Archive for Marketing Plan

What to look for when hiring marketing help

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (1)
Monday, March 12th, 2012

searching for marketing helpAs a small business owner, you realize the importance of marketing but struggle to “get marketing done”. It’s time to get some help, but what should you be looking for when hiring either an employee or a consultant? For many small business owners, the first question to answer is what type of help do I need? Do I need a marketing manager or a marketing leader?

Do you need a marketing manager? Titles vary, but for this post let’s assume that a marketing manager is a the person who goes to work with a set of tasks that need to be executed in a repeated fashion to deliver a desired result. They “do marketing” usually through a combination of performing activities themselves and managing projects involving other staff and outside vendors.

Of course, not just any marketing checklist will do (if only it were that easy). Someone needs to create the strategic plan. Someone needs to take the owner’s vision for the business and translate that into the practical list of tasks for the marketing manager. Let’s call this person the marketing leader.

The marketing leader must also be able to look at things from the customers point of view and challenge you (the owner) to change your products and services to serve them better. As the business owner, you must be willing to listen to these challenges and know when to accept them and when to stand your ground. This can be difficult; if you are not willing to listen and be pushed a little, you are better off not spending money hiring a marketing leader (whether a full time position or consultant), as you will certainly view the money as “wasted”.

The situation that seems to cause the most frustration in small business is when there is a person assigned to marketing but they haven’t been given a strategic plan or specific set of goals to follow. They are always busy but no one seems to be happy with the results of their efforts. Owners feel frustrated because they aren’t seeing the results they need, but they are not sure how to correct the problem.

Luckily, this is also one of the easiest problems to fix. Working with a marketing leader to create a strategic marketing plan allows you to give your marketing manager the direction they desire along with the criteria for them to know when they are doing a good job. It is a true win-win situation as the employee is much happier at their job and the business owner get the results they were expecting.

So the answer to the question “do you need a marketing leader or a marketing manager” is you need both. However, once you understand the roles of each, you are better prepared to make informed decisions about how to spend your time and money. Many small business owners can work with a consultant for a short period of time to create their strategic plan and then use existing or more affordable resources to carry out the day to day activities.

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Professional Service Marketing Is a Process, Not A Checklist

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Thursday, April 21st, 2011

Marketing Implementation CycleImplementing a system for marketing professional services is not about creating a checklist of to do items and then moving in a linear fashion through the list, checking off one item at a time. It’s not a “set it and forget it” type of process.

Rather, it is an iterative process where you create, edit, evaluate, improve, and delete over time.

Let’s look at creating marketing materials as an example. In Duct Tape Marketing we advocate creating a marketing kit, a collection of educational marketing materials that can be used in a variety of settings. When you begin installing your marketing system, you create a baseline set of materials that go into your marketing kit. Creating a marketing kit is not an item that you check off of your list and never visit again. With each campaign you look to your marketing kit for materials you can use. You identify new materials you need to create. When you create materials for a campaign, you should consider how you may be able to re-purpose them and and add them to your kit. As your kit grows, you will find pieces that you no longer use, or no longer fit your marketing strategy as it grows and matures.

The same thing goes for lead generation campaigns. You don’t sit down and implement all of your lead generation (referral, advertising, and PR) campaigns at once. You typically pick one campaign, get it up and running, and then put it into “maintenance mode” so it continues to execute while you begin to implement your next campaign.

In my opinion, the only way to keep this iterative process on track while managing all of your other responsibilities is to 1) set aside time (use a marketing calendar) to consistently work on your marketing system and 2) have a process in place for reviewing, evaluating, adjusting, and implementing the next steps in your strategic marketing plan.

Think of marketing is something you do, rather than something to get done.

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Are You Trying To Teach a New Dog Old Tricks?

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Tuesday, April 5th, 2011

If you are building a social media audience for the sake of “reach” then you may be doing just that.

You have probably seen formulas like this:

#followers X #messages = reach

which are typically followed by a discussion the importance of “maximizing your reach”, with the implication being that “bigger is better” in terms of your reach number.

Is it just me, or does this sound an awful lot like the “blast it wide and often” approach that we used to hear related to direct mail campaigns? This approach to direct mail has proven to be less than effective for marketing professional services and I don’t think it will fair much better when applied to social media tools.

Rather than focusing on talking to the largest number of ears, we should be focusing on talking to the right ears (correct ears, I’m not discriminating against left ears) about things they care about.

Can I be effective only spending 20 minutes per day?

I recently had a conversation with a customer who had been told by a “guru” that it wasn’t possible to be effective by spending only 20 minutes per day using Twitter.

Regular readers here may be getting tired of hearing me say this, but social media tools are means of communicating – preferably conversations vs. one-way talking. If someone told you that is impossible to be effective spending twenty minutes a day talking to customers and referral partners, how would you respond?

When you hear these broad “truisms” being talked and written about, you have to remind yourself that the person speaking most likely doesn’t know your marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy serves as the foundation for all of your marketing efforts, so it’s up to you to put any advice you read or hear into the context of your strategic marketing plan.

So if your marketing plan tells you that you need to cultivate meaningful relationships with 30,000 twitter followers, than you are obviously going to need to spend more than 20 minutes per day doing so. However, if your marketing plan calls for cultivating your existing relationships first while also meeting and connecting with your well defined ideal customer, I think you can be effective with those 20 minutes.

But don’t take my word for it – set some business related goals, make a plan, do the behaviors and measure your results.

 

Photo credit - by Kurt Wagner on Flickr

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Strategic Marketing Plans – More important than ever

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (1)
Monday, March 21st, 2011

In Duct Tape Marketing, we are always stressing the core principle of “Strategy Before Tactics”. I believe this is important now as it has ever been. I say that because I also believe it is easier than ever to get caught up in the “marketing idea of the week” syndrome.

Everyday we hear about a new tool that will make it easier to get our message out, easier to connect with customers, and easier to sell more stuff. The problem is, without a strategy, every idea sounds like it “could work” and if we are not careful, we can spend all of our time chasing shiny objects without actually being effective in marketing our business.

Your marketing strategy lays the foundation for everything else you will be doing in your marketing (and your business). It defines who you serve, what problems you solve, and how you solve them differently from everyone else.

Then comes the tricky part – putting your strategy into action. In order to get from strategy to implementation, I believe every professional service firm needs the following components in their marketing system:

  1. Marketing Content – that is educational, builds trust, and a system for publishing it consistently.
  2. Lead Generation Tactics
    1. Inbound tactics – these are all of the tactics (SEO, local search, social media, etc.) that help you “get found” by people who are looking for the products and services you offer.
    2. Outbound tactics- while inbound marketing gets the lion’s share of the press these days, there is still a place for outbound marketing – as long as it follows the 2-step or direct response approach.
  3. Follow Up System – more complex and\or expensive your products and services tend to have longer buying cycles. It’s important to make sure that once someone finds you, you maintain your “top of mind” status so that when they are ready to buy, they remember you.
  4. Technology tools – can help us be more efficient with our time and resources. Technology can help us be more effective, but it won’t do the job by itself. Technology touches overlaps with all of the other items on this list so perhaps it shouldn’t be a separate item. I do believe that the fewer of these tools you have and the more the work together, the better off you will be.
  5. Analytics & Reporting – In order to be effective, your marketing system needs to have feedback loops built in so you know what’s working, what isn’t, and what to do about it.
  6. Review Process – Marketing systems, like businesses, are not built overnight. The only way (IMO) to implement a long term marketing plan while being flexible enough to handle the day to day challenges that arise in business, is to have a well defined planning and review process that you follow on a consistent basis. If you want accountability in marketing, you need a standardized review process.

The other big piece to getting all of this implemented is having an integrated web presence that acts as your marketing hub and ties these components together.

I also believe you need a sales system, but that’s a little outside of the scope of this post.

Did I miss anything? I’ll be expanding on each of these items in upcoming posts, so let me know what you think.

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Sales and Marketing Plan Pro from Palo Alto Software

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (1)
Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

Disclosure – I am part of the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network. Duct Tape Marketing and Palo Alto Software are Strategic partners. The marketing plan piece of this tool is based on the Duct Tape Marketing methodology. Long story short – I’m biased – but I’m not getting paid to write this.

The folks at Palo Alto Software are launching a new product today called Sales and Marketing Pro. This software builds upon their Marketing Plan Pro software – expanding to include more help for managing your sales planning and execution. Just like Marketing Plan Pro, Sales and Marketing pro combines great planning software with plenty of deals from “best in class” strategic partners who provide the tools you need to go from plan to implementation.

Sales and Marketing ProHere is the dashboard (click on the image for an expanded view) that you see when you launch Sales and Marketing Pro. The dashboard is divided into 3 main sections:

  1. Sales
  2. Marketing
  3. Toolbox

Sales

This section contains software tools to help manage your sales process. If you need a customer and contact management system, Palo Alto has teamed up with Batchbook to give you six month’s access to their social crm program for free. You’ll also receive a free, customized training session to help get you up and running.

Setting and managing sales appointments is one area where it is easy to spend a lot of time better spent elsewhere. That’s why I was happy to see that Sales and Marketing Pro includes a 3 month free trial for Appointment-Plus. Once you start setting appointments without the back and forth of multiple emails to find a mutually agreeable time, you’ll wish you had used this service sooner.

Want to focus on your sales forecast and milestones without having to create a complete marketing plan? The Sales Plan section allows you to do just that by breaking out the sales related sections of the full marketing plan software.

Marketing

Sales and Marketing Pro still helps you create a Duct Tape Marketing style marketing plan just like you can with Marketing Plan Pro. Start with the Basic Marketing Plan to get up and running quickly. Later, you can change to the Standard Marketing Plan as you need to add more detail to your plan. The software is loaded with examples and audio files to guide you along the way.

In addition to the planning software, Sales and Marketing Pro includes other marketing tools to help you implement your plan. Email plays a big role in small business marketing and Sales and Marketing Pro includes offers from Vertical Response to help you with your stay-in-touch marketing campaigns. Also included is a 3 month subscription to Email Center Pro – a  very cool tool that helps you stay on your email communications with your customers. If you have more than one person that handles email accounts like “info@” or “customerservice@”, then you will want to take a look at Email Center Pro.

And if you still need a website (you have one, don’t you?), they have even included a free domain name for 1 year along with a 3 month trial website hosting account from Network Solutions.

Tool Box

The toolbox is a collection of resources that will help you implement your sales and marketing plan.

In the Sales and Marketing Library you will find a collection of articles on everything from pricing, to customer service, to creating a marketing forecast. The library also includes 2 eBooks – one about social media and one about search engine optimization. Rounding out the library, there is a special offer to purchase a copy of the Duct Tape Marketing book for only the cost of shipping.

Sales and Marketing Pro is currently selling for $99.95 which includes free shipping and a 60 day money back guarantee. Learn more on the Sales and Marketing Pro website.

Stayed tuned as I plan to have a webinar demonstrating Sales and Marketing Pro along with some giveaways of the software.

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Categories : Marketing, Marketing Plan, Small Business Marketing
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Marketing Plan Engagements–Focusing on the Right Things

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

Tim Berry’s post about Business Plan Software and Business Plan Consultants really struck a chord with me. Once again, Tim took a point a view that I really believe in and expressed it much better than I.

By the way, in addition to Business Plan Pro, Tim’s company also makes a piece of software called Marketing Plan Pro powered by Duct Tape Marketing – so now you know my bias.

Tim’s post is about what he feels is the right way and the wrong way for business plan consultants to use software in a consulting engagement. Tim mentions a few reasons why experts often chose the “wrong” way. I’d like to offer a couple of other reasons, based on my experience both as a consultant and working with consultants, as to why consultants may chose the wrong way – both of which can be summarized as misplaced focus:

Focusing on billable hours – Tim’s post was about his pet peeve, and this idea that “experts sell time” is one of my pet peeves. There are lots of reasons I’m against the billable hour, but one of the biggest reasons is it tends to makes us think we should be trying to be efficient when we really should be focusing on being effective.

Being effective takes time. Teaching someone to use a tool (software) takes time. Not only to learn the tool, but to change habits as well. But, once we learn to use the tool, we become more efficient.

Ironically, rushing to get things accomplished early often leads rework, and we end up not really saving time at all. Looking back, how many time would a little patience at the beginning of a project saved time and effort in the long run?

Focusing on the plan (document) rather than the process. Along with the billable hour issue, I think this misplaced focus distorts whole customer\expert relationship. As Tim mentioned, the customer owns the business plan and the plan lives in the customers space – at least that’s how it should be.

When the focus is on billable hours and the document, the plan belongs to the expert until it is turned over to the customer for payment. The focus is on the writing, rather than the planning, testing, gathering feedback, adjusting, etc.

The roles and responsibilities tend to get mixed up in this scenario as well. Rather than working together, the expectation becomes that the expert drives the process and is responsible to “ask the right questions” until the plan is delivered. Then once the plan is delivered, the customer’s role becomes that of the editor and the critic.

Is it too bold to say these problems stem from focusing on us (consultants) vs. them (customers)? It’s easy to say we focus on our customers, but it takes effort to put that into everyday practice.

And what about when we are the customer? Are we taking the easy way out by pretending all of the responsibility belongs to the consultant?

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How Often Do You Review Your Marketing Plan?

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

I really like the point Tim Berry makes in Business Planning Is Not About Pages. As Tim says about business plans, marketing plan summaries can be useful and have their place, but a summary is not the plan. I love the distinction Tim makes the planning process and output:

“And for the record, that 10-page business plan, or the 20-page or 50-page business plan, those aren’t plans either: they’re output. They are a snapshot of what the plan was at one time. By the time you’ve printed them out, if there’s good planning going on, they are already out of date.”

Last year I wrote about The Marketing Plan Review Process – Your Key to Marketing Success in my April newsletter. I firmly believe that having a marketing plan review process in place is the key to effectively growing your service firm. Overall, I would say having a regular review process it is second only to creating a sound marketing strategy.

How often to you review the marketing plan at your firm? In my newsletter article, I mentioned that I prefer to conduct review monthly. What do you think about that – too often? Not often enough? I’d be interested in learning how often your firm reviews and updates your marketing plan.

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Categories : Marketing, Marketing Plan, Marketing Strategy
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Using a Marketing Calendar

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Monday, September 13th, 2010

In Duct Tape Marketing, we often talk about the importance of “living by a calendar”. One of the main points of this advice is that creating a marketing system is not something that is accomplished over a long weekend. Rather, it takes a steady, consistent approach to create and maintain your marketing system.

When I’m working with customers, we generally discuss two broad ways to use a calendar to help us build a marketing system – 1) using monthly themes and 2) setting appointments with ourselves.

Setting a monthly theme

Many people find it helpful to pick a theme for a particular month and work on the project(s) they need to complete for that theme. For example, you could designate September as “website month”. Projects could include:

  • Creating your site if you don’t have one
  • Adding a blog to your site
  • Adding and opt-in newsletter signup form
  • Working on getting inbound links to your website

Setting regular appointment with yourself

The second way you should use your marketing calendar is to make appointments with yourself to work on your marketing. These appointments should be treated as if they were appointments with your most important customer. That means no rescheduling at the last minute, no interruptions, no reading email during the meeting, etc.

How often should you have these meetings? Ideally, I think you should schedule one meeting per week to work on your marketing. Some people prefer an every other week schedule. In my experience, people who try to have only one meeting per month struggle to make significant progress on their marketing system.

How long should the meeting be? Pick a duration that works best for you. For me, that tends to be about 90 minutes.

Consistency is the key

By using your calendar to schedule and keep your regular marketing appointments, you will soon have a marketing system in place that will help attract more of your ideal customers.

How do you make sure you set aside enough time to work on your marketing system?

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Marketing Tactic Building Blocks – Call To Action

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

TacticBuildingBlocks

The next block in our model of a successful marketing tactic is the all important Call To Action. Much has been written about the importance of having a call to action in your advertising and marketing materials, so I will just mention my top three reasons for having a strong call to action.

Your call to action provides the answer to the question “what do I do next?”.

One of the great marketing challenges in today’s environment is getting the attention of prospects and customers who need our services. Once we do gain their attention, the biggest marketing mistake we can make is to fail to provide a clear course of action related to what they can, and should, do next. A call to action may be as simple as providing a phone number to call or linking to a relevant page on your website. Without a clear next step, chances are your prospective customer will move on to the next provider, no matter how clever your marketing materials

Your call to action provides a link to your measurement system.

Professional service firms need to move away from spending money on a marketing model that just “gets our name out there” and towards a model that provides feedback on the results of that marketing budget. The way to capture that feedback is to provide a call to action that can be measured. What would this look like in our referral system example? You could create a gift certificate for people to share with their family, friends, and colleagues who they think would benefit from your service. The call to action is to bring in the gift certificate to receive their free or discounted service. By including information about the person you gave the certificate to (name, date, etc.) you can have some very useful information about who your best referral sources are, the amount of time between when a certificate is given and when a client comes in, which offers are the most popular, etc. Contrast this with the typical process of asking a client how they heard of you – “I’m not sure, I think Joe told me about you, or maybe it was someone at the chamber, or BNI…”.

Move your marketing plan from guessing to knowing by including a call to action that can be measured.

Your call to action helps move people through the marketing hourglass.

In Duct Tape Marketing, we often use the marketing hourglass as a conceptual model of the marketing process. The general idea is that the hourglass consists of several stages and we need to make sure that our marketing system addresses prospects and customers at each and every stage of the hourglass. One of the ways we can help people move from one stage of the hourglass to the next is to 1) use our marketing materials to make people aware of the next stage and 2) include a clear and compelling call to action that tells them how to move to the next stage.

One note, I used the phrase “help people move” on purpose. I think it is important, particularly when marketing professional services, to realize that WE don’t MOVE people, they have to choose move to the next stage. Even if you can force someone to move (which I doubt), in the case that you do, you are bound to have a client that has an unhappy experience.

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Building Blocks of a Marketing Tactic – Tools

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)
Monday, March 29th, 2010

Continuing our discussion on marketing tactic building blocks let’s talk about the block labeled Tools and how it related to referral marketing, specifically, working with Strategic Referral Partners.

TacticBuildingBlocks 

For this discussion, tools include items such as newsletter creation and distribution software as well as standard letters or your marketing kit.

What are some specific tools we need to successfully implement the tactic of working with Strategic Referral Partners?

Perfect Introduction in Reverse Letter – once we identify a potential Strategic Referral Partner, (someone who serves a similar target market that we do but solves a different problem for that group), we must approach them and learn more about them in order to determine if they are, in fact, a good match for our business. One of the tools we use in Duct Tape Marketing to help us approach potential referral partners is something called the Perfect Introduction in Reverse. Basically, this is a letter that helps open the door to a new relationship by asking your potential partner how you may be able to better help them. 

A Referral Kit – once you confirm that someone is a good fit for the role of strategic referral partner for you firm, you want to make it is as easy as possible for them to refer others to you. This is where your Referral Kit tool comes into play. This can be as simple as one page, but you will want to include educational material on how to spot your ideal prospect, how to communicate what you do, as well as an explanation of what will happen once you receive a referral. You may also want to include special appointment cards, gift certificates, or special passes to your upcoming events.

A stay in touch system – another essential tool to successfully implementing a strategic referral partnership is having a system in place to follow up. This system can be a sophisticated CRM (customer relationship management) software program or it can be a simple set of index cards. The important thing is that you systematically stay in touch with you referral partners so that when they do run across someone who has a need for what you do, they will remember and refer you.

Those are just three examples of tools that you will want to have in your marketing toolkit. Once you have these tools, you can leverage them across different contacts as well as different marketing tactics.

Next time, we’ll talk about the Knowledge & Skills building block.

Referral Marketing Programs for Professionals

ReferralFlood

Learn how to generate a flood of new business without spending one dime on advertising. Available as a Self Study Program as well as group and individual coaching programs

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