Sep 7, 2011 | Collaboration, Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Chatting to a very successful distributor during the week at Sydney’s Fine Food trade show, he said he simply did not “get” facebook and Twitter as marketing tools. “I will wait till my 14 year old daughter gets interested in the business, and does it for me” he said, “but I guess I should be doing something, just too busy to think about it”
Pretty typical in my experience of SME’s and their relationships with social media, just something else to do, and no more time to do it in!
So here are a few thought starters, simple things to do with facebook to turn it from something else to do, to the most important tool ever put in your hands to engage with your customers.
- Change the “face” regularly, the picture on the landing page, the animation, put up some simple recipes of the day, week, or season, just make it interesting. Even Google changes their landing page almost daily, putting up some design that is topical for some reason .
- Have a page where visitors to your site can engage, you just become the facilitator. In the case of food marketers, a place to exchange recipes, cooking techniques, photos of finished dishes, and people enjoying them seems like a sensible idea.
- Make sure you have a spot where other platforms that may be of interest to visitors can be reached, allow them to add their own links to spots they like.
- Have good quality, relevant content, and make sure you keep it fresh.
- Have a range of incentives rolling through, these might be anything from samples and deals, to points type accumulation programs for a prize.
- Make giving easy. If we are talking food products here, and I am, create seasonal hampers and gift to a friend offers, a Xmas hamper delivered to a customers friend with seasons greetings will always go down well.
- Enable Q & A pages, and conversation streams. This may be on the page, or in a linked blog if the topics are a bit more serious. In the Australian food game, SME’s are struggling for survival in a retail oligopoly where housebrands are being pushed by retailers, and imports are growing on the back of the high $A. There is plenty to talk about, some of it commercial and perhaps not engaging for consumers, so keep it linked but separate and do not be afraid to tackle serious stuff, just be a bit careful.
- Be responsive to posts fans put up, engage in the conversations yourself, just don’t try to dominate it.
- Make sure you have a strong call to action, not too overtly commercial, but the point of it is ultimately to get a sale, so find creative ways of asking for the order.
- Ask for visitors ideas, views, and thoughts. Where better to test a new product idea, and do some focussed qualitative mrket research than with those already engaged.
- Watch and learn from what others are doing, the web is a great big learning experience. Social Media Examiner is one site that often puts up very useful information, here is a list of the top 10 SME sites from around the world they have just judged, some good pointers in there.
- And last of all, make it fun, and never let down someone who visits and engages!
This is all pretty easy stuff technically, it just takes time to plan, assemble the content, and make it happen. My distributor friend can probably get his 14 year old daughter to do it for fun, you don’t have to pay someone big bucks, you just need to engage in the conversation as you would over the back fence to your neighbour.
Sep 2, 2011 | Branding, Communication, Marketing
The link here is to the Social Media Examiner site, probably the best commentator on things “social media” amongst the thousands out there, offering 9 reasons why content does not get shared, emerging from some useful research.
Thing is, as I read the list, it is not just about the leverage offered by social media, it is about marketing generally.
All the 9 reasons can also explain why your brand has little relevance to a consumer, refuses to “stick” despite the huge advertising budget, and just gets missed by busy consumers.
Make sure you have a look at the Volkswagen ad in the post, sure to bring a smile to the face of anyone with a heart, it also ranks in the top 10 viral ads, according to the number of on-line views.
Aug 31, 2011 | Innovation, Marketing, Personal Rant
The retirement of Steve Jobs last week has prompted a blizzard of comment, even a cartoon, from my favorite Tom Fishburne, and at the risk of just adding to it, it seems appropriate to simply state that a bloke I have never met, who has never even heard of me, about whom I know nothing more than has been published over the 30 years of his extraordinary career, has changed the way my life is lived. His commencement speech at Stanford is now one of the web classics, with millions of views.
We all have ipods, or their substitutes, connected phones have revolutionised the way we communicate, tablet computing has just been changed forever, and my kids insist on a Mac at double the price of a technically comparable PC, and that is not to mention the huge impact the original Toy Story movie had during Job’s forced sabbatical from Apple.
It will be truly fascinating to observe the transition of power at Apple, can the innovation and marketing machine he built survive in its current form without Jobs?
Aug 26, 2011 | Change, Management, Marketing, Small business, Strategy
The decision yesterday by the federal Court to allow Metcash to purchase Franklins from Pick n Pay, then onsell, presumably with tied supply agreements is another nail in the coffin of competition in the retail trade, despite the interpretation of the law by the courts.
Now you have Coles, Woolworths and Metcash with a share above 90% of the supermarket trade, limited choice for consumers, a nightmare for suppliers, particularly the decimated local suppliers who have struggled against the increasing power of the retailers for 30 years, and have largely failed.
Several things will emerge that will accelerate change in the supply landscape.
- Scale should dominate the strategic thinking of suppliers. You need to be a gorilla to play with gorillas, so get big or get out. The only alternative is to back off and be a small specialty producer, concentrating on the small share of retail trade not controlled by the 3 gorillas.
- It will be increasingly difficult at the smaller end of the size scale. The businesses left that turn over between a couple of million, and 50 million, many of them regional, with extreme pressure on their finances at a time when banks are not being helpful despite their advertising, will struggle. There are only a few left, and many of those will go to the wall.
- Competition between supply chains, from growers through to retailers will increase. Soon, if you supply Coles, you will not be able to supply Woolies, without risking your position with Coles. Suppliers will need to make choices, and gear up to integrate themselves into a supply chain system, losing their independence, and closing off options. This may not be a bad thing, but it is a substantial change from the current practice and way of thinking, and it limits the scope of customer base available through which to reach consumers with your product.
- The move to housebrands will accelerate, further enabling global sourcing by retailers, squeezing local suppliers. The $A has punched this process along over the last couple of years, adding more pressure to local suppliers who, having lost shelf space for their brands, were relying on contract packing to stay afloat
- Retailers are lousy marketers, good at sales, but lousy marketers. With housebrands coming to dominate categories on price, attractive to consumers in tough times, where will the innovation come from? Where is the incentive for local suppliers to risk their limited capital in doing something different?.
The ACCC, governments at all levels and the courts implicitly decided years ago that the SME end of the food industry was fair game, the survival of the fittest, and all that, and from an economic perspective, it may be the right thing to have done, but at what cost in human terms. The old question I have used in many seminars to make the point about retailer power:
Question. “Where does the 400kg gorilla sleep?”
Answer. “Anywhere he bloody likes”
Aug 25, 2011 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media
“Old” marketing is all about a business sending its messages out to their markets, it is what we are all used to, and it is the way much of our marketing ecosystem has evolved, outbound marketing.
The “new” marketing ecosystem is all about attracting your customers, potential customers, and brand building targets to you, inbound marketing.
But is it “new”?
Not really, trade shows which have been with us forever, are largely about inbound marketing, and marketers have always been aware of the power of word of mouth, and have sought ways to harness it.
Inbound marketing is pretty powerful, as by the time a customer has come to you, the first couple of hurdles of awareness, and empathy that need to be cleared by outbound marketing before there is a chance of a sale, have been cleared by the customer before they meet you. They are willing to be engaged in the next stage of building a brand, or making a sale.
Social media, blogs, and all the exploding electronic opportunities to communicate constitute the means to embrace outbound marketing. Increasingly we are seeing research that supports the power of these “new” marketing mediums, and whilst some remain wedded to the old ways, the future is with those who innovate in the ways they communicate.
Aug 22, 2011 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Social Media
Media is now “free”, you can make a commercial and put it up on youtube and work/hope to attract an audience, a significant difference to buying time on TV, where you are paying for the delivery of an audience to your advertisement, assuming not too many of them can time-shift to avoid it.
Most ads on youtube and other free media fail to generate viewers beyond the immediate family of those who made it. Some however, generate a significant audience, and a very few deliver a huge audience, one that chooses to watch, and have therefore the potential to delver a brand proposition with enormous authenticity.
This commercial for Dove achieves this rare double, powerful positioning, and a wide audience, almost 13.5 million views to date, although a few, like me, are hardly in the target market, but it is one of the very rare few where they got far more than they paid for.
