Sep 25, 2014 | Management, Marketing, Social Media
There are lots of so called “measures” that get touted as being able to deliver useful insights into the effectiveness and productivity of investments made in Social Media. Many tell you nothing of value, and are often misleading, but because they are easy and obvious, are often the ones used. Measures such as friends, followers, number of posts, even quasi mathematical ones that measure nonsense like the ratio of followers to followed are touted, but really tell you nothing of value, nothing that assists the process of building the returns from your investments.
However, there are three measures that will give a very good view of the productivity of your investments, the first two are easy, the third takes more work and understanding, but nevertheless can be accessible to even a small business without great technical and financial depth.
- Conversion rate. Not necessarily to a sale, but to something that you are asking visitors to do. Download a whitepaper, enter a contest, comment, offer a suggestion, etc. This requires the receiver of the message to actively participate, and take an action, to be converted in some way. The word “engagement” is often used in this context, and is a reasonable simile, but can mean different things to different people, so is more “fluffy”
- Amplification rate. This is just the number of shares, retweets, reposts, and embeds, and backlinks that an individual piece of content generates, and the rates overall of what you achieve. If your first level contacts amplify for you, over time, their contacts become yours, and evolve into your sales funnel.
- Financial value. This is obviously the holy grail, and there is no way I know to measure easily, but it is the reason most of us invest out time and resources in Social Media. Setting out to create a measure requires that you build a picture of your sales funnel, and have sufficient sensitivity in your data to be able to follow a prospect from the lead generation stage through to a transaction. This can be done with the integration of CRM and web analytic tools, but is generally pretty challenging for small businesses. However, if you know your average sales cycle times, sales numbers, and track the investments made in Social Media, you can get a reasonable picture using excel.
Being without a simple, and consistent way of measuring the impact of your investments when the tools are available and easily deployed should never be tolerated. The days of “black box” marketing are well and truly over.
Sep 10, 2014 | Change, Governance, Management, Sales, Strategy
Courtesy Hugh McLeod
http://gapingvoid.com/2014/02/26/how-to-be-successful/
In life, and all its aspects, business, social , relationships, there are no shortcuts, just easier and simpler ways of doing things. It is just that it takes time and effort to find the easier, more productive, and value additional way.
The rules for success are the same in every context.
- Understand the selling process. Business, pleasure, social, you are always selling, a point of view, activity, feeling, yourself. Always selling!.
- See through the eyes of the other person. Again, customer, partner, casual acquaintance, it does not matter, it simply is better to see yourself as others see you, rather than just as you see yourself.
- Have a deeper understanding of whatever it is you are talking about than those to whom you are talking. If listeners are to get any value from listening, they need to think that there may be something of value for them, and that you know something they don’t, otherwise, why would they spend their valuable time on listening. Another of my old dads pearls of wisdom: “If you can’t say anything useful or sensible, keep your trap shut.”
- Seek ways to simplify. Our world is increasing complicated, finding ways to simplify even small bits of it are enormously valuable. Finding a way to reduce the friction to get a better, more valuable to someone outcome is the competitive advantage of the 21st century. Most things are done the way they are done because that is the way they have always been done. Not a good idea for the future.
- Start anything you do with the end in mind. This enables you to manage by compass, rather than by a map, which enables flexibility, agility, and room for the unexpected, serendipitous, and wonderful to emerge.
- Be nice. Nobody likes being around jerks, so be nice.
Sounds easy, but in fact it is very hard, that is why so few people are able to find the success they would like, and in many cases, deserve.
Call me for a confidential discussion about how to best leverage your opportunities.
Aug 28, 2014 | Customers, Governance, Leadership, Management, Small business
Small businesses make up the vast majority of business numbers, make a huge contribution to economic activity and health, but most do not last 5 years.
Over 20 years of observing small businesses as a contractor and consultant, I have seen a modest number of factors that the successful businesses, those that last the distance and deliver good financial returns over an extended period, set out to manage in a very deliberate way.
- Your time is the most valuable resource you have, and is non renewable, so outsource as much as you can to free up your time. It does not matter if you outsource to an employee, or to someone in the eastern bloc, it gives you back your time. Always ensure you retain control of the things that are at the core of your value proposition to customers, that is where your valuable time should be spent.
- Make yourself redundant. When the business runs without you, it is successful, You can then do what you want, but have the income stream coming in to allow you do what your want. The old cliché of working on your business rather than in your business is a cliché for a reason.
- Deliver value to customers first. Most business owners earn the most from their business the day they sell it, so do not become too emotionally involved with the idea of owning the business, be in love with what it can do for you by delivering value to customers.
- Find a niche and own it.
- Leverage the talents of others, there is always someone who can do something better than you, find them, and leverage those talents. On the flip side, do not allow low performers to persist, as it not only enables under performance in their role, but it sets a low bar for the others who can see that non performance is acceptable.
- Automate the day to day stuff as much as possible, and it is possible to automate almost everything these days. This requires time and effort up front to ensure there are robust and repeatable processes, but pays off in spades in very quick time.
- Always be curious, about what your customers are doing, and why, what your competitors are doing, why and how, and what is happening in domains outside yours that may be applicable to your domain in some way.
- Be generous. It pays off. Generosity engenders a feeling of obligation, and in this day of commodities and transparency, having someone feel they owe you a favour is very valuable.
- Have a plan, so at the very least, you know the point from which you have departed.
- Interrogate your business model routinely, as the pace of change is such that the optimum way of extracting value may not be the way your are doing it currently. The Business Model canvas is a great tool, and it is not so silly to keep drawn up on an A3 pinned to your wall to take post it notes with thought s as they occur to you, and others.
- Measure progress to wards objectives. Too many measures are as bad a too few, the challenge is to get the right measures, measuring the things that really measure progress, not just that something is done.
- Watch and manage the cash.
None of this is easy, or comfortable, but as I look around at successful SME’s, they are all employing at least 5 or 6 of these strategies. I would recommend that you do a relatively simple assessment of each parameter, measure yourself, and use that measure to identify areas to target for improvement. Simple spider graphs are very useful as a visual tool for recording progress.
Happy to have a yarn with you about how an outside resource may be able to assist the process.
Aug 8, 2014 | Management, Small business
clickconnect.com.au
Most SME’s I see are run by a single person, without the benefit of any sort of advisory board beyond those with whom he/she has dinner sometimes, when they get the time.
The hats they wear make Josephs coat look bland.
CEO, CMO, CTO, COO, CFO, CSO,…. The list goes on, up to and including CCO (chief cleaning officer), CBW, (chief bottle washer) and CSK (chief shit kicker)
These multiple roles have always challenged small business leaders, their primary resource beyond domain capability has always been time, and that is non renewable. Recently the explosion of the time and expertise necessary to have a chance at competing effectively in the face of commoditising and transparent markets, aggressive competitive activity, increasing customer scale in B2B, and marketing automation, has multiplied the size of the marketing hat enormously.
Where does the time come from?
Two places:
Focus and discipline.
- Focus on customers, and a niche where you can be significant. The old adage of big fish in little pools rather than the opposite hold truer than ever.
- Discipline to build a plan, assemble the resources to execute, then to execute with the agility necessary to respond instantly to new information, changes in the market, customer preferences, or whatever it may be, but not to be distracted from the broad objectives of the plan. The second part of discipline is to measure progress, not just against the plan, but more importantly, towards the objectives of the plan, the better to understand the next step.
Most SME’s I see have bits of both, not enough of either, so they are like empty drink cans bobbing around in a rough sea, unless they can keep upright, and plug the hole, eventually they sink.
Need some thoughts on how to identify and plug the holes?
Call me.
Aug 6, 2014 | Governance, Management, Marketing
www.strategyaudit.com.au
Developing metrics to measure the impact and ROI of marketing is becoming a game of choice around competent boardroom tables. Given the level of marketing engagement around many of those tables, it seems sensible for marketers to take the initiative.
Following are seven headline parameters that make some sense and can be further broken up to match the enterprise specific strategies that should be in place. Measure yourself on a five point scale.
- Do you have a clear, 360 degree understanding of the behaviors, mindset, product category usage and limitations of your primary customers?
- Do you create, launch and measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns with the deep involvement of data intelligence tools
- Do you” listen” for customers behavior and respond in real time?
- Are you engaged in all stages of the customers product usage life-cycle, from first consideration of the potential benefits to the assessment of operational performance?
- Can you optimise marketing investment across all channels and activity types?
- Are all the KPI’s across the business aligned to the desired market outcomes?
- Is the boardroom “on board” with all the above. (bad pun, sorry)
If you score less than 30, you need to do some work. One of the easiest ways to keep track of progress is a simple spider graph. Making the assessments a normal part of your marketing audit processes, recording progress in a simple way, then evaluating the performance and capability gaps that emerge will make you a more competitively effective enterprise.
Jul 3, 2014 | Communication, Customers, Management, Marketing, Small business
Have you ever been in a conversation where despite the language being clear, the subject of the conversation is absolutely muddled?
I have, many times, and it occurs particularly where there is an individual in the conversation who has a barrow to push, and irrespective of anything else said, responds from the barrow.
Now it is happening every day with websites I see.
The site is talking about themselves, their particular barrow, when those looking for something are not interested in their “news” they are looking for stuff that is in their interests.
B2B sites seem to make some pretty consistent mistakes, talking about:
- The size and geographic reach of their business
- What they have done to shape markets
- Their latest “innovation” which more often than not is just a paint job
- Their great record of corporate social responsibility
- The sustainability steps they have taken.
There are many others, but you get the picture.
By contrast, B2B customers seeking goods and services via the web are looking for:
- Information on how the product or service offered will perform
- Delivery and after sales service arrangements
- Evidence of the expertise claimed
- Technical information on the design and performance parameters
- An open, simple and transparent communication process pre and post sale
And so on.
The marketing challenge is to see your products and services from the perspective of the customers, and potential customers.
To me it seems blindingly obvious, but clearly, a large percentage of B2B web site managers have no idea, and their marketing needs some intelligent thought.
