All Change Again!

On a week where there are three big changes happening, I’m wondering how well we cope with change even though really, there is nothing but change in business and in marketing particularly.

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Clicks And Leads is a “tongue in cheek” digital marketing Vzine by entrepreneur, author, podcaster, speaker, Nicola Cairncross.

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Welcome back, it’s Nicola here with the weekly Vzine, and it’s a bit of a funny time of the evening, light-wise this evening, so my camera keeps making alarming, flashing signals at me but hopefully you can see me well enough. It’s pretty well-lit in here.

I wanted to talk to you this week about change, and that’s what I’m going to be covering in the middle section. It’s got quite, quite cool here in Greece, and I understand it’s even colder in the UK where I’m coming back to in a couple of weeks.

But here we are still able, in the sunshine, in the daytime, to sit out in a T-shirt and, indeed, if you go out in a jumper, you really seriously suffer. So everyone has to wear layers out here at the moment because you never know what’s going to happen.

And the fire’s going behind me. That’s the wood-burning stove, so I’ve been out hauling wood today. Basically, they deliver it in a big pile and they dump it in your driveway and then you have to move it to where you want. But it’s good aerobic exercise, so I’ve obviously got my gardening gloves as well because you never know what critters might be living in the bits of wood.

So, yeah, it’s quite a nice ritual at this time of the evening to get the fire going. I really enjoy that, and I think if ever I came back to the UK, I would definitely get a wood-burning stove or something similar because they’re really efficient and they’re really cosy.

Let’s stop me wittering on about the weather and crack on with the show, shall we?

Today I want to talk to you about change

It’s a topic that’s come up a lot over the last couple of days because I have been talking to my son, Nelson and daughter, Phoebe, and they are moving out of their dad’s flat, which is a big change.

They’ve managed to find something together, which I’m really pleased about and they’re going to be doing that either between Christmas New Year, or just after the holiday period, finishes. Not before the 5th of January, I hope, because that’s where I’m going to be until then, so it’d be great to spend as much time as possible with them.

And, yeah, the other reason we’ve been talking about change actually made me feel a bit weepy, to be honest, because it’s a big deal. They’re growing up, and that means although they’ll always be my babies, they’re going to be a bit more independent babies now.

And the other reason I want to talk about change was because I’ve been watching the Social Media Examiner series where they’re talking about what is going on with Facebook Video because they’re finding that their videos are doing much, much better on YouTube where people are watching them through to 60, 70 percent and not as many people watching them, but watching them for longer.

Whereas on Facebook, Facebook are reporting lots of people are watching, but when you actually look at the percentage of people who drop off, it’s mostly people drop off after the first sort of 30 seconds or so, so that isn’t good, is it?

So what to do about Facebook marketing?

What to do about video marketing? Whether you need to change your strategy depending on whether you’ve been using the strategy I’ve been using, which is where you create an audience out of people who watch through to 50%.

Now, arguably, if you’ve got 10,000 people viewing the thing, and 90% of them drop off in the first 30 seconds, you’re still left with a good number of people who are watching your video through to 50%. And those are the people you really want to reach, so that’s where you put your retargeting efforts.

The other thing is they’ve decided that they’re going to pull all their long-form Facebook advertising and put it onto YouTube.

So you’ve got to keep agile in this world. Marketing changes all the time, and it’s never changed so quickly. So you have to keep up, and you have to be ready to adapt, and you have to change the way you do things, and people don’t like that.

I don’t like it particularly when things change. I don’t mind so much when it’s business as when it’s personal, but you’ve got to be ready to change your strategy.

I mean, I review mine every week. In the weekly Clicks And Leads Academy call this week, we were talking about all the different businesses that I’m mentoring and how each one of those is different depending on the market segment they’re serving, or even the vertical they’re in.

For example, one of them’s working with women in corporate lives, one of them is a LinkedIn expert, one of them’s a PR expert, and another lady is mentoring businesses, but only those who are managing directors in the construction industry.

So each of those different types of business verticals need different marketing plans because they’re all very different people, those kind of people.

You’ve got to be ready to change your strategy, especially if you’re mentoring. I have to be ready to jump from one kind of market and one kind of type of person that my client wants to market to, to the next one quite quickly, and keep on my toes. And I really quite enjoy that; it keeps my brain agile.

What can you do this week to keep up with all the changes?

Lots of changes on LinkedIn this week. Apparently, LinkedIn Video is doing better over there because they really want to push the content.

And I’m changing the way I do things at LinkedIn because I want to get rid of all the people I don’t know from my contacts and make my timeline, my feed, more enjoyable by seeing people I know sharing content and see what they’re up to, rather than just seeing a whole stream of people who I don’t know. I’m doing that as a result of some of the advice my LinkedIn expert client gave me the other day.

So you’ve got to get ready to change. Everything changes all the time. Try not to resist change. Try not to let it make you feel a bit sad like I felt last night. Try and differentiate – is this a business change or is this a personal change? And how can I roll with it and roll with the punches, as they say, rather than getting steamrollered or bamboozled by change?

Hope that helps.

Okay, so we’d better wrap this up before it gets any darker. So on the blog this week, among many other one-minute videos, I’m covering three hotel marketing tips. So you’ll find that interesting if you’re in the hospitality industry.

If anyone sees them and wants to pass it on to the General Manager of The Grand Hotel in Brighton, then I actually did make those videos specifically for The Grand, so do pass them on.

On the blog, last week’s Vzine, episode 78, I’m talking about what is the alternative to moaning and griping. And I go into that in quite some detail because I learned a little while ago, well, quite a while ago now, there’s absolutely no point in moaning because the only people who want to listen to that, well, nobody wants to listen to it, to be quite frank, and actually, it just brings you down further. So it’s much better to have a bit of a cut-off time.

Go and watch it, I make some suggestions for how you can stop yourself moaning and groaning. We do have a little social club out here for the men called Moan and Groan, funnily enough.

Okay, interesting one on the podcast this week. We talked about; Does Your Schedule Reflect Your Values? And that was a really interesting conversation Judith and I had where we examined our own schedules and our own values, and saw if they match up.

Because a lot of people say they want to do things, but then they don’t actually make time for them, do they? Or they don’t schedule time in their diary to do it.

It’s like I keep saying, I’m a science fiction writer, but I’m not actually doing much of that writing right now, although I’m talking about it quite a lot. It’s a good example of how my values are not matching my schedule.

So I have got a writing course booked in January, I’m allowing six weeks quite intense time for writing in January. I’ll see if I can get anything done over Christmas as well because I keep saying that’s what I’m going to be doing, so let’s see if I can stick to my own schedule, shall we?

Speak to you soon, bye.

Creative Direction & Video Editing
Phoebe Soremekun

Intro Music
Pool Cosby

Incidental Music
[No Copyright Music] Journey Home – Day 7
[No Copyright Music] Fresh Start – Joakim Karud
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Drone footage of The Mani
Georgios Ser-Aouas

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