Deliver Value

What may seem like value to you may well be spam to the person you’re sending it to. This is the curse of traditional companies fumbling their way through the social channels.

Marketing and Communications professionals have been trained to listen to what a client wants, figure out a smart, clever and/or impacting way to deliver that message and then go forward, create the campaign and do everything within their power to get that message out there. When you apply this as the overarching strategic imperative, we are all missing one core point: no matter how targeted that messaging is, it’s still going to hit a bunch of people who really don’t care all that much about it.

Even the best of the best in advertising and communications don’t get 50% success rates on any of their campaigns (targeted or mass). This means that the majority of the people you are targeting are simply not all that interested in what you have to say. 

The problem with that is Marketers don’t think they may need to do less, they think the opposite. They will look at failed campaigns and think they need to target more people the next time to get a better result. Just today I got a press release from a company that should definitely know better. The message was not targeted, in fact if they even took a quick glance at this Blog they would know that it doesn’t cover the industry of their client, and I will not be at their upcoming conference.

There’s no value to me, there’s no value to the agency and there’s no value to the client.

It’s a big waste of time and money all the way around. How many years have we been having long online discussions about the difference between Media Relations and Blogger outreach? What has changed? If anything, even the mass media want to be handled more like Bloggers. They don’t want to be pitched and they don’t want standard press releases (yes, I’m generalizing). They do want to know what you think the ideal story for their readers might be.

That’s the shift towards delivering value. 

Value is all about focusing on the small few who can really help your message spread. It’s definitely not as fun or as sexy as a billboard in Times Square or a 30-second spot on the Super Bowl, but that stuff does click and groove when you have laid a strong foundation of building, providing and communicating value.

It may sound pedestrian, but seriously think about the last time you really focused on delivering value first and then spreading the message far and wide.