Sep 21, 2015 | Branding, Marketing, Small business
Share of wallet
The calculation is easy, sales over total wallet, the problem is in defining the denominator, or what is in/out of your wallet.
The definition of the wallet is the really hard bit, the debate however, can be extraordinarily useful in terms of focussing the attention of the enterprise on the immediate and longer term priorities, and how those priorities are to be addressed.
Markets can be broken up in as many ways as imagination allows, but often for me it has been useful to break it into three.
Target market. The immediate markets where you need success in order to pay the bills.
Adjacent markets. Those market segments around you that would benefit from your solution, in the event that you were able to create and deliver that solution.
Generic market. The wider market that many consider as ‘The market’.
Lets take the insurance market as an example, as there are plenty of current examples around.
The generic market is, pretty obviously, ‘Insurance’.
Insurance companies are seeking to deliver services in increasingly specific niches, and are often creating apparently separate businesses to do so, although they are really just brands.
NRMA for example started with car insurance, and under that brand also deliver, home, contents, and other types, obviously leveraging their marketing reach to homeowners. Under different brands, CGU, SGIC, and others they also deliver competitive personal products as well as more specialised ones. Similarly, Suncorp delivers a range of products under a host of brands, AAMI, APIA, Bingle, Shannon’s, GIO, and others, many of them overlapping and directly competitive.
If you happen to be the marketing manager of “Shannon’s” car insurance for car buffs, does your wallet include the adjacent market of home insurance for said car buffs?
The arguments for and against are obvious, the temptation to lose focus on the primary target market equally obvious.
For many small businesses there is also a geographic component.
One of my mates runs a café in Burwood, and having this debate with him is instructive.
How does he define his wallet between coffee consumers in Burwood and the adjacent suburb of Croydon, and between individual consumers in those suburbs Vs businesses to whom he offers simple “sandwich catering” to order. The manner in which he spends his limited marketing budget, the sort of offers he makes, and the staffing he employees are defined by the answers to the questions.
Defining your wallet is a fundamentally important process, give it due care and attention.
Sep 14, 2015 | Branding, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
My small business clients ask me this all the time.
They know they have to stand out on Social Media, but the question is how?
The necessary steps and supporting processes are now pretty well understood, but not easy to execute.
1. Find a niche and own it.
This is about the most common piece of advice out there, because it is right, yet so few small businesses do it well. They are seduced by the numbers. ‘there are a billion people on India, if we could sell a widget to .0000015% of them we would be right.’ In contrast, success comes to those who find a niche that fits their expertise, and offer a product that is both differentiated and the best around in some way for the very specific target market. A friend of mine has a potential very deep niche in highly specialised light bulbs. He has access to the products from specialist producers around the world and combined with the specialist technical knowledge he has necessary to understand the best combination of characteristics for a particular use. However, he keeps on being distracted by the opportunity of selling a box of common bulbs available in a suburban lighting shop.
2. Understand the market intimately.
This follows from the point above. People are being bombarded by all sorts of messages, you need to know the ones that will cut through because they promise to deliver a unique benefit of some sort to the target specialised audience. A message about a “light bulb for printers” will not get through the mental defenses of a professional printer, but offering an “Ultra Vitalux lamp with double the normal lamp-life” almost certainly would.
3. Identify and connect with influencers.
In every market, there those who lead, who experiment, and are not afraid to take a shot, and there are the rest. If you can identify and connect with those thought leaders, their endorsement will influence the views and behaviour of the rest.
4. Create a “tribe”.
Seth Godin and Clay Shirky brought the notion of “Tribes” into the vernacular. If you can build one around your particular expertise, those in the tribe will become advocates for your product and expertise. The mistake most make at this point is that they take the opportunity to turn the group or tribe into something that is about them. It has to be about the group, any step beyond a hint of commercialism will kill it dead.
5. Build a brand.
A brand in this context is not the sort of investment exercise necessary in a mass B2C market, it can be done on very small budgets, with a bit of imagination, and a genuine and unique story. Brands are at their core stories about the products, so tell yours.
6. Have a point of view.
Being different makes you stand out, but different just for the sake of being different is flimsy. Stake out a position that is a key part of your brand story that will not resonate with everyone, and be the advocate for that position, defend it against the naysayers and the status quo.
7. Communicate consistently.
In this instance, consistently means communicating not just regularly, but with a consistent message and tone of voice across all the digital platforms and media you use. Digital marketing is a content hungry channel, so the trick is to pick which combination of platforms and media generate the best returns and stick to them, while perhaps experimenting on the fringes. To try and use all the options just a bit is a sure road to failure, much better to pick a small number that are relevant to your prospects and do them really well.
8. Engage with your audience.
Success in digital media is all about the level of engagement you can build with your audience , and subsequently their relevant networks, and those interested in the topic. This takes work, particularly as engagement evolves towards a transaction. Generally it becomes harder to automate the closer you get to a transaction, depending on the products being sold. For many B2B products, the close is face to face.
9. Be opportunistic as appropriate.
None of the above should remove the motivation to use circumstances as they occur to your advantage. Digital media offers great opportunities to become part of a trend, even initiators of trends by the use of hashtags, particularly in Twitter. The downside is that the opportunity must be empathetic with your niche, brand, and everything else you are doing or it may depreciate what your other efforts are delivering.
The huge advance that digital has made that makes the effort necessary to compete is that you can now see clearly what works and what does not, almost in real time.
Aug 31, 2015 | Branding, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
So, you have a small business and your neighbour tells you Facebook is the place to be, that you can get heaps of likes and sales out of a few dollars.
Not all true, but it can be.
Facebook can be a great way to build a small business into a bigger one, for many types of business, primarily B2C rather than B2B. There are however, some pretty simple hurdles.
Have a clear objective. Facebook visitors do not normally buy off the site, gaining their attention and trust is a process that takes a while. If your objective is to get visitors to click a link in your ad that takes them to your website, the ad copy is likely to be different than one where the objective is to collect likes.
Know your market. Know as much as possible about those you want to attract. Facebook has some really cool filters that allow you to determine who sees your ads, so there is no point in paying for someone who is never going to buy your product seeing an ad. The options cover behavioural, demographic and geographic options.
Don’t boost, promote. Every page has a ‘boost” button on it, which offers a quick and easy way to put your ad in front of eyeballs, but no way to determine which eyeballs. You need to use the Facebook Ads Manager to target your ads, making your dollars work much harder.
Custom audiences. People on Facebook are not generally there to buy, they are there to be social, exchange information, dates, photos, and all the rest. Therefore they may not be interested in your ad, even if it is highly relevant. Facebook addresses that problem by allowing you to upload your own data for use in the campaigns.
Variation. Ads work differently for everyone, so it makes sense to trial a number of versions of your ads, looking for the combinations that work best. You can do this on a small scale if you choose, just to keep the ads fresh for those who see them several times, or if you are spending more, you can systematically split test the differing ads to identify the best options. Some closed groups allow ads only at specific times, and have other criteria that suit the group. In these cases, I usually suggest that the ads change every time. One of my clients places ads in a group that allow them only to be posted on a Thursday, so every Thursday she posts a different ad, carefully targeted at the niche that is a small part of the group membership. Works well.
Be personal. Facebook is at the social end of ‘social media continuum’ so behave accordingly, and choose a tone in the ads that is social rather than sales.
The genius of social media generally, is that it enables a small business to act like a big one, so don’t miss the opportunity.
There is plenty of help out there that will assist you with the detail, Kim Garst, various posts on Social Media Examiner, and many others less well known. Use them.
Aug 19, 2015 | Branding, Marketing
Small businesses have great opportunities to leverage their skills, but now more than ever, they need a brand as the digital spot on which to double down their marketing investment, to create a wall from which to defend their territory.
Most do not have the skills, and become bogged in the jargon and options, so following are 6 simple guidelines:
Simplicity. You cannot be all things to all people, even in a local area and pretty specific market space. The more targeted the market segment, the simpler the communication and the need to provide more and more to attract clients. One of my clients is a personal trainer, but not one of the toned, buffed 25 year olds we normally see, she is an amazingly fit, middle aged mother of two who specialises in helping immediately post natal women get their pre natal bodies back. Her journey from young Mum with a desk job to successful trainer is a story her clients all relate to exactly.
Differentiation. Even in a narrowly defined niche, there has to be something other than price that makes you different, and the difference must be relevant to the target market. Continuing the story above, a young Mum can come along to the classes, exercise and relax in a very social way with others in the same boat, while their babies are being looked after in a crèche in easy eye-line.
Originality. Being different is great, being original in the manner in which you express your value propositionn is even better, then delivering that value in a differentiated manner is the core of brand building. The value proposition of a business is remarkably important, and remarkably challenging for most to get right.
Disruptive. Doing things in an entirely different way to everyone else gets you noticed, and when the disruption favours your target market, you can be way ahead, although those outside your target will probably not “get it”. My elderly mother lives in a regional town, and has her fair share of medication and mobility challenges, but still lives alone in a terrific spot for an old girl. One of the pharmacists in town packages up her medications into a card that puts each of the meds to be taken at a specific time in the one blister, then delivers the card weekly. Any change in med is immediately reflected in the updated card that will be delivered the day she tells them, and any remainder from the previous card taken away. On top of that, the pharmacist is one of the few licensed to mix his own meds from ingredient, so rather than taking a handful of pills, Mum takes just one or two that have the actives combined in one pill where they are compatible. As another bonus, they are generally smaller than many of the throat stuffers that come from “big pharma” Guess who has the market for the elderly in that town tied up!
Symbolism. Humans are visual animals, we value and put meaning into symbols that come to mean way more than just the illustration, or expression. Think about the Nike logo, 
a powerful symbol of sporting aspiration and achievement, or the Apple logo, a symbol of beautiful, functional original design, or in Australia where I live, 
the Aboriginal flag, that has come to express the need for our aboriginal people to express themselves as part of, but different to the rest of Australians.
Meaning. I struggled here for the right word, a word to convey more than just relevance, more than just delivering on a value proposition, something that has a deeper humanity in it than just a brand. Several businesses have made a commitment of “one for you, one for Africa” as a way of adding meaning to their brand, and it works. My personal trainer mate above achieves this by genuinely caring, and demonstrating that care in a variety of ways, about the health of happiness of her clients, even when they are no longer clients, usually because they go back to work in much better shape than would have otherwise been the case.
Let me know what you have done to build your brand.
Aug 5, 2015 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Small business
It seems to me that in the tsunami of digital marketing going on, FMCG is being left behind.
For brands largely dependent on consumer sales via supermarkets, you would think that they would be at the forefront of finding ways to engage with consumers as a means to loosen the choke hold the retailers have on every day purchases through their scale of operations.
When in store, consumers are driven by the environment to “commoditise” their shopping, constantly bombarded by price activity that has over time eroded the impact that a brand can have, giving retailers greater control of the shoppers purse. Price has become such a central driver in FMCG that I suspect many have forgotten how to really build a brand and market value to consumers, rather than just price and availability.
On the other hand, marketers kid themselves with the notion flogged by the snake oil bunch that people want a “relationship” with your brand, and spending mega bucks on building such a relationship will delver returns. Truth is that most supermarket shoppers, confined by a finite budget give their brand “relationships” little thought when in store. They tend to have a pool of acceptable products in a category, and buy from that pool based on an almost instantaneous response to their previous experiences. Marketers really only get the chance in to get a considered response when a product is being considered for the first time, or there is some other powerful outside stimulus. It is here that an ability to deliver highly targeted messages to consumers via digital means can have a real impact.
So how do we cut through the haze?.
The old rules of marketing still apply, just digitally.
Years ago I worked for a dairy company, we had a great long life custard product, and the simple co-location of a floor stack of custard next to the bananas when they were in season and a value price, with a bit of POS material, saw the sales of both soar. I have done this time and time again, with different product combinations, and the results have been consistent, problem is finding you way through the planograms and rules imposed by central head offices bent on selling floor space to suppliers and maintaining a discipline at store level, often at the expense of innovating to sell products to consumers.
How could digital work to enable this proven technique?
Apples iBeacon technology is one of several systems that use location sensitive smart phones to deliver brand messages. Unilever appears to be successfully trialling it with a Magnum promotion in the UK in collaboration with Tesco, who have a bit of history of innovation in the digital space. Retailers also have the building blocks of truly innovative co-location and collaborative activity housed in their loyalty card data. Combine that with geo-location and opportunities really open up.
Young consumers, heavy users of digital are not their mothers, they are distinctly different, and see brands and digital through different eyes. Relying on them to accept a commoditised selection on supermarket shelves is probably going to end in pain, as they select the products and brands they want to interact with digitally, and have a whole range of considerations their mothers would never consider.
I know this digital stuff is going to work when marketers manage to crack the code, and have the grunt to either collaborate constructively with retailers, or go around them. I have written about the cottage cheese club previously, an analogue version of what is possible, now simple and highly extendable with digital tools.
For heavens sake, get on with it!
Jul 22, 2015 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Small business
Email marketing is the stuff of small business dreams.
For the first time they can communicate with their markets, being able to measure the effectiveness of their efforts. Unlike the days of broadcast media where the return on any set of marketing activies was extremely hard to calculate, and therefore out of the bounds of possibility for those without a lot of money to risk, knowing the return and being able to experience for a modest outlay is fantastic.
There are myths, legends and piles of horseshit proclaimed about digital marketing, and SEO and email marketing key amongst the fodder.
I thought I would try and dispel some of the myths by offering some views of the basics.
This one is about email marketing, SEO will come in a few days.
There are piles of data available from email marketing providers, from the freebie version of Mailchimp to the really sophisticated providers like Infusionsoft, and everything in between. Each provider does things a bit differently, and charges for the levels of sophistication and integration that can be delivered. But all deliver metrics that will help you better target your email communication.
Following are the common, and probably most useful ones.
1. Bounce rate.
Simply the percentage of emails that could not be delivered to a recipients inbox, they “bounce”. Usually this is because the email as written is incorrect, or the email account has been closed, often because an employee has moved on. From time to time, you will get a bounce from an address due to a temporary problem, or closure such as a maintenance closure of a recipients server. Generally these will be delivered when the problem is removed, but those undeliverable where there is no temporary problem should be “cleaned” out of your list immediately. ISP’s regard high bounce rates as an indication of spamming, and so are likely to take action against such accounts.
2. Delivery rate.
As implied, it is the percentage of emails successfully delivered. Simply the converse of the bounce rate.
3. Open rate.
The percentage of your emails that were opened, pretty obvious. These days, we get so many emails that often we just skim those that appear important and delete or leave the rest, and most of us have our spam filters turned on, so that emails from suspect sources or with suspect subject lines are dropped automatically into the bin. This can easily happen to your marketing email. The best way to avoid it is to have personalised emails, “Dear Fred” rather than just “Hi”, and ask those joining your list to put your email address into their “safe” list in their email account.
4. Click Through Rate.
Often shortened to CTR, this is the number who clicked on one or more of the links in an email message. This measure is one of the foundations of successful digital marketing. When a target or prospect gets something, but does nothing with it, generally the communication will be deemed to have failed. Depending on what you are doing, an expected CTR will vary widely. You could reasonably expect a higher open rate and CTR on a newsletter that has been subscribed to, than an overtly promotional message, even from a trusted source. There are various techniques used too increase CTR rates, the best ones being an offer of something for free, which is the most common, but surveys work very well, asking for 2 minutes to gather general market or product information generates good click through rates as people like being asked for help when it is anonymous, and simple contests, like ” Which of these three is out of context” questions also can deliver excellent CTR rates.
5. Sharing rate.
The percentage of recipients who click on the “share this” button to share on one of more of their own platforms, or forward to others. Digital marketers often talk about “engagement”, the necessity to get some level of engagement before anything useful can happen, and sharing is one very useful measure of engagement. Equally, if you get a shared email post or message from a trusted colleague, you are highly likely to open and read it, it is a referral of the message.
6. Conversion rate.
The percentage of recipients who clicked on a link in your email to complete a desired action. It may be signing up to a list to receive more posts, or a move to the next level of a sales funnel, or even straight to a shopping cart. The conversion rate is the key measure of success of any communication, the recipient has done the action that was the objective of the email.
7. Email ROI.
Pretty self explanatory, but vital measure, and can become complicated when you start feeding in variables. In its most simple form it is the revenue generated by a campaign divided by the number of emails sent. Email marketing is not free, it consumes time and resources, so measuring the return you get on the investment is a crucial activity, and is the one that makes this type of marketing so effective.
Most will have heard the cliché “the money is in the list” from email marketing people, and it is half true. To my mind, the money is only in the list when those in the list take some action as a result of the communication they receive. However, growing your list of engaged and responsive receivers, waiting for your next communication or offer is a building block of ongoing email marketing success.
Need assistance, there are plenty more posts on digital marketing on this site, and there are many others around, mostly trying one of the techniques to get you into their sales funnel. Mine is really simple, call me if a chat would help.
