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.
Jan 20, 2015 | Branding, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Interactive content adds greater value
The mantra “Content is King” is now about three years old, geriatric in web years.
Now almost everybody is doing it, certainly almost everyone small businesses need to compete successfully against to survive.
Content is rapidly becoming a commodity, something to be “sourced” as you would a new printer cartridge, or replacement part for a bit of machinery, the only real challenges left are to know where to look, how to sort through the options, and how much to pay.
Given this is the case, how should forward thinking marketers, particularly those on small budgets set about differentiating themselves amongst the welter of competing attention grabbing options available?
The answer is pretty easy to say, but not so easy to execute.
Find ways to actively engage the individuals in your market with your content . Just getting them to read a post, or even download a white paper is no longer good enough, you have to find the means to put their brains into gear, rather than just letting them operate on autopilot.
Turn a white paper into an interactive performance measurement tool,
Build a quizzes and games into your infographics,
Create questionnaires to complement your best practise databases,
Throw out the product brochure, and let customers design their own product and add the extras.
There are a few services evolving to assist the process, several tailored for specific social media platforms, but the hardest bit is to find the creativity, imagination, and market insight that will allow you to understand the interactions with your product and its competitors sufficiently well to know what sort of activity will engage them.
Get it right, and you will also get to gather an extraordinary array of customer behavioural data that can be leveraged, delivering value to your business and your customers.
Jan 19, 2015 | Collaboration, Communication, Small business
Great communication is a two way street!
Working with a colleague over Christmas to assist in the development of a presentation that was a really important opportunity to build her personal brand with the audience. Creating presentations that work is a process, and hard work, so to start, we broke the task of building the presentation down into three components.
- Twitter Pitch. Twitter has its detractors, but the huge unintended benefit for those communicating ideas as distinct from the minutiae of their lives is that it forcse us to distill ideas into 140 characters, what I call the” twitter pitch“. Applying this discipline to the preparation of a presentation is usually the same sort of challenge as presented by developing the elevator pitch for your business. In this case, the challenge was to articulate in one sentence the central idea that was to be conveyed. Not easy.
- Know what you want to happen. Clarifying this really has three parts:
- Define what it is that you want the audience to know as a result of the presentation
- Know what you want the audience to feel during and after the presentation
- Know exactly what it is you want them to do with the information you provide, and deliver them the means to do it. A “call to action” if you like.
- Create a structure for the presentation that delivers on the points above. Again, there are three factors at work:
- Have a logical, sequential structure of some sort for the presentation.
- Gain the trust of the audience, listening but not believing is a waste of everyone’s time.
- Do it with feeling. People rarely remember facts, but they do clearly remember the emotions they felt while the facts were being recited. I do not remember the date of the assassination of JFK, but I do remember (yes, I am that bloody old) exactly what I was doing at the time, and how I and those around me reacted to the news.
Delivering a presentation is a difficult to obtain opportunity to sell. An idea, a product, your skills, the reason your business exists, it varies, but the common point is that those in the room have given you their time and attention, their most valuable resource, don’t waste it for them, and miss the opportunity for you.
On a final note, you may also notice that all of the above is in “threes”. For some reason I do not understand, the human brain is very efficient at remembering things in threes. If you organise your presentation into blocks of threes, you will be better able to manage the flow, remember the sequences and words, and deliver.
None of this is easy, and rarely is a great presentation prepared alone, and it is never done at the last moment and without practise and a critical eye.
Need a critical eye, and sounding board? I can help.
Jan 16, 2015 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business
http://www.markstewart.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/women_chatting.jpg
Most would acknowledge that word of mouth is the most effective marketing channel there is, then promptly forget that fact as they set about preparing and implementing their programs.
Discounts, bundles, making ads, facebook likes, social media mentions, retweets and shares, and many other activities all get a guernsey, but when was the last time you explicitly set about creating word of mouth, real life endorsements, Margie from Marrickville telling her neighbor over the fence that your product is the best thing since sliced bread?
How much of your marketing budget has as its specific aim to create personal endorsements?
We all know that “WOM” is the original marketing channel, so I was surprised to see this research that reflected that only 28% of small businesses when asked to identify their best marketing channel noted Word of mouth in its proper place.
Have we just forgotten the basics, been seduced by the the welter of choices available?
Perhaps it is just the sample, choices, or that it is from the US, but I asked a small group last week a similar question, albeit open-ended, and word of mouth came in at about the same level.
We can now target messages to specific behaviors practiced by very discrete subgroups, why would we not seek to ensure we deliver outstanding value to them, then encourage them to spread the word amongst those they know who are similarly interested?
Word of mouth, the original and still the best social media platform.
