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Marketing Catalyst Online Marketing Resource Center

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

Regular visitors here know that I my job is to help business owners consistently attract their ideal customers by installing the Duct Tape Marketing system in their business. The Marketing Catalyst is one of the main ways we do this (the other is our Managed Marketing programs).

Recently we added a new online marketing resource center to the Marketing Catalyst program. The resource center is a private website that hosts all of the course outlines, workbooks, audio, and video files as well as links to external resources – everything we use when helping customers implement the Duct Tape Marketing system in their business.

Having these resources online provides a number of advantages over the previous, paper based resources we offered. Using multimedia, we can cater to the way you like to learn. The online resources are much easier to update – an important feature in today’s rapidly changing marketing world. Having the resources online also makes it easier for you to share with your employees and co-workers and keep them informed about your businesses marketing goals and plans.

Another nice feature of having these resources online is it makes it easier for me to show you what the program is like by offering you a free trial. The free trial gives you full access to Session #1. You can also see the outline for the other sessions in the program, giving you a feel for what you will accomplish in the overall program. To get your free trial, simply click on this link.

For more information about Duct Tape Marketing and the Marketing Catalyst program, watch this short video featuring John Jantsch, the founder of Duct Tape Marketing.

Please contact me if you have any questions or need help accessing your free trial.

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Categories : Marketing, Marketing Plan

Tags : duct tape marketing, marketing catalyst, Marketing Strategy, marrketing resources

Marketing Strategy – Channels vs. Function

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (1)

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

Marketing strategy before tactics – if you have visited this blog before, or have heard any of my fellow Duct Tape Marketing Consultants speak, then I am sure you are familiar with this concept.

But how do you know if you are focusing too much on tactics and not enough on strategy? I think you can tell a lot by the starting point your choose and the questions you ask when you begin working on your marketing plan.

When we focus on tactics we tend to focus on marketing channels, ways to “get our message out there”. You can tell if you are focused on tactics if you start your marketing plan by creating a list like this:

social media
direct mail
advertising- online and offline
PR
Video
email marketing

When we focus on tactics, there is a tendency to stress efficiency over effectiveness. “How many different ways can I blast out my message?” becomes the primary question we try to answer.

However, when we focus on marketing strategy, we tend to focus on function – the purpose or goal we are trying to achieve. When we focus on function, we start working on our marketing plan by creating a list like this:

How to I find new customers?
How do I keep more of my existing customers?
How do I get more referrals?
Can I re-activate or re-engage my former customers?

When we focus on function, we start by thinking about the customer. What do the need? What motivates them? How do they make decisions? How can I provide what they are looking for?

When we focus on our marketing strategy, we begin with function and then decide on the appropriate channels to help our ideal customers find what they need.

Don’t mistake a list of tactics and channels for a marketing strategy. Focus on the needs of your customers and the goals of your business first and let the tactics follow.

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Categories : Marketing Strategy

Tags : Marketing Strategy

When Is A Lead Sales-Ready?

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Wednesday, October 5th, 2011

cooking_timer Not every lead you generate comes to you “ready to buy”. Some leads will never buy your products or services. According to some studies, only 25% of new leads could be considered sales-ready (I think that may be high), and upwards of 25% are probably never going to buy from your business.

That leaves approximately 50% of your leads who may buy from you at some point but are not ready to buy right now. Our challenge in dealing with these 50% is this two fold – 1) how to we stay “top of mind” so they will remember us when they are ready to buy and 2) how do we know when it is appropriate to move from a marketing conversation to a sales conversation?

For professional service providers, achieving and maintaining top of mind status is typically achieved by sharing relevant and timely information on a consistent basis with your prospective customers. Electronic newsletters are a common way to “stay in touch” these days, but phone calls, handwritten notes, whitepapers, and recorded webinars are all great ways to deliver relevant information while establishing yourself as an expert and building Know, Like, and Trust.

Detecting when to shift from a marketing conversation to a sales conversation can be a little trickier. With today’s emphasis on marketing with digital media, marketing conversations typically do not take place face-to-face, so it can be difficult to detect a prospects level of interest. Therefore, many professional service firms just wait for the prospect to initiate a sales conversation.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, What Type of Salesperson Is Your Website?, some marketing automation tools give us the ability to detect our prospects’ “digital body language”, providing us clues about the sales readiness of a particular prospect.

Before spending money on a marketing automation software solution, it is important to think about the criteria that you will use to define when a prospect is ready to have a sales conversation. Software vendors usually refer to this as “lead scoring”. The basic idea behind lead scoring is you assign values to your prospects attributes and behaviors. You then adjust your end of the conversation to match the prospects level of interest and where they are in their particular buying process.

If you have different people fulfilling the sales and marketing roles in your business, one of the best things you can do to insure they are aligned with the same goals is to have them work together to develop the criteria of what constitutes a sales ready lead.

When working on your lead scoring scheme, you should take the following three broad categories of criteria into account:

1. Demographic Data: Geographic location, company size, industry, position in organization, etc.

2. Lead Source Data: Where did the lead came from – web search, tradeshow, referral, advertisement, etc.? What questions or search terms led them to you? What business problem are they trying to solve?

3. Behavioral Data: Knowledge of whether they visited your website or read your content marketing materials. Different actions should carry different scores – visiting your pricing page should receive a higher score than a visit to the careers page.

Once you collect this sort of intelligence, you can use it to determine a prospects area of interest (which pages did they visit) as well as their level of interest (did they visit an area multiple times, download related resources, or return to the site more than once?).

Use what you learn to adjust your communications to the appropriate level. If someone’s behavior indicates they are in research mode you may want to send them a whitepaper or case study. A repeat visitor who has consumed most of your marketing content may appreciate a phone call to help answer any questions they still have that are preventing them from moving forward.

Like all marketing tactics, success with lead scoring and marketing automation is dependent on having a sound marketing strategy in place. If you are not sure if you are ready for marketing automation, may I suggest taking advantage of our free Signature Brand Marketing Audit.

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Categories : Marketing

Tags : marketing automation, Marketing Strategy

People Buy Your Why

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Wednesday, July 20th, 2011

Have you had a chance to read the book Start with Why (Amazon affiliate link) by Simon Sinek? The big idea from this book is people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it. The book explains how the part of our brain that is responsible for decision making is different from the part of the brain that is responsible for language and the challenges that presents when we try to aspire others to take action.

In Duct Tape Marketing, we are always talking about the principle of “strategy before tactics”. I find that while most business owners agree with this concept on an intellectual level, they often struggle with putting it into practice. I believe the ideas in Simon’s book line up perfectly with this principle – first we have to be clear about our WHY. With a crystal clear WHY, almost any tactic can be successful.

If you have taken the time to really think about your ideal customers, I’m willing to bet that once you got past the typical demographics (industry, geography, revenue, etc.) you will find indications that your best customers share one or more of your beliefs. They like what you stand for. You both value your relationship. As marketers, we sometimes muddy this up by calling it your Core Difference or some other name but it’s really just your WHY.

We marketers are also fond of saying “marketing is everyone’s job”. What if we replaced that with “everyone should understand and be able to communicate our WHY”? What effect would that have on your business? Would it change more than marketing? I think so.

If you haven’t had a chance to read Simon’s book, I highly recommend it. Start your marketing with WHY, find customers who believe what you believe and work together so that everyone can succeed.

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Categories : Books, Marketing

Tags : duct tape marketing, Marketing Strategy, profe

Strategy Before Tactics Saves You Money

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (2)

Monday, March 7th, 2011

Over the weekend, I read an interesting post on the CRM & Tech for the Small Business Blog titled – Top 3 Reasons Why Changing CRM Software Won’t Help. The post describes three common scenarios where small business owners decide to try to solve a particular problem by purchasing a new CRM (customer relationship management) system.

The post provides several counter arguments to the “excuses” typically raised in these scenarios. While I don’t necessarily agree with all of the arguments raised in this post, it did remind me of a common theme that is often the root cause of these frustrations – putting tactics before strategy.

Of course, we usually don’t see the lack of strategy as the problem. We see the symptoms, the biggest being frustration from having spent a lot of money and not seeing any significant returns.

This practice of selecting a tool and then trying to “back into” a strategy is one that I have seen and have been arguing against since my early days (those dark days before the internet) of automating business systems. I still believe that we need to create a business system before we try to automate it.

In the case of CRM, that means having a sales and\or marketing processes defined before trying to select a tool to automate it. If you purchase a technology with the idea that it will “give you a process”, you are in for a frustrating journey. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but if it does work, it will take longer and be more expensive than needed.

Many businesses have learned the hard way, that there is a big difference between conducting a free webinar and conducting a webinar based marketing campaign which includes planning, promoting, presenting, and following up.

The same thing happens with web sites, blogs, social media tools, email marketing, and webinar services. Often we are told we must be doing these things, so we make the purchase before knowing how it fits into our strategy. Then we either try to make-it-fit later or just let the project die.

“Strategy before tactics” may be one of those phrases that seems cliché, but it can save you a lot of money and frustration if you put it into practice.

Comments (2)

Categories : Marketing

Tags : Marketing Strategy, professional services marketing

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

Tags : Marketing Plan, Marketing Strategy, profe

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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Categories : Marketing Plan, Marketing Strategy

Tags : duct tape marketing, Marketing, Marketing Plan, Marketing Strategy

Marketing Tactic Building Blocks – Follow Up

By Bill · Comments (2)

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

The final building block in our marketing tactic model is the Follow Up block. As accountants, lawyers, and other service professionals, we tend to, as my fellow Duct Tape Marketing coach Bill Doerr is fond of saying “meet people by introduction rather than by crisis”.

In other words, for most professionals, we don’t meet people at the specific time that they have a need for our services. However, chances are they will need our services in the future. Hopefully, they will have a need for our services several times over the course of our relationship. Chances are, they will also have friends and acquaintances who will periodically have a need to know about us and what we do. We spend a lot of marketing effort to help us achieve “Top of Mind” status. It is of paramount importance that we have a follow up system in place so that once we achieve Top-of-Mind we are able to stay Top-of-Mind, so when a need to know about what we do does arise, they will contact us or refer us to those with the need.

Of course, we also need to have follow up systems in place so that when someone responds to one of our Calls to Action, that we respond appropriately, whether that mean starting a sales conversation or continuing to educate via our marketing materials.

In the building block diagram, there is a dotted line (you may click on the image to see the larger version) right below the Follow Up block. This signifies that, while every tactic needs to be attached to a follow up system, you certainly don’t need to have a separate follow up system for each tactic. As a practical matter, the fewer systems that you have, the more likely your are to use them consistently and effectively. As I mentioned in the Tools block, these systems should only be as sophisticated as needed to get the job done. For some firms, ACT! may do the job. Others may use something like Salesforce.com. For others, a simple index card based tickler system may do the trick. The “best” system isn’t the one that has the most bells and whistles, it’s the one that produces results.

That’s the end of this series of blog posts. Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback, both here and in person. I’d love to hear your opinions about this model – did you find it helpful, what do you think is missing, etc. Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

Comments (2)

Categories : Marketing, Marketing Plan, Marketing Strategy, Small Business Marketing

Tags : accountant marketing, lawyer marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, marketing tactics, professional services marketing

Building Blocks of a Marketing Tactic – Execution

By Bill · Comments (0)

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

We’ve been talking about the building blocks necessary for successfully implementing a marketing tactic. We started by discussing the importance of starting from a sound marketing strategy and using that strategy to help set our goals and expectations for our tactics. Next, we talked about examining the specific tools, knowledge, and skills necessary to implement the tactic. That bring us to the execution block of our model.

The execution block of this model may seem like a contribution from Captain Obvious, but I think it is important to point out that we must DO the activities related to the tactic if we are going to succeed. It is easy to focus on all of the shiny tools and read the books and go to seminars, etc., but if we don’t actually to the day to day work, our tactic will not be successful. When we look at creating a referral system, this means we have to send our Perfect Introduction in Reverse Letters. We have to pick up the phone and make the follow up call to see if it makes sense to have a face to face meeting. We have to show up to the meeting and have an honest (structured) conversation to determine if it makes sense for you to partner with this person. You have to stay in touch, make referrals, send thank you notes, etc. We put tools and systems in place to make it easy for us to do these things efficiently, but they still need to be done.

Our own attitude plays a big part in the Execution block. The wrong attitude will hinder us from actually doing. If I have the attitude that strategic partner relationships don’t work because I always give referrals but I never receive them, then guess what, it’s going to be very easy for me to put off making calls or sending letters, or anything else that would help me get more referrals. This often leads to a downwards spiral until I just give up trying. What I should be doing is looking at the different parts of this model to determine why I’m not getting results. Am I approaching the right people? Do I have the right tools for the job? Do I need to acquire some new skills?

Our attitudes are also largely affected by the way we measure and judge our progress. I believe it is important to measure the things we have control over, our behaviors, rather than just the end results. For example, I can’t make people give me referrals, but I can do the behaviors that are likely to lead to getting referrals. If I am doing the behaviors but not getting the results, then I probably need to change my behaviors.

Planning is great. Systems are great. Education is great. Bottom line, you actually have to execute if you want to see the results.

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Categories : Marketing Strategy, Referral Marketing

Tags : Marketing, Marketing Strategy

Archive for Marketing Strategy

Marketing Catalyst Online Marketing Resource Center

Marketing Strategy – Channels vs. Function

When Is A Lead Sales-Ready?

People Buy Your Why

Strategy Before Tactics Saves You Money

How Often Do You Review Your Marketing Plan?

Using a Marketing Calendar

Marketing Tactic Building Blocks – Follow Up

Building Blocks of a Marketing Tactic – Execution

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