“How many of you are addicted to crack cocaine?” Mandalay Entertainment Group CEO and Chairman Peter Guber asked the audience at the Experian Marketing Services Client Summit in Las Vegas.
While no one raised a hand, everyone agreed that they all do share one common vice: their smartphones. In fact, we check our devices up to 270 times a day, which make them a top-notch gateway to spur interactivity between a brand and its customers—if utilized the right way.
A successful call-to-action is part strategy, part magic, says Guber. If marketers want to sell their product, they have to truly believe in it—otherwise potential buyers will see right through their bag of tricks.
“Success is really measured by the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm,” said Guber, quoting Winston Churchill. “The more you can handle failure and the possibility of failure, the more you’ll achieve success.”
But success means different things to different people. For example, success for a five-year-old child may mean not peeing in their pants while success for a 16-year-old teen may mean obtaining the coveted driver’s license, said Guber, who despite a long résumé of career successes—he’s owner of NBA team the Golden State Warriors, co-owner of MLB team the Los Angeles Dodgers, an entertainment and media analyst for Fox Business News, and a published author—has seen his fair share of failures, too, and even the occasional movie flop. “Even when it was shown on planes, people tried to walk out,” he quipped.
For marketers, success is getting people to act on a call-to-action, which Guber says can be achieved by creating emotional experiences that resonate and lead not just to purchases, but to evangelism for the brand.
All it takes, says Guber, is a little bit of “M.A.G.I.C.”
Motivate: “You have to let your coherence and congruence shine through…because you’re trying to get that person to do something,” Guber said. “If you’re not motivated internally, you are inauthentic. If you’re inauthentic you can’t move their feet, their wallet, and certainly not their heart.”
Audience: Marketers throw around the terms “customer,” “client,” and “consumer” so loosely that they can forget that they’re talking about real people, said Guber. Authentic connections come from truly communicating with an audience rather than just contacting people routinely.
Goal: If marketers aren’t transparent with their audience about what their goals are, and don’t take pride in those goals, they can give the impression that they’ve got something up their sleeve. Once an audience suspects that a marketer’s motives are all an act, their trust can quickly disappear.
“You lose all trust,” Guber said. “[And] relationships trump transactions.”
Interactivity: By listening, engaging, and encouraging people to participate, marketers can give their audience the unique, emotional experience they crave.
“You have to turn them into participants because that’s what they want,” Guber said. “If you don’t do that, you’ll never get them to metabolize your call-to-action.”
Content: While Guber says the first four M.A.G.I.C. tricks don’t require an ounce of storytelling, the grand finale, content, relies on it heavily. The best story a marketer can tell is a personal one—something their audience can relate to. Guber recommends observing audience members and coworkers to “hijack” stories.
Listening—and then embedding relevant information into content offerings—is the “secret sauce” of content marketing, Guber says.
