by Scott on June 13, 2007
Here is my kids’ school’s mission statement.
Acres Green Elementary provides a positive safe environment where best teaching practices are used to educate the whole child while honoring individuality and creativity.
Here’s another area school’s mission statement.
Copper Mesa Elementary is dedicated to excellence in education and is committed to being an exemplary community of learners. Every child is worthy of a positive, successful learning experience. Our dedication is to create a child-centered environment that encourages risk taking, embraces diversity, and validates the whole child. To promote educational excellence, we will share in the responsibility to foster curiosity and a love of learning. We will model, encourage, and inspire all learners to explore the possibilities of the world around them. Guiding students to reach their personal best, we will provide positive, supportive, challenging, differentiated opportunities for students to demonstrate understanding. We are committed to recognize, value, appreciate, and take pride by celebrating the achievements of all. As a community of learners, leaders, and partners, we are united in our goal to enrich the lives of each child, as he or she becomes a life long learner seeking to reach their fullest potential.
huh?
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by Scott on April 09, 2007
A previous blog post covered a 6 Step Plan to build your business with referrals. Current customers are your best source for new customers. Beyond traditional referral marketing, there are tons of ways to turn your customers into a virtual small business marketing department. Here are two:
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by Scott on March 14, 2007
This is the last of a 3 part series on small business marketing. Part 1 listed three reasons that small business owners avoid marketing efforts. Part 2 listed three quick examples of why marketing is important. This final part lists 7 steps that small business owners can take to improve their marketing results.
Ways To Improve Small Business Marketing
Individually, these are all good ideas for small business marketing and books worth of advice have been written about each idea. The real power comes from putting them together in a way that each step builds on the previous.
- Be “Remarkable”
See Seth Godin’s Purple Cow
. Build something that is “worth making a remark about”. Have a story to tell about yourself and your products. People won’t want to sell for you, but they will share interesting stories about you.
Do something different than your competitors. Have your own unique marketplace niche. If your competitors compete as “the lowest price” you won’t get to remarkable by being “lower than the lowest price!”. If your competitors compete by being large or by being small and personal, you won’t win by being larger or smaller or more personal. Do something differently.
- Participate In, Listen To, and Learn From Your Customers’ Community
Before you can do the next step (Be Heard) you have to do a lot of listening and learning yourself. Go where your customers’ are, both physically and online. Find out where your customers meet in person and get invited to attend. Find where your customers meet online and actively participate. In both cases, don’t participate by selling your product (see #7). Instead first just listen then start offering real, helpful advice. From this participation you will get more and more chances to be heard.
- Be Heard
Because you are doing #1-Be Remarkable, you will have plenty of interesting things to blog about. Because you are doing #2 in the list-Listen to your Customers, you will know what is interesting to them.
Blog, blog, and blog some more. Start blogging well before your product is released. Don’t wait until you are asking people to buy. Ian Landsman, developer of help desk software HelpSpot, wrote about how he found success at starting to blog well before a product is released. Read the excellent book for small business bloggers, Clear Blogging by Bob Walsh.
- Offer a Free Trial or Service
When people hear about your product or services, make it easy for them to try out themselves. Offer free samples, trials, or introductory services and don’t expect prospects to jump through hoops. This is especially important online. A two page sign-up form simply stands between you and a prospect and does not make it easy and free to try.
- Be Welcoming – Make it Easy for People to Send Feedback
After a person has tried your service, make it easy for them to provide feedback. Put a feedback page on your website and put a link in your product and emails to that feedback page.
Build places on your website where people can easily and voluntarily share some information about themselves that will help you better meet their needs. But don’t ask for every piece of information that you think might be valuable in marketing. For example, an insurance agent’s quote request page should ask for car make and model but not favorite hobbies. Make your information request and feedback processes frictionless and be sure to respond promptly.
- Ask For and Track Feedback, Testimonials, and Referrals
Now that you are getting feedback, use the positive feedback as testimonials. Also, ask those the provided positive feedback for referrals. Finally, track referral activity so that you can thank the referrer, giving your customer an even more positive experience.
- Let Others Do the Talking
When you boast about your own product, no one will believe you anyway. We have built a natural response to ignore others’ bragging. Don’t waste time on what gets ignored, instead be an informed expert (see #2) and make it as easy as possible for others to try out your product (see #4), to initiate conversations with you (see #5), and to share with others how great your products are (see #6).
Small business marketing can be almost systematic and does take planning. There are many small business marketing systems out there (here’s one we are building) to facilitate some of this so that you can focus on building even more remarkable products and services.
Note:
See also Improve Lead Conversion by Avoiding These 6 Marketing Mistakes
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by Scott on March 11, 2007
This is the second article in a three part series on getting started at small business marketing. In the first article I wrote about 3 reasons that micro-ISV and other company founders avoid small business marketing or start too late. In this article we take a quick look at three examples of where it takes more than a great product to get noticed in the marketplace.
Example 1: What’s Hot?
How many times have you seen a company success story to which your first response is “Hey, I could have done that!”? You see a Google acquisition or a hot startup on the cover of Business 2.0 and, if you are like me, you sometimes immediately think “That’s not so hot”.
What we are forgetting is that it is not the product that made the buzz. Most press mentions and awards and referrals are not about the product. They are about the story behind it; the way people feel about the creators of the product, the conversations people had about it. All things influenced by a company’s marketing and PR efforts.
Example 2: Musicians vs. Labels
Where do you stand on the digital rights management (DRM) and music revenues debate? Record labels are vilified in the popular blogosphere for being bloodsucking, greedy, enterprises that care only about money and not the music.
These devilish descriptions of record labels may be true – after all, the record labels are in business too which means seeking the lowest supply costs and the highest revenue margins – but we are not debating that here. The point for this article is this: the musician is the builder. The record label is the marketer. While many people decry the marketer’s unfair leverage, small companies can learn from this example that marketing provides leverage and value.
Interlude: Yes, The Product Does Matter
The remarkability of your product is very important. I’ll say it again. Please do develop remarkable products. In fact, a remarkable product is the basis of effective marketing.
This is not about making junk and marketing it well. It is not about selling sand to Saharans. This is about how even with a super product, it is the additional marketing activities that push that product to the next level. The final example helps illustrate this point.
Example 3: Three Steps to the Jolt Award
As final example of the importance of marketing your product, look at this
article from Andrew Binstock, an industry veteran, writer and judge in the software industry’s top prize, the Jolt Award. Here he offers three steps to become a Jolt Award Finalist.
Quoting Binstock,
1. Have a good product. This more than any other factor will improve your prospects.
2. Articulate why your product is better than others. Many vendors set up portals specifically for Jolt judges. They include movie clips of the product (10-15 minutes), screen shots, and generated reports. This is a superb idea.
3. Follow up with the judges. Send me a press kit in the mail. Some companies used to send ‘swag’—an industry terms for those inexpensive promotional chotchkas vendors give out. In a sea of choices, having a name to remember and with which I can associate specific features is a big plus.
Binstock’s step 1 is all about product. Steps 2 and 3 are all about PR and marketing. The point: don’t just build a product and expect people to love it and flock to it.
How?
But what do you do when you have years of experience building and almost none marketing what you build? Maybe you came from a company where marketing was its own department and now you are the marketer. In the next and final article we’ll talk about just that.
Part 2 of the series is here.
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by Scott on March 09, 2007
Whether it’s marketing departments at Fortune 500 companies or a small business marketing team, I’ve observed the split between those that produce the product and those that try to attract customers to it. In these companies its not the job of the producer of the product to market it. As a small business owner, you do not have that split though.
So, here are a few thoughts on why small business marketing is important and why small business owners may not think of themselves as the marketing department. In my next articles I’ll share seven tips on how to practice small business marketing without becoming a salesperson.
3 Reasons New Business Owners Don’t Put Too Much Planning into Marketing
Bob Walsh reminded his readers of an excellent, relevant video of a Seth Goodin presentation to Google called All Marketers are Liars. Godin’s right – marketers are liars (it’s called puffery). And who wants to be a “liar”? Not me. Not you.
Yet the truth is that competency at a task does not correlate to how well the resulting products are received or celebrated. This is a hard thing for microISVs and most small businesses owners to hear. Here are three reasons why people put too little thought into their small business marketing plans.
- They’ve been told they’re the best programmer (or lawn care guy, accountant, painter, etc) that people have ever worked with. What more could people want?
Yet company owners are only paid if they get “hired”. Being great at building the product or service the company offers does not make one great at getting “hired” in the first place.
- They Have Such Personal Excitement About Their Product That They Don’t See How Anyone Could Not Immediately Just Want It?
Again, people could only want it if they hear about it. The marketing efforts we will talk about in the next article are all about helping people hear about a product, try products, and talk with others about their experiences.
- They Don’t Want To Be One of Those Slimy Greedy Salespeople.
They’re not alone in this aversion to sales. Katherine B. Hartman, a marketing professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington says that in an analysis of movies and TV shows from 1903 to 2005 “the salesperson character personifies some of society’s most despised characteristics-greed, deception, distrust, and selfishness.”
So I’m not proposing all small business owners become salespeople. I’m recommending that new companies should plan from the beginning for the marketability of their products, services, and business and have a small business marketing plan. In fact, make it part of deciding what product or services to offer.
Part two of this series is here.
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