Choose Who You Write For

I was talking with someone a few days ago who was building a new product to help people with retirement planning. I asked, “who’s it for,” and the response was “everyone.” Gasp!

There are over 7.5 billion people it the world – the product can’t possibly be for everyone.

Too often we approach the outreach to learners in a similar way. You may have an email list of 500, 5,000, or 50,000. Who you send your marketing email to, is a choice you have.

The cool thing about technology, especially email marketing services, is you can segment your audience…and you should. Using the segmentation and email management features will certainly help you. If you have a home grown product, ask IT if it is already an option.

People have a limited amount of time and when they read emails from you that are not applicable, they unsubscribe or stop reading altogether. You may have heard the worst medication for a patient is the one they aren’t taking. Well, the worst email for your company is the one your audience isn’t reading.

To zoom in a bit more – your email list might include practitioners from different care settings (e.g. hospital, community, long term care, etc.). Each of these learners has a slightly different focus and interest level in what they are learning. Making that assumption, you can create “tags” or separate audiences to better segment your email list and send content that people are interested in reading.

Also worth noting: There are a many people who are already in a niche environment and might think – cool – but not for me. However, there’s typically a way to further breakdown the list. For example, if you create content for hospitals, you can add tags for IT, oncology, ED, administration, etc. etc.

Be creative. Try a segmented list and see what the response is. You get to choose.

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

Marketing: What I’ve Learned…so far

I hope you enjoy a slight variation in today’s blog post. Here are some thoughts on a recent Workshop I participated in.

January 2019

In January 2019, I started an epic marathon and just last week, I finished it. Phew!

Not too bad for my first marathon – but it wasn’t running, it was The Marketing Seminar (TMS), an Akimbo Workshop, created by Seth Godin and happened to be my 4th Akimbo Workshop within one year.

This iteration happened to be the sixth offering of TMS and followed the release of This is Marketing, Seth’s 19th (best-selling) book.

It includes 60 deep, thought provoking lessons. And I signed up on purpose!

Part of my celebration is to write this post, as gently nudged by my (new) partners in crime, Staci Boden and Dave Bates – two wonderfully kind and generous people.

Without further ado…here are my thoughts on Marketing.

Marketing in the 21st Century focuses on making change happen. To do this, you need to know what change you seek to make.

The key questions to start with (always):

  • Who’s it for?
  • What’s it for?
  • What change are you seeking to make?

To clarify what your position is, you’ll need to have answers to these questions. Zooming in to the smallest viable audience is typically a great place to start.

Marketing is more than SEO or short advertisement focused emails. These are all too common and often many people gravitate to them – the shortfall is that they steal attention and time – two resources that are in short supply.

So if it isn’t SEO, what is Marketing consist of? It is earning trust, seeking enrollment, creating tension, showing up consistently, and bringing the generosity. Combined with learning more about these themes, TMS provided an opportunity to add clarity to my project. (This website was created and designed while in the second half of the Workshop, again nudged by friends in the Workshop.)

Adding clarity to one’s own project is one of the most profound aspects of TMS. Interestingly enough, I went in with one idea and it evolved to something better. Better in terms of the change I seek to make. We learn to make things better by making better things.

In big part, the design of the learning space (or container) is what stands out. As an educator, here are some critical components:

  • Quality of the lessons (trust in Seth Godin as a teacher/leader in Marketing)
  • Cadence of the lessons dropping (they do not all come out at once)
  • Format of promoting participation – both to find the others and to work with people outside of your specific industry
  • Posture of the Coaches and students (and Remarkables)

The questions themselves helped create new ideas but the power of the Workshop is the cohort – the peer to peer participation and connection that helps us make significant progress. It’s a community of like-minded people.

People like us, do things like this.

-Seth Godin

July 2019

It was an amazing seven months – 200 days – and I’m grateful for all the great people I was fortunate to meet and learn from. Thank you!

Stay tuned for a new education Podcast and come back for more posts here.

I’m looking forward to being part of future Akimbo Workshops. I’d love to see you there and I cannot wait to meet you.

Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash

Connecting to Your Audience

What is the 20% of effort which can bring you 80% of your results?

Building a better connection to your audience.

In the past, our conference would send advertising to prior attendees when the conference was open for registration. We never sent anything meaningful in between conferences – merely interrupted them when we were ready.

This Summer is a good time to transition to a different way forward. A different path with consistent, relevant emails to help pharmacists provide safer and more optimized medication use, to meet the needs of their patients.

Our new steps start next week. I hope you consider starting your own new path too.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Marketing to Busy Practitioners

For an education provider, the trend of advertising to your email list is the way we’ve always done it. You have a program to advertise and voila – an email is sent.

With all the noise we hear and see though, not all of our emails are getting to the right people. You can reframe this by identifying who your target audience is and sending out information they would want to learn and stories that resonate with them.

Yes, we’ll have to advertise for programs and these should be the exceptions, not the rule.

It takes time to learn who your audience is and effort to craft meaningful messages to them – the end result is a more engaged and connected customer.

The best time to begin is today.

Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash