Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

Simplify your marketing, make it real

Monday, November 29th, 2010

Marketing is the make or break of most businesses. Don’t think about it as an activity, an action, a thing-to-do, a campaign.

Think about your new clients, what are they doing, thinking about, talking about. How can you help those people ? What is the conversation you would have with them ?

Understand where your new clients are at mentally, physically, emotionally. Understand their needs, wants, desires. Take your business TO THEM, fit in with them, include them, reach out to them, welcome them, talk to them.

Work out where you can intersect their lives. What message will you bring to them at what time.

Even if every day you just journal those types of thoughts, experiences, ideas. Talk to existing clients, and potential clients, not to sell or market, just to understand them.

After a time your better understanding will lead to better marketing.

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How to get my money that is in your wallet

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

The Guy Kawasaki  video reminded me of something I was talking about recently.

You need to make a machine, that starts at the customer’s wallet, and goes all the way to your bank account. Starts with the customer, via marketing, sales, delivery and support.

It start with giving value to the customer, and having a meshed organisation, so the customer/marketing/sales/product all works together to extract the sale. This may seem obvious but hard to do. Poor sales performance doesn’t require better sales training, or better/new sales people, it needs more cohesion between sales & marketing, and marketing & the customer. If this all meshes, then each piece is easy and natural.

A good example of poor meshing is software development. Customer asks:
“what do you do?”
“software development, using xcf method with agile computing and cloud components”  …. this means NOTHING to the customer.
customer asks : “can you program CRMs for my website”
“yes we can”
customer asks : “can you help with our monthly budget reporting ?”
“yes we can”
customer asks : “would I be able to get monthly sales ROI month on month for website sales ?”
“yes, I’ll get back to you on that in a proposal”

Given you do everything, sales and marketing aren’t able to be specific about anything. This is the real swiss army knife approach, we do everything, which might even be true. But you can’t effectively market or sell ‘everything’.

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getting ideas to spread – an intro to Seth Godin

Saturday, January 31st, 2009

Seth is someone you ought to listen to.

Here is an easy and fun to watch video as an intro to his ideas.

This video introduces you to:
– old companies sell average products to average people, and use a lot of TV advertising. Seth says this is dead
– we are in an economy of idea spreading, or idea diffusion. Make something remarkable, and get WOM (word of mouth) to spread the idea
– be remarkable. Good or very good isn’t enough – be remarkable

Seth is listed in the top 50 business thinkers, runs a blog, and authored a lot of books.

You will find Seth slowly moves you along in your ability to innovate.

He has a quality that slowly convinces you of news ways to think/look/understand Before you know it, you will be innovating too.

My Take

Idea Diffusion for me brings together a few concepts:
– Malcolm Gladwell’s tipping point – talks about different sorts of people – connector/maven/salesman. Whilst Seth doesn’t differentiate between these types of people, he still makes the point – ‘telling the right person, and hopefully that person will tell/convince their friends’.
– word of mouth (WOM) advertising is a cheap and effective marketing strategy – when done well. Seth says – be remarkable – you will get WOM.
– web 2.0 and social networking on the internet has changed a lot of people’s lives. This can be explained similarly to WOM and idea diffusion.

I like the juncture between remarkable, WOM marketing, web 2.0 communities, and an ecommerce site. If you can get this happening, then you have unlimited free marketing. You have also dramaticly reduce your costs, as you no longer pay for advertising, or sales or channel commissions. You effectively disintermediate all sales/marketing costs from your business, and have unlimited scaling of your marketing for free.

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Customer focus – build it into your strategy

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

Are you focused on your customer ?

You should think / write / experience everything from your customer’s perspective.

Don’t write on your website ‘We are an advertising agency’. That is focused on your self. Instead try ‘helping you to get more bang for your advertising dollar’.

Your customer focus needs to be right back at the roots of your company – in your mission /vision / brand.

This is a great post by Jay Ehret about a case study.

Here is the original focus in the case study  :

Mission: To provide our customers a great value with our lines of furniture and to provide tailored furniture and services to meet their needs, striving for 100% customer satisfaction.

Vision: To be the number one destination point for furniture in the region.

Brand Promise: To provide tailored (customized) furniture and services to meet your needs.

Can you recognize above – how its inward focused ? how it’s talking about you and your company ?

Does that sound like your own mission/vision statements ?

And here is the updated version – adapted from Jay’s work:

Mission: To deliver furniture that tells stories. To alter competition from price to experience.

Vision: delivering lifestyle to customers through furniture.

Brand Promise: Come home with pride.

We are now talking about customers and experience.

We’re taking the game from furniture to experience. Customer’s will enjoy the lifestyle benefits associated with our furniture. Customers will talk to other customers about the experience at our store.

Learn more about customer experience.

Imagine the word of mouth, from a proud owner of new ‘lifestyle furtiture’. When they next have guests over – you’ll be sure they mention your store.

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When Its Wrong to Innovate

Monday, January 26th, 2009

You need more profit, growth , and product changes. You know you need to differentiate , niche, position , brand and develop loyalty.

This is all innovation.

Seth Godin says you need to be remarkable. This helps reinforce – small changes, or bandaids, are generally not enough.

Surely you can’t make or review all these changes at once. You need a structure to help you reduce clutter and focus.

You can make innovation at several distrinct places in your company:
– business model
– marketing strategy
– branding innovation
– product changes
– pricing changes
– sales techniques
– customer service changes
– customer retention plans
– customer referral

Changes towards the top of the list generally cost more, requires more vision, and generally is a bigger risk.

The bigger changes (towards the top of the list) clearly require more buyin – from higher levels of management, the CEO, and even the board.

You will also have the potention to make much more profit from the innovative changes that are more aggressive. You can literally blow open a market, and make competitors irrelevant by business model changes.

Having said bigger is better, many innovations might be WRONG for you:
– you might like smaller changes – so you can manage the risk
– you might not have senior enough buyin
– you might not be able to find the right ideas
– you may not require big changes to meet your goals

As you get more comfortable with innovation, you will find the real value is innovation at more than one level at the same time, like:
– branding and pricing changes
– business model and changes in marketing channels

But again, starting with smaller changes, with one dimension is easier, and less risk to start with.

My suggestion would be for you to work out:
– what are your goals for the company
– do you need small incremental change, or do you need more significant change
– what sort of senior buyin do you have ?
– how much risk can you stomach ?

Targeting your effort to where innovation will best fit your organisation’s needs should now be the obvious answer.

So when you hear – “we need product or price changes” – ask yourself – is that the WRONG place to innovate ?

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Being competitive in the Experience Economy

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

Just listened to podcast from Phil McKinney. He spoke about the ‘experience economy’. Roughly its like why is going to DisneyLand a premium over the local ride park. How does Harely generate such an emotional response ? You pay a premium to get an experience, as opposed just to a fun night out.

Obviously much of this is just strong branding over a long period of time.

It also occured to me, you need to understand where the experience is in your industry. Then you need to go and own that experience.

I’ll reference ‘Circ de Soleil’ and the book Blue Ocean Strategy. BlueOcean talked about Circ-de-Soleil beat out circuses, by making the acts faceless, and removing the expensive actors (both animals and invididual stars). BlueOcean was able to control costs, focus on a better paying market charging a premium price. Less costs and premium prices – now that’s profit.

Here I am saying Circ-de-Soleil owned the experience. Its like running an art gallery perhaps, you dont want to be at the beck-and-call of the art industry, as to who will show in your gallery.

You need to own the experience – not the artists. You need to still make the same money, if you change artists, someone else signs your star. This also stops a star leveraging their value for more pay.

Another good example is say – ‘Kaos Comedy Restaurants’. Having the waiters be funny, tell jokes, and be rude – all part of the night. They owned the experience, and not the artists.

RedBubble seems to be generating lots of attention, and recently won a cool-company award. They own the platform and the community in which the art is shown. RedBubble aren’t in trouble if a single artist goes. You dont go to redbubble to get to just one artist.

I guess this is ultimately what will put Hoyts out of business. They don’t own the movies. No-one is loyal to Hoyts – we’ll go where the movies (the art) goes. OK – they still have some experience going to the cinema.

Hoyts whole ‘only at the movies’ campaign is rediculous. For the life of me – I cant understand why Hoyts dont market ‘better at the movies’ – ‘or more fun at the movies’, or do lifestyle marketing. The only edge/value they have left is the experience – yet they market about the movie itself.

I can even see a time, when a huge star disintermediates the whole movie industry, and sells direct over the web, DRM protected movies. Like the next star wars movie – ‘only on the web’. But that’s another story.

Don’t let your company be the next circus or the next Hoyts.

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Marketing activity = Danger Will Robinson !

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

How to know when your company is in danger from poor marketing planning.

“we need a new website, we need a CRM. Our last 3 web sites didn’t work – we need a better one.”

If you are thinking about marketing tactics – then that is the mistake.

If you don’t have a bigger vision, and an understanding of why you are investing in each marketing tactic, then you WILL fail.

If you can’t clearly and distrinctly describe the aims of your website, the branding it needs to promote, what interactions you want to promote. Then your screwed.

You need to take a step make, and to some marketing strategy, as opposed to planning/investing in marketing tactics.

Lots of small business owners want to see action, and don’t value sitting around talking, and strategizing. The only problem, that’s exactly what you need to be doing.

Now I know these sound contrite – but here is a starter of documents you need to consider.

Mission Statement
Vision Statement
Benefit Statement
Positioning Statement
Value Proposition
Unique Sales Proposition
Strategic Differentiation Statement
Brand
Brand Promise
Brand Identity

Now imagine you went to your web developer, or marketing planner, and said please read through these. We need your input on a new website that better supports our vision/brand/value to the market. We want to website to help us better interact with new prospects.

You and the website developer now have a shared understanding of what you are attempting to achieve. You can at least converse based on this understanding.

And when they do come up with website concepts, and ask you about the AI. All you have to do is judge it on how it meets your stated goals – not does it look cool.

So the next time someone is talking about redoing a website, or new brochures, or change the tele marketing tacticts. And the DONT give you some idea of the vision/branding/value – then DANGER WILL ROBINSON !

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Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

This was a fantastic book.

You should read this if you :

– are launching a new product

– are reviewing your marketing of a product – especially on a crowded industry

The basics are:

– differentiation through marketing alone is not enough

– your product must genuinely be different to your competitors. And it needs to STAND OUT

– brainstorming is rubbish – its all about edge thinking

– you need to champion your ideas – although this is less relevant if you own your own business

The book details an innovation system about edges

– take your thinking and product to the extreme edge

– make it invisible, or outrageous, or obscene, or quiet. It has a very useful list of starting ideas.

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