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Rock your marketing and advertising like Warren Buffett

Differentiating your brand could be tricky work if your marketing and advertising involves one of the world’s richest men—unless that man is Warren Buffett.

“We thought, What’s the most ridiculous getup we could think up for Warren — and thought, Nah, we can’t do that,” says Phil Ovuka, director of creative media services at Geico.

Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett has become a staple of the Geico employee-created videos used to kick off their annual team meeting. Over the past four years, Buffett has appeared as a hobo and a DJ. This year, his tattooed Axl Rose send-up stole the show and netted thousands of viral impressions.

What can Warren Buffett teach your brand?

Suppose an employee brought you a marketing and advertising idea so off-the-charts outlandish you couldn’t contain your laughter. What would you do?  Dismiss that idea and you lose three ways: employees lose trust in sharing ideas, your brand loses fresh thinking, and you lose an edge that can differentiate you from competitors.

“Differentiate until you want to cry,” says Jon Spoelstra, author of Marketing Outrageously: How to Increase Your Revenue by Staggering Amounts! Otherwise, you’re just like everyone else.

Spoelstra’s track record of creating marketing and advertising success stories in basketball and arena football are legendary. The way to start, Spoelstra teaches, is “by making new a way of life.”

Step into each day looking at things from new and unexpected perspectives. Slaughter the sacred cows and bring in fresh thinking.  Doing so will make your people happy, your brand strong, and you rich. Ask Warren Buffett about that.

The bigger the response, the better the idea

Ideas everyone agrees on are safe, bland, vanilla. They’re dreck. It’s the thinking that produces ad-speak-laden messages: “family owned with a commitment for quality and your satisfaction.” Gag me.

Marketing and advertising ideas worth exploring are the ones that double over half the room in laughter, while revolting others. Strong reactions tell you that idea carries a charge that will light up a brand. Nurture such thinking in people and you’ll create an unexpected employee benefit: opportunity.

By stepping into his Guns N Roses persona, Warren Buffett tells everyone, Geico is alive with opportunity. The boss is on the team, not in the watchtower. His appearances in those videos is a clarion call to every Geico employee: your ideas are welcome at the top. It’s a marketing and advertising message that resonates with customers too, earning Buffett and company over 327,00 plays on YouTube as of the moment this was written.

Employees created the video, wrote the lyrics, delivered the message. It works because it’s an authentic sentiment delivered by people who believe. This kind of thing only happens when you create a safe space for outrageous ideas.

How welcome are outrageous ideas at the top of your company?

Jon Spoelstra is our brand of crazy. That’s why you’ll find him teaching a class called How To Make Big Things Happen Fast at Wizard Academy. I spent two days attending his first workshop and highly recommend it–especially if you want to find the way to your envelope’s edge. Click here to learn more.

Online advertising in a magazine?

A magazine that updates scores. Ads showing a car driving down the road and, at a touch, reveals specs and customized pricing. News stories that link to background information. Meet the coming face of interactive magazine publishing . Are your online advertising best practices ready for this new technology?

Check out examples interactive advertising in a magazine being developed now. Look past the corpo-speak and see the future of how your customers will be consuming information in the near future. Near as in when the iPad comes out.

Don’t think this advance is way off or reserved just for the big boys. The ability to create this kind of interactive advertising will come to the local level quickly. How can you prepare? Here are three things you can do now:

Give your banners muscle

Consider how you currently execute banner advertising. If your ad simply transports a reader to your home page, you’re missing out. The shortest path to conversion is relevant results; a click is my question, where you take me is the answer.

Instead of just bringing visitors to your home page, choose specific points of your banner ad to bring visitors relevant points on your site. Click on the product, you’re taken to that specific product’s page. Click on copy in your ad and it brings you to an expanded version with more information. The company logo in an ad on the sports page takes visitors to a landing page written for sports-minded customers.

Whether you’re paying by click or impressions, the more efficiently you resolve each click, the more likely you’ll convert visitors into customers. It starts by answering the questions customers are really asking (not the ones you want them to ask) quickly and efficiently.

Show don’t tell with video

Video brings visitors into your business in a way words alone can’t. It’s a form of interactive advertising that communicates differently than cable or TV video; don’t consider using your TV spot on your site as having video. In fact, TV spots on websites can create a conversational disconnect.

Web video works best when it’s person-to-person conversational. Grab a Flip Video camera and welcome a customer as you would when they come into the store. Interview some of your customers. Don’t worry about making it pretty; the more authentic is looks, the more believable the message.

Engage visitors in conversation

Creating polls or surveys is an easy way to solicit customer input and generate better engagement. Survey Monkey gives you the ability to conduct live polls of your web visitors and display ongoing results live. Your online advertising immediately appears more connected and customers gain a greater sense of involvement.

You may get some poll results you don’t like. If you have a product or service customers aren’t happy with, they’ll tell you. That’s a good thing. If they’re already unhappy, at least now you have a way of addressing it with them and in front of everyone else. You’ll just have to walk your customer service talk.

Advantage goes to the prepared

Not only will making these adjustments enhance the effectiveness of your online advertising now, but when time comes for interactive media in dynamic publications, you’ll already have the necessary best practices in place.

Marketing Scott Brown: social media lessons to help you win

His January 19th win shocked the political world, but Scott Brown’s victory came as little surprise to marketing experts tracking social media numbers.  Scott Brown’s historic success demonstrates how social media’s underlying principles of human behavior can help you win customers.

What social media reveals quickly

Traditional polls were all over the map in the Massachusetts campaign’s final days. But, social media numbers tabulated by the Wordstream Internet Marketing blog turned out to be the most accurate in predicting the election’s outcome. What if you had this kind of advantage in your business?

Scott Brown’s social advantage over Martha Coakley
  • 10:1 advantage in web traffic
  • 10:1 advantage in YouTube viewership
  • 3:1 advantage in twitter followers
  • 4:1 advantage in Facebook followers

Democrats had dominated the web since Howard Dean made revolutionary use of it during his presidential run. But, the technical edge is narrowing. Last month, for example, Republican congressmen sent out 529% more tweets than their Democrat counterparts. Recently, 500 conservatives gathered with Newt Gingrich for workshops on effective use of social media. Here’s the catch: it takes more than a flurry of activity to drive success in politics or business.

Mark Senak, a Democrat, theorizes in his report “Twongress: The Power of Twitter in Congress,” that Democrats are paying less attention to resources that proved critical to Obama’s win even as Republicans make significant gains. Nothing creates results like sustained effort. In social media, competency in doingness is often mistaken for mastery of beingness. True success is less about what you do than who you are; social media just exposes the truth more quickly.

How do you campaign for customers?

Scott Brown’s win had less to do with social media than how he connected with something deep in the hearts of voters: they wanted to be heard. He looked them in the eye and said, “you’re not just another brick in the wall.”

As my partner Roy H. Williams says, he “spoke to the dog in the language of the dog about what’s in the heart of the dog.”

That’s connecting with a true felt need. Comparing how Brown and Coakley were able to “speak dog”   offers clues for how you can better connect with your customers.

Be different where it counts

While both candidates reached out via traditional and social media, Scott Brown did it better. Compare their websites. Brown’s social media elements jump out, as do ways to get involved. Coakley’s links are lost in a traffic jam of graphics.

Other subtle differences: Brown’s blue is deeper, more pure.  Coakley’s blue seems pale by comparison. Pure is strong. Pale is weak.

Brown’s photo is an action shot taken from a low angle; you look up at him. He seems bigger than life. Coakley’s is a posed portrait shot from a high angle; you look down at her. She is diminished. Up is good. Down is bad.

Brown’s video shows him campaigning. Coakley’s video is Obama campaigning. Brown is engaged. Coakley’s along for the ride.

Doing little things right gets big results

While such distinctions seem small, they send a message to customers. Your marketing, especially your social media, will be successful only to the degree you’re willing to authentically connect with your customer’s felt need.

Saying you’re connected and demonstrating it are different matters. Being real demands sustained effort to create trust and credibility.Voters and customers can smell a fake even over dial-up. Twittering once every week or so is worse than not doing it at all. Ditto with intermittent blog and Facebook posts.

Social Media opens a door; what you do with it determines if anyone comes in. Whether they stick around is a reflection of how real you’re perceived as being.

Whether it’s social media, traditional media, or person-to-person interaction, since time began, all people want is connectedness, recognition, and appreciation.  Scott Brown was able to provide that. Martha Coakley didn’t.

Which campaign trail seems a better path for you?

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