Feb 6, 2015 | Governance, Management, Marketing, Small business
9/10 small businesses fail in the first 3 years, leaving behind a pile of financial and emotional debt that generally weighs heavily on the “owner”.
Often, the failure comes as a surprise to the owner, full of optimism and the sense of freedom and commitment that usually goes with a start-up, irrespective of the nature of the start-up, globally targeted tech innovation, or a sandwich shop in the local mall. However, the signs are usually pretty obvious to an observer who knows the symptoms.
- Mistaking sales for profitability
- Having the wrong customers
- Not managing their cash
- Not knowing the difference between cash flow and net profit on the P&L
- Losing sight of the reason they are in business
- Poor allocation of limited resources, particularly time
- Outsourcing tasks to the cheapest available resource, rather than the most appropriate
- Not understanding the detail of their cost drivers
- Thinking that the competition thinks and acts like them
- Mistaking speed for efficiency and productivity
- Not treating existing customers like gold
- Not recognising when the horse is dead
- Poor hiring decisions under pressure to fill a seat
- Not leveraging the digital productivity tools now available
- Not understanding their primary customers sufficiently well
- Failing to leverage obvious collaborative opportunities to engage and serve customers
- Chasing the next customer rather than obsessing about the current.
- Taking the money of anything that walks through the door
- Not being able to say “No”
- Missing some of the regulatory stuff, particularly in relation to staff
- Not understanding and leveraging the digital tools available
- Failure to plan
- Failure to recognise when an existing plan is leading to a dead end
- Unclear business model
- Inconsistent application of the business model
- Price increase “phobia”
The list can go on and on, I am sure you can add some, but people still keep trying. Being prepared to work 18 hours a day,(or often just being sucked in) be the worst paid in the place, risking the house after writing a 100 page business plan for the bank against a template you got from the web that you know they will never read, and being patronised by employees of some institution whose riskiest act today will be to have chicken instead of ham on their sandwich.
Who would not want to work for themselves?
In 20 years of being such a dumb-arse, I have seen all the above, and more, while usually making less than I did as a corporate operator, but reveling in the personal and intellectual freedom. If that experience could help you to avoid that “oh shit why didn’t I see that “step, give me a call.
Feb 2, 2015 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
courtesy toprankingblog.com
The purpose of a website is either commercial, or it is a hobby.
Assuming in most cases it is the former, the usual commercial rules apply, just because you have a website does not mean everyone apart perhaps from your mother will be excited.
So, to have a successful web presence the same 5 basic rules of marketing that have always applied, still apply:
- Understand the drivers of behaviour of those in your market
- Have a clear objective.
- Have a plan that lays out the “roadmap” to achieve the objective.
- Execute against the plan, but enabling learning from experience to occur whilst you do.
- Have a few key metrics to track performance towards the objective.
You can make this as complicated as you like, but it will generally not help, just confuse. Nowadays however, navigating through the digital tools and options available has become a job for a specialist, and that does not mean the pimply teenager down the road who is a Facebook maven.
A website is just another tool of commerce, the starting place that enables small businesses to communicate and compete in ways unimaginable 20 years ago. The digital revolution has also spawned a host of further tools to enable relationships and transactions, but the basics of finding a customer, engaging with them and moving towards a transaction have not changed one bit.
For small businesses too compete, they need to do a few things well:
- Have a really detailed customer profile. Demographic, geographic and behavioural knowledge and insights are what enables them to target messages specifically, as if to one person.
- Create and/or curate information of interest to this specific audience. Information that alerts, informs, and demonstrates your knowledge, has the opportunity to at some point in the targets future, to give them a reason to engage. There are myriads of tools to do this, from those that scrape social media platforms for key words, to following thought leaders and repackaging their ideas, to creating interest focussed newsletters automatically. However, don’t believe that any of this is easy, as you will be sorely disappointed.
- Open the chance of engagement. By simply making the target aware of the content, and giving them a reason to stay on your site or platform, you open the opportunity for engagement. This is where the tools really come in, to sort, organise, and direct the appropriate content automatically once set up. The reach of social media into most segments is now extremely deep, but increasingly the platforms are seeking to be paid for the provision of that reach to you. Advertising, but once you have someone’s attention, by whatever means, you need to make sure you do something useful with it, as you may not get a second chance.
- Engage the targets with the content, by demonstrating that you are the one who can and will deliver value at the time of a transaction.
- Enable the transaction. Often this doe not mean buying over the web, it is much broader, and encompasses all the elements of the sales as well as the logistics channels and after sales service.
- Retain the faith of the customer for future sales, and turn them into a source of referrals for you to their networks.
Again I say, none of this is easy, but the point is that none of it was available to small business just 20 years ago. There has been an immense democratisation of opportunity, make sure you use it, and when you need assistance, call me.
Jan 20, 2015 | Branding, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Interactive content adds greater value
The mantra “Content is King” is now about three years old, geriatric in web years.
Now almost everybody is doing it, certainly almost everyone small businesses need to compete successfully against to survive.
Content is rapidly becoming a commodity, something to be “sourced” as you would a new printer cartridge, or replacement part for a bit of machinery, the only real challenges left are to know where to look, how to sort through the options, and how much to pay.
Given this is the case, how should forward thinking marketers, particularly those on small budgets set about differentiating themselves amongst the welter of competing attention grabbing options available?
The answer is pretty easy to say, but not so easy to execute.
Find ways to actively engage the individuals in your market with your content . Just getting them to read a post, or even download a white paper is no longer good enough, you have to find the means to put their brains into gear, rather than just letting them operate on autopilot.
Turn a white paper into an interactive performance measurement tool,
Build a quizzes and games into your infographics,
Create questionnaires to complement your best practise databases,
Throw out the product brochure, and let customers design their own product and add the extras.
There are a few services evolving to assist the process, several tailored for specific social media platforms, but the hardest bit is to find the creativity, imagination, and market insight that will allow you to understand the interactions with your product and its competitors sufficiently well to know what sort of activity will engage them.
Get it right, and you will also get to gather an extraordinary array of customer behavioural data that can be leveraged, delivering value to your business and your customers.
Jan 19, 2015 | Collaboration, Communication, Small business
Great communication is a two way street!
Working with a colleague over Christmas to assist in the development of a presentation that was a really important opportunity to build her personal brand with the audience. Creating presentations that work is a process, and hard work, so to start, we broke the task of building the presentation down into three components.
- Twitter Pitch. Twitter has its detractors, but the huge unintended benefit for those communicating ideas as distinct from the minutiae of their lives is that it forcse us to distill ideas into 140 characters, what I call the” twitter pitch“. Applying this discipline to the preparation of a presentation is usually the same sort of challenge as presented by developing the elevator pitch for your business. In this case, the challenge was to articulate in one sentence the central idea that was to be conveyed. Not easy.
- Know what you want to happen. Clarifying this really has three parts:
- Define what it is that you want the audience to know as a result of the presentation
- Know what you want the audience to feel during and after the presentation
- Know exactly what it is you want them to do with the information you provide, and deliver them the means to do it. A “call to action” if you like.
- Create a structure for the presentation that delivers on the points above. Again, there are three factors at work:
- Have a logical, sequential structure of some sort for the presentation.
- Gain the trust of the audience, listening but not believing is a waste of everyone’s time.
- Do it with feeling. People rarely remember facts, but they do clearly remember the emotions they felt while the facts were being recited. I do not remember the date of the assassination of JFK, but I do remember (yes, I am that bloody old) exactly what I was doing at the time, and how I and those around me reacted to the news.
Delivering a presentation is a difficult to obtain opportunity to sell. An idea, a product, your skills, the reason your business exists, it varies, but the common point is that those in the room have given you their time and attention, their most valuable resource, don’t waste it for them, and miss the opportunity for you.
On a final note, you may also notice that all of the above is in “threes”. For some reason I do not understand, the human brain is very efficient at remembering things in threes. If you organise your presentation into blocks of threes, you will be better able to manage the flow, remember the sequences and words, and deliver.
None of this is easy, and rarely is a great presentation prepared alone, and it is never done at the last moment and without practise and a critical eye.
Need a critical eye, and sounding board? I can help.
Jan 16, 2015 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business
http://www.markstewart.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/women_chatting.jpg
Most would acknowledge that word of mouth is the most effective marketing channel there is, then promptly forget that fact as they set about preparing and implementing their programs.
Discounts, bundles, making ads, facebook likes, social media mentions, retweets and shares, and many other activities all get a guernsey, but when was the last time you explicitly set about creating word of mouth, real life endorsements, Margie from Marrickville telling her neighbor over the fence that your product is the best thing since sliced bread?
How much of your marketing budget has as its specific aim to create personal endorsements?
We all know that “WOM” is the original marketing channel, so I was surprised to see this research that reflected that only 28% of small businesses when asked to identify their best marketing channel noted Word of mouth in its proper place.
Have we just forgotten the basics, been seduced by the the welter of choices available?
Perhaps it is just the sample, choices, or that it is from the US, but I asked a small group last week a similar question, albeit open-ended, and word of mouth came in at about the same level.
We can now target messages to specific behaviors practiced by very discrete subgroups, why would we not seek to ensure we deliver outstanding value to them, then encourage them to spread the word amongst those they know who are similarly interested?
Word of mouth, the original and still the best social media platform.
Jan 12, 2015 | Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Courtesy www.groovehq.com
Writing a blog is hard work, great to do as it forces you to think critically, read widely, seek to question your own preconceptions, and expand your own expertise, so it can be intellectually rewarding. It is nevertheless time consuming hard work.
As such, it can be seen either as a hobby, or an investment, and if it is the latter, there should be a return on the time and energy expended.
For most small businesses, it can easily become a chore, which is why so many fall back on some formulaic way, just to pump out words and fill a schedule, and end up doing nobody, themselves particularly, any good.
There have been many posts about the “10 smart ways to write more blog posts” lots of advice that suggest a process is the way to make blogging both easy and commercially productive, this one from GrooveHQ being one of the better ones (and I borrowed their header photo) but like most others, misses the essential point.
Blogging is now so common, has become such a generic activity that most material out there is “average”. The task of filtering the really good stuff out for comment and further consideration is becoming increasingly automated, adding to the “average” tendency, as the really good stuff always happens on the fringes, and it usually elusive and challenging, just like any other sort of useful innovation.
To me there is really only three ways to be genuinely useful, to attract and keep readers.
- Display really deep domain knowledge, and be generous with it. Mitch Joel, Mark Schaefer, Avanish Kaushik and Ian Cleary are a few that spring to mind that do this consistently and well, and GrooveHQ is rapidly becoming one of my core reading list, listed down the side.
- Be genuinely interested, concerned curious, and yes, passionate, in your domain, and have that communicated simply by demonstrating an independence of mind, generosity of ideas, willingness to kick the sacred cows, and make the elephants visible.
- Be original, prepared to be challenging, and persistent.
My clients, small businesses in the most part, are being increasingly left behind as is the case in most arenas of competitive activity, they lack a depth of resources, so they just have to be smarter, more agile, and personally committed than their larger competitors.
Those that do it well will flourish.
