With skyrocketing gas prices in the US people seem to be doing what they can to save a little gas here and there. My wife and I are hopping on our bikes for grocery runs and walking to the nearby coffee shop. Returning to good, wholesome basics is what we’re doing. Stuff we should be doing no matter what the cost of gas!
It’s funny but that seems to be the lesson we all need. In times of economic uncertainly people tend to refocus on blocking and tackling, doing the basic stuff you should always do. When the market is rockin and gas is cheap it’s easy to get lazy. Let calls go unreturned, let relationships drift, let the blog posting wither, chase the next new thing.
The best thing about a slow market is that it slaps you upside the head and forces you get back to basics.
So, instead of focusing on the external circumstances beyond your control turn your focus to the internal realities within your grasp. Hug your customers!
And. . . go pump up the tires on your bike.
Seriously, my friend Andy Sernovitz did write a great book called Word of Mouth Marketing.
Now he’s hosting a small-group word of mouth marketing seminar. Usually he only does private training for companies at a very large price, so this is a rare chance for 50 people to get the best introduction to word of mouth that there is.
Word of Mouth Marketing Crash Course - Chicago, July 30th
I’ve arranged for a $250 discount for my readers. Use code “weloveducttapemarketing” when you register. - http://events.gaspedal.com
Andy promises you will learn a repeatable, proven marketing framework that is easy to execute, affordable, and provides measurable results within 60 days.
I wonder if you could help me an experiment by answering the following in comments.
1) What’s the hardest part about marketing for you?
2) What’s the easiest part about marketing for you?
I’m curious how often the same thing will be one for some and the other for another.
I’ll go first
Hardest - 1) Remembering it’s always about the money
Easiest - 2) Remembering it’s never about the money
Not as simple as it seem perhaps.
My monthly expert interview series continues in July with a live session with David Meerman Scott on Wednesday, July 16th Noon CDT.
David is an online thought leadership and viral marketing strategist and author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing and online media to reach your buyers directly.
David never fails to add valuable insights the world of marketing online. - Enroll here
If you missed it, last month’s guest was Michael Port, author of Book Yourself Solid - listen to all the archives here.
Tom Wilson, Executive Director of AT&T’s Small Business Group, is my guest this week on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast.
I’m a big fan of technology for the small business because I think it’s one of the great ways to level the playing field. In this show we spend time talking about tools the small business owners and sales folks can use to keep working even when they are on the go and out of the office.
The ability to respond to customers and prospects and do it from anywhere is a true competitive advantage. Enabling your staff to work from anywhere is quickly becoming an expectation.
Given my guest for this show the tools we discuss are obviously AT&T centric, but the concepts, important as they are, apply no matter the brand.
The phone or handset or minitop or communication portal, whatever we end up calling it, is certainly moving towards becoming the lifeline for the entrepreneur on the go.
So, what are your favorite tools for staying on the go and getting work done?
I am doing an interview today with a journalist writing a story about entrepreneurial cities.
You’ve probably seen these kinds of articles before, but to me this is such a tough question. What’s the best place to be an entrepreneur? Most of these types of polls take a look at tangible things like access to capital, learning resources, mentoring facilities, focused government programs and the presence of universities and incubators.
While I think these tangible assets are indeed important, there’s another very large factor that I’ve found as I travel around the globe speaking to groups of entrepreneurs. It’s something I can only classify as a vibe. What I have found in some cities is the entrepreneurs there simply love running a business, are passionate about learning how to do it better, and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. For these folks this is not a job and they are willing to come together and support each other in that mission.
I’m not sure how to bottle that and tell you why it exists, it’s like telling you that in some cities entrepreneurs just seem happier, but that’s my experience.
Recently I’ve found this to be the case in Boston, Austin, San Diego, Phoenix, and Portland.
So my two question to you today are:
1) What cities are great for entrepreneurs?
2) What makes a city great for entrepreneurs?
Maybe you’ve heard of this term that some marketers use called “Lifetime Value.” The idea is to calculate what a customer might be worth over the course of doing business with you perhaps for years as opposed to a single transaction. The determination of this number might change the way you look at how much you are willing to invest to get each new customer.
For businesses that can offer a customer multiple transactions over time this is a significant concept. For businesses such home remodelers, who might only work with a customer once in their lifetime, this might not seem to matter.
Here’s my take. The lifetime value of every single customer is unlimited when you factor in a customer’s ability to make referrals. A logically and emotionally satisfied single transaction customer might be a source of business for years. In fact, I’ve personally witnessed a single customer send substantial amounts of business to a customer of mine over a ten year period.
So how can this concept inform your marketing approach? In a way you could take this concept to the extreme and actually give away your products and services to customers, make certain they are thrilled, set the expectation for referrals and never have to go looking for business again. Could you target customers with significant referral capabilities and test this?
Interesting concept, now how can you apply it?
There are really only four ways to grow a business – Get more leads, close more deals, increase your average transaction or add products and services to your offerings. Of the lot, trying to generate increasing numbers of leads is the most expensive.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that you drop your lead generation efforts, I’m simply advising you to give more real focus and effort to the other three first.
In other words – fix your message, fix your follow through, and fix your hourglass. Do that and you might actually find that you can grow your business while decreasing the number of leads you need to in order do so. Too often a lone fixation on lead generation for growth can attract the wrong kind of prospect and run your resources dry while you chase your tail looking for the next live one.
In most cases, the easiest thing to impact in a small business is lead conversion. By creating a truly systematic way to present, follow-up, transact and thrill your customers and prospects you can almost certainly expect to do substantially more business with the amount of leads you currently generate
With a message that communicates how remarkably unique your business is, targeted at a narrowly defined ideal prospect, price pressure goes out the window. Find you message, raise your prices and grow through increased average dollar per sale.
I use an hourglass image to illustrate the idea that every customer that comes into your funnel and squeezes through that small part to become a customer needs to immediately go into another expanded set of offerings (the bottom widening part of the hourglass) that includes complimentary products or services, introductions to strategic alliances and an acute focus on referral generation – that’s how you build real growth momentum.
So, fix your message, fix your follow through, and fix your hourglass first, figure out how to get bigger this way, and then turn the lead generation tap and prepare to witness a flood of growth.
As frequent readers of this blog know I am building an army of Duct Tape Marketing coaches in an effort to take the message that marketing can be simple, effective and affordable to the legions of small business owners out there trying to grow their companies.
I have to tell you that I am personally very proud of the group of business professionals that have been attracted to this opportunity so I thought I would introduce you to a bunch of them by way of their blogs. (What you didn’t think my coaches would have blogs?)
Go check out this great group of marketing and small business related blogs.
This article on the AP wire is such a good reminder - mid year financial check-ups
The grade school my kids went to used to celebrate 1/2 birthdays - the 6 month date between one birthday and the next - why not celebrate 1/2 vision day for your business.
So, you sat around the fireplace in late December 2007 and made a list of goals, right? July 1 is such a great date to take a look at just how well you are doing. It’s also a great time to create some new goals, realign unrealistic goals, and create a list of action steps that will point you towards realizing your current vision for your business. While you’re at it make sure you work on personal, business, strategic and tactical goals all at the same time - there is no such thing as life/work balance - it’s just all about vision and having fun.
Oh, and don’t forget - marketing is a habit - do it every day, week, month, quarter and do it passionately.
I’m not really that fascinated with Facebook but many of my readers are so here’s a hack that someone noticed I was doing and they asked me how so figured maybe others wanted to know as well.
Each time I write a new blog post it automatically changes my status in Facebook to something like: John New blog post: The Perfect Referral Motivation http://tinyurl.com/5lzajj- 3 hours ago. The link is a link back to the last post I wrote. All of my FB friends get to see this status update in one way or another depending on how they monitor things and each post gets some traffic from Facebook.
The key to making this work for me is a bit of duct tape automation. As always, I’m sure there are multiple ways to get this done, but here’s mine.
I do it using Twitter as a go between - I use a WordPress blog and have a plug in called Twitter Tools that publishes a tweet to Twitter with each new blog post with the title and a tinyURL back to the post. (Ooh side bonus, it updates my Twitter account and my Twitter followers get the notice too.) Then I use the Twitter Facebook application to post my tweets to automatically update my status on Facebook and send a status update to all my FB friends.
Do you want to know the best way to motivate referral sources? Well, perhaps you’ve guessed it’s not money or for that matter direct compensation of any form. There will certainly be exceptions to this, but the perfect referral motivation is to tap our deep seated human need for community. People get great pleasure from offering help and knowing they can be called upon as a source of reliable information.
When referral sources are motivated, intentionally or unintentionally, out of a desire to help, they will often go to great lengths to do so. On the other hand, when the motivation is monetary, they will view it as market transaction and the motivation is often significantly lower or certainly different - ranging from indifference to distaste depending upon the industry.
In a fabulous book, Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, the author conducts numerous experiments around the idea of social vs. market norms that shed some very tangible proof on this idea. (Dan will appear on an upcoming episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast.)
As Margaret Clark, Judson Mills, and Alan Fiske suggested a long time ago, the answer is that we live simultaneously in two different worlds-one where social norms prevail, and the other where market norms make the rules. The social norms include the friendly requests that people make of one another. Could you help me move this couch? Could you help me change this tire? Social norms are wrapped up in our social nature and our need for community.
The second world, the one governed by market norms, is very different. There’s nothing warm and fuzzy about it. The exchanges are sharp- edged: wages, prices, rents, interest, and costs- and- benefits.
So, as a marketer I believe the message is this - can you design a referral program that taps into people’s desire to help? Can you give them, in a systematic way, the ability to use their influence to add value to the relationship they have with you or with their network?
Well, yes, and here’s the simplest way to do that - give without keeping score. Make referrals, make people thrilled, make time to help others get what they want and they will be motivated beyond belief to help you get the same.
When blogging first got going the idea of writing a blog post and then pinging the RSS and blog directories to notify them of your update was standard operating procedure. Fact is, it still is, but it’s become automated by services like Feedburner.
Now that social networks like Facebook have begun to enter the small business mainstream, users are looking for practical ways to extend their conversations and open up new access points through the many features and functions available. Part of the trouble with this is that it can be a bit overwhelming. The cool thing about Facebook is that it can do so much. However, lots of choices can also lead to paralysis for the newcomer.
One very simple and powerful way to get more mileage out of your Facebook presence is to note and tag. (The blog and ping equivalent) There is a default Facebook application simply called Notes that is terribly underutilized. The Notes application allows you to write a note. There’s nothing too sexy about that, right? Here’s where I think it gets interesting. You can also automatically create notes using any RSS feed. So, if you have a blog (please tell me you do) you can republish your blog content right into your Facebook notes application. (Of course you can also add a delicious feed or a custom RSS news feed of any sort.) This does several things. You get automatic content creation for your new outreach and your profile gets updated with every new blog post or note. In addition, Facebook friends can comment on the notes much as they might on your regular blog posts.
One of the core marketing strategic objectives of social networks is to expand your reach and open up new avenues of networking. Adding tagging to the above Notes strategy really helps this objective along. Once you post a note you can tag anyone on your friend list in the note. This causes them to get a notification that they were tagged in a note and it posts the fact that they were tagged into their profile for all their Facebook friends to see. Now, first the disclaimer: Don’t use this as a way to spam your friend list. Write legitimate blog posts and notes that have some relevant or direct mention of your friend and then tag them. Pointing to their blogs posts or media mentions of them and writing a note is a fine use of this tactic. (Tagging photos and videos in this manner has the same impact)
Of course one of the keys to making this work is that you have people in your network that you have reason to tag in a blog post or note. Reach out to journalists, authors, speakers, and other industry and hi profile folks and send them friend requests so that you can utilize this powerful feature. They won’t all accept, but many will and if you then start utilizing this practice in a sincere and meaningful way you will find that your network will begin to respond to your communications. If you’ve been holding back because you didn’t know why you would do this, now you do.
By the way, here’s my Facebook profile, send me a request if you would like to get started. Of course, then you can write a blog post mentioning some brilliant marketing point I made and then well, tag me in your post on the Notes application. You know, just as an example!
Cash flow and marketing are attached at the proverbial hip - Marketing is all about growing your business, but quite often, even when things are rocking along, you can’t grow your business without effective cash flow planning.
When the economy make a move towards uncertainty, fully understanding the relationship between strong cash flow and strong marketing becomes even more crucial.
Join me Tuesday, June 24 at 4pm CDT as I host Cash Flow - the Lifeblood of America’s Small Businesses. How to Manage Through Times of Economic Uncertainty with the help of Raymond Joabar, Senior Vice President of Lending and Network Development for OPEN - Sign up here
We will discuss cash flow planning, cash flow pitfalls, smart growth, maximizing cash flow, and how to effectively measure cash flow. I promise to make this seemingly boring topic engaging!
This free webinar is brought to you by OPEN from American Express®
Charlene Li, senior analyst with Forrester, stopped by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast to discuss social media and her new book, co-authored with Josh Bernoff, Groundswell.
Much of Li’s work at Forrester is in working with very large organizations to help them understand how to use social media, but the funny thing is that most if not all of what is contained in the book applies to small businesses as well. In fact, big companies are actually diving head first into social media in a bit of an attempt to look and feel smaller.
Make no mistake, the Groundswell that Li and Bernoff cover in this book is not a passing trend, it’s a reality.
As a small business owner the only really tough question is not what or how, it’s why. Understand what practical objective you want to achieve (Groundswell covers many) and then pick that one objective and apply the appropriate tool - it’s that simple. Don’t try to do it all - do one thing in social marketing and then move on to the next. (See: Hierarchy of Social Marketing)
In case you’re wondering (and I’m sure I’ll still here from some of my VA readers) that’s not a typo in the title - I’m trying to create a new word by running guess and projection together to illustrate a point that alludes most of the business owners I’ve worked with over the years.
I believe that there is real power in revenue projections for the small business, even if you feel like all you are doing is guessing. But, no one in ten business owners I talk to takes the time to project the furture. Instead they go out there and see what happens week to week and then add it up at tax time.
Projections, particularly aggressive ones, are like goals. If you set a goal, even if you don’t really have a clear idea of how you are going to reach it, you often start doing things that make the seed of the idea come about. It’s just the way the universe works. (It’s not hoping or praying, it’s intention and attention)
So, use this to your advantage and create an annual revenue plan right now. Don’t look at this as a financial statement requirement (although banks love them when they loan money) start to think of this as marketing goal setting and give your goal the focus it deserves by also tracking how you are doing on a weekly or monthly basis. Big companies use something called a Gap analysis to measure the gap between all kinds of things - budgets, revenues, brand awareness. You can do the same thing with your revenue projections. Our goal - our reality this month = the gap (or the bridge). This is a simple way to turn this often intimidating set of tools into a game.
I could give you post after post about all the wonderful things you should have in a marketing plan, but if you don’t first have some “where am I trying to get to” goals for sales, your plan won’t drive you very far.
Long time blogging buddy Jim Kukral has created a great series called the Online Video Toolkit for anyone wanting to learn how to jump in and master the use of video for online promotion, education, and training.
You know you need to learn all you can about this medium, but you’ve probably also discovered that there are lots of moving parts when it comes to get it done in ways that are easy and affordable and don’t hurt your brain too much. Hiring video professionals to create online tools can make a lot of sense, but learning how to do some of this on your own will give you the flexibility to create great promotional tools almost in real time for very little money.
Go take a look at what Jim’s put together it is a valuable resource and he isn’t selling a darn thing, it’s just free lessons of the “here’s what works” kind.
Before you click through watch the hilarious video Jim did below just for Duct Tape Marketing readers.
Video: OnlineVideoToolkit.com
Along with being one of the world’s biggest book stores, Amazon also offers some interesting user generated content avenues that could lead to a bit of exposure for small business owners who explore them.
Under the heading of a simple way to encourage readership and participation on your blog.
It’s a great practice once you start building a community of readers who comment on your blog posts to encourage more conversation by commenting back on comments. A great way to take this a step farther is to send a personal email to 1st time commenters thanking them and encouraging them to come back. I use the Akismet spam filter plug in for WordPress and will usually hold a first time comment for me to approve, signaling the first timeness. It’s a simple but systematic way to build community.
In addition, think about adding the Subscribe to Comments type plugin so a reader that makes a comment can receive email notification when someone else makes a comment on the post.
To get to the heart of the question in the title I guess we first need to agree that a marketing plan is an important small business tool.
I think it’s essential and here’s why. Creating a marketing strategy that really allows you to build marketing momentum and then surrounding that strategy with the right tactics to amplify it requires some time, energy, thinking, research and a dash of luck.
The best thing a marketing plan - or should I say it more correctly - a marketing planning process can do is force you to sit and ask yourself hard questions, questions you may not have a ready answer to, questions you never thought to think about.
The plan itself is secondary quite often, the planning process is where the headway actually gets made.
With that in mind, and back to my original question, the plan then should be simple as possible, but not too simple. (to quote Albert Einstein)
In terms of the actual document that you might use to inform and direct your annual, as well as day to day, marketing activity, a one page plan might suffice. However, getting to one page, likely will involve a process that may take several weeks or months and a draft plan of many pages and sections.
It’s a bit like carving I suppose. The finished piece will be a simple expression of a process that took a great deal of effort, but that’s how the beauty in the stone is found.
And that planning process and subsequent plan should lead you to a brilliant understanding of:
Look for more on this in the coming months as I release a marketing planning software tool based on Duct Tape Marketing in conjunction with the great folks as Palo Alto Software.
