Feb 12, 2015 | Marketing, Social Media
Social media is usually lumped in with digital marketing, as if it is all the same stuff, part of the same marketing toolbox.
There is some overlap, significantly around the advertising that occurs on social platforms, but not as much as most just assume.
Think about being at a party, the bloke in the corner holding forth to a small group of people, arguing a point of view, taking questions, and debating the foundations of his views. The person on the right is not talking, not asking questions, but they are listening.
Are they engaged in the conversation??
Of course they are.
Do they want to be sold to?
Probably not, they are just listening, at some point of they want some clarification, to actively instead of passively engage in the conversation, or to be sold to, they will ask a question, make a comment, or otherwise change their engagement from passive to active.
Social media is the same, a few people are engaging overtly, liking, retweeting, commenting, sharing, and so on, but those “listening” can also be passively engaging, absorbing the flow of the conversation, and they matter.
By contrast to social media platforms, email or digital marketing takes a message, information, or a sales pitch and sends it to you, expecting an outcome, one of which can be that you ignore it and perhaps unsubscribe.
The response rates to email marketing are way better than stuffing letterboxes as we did in the old days, which delivered 1% if you were really lucky, had a great offer and a good copywriter, simply because it was almost random. The best you could do to profile the potential customers was broad brush demographics of the location of the letterboxes to be stuffed.
Email or digital marketing however can be hugely more effective, as you market to a list, people who have expressed some interest in hearing what you have to say, and which you can slice and die in all sorts of ways to have a highly targeted and personalised communication that offers the option to becoming a conversation, at the initiation of the receiver.
The other point to remember is that everyone influences someone.
Feb 9, 2015 | Governance, Leadership, Management, Marketing
Gaining some sort of commitment is the first stage of any commercial process, and repeats continuously up till, and after a transaction takes place. Sufficient commitment to click an opt in button, allocate the time to a webinar, look at your product demonstration, conduct a trial, or commit to a purchase, all require that in a variety of ways, the seller has in some way engaged with you, and built your commitment to them.
It does not matter if you are BHP, a local tradesman or the suburban lawyer, addressing these four pillars will bring you business.
- Demonstrate you care. People will be attracted to those who care about what they care about, and who care about them. Showing interest by asking questions and genuinely listening to the answers and responding appropriately demonstrates you care. Next time you phone someone and you get a recorded message telling you that your call is important to them, and then wait 10 minutes to be connected to a call centre in Bangalore, you know they do not really care.
- Demonstrate you can be trusted. Nobody wants to have anything to do with those they do not trust. It follows that demonstrating you can be trusted, that you do what you say you will do becomes a fundamental foundation of a relationship, even a passing one. pretty important. Trust is the foundation of any relationship, and in a commercial one, a money back guarantee usually goes a long way.
- Demonstrate your influence. Being able to get things done, to cut through the complication and hubris that exists in most situations builds confidence in your capacity to deliver on your undertakings. This is sometimes a bit challenging, particularly in the early stages of a relationship, but there are usually ways. Some time ago, I had some work done on my house, and the architect as part of his service took on the task of dealing with the notoriously pedantic and difficult local council. No big deal, no fuss, just part of the service. Clearly he knew who to talk to get things done, and as it turned out, he did.
- Demonstrate your authority. In the past your title used to be a demonstration of authority, but no longer. Just being a lawyer of accountant, or the CEO used to be enough, but we now know that these titles just assure us that there is still a pulse. In these transparent times, authority is usually earned rather than bestowed. Finding ways to demonstrate the authority of your knowledge, leadership and position is a marker to those who may be in a position to seek out your services or products. Social proof is rapidly becoming the marker of authority, the number of comments and shares of a post, speaking at industry gatherings, published material, all point to some level of authority. Of course organisational authority is still important, but significantly less so than yesterday, and tomorrow, it will become just a label.
Your marketing challenge is tangled up in these four parameters of relationship building, and working on them all, tiny piece by tiny piece will improve your outcomes measurably in a relatively short time.
Call me when you need help, or trawl through the years of accumulated knowledge demonstrated in these 1400 odd posts.
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 27, 2015 | Leadership, Small business, Strategy
Time to think
Those who run small businesses have some very common challenges.
Significant amongst them is insufficient time to get everything done that needs to be done, and no time left over for “self”
The old cliché working “in the business and not on the business” is a cliché because it is appallingly true.
Most, if not all have also heard about the “urgent but not important to Important but not urgent” continuum, certainly I have written about it in the past.
However, taking some concrete action to free up the time is harder than the easy clichés of business coaches and consultants, so here are a few added steps to take along the path. They come from the “Lean” thinking movement that has so profoundly altered the way we manufacture things over the last 25 years.
First: distinguish between policies and procedures.
Policies are the things that deliver a framework for activities an decision making. Think about it as Google earth focussed on a large region. You can see the shape and limits, but not the detail of the roads, railways and suburban areas. Procedures by contrast are a step by step expression of the sequence of activities that together contribute to the outcome. To continue the analogy, they are the GPS, giving you street by street instructions on how to get from point A to point B.
Second: Make a list of all the things that are recurrent activities, and priorities them against a list of questions you ask yourself:
- Is it required for the business to function efficiently?
- Are there repeatable steps with specific start and end points and efficiency/productivity metrics?
- Does the task have to be done by me, or could someone else do it
- Is it the best use of my time?
Third: Be ruthless about eliminating those tasks that do not add value that make no contribution to your ability to serve customers, and by delegating to others.
Fourth: write the procedures to make the tasks that remain routine, repeatable, and robust. You generally have two options in writing procedures.
- Have a roundtable with all those involved in the task, and map it out on a whiteboard, or butcher paper, capturing all the interactions that occur.
- Take a bit of time, and keep a record for a couple of times the job gets done, then whiteboard it to standardise, and eliminate the unnecessary loops and rework that almost inevitably you will uncover. Think about it like building a house. Start with the foundations, then progressively fill in the external walls, internals walls, followed by the details of the fittings and fixtures.
Once documented, test the procedure a couple of time to “stress test” it, then delegate.
Fifth: Outsource where possible those tasks that take a capability not readily available in your business, or where there is a specialist available who can do it better and quicker, and therefor in the long run cheaper, than you.
Voila! For most small business owners, 4 hours a day.
Jan 23, 2015 | Customers, Sales, Small business
Courtesy Geoff Roberts http://tinyurl.com/o2mcd4p
Over the years working with B2B clients, it has become evident that the sales personnel are often tied up doing other stuff, things that have nothing to do with selling.
Following up unpaid invoices, checking inventory, trying to shuffle production schedules to accommodate something that has already been stuffed up, doing forecasts, filling in annual budget forms, chasing slow paying debtors, the list goes on.
Sales people are employed to sell, and a large percentage of this other stuff is not customer facing, but just admin that somebody thinks may be necessary, and often is, but is not contributing to the next sale.
My answer is to rename the sales function “Revenue Generation” and to ensure that every activity that is not directly related to “RG” is moved elsewhere, automated, or best yet, eliminated. Sales has become just a generic functional term, it no longer carries the urgency and importance so necessary to keep everyone in jobs, and customers coming back. Revenue generation by contrast, seems to communicate that necessary urgency and importance.
When you have done all that, you will have freed up typically 30-50% of a sales persons time, and logically, that enables them to sell more (or perhaps you need less of them).
However, there are 3 further steps to be taken:
- Only have revenue generators who genuinely love what they do, and understand and can articulate the value they and your products can deliver for their customers.
- Only have revenue generators who are committed to doing what they say that will do
- Have everyone in the organisation recognising that irrespective of their role and function on a chart, their real job is to contribute to the process by which revenue is generated, and who will not let any superficial, political or shiny new thing, get in the way.
This is all pretty easy to say, but hard to do in the face of a culture that dictates the way things are done, but clarifying ‘Why” things are done always helps.
Need help? Drop me a line.
Email or digital marketing however can be hugely more effective, as you market to a list, people who have expressed some interest in hearing what you have to say, and which you can slice and die in all sorts of ways to have a highly targeted and personalised communication that offers the option to becoming a conversation, at the initiation of the receiver.
