If you don’t know who Gary Vaynerchuck is yet, you will soon – because he’ll tell you. The boldly self-assertive businessman who preaches hard work and shameless self-promotion became an online entrepreneurial success and is now sharing his best marketing strategies with the world.
What’s so special about Gary Vee (his abbreviated alias), you may ask? Born into a poverty stricken family in a small former Soviet Union town, Gary arrived in the USA unable to speak a word of English and with no other choice but to work really, really hard. After making it to college, Gary discovered the Internet and rapidly catapulted his parents’ small wine store from a $3 million to a $45 million business – which was only his first step into a prolific career of online entrepreneurship. Today, he is the owner of the hugely successful digital media agency VaynerMedia, three-time New York Times best-selling author, renowned motivational speaker, angel investor and venture capitalist. Gary Vaynerchuk is someone whose marketing strategies you may want to pay attention to.
Walking the Walk
There are a number of marketing strategies that Gary Vee has referenced in his talks and blog posts, many of which brands can learn from. We’ve put together what we believe to be his top four mantras for marketing success.
1. Bet on your strengths
This is a piece of entrepreneurial motivation that can apply to anyone: focus on your strengths and ignore the rest. Gary Vaynerchuk admits that he is bad at “99% of things” but focuses his time and attention on the one thing he is good at in order to achieve success. It goes without saying that everyone has different strengths, and Gary urges audiences not to mimic exactly what he does, or what the fashion is, or what Steve Jobs did, but to find your own niche.
2. Stay active and engaged
Gary promotes engagement through The #AskGaryVee Show on YouTube, where he answers questions about marketing, social media and entrepreneurship directed at him on his blog, Facebook and Twitter accounts. Maintaining online activity and engagement are marketing strategies that develop a loyal fan base and promote brand awareness.
Posting content on blogs, vlogs, and social media networks is obviously vital and ensuring that you are interacting with audiences and followers is just as important. Don’t sacrifice your content just because it’s the weekend or the festive season. With Meltwater’s social media monitoring tools and engagement platform you can create social media calendars and plan your posts in advance.
3. Focus on context
Adding to Bill Gates’ “Content is King”, Gary declares, “but Context is God”. Great content is wasted if it is not presented in the appropriate context. Contextualisation means respecting the platform and the audience – this means understanding, for instance, that a woman on Pinterest may be looking to shop, while on Facebook she may be wanting to catch up with her world, and therefore using different marketing strategies on these different platforms. Focus on context and your content’s efficacy will improve as a consequence.
This doesn’t mean blindly creating an account on every social media platform. It means an even more in-depth analysis of where your consumer’s attention is. For instance, Facebook is the most used social media app in South Africa with 14 million users but is considered outdated by fourteen-year-olds because their parents are on it, and are signing up to Snapchat and Musical.ly instead. Focusing on consumer attention and marketing for the year you are in means understanding the demographics of your market and monitoring current conversations and trends.
4. Follow Consumer Attention
It’s now 2017 and consumers have too much choice, limited time, and are growing tired of hearing the same thing. To stand out, one has to keep up. Winning the Attention War means marketing for the year you are in and not throwing money into South African marketing campaigns that have failed to demonstrate results.
To illustrate our point, we’ll use the example of social media and television marketing strategies. Television commercials are becoming increasingly outdated on account of fast-forwarded advertisements, as well as the phenomenon of “second-screening” (using one’s phone while watching TV). Further to this, Markerters can no longer count on product placements in the checkout aisle – shoppers are too busy scrolling from news feed to news feed. To successfully market yourself this year means grabbing consumer attention by going to where consumers are – their smartphones – and demanding their attention. Gary Vaynerchuk did so by introducing himself to the world via YouTube, and has since developed a healthy following of 1,37 million Twitter followers. Consumer attention is constantly changing – change with it.
“The brands that connect with clients in a real way will win.” – Gary Vaynerchuk.
To discover where your consumer’s attention is, contact the Meltwater team.
