Oct 31, 2014 | Customers, Marketing, Social Media
What is the difference between a cookbook of recipes and tips/secrets by a top chef, and the stuff you turn out at home using the book?
Usually a fair bit, surprising really when you have all the information necessary to create and present the dish to hand.
The difference is not the Intellectual Property reflected in the cookbook, the stuff that gets written down, it is the Intellectual Capital of the chef, what is between his ears that cannot be adequately reflected in just words and pictures, but just “happens”.
Same in business.
I have an occasional client that sells technical flavor and texture enhancing products to an industry niche. They are a successful and long lived business, increasingly struggling in a world that they seem not to understand despite the brainpower in the labs.
They have a fancy website that tells you nothing, not even the basis of the recipes to continue the metaphor. In their mind, the “recipes” of technical ingredients are their intellectual property, not to be given out to their customers and competitors under any circumstances.
However, their customers all have a pretty good idea of the “recipes”, they are trained in “recipe” generation, they just lack the nuanced understanding of the real detail, the stuff that is between the ears of a few of my occasional clients employees. Their competitors are unlikely to learn anything they do not already know, they have their own “chefs”, and their own Intellectual Capital that they set out to leverage with customers. The real competitive arena is not the recipes themselves, but the value they add to their customers operational processes, and the outcomes in their consumers mouths when they get to taste the finished products.
Net result of this Neanderthal view of the digital world is that nobody comes to them via their website, or other digital means. They wonder why and conclude that this digital marketing is just a stunt brought on by shysters who do not know anything about the technology they are so proud of, which they believe is so good that it must just sell itself.
Bullshit.
Their products are now almost commoditised, at least to the recipe level.
To sell nowadays, you must demonstrate that not only do you know the recipe, but that when the dish comes together, it really is something special.
Oct 20, 2014 | Customers, Marketing, Small business, Social Media, Strategy
Most Aussies will probably recognise the diagram above, the London Underground.
The first time anyone arrives in London, an underground map is a vital piece of paper, even in these days of mobile phone enabled GPS tools.
The underground system in London is pretty complex until you figure out how it works, and when you take into account the interchanges with London buses and British rail, it is not something you approach without a clear understanding of the details of your intended journey. To get anywhere, you need to know just two things:
Where you are
Where you need to go.
After that, with the map, you can figure out the best way to get there ,what the route options may be, what it will cost, and how long it should take to get to the destination.
Why is it that people understand this instinctively for a sojourn on the underground, but fail to do it for their business?
Social Media is the shiny new toy around at the moment, everyone knows it is there, some dabble in it without a map, and get lost, have their pockets picked, and decide that from now on they will catch a taxi, if they really have to get somewhere. Other wise they will just stay in their hotel.
“Social Media” used as a noun, has some similarity to the underground, in that it is complex, but navigable with a map, where it differs is that it changes, evolves, even mutates, every single day, in some meaningful way. However, if you understand the structure, where and how it all fits together, navigation can become relatively easy, relatively risk free, and open up the opportunities of a wonderful tool.
Need a map?
Sep 29, 2014 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Small business
Share of wallet, share of attention
Share of Wallet is, very simply, your share of an existing customers total purchases in a domain you service. You can fiddle at the edges in the way you define the domain, but it remains that better servicing an existing customer to get a greater share of their wallet is almost always more productive than going hunting for a new customer.
Share of attention as a measure can be as simple or complicated as you like. Definitions vary widely, but usually include measures of aided and unaided brand awareness, and the awareness of a specific marketing activity amongst the target market of that activity.
Share of wallet is the measure to be applied at the bottom of the sales funnel, share of attention the measure at the top. It is unlikely that a marketer will ever get to have a share of wallet until there has been a share of attention established.
Share of wallet always has been, and still is, a simple measure of great power. Share of attention used to be pretty simple when the communication mediums were limited to the few TV and radio stations, magazines and newspapers people consumed, but has become remarkably more complicated since the fragmentation of media.
Attention is the thing that those with whom we wish to communicate allow us to have from them, it is a gift of their time and intellect, and we so often undervalue or even abuse it.
We have 8 hours sleeping, 8 hours working, that leaves 8 discretionary hours to be spent, broken up into social time family time, entertainment, and all the other things we do with our lives.
Gaining peoples attention amongst all the competition, the first and necessary task in a marketing program is a huge task, but the benefit delivered by digital media is the huge palette we now have where creativity, innovation and an intimate understanding of the market and customers inhabiting the market pays dividends.
Sep 16, 2014 | Customers, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Westslawntennis.com.au fundraiser
The business function of Social Media is to spread the message, and make sales. Each platform differs in the balance between the “Social” and “business” focus but nevertheless, they are essentially the digital equivalent of a social gathering. Some are the digital Sunday BBQ of a group of friends, while others are more like the voluntary after work drinks of the sales reps, sharing things of common interest, but usually about their successes, quotas, problem customers, and bitching about the boss.
Having fun is great, it helps the quality of the output enormously, but the objective is commercial, and so the investment of time and resources should be considered in the context of all the other investment options a business faces.
To effectively spread the message, there are a few seemingly simple, but in fact really hard things that need to be determined and done.
- What is the message I need to spread?
- To whom should I spread it?
- What can I do in return for those who take the time to absorb and hopefully respond to my message?
This last one is really important, and often overlooked, as the “social” part of social media takes over. As in life, there is a principal that always works, “Reciprocity”.
Doing something for someone sets up a psychological “balance” of favours, and doing one for someone, is like putting a favour in the bank, when you come to make a withdrawal, there is something in the account.
Like any account, you can overdraw with prior arrangement, but sometimes the interest rates become a bit onerous, so having a positive balance is always a good idea.
Social Media is not a very good vehicle for sales, it is “Social” and sales in a social context grate, (when was the last time you knowingly asked a committed Amway rep to the friendly Sunday BBQ?), but it is a great vehicle for accruing favors, and reciprocal rights to be cashed in later.
Social Media is however, a great set of platforms for the generation, storing and sharing of information of all sorts, and if information is the lifeblood of commerce, as we all accept, it seems like a good place to be making a few investments.
When you need help sorting through the myriad of options, give me a call.
Sep 15, 2014 | Branding, Communication, Customers, Small business
Cold emails are usually no more welcome that a cold phone call. However, For small businesses, the emergence of email marketing has transformed the opportunities they have to communicate, but so many fail to do some pretty simple things before embarking on a campaigns, so screw it up, and often give it away as ineffective.
Email marketing has become subject of some very good automation software, integrated in highly sophisticated platforms like Salesforce, and the Adobe marketing cloud, but for SME’s without the financial and management resources to make the investments these require successful, there are still very good low cost packages, like Mailchimp, which at the basic level is free, Aweber, and others at about $30/month.
However, the key to success is not the software, it is how you use it, so some simple market tactics to use.
- Find a connection to the recipient. You have a much better chance of not just getting the email opened, but also read, if you can establish some meaningful connection with the recipient. A common former employer, people you know, interests you share, or some project type you may be working on. This takes some time and research, but the investment pays off. LinkedIn is a wonderful tool for uncovering these connections.
- Nail the email subject line. If you fail to do this, the email will not be opened and read. We are all too busy to open emails that do not immediately touch some chord. The challenges is to do this in a very few words that communicate the value the email will deliver, and why it was sent to you. The subject line is in effect the headline of your story, so make it compelling to the potential reader, or they just become at best, a passing browser.
- Keep the email short, simple, and with a clear call to action. The recipient must understand easily what the message is all about without having to interpret blocks of text. Remember that many of them will be opened on mobile devices, making the clarity even more important. At the end of reading it, which should be a very short time, there must be no doubt about what you want them to do with the information.
- Be respectful. If the recipient gives their time to read, and hopefully respond, that gift needs to be respected, and even if they do not immediately respond, following up too quickly, or too aggressively will rarely be appreciated. You are asking them for something, be respectful of their time and expertise, and the simple fact that it is you doing the asking, not them. Disrespect is about the quickest way to turn off somebody from responding I can think of short of being rude.
- Never be desperate. Desperation is not a pretty sight, and will sway most people away from responding. Desperate people have little to offer back to a time poor person with the power to say yea or nay to you.
- Never, never, never promise something you cannot deliver.
As a final catch all for email marketing success, it is essential that you have a list. This is one case where bigger is actually better, the more accurately segmented and targeted the better, and the greater the level of active “opt-in” by those on the list the better.
Like all marketing activities, the better you are at it, the more targeted to the message recipients interests, problems, and situation the activity, the better your results will be. See the email you are about to send as if it was you that had just received it, and be a harsh judge.
Sep 8, 2014 | Change, Customers, Marketing, Small business
www.strategyaudit.com.au
In 1968 a seminal Book called “Consumer behaviour” Engel, Blackwell & Kollat described the 5 steps in the marketing process that dominated marketing thinking for the next 45 years.
It is clear that they are still as valid now as they have been for all those years. It is just that the tools we now have to manage the process are at once way more sensitive, and way more complicated than they were.
The 5 steps are:
Problem recognition. Not much has changed here, although we are way more sophisticated at discovering when someone may be seeking a solution to a problem, and can step in and assist, but essentially, the recognition of a problem to be solved remains where it has always been, with the consumer. In B2B, the sophisticated sales approach has evolved to what Neil Rackham calls “situation questions” that lead to unearthing and defining a problem, or opportunity for improvement the buyer was not immediately aware of.
Information search. Here the world has been turned upside down by the search tools available to consumers. In addition, sellers now have the opportunity to recognise an information search, and try to engage in the process with the searcher to deliver valuable information, and perhaps progress the sales process in their favour.
Alternatives evaluation. Perhaps this stage is where the greatest changes have occurred. Pre-web, it was the sellers who had most relevant information, and they were in control of the timing, type, amount of information, and how it was given out to a prospect. Now, the power is with the consumer, and in most cases this 3rd process is well advanced before a potential supplier has any idea that the buyer is in the market. However, it is also here that the tools available have exploded, from personalising the web site delivery of information to rapidly evolving promotional and informational mobile apps, emerging geo location mobile promotions, product and service review websites, and more .
Purchase. Amazon and Ebay turned the retail experience on its head, aided more recently by the penetration of mobile. However, when you look at the numbers, the percentage of a consumer total purchases made on line is not more than about 5%, but the spread is uneven across categories, and there is all sorts of research that offers a different, nuanced view. Just ask your local bookstore of music retailer if you can find one. In addition, new ways to purchase have evolved. Apple for example built an entirely new purchase eco-system with iTunes, which in itself is now being disrupted by Spotify and other subscription models.
Post purchase. The notion of the purchase transaction being the end of the game is also over. Lifetime value of a customer is now a really important consideration, as is the consumers opportunity to express their views post purchase via social media. Businesses that ignore the value and opportunity of the post purchase period, indeed the opportunity of consumers to express views on virtually anything, will probably not live long enough to fully realise their mistake.
These 5 steps still “step out” (sorry) the process, it is just that the tools being used have changed radically. It does not matter if you are the corner store, or Walmart, the steps hold true in almost every consumers approach to a purchase more significant than a box of paperclips, sometimes even paperclips.
Human behaviour is too hard wired to evolve at the speed at which the tools have evolved, so the manner in which the tools are used fits with the established behaviour, and changes it over time, rather than radical changes in behaviour emerging as a result of the new tools. Even the most widely adopted tool set of social media is just automating existing behaviour patterns, enabling the existing behaviour to be more effective, rather than introducing new ones.
