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Blog posts in Marketing strategy
Ten signs that something is missing from your marketing strategy
May 22, 2012
How effective is your marketing strategy? Here are ten signs that your business may need some marketing help. Be honest — how many of these statements are true of your business?
- You are failing to consistently attract new visitors to your website
- You are not turning website visitors into customers
- You are losing people in the middle of the sales funnel
- People don't recognise you as an expert in your industry
- You aren't creating unique content that gets you noticed
- You only approach prospects with the full sales pitch
- Your sales team is not up to date with your marketing
- Your marketing content is not up to date
- Prospects don't understand what you've got to offer
- You're not clear what buying stage your prospects are at.
Sookie Shuen is the community manager at Tomorrow People, an inbound marketing consultancy. The Tomorrow People’s eGuide, The Marketing Funnel of Love, promises to help you fall in love with your marketing strategy again!
How to motivate your customers to buy
May 02, 2012
It’s fascinating how a simple change of language can completely alter your perspective on something. In a meeting with David Tovey from Principled Selling, we were looking at stages in the buying decision and discussing which parts are marketing, which sales, and which customer service.
To my mind, marketing is the act of taking your products and services to market, and is therefore the umbrella term for the joined-up whole. However, I conceded that most people see marketing as filling the top end of a sales funnel. The awareness and lead generation bit. Then David said something brilliant. He said, “we don’t call it marketing; we call it motivating” — and he is spot on!
Use the word marketing and many people think of fluffy branding activity or expensive awareness campaigns. Many of which seem to have little link to an actual sale at the end of the day. But, if you switch the word to talk about how you’re going to motivate potential buyers to want to talk to you, and then to want to buy from you, and then to want to keep buying from you; then the purpose of the activity becomes clear. The purpose is to help them.
The most motivating thing of all is to be genuinely helpful. If you can help your potential buyer to achieve something that’s on their list, then you’re on to a winner. So, think about the steps in a buying decision and think about ways to be helpful…
- If they’re scoping a project, think about a blog or paper that helps them to prepare a project brief.
- If they’re choosing between suppliers, think about providing a scorecard of key criteria against which to assess potential suppliers.
- If they’re teetering on the edge of a decision, find a way of letting them try before they buy with a trial or gateway product.
So, ask yourself if what you’re putting out there is helpful? If the answer is yes, then it’s likely to be motivating.
And, that’s good marketing.
Bryony Thomas is an expert contributor to Marketing Donut and a marketing consultant, speaker, and author. Her first book – Watertight Marketing – will be available Summer 2012. This blog originally appeared here.
Book review: What Matters Now
April 23, 2012
In 1987, Tom Peters wrote Thriving on Chaos (one of my favourites). And in 2007, Gary Hamel wrote The Future of Management. Both books signalled the need for changes in how we manage businesses.
Management revolution
You would think management is going through a bit of a revolution. More recent books like Hacking Work by Bill Jensen and Josh Klein, The New Normal by Peter Hinssen and Employees First, Customers Second by Vineet Nayar are sure indicators of a new way of thinking about how we should organise a business.
In What Matters Now by Gary Hamel, we are starting to get a better understanding of not only the need for change but also a sense of urgency. Now is the word.
Can you afford not to change?
In a world of relentless change, ferocious competition and unstoppable innovation, can you afford a centralised approach to decision-making? Can you afford bureaucracy? Can you afford decision-making that takes months, sometimes years? Can you afford to miss the weak signals from the marketplace? Can you afford for half of your staff to not be really engaged?
Can you afford not to be fluffy?
In a world of extreme transparency where the power is back with the people (read customers and staff), can you afford treating staff and customers as commodities? Can you afford not to work on loyalty and long-term relationships? Can you afford not to work on branding that is actually heartfelt and based on passion and values? Can you afford not to have a moral compass?
Can you afford greed, indifference, and incompetence?
Do you think the world can afford or will accept another economic crisis that was mainly caused by management and leadership losing all perspective on values, longevity, community and common good (instead we had greed, incompetence, deceit, denial, blind indifference to human cost, narcissism etc).
Centralised management got us into the current crisis and is as a result discredited. Staff, customers and society will soon no longer accept the current management practices. It is morally corrupt, it makes no sense and as an organisation you will not survive the onslaught of change that is currently taking place.
So is What Matters Now a good book? I’m not sure. Is the message important? Absolutely.
In some ways it is an extension of Hamel’s previous book, “The future of management”, but with a deeper sense of why and why now. What The 2020 Workplace is for HR, What Matters Now is for management. And that is saying something.
Which is why you should you read it. Now!
If you are an SME…
As a small and medium sized company, this is your opportunity to topple a giant. It is much easier for you to apply the principles and it should be closer to your heart. It makes good business sense too.
Ron Immink is the CEO and co-founder of Small Business Can and Book Buzz — the website devoted to business books.
Could your marketing be more entrepreneurial?
April 16, 2012
In the absence of in-house marketing expertise, more often than not we find ourselves working directly with the founder/owner-manager on their marketing activities. Many of our clients are entrepreneurs running small and medium-sized social enterprises — businesses that trade, and reinvest their profits, for social good.
Our experience tells us that not only do they do business differently but their approach to marketing doesn’t always follow suit with conventional strategies and practices either.
We find that their entrepreneurial personalities most definitely influence their marketing style and thus “entrepreneurial marketing” becomes second nature. And they are not alone. These entrepreneurs have almost created their own marketing community and although they may not be following prescribed marketing theory, they know how to get results.
Entrepreneurial marketing is gaining recognition as an opportunity-focused approach that brings together the innovation, risk-taking and creativity of enterprise with the market understanding and customer-orientation of mainstream marketing. In other words, they put an entrepreneurial twist on traditional marketing strategies.
So what are the tell tale signs of entrepreneurial marketers?
- Proactive, moving quickly with ideas and being in regular and close contact with customers to understand their changing needs and preferences.
- Thriving on developing and launching new ideas, based on instinct and intuition. Testing them live in the marketplace, using trial and error. No grand market testing initiatives here!
- Maintaining an extensive personal network of contacts and using that to develop and adapt marketing activities. High investment in building relationships not acquaintances.
- Using peers and business contacts to sound out ideas and gather information and knowledge rather than undertake formal research.
- Being plugged into several specialist networks, each offering different value to the business. Understanding the importance of informal conversation.
- Actively seeking to be different and differentiating through innovation. Seizing and acting on opportunities quickly.
- Building alliances to break into new markets. Not afraid to collaborate with competitors.
Despite feeling that they have limited marketing ability, many entrepreneurs naturally find their own way, yet recognise the value of some textbook marketing when they need it. This hybrid approach is very exciting to see in practice with the entrepreneur playing a central role in challenging accepted thinking on how marketing should be done!
Ranjit Bansal is co-founder of Dynamic Marketing.
How do you spot talent?
April 05, 2012
There is a war going on. A war for talent.
If you have read The Talent Masters by Ram Charan and Bill Conaty, The 2020 Workplace by Jeanne Meister and Karie Willyerd or any of the latest books in the human resource space, then you are aware of the importance of recruiting and retaining talent.
81% of CEOs claim that they are losing that war. George Anders in his book, The Rare Find, looks at what makes a recruiter successful and uses examples from the special forces, the FBI, sports, venture capitalists, education and the medical sector. It also explains how Facebook recruits its talent (online coding puzzles!).
The book refers to “The long tail” and how you can use that long tail to spot talent outside of the standard top resumes. This book has elements of Business Exposed by Freek Vermeulen (super CEOs and super talent are hugely overrated) and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (trust your instincts).
The Rare Find has a few key messages:
1. If you don’t know what is coming you need to hire the unexpected — look outside the box
2. Resumes and CVs are only the tip of the iceberg, find out the whole story — read the CV upside down
3. It is not about skill, it is about character and hidden virtues — compromise on experience, but do NOT compromise on character
4. Use observation
5. Ignore cultural fit at your peril
6. Don’t look for “good enough” but try to find the “could be spectacular”.
This book makes absolute common sense and in some ways there is nothing new in it. The good companies will understand the messages in the book instinctively.
I think it is a sister book to Mavericks at Work by William Taylor and Polly LaBarre, where the key message is that you need to recruit people that share your passion and that skills are secondary. This book has the same message about the importance of character and how that supersedes experience.
How your mum and dad raised you is more important than your education. And it is best explained through what the FBI looks for in candidates:
• Initiative, perseverance and compatibility
• Discipline, trainability and judgement
• Loyalty, leadership and maturity
You can’t gauge that from a CV.
Ron Immink is the CEO and co-founder of Small Business Can and Book Buzz — the website devoted to business books.
Is time your most precious resource?
March 21, 2012
Those of us that are self-employed soon learn that the true currency in business is not money, but time. If we can learn to manage and manipulate this most precious resource, then the money will flow, as if by magic. The problem is that most people find learning to manage one's own time is the most difficult part of setting up as a business.
This is likely to be an issue for a lot of people at the moment. The new year is a time when many people take the heady step of striking out on their own, often either because they are bored with their current lifestyle or they are forced to through being made redundant.
In a corporate environment, time management is enforced by a higher power, a process which always also generates plenty of good excuses for not meeting externally imposed deadlines. There are invariably genuine and easily documented evidence of having been let down by customers, suppliers and co-workers.
These pressures apply in equal measure to the self-employed, but the downside can be an immediate and fatal cash flow crisis rather than a missed quarterly profit target. So the first and most essential personal skill for the aspiring entrepreneur is always one of time management.
This could mean realising sooner rather than later that all our efforts should be directed towards generating revenue, or that extra hours need to be applied to complete a project and thus receive an agreed stage payment. The trouble is that the importance of time management is often undervalued among those considering entrepreneurship.
People tend to think they will make a good founder because they are bursting with new ideas and enthusiasm. This is an essential first step towards starting a business, which always involves the making of promises, but it is not enough.
What characterises a successful entrepreneur is their ability to actually deliver on their promises, which typically involves engaging a second person who is adept at project management. In the meantime, the creative entrepreneur is forever rushing from one place to another and invariably arriving late for appointments.
Fortunately, my own career in start-ups was predicated on punctuality, as I was always responsible for sales. Confucius might well have said that "the salesman who turns up late for a client appointment will never close a big deal", so a wise sales manager will always arrange time management courses for new team members.
When I became self-employed, I was forced to master the basic spreadsheet, not only to monitor my own sales pipeline on a daily basis, but also to manage my own personal time in the form of a daily, online calendar, accessible on whatever device I might be using.
Personal discipline involves my making a specific diary appointment for every promise that I make, ensuring the system pings me audibly when that promise is due. Then, I make an instant value judgement as to whether that task should be done immediately or postponed to a quieter time.
This approach is exemplified by the most effective day in our working calendars, the day before we go on holiday. There is always a towering list of things to do, but we are forced to apply a ruthless filtering mechanism to each item, prioritising, delegating, and even deleting where necessary.
As we finally get on the flight to somewhere warm and sunny and look forward to a few days of uninterrupted sleep, we are happy in the glow that we achieved everything we could on that last day, but rueful that not every working day was as effective.
My advice would be to find a good book on time management and have that as your holiday reading.
Originally published in The Financial Times. Copyright © Mike Southon 2012. All Rights Reserved. Not to be reproduced without permission in writing. Mike Southon is the co-author of The Beermat Entrepreneur and a business speaker.
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