Seven Tips to Increase your Internet Presence
Many of my clients are starting to blog, but are overwhelmed with “What should I write?” and “How do I begin?”. ColoradoBiz Magazine had a recent article by Scott Esmond [...]
Small Business Owners and Branding…Is it Worth It?
Living in a small town in Southwest Colorado, I primarily work with small to mid-size companies. It is a pleasure working with owners, however, most small business owners do not have very many resources and therefore have to “do it all”. To that end, when I do a web site project for a company, I also become an integral part of their marketing department. Many times I assume the role of IT department, marketing department, copywriter and graphic designer. Through this process, I also try to help owners understand the importance of branding.
When creating a web site or an Internet marketing campaign, one of the most important questions I ask the client is “Who are you trying to reach and what emotional connection are you trying to make?” This starts a larger discussion on branding and positioning.
A lot of small business owners just put an ad together or a web site hoping that the mere presence of advertising will drive business their direction. However, if they have never thought about who they are trying to attract or their overall strategy, they may use the wrong message, photos, and copy that is not attracting their key market. In addition, their web site, brochure, and advertising may be sending different, conflicting messages. For example, they may create a beautiful professional ad but when the potential customer goes to the web site, they have old graphics, miles of copy and confusing navigation. This will cause the customer to jump off the site and not call or Email.
When asking if a company has ever tried marketing in a specific channel, many owners will say “we tried it and it doesn’t work”. However, was the marketing channel the problem (i.e. magazine, PPC ad, online advertiser) or was it the ad itself?
Before starting a web project or any other marketing project, it is extremely important that your marketing team truly understands who you are targeting and what colors, fonts, words and copy will attract that type of person. People buy because of emotions to solve a need, save them money or save them time. If your key audience is not quickly understanding how your product or service will help them, then they will move on. You are not trying to sell the entire world…you are simply trying to connect with potential customers who “match” the value you are offering.
Futhermore, it takes at least 7 “touches” for a person to even recognize that they saw your ad or article. Therefore, marketing should be a comprehensive strategy, not one that just throws mud on the wall to see what sticks.
Finally, all marketing should have a specific lead channel. My next article will talk about the evolution of online brochure web sites to lead generation web sites.
Marcy Mitchell, owner of MTECH Internet Marketing, has been helping small to medium sized business owners develop comprehensive marketing strategies and effective web sites for the past 14 years. For a complimentary marketing review, contact her or call 970-731-6325.
Growing Spaces – One of the 50 Colorado Companies to Watch
One of my clients, Growing Spaces, has recently been named “One of the Top Colorado Companies to Watch”. They are currently featured in Cobizmag.org. Here is a snippet of the article:
GROWING SPACES LLC
www.growingspaces.com/community
SNAPSHOT: Based in Pagosa Springs, Growing Spaces produces energy-efficient greenhouses using a passive solar geodesic design for year-round growing.
LEADERSHIP: Owner Michael Parsons started Growing Spaces out of a garage in 1989.
WORK FORCE: The company employed 10 full-time equivalent employees in 2009 and expects to add one or two employees in 2010.
CUSTOMERS: The company has supplied its Growing Domes to more than 1,200 clients in 48 states and 11 countries. Best-known customers include Toyota Motor Co., Shumei Natural Gardens at Rodale Institute and Naropa University.
PIVOTAL MOMENTS: The company cites the “phenomenon of Y2K” as an impetus for people deciding to become more self-sufficient, and the company went from producing 14 Growing Domes a year, to 75. The company launched its website in 1994, putting it well ahead of competitors in e-commerce.
MARKETING STRATEGY: The company’s most successful campaign is its “Tour of Domes” each April in Pagosa Springs when six Growing Dome owners open their domes to the public, displaying fresh herbs, flowers and vegetables when outside it is still snowy. People come from as far as Santa Fe., N.M., and Colorado Springs for the tour.
Growing Spaces has been working with MTECH in developing a robust social media presence with their new interactive blog (http://www.growingspaces.com/community), facebook page and YouTube channel. They are currently re-designing their web site and expanding their marketing initiatives.
Marketing Positioning and CRM for Colorado companies
Most small business owners may not think about their “target market” or “market position” as often as larger companies. However, even if you think you have little to no competition, you may not be aware how important positioning is to increase your revenue stream.
Here is a great article from Marketing Tools:CRM Newsletter that makes some great points:
Marketing Positioning — It’s The Customer’s View That Counts
Where do we fit in our competitive marketplace? That’s a question often posed when new hires are brought into a company and possibly the most interesting and important question for marketing and sales organizations to get right. The question, “Given all of the players in our space, what is our positioning?,” should be answered conclusively.
While marketers often talk about the science of marketing, many people refer to the quantitative aspects of marketing as the science, or hard-marketing. While it’s true there is a great deal of mathematics and analytics in marketing, it’s also true that there is a science to developing an effective positioning, and this methodology can be summarized as follows:
a. Identify your target market;
b. Define your company (or product, brand, etc.) in the mind of the target customer;
c. Develop an understanding of your company’s (or product, brand, etc.) distinctive place in the customer’s mind.
Let’s look at each of these steps individually.
First, identify the target market. This is not always as easy as it sounds. By segmenting the market carefully, and understanding your company’s value proposition relative to each segment, it will become clear which segments are best suited to your solutions, and which ones should be targeted first. The more selective, or granular the segmentation, the better you will understand your very specific value proposition, and this will lead to a much clearer picture of your competitive landscape.
Second, think about your company or solution as if you were one of the target customers. What is your current brand perception, your view of the key values, strengths, and weaknesses, as perceived by this target market? For small, or emerging companies, the perception may be complete lack of awareness.
Lastly, and most importantly, build an honest and complete view of how the customer thinks of your company or solution in terms of a very distinct place in the competitive landscape — a place that is different from all of the other competitors.
Of course, in an ideal world, your customers’ views will match precisely how you want them to see you. If this is the case, then your positioning statements and marketing reflect this existing view. In most cases, however, marketers are challenged with creating a more complete understanding of their company’s value to a target market, in terms of the distinctive place in the market that they believe the company should occupy.
Getting to the most appropriate positioning involves two equally important elements of success. To begin with, your solution must actually do the things you say it does, in order to occupy that distinctive space. That is, it must deliver on that promise. If the actual product/solution is really the same as that of your competitors’, and all you have is marketing statements, that strategy will soon be discovered by the market and a short-lived celebration of success will result.
Next, once you have established that your solution actually works, is distinctive in the specific ways we’ve identified, and solves a set of particular problems for your target customers better than your competitors, you can then start to tell the market about this uniquely beneficial approach.
The marketing must consistently focus on these distinctive benefits, highlighting how your solution is most particularly suited to solve the problem for the target customer in a manner that is superior to your competition.
Rather than diluting your marketing positioning by identifying all of the aspects of your solution, it is essential to position the solution in a very focused way — reinforcing at every possible opportunity that unique and distinctive place in the market that your company occupies, and intends to own.
For marketers, positioning is not about a feature-function battle against competitors; it’s about building a common understanding between the market and the company, relative to the share of the market that it serves best.
We know we have done a good job of positioning our company/product when our prospects and customers know exactly where we fit into the competitive market landscape, and we agree!
Gavin Finn is president and CEO of Kaon. He is an experienced operating executive with more than 20 years of building value in profitable, growth-oriented organizations. Gavin joined Kaon in early 2005 and is responsible for corporate and product strategy, customer satisfaction, corporate growth, and financial performance. Reach him here.
Facebook “Like” Instead of “Fans”
For those of you who have websites that suggest visitors “become a fan” of your Facebook page, you need to update your sites. Facebook has changed “Fans” to “Liking” a page. At their annual f8 Developer Conference, Facebook announced platform updates that work to integrate their platform with sites across the web.
Now with more than 400 million people using Facebook and $100 million of them using Facebook from their mobile phones, Facebook wants to continue this growing trend and develop social applications that integrate web sites with their new tools.
Facebook’s New Social Plugins
- Like Plugin- This is the upgraded “Fan” plugin. This plugin is simple and requires no login. It will show visitors to your site, which of their Facebook friends have engaged with your site recently. If a user likes something on your site with this button it automatically appears in their Facebook profile as well.
- Activity Stream Plugin – This displays a filtered view of the Facebook News Feed containing updates from only your site.
- Facebook Login Plugin- It works like the existing Facebook Connect login button, and it adds photos of your Facebook friends who have already joined the site.
- Social Bar Plugin- A toolbar that is added to the bottom of your site. The Social Bar includes a Like button, friends who like the site, as well as Facebook chat.
- Recommendations Plugin – A plugin that shows recommendations of items or content that visitors to your site may be interested in, based on recommendations from Facebook connections.
So, Why Should Your Business Care About Facebook?
While you should always consider your audience when deciding on any marketing channel, if you are trying to attract people between the ages of 18 and 54, then you should look into Facebook. In addition, if you are using a blog, all of the social plugins mentioned previously in this post help business bloggers achieve the important goal of getting more people reading their content.
As an example, let’s say that you click a link in an e-mail or on Twitter. After clicking, you then go read the blog post as you normally would. If a site is using the Like Plugin, then upon arriving at the blog you could see that some of your Facebook friends have recently read other articles on this blog. As a result, it more likely that you will read more content on the blog and possibly share it with your connections on Facebook or other social networks. As a marketer this is a big deal. It creates stickiness while increasing the reach of your content.
This same example could also be used for landing pages. If you are releasing a new whitepaper and using a form to collect leads, think about the improved lead conversion you could see, if prospects could see that friends had already liked the report on Facebook. In this case a social plugin provides “social proof” for the credibility of your whitepaper. While the likes may have happened on your Facebook fan page, with the new social plugins it is displayed on your own site and landing pages.
Is Your Organization Living Your Brand?
As an instructor for Marketing for Smarties, I spend a lot of time helping owners develop a unique positioning statement. It is important to communicate the distinctive benefits your product or service provides for customers compared to your competition. This unique positioning, along with your overall vision, helps define your brand.
Many companies or organizations spend thousands with consultants coming up with their brand, but they don’t know how to effectively communicate that brand throughout their entire organization. Here is a great article from Cobizmag.org that talks about how to penetrate your brand:
The secret behind living your brand
Hire for role fit, culture fit and brand fit
By Kathleen Quinn VotawThe statistics on why companies lose customers haven’t changed for years. Is anyone listening? A full 68 percent of customers who leave are turned away, not by dissatisfaction with the product, but by the indifferent attitude of a single employee. All the money you spend on perfecting your product and advertising its quality is wasted if your employees aren’t delivering what your customers expect. In other words, your entire brand comes down to the individual impression left by a single employee.
There’s a competitive opportunity here for companies that make sure every employee is living their brand. But can you trust your brand to anyone? That answer is no. The secret behind successful brand strategy, whether internal or external, is talent recruitment. The 68 percent of lost customers says loudly: “It’s all about the people.”
Jack Greenberg, Chairman and CEO of McDonald’s, gets it: “We succeed or fail, every day, in every restaurant, because of our people.” What’s true for McDonald’s is true for every business, in any industry.
What is “living the brand?”
If honesty is a core value in your organization, and you ask the receptionist to tell people that you’re out when you’re actually in, then you’re not living your brand. If the plaque on your wall says, “We value our customers” and your menu says, “No changes or substitutions please,” you’re not living your brand.
Your brand is your promise, your commitment to customers. It’s your commitment to employees too. It represents everything your company makes or says – and what it feels like to do business with you. In a sense, your brand has a personality, and it’s reflected in the actions-and attitudes-of your employees, both in interacting with one another and with your customers. The best brands deliver on their promise no matter what the circumstances: a bad economy, a blip in production timing, or a bout of flu that leaves you shorthanded. Core values don’t change, and neither do successful brands. Employees of companies with successful brands find a way to do it.
Your brand is built on your core values, and when employees live it, it means that your brand permeates your organization’s culture. When your employees live your brand, they have passion around your product or service and pride in your company. Who wouldn’t want to do business with you?
Recruit for ‘brand talent”
Just as you look for certain skills and competencies to fill specific roles in your business, and assess each candidate for cultural fit, you need to consider how well a candidate “fits” your brand. People may qualify in every other way, but if they are not capable of enhancing your brand at appropriate customer touchpoints, they are not the “brand talent” you need. Every person you hire should have brand talent that will allow them to “live” your particular brand. If part of your brand promise is “fun,” for example, you wouldn’t want to hire an introvert to interface with customers.
If it’s truly all about the people, brand success comes only when your brand is an integral part of your culture and in an environment where employees bring out the best in one another. This means that brand talent applies to both internal and external customers. There can’t be one brand of behavior inside an organization and another brand for customers. Employees must be engaged with one another in understanding and interpreting your brand and in helping each other execute it at every touchpoint with customers.
Hire for role fit, culture fit and brand fit.
How to deliver your brand promise
Your brand shouldn’t live in your marketing department. It should live in the heart and soul of every employee. Here are steps you can take to ensure that it does:
• Define your core values. This should not be a wish list: What are your real values? How do they align with your brand?
• Understand the competencies that make your brand a success. List competencies in marketing, sales and service areas, and also in product development, quality, administration and every other area of the company as they specifically relate to delivering your brand.
• Hire the right people, with the characteristics and capabilities to live your brand.
• Train every employee on your brand and what your organization’s expectations are of every employee in delivering on the brand promise.
• Develop an integrated communication plan for both inside and outside the company and check for understanding of your values and brand. Employees can’t live the brand if they don’t understand it. Communicate in both word and deed.
• Establish a program for defining and sharing best practices and continuous improvement as they relate to delivering on your brand.
Whether your focus is acquiring new customers, or retaining customers; and whether you are starting your company, growing it or selling it, a strong brand is a key element in achieving your goal. The secret is recruiting the right talent to deliver on your brand. (Shhhhhh! Let someone else hire the indifferent employees.)
Kathleen Quinn Votaw is founder and CEO of Golden-based TalenTrust, a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) firm that helps companies accelerate their growth by hiring exceptional talent. Kathleen is president of the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), Denver. Reach Kathleen at kvotaw@talentrust.com or 303-838-3334 303-838-3334 x5.
Right Product, Wrong Marketing Channel
Printed on Cobizmag.com By Esty Atlas
True Story: It was a Friday morning at a Washington, DC subway stop. A typical morning rush hour, there was a man playing an instrument for tips. But this time, something was quite different from the usual street busker. That’s because this musician was part of an experiment being conducted by The Washington Post.
The busker was playing his violin for about an hour in the subway. The test was to determine if people passing by would appreciate his music. They didn’t. The Washington Post purposely placed a world renown violinist into a remote location to study people’s responses.
Herein lies a wonderful lesson for marketing products. Normally, this musician, better known as the famous violinist Joshua Bell, would command, at minimum, $100 per ticket at one of his typical stage performances. But in an a-typical environment (an underground subway station), the public reaction was less than the customary standing ovation he normally received.
Before I tell you the exact response, take a guess. What do you think his recognition factor was: 5 percent, 10 percent, 20 percent, 25 percent?
Despite the fact that he was playing Bach’s legendary “Chaconne” to perfection on his $3 millon Stradivarius violin, of the 1,097 people that passed by that hour, only ONE person recognized who Bell really was. Yep; one person. That one person left a $20 tip.
As for the other 1,096 people who heard him, but thought little of the talent they were passing, he collected $32.17 in tips for a total of a whopping $52.17 earned in an hour’s worth of work. Suffice it to say, substantially less than his normal compensation for a stage performance.
This is the key point. Just because you have a product or service that you believe is wonderful, getting other people to notice is no slam dunk if it’s not put into the right context.
The editors and researchers at The Washington Post were genuinely surprised that the famous violinist wasn’t recognized more. Reporter Gene Weingarten came to the conclusion that basically people are too busy during rush hour to notice true talent. He also concluded that in a concert setting, people are in the right frame of mind and are expecting brilliance. In an unexpected environment, however, people took little notice.
So, how does this experiment translate to a marketing or PR blunder? Simply put, it’s a case of Right Product – Wrong Place.
What does it means for your business?
If you are running ads in the wrong publication, sending out mass direct mail to zip codes rather than to specific people, you are playing the numbers game. It doesn’t work anymore. Consumers tend to screen out anything that looks unfamiliar as they did to the violinist in the subway. They toss unsolicited mail, throw spam into the trash, guard their email addresses with their first born, fast-forward through the commercials of their favorite TV programs, and rely on caller ID to see who it is.
Your challenge in the 21st century of marketing requires strategic new tactics to get recognized. It takes a combination of common sense and creativity to be received positively.
Your Strategy Should Be: Do your homework. Create the right environment for your product or service. Make sure it’s a good fit. If you’re not sure, spend a few bucks to do some market research. Many factors affect marketing, but placing the right product in the wrong places is unlikely to produce the desired results.
Esty Atlas is the public relations director for Hughes & Stuart Marketing located in Greenwood Village. She is a four-time Emmy Award-winning writer, creative producer and coauthor of “Roadrunner Marketing: Strategic Secrets You Wish You Knew.“ http://www.hughesstuart.com.
Facebook Now Sending Weekly Updates on Visitors, Fans
The only true way to evaluate the effectiveness of a marketing channel is to track it. MTECH is all about comparing the ROI of one marketing channel versus another. With the advent of social media, many clients constantly ask me how this helps them increase the bottom line of their business.
Well, Facebook just made that decision a bit easier by now Emailing a weekly report of the visitors, fans and posts to your Facebook page.
By comparing this to other website landing pages driven by marketing advertisements, you can start to see how Facebook compares to the amount of traffic it potentially drives to your site as well as how well it connects to your key audience.
If you don’t have a Facebook Page (not profile) yet, you might be surprised how many of your customers are using this vehicle. So, I encourage you to take a little bit of time, set one up and start playing with it.
Facebook Fans Become Customers
In speaking to various groups and business owners, I get a the most questions about Facebook. What is the difference between a Facebook profile and a page?
How can I use it to promote my business? First of all, realize that your personal Facebook profile is not the place to promote your business. It is like sending a Christmas card to someone with your business card in it…not socially appropriate.
Instead, set up a Facebook Page to promote your business.
So, how effective are Facebook Fan Pages? Are they actually generating customers and leads for your business?
Dessert Gallery, a popular Houston-based bakery and café chain, experimented with a Facebook Fan Page to measure how helpful the popular social media site really is. They set up a “sweet” Fan Page and updated it regularly with pictures, contests, reviews and other items designed to interact with their customers. Three months later, they surveyed over 13,000 customers on shopping behavior and store evaluations and received a significantly higher and more positive response from those customers who became Facebook fans.
In fact, the study found that compared with typical Dessert Gallery (DG) customers, the company’s Facebook fans:
- Made 36% more visits to DG’s stores each month
- Spent 45% more of their eating-out dollars at DG
- Spent 33% more at DG’s stores
- Had 14% higher emotional attachment to the DG brand
- Had 41% greater psychological loyalty toward DG
Creating a Facebook Business Page helped the bakery chain reach a wider range of people and connect with them on a more personal level. More people felt inclined to visit and spend more money, and a large portion of customers felt increased loyalty to the brand.
Colorado sending “anti-business” signal?
This article was published in the Cobizmag.com recent edition.
Short-sighted measures make the state far less attractive
By Diane Schwenke
Businesses across the state have recently been taken by surprise and alarmed by a package of bills proposed by the Governor and passed by the Legislature in record time, which took effect March 1. The bills were aimed at helping to fill the state’s current budget gap by eliminating or reducing state tax credits and exemptions for businesses in Colorado.
These measures have been used across our state for decades to help companies keep and grow jobs. The increase in taxes paid by the private sector as a result of this package will make it more difficult to keep jobs in Colorado and lure new ones to our State in the future.
We know that Colorado is facing unprecedented economic challenges. Unemployment statewide is 7.5 percent and locally it is 9 percent. We continue to hope that the state and local economy is positioned to return to stability and growth this year. However, the decisions we make now, in both the private and public sector, are critical to achieving that goal.
Colorado has very little ammunition to lure business. While other states are rapidly adding incentive packages to attract companies, we are removing several of the key provisions in our limited arsenal. As the country rebounds from the current economic woes, businesses are looking for opportunities to take advantage of an educated workforce and reasonable property costs.
They will be looking for additional incentives to relocate or expand their operations. Colorado will now have less to offer them based on the recent work of the Colorado General Assembly. In fact, we may have just put out the “Closed” sign in terms of the overall message we have sent business, particularly when compared with other states that are seeking jobs for their citizens.
We know the state’s budget problems are severe. We understand the challenges our elected officials face; the private sector has been experiencing and managing the very same issues. Nonetheless, it is short-sighted to balance the budget with one-time funding sources and the removal of economic policies that drive job growth and ultimately tax revenue.
Colorado’s business community contributed, in the past two years, more than $330 million in cash funds and forgone revenue with the repeal of the vendor fee ( a program where the state paid business to collect state sales tax, which business now does at its own expense) to shore up the state’s budget shortfall. This year, we will continue to do what we can to get our state finances back on track.
In the coming year, the $800 million dollar deficit in the Unemployment Insurance Fund will have to be replenished as well-state government does not cover that cost, business does. Finally, we expect we will also be paying an increased property tax rate due to plummeting home values and the constitutional requirement that business make up the difference in those property tax rates. All that, while trying to cope with the loss of revenue in their own businesses at the same time. The total cost of the actions taken previously by policy makes along with this anticipated deficit in the Unemployment Insurance fund will be well beyond $1 billion over a few short years. That was BEFORE this most recent action.
Business is already contributing to help the state close the budget gap. With this latest legislative action the primary job and tax generators of this State are being required to do even more. There will be unintended consequences. Dollars that could have gone into job growth will be going to pay sales tax on energy used to manufacture a ceramic component part at CoorsTek which must compete internationally for sales, or to pay sales tax on the takeout boxes that a Nick and Willy’s pizza comes in. Make no mistake this will affect the bottom line costs of many small businesses as well as large ones…at a time when they can least afford it.
If this recession has shown nothing else, it has shown the direct correlation between the fate of free enterprise and the fate of government budgets. One cannot help but wonder then, why lawmakers in this State choose to make it tougher for free enterprise to return to the profitability that will be required to in order to have more sustainable state tax revenues.
In 2010, as the Chamber and as the local business community, we will continue doing what we can to get our economy back on track. But we cannot do that alone. We, along with other business associations across the State urge our elected officials within the Colorado General Assembly to join us in this goal, to see business as the ally we are in moving this state forward and to partner to promote activities that lead to jobs for Coloradans.
Diane Schwenke is the president and chief executive officer of the Grand Junction Area Chamber of Commerce.
