Nov 11, 2015 | Marketing, Small business
marketing foundations
Marketing now is as different to marketing just 20 years ago as car manufacturing was before and after Henry.
However, the basics remain unchanged, just as happened with the manufacturing disruption Henry brought to building cars.
I find myself spending lots of time talking to small businesses about the things necessary for success, particularly in digital marketing.
They tend to be different conversations, but always coming down to a small number of common factors. It does not matter much if their focus is on a social platform, email marketing, video, webinars, podcasts, or any of the other techniques that have evolved recently, the 3 foundations remain.
- Positioning.
Positioning is one of the oldest notions in marketing, defining how your customers or prospects see you, what they think you might be able to deliver to them. In other words it is the unique story they recall when they think of you.
In the brand building process, researchers often seek the human characteristics of the brand that are present to be built on, removed or modified, and always seek the favourable characteristics. Reliable, detail driven, fun, creative, and so on.
In digital marketing it is no different, but just needs to be even more focussed. For most small businesses, it is way better to be really, really good at a small number of tings that are of value to your target market, than pretty good at a whole range of things. In the former you are the expert, someone worth considering, in the latter you are just another of the generalists. This is often a challenging choice for small businesses to make as the instinct is never to turn away a potential customer, but the fact is that there is so much competition out there that unless you are distinctive, and deliver some sort of value that cannot be obtained elsewhere, any customer relationship will be tenuous, or price driven.
Positioning can be most easily thought about on two parameters.
First, the niche you occupy
Second the persona of the ideal customer you are seeking. These are mutually reinforcing, and the more focussed on each the better.
One of my mates is a terrific, creative landscape designer. However, she occupies a very specific niche. Do not ask her to design a landscape for a block of units, or a park, both jobs she can do really well, but so can many others. Her expertise is in personal outdoor spaces with a “Japanese garden” flavour. If her particular style is not what you are looking for she will recommend several others in the area who can help, but she will not do it for you. But if the “tranquillity” of her speciality is what you are looking for, there is absolutely no one better.
Her ideal customer is equally specifically drawn. They are successful, middle aged couples with no children at home, working in the relatively small spaces of the near city suburbs, seeking an easily maintained space for quiet times and contemplation. If you have kids, or want a broad entertaining area, your needs will rarely overlap her special design skills, and again, she will recommend someone who will do a great job for you.
2. Communicating.
There are all sorts of ways to communicate, both digitally and offline. The sum of the combination of the options is almost always greater than the sum of the individual pieces of communication by themselves.
The key is to ensure that every piece of communication has a purpose that serves the overall objective, plays a role in the jigsaw of communication.
Having an objective is paramount. For some people that objective will be a personal meeting with a prospect who has been ‘warmed’ by a series of communication pieces that each has an objective and call to action as a part of the communication. It could be an email with a download, video with an invitation to subscribe to the channel, or an ad designed to gain attention and build, awareness of the product.
The key these days is to appropriately mix and sequence the communications in response to the signal coming from the prospect as they move around, and hopefully through the sales funnel.
3. Automating.
The days of one piece broadcast communication, with little hope of identifying the recipient are gone, technology has turned the communication process on its head. It is now the case that a piece of communication has not been of any value unless an intended recipient actually does something with it. In order to know, you need to be able to track the actions, then respond appropriately to the signal the receiver gives you.
Without automation, this is virtually impossible on any commercial scale. You need t build repeatable and predicable processes that respond cross the marketing and sales processes, so you have to also ensure that the right people are in place, and that the product offering is relevant to the target market.
None of this is easy, particularly for small businesses, and the cost can be a barrier, but think of the cost of doing it wrong.
Get the foundations right, and the building will stay up, get them wrong……….
Oct 30, 2015 | Communication, Social Media
“Self indulgent nonsense that passes as digital marketing strategy”.
That is what it often is, perhaps usually, but it can also be the road to success when leveraged by a truly expert marketer.
But everybody is a marketing expert, it is easy, just common sense, surely?
Why is it then that I see so much crap, so much waste of time and money, often lots of it.
Big businesses are the worst, the marketing people spend money like it is not their own.
Hang on, it isn’t.
By contrast, small business is intimidated by the jargon, the smoke and mirrors that has been so prevalent over the last 100 years, joined recently by the mystery of digital. They shy away and often do not take advantage if the greatest single marketing opportunity that has ever opened up for them .
The ability to not just send a personalised message to an individual, but to see what they do with that message, respond appropriately, and to enter into a ‘conversation’ with them.
I know there are lots of self styled gurus out there blathering on about people becoming engaged with brands, wanting to carry on a conversation with their favourite brand, and promising to deliver such an outcome, when common sense says it is crap.
Look at your own behaviour.
Do you crave the attention of a ‘brand’ do you actively seek a ‘brand experience’ crave digital interaction with your brand?
I thought not.
Most people are not thinking about interacting with their favourite brand of yogurt except when they are in the supermarket, or their head in in the ‘fridge looking for some brekkie, despite the protestations of digital marketing bag men whose job it is to flog a digital inventory of some sort.
Be careful, and ensure that you build the foundations of great marketing, get the fundamentals in place, then you can go ahead and win.
Oct 23, 2015 | Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Courtesy: “First dog on the moon”
I am getting pretty annoyed with the enthusiastic panting of the toothy self appointed social media guru brigade extolling the ‘awesomeness’ (my current second most hated word) of social media.
They give the serious advisors amongst us a bad name.
It happened again during the week. At a casual SME meetup, there was one of these types there flogging the line that all you had to do was give him some money, and you would make it back 10X (actual claim) because he was able to focus his specialist and exclusive Social Media expertise on your objective and ‘Abra Cadabra’ money would appear.
The loaves & fish story have nothing on this lot.
Social media is just a fragment of the challenge of Social Marketing enabled by the technology that not just encourages, but demands that your ‘targets’ (will have to think of another word) have the opportunity and means to communicate with the marketer.
As I have heard it said, ‘it is not communication until the intended message is received, understood and has elicited a response’.
Seems to me there are a few questions you should ask yourself about your message:
- To what extent does it assist the prospect move along the journey to a transaction?. We do not engage in social marketing for our health, it is for a commercial outcome. Therefore measure it against the progress towards that outcome, recognising there are probably many other things in your message mix, from deliberate marketing communication aimed at the prospect, to random stuff like how clean was the company delivery truck was when it passed your prospect at the lights last week.
- How does the communication add value to the prospect?. If you cannot add value in some way, why should the message assist the journey to a transaction?
- What do they do next as a result of seeing your message?. If they do nothing, it is just another of the 95 gazillion messages they might see today, if they do something as a result of seeing it, whole new ball-game? It is great to have someone take action as a result of your message, greater if that action not just moves them down the transaction path, but if they also share it with their networks. In effect they are not only acknowledging the value of your message, they are endorsing it to their networks. This is the gold at the end of the social marketing rainbow.
Social marketing is pretty easy to write and talk about in a superficial way, but very hard to put into meaningful practice. It takes careful and creative analysis of your prospects and your own value proposition, as well as the construction, content and nature of the messages sent. This is not an exercise conducted with a fairy wand and pixie dust, it takes serious marketing thinking and experience.
If it sounds almost too good to be true, grab your wallet and get out, because it almost certainly is.
Oct 21, 2015 | Branding, Governance, Marketing, Social Media
Fundamental things apply
Great line for a song?
We all know the words, written by Herman Hupfeld from the song ‘As time goes by’, made famous in the movie Casablanca.
It also applies to marketing, particularly the explosion of techniques and tricks that have emerged with digital technology.
Despite all the rumors and offers of instant success, there is no algorithm for great marketing, no sure fire way of short-cutting the risks and uncertainty.
Great marketing takes time, effort, resources, curiosity and a willingness to be different, to see things others have not seen, to create the uncreatable.
You do not do that in front of a screen, the best you can do there is look at the results of stuff you have tried, get a superficial look at what others have tried, and manage digital development and deployment.
Instead of relying on digital bits to do the work, you have to get out and talk to customers, potential customers and others who may have an influence on the way a product is produced, delivered and valued by customers, whether they be a consumer of a simple product or a major corporation making a significant investment.
The fundamental things apply, the same things that have always applied, they have not been replaced by digital tricks.
We can now deliver a message to a tightly defined audience, as small as one, but if the message is poor, wrongly targeted, the product fails to deliver value, you may as well whistle in a hurricane for all the good it will do you.
Make sure the basics are covered, ensure the fundamental things that make a marketing program work are in place. There is no substitute.
Oct 19, 2015 | Customers, Marketing, Sales, Small business
Strategic Key Account Planning
Almost every organisation I have dealt with uses some variation of the accepted sales funnel model.
Start by gathering as many leads as possible, then progressively whittle them down through the funnel until you have a customer. The practice is always way more chaotic than the nicely drawn funnel, as leads enter and exit the funnel at various times for various reasons. Chaotic is usually an appropriate expression.
When you think about it, there is a huge amount of waste in the process.
You start with many, and expend considerable resources to turn leads, of which a large majority are unlikely ever to be customers, into prospects, into hot prospects, (or whatever creative name you call them) then create a transaction, then hopefully to build a relationship.
In most B2B situations, this simply does not make sense.
Would it not be far better to spend a fraction of the resources identifying your ideal customer based on your value proposition, then identifying the decision makers and their procurement processes in those ideal customers, then setting out to engage them with personalised marketing?
This is in effect turning the funnel upside down, but recognising that prospect behaviour is unpredictable if not chaotic, it may be that the pyramid, in what ever orientation is the wrong metaphor.
Why not use a cycle of some sort, with the central objective of creating a relationship with the key customers and prospects in your industry.
Digital technology is making this easier by the day to execute, but the foundations of good marketing have not changed. Digital technology cannot change those foundations, the things you simply have to get right to earn the confidence of a prospect to give you their money.
Oct 16, 2015 | Collaboration, Customers, Marketing, Small business
local business is your business
Small business owners seem always struggle to find the ways to build their business. B2B, B2C, does not matter, the challenges are similar.
How do you identify, engage, then build towards a transaction and relationship with people to whom your product or service solves a problem, and adds value too their lives?.
In my local area, there are a significant number of networking groups, ranging from community based ones to expensive franchise operations. I am a member of two groups, plus a local chamber of commerce. It takes work, but they do deliver results. In observing the behaviour in these groups of those who are successful, there are some pretty common things that can most small businesses can learn to do better.
1. Elevator Pitch. It amazes me how few can state in a few words what they do, what problems they solves, what outcomes can be achieved, and why their services are worth consideration. It should not be hard, but it is. Developing a good elevator pitch should be a priority.
2. Think local. Most small businesses find most of their business in the local area. It seems therefore to make sense to invest in the activities of the local area, from being a voice in the community groups such as Rotary, to sponsoring the local kids sporting teams with playing gear. A little bit of time and effort, but very little money can go a long way in a community.
3. Be vocal. Communities offer all sorts of ways to engage and make it clear what you stand for. A builder might be a protector of the architectural heritage of an area, the local sports store agitate to turn the local dump into playing fields, a bike shop might be the lead voice in having some waste land rezoned to enable building a bike track. The list can be as long as your imagination.
4. Collaborate. Locasl can build scale by collaborating, cross promoting, and assisting each other in all sorts of ways. Again, being open to ideas and opportunities can reap large rewards. My local bottle shop holds tastings on a fairly regular basis. They secure the time of the winemaker of a high quality small winery, who then takes a small group through the current releases, a vertical tasting, or whatever is appropriate, and over the course of the evening, the Japanese café next door delivers some terrific ‘nibblies’ Everyone wins.
5. Leverage the network. Local networking groups of various types do deliver value, but like all things of value, success only comes with work. Others need to understand what you do, how you deliver value, why they should use you instead of an alternative, they need to find common ground and build some trust. Going to the meetings is just the start.
6. Referrals. An adjunct to the networking activity, it pays to ask for the job, or referrals. Network theory clearly demonstrates that the networks of those in your network are the most potent source of leads there is. Many people feel that asking for a referral is not good form, remove that notion from your mind. Members of a networking group are all there for the same reason, to build their business, so they will not mind, and so long as you are prepared to reciprocate.
7. Offers. Offering an incentive of some sort always helps. A friend runs a small suburban bistro, open 6 days a week. He is booked solid Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings, but has to carry the overheads of being open and able to provide services at other times. He is always creating offers of his slow times, two for one, a bottle of champagne on the table, cakes for birthdays, on and on, in order to get bums in seats in the slow times, and as a result has a thriving business, with many repeat customers across the week.
All this stuff can be done as a part of your general marketing activities, it adds a critical personal dimension very challenging and expensive to achieve with any form of media. The range of options for small businesses has never been wider, and never forget that people buy from people far more than they buy from businesses.
