Your startup will do better in the SF Bay Area. Here’s why.

If new companies are going to ‘save’ the U.S. economy (certainly decades older, ingrained companies will not), it’s worth examining the center of the startup universe right now. Without a doubt, that’s San Francisco. But the real question is why here?

In a recent article in Inc., Phillip Rosedale explores this question and makes some very astute observations. Most importantly, he believes that there are tech geniuses just about everywhere on the planet. But only San Francisco makes it safe to work on risky ideas. Why is it safer here? Because if your killer brainstorm doesn’t pan out, there are a few dozen other new businesses down the block willing to give you a chance. In other words, here you can fail and still succeed.

It’s interesting to pursue the notion of risk-taking a bit further as well. If your company is willing to take risks when it comes to marketing, you have an exponentially better chance of being noticed, and perhaps of even making news. When it comes to building a new brand, visibility is everything (and very hard to come by).

The other major difference according to Rosedale is the ‘sheer density of tech entrepreneurs’ here. In fact, it’s ten times greater than you’ll find in other cities (including New York). What’s more, the culture in Silicon Valley provides for a far greater level of sharing and collaboration. So you get lots of opportunities, as well as all kinds of shared information to build upon. It’s a very potent combination.

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Remember ‘Information wants to be free’ by Stewart Brand (who also happens to live in the Bay Area)? In a very real sense, that’s what’s happening here for new tech companies. There are tens of thousands of techies, hackers, big data crunchers, IT geeks and entrepreneurs working and living together, and using what they learn to create new business models. In effect, the entire region has become an incubator.

So why does this matter to a marketing company like ours? We love working with startups because it’s the best opportunity to shape how the new company will be perceived by the public, and more importantly, potential customers. It’s about building a brand from scratch. It’s exciting, and it’s fun. You can check out our new website devoted to startup marketing by clicking here.

‘The good thing is people who are creative and entrepreneurial and innovative can make a name for themselves and their company if they do something a little different.’ – Nate Silver We’d like to help you along.

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If you’re in business today, you’re also in the original content business.

Remember the good ‘ol days? Say maybe five years ago? Way back then you could make a good product, put it up for sale, do some reasonably intelligent marketing, and viola! You had a working business model.

In other words, there were really two key components. The first was manufacturing and distribution. The second was marketing. Some brands made fantastic products. Others had terrific advertising or more recently social media programs. A few had both.

But alas, things have changed. Today it’s no longer enough to have a fantastic product line. Or even to create and execute a leading-edge marketing campaign that includes digital, traditional, social and PR. Today, we live in a 24/7 information culture. Everything is news. And that means what’s top-of-mind is constantly changing from one moment to the next. Just check your Facebook or Twitter feed right now, and then about an hour later to see what I mean.

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This new info-centric model requires that your business actively participates in creating news – or more accurately – original content. If you’re not participating, that means your brand simply won’t be thought about. Because there are too many other businesses out there aggressively creating content on a daily (and sometimes hourly) basis. And what’s more, this trend will only accelerate in the days to come.

So hypothetically, let’s say that you agree that your business needs to produce more content. What’s your strategy going to be? Here’s the best way to begin: Think about how you can best demonstrate EMPATHY with you customers.

Home Depot is producing a series of ultra-short Vine videos that provide simple ‘how to’ tips for home repair. Expedia created a series of ‘emotional journeys’ ranging from stories on cancer survivors to finding true love. Qualcomm came up with a series of video documentaries featuring key influencers to shift perceptions about the brand. Urban Outfitters teamed with Converse to launch a Vine Video contest where customers can submit Vines that document ‘a day in the life of your Converse sneakers’.

There are literally hundreds of other examples. Now, did all these brands come up with these ideas and produce them on their own? No, they did not. So find the best creative resource you can, come up with a budget, and put them to work. Please note: We’re available.

In the time it took you to read this, a great deal of news has been seen by your prospect. The question is, are you part of that stream, or not?

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Is your brand still throwing money away on banner ads?

Some habits die very hard. Since the rise of the Internet, brands both large and small have thrown substantial marketing dollars at two tactics: Google keywords and banner (or display) ads. Initially, both of those provided a fairly decent return. They’re fairly easy to execute, and heck, it seemed like every other business was using them, too.

But that’s essentially the problem. Too many advertisers jumped in and pushed the price of keywords high enough so that savvy marketers moved on to more creative approaches – such as smart original content or Open Graph advertising on Facebook. And now, banner ads have become about as effective as a billboard on a highway where no one drives. If you need to be convinced, just take a look at the stats below.

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These intriguing stats were compiled by Digiday and Business Insider. They’re important. They also serve as the latest example that ‘me, too’ marketing is destined to fail. When everyone else zigs, your brand needs to zag.

Don’t just follow other brands in your category. Make a real attempt to lead with fresh thinking. Hire creative marketing pros who can elevate your brand above the fray. Be brave. Make news. Develop a community that shares content you’ve provided. And leave the failing tactics to those who can’t see their way forward.

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Even to find your own job, it pays to advertise.

There’s a marketing lesson to be learned from Ann Margulis in Sydney Australia. Even in the age of ‘free’ social media, LinkedIn and constant networking, it still pays to advertise.

Ms. Margulis, who is sixty years old, was in a position that’s certainly familiar to many boomers. (Full disclosure: I’m one of those, too.) Over a period of five months, she applied for more than 500 administrative and office positions. She had some follow-up calls and interviews, but no job offers.

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Finally, in desperation, Ann decided to put her twenty years of experience in advertising to work. She created a self-promotion billboard complete with her age, photo and phone number. Now here’s the part where she got a very big break that most of us would not: the outdoor ad agency in Sydney had a CEO who decided to give her free use of a ‘vacant billboard’. I would say that the angels must have been looking out for Ann.

A few weeks later Ann Margulis was hired by a Sydney staffing agency. Regan Brown, managing director there, said he saw the outdoor ad and thought that she would be a perfect fit for his business. Here’s a quote from Mr. Brown: ‘If you need a job well done and you need it done well all the time, consider the mature age workers of Australia who’ve been there, done it before, have the experience and won’t let you down.’ Well said.

It’s important to remember, a billboard is not new media. Outdoor advertising has been around for over 150 years. If you want to get attention for your brand, it pays to advertise not just online, but in traditional formats as well. If it weren’t for her brave decision to advertise the truth about her situation, there’s a very good chance Ann would still be looking for work.

How many marketing ideas has your brand brought to life that have made the news?

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What your brand can learn from Google about marketing.

Unlike giant consumer brands like Budweiser or Pepsi, Google isn’t known all that well for their advertising. They don’t run a regular schedule of commercials, they don’t buy radio time, and their print ads only appear sporadically. You don’t see their logo popping up in the sidebar of your Facebook or LinkedIn page among all the other advertisers. They did run a spot on the Super Bowl, but I haven’t seen it air since then.

Nevertheless, Google is still a hugely successful brand in 2013, and a brilliant marketing machine. Here’s why: Robert Wong, who is Chief Creative Officer at Google Creative Lab (their internal agency) says that Google marketing is a ‘a combination of understanding the company’s own culture and story, and then demonstrating the product in the most empathetic way possible.’

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In other words it’s storytelling – done correctly. Many brands have very good stories to tell, but they haven’t figured out how to make them matter to the target. They don’t get the ‘empathetic’ part right.

Google is also smart enough to have marketing involved… before the product is ready for launch. When their engineers were working on Google Glass, they involved Wong’s team to help them figure out what the product would eventually become. Here’s how that process worked: The marketing team wound up making a video about the product far before it was even completed as a test model. According to Wong, ‘The video helped galvanize the team into making the final product. Storytellers can help invent the future.’

Does your marketing team (or your agency) get involved with product development? That’s how we like to work – at least when given the opportunity. Products are better when they are influenced by marketing pros, and not just product development teams. It’s a newer model, but it works.

When Google does take the time to produce a new TV spot, they always use the same ‘empathetic storytelling’ rule. To advertise their basic product – search – they must have been tempted to shout out about the sheer volume of queries conducted on Google. But instead, they told a single, more emotional story about a young man falling in love with a French woman – all through the premise of his own search history. Viola! A much more involving communication. And one that gives the brand a human (not evil) persona.

Google made billions based on mathematics (a better search algorithm) and smart management. But they also understood that even a leading edge tech brand needs to humanize their story in order to succeed. That’s something that holds true for not just other tech startups, but consumer brands as well.

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A responsive website. Does your brand really need one?

Do your customers and prospects use a smartphone or tablet? Do they use that same smartphone or tablet to visit your site? Do you know that over 40% of web activity is now on a smartphone or tablet? We all know that number will only increase.

So what is a “responsive website”? Basically it’s a site that provides an ideal experience without painful scrolling, panning, or resizing – across a complete range of screen sizes. Everything from your pocket sized iPhone to your 27” iMac. And what happens when your site isn’t responsive to a smartphone? Click here to see.

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So now, let’s say you have a startup. What’s your biggest challenge? Customer acquisition. And what provides an instant roadblock to customer acquisition? A website that doesn’t allow visitors to access information nearly as easily on their mobile devices as they can on their desktops.

Responsive web design is a paradigm shift that addresses a very basic user need. Essentially designers are forced to stop thinking in terms of ‘pages’ and to think in terms of ‘actual use’. If your brand wants to have a site that works like the world does today, you need to make the change.

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What Facebook ‘Home’ really is: a platform for advertising.

Here’s one thing I can guarantee you won’t be mentioned in the upcoming new commercial for Facebook ‘Home’: the primary goal is to get you to view more advertising. But the truth is, that’s what it’s about.

Facebook wants to be more profitable, and the key to getting there is to find ways to serve up more ads people will actually see and respond to. Why does ‘Home’ change this equation? Because when it’s installed on an Android phone (it’s not available on iPhones yet) it effectively takes over the home screen. And naturally, that’s where the ads will appear as well.

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In the press conference to introduce Home, Mark Zuckerberg stated that the average mobile consumer looks at their lock screen (or home screen) roughly 100 times each day. Facebook is touting this as a way to ‘be in better touch with your friends’ to consumers. But to brands, the pitch is that people will be consuming more content from Facebook…and other partners. By partners, feel free to substitute the word ‘advertisers’. Here’s a video Facebook produced to promote Home.

So how important is this to Facebook? Well, one indicator is that the company is launching its first-ever television ad campaign. (A rough cut of the commercial produced by Weiden & Kennedy was shown during yesterday’s press conference.) For now, Facebook is saying that it will ‘eventually’ show news-feed style ads like sponsored stories and page-post ads in something called ‘Cover Feed’. But they won’t be doing that right out of the gate. First they want to get as much adoption of the app as they possibly can. And that means they don’t want advertising to slow that process down.

So what does the new HTC ‘Facebook Phone’ have to do with this? The HTC First comes with Facebook Home pre-loaded – so you don’t even have to bother downloading it. If there were ever a mobile device for Facebook fanatics, this is it. It will be available starting April 12 from AT&T for $99.

My take is, you really can’t blame Facebook for giving this a shot. They built the world’s most popular social network, and they’re going to do everything they can to monetize it. But there’s a lesson for your brand here as well: Even the world’s biggest social platform decided that they needed traditional advertising to make this a success. I have no doubt we’ll be seeing more Facebook TV spots and other types of ads in the months to come.

You can’t depend on social media marketing alone to get the buzz you need today. You have to integrate social with paid media ads. In other words, you have to invest to move the dial.

The other important thing to note here is that brands are still trying hard to ‘crack the code’ for mobile marketing. There’s no guarantee people won’t abandon Home once they start seeing a bunch of advertising. But since mobile phones are so damn ubiquitous today, marketers are going to keep trying to find ways to connect with you via the hand-held computer you seem to be looking at all the time.

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The biggest opportunies for your brand today are mobile.

You remember the story. A 17-year old kid was recently paid $27 million in cash and $3 million in stock from Yahoo to acquire his technology. The kid was Nick D’Aloisio, and his brand was called Summly. So what does Summly do that Yahoo thought was worth $30M? It automatically condenses stories so they can be read more easily on mobile devices.

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In other words, it shortens them. Summly is a tool for 2013. Who has the time to read a long story anymore? I’ll be brief: not very many. And while we’re speaking of numbers, here are another two mobile factoids: 1) 43% of all email is now read on mobile devices. 2) Smartphone users now check their Facebook pages an average of 14x each day (!)

In case you’ve been away on another planet, the world has become mobilized. The computer people use most often is the one they can hold in one hand. The big screen is going to become a relic – at least for most consumers on a day-to-day basis.

So what does this mean for your marketing plans? It means you should begin by thinking about the small screen – first. All else should follow. Should your website still look good on a 23″ monitor? Of course it should. But if that’s the same design your prospects are seeing on mobile phones, you’ve got a problem. In case you didn’t get the news on that other planet, that’s known as Responsive Design. Here’s a video we created on this same subject.

Every consumer brand has had to re-think their basic approach to marketing because of mobile. Retailers have equipped stores with mobile-specific promotions that activate your device when you walk in off the street. Others are using location-based apps to appeal to customers who are nearby. New mobile apps are introduced on a daily basis that intend to integrate forward-thinking brands with your lifestyle.

Mobile is the new frontier. That’s where the most innovation is happening. It holds the most potential for inspired new ideas. It’s where you can make your mark. Don’t wait.

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If you want your brand to succeed, try a narrower target audience.

If you have a consumer brand as ubiquitous as Coke or Pepsi, you can skip this blog. For everyone else who’s struggling to build market share in today’s slowly-expanding economy, you should probably read on.

Here it is in a nutshell: Today your brand will be more successful if you focus on a narrower, more defined target and position all of your marketing efforts directly to them. Ask yourself, ‘Who is my best potential customer?’ If the response begins with ‘Anyone who needs…’ you’re already on the wrong track.

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Why? To begin with, you simply don’t have the budget to reach ‘anyone who’. It takes hundreds of millions of dollars in media spending to begin to make a meaningful impression on the overall population – and that’s just in the U.S. In addition, people want to identify with brands that feel like a good fit for who they are. Great examples today are Apple, Adidas, Godiva, Whole Foods, REI, Mercedes, bebe, American Express, Restoration Hardware…the list goes on. If you’re trying to be all things to all people, you won’t be able to make a real connection with any of them.

Often, this is a very hard principle for CEOs of smaller brands to accept. They think that by narrowing their target, they’re going to limit sales. In fact, the opposite is true today. Now that we have networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube (and others), people are voluntarily offering up essentially unlimited personal data in the form of content they create. Each time this happens, the consumer provides a little nugget about what they like, and just as importantly, what they don’t. Smart brands are harvesting this data to reach out to the audience that’s the best fit for their brand.

B2B brands have a better understanding of narrower positioning and marketing for two reasons: The first is they understand there’s a very specific audience for their product. The second is they have limited marketing budgets, and they can’t afford to try and influence a broader target. Consumer brands can learn a lot from this approach.

It’s estimated that Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ sold roughly 50 million copies. That album was released in 1982. There simply are no albums that sell that broadly today. Things have changed. The better – and more narrowly – you can define your target customer and how your brand personality fits them, the better your chances are for long-term success.

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