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Nike Just Do It ad

Around 15 years ago HubSpot used to trash advertising. They’d say things like, “As soon as you stop spending, it disappears” (not always true, but more about that later), all to promote their then-new “inbound marketing” approach.

Today ad management is part of HubSpot.

Nonetheless, I still see anti-advertising tweets, blog posts, and other marketing messages. Here’s an example from the past week that got over 2,000 likes and retweets (!). 

anti-ad Tweet

In responses to the above tweet, the guy later said (a) he didn’t have good targeting, and (b) he only spent $600 before pulling the plug. He was bootstapping the business and didn’t have more money to try on ads. That hardly justifies such a definitive, blanket dismissal of all advertising.

Sometimes the tweet takes the form of something like “In two years we grew our company to $2M ARR without spending a single dime on advertising.” Great! If you have a SaaS tool that’s a candidate for product-led growth, like Slack, for example, that is a real possibility.

But not every company or product has that opportunity, and for those that don’t they need to take advantage of a wide range of marketing tools. And advertising is certainly worth considering. Forget your personal experience or feelings for a moment; let’s look at the data.

In their famous “The Long and Short of It” study, Les Binet and Peter Field say that many companies grow by achieving “extra share of voice” (ESOV): a share of voice in their industry that is larger than their market share. Since market share, though, is the greatest multiplier of marketing, large companies may grow without any ESOV and small companies need considerable ESOV to drive growth.

Extra Share of Voice chart

Share of voice can be gained through advertising. It can also be gained through:

  • Blogging and guest blogging
  • Videos
  • Webinars
  • Podcasts
  • Emails
  • Events
  • Social media
  • Etc. 

Well-targeted advertising can be a cost-effective way to amplify your content and get it in front of the right people (email, too). Experts from HubSpot to marketing maven Larry Kim have some great suggestions on how to do this.

Using advertising in this way can accelerate your growth by months if not years. As one head of sales that I worked with approvingly said to me after just a few months of targeting enterprise accounts, “People are saying to me that they had to talk with us: they are seeing us everywhere.”

And this wasn’t outrageously expensive. We were spending about $5,000 a month and generating over 250,000 ad impressions/month; that’s a lot of visibility when targeted at 10,000 people in big accounts.

Of course, you can wait on inbound and SEO, but that can take a lot longer. Three years ago, Rand Fishkin wrote about the six (mostly ignored) SEO truths.

It’s only gotten worse since then.

Dan Shewan wrote about their experience at Wordstream:

“Several years.”

Don’t kid yourself that your time is free and creating content and engaging in social media isn’t costing you anything. They are. HubSpot spent tens of millions of dollars building its massive content repository.

It’s not an either/or situation: you don’t have to choose between advertising and content and inbound marketing and everything else. Use them all together to create highly effective multichannel marketing programs.

Two Types of Advertising

There are two major types of advertising: direct response ads and brand ads. They work in very different ways.

Direct response ads have an immediate effect: people buy the item, sign up for a webinar, download a white paper, etc. Usually the percentage of people seeing the ad who act is very small. Otherwise, the ads, like this one, are forgettable and immediately forgotten.

Marketo all-text search ad

There are five components to a successful direct campaign:

  • Targeting
  • Offer
  • Ad creative
  • Landing pages
  • Remarketing

You need to get all five right – and constantly test and optimize them over months — or you’ll be far less successful than you could be, or totally fail.  It’s not a task for a dabbler, or someone with just a few hundred dollars and a few weeks of time/patience.

Brand ads, on the other hand, have a weak immediate effect but since they communicate emotional messages they stay with people much longer. Over time they grow to have a greater impact than direct response ads (and they make those direct response ads more effective).

Again, Binet and Field clearly describe this via this chart.

This brand ad by VW UK targeting small business owners barely shows the product (or service, in this case), which is typical of many brand ads, but it had an 11X return on ad spend.  You don’t think that it also built trust?

And this tech ad has a similar memorability. 

Again, you don’t have to spend a ton of money to achieve this. I created this ad for a client for $500. 

It has a strong, memorable emotional message and it also had a 600% higher response rate when used in LinkedIn ads than product-led messages (which had had good response rates previously, too).

Remember: if you’re promoting a B2B offering, and many B2C ones, at any moment probably only 5% of your market is interested in buying it. One of the most important tasks of marketing is to build mental availability (the likelihood that a person will think of you when they are starting the buying process) with the other 95%, and brand ads are a proven way to do it.

Maybe in addition to building ESOV across your entire market you’re also running a targeted, account-based marketing program. Again, advertising should be part of it. Leading ABM software programs, like Demandbase, provide account-based ad management. LinkedIn makes it easy to target people by account and title, or even more precisely based on their email address.

Familiarity breeds trust and, as those enterprise prospects told that VP of sales that I was working with, if prospects have been seeing your ads for a month or more before your team starts to reach out to them, they are more likely to think, “Hmm, I’ve heard of them. Maybe I should see what they have to say.”

As Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman wrote in Thinking Fast and Slow, ““A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”

If frequent repetition can make people believe lies, just imagine how effective it can be when communicating the truth about your products.

Advertising also sends a subconscious message for startups and SMBs that you’re substantial and that you’ll be around.

Ads can increase the effectiveness of your channel program by generating leads to pass on to channel partners, providing channel partners with a way to generate leads for themselves (as I help train Acronis partners to do), and building your brand so partners have an easier job in selling you through.

So if you’re a small startup that’s bootstrapping and needs to do everything by hand, that limits your options. But when you have the budget and are ready to automate and scale, you’ll need to put significant dollars into your content program, your ads, or – ideally – both.

This classic B2B ad from the 1960s for B2B advertising neatly summarizes its impact.

1960s McGraw Hill ad for ads

You’ll remember that ad, won’t you?

Large brands spends billions of dollars a year on advertising – – P&G spends over $200M/year on ads just for Tide — and they have the tools to measure results. They’re not stupid. They wouldn’t be doing this year after year if it didn’t work. B2B companies like IBM, AWS, and Salesforce have significant ad budgets as well, and sufficient data to develop complex attribution models to optimize their marketing mix. (They provide attribution modeling tools as part of their software offerings.)

What would happen if they just stopped advertising? The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science studied this and found that when brands stop advertising, likely moving below the ESOV line, their sales drop significantly. And the smaller the brand, the more rapid the decline.

Chart showing effect of the stopping of advertising

So don’t be all doctrinaire about this, all “people hate ads.” If people hated ads that much, they wouldn’t work. People hate bad ads. Make your ads so good that people like them (probably by talking about them and their problems instead of talking about you and your product).

Size may be the biggest multiplier of marketing, but creativity is the second largest. 

Test all of the arrows in your quiver. Find out what works for you.

PS: Binet and Field are hardly the only ones with research on the efficacy of advertising, but their charts are the most attractive. If you want to do a deep dive on this topic, I suggest starting with Byron Sharp, Mark Ritson, the LinkedIn B2B Institute, and Paul Dyson, among others.

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In 2008 (12 years ago), with an update in 2013 (seven years ago), Mike Volpe, then the CMO of HubSpot, wrote, “The fundamental reason email open rate metrics are unreliable is that the metric relies on a tiny image in the email being downloaded by the person reading the email.  When this image is downloaded from the web into the person’s email reader, the software counts that email as being read.  This is the only way that anyone has been able to figure out how to track if someone opens an email, and all email marketing systems use this method.” He then notes that virtually all email clients block images by default. Ergo, it’s not reliable.

Remember: this is the CMO of a company that sells email marketing software talking. 

Digital marketers have known this for years. Many, many, many in the industry have written about it.

But the bright side is that if an email is only counted as opened if someone downloads images, “this has the implication that almost always the open rate that the system records is lower (sometimes far lower) than reality. In short, the number of people who open your message is usually greater than the people who download images and thus trigger an ‘open’ read.”

I asked a leading digital marketer, who works with dozens if not hundreds of major B2B accounts, about this and he wrote, “Big can of worms… Open w/o images became the default in email tools a few years back. That destroyed open rates as a valuable funnel measure. Email security servers also open lots of emails to check the images and links for viruses, etc. To get any value from opens, you need to eliminate the opens that happen quickly after sent/delivered. Same for clicks.”

This unreliability may explain why “benchmark” reports show wildly different open rates. For example, HubSpot consistently reports open rates (around 20%) that are about 50% higher than Constant Contact (often in the low teens).

HubSpot Sales showing over 100 opens to an email

The HubSpot Sales tool for tracking emails often reports absurd numbers of opens and clicks. 

If they know that this metric is unreliable, why do email and martech platforms report it at all? It’s helpful in understanding which topics and Subject lines are more successful.

I think that clicks are more reliable, but that may be my fantasy. This email marketing company goes into great detail to explain why both opens and clicks have become unreliable.

Personally I am comfortable with ambiguity and resigned myself to this long ago, but I know that others who want/expect hard data and one-to-one results – people with perhaps more of an engineering personality than a marketing one — won’t be happy with it.

Gartner B2B Buying Journal graphic

This Gartner’s B2B buyer’s journey graphic perfectly illustrates the challenge and why omni-channel marketing is so important. Several people are typically involved in the B2B buying decision and they may come in and/or be influenced in many different ways over many months.

Continue with that omni-channel approach and you will get leads and sales from the long tail. When you least expect it a lead will drop in and close quickly. Your long tail may produce more qualified leads than your targeted segments.

What is measurable is what really matters: conversations that lead to opportunities and deals.

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A brand is one of a company’s most valuable assets.

Some would say it’s a company’s most valuable asset. John Stuart, former CEO of the Quaker Oats Company, said, “If this business were split up, I would give you the land and bricks and mortar, and I would take the brands and trademarks, and I would fare better than you.”

Strong brands have more loyal customers, and they find it easier to close new accounts.

Strong brands can charge more.

And strong brands grow bigger and faster. 

Ten years ago, when I sold my agency, the value of its brand was a significant factor in the interest of the eventual purchaser to buy it. They kept using the brand after the acquisition, showing that the company was worth more than just its customers, tech (which they discarded for their own), employees, and SaaS recurring revenue.

Annually the brand values of the top public companies are ranked, and they are calculated to be worth tens of billions – and in a few cases hundreds of billions – of dollars. Sometimes the brand value is called “goodwill” – the value of a company beyond what can be calculated from its tangible assets.

The brand is created by more than a company’s logo, colors, and promotions. The quality of the products and customer experience are central to a brand, too.

For a private company, or one that’s not being sold, the monetary value of its brand may be difficult to define, but here are a few metrics that may be useful both to quantify it and to tell if it’s moving in the right direction:

  • Can you charge more than the competition? (And, multiplied across all sales, what is the value of that premium?)
  • What is your trend in customer lifetime value (CLV)?
  • Are direct website visits – not from search, but by typing in your known URL — to your site increasing?
  • Google Trends for your company versus competition. Here is the last five years for Amazon Web Services (AWS – the blue line), Microsoft Azure (red), and Google Cloud (yellow).
Google Trends graph
  • Increases in opportunities and sales that don’t come from short-term leadgen programs. Are potential customers contacting you more and more, or do you have to do all of the outreach?
  • Positive social media mentions
  • Your Net Promoter Score trends

There are many other ways to measure the strength of your brand, including surveys and focus groups, but these are some quick, useful ones.

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Google Ads (like the far less popular Bing ones) are very valuable for most companies because whether we’re buying for ourselves or a company, we often start by searching for information on the purchase. Google Ads get your offering in front of that very important audience: those who intend to buy soon. (Using such intent data – including but not limited to Google Ads — to improve your marketing results is the focus of Phase Two of my Bullseye Marketing framework.)

Since in many industries it’s difficult if not impossible to get your organic web pages onto the first page of Google search results (>50% of clicks happen on just the first three links there) the only way to get in front of this important audience is with search ads.

Google Ads won’t work for every company. I worked with a company that had an advanced programming tool. Their customers were technically sophisticated, and they weren’t using Google to search for tools like this. They might be asking about it in online forums. You need to go where you audience is.

You need to be careful about the keywords you use. Some will result in clicks from a broad, useless audience. But others can be very good at separating the soon-to-buy from the vaguely curious.

The components of a successful Google Ads campaign include superior:

  • Keyword selection
  • Offers
  • Ads
  • Landing Pages
  • Remarketing

Google Ads Machine Learning Solutions can help you improve your targeting, creative, bidding, attribution, and success.

A recent email/newsletter from digital marketing maven Avinash Kaushik had this story about Google Ads:

“One of my favorite Paid Search stories is of an advertiser that sold household furniture offline and online, in the Chicago area. One of the ad groups they crafted with love was for night stands. Pretty much immediately, they saw a huge spike in search traffic. Much celebration.

“Then, they checked their data and it was nearly 100% bounce rate. Much sadness.

“Then, they checked the Search Query report and found that almost all of the traffic was for one night stands. Turns out a lot of people in Chicago geographic area were looking for night stands the experience and not night stands the product.

That day they learned the value of negative keywords. :)”

You don’t want to be that advertiser!

Google Ads management requires experience; it is a very deep tool. But, used properly, it can produce great results for a company.

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Robin Robins is a leading marketing consultant for small managed service providers (MSPs) and IT services companies. She regularly runs workshops for vendors and at channel conferences and claims 8,000-plus MSP and IT services clients over the past 17 years. As a result, she says, “We have more documented success stories than any other marketing consultant in this industry, period.”

Since I, too, work with channel partners and other kinds of companies (from MIT startups to multi-billion dollar enterprises) to improve their marketing and business results, I figured I could learn a thing or two from her. So I recently sat in on her three-hour workshop at an industry conference.

She provides a lot of value to the small companies that don’t have a repeatable sales and marketing process. And I have no doubt that, if rigorously implemented, many companies could see significant sales increases, as she claims.

At the same time, she either leaves out entirely or denigrates important programs that could grow those companies even further. 

Right from the get-go Robins says on a slide that she will cover “what type of marketing is hands down the BEST for promoting and selling IT services, and which ones will waste your time and money.” (All quotes are from her slides and include her original emphasis.) And she believes that the best type is direct response marketing: running repeated direct mail (she’s hot on direct mail) and related campaigns with offers that will generate leads and produce more sales — now!

Slide with example of direct mail template

Robins provides clients with direct mail templates (that her firm will help customize), phone scripts, email templates, website templates, etc. that have been tested and refined over thousands of campaigns.

I have no disagreement with any of this. It’s exactly what I would recommend for most small companies that are just getting going with marketing (which are the types of clients that she repeatedly cites — ones with a few hundred thousand dollars in revenue who want to get into the $1-2 million-plus range). Since they have such little experience in (or faith in) marketing, and may not have a defined sales process either, this targeted account approach should be effective. And it’s important that they experience quick wins that will encourage them to stay the course.

All of that (and more) is covered in Phase One of my Bullseye Marketing approach. But she doesn’t go much beyond that. And MSPs and small IT firms will need more.

For example, in the three seconds that she mentions them, Robins lumps search ads (like on Google search) into one big “media” bucket. But search ads are fundamentally different from display ads, blog posts, YouTube videos, and other media. They have a unique power because almost all buyers today, including buyers of IT services, start with online research using (almost always) Google. By targeting ads using the right keywords, you can get in front of buyers who intend to buy soon at the very beginning of their research, and get on their shortlist of potential vendors.

Leading MSPs spend thousands of dollars a month targeting ads to people searching on such phrases as “business IT services”, “managed IT services”, and “outsource IT”, because search ads work.

Search ads are a great example of what marketers call “intent data”, which you use to identify those companies who intend to buy soon. There are other ways that companies can use intent data to identify the customers that plan to buy soon and make their marketing more efficient. And it’s critically important that they do, because 90-95% of their customers — including those receiving Robins’ direct mail pieces — are not planning to buy soon. Using intent data to accelerate sales is Phase Two of my Bullseye Marketing approach.

In Phase Three of Bullseye Marketing, you use long-term awareness and branding programs to improve your results over time.

Robins utterly dismisses this right at the beginning. On one early slide she says, “Effective Marketing for MSPs and IT Services: … It’s ACCOUNTABLE to delivering MEASURABLE RESULTS (you can’t take “branding” or “awareness” to the bank)”

That’s a pretty surprising statement from a person who has made herself a brand in the MSP world.

Branding is definitely harder for a small company to measure than a direct response campaign. But not everything important is measurable, and not everything measurable is important.

In his book Behind the Cloud, Marc Benioff, the founder and CEO of Salesforce, (and his co-author Carlye Adler) wrote: “A brand is a company’s most important asset. A company can’t ‘own’ its facts. If the company’s facts (speed, price, quality) are superior to the competition, any good competitor will duplicate them, or worse, improve upon them, as soon as possible. What a company can own, however, is a personality.”

To the degree that Robins thinks that branding is important, she thinks it is a by product of those direct response letters, calls, and emails. Well, yes, if you want your brand to be, “Are you ready to buy from us yet?” But your brand should represent more than that. 

Robins makes the mistake of what is sometimes called “marketing short termism” — that since you can measure the response to some direct response campaigns within a few weeks, those are all that you should do. But marketing research has shown that multiple direct response campaigns do not, in the long run, produce the same impact as branding campaigns — even though those branding campaigns may take two years or more to hit peak effectiveness.

This is the way that a study of 1,000 award-winning campaigns represented the difference, with the yellow line showing the quick, short-term hits from direct response campaigns and the purple one the gradual but longer-term impact of branding programs.

Robins actually has it backwards: direct response programs don’t significantly build your brand, but a strong brand makes direct response programs more effective. Are you more likely to open a letter or email, or take a call, or click on a link, from a company that you know and respect, or one that you’ve never heard of?

This classic ad from the 1960s make this point brilliantly:

Ad promoting brand campaigns

Have you ever heard of AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Cisco, Samsung, Salesforce? Strong brands have more loyal customers, and they find it easier to close new accounts.

Strong brands can charge more.

And strong brands grow bigger and faster. 

The generic direct mail, web, landing page, and other templates that Robins provides — like the one above — simply don’t help reinforce the individual company’s brand, even if the copy is customized. At my first agency we did millions of dollars of marketing work for IBM. They had a 120-page visual brand guide explaining how to use their logo, fonts, colors, and so forth that we had to use. (Well, except for that one IBM marketing director who said, “Please just make it any color except blue. I am so sick of blue.”)

Small companies don’t need a 120-page brand guide, but they should have brand standards that they stick to. The whole point of using those visual brand elements over and over and over again for years is so that people will ultimately think, “Oh, that’s X company again” everytime that they see them. Every little bit helps.

All those companies that sponsor the conferences where Robins speaks aren’t idiots, or just being nice. And neither are the companies that spend billions to put their logos on baseball fields, NASCAR cars, and branding TV ads. They’re building their brands.

And even small companies can build strong brands over time if they focus on narrow geographies and industries, as Robins wisely counsels them to do. I’ve done it, and experienced how valuable that brand equity is when the owners decide to sell.

The other area where I strongly disagree with Robins is when she says, “Fact: Given NO OTHER Logical Reason Upon Which To Base Their Decision, Prospects Will Always Default to Buying On Price.”

No, no, no.

People don’t buy with logic. Even B2B buyers buy with emotion and justify with logic. And for B2B buyers the strongest emotion is often the trustworthiness and reliability of the vendor. And that’s where brand comes in again.

Of course, Robins knows that business decision makers buy on emotion. At the end of her workshop she shifts into pure sales mode. She outlined a set of seven offerings worth $15,900.50. BUT if you act now, you can get it for $4,759, or six low, low payments of just $809/month.

That’s not an appeal to logic. That’s an appeal to the “I can get a bargain” monkey brain. (And it’s pretty ironic since at the beginning of her workshop Robins said that she would show the attendees “How to get paid what you’re worth without discounting, making concessions or a lot of ‘convincing’”.)

So Robins offers a valuable service for small companies that don’t yet have a systematic marketing and sales program. And if they are diligent about implementing it, they are likely to see good results. But companies should take advantage of the wider marketing universe beyond Robins’ direct response solar system. After a while they will need more. And that’s where Phases Two and Three of my Bullseye Marketing approach come into play, and our services to enable the channel partners of companies. 

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Whatever you think of Greta Thunberg, this tweet says it all:

Tweet showing Greta Thunberg a year ago sitting alone, and huge crowd now

A year ago she was sitting alone outside of the Swedish parliament, and by last Friday millions of students were answering her call to strike for climate action. This could not have happened without social media (which is then picked up and amplified greatly by traditional media). Wikipedia describes it like this: “Thunberg posted her original strike photo on Instagram and Twitter and other social media accounts quickly took up her cause. According to Ingmar Rentzhog, founder of a Swedish climate-focused social media company, We Don’t Have Time (WDHT), her strike began attracting public attention after he turned up with a freelance photographer and then posted Thunberg’s photograph on his Facebook page and Instagram account. He also made a video in English that he posted on the company’s YouTube channel that had almost 88,000 views. A representative of the Finnish bank, Nordea, quoted one of Thunberg’s tweets to more than 200,000 followers. Thunberg’s social media profile attracted local reporters whose stories earned international coverage in little more than a week.”

Maybe only one in a million (or less) posts go viral, and planning on virality is not a strategy, but when it does happen – wow.

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Four years ago Volkswagen was caught with more than its hand in the cookie jar – it had been faking emission tests on its diesel vehicles for years. People who thought that they were driving clean cars found out it was just the opposite.

The company pled guilty to felony charges, costing it tens of billions of dollars and untold damage to its brand. In a rising market, VW’s stock price dropped from $27 to $10 a share.

A few feel good commercials, like Wells Fargo and other corporate miscreants have run, isn’t going to be enough. But time and a new, all-electric van…? Well, maybe.

This summer VW announced that it was working on an all-electric relaunch of its famous van. The commercial even acknowledges the company’s past crimes.

Actions speak louder than words. The new van won’t be available until 2022, so we’ll see. But that could turn around the brand far better than a few commercials.

PS: Reader Dan Greenberg responded to this piece. He notes that this is not just an advertising strategy, it is the tip of a complete re-orientation of VW’s line to ultimately being all-electric. He wrote me, “It is, in fact, one of the boldest strategic shifts of a large company ever. They are taking the opportunity – and I think they see it as an opportunity – to shift the company from diesel (which is a dying market as European cities and other places outlaw it) to electric.” They will have 20-some models coming out over the next several years, and their Porsche subsidiary has a Taycan sports car that can go 0 to 60 in 2.6 seconds

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It’s not just a chicken sandwich

Lots of fast food chains have chicken sandwiches: McDonald’s, Burger King – Chick-fil-A is built on them. So how does a new chicken sandwich from the Cajun fast food chain Popeyes get so much attention?

They introduced this big boy on August 12, anticipating demand with enough inventory through September. But by last week it was sold out everywhere, and Popeyes was promising to restock asap.

Popeyes chicken sandwich

Apparently much of the interest was generated on social media, fueled significantly by competing brands poo-pooing the new category entrant starting around August 19 (Popeye’s must be grateful!). 

It gained a lot of attention on Black Twitter.

Facebook post about the sandwich

And celebrity chefs chimed in.

Emeril Lagasse tweet about the sandwich

Ultimately, with lines around the block and Sold Out signed on Popeye’s doors, the traditional media picked up on the story, too.

Reporter tweeting about long lines

But the real demand was created via social media. If they anticipated for six week’s of purchases and it sold out in two, that means it was roughly 3X more popular than anticipated.  A late summer viral explosion could do that for a small brand.

As Mary Tyler Moore (younger readers: she was an actress who was very popular in the 1960s-80s) once said, “We can only do our best work. Then it’s up to the public whether they like it or not.”

***

PS: Anytime a company gets involved in a matter of politics or social policy, even with the best intentions, it can run into some controversy, as this tweet illustrates:

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Painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware River

Companies and successful entrepreneurs often promote their founding stories to the level of myth:

  • Bill Hewlett and David Packard in the first Silicon Valley garage
  • Sam Walton’s first 5&10 in Bentonville, AK, and his first Walmart a few years later
  • Oprah Winfrey rising up from poverty, attending Tennessee State University on a full scholarship won in a high school speech competition, and in Chicago quickly taking down Phil Donahue as the top rated talk show. She was on her way to becoming a billionaire.

Founding myths are best when they involve rising up from little or nothing.

These stories are very important because people remember stories far more than facts, and they typically include the unique values of the founder that led to success. The Walmart story says, “Sam’s competitors thought his idea that a successful business could be built around offering lower prices and great service would never work…”

As we prepare to celebrate our nation’s birthday, we are also celebrating our founding myth and values which are embodied in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…”

We had a small, ragtag army that rose up and defeated the most powerful empire in the world. As they sing in “Hamilton,”: The world turned upside down.

Of course, the young nation hardly lived up to these words initially. Several hundred thousand black people may have been created equal but in 1776 they were held as slaves. Only white, male land owners could vote and had full rights.

But the direction of the country over the past 243 years has been to make those founding values real by emancipating slaves, expanding voting rights, and providing additional rights as the understanding among liberal democracies of what those should entail has expanded. .

The USA has done many great things. A friend was recently vacationing in Croatia and a person said to him, “You liberated us twice. You didn’t need to do that, but you did.” And we’ve done some not so great things.

But our founding myth has been an inspiration to people all over the world. In 1945, when Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence, he started his declaration with, “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.”

There are now many democracies, but we are the only major country with this kind of founding myth and document, and these values continue to inspire people all over the world.

Happy birthday! And may all of your stories be inspirational.

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When you create a great white paper, infographic, video, etc., the reach of your network through emails, social media, your website traffic, and so on may not be enough to take full advantage of it. That’s where content syndication comes in.

Content syndication is a method to get your content on other sites, such as as a guest blog post. But in my experience, based on having written guest blog posts for many leading business/marketing sites, only about 2% of the people who read your post there will click through to your site.

To get better results, and to generate useful leads, you may need to use a paid content syndication campaign.

The first step is to create the content that your target audience would be interested in. If you sell to an expert B2B market, you may need an advanced level white paper. To reach an entry level consumer, though, a basic guide or configurator may be more appropriate.

The sites and services that you use to syndicate your content will, of course, be totally different depending on your industry. But once you figure out which sites and services to use, you can investigate their services.

The worst is something like Outbrain (which I mistyped as “Outbrand”, but that may be more accurate) which shows links to those terrible, spammy articles at the end of many online news stories. But some of the best publishers in the world have their own content industry-specific syndication programs that you can use to reach an audience with your high value content. This may be done through online ads tied to appropriate site content, emails, or even teleprospecting.

For advanced programs, you can ask people a question before they’re allowed to download your content, making it even more likely that the downloads that you’re paying for are qualified leads.

Key to success is having a sales team ready to jump on these new leads as soon as you get them. A two-week old lead is dead; no one will remember downloading your content then. You must act quickly to be successful.

This may sound a bit general, but that’s only because how you execute a content syndication lead generation program can vary so much from company to company and industry to industry. Working out the specifics for your company is where your marketing team, agency, and/or consultant come in.