Archive for Marketing Strategy

Storytelling and Content Marketing

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Monday, November 26th, 2012

A little over a year ago Coca-Cola launched their Content 2020 advertising strategy, announcing their “move from creative excellence to content excellence”.

Below is the part one video explaining the Content 2020 strategy. While this is obviously a “big brand” approach to content marketing and social media, there are several lessons that small business can take away from Coke’s approach – here are a few that I noted:

  • The importance of storytelling – note the emphasis on storytelling throughout the video. Small business have great stories to tell, be sure to share yours.
  • Liquid and Linked – at the 0.32 mark, the idea of content excellence being liquid (contagious ideas) and linked (ideas that are innately relevant to business objectives) is discussed. Pay special attention to this section.
  • Compelling Content – Coca Cola is striving to create the world’s most compelling content – how can you create the most compelling content in your world, whether that is you neighborhood, city, or industry?

You can see the Part Two video here

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Categories : Marketing Strategy, Small Business Marketing
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Balancing Courage and Focus in Small Business

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Thursday, September 20th, 2012

Last Tuesday night I was watching Charlie Rose’s interview with Dick Costolo. Mr. Costolo is the current CEO of Twitter and during the interview he said something that really struck a chord with me and I wanted to share it with you here today.

What Costolo said he that he spends a lot of time thinking about the balance between courage and focus at Twitter.

He went on to explain that by courage he meant “are we being as bold as we could be, are we taking chances and not just trying to protect what we have”. Focus is important because “we can’t do every new thing we want to do. We have to do few things and decide what we are not going to do and make sure we are concentrating our efforts”.

Costolo sited that he believe this balance is what companies like Amazon and Apple do so well. I think this lesson applies equally to small business owners. How do we make sure we are trying new things without falling into the trap of chasing every shiny object we see?

I think a big part of the answer to that question lies in the way Costolo described Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ “maniacal focus on the customer”.  Pushing yourself and your company to do new things but using your customer focus as a filter for selecting which projects to pursue seems like a great recipe for success to me.

How do you balance courage and focus in your business? Leave a comment below, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Categories : Marketing Strategy

Inbound Marketing Makes Cold Calling Easier

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Thursday, August 30th, 2012

cold calling is hardCold calling is hard work and very few people like to do it. One reason people don’t like it  is that it is hard to get the conversation started – both with the gate keeper and the prospect. Many people are uncomfortable with the idea of calling up a stranger and immediately asking for something – time and attention in order to try to sell. Small businesses that embrace inbound marketing can use the assets they develop during that process to make cold calling easier by changing the conversation from one of asking to one of offering something of value.

At the risk of oversimplifying, inbound marketing consists of two major steps; 1) create information that is valuable to my ideal prospects  and 2) doing everything I can to make sure that my ideal customers will find that information when they are looking for solutions to the problems I help them solve.

Step #1, creating valuable information, typically includes some marketers refer to as a lead magnet (or bait piece). Lead magnets are often whitepapers or eBooks but can be case studies, webinars, books, ROI calculators, top 10 lists, etc.  The information contained in the lead magnet must not only be of value to your prospects, the value must be perceived to be high enough to justify “purchasing” it with their contact information.

One of the drawbacks of inbound marketing is that it takes time to see results in the form of leads. Small businesses can jump start those efforts by having their sales team offer the lead magnet to the people on their prospecting list. Now they have a simple, more comfortable way to start a conversation – “I have a free eBook that outlines the 3 questions CEOs of companies like yours wished they had asked before spending money on XYZ, is that something you would be interested in seeing?”.

It also makes the initial conversation with the gate keeper less adversarial – “I have a free eBook that outlines the 3 questions CEOs of companies like yours wished they had asked before spending money on XYZ that I wanted to send over to Bob. He he the best person to send that to or do you think I should also send it to someone else? Great, which email address should I use? ” .

This approach also make following up less awkward. Rather than “just checking in” you get to ask what they liked, what they thought about X, is that an issue they are facing, and would they like to see more information or additional case studies, etc. In other words, you have a natural way to start having a sales conversation.

Smart marketers will seek out feedback from sales about these follow up conversations so they can produce additional marketing content that helps further engage existing prospects as well as attracting new leads.

Inbound marketing tactics are powerful tools for small business. You can make them more powerful by combining them with traditional outbound tactics like cold calling, networking, and direct mail.

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How to Identify Your Ideal Customers

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (1)
Tuesday, August 21st, 2012

When we talk about small business marketing, we always talk about starting with a sound marketing strategy before jumping into tactics. One of key elements of your marketing strategy is identifying your ideal customer – those customers in your sweet spot, the ones you can really help, and the ones who truly value your unique approach and what you bring to the table.

Most small business marketers describe their ideal customers in terms of demographics – industry, income or revenue, location (zip codes), etc. Demographic information is helpful, but most small business owners benefit from asking two questions to help them identify their ideal customers first, and then use demographic (and other) information to help them find more customers who meet their ideal customer profile. Those two questions are:

Are They Profitable?

If you can, create a spreadsheet of your customers and list the amount and type of business you do with each. You might even rank them in order from most to least business over the last three years.

Now remember, revenue is not the same as profit. Your biggest customers may not be your most profitable ones. Determine which customers are your most profitable. Which types of work or projects are the most profitable? How much work are you doing that is not profitable? This exercise can be a real eye opener.

Do They Refer You To Others?

Once you have identified your profitable customers, make a new column in your spreadsheet where you can identify the customers who are known referral sources. Consider this: Only happy clients refer and happy clients are most often happy because you or your approach is a good match for what they needed. This narrow group of profitable clients, the ones that also refer, holds the key to discovering your ideal client profile.

Now that you have identified your profitable customers who also refer you to others, learn everything you can about them that will help you find more customers just like them.

P.S. – More tips on creating your ideal customer profile and creating a marketing strategy can be found in this free small business marketing strategy guide.

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The Key To Small Business Social Media Success

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Thursday, August 2nd, 2012

The key to effectively using social media for growing your small business isn’t picking the right tool, or determining the right number of hours per week to spend on social media, or any of the other myriad of tips and tricks we hear every day.

The key to effectively using social media in small business is to start by defining business goal – what is it (specifically) that you want to accomplish? Do you want to:

  • Increase your store sales by driving more traffic to you store?
  • Find the best people to hire for your open position?
  • Increase referrals by teaming up with strategic referral partners?
  • Improve your ability to serve your customers by keeping up with their industry news and competition?

Once you define your business goal(s), you can start to ask important questions like:

  • Who should I be talking to? Where do they hang out?
  • Why would anyone take the action I am asking them to take? What’s in it for them?
  • What should I be measuring to help me determine if I am headed in the right direction? How will I know what’s working and what’s not?
  • Once a conversation begins, what’s the next step?

With your business goal defined, your next step is to determine how to use your social media communication tools to get someone (including yourself) on the path or continue along the path towards fulfilling that goal.

For example, if your goal is to increase referrals by building a referral partner  network, there are several steps along the path to meeting that goal. You can’t just connect or “friend” someone online and then wait for the business to roll in. You must to identify and approach potential partners, meet with them and decide whether you are a good fit,  work to achieve and maintain “top of mind” with them, and manage the giving and receiving referrals. All of the steps along this path require communication; whether social media is appropriate for each individual step will depend on a myriad of factors – much the same way you know when it’s ok to send an email but in some cases you need to pick up the phone or meet in person.

If you find yourself getting caught up in trying to find the right tool or the “magic formula” for social media success, trying taking a step back and defining the business goal you want to achieve.

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Categories : Marketing Strategy, Small Business Marketing
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Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Content

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (1)
Wednesday, August 1st, 2012

KPIs for content marketingWhen we help small businesses create their content building plan using the Duct Tape Marketing system, we talk about building three different type of content:

  • Content that builds trust
  • Content that educates
  • Content that helps close or make the sale

As we create this marketing content, we want to have systems in place to measure the effectiveness of what we are doing and help us continuously improve our content marketing efforts. One way to do this is to select and track some key performance indicators (KPIs). Below are some KPIs, and the questions they help you answer, to consider when measuring the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy.

KPIs for Content that Builds Trust:

Traffic, page views, time onsite – are people able to find you when looking for solutions? When they find you, do they stick around to learn more (do they think your content is relevant)? Or do they go look for something else?

Content downloads – do prospects express their interest in learning more about the problems you solve and how you solve them by downloading your eBooks, whitepapers, etc.?

Inbound links and page rank – Links from other websites are one of the ways that people “vote” for the content they like and trust on the internet. This is why having links to your site is such an important factor for ranking well in the search engine results. Is your content getting votes?

Fans / followers – The rate of growth in your fan or follower base can be a good indication of whether or not you are putting out content that people like and trust. Do you find that publishing certain types of content increases you fan base more than others?

Mentions, Comments, and Shares – which content in most interesting and engaging from your audiences point of view? Which content are they indifferent about?

KPIs for Content that Educates

Opens and click-throughs – are people interacting with our content? Or are we being ignored? Are we using jargon or other language that is preventing us from connecting and preventing us from educating?

Inquiries, list growth – as prospects learn more about what you do, does their interest grow? Do they want to continue to learn more?

Form submission rate – do prospects feel that the perceived value of the educational content they will receive exceeds the cost of providing the information you request on your form? Does the messaging on the form or landing page match the expectations that brought the prospect to the page?

Funnel conversion – are we providing the information our prospects need to help them move to the next stage in their decision making process?

KPIs for Content that Helps Close

Number of qualified leads – is your content generating leads? Are they they right type of leads?

Meeting with sales – are leads meeting with sales? If not, why? Are we asking for a meeting before they are reads to talk to sales? If so, what other content do we need to help move them closer to being ready to talk to sales?

Opportunities – Once prospects talk to sales, are we generating sales opportunities or does sales disqualify a majority of prospects? Do we marketing and sales need to revisit the definition of a “sales ready” lead?

Active Pipeline – do we have a healthy pipeline? Do we need to change our strategy to generate more leads? Better quality leads?

Closed Deals – the ultimate measure of our marketing, are we generating sales? Is there anything we can do, in terms of creating content, to help improve our closing rate?

These are just some of the KPIs you can use to measure the effectiveness of your marketing content strategy. Rather than trying to implement a large number of KPIs, may I suggest that you start by identifying on or two questions that, if you knew the answers to them, you would be able to take action to improve your marketing system. Select a few KPIs that will help you answer those questions first. You can always track new KPIs when you have new questions to answer.

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Categories : Marketing Strategy, Small Business Marketing
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What is Your Make It Easy to Switch Offer?

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (1)
Tuesday, July 24th, 2012

One of our main jobs as small business marketers is to build trust, as in Know, Like, and Trust. One of the ways we do this is to help minimize risk in the mind of our prospective customers. Most of us are resistant to change, but that resistance must be overcome if we are to close the sale.

The first step in building trust is to realize how we are asking customers to change. We may be asking them to:

  • Purchase something they have never purchased before (i.e. never hired a consultant before)
  • Change from working with someone they know to working with a stranger (i.e. switching suppliers)
  • Change to a new way of doing things (i.e. adopting cloud computing)

Once we understand the things we are asking them to change, we can work on building offers that help minimize the customers risk associated with change. Each situation is different, but here are a few suggestions to help you start thinking about your offers:

  • For those who have never purchased a service like yours before, can you offer a free trial and/or an exceptional guarantee?
  • If your customer is leaving one provider in order to work with you, what can you do to make that transition as smooth as possible? Can you port over their information? Will they have costs that will be duplicated during the transition period that you can help alleviate? For example, many domain hosting companies allow you to transfer to them “1st year free” to help reduce the reluctance to change because you already paid your existing provider for the coming year of service.
  • If you sell services that ask customers to change the way they operate, can you carve out a set of functionality for them to try before they make a full commitment? Using the cloud computing example above, can you start by moving their data backup function to the cloud first (or their project management function) rather than asking them to move their entire IT infrastructure at once?

To build trust, take a look to see where you are asking your prospective customers to take a risk and design a “make it easy to switch” offer to help reduce that risk.

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Categories : Marketing Strategy, Small Business Marketing
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Putting What You Learn at a Marketing Workshop Into Practice

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Thursday, June 21st, 2012

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend John Jantsch’s Strategy and Tactics Workshop. It was a great event (I’m not just saying that because I’m a member of the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network) and I found it very helpful to be able to take the day to slow down, take a breath, and work on my business. It was also helpful to share experiences with a great group of small business owners who also want to grow their business.

So today is the day after a workshop and I am faced with the same situation that we all face – how do I catch up on the work that piled up yesterday and make sure I start implementing my ideas from the workshop? Here are some of the ways I try to tackle this problem. I would love to hear what you do to put your learning into practice.

Set Appointments on Your Marketing Calendar

Step 7 in the 7 Steps to Small Business Marketing Success is “Live By a Calendar”. This is something I have believed in long before I became a Duct Tape consultant and that belief has only strengthened over time. My first step when returning from a workshop or conference is to review my notes and mark my “next actions” down on my calendar. I like to reserve slots on my calendar related to my various roles, so in this case I am adding items to the slots that have been designated for marketing.

I also mark my next actions, rather than the end result. This is something I learned from David Allen’s Getting Things Done and it helps me not only get started quickly, but helps me build momentum. For example, if I wanted to work on getting more referrals from strategic partners, I wouldn’t write “Build Referral Network” on my calendar. I would write something like “Identify 5 Referral Partner Candidates” or “Schedule calls with 5 people who have sent me referrals in the past”. Personally, I like to schedule my work in 90 minute time slots. I may not be able to “land 5 new customers via referrals” in 90 minutes, but I sure can knock out a bunch of “next steps” in that time. There’s nothing magic about 90 minutes – it just works for me. Find a time box that works for you and use it on your calendar.

Prune Your To-Do List

While you are thinking about the important things you want to accomplish and how you will get them done, take some time to review your to-do list and remove any “dead” items. Most of us have items that have been on our to-do list for an extended period of time. We haven’t addressed them in months and, in all reality, chances are we never will. This happens for a variety of reasons – priorities change, the item was more of a wish list item than a to-do, or a myriad of other reasons. If you have been carrying an item on your to-do list for an extended period of time, give yourself permission to just delete it or move it to a “someday” list. Getting rid of this mental weight will help you move forward with the items that will truly make a difference in your business.

Find an Accountability Partner

Having someone to follow up with after the event is also a great way to make sure put your learning into practice. If you don’t have an accountability partner already, ask someone you meet at the event. Almost everyone I have met at an event is open to the idea and it helps to have that shared vocabulary and experience you acquired at the event when discussing your challenges and progress.

What do you do to put what you learn at a workshop or conference into practice?

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Categories : Duct Tape Marketing, Marketing Strategy

Keyword Research Using Übersuggest

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Friday, June 8th, 2012

Keyword research is becoming a staple of small business marketing these days. Whether you are optimizing a web page or searching for topics to write about on your blog, you will want to have a good keyword search tool in your toolbox.

Übersuggest is a free keyword suggestion tool that makes good use of Google Suggest and other suggest services. Ubersuggest will help you build a list of highly relevant keyword phrases (including long-tail keywords) quickly and easily. Here is a quick video I made showing how to use Ubersuggest to find keyword phrases related to estate planning:

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Categories : Marketing Strategy, Technology
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Marketing Strategy and SEO Best Practices

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (2)
Monday, February 20th, 2012

In Duct Tape Marketing, we often talk about the importance of strategy before tactics. When you start with the right marketing strategy, almost any tactic can work. When small business owners jump straight to implementing tactics without a strategy, they typically end up frustrated by the (lack of) results they receive from the time and money that they spent.

Launching a website used to be viewed as one of those “let’s hurry up and get it done” tactics small businesses rushed into to. Today, some are taking a similar approach to tactics related to social media, mobile marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Saavy business owners, however, are adopting the point of view that they don’t need a “web strategy” and a “social media marketing strategy” and a “mobile marketing strategy”. The realize  they need an overall marketing strategy that takes into account these different ways of communicating with prospects and customers.

When it comes to SEO and your website, Google seems to agree that tactics alone are not enough. Listen to SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin explain how the “job of SEO has been upgraded from SEO to web strategist” by Google’s Panda update.

Wistia

As Rand explains, having content and incoming links is no longer enough. The overall user experience is becoming more. As the SEO expert becomes more of a web strategist, her job will be easier if there is an overall marketing strategy has been defined and shared with everyone in the company.

I think the approach that Rand describes fits in very well with our concept of the Marketing Hourglass. The marketing hourglass  helps you understand what prompts prospects to look for your solutions and how they go through their decision making process. The more closely you can match your content to the information your ideal customers need to make decisions, the better your site will do in the usage metrics mentioned in the video.

Has your approach to SEO changed since the Panda update? After watching Rand’s explanation, do you think it should (or will) ?

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