Sep 28, 2012 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales
Working with a client recently, I realised my language had changed. The word “Pitch” had been substituted for the more usual “Present” as I encouraged them to get out and engage with their markets in a very focused way to build sales, rather than taking a more passive approach, and presenting their credentials, hoping to strike a nerve.
Any presentation, as I have argued before is an opportunity to sell something, a product, an idea, a course of action, but it seems to offer three alternatives to an audience, buy in, leave it alone, or remain on the fence. By contrast, a Pitch seems to offer less options, you either buy in, or not. No middle course, no fence, yes or no.
Before he was famous outside advertising, Bryce Courtney used to write a weekly column for one of the Australian newspapers called “The Pitch.” Looking back at a dog-eared copy of a compilation of columns published afterwards, and decoding the great stories for the message, it is unashamedly, “Pitch” as a call to action, leave no middle ground, and manage a conversation for a “Yes or No” outcome.
A more recent publication is Oren Klaff’s great little book, “Pitch Anything” which offers a framework for making a pitch successful, and whilst the focus is on capital raising, the lessons are applicable everywhere.
So stop presenting, and start pitching when you want a clear outcome.
Sep 25, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Big Brother is watching where you are, if you have a smartphone. The GPS capabilities of the newer smartphones opens up an extraordinary Pandora’s box of opportunities to market to those in immediate reach, alternatively to deluge them with SPAM, as illustrated by Tom Fishburnes cartoon . (make sure you click through to his Google keynote)
You are a smart young thing, with a purchase history in a chain of fashion stores. As you walk into the orbit of a store, your phone tells them who you are, and that you are close, which offers the chance to mine your database, and come up with tailored specials, available for the next 20 minutes, just for you. Or perhaps as you move towards the cinema complex in George Street, the movie about to start that sits in your preferred genre, offers you a preferred location, and a coffee. The opportunities are endless, the potential to annoy by filling your phone with Spam almost as endless.
This evolution will require a rethink of the customer acquisition process. Aiming messages at consumers with the laser-like accuracy to avoid being a Spammer will require a sophisticated data mining capability, as well as a sensitivity to consumer preferences that will be hard to translate into an algorithm.
The downside for those who do it poorly is that potentially loyal consumers will move elsewhere, and block your messages, the emerging equivalent of retail purgatory.
Sep 13, 2012 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
In a chook-house, there are both chickens and eggs, all mixed up, and hard to tell which chicken laid which eggs. It is a bit like the web, full of sites that could belong to any number of businesses.
As a part of a project a while ago looked at the sites of a range of operators competing in the market category in which this particular client operates. Most spruiked the features of their products and brands, what they did, rather than talking about the benefits that usage delivered, what problem the product solved, and why that solution was superior.
Why is it that the designers of sites seem to think that the most important thing to be said is what their product does, rather than designing the site to offer information that relates to the reasons why a customer may be seeking a product?
The old habits of printing a brochure and shoving it into every letterbox in reach die hard, and are being replicated on the web. A real pity, when the real opportunity is to target the offer to the individual who is attracted to look at the detail of your proposition because it engages them with something they want to know
Aug 25, 2012 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Social media is a jungle, full of vegetation that limits the view, poisionous flowers that look beautiful at first glance, small areas of bright sunlight that somehow finds its way through the foliage, nasty surprises of many types, and gems that can change your life.
Those who know the jungle can pick the nasties from the goodies with little more than a glance, when the reluctant wanderer can barely see any difference, and they seem to be able to find their way effortlessly through the undergrowth whilst we flounder.
That is the nature of our environment, get used to it.
There are many blogs out there that offer information, insight, and advice, use them. Jay Baer’s convince and convert, Mike Stelzner’s Social Media Examiner, and Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation, Jeff Bullas, being four of the best. All offer advice, insight and opinion via a range of means, and will throw a bit of light into the dark corners.
A client asked me recently why he should bother spending the time and money (it is not cheap, it just costs differently to the stuff on the P&L) on social media, and my answer was simple: “that is where your customers are!”
Jul 23, 2012 | Communication, Social Media
The “social” part of social media is a metaphor for a conversation you would have over the back fence, or in a shop, on the street, and so on, it is just electronic.
It makes sense therefore to treat the e-conversation the same way you would treat a personal one, listen, ask questions, be polite and attentive, engage.
From one of the gurus, here is a list of 19 ways, all of which are just the common sense rules of behavior we apply without a lot of thought when we engage in a conversation across the back fence, that should be applied to blogs, and all other forms of social media.
Many businesses appear to miss the point, seeming to think that they can control SM as they do their internal communications, and failing to recognise the totally voluntary nature of social media. It is this voluntary participation that gives SM its power to endorse and inform. Just like over the back fence, we recognise that there is little self interest in an endorsement, and it comes from somebody with whom we have engaged voluntarily, so it carries great power.
Jul 17, 2012 | Category, Communication, Marketing, Sales, Strategy
Huge amounts of marketing dollars are spent to convince customers to come back. They try the product, leave, or just shop around, so we spend to get them back.
If marketing really was a war, as the analogies often go, it would be the same as expending resources to take a hill, then abandoning it to the enemy, only to have some general say take that hill, so the grunts go through the hell again.
How much easier to have kept it once taken.
