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 2, 2015 | Customers, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
I find myself writing a proposal for the development and implementation of a digital marketing strategy for a bunch who know they need it, because I suspect their kids told them, but have no idea what it is.
Part of the challenge is to figure out how to balance the digital and social media education against the tough realities of marketing which have not changed despite all the new tools. The entrenched view that marketing is about putting out a monthly newsletter full of general bluster and crap and discounting as and when deemed necessary, usually from an inflated starting point pervades the thinking, and has contributed to ensuring the previous efforts in the digital space have failed.
Perhaps I am wasting my time?
Some of the essential early questions are proving to be challenging for them. Questions like:
1. Who is your audience? We need much more than generalised demographics, we need specific behavioural information informed by the demographics to the point of being able to give prospects individual personalities which we can address in communications.
2. Why and where do they spend their time online? The prospective audience all have digital lives, and if we are serious about becoming a part of those lives, we need to be serious about understanding how it works on an individual basis now, or we risk alienation.
3. What do you have to say? Unless what you have to say is of interest to them, sufficient to engage and over time lead them to a transaction, there is no future. Speaking to a prospect in their words, explaining why should they care about what you have to say is now essential.
4. How does what you have to say add value to their lives? It is one thing to be noticed, and hopefully gain some interest, but unless we can tell them specifically how the item being promised will add value to their lives, they will not engage. Long gone are the days of broadcasting generalised features and standing back with an order book. Now we have to specifically target benefits and articulate them unambiguously and with sensitivity to the aspirations, situation and needs of the prospect.
5. Why are you reaching out to them? The initial and quite reasonable and logical reaction to digital communication is that you are just trying to reach them to flog them something, and nobody likes to be a target. Describing the payoff to them in their terms is essential.
6. What results are you expecting? Knowing the end you are seeking is pretty important. This is not just the end point of the whole process, but the end points in all the building blocks in the engagement to transaction process. The practise of marketing has been revolutionised by the ability to collect and analyse data. For the first time we can now identify which half will be wasted and eliminate it.
Todays digital consumers are pretty savvy, cynical and can smell a con a mile away. However, they are also able to see the intention behind the tools and the benefits that can be delivered to them by the tools, and are comfortable with the trade-off if it is of benefit to them.
Jun 26, 2015 | Customers, Small business, Social Media
Customer profile development
It often happens at events at which I speak, big or small, does not seem to matter.
Someone afterwards comes up to get some advice on their particular scheme to make a million from an online business.
It happened again last week, one very sensible business idea that has been road tested and while sort of working, is sputtering, and a second that is as likely as the second coming to deliver salvation.
The advice I give always starts at the same place, the 4 core questions that need to be asked before anything else:
Who is your ideal customer?
Where can you find them?
What is it that you can deliver to them that will attract them to you?
What result do you want to give them?
It is rare that anyone I speak to has really thought through all four, indeed rare that even the first is clear, but without that discipline, you may as well keep the money you would give away chasing the dream.
It is reasonable to start with a view, and after testing, alter it based on what you have learnt, but let’s take them one at a time.
Who is your ideal customer?.
In the pre digital age, all we could do was describe our ideal customers in very broad demographic and assumed behavioural terms, now we can be extraordinarily specific. We have also broken the bounds of geography, our customers can be anywhere in the world, and we can reach them. Bombarded as we all are with messages, unless a message speaks specifically to us, about something of immediate interest, we no longer see it, the auto spam filter between our ears screens it all out. In the event your million dollar idea has more than one ideal customer, do the exercise twice, be prepared to have two, or three, or four, sets of ideal customers and the messaging that is specifically relevant to them researched and prepared.
Where can you find them?
This question is not about geography, but about our digital lives. People with similar preferences tend to stick together, it was always so in the school yard, and it is the same in our digital lives. My eldest son is a specialist in old fashioned large format, black and white, architectural and landscape photography. His peer group around Sydney is pretty small, in Australia modest, but his global network of like minded specialists and hobbyists is substantial. You will find him in digital places that accommodate those particular specialists, and if you want to talk to them, the way to do so is to go there digitally, and say something of specific interest. Unless you can identify and deeply refine the profile, you will never find him, or anyone else who might buy your idea.
What can you deliver that is attractive to them?
Our range of choices of goods and services and their providers is vast, what is it about you and yours that is likely to be attractive to a prospective customer? To continue the analogy with my son, if you just knew he was a successful photographer, and you sold top end photographic equipment, you might think he was a prospect. No so. You need to be able to deliver him something specifically about his form of photography that is unavailable elsewhere, and that he is currently thinking about, or could be enticed to think about, before he will even notice a message from you.
What result do you want to give them?
Everyone to whom you try to sell something recognises that you are doing it for profit, not your health. While they may be happy to see you healthy, they will only buy from you if there is something in it for them beyond the warm feeling of making you successful. It is therefore essential that you define the result that your prospect will get from using your product. Again using my son, it would be attractive to him to find a large format camera and tripod setup that weighed less than the many kilos of his current setup, which he packs onto his back as he walks long distances to get just the right aspect and light, but any sacrifice of image quality, and his standards are extraordinarily high, would be absolutely unacceptable as a trade-off.
When, and only when you have thought through all this in detail, will you be ready to seriously contemplate an investment in the digital technology and content creation necessary bring your dream alive.
May 8, 2015 | Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
I am speaking to small businesses all the time, and there are a lot of common conversations that occur. One of the most common is about advertising, particularly as it relates to advertising with Facebook and Google.
The conversations take a pretty common route.
The first thing to understand is the huge differences in a potential customers situation as they encounter Facebook ads, and Google AdWords.
The reasons people go to these two platforms are different.
Facebook is social, people are not there to buy stuff, so the path from the social to a transaction usually has a number of steps.
By contrast, a Google search is very specific, “I want information on XX”. Sometimes it will be for the purpose of researching, and sometimes they are committed to making a purchase of a product in your category. They are a “sale ready” audience.
It is for this reason I often recommend people start with AdWords as a means to advertise digitally, learn, and perhaps later use Facebook.
Irrespective of the platform choice, following are the 12 things that make sense to me that you should consider as you start on the digital advertising journey.
- Learn about the platforms, at least in principal, so you understand the stuff told to you by so called experts, and are in a position to ask intelligent questions.
- Start small, figure what works, and expand along the best path, always being prepared to adjust as you learn more. Having a plan, and ensuring the plan is captured in a detailed brief is essential, even if you are doing all the work yourself.
- Tracking and metrics. Before you start, know the source of visitors to your website, and track the changes that occur after the ads are placed. The huge change that has occurred with digital advertising is that we can now answer the question “which half of our advertising is wasted.”
- Define those you want to reach, in as much detail as possible. There are many different, although overlapping audiences you can target: current Facebook fans, and their friends, your current mailing lists held in whatever form they may be, visitors to your website, your competitors customers and friends, (particularly Facebook) and “lookalikes” to any of the above. The choices in the platforms are pretty good, take the time to really understand the choices you are making.
- Build relationships with current customers/fans. We all know that it is easier to get more business from an existing relationship, whatever the form of that relationship, than it is to start from scratch and build a new one to the point where they are prepared to buy from you.
- Create “stickiness” and trust by offering free advice, content, and ideas, and advice, and in responding, do so on a personal level. Webinars, podcasts, lists, blog posts, all serve differing needs in the process and the old adage that you have to give a bit before you can expect anything to come back, still works.
- Understand the customer journey. Facebook particularly, but also Google, require conversion to a sale after the initial contact. To do that you need to provide access the offers, products and relevant information through a landing page process of some sort, leading to a shopping cart, or sign up form. At each point, the potential customer has to make a choice, “do I proceed or not?” and making that choice easy, to the point of automatic requires real understanding of their mindset.
- Landing page optimisation. The differences in performance of differing landing page copy and design is astonishing, so the optimisation of landing pages is a whole process, even an art in itself.
- Create the process before you place the ads. A very common common mistake is to place some ads, they often do not cost much, then when a response arrives, you start wondering what to do with it. Wrong way around. Have the process mapped out, with the follow up content written and the delivery sequences mapped out.
- Analyse and analyse. Obviously having the right metrics to analyse is important, but tracking visitors, conversion rates, and the path a visitor takes to a transaction is enormously valuable in optimising the process. To some extent this is a repeat of step three, but the emphasis here is on the continuous improvement by testing and tweaking of the communication.
- Have a budget, and stick to it. Tracking conversion rates and the cost per conversion at each point in the customers journey as per the point above is vital. The opportunity to measure the conversion costs has never been greater, so make sure you do, and you give yourself time to correct the mistakes you will inevitably make.
- Rinse and repeat, to learn and improve.
You can pay someone too do all this for you, but even if you do, it is reassuring to understand the principals of the process. Most small businesses are careful with the pennies, so making the effort to understand where your money is going, and how to maximise the impact gives the confidence to make the commitment.
Apr 21, 2015 | Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
I hate you
Small businesses are all aware of the power of Social Media, usually want to play, and mostly get it wrong. Following are the 11 Mistakes I have most often seen over the last few years. This is despite facebook being around since 2004, Twitter since 2006, and the others mostly 5 or 6 years, so you can’t really say this stuff is new anymore.
The application of Digital technology to marketing is the greatest innovation since Guttenberg put ink to paper. It offers small businesses the opportunity to be something other than bound by geographic boundaries and the economics of scale.
- You have no plan.
The last thing you want to do is overlook the first thing you should do every time you allocate some of your scarcest resources. Identify your target audience, do your research, determine your objectives, develop your content, and make your choices of the tools best suited. Then act accordingly, monitor results and improve, rinse and repeat.
- You are working solo.
Solo can be done but is really hard work. I picked up a typo in a mates newsletter a week or so ago, pointed out the page in an email, and he still could not see it. Working solo, you often miss what is right in front of you, and there are only so many things you can do yourself, so pick the ones you can do well, and are necessary, and ignore or outsource the rest.
- You think you are a writer
We are all taught to write at school, that does not make us writers. Of course, you’re not trying to be Hemingway, but quality writing makes a huge difference to the results, even in 140 characters.
- You fail to interest your audience.
Pretty obvious. We have so much blasting at us that we get little chance to impress, a fleeting second at best. Breaking through the mass of communication is critical. Best exercise I usually recommend is to haunt the shelves of your local newsagent for a while, read the headlines of the magazines. Those people know how to attract and interest an audience.
- You’re Not Being Yourself.
It is easier to outsource the blog posts and social media updates, but I recommend that you at the very least read and edit every post that goes out under your name. Authenticity is now almost a cliché, but that is why it is right. Unless you are Barak Obama, people will get annoyed that you are not writing the posts that are under your name. Social media is as much about opinions as they are facts, tell people what you think, recognising not all will agree, and perhaps even better some will dislike you and not come back, leaving a tighter group of advocates. Being a fake, bland, and opinion-less is a quick way to lose credibility and audience.
- You not consistent.
Be regular and predictable in the frequency and length of post, and keep the same style. To some extent this is inconsistent with the “be interesting” advice above, but it is a useful to be maintain the same persona. You would have trouble with a friend if they behaved inconsistently, sometimes late, sometimes early, often unpredictable and erratic. Once or twice can be fun, all the time is tiresome. Same in social media.
- You are careless.
Written communication is far more informal than it was in the past, but that is no excuse for typos, grammatical mistakes, and confusing messages. Some colloquialism and slang is OK, but a little goes a long way.
- You are not visual.
Human beings are visual animals, and visual is becoming easier by the day, so use it. There are many alternatives, stock images, your own shots, video, Instagram, vine, YouTube, and all the rest. Use it to make a point, stand out, and engage.
- You are not tracking the numbers.
This is the last, and most stupid of all, as well as being disturbingly common. The huge benefit of digital marketing is that suddenly, your efforts can be tracked, a genuine calculation of return can be made, suddenly we get to find out which half of our communication budget was being wasted before we had the numbers. if that is not enough, the free analytics are pretty comprehensive, more than most small businesses can easily use.
Mar 11, 2015 | Change, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Designing websites requires the skill of a master juggler
Often I find myself working with a small business to specify a website and digital strategy, and sometimes I am actually taking a brief for a website design. Either way, the same questions keep popping up, so I thought it sensible to list them down.
For some unknown reason, I stopped at 69, although I am sure you can add a number more that have been missed.
Background information.
- What is the purpose of the site?
- What is it about your current digital marketing that needs to be changed, and why?
- Who are your most aggressive competitors?
- Where are the new competitors going to come from?
- If you were to start in business again today, what would you do differently to what you are doing currently?
- How has digital technology changed your competitive environment, and what impact do you think it will have in the next few years?
Your strategy
- What are your corporate values, mission, purpose, however you choose to articulate the reasons you are in business?
- What problems do you solve for your customers?
- What makes you different to your competitors?
- What do you do better that your competitors?
- Why should people do business with you rather than others?
- What are the things you will not do to attract or keep a customer?
Customers
- Describe your most valuable customer.
- Describe the customer journey, how do they typically end up with you?
- What are your levels of customer churn and retention?
- From initial contact, what are your conversion rates?
- What is your conversion cost?
- How do customers find you initially?
- How much is a good customer worth to you over a period of time?
- How long is the sales cycle?
- Do you have a good database of current, past and potential customers, and how is it managed and refreshed?
- Do you know why former customers stopped buying from you?
- Do you have a referral system that captures benefits for the referrer?
Competitors
- What elements of your competitors sites do you like/want?
- What elements of competitors sites do you want to avoid?
- What are your competitors doing to attract your customers and potential customers?
Technical considerations
- Do you have a site architecture or is it part of the design exercise?
- Do you have hosting, domain, email management services to be continued?
- Are the current arrangements if any, compatible with the needs of the new site?
- Are there any specific mobile requirements needed? It is assumed that “mobile friendly” rather than just “mobile compatible” is required.
- What analytics do you want?
- Do you have preferences about the CMS system used?
- How will the content management/ approval system work?
- Do you require log in and chat features, and will they be password protected?
- How will user names and access to the site CMS be managed?
- Are there content on demand requirements, i.e. hidden content becomes visible after a series of actions.
- Are there digital commerce and shopping carts to be managed?
- How will inventory and fulfillment be managed?
- Are there any general functionality requirements you need, such as data bases, and data base interrogation processes, site search facilities, calendars, maps, et al?
- What other digital systems are needed to be integrated, CRM, MRP, order/invoice?
- How will you manage SEO?
- What sort of content download requirements are there?
- What levels of skill are there in the business to apply to the site maintenance?
- Are these compatible with the requirements of the site or is training and outsourcing required?
Design elements.
- What are the most important three things in the design?
- What content and design elements of a current site are required to be carried over?
- What information will go where?
- What corporate logos, colours, designs and style elements must be present?
- How do you want the inclusions that are required, such as calendars & maps to work?
- Will different parts of the site have a different look and feel?
- Are there taglines, market positioning statements or other such marketing elements that need to be incorporated?
- Do you have the original artwork files of elements you want incorporated?
- Do you have photos, video, or other material you want incorporated, and if “yes” do you hold or have paid for the copyright use of them?
- What font sizes and styles are preferred?
- What contact information and automated functions do you want, and where do you want it?
Marketing strategies.
- How are you going to create the content for the site initially, and on an ongoing basis?
- Who is going to maintain the site?
- How does the site integrate into other marketing activities?
- When someone is on the site, what do you want them to do?
- What sites of any type do you like, and why?
- What are the pages you require?
- What social platforms do you want connected, how prominent should the connections be, and which pages do you want them on?
- How are visitors to the site going to be converted?
Project management considerations
- When do you want it? (oh crap)
- Who in your organisation is going to provide the content agreed?
- What content will the contractor provide, and at what cost?
- How will the approval process work as the project progresses?
- How much do you expect all this to cost?
- What are you now prepared to do without?
When you need someone who has successfully juggled in the three ring circus, and knows how to deliver you a great performance without stealing your shirt, give me a call.
