A bit of thinking goes a long way
I had a good chat with one of my customers today, who is the General Manager in a $15 M firm. The company is family owned and has a great offering. There are a couple of problems though; as a typical entrepeneur driven company, there is not a lot of structure or deliberation behind their decisions; owner makes gut-feel decisions, General Manager implements, venture may be succesful, may fail. He gave me a couple of examples that would make your hair stand on end.
Since we have just completed some work for this firm, I sat down to have a chat about what we can do next. The GM only had one thing on his mind; help me convince the owner that the next time there is "a great opportunity" knocking, let's have a good look at it, and put a little science behind our hunch.
Does this sound familiar? How many entrepeneurs are more than happy to spend a few $100k on an opportunity they recognise, but baulk at spending $10k to evaluate it? Is it ego or is it lack of confidence in other peoples judgment?
Word of Mouth – Democratising Marketing
I read this post from a Kerry Stranman, a contributor to the Word Of Mouth Marketing Organization (WOMMA) about Democratizing Marketing...that title put me off a bit (it has that "advertising agency" flavour to it), but the gist is interesting; marketers are losing control over "the message" they wish to deliver because customers can now directly communicate with massive audiences of other customers via the Internet. If it's great, they'll spread the word, if it's bad they will too...
Right now, you may think that this doesn't relate to your business. That your customers don't look online for information about your type of services or your company.
I don't care what anyone says; within the next couple of years what you do online will be just as important as what you do offline; it's only a matter of time. Why? Because when people buy stuff there are two things they will always want to know: am I getting the best value for money? Can I trust this product/brand?
People's networks are the first place where they look for this information, and the growth in online networks or communities are phenomenal. Maybe no one is talking about your product or service yet. But how long before they will?
Spending time thinking about growth
In small organisations, it is something that tends to be done when things are not going well, or when there is a need for documentation for finance purposes. With typically limited resources, planning is seen as taking too much time, and on top of that, people may not want to admit that they don't know how to create a plan.
On the other hand, almost everyone agrees that planning is something they should really do more of.
In my experience any planning is better than none. If there is only time to just get together and write down specific goals, and some high level ideas about how to get there, it's better than nothing.
It doesn't matter if it's not perfect; the planning process is what will give you the benefit, not the actual piece of paper you end up with. Having said that, when you write it down it does become a commitment, and it does become measurable.
How does your business deal with this?
Sometimes people deserve a rave
Sometimes you come across websites that just hit the mark. I have been reading John Jantsch's post on his Ducttape marketing weblog for small business marketing for a few months and I really enjoy it. The ideas are fresh, it's easy to read and even if you get one idea out of every five that you can apply to your business it is worthwhile. Credit where credit is due.
In B2B, online is still just one cog in the wheel
According to a recent Australian study, "The Australian online advertising market grew nearly 50% in 2005 with $605m in revenues and this is expected to increase significantly to more than $1.5bn by 2009."
Frost & Sullivan also predicts that Australian online advertising revenues will exceed magazine advertising (which accounts for around 7% or $700m of the total advertising market) in 2006 and radio advertising in 2007.
That's significant of course, but the reality is that these dollars are spent by the big consumer brands.Business to Business SME's have never been big advertisers; referral business, direct marketing and personal selling is where it's at.
Most SME's already struggle with the plethora of choices to spend their promotional dollar. More often than not they end up doing whatever is sold to them most effectively. And not very often as part of a more structured campaign or strategy.
Yellow Pages is still a big favourite, even if the results they get are doubtful at best. Why? Because customers get something tangible, in a format they understand.
Unless we, as marketing professionals can make it easier to create effective, multi-channel strategies I think that it will remain like that for quite a while to come.
Knowing what you don’t want is important
As we are working on re-developing our website and brand identity, I have come across a couple of sites that do a great job in highlighting what we have to avoid at all cost.
From my experience in planning anything, it's equally important to look at what you don't like as it is to look at what you do like.
The first one is webpagesthatsuck.com which is a bit of a classic in webdesign land I think, but I had never had a close look.
The second one is sending-up well, us I guess. I mean marketing consultants, marketing experts, whatever you wish to call us...the name says it all: Huhcorp
Please let me know if we ever start to sound like this...
Turning Customers Into Evangelists
Going to Florida for a seminar is not really on the books yet, but after having read a fair few articles on the Word of Mouth Associations website it would have been nice.
Although the article itself is not revolutionary, it does focus the attention on something that I think is so often forgotten; turning customers into fans starts with the product.
9 times out of 10 the expectations of marketing are squarly focused on promotions and sales. It would be interesting to calculate the ROI on general promotional activities versus money invested in turning a customer into an advocate.
No, even better, let's see how much business has been generated from customer referrals and other word of mouth promotion, and how much from general advertising, trade shows etc.
In b2b marketing, I don't think there is a question about what comes up trumps.
So why don't we do more with it?
Here are three reasons I can think of:
1. It takes long term thinking; the results pay off in the long term
2. It's not as visible; no new website, ads or brochures to flash around
3. Based on the two factors above, it is a higher risk strategy for a marketing person.
Solution? Get support from the top first; it's not a hard sell once you have the numbers.
Word of Mouth Basic Training: Day 2: Turning Customers Into Evangelists
Campaigns versus impulse
Campaigns versus impulse – get mileage out of your marketing activities.
It is very easy to fall into the “opportunity trap”, i.e. spending your marketing dollars on whatever opportunity looks great at the time it is being offered to you. Don’t. You wouldn’t (hopefully) spend your money like that in any other business area. Creating a small campaign is not very hard to do, and the results are almost certain many times what an impulse activity will pay off.
Here are four simple steps to follow:
Set an objective – that means that you look at who you want to promote what to, and that you set a specific (numerical) goal to achieve it. Numbers are magic. Once you have committed yourself and your partners/staff to it, it really focuses you.
Set a budget – however small or large, a budget is part of your commitment to make it work. Clearly, if you are going to spend money, you want to get meaningful results.
Step out an action plan – sounds silly, but a simple timeline with who will do what will ensure that things get done. It also helps communicate internally, and externally with potential partners that you are serious about what you are doing.
Track the results – accountability is not something that is often associated with marketing. I believe it is the essence, so develop a simple method of tracking the results of your activities. There are many different ways for many different programs, but any identification of the offer will help you track the outcomes of your program.
Try it. It works!
The business case for RSS marketing
If you are interested in Internet and email marketing, have a read. - A concise summing up of the challenges in email marketing, as well as a really useful explanation of where things are going. Even if you are not a tech person, you'll find this whitepaper a really clear outline of the problems internet and email marketing face. 28 pages is a bit much, but even if you just read the first couple of pages; you'll get something out of it.
"RSS marketing - the business case"
http://www.johnlawlor.com/rok-report/rss_marketing_the_business_case.pdf
“Marketing to IT professionals” in b2b Magazine
"Marketing to IT professionals" in b2b Magazine - The SMB market for IT is set to grow exponentially, IT buyers can no longer be lumpted together as one big group, there are changes in spending; all and all an interesting read from a good source.Breaking through to IT professionals.
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