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 18, 2015 | Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Blogging is a journey
Writing a blog can be confronting, and often small business owners shy away for the commitment. Make no mistake it is a commitment, but so is anything worth doing.
After 6 years and 1400 posts, and a lot of reading of posts by others, I have learned a bit, I hope, and assembled a few tips:
Be selective. Starting out you cannot do everything, so pick the platforms that suit you. Logically this follows some thought about where your target market hangs out digitally. This particularly relates to those in your field who are influencers.
Create an engaging profile. Every platform offers the opportunity to create a profile. Do it thoughtfully, considering the things that your preferred readers might like to see. Too often I see profiles that are incomplete or look like resumes, in the latter case, unless you are actively looking for a job, it is not of much interest to anyone but your Mum.
Upload a photo that does you justice. Your profile photo is like the headline photo in the front page of a newspaper, and you only get one chance to make a first impression.
Background images. Again, most offer the opportunity for a background image, this is the opportunity to confirm your expertise, or the thing you want to be remembered for. Unless, you are a Vet, no cats allowed.
Understand the platform. Whichever platform(s) you choose to start with, spend a bit of time understanding how they work, the features, and how you might be able to use them. Just having a profile up is useless, you need to be able to actively engage in the features of the platform to be noticed.
Follow and comment. Engagement starts somewhere, in most cases following those with whom you feel you would like to share a coffee with in real life is a good start. Once following, make comments on their posts, refer to other things they may be interested in, link to your posts, and create debates, offer an alternative point of view.
Learn from others. Social media has been exploding for the last 15 years. There are some real gurus out there along with all the wannabe’s. By watching and listening you will figure out quickly who they are, learn from them, model your digital behaviour on theirs, without copying, as you need your own ‘voice”. One of the gurus I have watched is Jeff Bullas, a true guru who lives almost around the corner in Sydney. By simply watching what he does, I have leant a lot.
Endorse and share. Sharing is an endorsement, if you feel something, is worthwhile, share it amongst your networks with a short note. These days it is easy to share on all platforms, but taking the time to write and endorse a post makes a lot of difference. Just clicking the ‘like’ button really means little any more.
Join groups. This is a great way to come to know those in a market who are the opinion leaders, and make a thoughtful contribution. I much prefer the closed groups, firstly because the rules can be set and you are less likely to be bombarded by irrelevant advertising messages, but more importantly because there is a common reason to be a member of a group, and if the reason is at the core of your businesses, it is clearly a good place to be.
Consistency. This all takes time and effort, but you have to be in the game to win. Those who find you worth following will get used to a rhythm, so once that is established, do your best to keep it up. Consistency in tone of ‘voice’ is also important. A blog is a personal thing, that is why people have followed in many cases, so outsourcing it can be a mistake. By contrast, having guest bloggers can be a great way to add value to your readers, and for your it offers the opportunity to attract new readers, point is that the guest post is explicitly written by a guest. I guest post regularly in a food industry magazine, it helps them with original and relevant articles and thoughts, and drives traffic for me.
Don’t pitch. When you use blog posts to pitch, if you do it too hard, you will lose readers. By all means offer access to landing pages that do pitch products or events, but they should be elsewhere beyond a soft invitation to readers who may be interested to click and go there. Hard selling on a blog post is the quickest way to put off readers other than being irrelevant or committing the sin of bad writing, I have seen.
Be visual. Human beings are visual animals, we respond to visual stimuli. Look at the reaction around the world to the photo of the little drowned Syrian boy being lifted out of the water. 
He is not the first to have been reported to have drowned, this was not the first story, it probably ranks at a number well over a million in the words written, but it grabbed the attention of the world like nothing that has gone before.
Be visible. Use social icons at every opportunity giving people as many opportunities to sample and connect as possible. It is a numbers game after all, and getting them to the front door counts.
Extend courtesy to others. Digital interaction is no different to face to face, apart for the obvious . People like to be thanked, acknowledged for their contributions, and have their efforts reciprocated. However, being selective in the reciprocity can be useful. There are many tools out there that just automatically do stuff, like follow or like. Following back an automated system is not the same as following back a person, so be selective and be careful who you like.
Start. Always the hardest thing, to make the commitment to yourself, and get on with it, dismiss the voice in your ear that tell you that you do not know enough, it is too hard, or that nobody will come. As we all know, the journey stats with the first step.
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.
Sep 9, 2015 | Category, Customers, Marketing, retail, Small business
supermarket buyers hold the power
Respected Australian Food industry journal Australian Food News published a terrific rewrite of a presentation I gave some weeks ago to a group of food industry CEO’s reflecting on the years I have spent in the industry.
After 40 years, I thought there may be something of value to pass on those following, and it was a great opportunity to have some fun.
A copy of the original presentation has been put up on Slideshare. AFN changed the order around, improving what was in effect a brain-dump set of slides accompanying a casual presentation.
Know your business and theirs
- Know more about your business than the buyer does. This seems pretty obvious now, but in an early (late 70’s I guess) encounter with one of the doyens of the industry, Eric Bender of Franklins, he demonstrated what can happen if you are underprepared. Eric took pity, and let me off lightly that day, and I never forgot the lesson.
- In a power imbalance, negotiation is challenging. Whether we like it or not, the buyer has all the power, even the biggest companies have little power to influence them in any way that is inconsistent with their best interests. I remember many years ago Coke had a blue with Coles (I think) believing that Coles needed them on shelf, so they hung tough, for a while. After a period which was a golden age for Pepsi, Coke relented.
- Don’t put your eggs in their basket. People often say that you should never put all your eggs in the one basket, but from time to time, when you control destiny of the basket, it is OK. However, putting all your eggs in the buyers basket has proved fatal for many, particularly small businesses that simply do not have the wherewithal to service the relationship at the margins on offer. Besides, depending on whose numbers you believe, there is somewhere north of $45 billion of sales outside supermarkets, so why do you need to covet the buyers basket.
Know your customer and control your message
- Buyers are lousy at marketing. Over the 40 years this has been proved over and over again. They are good at being retailers, they understand the dynamics of their floor and shelf space, customer traffic, negotiation, and copying quickly, but very little about customer behaviour outside their stores, and the importance of branding and communication that contains a promise other than price, then delivering on it.
- Know the rules well enough to play in the grey areas. There are the written rules, there are the unwritten rules, and between them is a grey area of interpretation. Knowing the rules well enough, and knowing the administrator of the rules well enough to identify the grey areas and play to them is a rare skill learnt over time, with deep experience. I used to work with a field sales manager affectionately known as “Cookie”. She was the best I ever saw in a store, had the planograms in her head, knew all the personnel, what they were like, what they wanted, and how to turn them inside out. She and her team destroyed all our opposition in NSW.
Experience counts
- Dealing with Buyers is a job for your “A Players” The smart people in your businesses should be the ones taking up the challenge of dealing with buyers, as it can be a make or break activity. Many seem to think it is a place to train future product managers, or hide the boss’s nephew. Wrong, nobody should be a product manager without having had the chance to be mauled a few times, but that should not mean buyer training is a pathway. Only allow your smartest, best, most motivated people in front of your biggest customers, who also is paid to extract the maximum from the piece of real estate you covet. I always found professionally trained introverts were best. They instinctively over prepared, and had data driven logical and sequential minds, and were generally smarter than the buyers they faced. Ask yourself “what is someone who looks after 40% of my sales really worth?” and pay them appropriately.
- Corporate memory is absolutely invaluable. Don’t re-learn from your new experience, it is really, really expensive, learn from the past. Learn from others, learn from the experience that the business has had in the past so you avoid repeating mistakes.
- Beware new buyer syndrome. We have all been faced with a new buyer, recently promoted from the baked beans aisle of the store in West Bullamakanka, who is suddenly given the power of “No” over you, and found the feeling seductive. You have little choice but to work with them, so put your best people on them, and there is a chance that when a bit older and wiser, they will remember the effort, and it will pay dividends.
When it’s over it’s over
- Let the horse die. No amount of flogging will get a dead horse to move, no matter how encouraging the vet may be, and you know he has a vested interest to keep you flogging. You must know when to give up and walk. In this case, the Vet needs your promotional money, so keeps encouraging you to stick at it, but you know the product has eroded so it only sells on price discount, which is below your floor, and the buyers keep buying it from promo period to the next, never at full tote. In the end it costs less to lead the horse out to a humane death while it still walks, rather than leave it to suffer, keeping up the strong and expensive medication, then suddenly finding it has died, and you have a warehouse full of horse food to write off.
- Innovation is more than changing the pack colour. Innovation is when you do something that makes the pie bigger, not just add something similar and slice it up in a different way. Besides, flagging “new and improved” leads consumers to conclude you have been selling them second rate stuff up to now. What retailers are selling to you is shelf space, and as such are going to get as much for it as they can, and they do not care if they sell your product or somebody else’s from it. You go in with your whizz bang new pack colour, they will take the promo money, and line fees, and all the rest, their business is selling you retail real estate, and if you offer a good enough price, you get the chocolates, this week.
Work with them not against them
- Be nice to buyers. There is little value in annoying buyers unnecessarily, although it is sometimes pretty easy to do. Remember that buyers like to be liked, just like anyone else, so get them to like you, store up the brownie points when you can, you may need them some day.
- Ensure the Buyer knows you are not afraid. You need to be serious, informed, appropriately acknowledging the power imbalance by being creative, but never afraid. Even when the buyer beats up on you, if you are prepared to push back, they will respect you in the morning, but if you cower and beg, well, there will never be any respect, and there will be no coming back.
- Buyers do not care about you. Retailers are in business to satisfy shareholders, and the individuals buyers have targets to meet that do not have anything to do with you. They care about themselves, and the challenges they are facing, so getting them to do something you want them to do revolves around you solving their problems, not them yours.
- Buyers need you or someone like you. When it comes down to it the shelf space needs to be filled. So if you can articulate the need, they will give you back a bit of the power imbalance that exists.
- Beware the armchair experts. Many of those who claim expertise haven’t actually got any. So listen to all the sensible advice you can find, but make up your own mind, and implement with focus, agility and passion. There really is no better way of knowing about buyer behaviour than by working with them.
So, there it is, almost 40 years of pain and experience in the time it took you to read this article.
Bargain.
Sep 4, 2015 | Customers, Marketing, Small business
So, you managed to get that cold email opened by the recipient.
Well done, past the first hurdle.
The next is to create an environment where the opener does something you want as a result of the opening, your next step in the process of engaging towards a transaction.
If you do not have one, why bother in the first place?
A couple of weeks ago I opened a cold email, simply because the headline promised something I had been actively seeking. A simple CRM system designed for small B2B businesses looking at the opportunities offered by sales and marketing automation to scale their businesses. Exactly the thing I had been looking for to assist one of my clients.
In addition, I could see from the auto-preview that it was directed at me, and that there was a logical connection.
I have reproduced it below:
A review of CRM options for SME’s contemplating a first step.
Dear Allen,
I was in the audience at the recent presentation you gave to small business CEO’s in the AFGC forum. I fully agreed with most of the points you made, and you raised a few I had not considered.
One of them was the difficulty many SME’s have taking that first step into marketing automation, usually a simple CRM implementation. I see from your Linkedin profile and significant number of blog posts that this is the sort of thing you run into regularly.
Attached is a review of a number of systems I completed a short time ago, which I thought might be of value to you.
I will ring you at 8.50 am next Thursday, and if you are available, hopefully take 5 minutes to see what you thought of the systems reviewed.
Kind regards
Stephen
He did ring at 8.50 the following Thursday, we did have a conversation, way longer than 5 minutes, my choice, and it is likely that we will do some business.
Lets look at what he did right:
- The headline of the email promised to deliver a benefit, something that may make my life easier.
- The email had been highly personalised, and was complementary of the work I had done.
- The CTA was crystal clear. He would ring me at a specified time, for a chat that almost required me to have read the attachment to participate. It would almost have been rude of me to have been unavailable and unprepared.
- He promised to take up only 5 minutes. How could I not give 5 minutes to someone who had gone to all that trouble, and who possibly had a solution to a problem in front of me.
Are your email campaigns as targeted?
Do you do the work up front to give yourself the best chance of creating a qualified lead?
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.
