new feature will allow users to purchase products without ever having to leave Pinterest—when they see a blue Buy It button. If you live in the United States and use an Apple device, you will begin seeing the new feature in a couple of weeks. According to the company’s blog, you should be able to discover over 2 million Buyable Pins on your iPhone or iPad by the end of June. Android users will have to wait a little longer to see the new Buyable Pins. 

My three-year-old grandson led me to a meaningful epiphany recently. We were sitting at the kitchen table playing with some Play-Doh when he watched me sink my thumb into a small ball of the clay. He pointed to my thumbprint and asked, “What’s that?”

I answered, “That’s an impression.”

Like most three-year-olds will do, he followed my answer with a question: “Why?”

“Because when I touched the Play-Doh, I left a mark on it.”

He proceeded to copycat the procedure, pressing his fingers and handprints into several lumps of clay; after each masterpiece, he would attempt to form the new word he had learned: “Look, Grandpa, I made a ‘preshun’.”

“I left a mark on it.” 

I had been to a marketing conference earlier in the week, where much of the focus was on falling CPMs, and rightfully so. Once upon a time, the cost of access to consumers was high, thanks to the relative scarcity of media. There were only one or two newspapers in most major metropolitan areas, and only a couple dozen radio and television stations (even fewer in smaller markets, of course). The law of supply and demand favored companies who distributed advertising messages, where the supply of big audiences was (comparatively) limited, and the demand was high. 

As a former Digital Sales Manager turned consultant, I am constantly asked How can I make sure this social media campaign will work? As with any campaign, there’s plenty a marketer needs to do to maximize success. But there’s one thing that’s enormously impactful and often overlooked:

If the headline doesn’t click in their head or their heart, there’s no way their finger will click.

The headline is the first thing a person sees—and too often the last. Social media are as cluttered today as are every other medium. People who are active in social media are often on several different platforms every day, and every one of those feeds is jammed with new information, new content, every time they check in. Do they carefully read it all? Ha. Do you? Of course not. 

The ever-evolving world of digital media can be challenging to stay up-to-date with all of the changes, but if you are selling digital media and want to do it effectively, it is a challenge you must take! 

So where you do you start? There is so much information available and it can feel overwhelming. I would recommend that you find a handful of different resources that you turn to on a regular basis. I like to think about resources in categories – those that help keep me up to date on what is coming and what is changing in digital media, tools to gain insight about a company’s website and those that help me stay current on consumer trends.

Below are 12 of my favorite digital resources:

Websites:

A few years ago, Google began setting a stage for users to be able to receive relevant search results based on content from social networks such as Twitter, Blogger, and Google Reader, along with other social networks that no longer exist. Google named this new content delivery Social Search and aimed to engage users by offering content from friends they knew and people they followed.

A few nights before the Super Bowl, we were all gathered around the dinner table, discussing the upcoming “big game.” My daughter suggested that the Super Bowl should be a national holiday. I asked why and she said, “It happens every year no matter what, everyone pays attention, even if they don’t like football, because they want to see the commercials, and we watch the whole game just for the commercials. So we should get the day off of school, making it a holiday!”

Prior to the holidays, the trades were publishing articles and digital pundits were posting blogs on what they felt would happen at the digital cash register over the largest consumer purchasing time of year. Many exploited Target’s and Home Depot's infamous 2014 data breaches in predicting that these chains would experience the worst holiday retail season ever, citing lack of consumer confidence in identity protection as the reason why.

Long gone are the days of dancing babies and pop-ups to entice consumers to click on display ads or sponsored content online. Gone also are the days when savvy marketers counted clicks as the only measure of value in an online ad campaign.