Jul 31, 2015 | Customers, Marketing, Small business
I am constantly surprised at the lack of understanding that many small businesses have of the greatest boon to small business in 100 years, digital marketing.
Last week I had the opportunity to do a short presentation to a network group, and took it by outlining the foundations of digital marketing.
For some in the group, it was yawn time, but for many, it was useful explanation.
Foundation 1. To explain some of the basic terms used in relation to websites, I used the metaphor of a house.
- The house is the website
- The land the house is on is the hosting
- The address is the domain
When you have the house, it needs to be connected to the world, the electricity, gas, and water or it is useless to anyone.
Then you need people to come, to make it a home, but to come they need a reason, in this case the content you can offer them.
Foundation 2. Continuing the house analogy, the notion of the three types of digital media as owned, earned and rented, was discussed.
- Owned media is your website. You own it, you determine what goes up, and who is able to access what. Just like your own home.
- Rented media are the various social platforms and forums that we inhabit. We do not own them, so are subject too the rules and behaviour of others, we have no control
- Earned media is the most valuable, and is when somebody shares in some way content you have posted. It matters little if that post was on your site, a social platform, or somebody else’s site, the fact that it was shared gives it credibility and value. I do not count “likes” in this context, as they are too easy, too automated to be a reasonable indicator of value.
Foundation 3. Traffic sources to your website. In summary there are four:
- Social traffic from social media platforms
- Search traffic, which is why having SEO optimises is important
- Content traffic, coming from content you post, and is shared around
- Advertising driven traffic.
Clearly there are overlaps and cause and effect at play, but the principal remains. The first three are often classed together as “organic” traffic, while advertising is obviously purchased traffic and as such is less valuable, but usually much quicker to generate.
Foundation 4. Digital marketing is a two edged sword. It enables you to target exactly an extremely specifically defined audience, and address them with very specific offers and information. This is the great strength of digital marketing. The flip side is that you must be able to say No, to a lot of seemingly potential customers, because unless your communication is very specific, it will not get read and acted on. This is very difficult for most. In the event you have several ideal customers, you will need to keep the marketing activity entirely separate.
Foundation 5. The fifth foundation is the foundation of all marketing, but now way more transparent and obvious; “fish where the fish are”
Foundation 6. Again, not exclusive to digital marketing, but now way more able to be automated and in control of the seller is the sales funnel. Every sales training process I have seen in 35 years in one way or another uses the funnel analogy, and it is equally valid with digital marketing. Difference now is that progress through the funnel can be tracked exactly, and managed pro-actively by the seller using data.
As a final note, there are thousands of tools to make your digital life easier, and more productive. Each person will evolve a way of working that best suits their skills and circumstances. There are many free tools that the beginner can use to cut their teeth, which can then be upgraded or substituted for more productive paid ones. The free tools I use are
Google analytics, Canva.com, Picmonkey.com, Mailchimp.com, Surveymonkey.com, Paint.net, Google keyword planner, Flikr.com and One-note.
The short deck I used I posted on Slideshare
Jul 29, 2015 | Customers, Marketing, Sales, Small business
Small businesses selling B2B always struggle to generate sales leads. Survey after survey confirms it as one of the biggest challenges they have.
There are plenty of tools out there that supposedly make it easy, and certainly they do make it easier than it has been in the past to generate many contacts, but it is still hard to generate a warm lead, and then to convert to a sale.
None of the tools are any good unless you have a crystal clear picture in your minds of the value you can deliver, being “wishy washy” and peppering the conversations with adjectives (particularly “awesome” my latest hate word) no longer works.
Following is a list of options that have worked over the years for my clients. Most are pretty obvious, when they are pointed out.
1. Referrals. Being referred is the best sales lead you could ever have. Someone who is familiar with your work saying “Bill is great at …. you should talk to him” to a colleague would be wonderful. Yet, so few of us explicitly ask for referrals. When you have done good work, ask who else your client knows who could benefit from your expertise, not expecting to be referred to their competitors.
2. Testimonials. Perhaps second to referrals are testimonials, people with whom you have worked who are prepared to say in the record how great you are. Video is the only way to go with testimonials. Nobody believes any more that the written ones on your website from “Monica X from Parramatta” are real, they believe you have written them. It takes Monica to front a camera, identify herself and say how great you are for it to be effective, then is very effective.
3. Personal networking. A lot of small business people join network groups, in the expectation that this will lead to referrals and work. It can, but almost always takes time and effort. Others in the group need to understand what you do, and how that is relevant to their problems, then they have to be convinced that you offer the best value solution to them. Being in such a group can be rewarding for small businesses in more ways that just generating leads, as it get them out of the office, and forces them to speak publicly about the value they can deliver, which almost always acts to sharpen the elevator pitch. These skills come in very useful when actually in elevators.
4. Digital networking. LinkedIn is the obvious tool here, too often misused by those who just see you there and immediately start selling. LinkedIn like any social platform requires that you demonstrate your bona fides first, and the best way to do that is to identify the groups, preferably closed ones, where your prospect hang out, and start to engage in the debates and conversations that occur. You can then follow up privately with some, and have a more focussed conversation about their needs and after a rapport is established, your solutions.
5. Seminars, webinars & e-books. In most cases, our clients buy from us because we have something, or know something that they cannot get elsewhere. Demonstrating your mastery of a topic by running seminars on them, producing webinars, and writing e-books demonstrates your mastery. The secondary benefit of this type of content is that it can be used, reused, repurposed, and reused again, and again.
6. Platform cross-posting. Many people blog on their own site, hoping people will stumble over the posts, but there are many other platforms now that can provide a shopfront for your products and services. LinkedIn recently introduced a blogging platform which works very well, you can open up a YouTube channel and post instructive videos, or put great information up on slideshare. Then there is guest blogging, a great way to leverage the lists of others, by adding value to their audience, a win win both ways.
7. Lead magnets. These are things that visitors can gain access to by exchanging their email address. It is a great way to reuse the content you produced in a webinar or e-book. Here the challenge is that you need to attract the eyeballs to the lead magnet before it has a chance of being magnetic.
8. Direct mail. Yes, snail mail does work in this day of digital everything. Now we get so few things in the mail that is not either bills or junk, that a handwritten envelope with a stamp, will always get opened and read. This requires that a modicum of research into your prospects is done, as a wrong spelling or title means immediate filing in the round-file. Best done in small batches, that way you can also test the response to the sales letter you send.
9. Warm cold calling. Bit of an oxymoron there, but a deliberate one. If you do not know the name and position of the person you are preparing to call, do to waste your time. However, if you do know their name, there is a reason they might be interested in hearing from you, and you can articulate that reason in 20 seconds or less, then that implies you have done sufficient research to make a cold call a warm one.
10. Advertising. The last and perhaps most obvious tactic to generate leads. All social platforms survive by taking advertising, they are the newspapers of the 21st century in that regard. You give them your profile and preferences, inadvertently or otherwise, and they sell that to advertisers to whom your profile fits their target. Having said that, the tools available on the platforms are terrific. Both Facebook and Google in particular set about making it increasingly easy to spend ad money with them with features like Facebooks lookalike audiences explained here by Jon Loomer, easy and AdWords strategies outlined by Wordstream.
Most businesses use a mixture of the above, too often randomly rather than as a deliberate strategy. The old marketing communication “rule of 3” still applies: Know what you want to say, know and articulate why it is relevant to the receiver, listen to the response.
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.
Jul 20, 2015 | Branding, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Myth 1. Fans, followers, and likes are valuable.
Reality. What you need to attract to your site is people who for one reason or another are willing to part with their money in exchange for what you have, or at least move towards that decision point. There are only two reasons for a website, the first is as a hobby, the second is commercial. Assuming yours is for the latter, act accordingly.
Myth 2. I have too do it all myself to be “authentic”.
Reality. Only partly true. If you are selling personalised services, there is some expectation that the voice of the person and the “voice” of the written words and other forms of content are the same, then you need to be involved in the editing, not necessarily the writing. However, my experience is that in the small business space, authenticity is very valuable, not so much in the corporate space.
Myth 3. You need to be on every platform.
Reality. Bunkum. Every platform is different, with a different user profile, user objective and type of response. Even for big corporations, diminishing returns kick in, and for small businesses, the task is simply overwhelming. I usually recommend to my small business clients 2, at most three, but do them properly.
Myth 4. Social media is not all that important, it is just where he kids go.
Reality. Aren’t kids your current and future customers? Social Media is the greatest competitive tool ever offered to small businesses, but like any tool, it can be used well and deliver huge value, or it can bite you in the arse.
Myth 5. I can wing it.
Reality. Some can, but they are very organised, have a strategy, and business objectives against which they measure themselves, but this is rare in my experience. Usually “winging it” means putting a post on Facebook at some point convenient, or tweeting a picture of yourself when at the pub. Both rarely work.
Myth 6. Social media is dangerous and unmanageable.
Reality. Social media can be dangerous when left to itself, it has the capacity to trash your biggest asset, your brand, almost overnight. On the other hand, like most dangerous things, it can be tamed and used to your advantage with knowledge, commitment, and skill.
Myth 7. Social media is all smoke and mirrors
Reality. Social media is now highly quantitative, able to give accurate and repeatable quantitative outcomes very quickly and cheaply. It can be reliable and accurate market research on the run, but it is also the first marketing tool to offer an ROI calculation on the investments made.
Myth 8. Social media is just too hard, I have too much else to do.
Reality. You cannot afford not to be engaged with Social media, it opens up the possibility of talking directly to your customers, and their friends, marketing nirvana. It is however, a consumer of considerable resources, and is not free. Many small business owners do not have the skills so they shy away, but the skills are readily available to either teach you, or as outsourced resources. Digital technology has opened up huge opportunities to free up our time, why not spend some of it talking to customers?
The simple fact is that Social Media is part of our marketing environment, it currently attracts almost half the advertising dollar, is now pretty much the only way to effectively reach large sections of consumers and customers, and for small businesses, is marketing manna from a digital heaven.
Jul 8, 2015 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Small business
Free works
It happened again last week.
A client asked why I advocated giving away a lot of information on their products and supporting technology, seemingly for free off their website. For them it is a challenging idea, one that runs against everything they have ever thought or done.
Their products are challenging, technical products, heavy in intellectual capital, so why give it away?.
To answer, I created the following list, and it is all about creating value before asking for the purchase order. Do it well, and customers do not have to be sold, they become buyers.
Provide assistance. Information assists potential customers to recognise that they have a problem, an opportunity, or that there may be a better way of approaching a situation.
Demonstrate. By demonstrating how their problems will be solved, enabling comparisons, and offering technical and financial case studies, the cost/benefits of a purchase can be more easily calculated. This makes the internal purchase approval processes easier for those charged with their carriage in a customers business.
Risk identification. Risks of adoption, and non-adoption can be articulated, demonstrated, and often costed and compared.
Learn. Information offers a prospect the opportunity to learn without the costs usually associated with learning, and they will not forget the opportunity.
Decision necessary information. Availability of strategically significant information from a supplier can accelerate the adoption and implementation of new products and processes, delivering a market benefit.
For my client, the list of benefits is as significant, and in this information driven modern commercial world virtually a competitive necessity.
Be expert. We will be seen as the experts in the market, and who would want to buy from an also ran?
Cycle time. It has the potential to shorten the sales cycle by removing some of the steps normally associated with such B2B sales of significant size
Conversion cost reduction. As a result of both of the previous items together, our cost of conversion from random and often unknown prospect to a transaction is likely to be reduced, and the numbers increased leveraging the costs of our sales effort.
Short listed. Information availability increases the chances that at least we get onto the short list of those who are considering making a purchase, but who may not be in our immediate sales radar.
Sales funnel information. Downloading of various material by prospects gives us not only information on who is in the market, but what they are looking for, and leads on their specific interests and concerns.
Build a brand. The biggest benefit of all is that of the building of the brand, the position of expertise in the market. In this day of ubiquitous information, being seen as the expert in any domain is a hugely valuable asset.
Being secretive, and believing that information held closely is power is now a failed strategy. It worked in the past, but no longer. Information is still power, but the way you leverage it has changed radically.
Jun 29, 2015 | Marketing, Sales, Small business
13 routes to success
Small businesses have few resources, so they need to get a lot of mileage out of what they do have.
How do they generate successful marketing campaigns that generate revenue and a long term position in a market without breaking the bank?.
Following are 13 ways that I have found to be successful in 20 years of advising small businesses. It is also fair to acknowledge that 20 years ago, the astonishing range of tools now available were barely in the minds of science fiction writers. There has been a revolution, and small businesses suddenly have the opportunity to look like and act like large ones, while retaining the advantages of being small.
1. Hone your elevator pitch.
You need to be able to engage a prospect in a very short time, sounds easy, but is very hard. The pitch is rarely about the product or service you have, although this is the subject of 9/10 pitches, the successful ones are about the outcomes your product can deliver to the prospect.
2. Collaborate.
Small businesses have great opportunities to collaborate with others with complementary products and services. The shoe shop with the dress shop, the florist with the liquor shop, the chiropractor with the gym, and so on.
3. Leverage social media.
I am often asked about the value of Social media, and can only respond by observing “that is where your customers are, so why would you not be there?”. However, managing social media can however become a burden if you try and do it all yourself. Listen to and believe many of the pundits with a silver bullet to sell, and you risk finding yourself lighter in the wallet, but no further forward, but trying to do it all yourself consumes considerable resources. The advent of digital marketing tools has not changed the basic foundations of marketing at all, just made them more accessible, and so outsourcing the bits you do not know how to do offers great opportunities for leverage.
4. Have a digital presence beyond a Facebook page.
If your marketing effort is all about Facebook, you have missed the boat. Facebook is a fantastic way of connecting, but it is only one, and it is not the best place o transact business, or cover the final step prior to a transaction, that is best done on a website. Social media delivers a set of great tools to drive people to a website, and start the process of engagement, moving them through a “funnel” towards a transaction, but it is only one of the tools needed. Refer above.
5. Foster creativity
The management structures of large businesses are designed to ensure the repeatability of process, so that they are not dependent on the knowledge and commitment of individuals. Therein lies their weakness, as another way of looking at a process is that it delivers multiple opportunities to say “no”. Find ways to foster the creativity of those in your networks, or out of them currently who have expertise and knowledge that can be applied to your sphere of operations.
Network relentlessly. Get out of the building, create networks and friendships that know about your businesses, what it does, its “Why” and it will enable over time organic growth.
6. Open envelopes.
A colleague of mine once said disparagingly about a mutual acquaintance that he would “go to the opening of an envelope”. On talking to this bloke on another occasion, he laughed and indicated that it was right, so long as he could wield the letter opener, meaning, he had an opportunity to put a point of view, and be the focus of some attention, even if only for a moment. I always thought it a good idea to take every opportunity to speak, as it builds credibility, and as a result, builds a business organically. It follows that you also need to be a competent public speaker, so if you are not, get some training, or opening envelopes at the local “toastmasters” group would be a good idea.
7. Seek referrals.
The most powerful marketing is word of mouth. When someone we trust tells us that a particular product or service is good, we tend to believe it, and will try it out when the need arises. Referrals are now hackneyed, as many web sites have them from people we have never heard of, and often we think the site owner probably wrote his own, but that does not diminish the power of the personal referral. Seek the personal referrals out, ask for them, post them, and build “social proof” in other ways.
8. Be the expert.
Whatever is your niche, make sure that you present yourself, and indeed are, an expert. The world is full of experts, but for a small business, if you are the expert in your local area, and those around who may need you understand you are the expert, who will get the business as it evolves?
9. Build relationships.
People buy from people, not businesses. I know that sounds odd with all the stuff being sold on line, but look at the sites that are successful, beyond the mega sites like Amazon and Alibaba, they all have a human face, and a personality. You might be sending your money via a credit card to a business you are not familiar with, but 9 times in 10, you would have looked at the profile of the “face” of the business, looked at the products they sell and endorse, sought some sort of social proof. You get to feel that in some way you know them, then you might buy. An old mentor of mine used to say, “Success comes to those who build many bridges, and never burn one”
10. Localise.
Most small businesses are local by their nature, be sure that your customers know where you are, that they can get their hands around your throat if necessary, but more importantly have a cup of coffee with you wen all is going well. Local, and the human touch that brings is enormously valuable. Even large businesses are localising. I rang the customer service lines of one of the banks recently, with a complaint, something they had done which had (presumably) unintended consequences on me, and I was nit happy. The first call was answered by a call centre, clearly not in Australia, the first hand-off was to the supervisor, again clearly nowhere near Australia, by which time I was getting really annoyed, but the third was to someone in a local call centre, who handled the problem quickly, easily, and in a language we both had as our first.
11. Offer incentives.
Most times these words are uttered, the first thing that springs to mind are discounts. These may play a role, but are far from the only ones. Time limits, quantity limits, guarantees, freemium, there are all sorts of incentives that do not require you to make a sale at a discount, many of them when used creatively will actually increase your conversion rates by adding some urgency to the selling process.
12. Everyone is in sales.
In every business, particularly small businesses, everyone in the business needs to recognise that they are in sales, that their job relies on selling, irrespective of the title they may have on their business card. This particularly applies to some of the marketing people out there who seem to think their job ends before accountability begins.
13. Promise the world, then deliver + Mars.
Under promising then over delivering used to be an effective strategy, but it has lost its gloss. Promising the world is easier than ever, and there are more people than ever making those promises in your space. Today you need to be known as the one who promises the world, like all the others, but then delivers with more than was promised. In effect it is an over delivery on the expected over delivery.
If you can do all of these, even a majority, the world is your oyster.
