Marketing For Power Packed Business Growth

The weekend of  25/26th November I was invited by my brother Simon to watch him and his wife Julie take part in a farce put on by the Muskham Players at their village hall/theatre.

The farce was well received and I certainly enjoyed it a lot.

The only problem? I've been using early Saturday mornings to catch up with stuff and last week I'd gone to the B2B show in Manchester, replaced lots of bits on my car and everyone in my family got some sort of cold/flu/virus thing making working more complicated!

The result was I had a pleasant change at the weekend and still left myself with stuff I'd planned to do last week.

And talking of acting we're getting closer and closer to putting on the first Bollywood Mikado - Words and Music still Gilbert & Sullivan the difference is that we're all doing Bollywood dancing. I love the change, mind you I'd like to get the dancing right soon though.

Technorati has a nice feature called link count which allows you to show the number of links that each of your posts gets (updated in real-time) for all your visitors.

It's a small piece of code you simply add to your template.

I'll see how it works out...

The code itself is shown for Blogger, Moveable Type, Typepad and Wordpress and there's even some code for people who don't use these.

Technorati call the link counter "reactions" as it allows you to check on reaction to your postings.

For those who believe that once Google has promoted your entry in its results it stays there I have proof that your pipe dream is just that.

As you may be aware the top search engine optimization people are trying to knock Brad Fallon off his number 1 spot in the search results for the Coolest Guy On The Planet.

All to no avail.

In October I posted about being the coolest guy on the planet and in it I noted that on 26th October I was 26th. Sadly I now have to report that today I'm 41st.

Now while this is fun for SEO nerds what does it mean to you and me?

It's clear that SEO is not a one-off. And it's more than that. You have to add off-page optimization too.

Trade show exhibitions allow prospective customers to

• see planned new products
•  talk to different suppliers
• network with their colleagues
• network with the rest of their industry

The aim is to educate and in due course the exhibitors will follow-up and sell products and services the trade show visitors looked at.

Contrast that with business exhibitions.

A business exhibition is rather like a 3 dimensional yellow pages. And rather than letting your fingers do the walking you really do walk from stand to stand.

And the stands are full of accountants, hire car firms, conference locations and other sundry business services.

In other words stall holders that many businesses only need on an irregular basis.

You're unlikely to see new products launched - they're aimed at the trade shows.

You can certainly talk to different suppliers and network with other business people.

However, everyone attending is "in business" and often there is no real detailed common ground or understanding of each others business. 

One of two Northwest business exhibitions I attended last year was very poorly received and stall holders and attendees I talked to were very disappointed with it.

I'm going to attend a business exhibition in Manchester this Wednesday. Some of the seminars look interesting so I'll see whether it's useful for my business or not and let you know. 

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Google Alerts are vital for anyone who runs marketing and PR on the Internet.

So, What Are Google Alerts?

Google Alerts first surfaced in 2003.  One of Google's engineers tired of checking a news site for the latest developments on Iraq.  So he created some code that allowed him to enter a search term and everytime it was detected in the first so many Google news results he was emailed. 

Initially it just looked at news and now the alerts cover the following different types of content:

• Blogs
• Groups
• News
• Web

An example search term could be something as simple as your own name. In fact I've set one up to do exactly that. The search term is simply "Jim Symcox" and I've been emailed 24 times on that search term alone in the last 5 months.

Why Use Them In Marketing?

Google suggests the following as good uses for Google Alerts:

• monitoring a developing news story
• keeping current on a competitor or industry
• tracking medical advances
• getting the latest on a celebrity or sports team

In addition I'd suggest using them to track the following:

• Checking what other web sites and blogs say about you
• Articles you've written
• Articles your clients have written
• Specific keywords you've used for your web sites
• Press releases

You can enter the article titles and any time they're used on the web you'll get an email notification. In addition if you're concerned that someone is going to rip off what you say you can plant some key unusual phrase, or two, in your article and set up an alert for each unusual phrase.

Tracking keywords you've used on your web sites means that you'll be notified of other content using the same keywords. That means you can keep an eye on competition and can also spark new ways of using the keywords on your sites.

Again tracking press releases using titles and a key phrase means that you can see where a press release is used.

This can also flag press releases used in off-line press if they have an online site like The Daily Mail, The Times or the New York Times and provided they use your key phrase verbatim.

In summary the major benefits of Google Alerts are:

• checking what's happened to your message
• Sparking creative ideas for further marketing communications
• Checking what's being said about you, your product and your competition

"The Coolest Guy on The
Planet Google Alert"

If you've read some of my other posts you'll have noticed that I've talked about the coolest guy on the planet competition for search engine optimization gurus.

Well I'm also into the competition and to keep an eye on what's happening for that key phrase I use Google Alerts!

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If you remember in my first post about Christmas Cards For Customer Relations I asked, ""..are we right to send all those Christmas cards out?"

Then in my second post I showed a format you could use for a personal business Christmas card. This post is concerned with how to approach the letter and contents you can use.

What To Put In For Your Customers or Prospects

Talk sincerely in your letter. And you can choose so many things to say to your customer, for example:

1. You can offer apologies for those times that didn't run according to plan, but don't dwell on them
   
2. Explain why you did things a certain way that worked well for the customer but may have been difficult for them to understand or accept at the time
   
3. Celebrate your customers wins - not your own.
   
4. Remind your customers why they're doing business with you. Preferably in the words they've used during the year to congratulate you on a job well done.
   
5. Show your prospects the ways that your customers are using you and getting great value from what you do.
   
6. Give some specific tips that relate to your customers specific industry.

Obviously there are many other ways of talking to your customer or prospect.

Remember everyone is always tuned to Radio Station WIFM (What’s In It For Me) so reading you talk about their business makes them interested in what you’re saying.

When you send your letter make sure it’s on standard good quality stationery.

Bear in mind it’s a personal letter so showing your logo all over the place removes the personal touch.

Also remember to use a Christmas stamp rather than a normal stamp or worse a franked envelope.

Finally please make sure it's signed from the person who has the most contact with the customer. And don't do what I caught one client doing - getting her PA to sign all her cards for her!

So, throw your cards to the wind, take a step towards a better customer relationship and write them a letter today.

PS There's nothing wrong with sending a card and putting your letter inside too.  

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If you remember in our last post about Christmas Cards For Customer Relations I asked,

"..are we right to send all those Christmas cards out?"

Let me explain what I mean...

The Road To Business Hell Is
Paved With Good Intentions

 Your cards are all sent with a good business intention. Which is
making sure you are in your customer or prospects mind, at least
once during the year.

Making your customer think of you to get TOMA, or top of the mind awareness is a good goal. Right?

Yes and no...

Business is all about building a relationship so that people
trust you enough to buy from you and continue doing so. Just
sending them a card at Christmas is not maintaining much of a
relationship is it?

You can find plenty of advice about choosing exactly the right
Christmas card, the "personalised message", the envelope even how to address the envelope. And this timely advice often seems to come from printers who always have a stock of Christmas cards
that match their advice!

These are all tactical suggestions. The more astute business
considers the aim of all customer contact and the Christmas card
as one element of it.

The Christmas card should be part of ongoing communications with your customers or prospects. It shouldn't be order, invoice and then 9 months later a Christmas card.

What Should A Christmas Card Contain?

Assuming you've decided on your overall customer communication strategy you need to decide exactly how you want to use a Christmas, or other holiday, message to fit in with it.

As part of your strategy a Christmas card may be all the good
things that printers and everyone else advises. Or you could send
your Christmas message in a different way.

What's The Difference The Astute
Business Person Uses?

What about a Christmas letter summarising what's been happening over the last 12 months?

The letter can be written as a standard letter each year and straight from the heart of the business owner.

Add one or two sections for each customer to give you the opportunity to make specific points and invite them to specials offers.

For example...

Dear Colin,

Standard and interesting introductory passage like:

"...Well here we are it's Christmas time again and we're all
looking forward to it at Acorn Service. We're feeling particularly
festive since our web designer, Donny, has just inserted bits of
holly all over our web site.

We hope your Christmas party goes with a bang and you get plenty
of mince pies to eat..."

First customer-specific section such as:

"... Do you remember when we managed to implement that new
marketing campaign last May and we got that staggering amount of new business? The last calculation we did was that it moved an
extra £82,000 in sales. And thanks again for that bottle of
champagne you bought the team it was appreciated."

More news ... of interest...

Then another customer-specific section like:

"... As a Christmas present to you we know you were questioning the cost of advertising so we'd like to offer you a free review of your highest priced current advertising piece. With the aim of helping bring your cost of lead generation down.

So a happy Christmas from all of us at Acorn Service ..."

A real letter is a much more intimate and meaningful
communication with your customers and prospects.

It's certainly more likely to be kept after Christmas compared to one of the many cards that end up being thrown away when the business stops work for Christmas.

In my next post on Business Christmas cards I'll give you a few things you can put in to help get your message to your customers and prospects.  

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Christmas! It's that time of year when a businessman's fancy turns to the customers and prospects he's seen over the last few years.

He waits in eager anticipation for the sound of the postman's laboured breathing. That postal struggle signals another sack chock full of cheery festive business greetings from every business he's ever dealt with.

And in return the businessman sends out his own sackful of business greeting cards with the Jolly Santa joke, the serious Christmas message or the politically correct card "for use in any celebrational situation."

Like you I've had them all. Have you had cards with messages like these?

• it was good to do business with you. Let's do more in the New Year
• Let's make this New Year our best ever
• Just to wish you a Happy Christmas
• From our winning team to yours

And even those without a message or signature.

Maybe the cards were signed by the MD, the "whole team", the MD's secretary or the office junior. Or perhaps the signature was pre-printed with the message on the card.

Why Send Cards That Are Meaningless?

Why do we send cards that mean nothing? It's not going to get us any more business. The perception is that cards are just a chore almost every business does around this time every year.

And yet when you communicate at Christmas time it’s that period of peace and goodwill to all men. People are looking forward to Christmas and often people are more relaxed and better disposed to others.

So are we right to send all those Christmas cards out?

I'll be looking at that answer in part two of this post series and then going onto to giving some steps to a better way of talking to your customers at Christmas. Or any other holiday for that matter!  

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I find some web sites intensely annoying. And it looks as though others feel the same.

A survey by Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS), carried out last year, delves into the issues shoppers have with web sites they land on.

I didn't see this survey from 2005 and luckily the results arrived by email from The eMarketer Daily today.

The eMarketer picked out slow loading web sites as being one of the top  annoying bugbears. They backed this conclusion up with further research  through Akamai.

Slow Pages Stop Sales

Akami's recommendation was that a web site should load in 4 seconds or less or risk a third of users leaving the site entirely and 75% unlikely to shop there again.

Annoyances On Web Pages

Intuitively I would have said pop-ups, pop-unders, , flash, page errors and links that go nowhere would be the issues flagged by most users.

In fact the TNS survey found pop-up ads are top of the list with 83.8% of users ranking them as extremely annoying.

Flash meanwhile is ranked as extremely annoying by only 41.5%. 

Other page irritations included (extremely annoying percent shown in brackets):

• having to install extra software to use the site (72%)
• dead links (66.2%)
• need to register/log on before viewing the site (61.1%)
• out of date content (56.5%)
• confusing navigation (55.4%)
• ineffective site search tool (52.4%)
• no contact information (50.2%)
• no back button (49%)
• overdone flash and animation (41.5%)
• moving text (33.5%)
• auto-playing audio (30.1%)
• poor appearance (28.3%)

The bottom line is that if you've a web site, or blog you need to make it load faster. I've already optimized my graphics but maybe I should do more to speed up my load times?

Until I do I can't really lay claim to being "the coolest guy on the planet yet can I?"

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I was re-reading Dan Kennedy's apparently defunct blog yesterday because I'd remembered a rather nice posting on Mail order mistakes . And remember mail order works almost the same on the Internet.

Briefly the mistakes Dan talks about are as follows:

1. Targeting The Wrong Market
2. Assuming Interest On The Prospect's Part
3. Using Weak Headlines
4. Not Giving A Reason For Reading A Letter
5. Weak Call To Action
6. Ignoring The Reasons Not To Buy
7. Chasing The Fool's Gold Of Exceptional Response
8. Attempting To Live Off Of The Initial Sale
9. Accepting Good Fortune As Never-Ending

And Dan Kennedy's most interesting point?

It's his last one: "Accepting Good Fortune As Never-Ending."

As Dan says about it,

"...in my late years, into retirement, it is no secret that my customer base diminished and that I struggled financially. I assumed a level of permanent customer loyalty and interest that turned out not to exist. All things grow or decline but cannot stay static for long."

This shows that your prospects are continually looking for great value. If you stop delivering that value why should they stay with you? You may have the strongest brand name in the world but if you stop delivering value you'll lose customers.

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Bob Searling on being interviewed by Dan Lok said,

"Too many companies think because they have a product or service, they should dictate to the customer how it should be used or what goals it should satisfy or problems it should solve.

I'm here to tell your listeners that that's just not true—your customers dictate those issues. Your customers are the voters, and the way your customers vote
is with their wallets, either by buying or not buying your product or service."

(extracted from How to Create a Million Dollar
Marketing Strategy for any Product or Service)

Both Bob Serling and Dan Lok are world class copywriters and if you can afford them talking to them is money very well spent!

The reason I extracted that piece from  a report I'm re-reading is that it fits the comments I make about branding.

I believe that companies often brand or re-brand themselves to attract more customers or keep the current ones.

This is a red herring.

Better customer service. more focus on the customer and better quality should come first. And anyone who says they already have all those things in place is fooling themselves.

So if I re-phrase Bob's quote  to fit my own thoughts on branding you'll see exactly what I mean:

"Too many companies think because they have gone through and branded or re-branded themselves that a customer should use their product or service because of its brand identity.   

I'm here to tell you, my loyal blog reader, that that's just not true—your customers dictate how they use or even perceive branding.

Your customers are the voters, and the way your customers vote is with their wallets, either by buying or not buying your product or service.
Regardless of how well you're branded."

Two examples might help...

IBM and Their New Operating System

Originally IBM probably had one of the most recognisable brands in the PC world. Arguably they could be credited with starting the PC market as we know it today.

 They created a new operating system for their PCs called OS/2. Did it destroy Microsoft's Windows operating system?

Obviously we know it didn't, so branding didn't help them dominate the PC operating system market.

FED-EX The Ultimate Overnight Service

We all know that Fred Smith created Fed-Ex with the then unusual concept of promising next day delivery. They built an enormous and recognisable brand.

Yet there are plenty of other large courier firms like UPS competing with them. 

Is Branding A Waste Of Time?

The short answer is no!

It becomes a resource drain when  considerable management focus and company money is put into branding or re-branding to the detriment of improving customer service, product quality or, perish the thought, training your people. So the message is:

 don't let your brand get in the way of your customers doing business with you.

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An academic report called The Changing Landscape of Print & Online Media quotes The Advertising Age as saying that in the first quarter of 2006 US ad spend fell 6.1% for local newspapers and 1.1% for b2b magazines compared to the same quarter the previous year.

And Internet advertising had an explosive increase in spend. Up 19.4%, without including Search Marketing spend.

Analysis of print media web sites in the Uk and US discovered unheard of use just 10 years ago of blogs, off-site hyperlinks and video and audio clips on press web sites.

The analysis showed links most likely to get coverage were:

• Consumer issues 
• Human interest stories
• "How to" stories for beauty & technology products
• Automotive
• AP video variety
• Feature/human interest
• Lifestyle: Homes/Gardens/Cooking content
• Games
• Local entertainment, live music, festivals, local sports
• People stories and other features
• In-depth projects
• Feature stories
• Local "slice of life"
• National news, but not sports

The key findings in the report about print media web sites were:

1. 100% increase in number who see it as “a way to package multimedia stories” from initial strategy to current strategy
2. Marked drop in those who see it as “marketing tool for the existing print publication” (from 30% to 13%)
3. Less print media organisations see subscription revenue as an objective for their online publications

From the comments given to the researchers it certainly seems as though the respondents believe that whilst the Internet probably wont kill off all print media it will certainly see off quite a few of the weaker ones.

 

I've just updated my "SEO Copywriter King" Blog with 5 top tips for using blogging for Search Engine Optimisation.

To get you moving up the search engine ranks check out this posting.

Sometimes you talk to a prospect and impress them with your wealth of knowledge.

If you're not extremely careful trying to impress someone can make you seem arrogant. If that happens a future relationship with your prospect is highly unlikely.

What about those prospects who simply want to use your knowledge themselves? Either to start up in competition, to understand what your offer is so they can get it cheaper. Or to simply use it to check what another company they're employing is doing.

What about stopping the FREE consulting?

OK sometimes giving FREE advice is so ingrained it can be difficult I'd be the first to put my hand up for that one. I mean check out the blog!

Still, saying that you expect to be paid for consultations certainly qualifies your prospects. You can bet those that are simply wanting to suck you dry wont want to pay for the privilege.

In addition it'll cut down on fruitless prospecting and reduce time wasting.

I've been blogging here regularly for over a year which works out at over 200 posts.

I know I'm getting a lot of readers, because I see the subscriber count and also the number of readers through Google Analytics and Statcounter.

I've had clients ask me why I don't start running a members only blog that gives insider tips on copywriting, search engine optimisation and my take on subjects too numerous to contemplate.

Until now I've always said that really I just like blogging because I can offer advice and it's up to the reader how they use it. I know it's great advice - because people have told me so!

That said, I feel no further obligation to make sure I'm giving a step by step instruction list of how to do stuff. And there's no pressure to blog 5,6 or 7 days per week to make sure people get their value for money.

Finally, I've been asked again if I can do a members only site. Similar to this blog but with more content and downloads and also to include a podcast. And maybe a forum...

It's like standing on the edge of a precipice looking over. Do I go with the membership site or not?

The benefit with a member blog is that by making membership a regular monthly payment only like-minded, committed business people would join up. People who know what they're doing and want to earn more.

Then posts to the forum would be between those committed members.

The new blog starts on Friday of this week. I've already set it up and subscribers will be emailed the URL.

I want to trial this for a few weeks so I'm limiting the starting numbers to 100. As soon as I've filled the membership I'll take down the subscribe button from this blog, although the unsubscribe button will remain.

Join now by pressing the subscribe button either here, or on the sidebar.