I don’t know about you, but I seem to be more attuned than ever to watching how advertisers and marketers are getting their messages across to audiences which are more and more discerning. These audiences are bombarded from the moment they wake to the moment their heads hit the pillow. I wouldn’t be surprised if in years to come someone figures out rate cards for dream-advertising and we all go to bed wearing some kind of skull cap attached to the mains.
Anyway, I digress.
My iPhone doesn’t leave my side and I find myself being pointed at a lot, whilst I take photos of random interesting things in order to share them with others.
I love it when advertisers put a smile on my face. Does it really cost anything to think laterally and get people to talk about your advertising? This is such a cool example by a favourite brand of mine. Poking fun at themselves and at the same time delivering a great message about a new product just launching…
When was the last time you thought outside the box and got creative? Go on – you know you want to…
We’re delighted to welcome another guest blogger to the Being Smarter stable. Maria Sadler runs The Small Marketing Company and has set herself up (quite uniquely) as a Social Media manager for people who know they should… but don’t have the time.
Maria’s first thoughts for Being Smarter are below…
You don’t need to throw large sums of money at advertising and PR to get started you just need to be a bit savvy. So here are some tips to get you started.
1) Think about your targets first
This may sound obvious but if you start to really hone in on who your ideal customer is, you can start to identify where they ‘hang out’. For example if your business benefits mothers with school age children you could target PTAs and school newsletters. If your business or service would be of interest to local businesses, check out the local Chamber of Commerce and local networking groups.
Now you know who your targets are and where you might find them, you need to consider how to attract their attention. If you are targeting a busy professional who will no doubt receive countless emails per day you need to grab their attention fast by being brief, different and a little intriguing.
These are probably the ideal people to send an eye catching but short email – Targets to Prospects software is perfect for this – or consider approaching them via Twitter, where you get 140 characters to grab attention.
2) Now think about your message
Once you understand your customer, you can then start to craft your message to make sure you get their attention. Work out what problems and issues they face and then think how your product or service could help resolve them. You may be desperate to tell them about a great new feature of your product but guess what, your potential customer won’t care.
Try the ‘so what’ test. So what benefit does that feature give the customer, focus on the feature that gives the greatest benefits, and think about the problems your customer has that you can alleviate.
3) Differentiate yourself from the competition
Whilst price is always a factor, at the moment is isn’t always the decider. So you need to determine what is different/better about your service above the competition. Here is one of the places that being ‘visible’ and something of an authority on a subject can be of great advantage, and this is where an online presence comes in.
Think about when you are looking for a product or service – what is the first thing you do? If you are like most people, you will go to Google and do a search for the type of product or service you need. If your name or company name keeps appearing on websites, blogs, articles, Twitter and other social media, discussing that very thing – the potential customer will begin to believe in your credibility.
4) Get your customers to blow your trumpet
Once you start to sell your product or service, ask your customers if they could give you feedback – you can then start to use this on your marketing materials as proof that you deliver. This will also become a very useful source of information on how you can improve your product in the future and what new products you could add to expand your offering. Finally it shows your customers that you care about what they think, and want to provide the best customer service.
Copywriting is a skill. A skill which can take years to master. A skill which you perhaps will never master, yet if you run any kind of business, the chances are you have a need to be able to write persuasively, clearly and concisely on a daily basis.
Whether it’s an important internal email, an email to a target or a client, a blog post, an advertisement or a script, there’s a big difference between average copy and great copy.
Assuming you don’t have years to master the art, if you need to get a document together quickly, then this application may be for you.
Wordy is a Wordpress plugin and web service which takes your draft copy and provides it to a network of copywriters for proofing and editing as required.
Academic text, corporate literature, blog posts and web content are all among the categories of copy that Wordy’s professional editors can handle, with specialized staff available to work on material focused on specific subjects. The interface to them is simple – you upload your file to Wordy.com, or use a Wordpress plugin for integrated editing.
Wordy then instantly returns a quote along with an approximate delivery time. As an example – EUR 7.68 for 26 minutes of editing on a 440-word document. If you accept, a Wordy copy editor checks the text for grammar, spelling, punctuation and structure—the company can currently accommodate both UK and US English—and returns it in ready-to-publish form. After that, you have two business days to accept the work or request a re-edit.
A great concept and one for the copy-phobic amongst you. We’ve not tried it yet – but if you have – why not leave a comment below.
As regular readers to the Being Smarter website will know, we like to feature new ways of doing things. Innovation is so key in business and today, we’re delighted to be participating in an innovation called a blog book tour which fuses social media, brilliant segmenting of a marketplace and win-win for the book authors and promoters.
We’ve been lucky enough to have Dr Karl Kapp, Professor of instructional technology at Bloomsburg University PA, USA as an advocate of The 8.45 Club’s method of training. We were delighted when he asked us if we would like to participate as a guest blog on Day #12 of his blog book tour, to promote the sale of his excellent new book “Learning in 3D” (affiliate link).
We thought that because 30 other people will be talking about the book itself, instead, let’s talk to Karl about this blog book tour concept, find out what such a thing actually is, how it’s being used in this context, and most importantly, how YOU could use it yourselves to promote your next publication. Guess what, it could be applied to any product or service with a bit of thought – so even if you’re not an author – keep watching…
So make a coffee – sit back and watch Dr Karl, live by satellite…
OK, so there are hundreds of sites, all claiming to be expert in getting website visitors and we we’re not pretending to be specialists, however we do have over 30 sites, all receiving traffic, some more than others and have been in the game for a couple of years now, which isn’t that long, but more than many…
Being Smarter, as regular readers will know is all about helping businesses do things better, faster, quicker… and thinking outside the box. Today is no exception.
I meet many people in my job all looking to set up web businesses, or who have bricks and mortar businesses, who don’t get online at all or who have some kind of webpresence, but it may as well be a blank homepage for all the good it does them.
Simply put, nothing will happen online unless you have visitors to your site, or ‘traffic’ as it’s known. Unless you have traffic, no one can buy anything, read anything, connect with you, collaborate with you or spread your message.
If you want one of the best explanations of this concept, then I thoroughly recommend you take 6 minutes out of you day and watch the video below…
Anyway, that’s not the main reason for today’s article.
Hopefully now, you appreciate the value of “traffic” to your website. The next question is how do you get it? There is of course no simple answer, and the devil is in the detail, however, I stumbled across a great set of immediately implementable ideas for someone starting out, or an established web business and wanted to share it with you.
I know I called the title 365 – because there’s at least one method I’m not sure about, however in 10 minutes, you’ll be able to scan through the pdf and choose at least 100 you could use for your business.
I should add, there’s a pitch from the orginial author in the first couple of pages, which if you purchase will earn us a few bucks/pounds, however it’s easily skippable, to get on to the meaty part!
Happy New Year to all of our Being Smarter readers.
I wanted to start the year by resurrecting a post from December last year – which seems very appropriate for the start of the working year for most people…
At a recent conference, a now colleague of mine, Ed Dale did four separate sessions on a topic which I am calling “How to do business in 2010“… he had a different title, but my take on it was simple – it was a message to all corporate management… to all the folks who’ve sadly been made redundant recently from that world… and to all smaller businesses who are paralysed by indecision. The message was something along the lines of
“Wake up and smell the coffee… the world has totally changed (not just by the Internet.) If you carry on doing business as it was done ten years ago, or do you know what, perhaps even a year ago… then you are dead in the water.”
There were 86 separate provacative statements, here’s my top 10:
1.) Whatever you do, make sure you’re in a business or market place that you are completely unpassionate about. Make sure that it leaves you feeling cold, empty and completely drained at the end of the day. The great news is that if you’ve found a marketplace you particularly have no interest in, it will help you to be average at best when it comes to selling to and supporting your customers – and they will love you for it.
2.)If you are in a small business, ensure you try to run it like a corporate entitiy. Make sure you absolutely do not in any way try to differentiate yourself from these bigger companies. Treat your customers like numbers and be completely devoid of any business personality.
3.) When developing products or services, it’s imperative that you don’t start to build anything without examining every ounce of detail at the early stage. Take as long as you like to write specs and make sure you start with the small picture and buld it up. You’ll never get anything launched if you don’t spend many weeks and months getting the finer detail argued about, before talking to customers about the concept – they won’t thank you.
4.) When your service is launched – for goodness sake try to sell it to everyone that moves… ignore segmentation and playing in niche markets – it’s a complete waste of time. If the product is good enough, everyone will want it.
5.) If you’re in the online game, think very carefully about building giant server or data centre infrastructures the minute your product is out the door. There’s literally no one else out there that does this kind of thing… and they certainly wouldn’t be able to scale it up to your demands.Your data is important to you, and so you should keep it under your control at all times.
6.) When designing your next product, ensure you get every feature that your customers will need into the very first release. Don’t design it so that it could be released in stages, or people just won’t buy it. They need everything on day one.
7.) Decision making – this is key. Involve everyone at all times. Ensure you plan as many meetings as possible – all day ones if necessary to reach a consensus. If you aren’t able to make a decision with the whole team after a huge amount of analysis and delay, then play safe and don’t make one.
8.) When it comes to recruitment, make sure you hire experts in their field, irrespective of whether they are difficult to work with. It’s much better to have a team of experts who don’t communicate than a team of generalists who gel as a team and work for the common good. Oh – and don’t work with them as affiliates or freelancers first to test them out – that just isn’t the done thing.
9.) Customers don’t mind being slightly misled about what they are about to receive as a service… as long as you hook them in, they’ll generally soon get over it. It also helps to provide a very detailed contract, which is difficult to break out of, for your protection.
10.) And finally, the Internet is just a fad. Stick with the old rules of marketing – direct mail and cold calling has worked for years. Your customer base has no idea what a twoot or a blag is, and they’re still on 56k modems, so video will never work on their pcs – you will just need to invest in a support department.
Ian Mash of Yeoman Consulting helps us to continue the theme of ‘practical ways to help your business life” by sharing some of his experiences of working at the coalface as a senior manager in one of the UK’s largest companies – BT.
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How many of us get up to do a full day’s work, and then conform to the expected norm?
Most of us I suspect, but the key to competitive advantage is to continuously challenge the norm, continuously challenge the status quo.
Think of the new and successful products or brands that do just that. Look at EasyJet. Who would have thought, 20 years ago that we would all be flying around Europe for £20 a seat, and that whilst we had to give up a free warm gin and tonic and a handful of nuts, we now accept a cheaper price and ‘what you see is what you get’ service.
BA certainly didn’t.
Look at Apple’s continued success based on innovation…the Ipod, and the iPhone. OK some of the ‘apps’ are pretty trivial like the beer glass one, but others like the SatNav one are powerful and have started to really shore up the niche.
Look at Mark Copeman’s idea of challenging the status quo of the training world with The 8.45 Club, a great idea to keep up to date while you’re having that first cup of coffee. (Ed-Thanks Ian) All of these are about challenging the status quo, getting an edge and most importantly asking ‘Why?’, the world’s most powerful question.
Why do we do things that way?
Why can’t it be done this way?
There are big inhibitors to that ‘why’ question in most companies… “because we’ve just spent £x million on a new system to support the process’ or “because that is how we built the business doing it this way”, but the competition or new start up doesn’t have that inhibitor when they’re looking for their edge…so it’s important that you challenge the status quo on a regular basis, if you’re not going to be playing panic catch up on your competition.
Interestingly that got me thinking about the question “what is a strong brand?” I remember being asked this by my marketing tutor and answering that “it was one I went to because I recognised it”. A torrent of sarcasm ensued and he drummed it into me, that a strong brand was one which one someone was prepared to pay more for.I’m sure BA comforted themselves on that mantra when Easyjet sprang up. In my view, they are both strong brands and plenty of folk still use BA… but Easyjet certainly doesn’t fit the definition of my old tutor.
So, maybe a strong brand is about being clear on the price for the deliverable and being consistent with that deliverable. Any way you look at it, it’s a challenge to the status quo.
Ian Mash will be back with more pearls of wisdom in the next couple of weeks and can be contacted on +44 7860 621976 and via email at ian dot mash1 at btinternet.com __________________
It was an inspiring few days with Ed and his team which I’ve enjoyed writing about. Today, however, seeing as a few people came to ask me during the event we were recording how I managed to persuade him to work with us, I thought I’d do my final article on how to get noticed… or more specifically, how we got noticed.
I’ve not had a great deal of experience of getting noticed in the B2C space, however I have spent the last 10 years or so working in the business to business environment, and believe me, it’s not an easy thing to do. Attempting to create new relationships with Directors of Marketing or HR in large corporates is difficult to say the least. Inboxes are crowded places, cold calls aren’t exactly the way forward, and snail mail will almost certainly end up lost in some strange basement post room.
So – how did I get Ed’s attention? What are my tips for getting noticed by your Targets?
Know your Targets
You are looking for new customers – you have to know who they are first. Remember, one size doesn’t fit all. You have to niche it down. If you are selling a service with mass appeal, focus on one niche at a time. Figure out 100 targets and then get to know them before approaching them…
Legal stalking
Do some basic searches on your Targets… find out all about them. Use Gist as a great tool to data mine and cross reference. If you can’t find anything on them, get to understand their company instead. People so often ask my why I bother with Twitter. Legal stalking is my answer – follow those of your targets who have a Twitter stream. Get to understand what makes them tick, so that when you finally come to approach them you can be personal and relevant. The key words in this whole article.
Email marketing is dead in the water
Broad brush, blanket, call it what you will, email marketing does not work when you are looking to target new customers. Sure, it’s fine to maintain a relationship (although I’d still question that) however you are never going to get noticed with an html newsletter. How many do you delete on a daily basis?
Get noticed
So – my personal favourite tack is to write a short, punchy email – question every single word within it to see if it is relevant and adds value to the approach. Make sure your target knows that this is not a cut and paste email. Write something personal in it… “I noticed you were interested in chocolate tea pots…” etc. Make it easy to read – and don’t send it straight away. Send it the next day. As the Lynx advert rightly says, you’ve only one chance to make a first impression.
Now comes the clever bit
I’ve been developing and refining a system for the last 8 years and have shown beyond reasonable doubt that the more personal you get, the higher the chance of a response. At the end of your email, refer your target to a URL, and do not make it your company URL – again, that’s not personal enough – if they liked you, they’d look it up anyway. Instead, make the URL personal. ie www.chocolateteapotsdemo.com/richard-fox.
That’s right – a URL with their name in it… put your mind in your Target’s shoes… they open the email, see the link and think “Huh – they’ve done something for me? wow – I’m intrigued – I’ll take a look.”
Think about it – you’d click the link wouldn’t you?
Get them engaged
So they click the link – and you’re thinking it’s just a redirect to the main website? Wrong. Big mistake, I’ve tried that too. Instead, that link needs to go to a page which is personal to them. A page which carries on the conversation and then tells your story. Typically in a short video format. Here’s an example of one we use… (imagine this at the bottom of your email).
You then need to know if / when they clicked the link so that you can follow up, or if you do it well – so that you can predict when they might respond to you.
How to automate this process
Having used this technique for a while now, I started to get my targets asking whether they could buy the system. My first answer was no, but now it’s yes…. Targets to Prospects is now born and in 30 seconds, you can create a personal page and personal link for your target. This is the exact technique I used to get Ed’s attention. This is what he said to me once we’d started to work together…
“I get dozens of approaches on a weekly basis and 99% of them tend to get ignored. I noticed Mark’s email to me, because it was personal. The link with my name in stood out from the rest of the crowd, and the page it landed on hooked me in, due to the excellent video story… As a result, I’m now looking forward to working with him over the coming months.”
He is a busy man to say the least. No one was more shocked than me when I got a response from him in 12 hours. I created cut through, because the communication was personal and relevant.
Tell me more
To see a full demo and details of how to buy a system for your choice of domain, you can check out Targets to Prospects here.
A big thank you
To Ed for a cracking few days and for the quote above. I learnt a load and am looking forward to bringing together his expertise in 8.45 Club style courses over the coming months.
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