4 Setting a Goal

The key to marketing is being clear about what you offer. Why? Because if you’re not clear, how are you going to communicate with your customers?  Your potential customers, supporters or members will respond to a clear message.  So, setting a goal can help you convey exactly what you are offering visitors to your business and / or website.

From time to time you will have marketing campaigns and so you need to be clear about your goals.  This applies equally to marketing products or services for sale and to marketing a cause.

Your goal isn’t always to sell as many widgets as possible in the shortest possible time. You need to be clear about the following, when setting a goal:

Some Possible Goals

One approach is to interview potential clients and find out what products or services they need. So, here are some possible goals you may set as a result. Do note you will set different goals from time to time, as circumstances develop:

I’m sure you can add to this list. The main thing is to work on one goal at a time or at least, if you have several goals, make sure you don’t put them all on your home page!  Website visitors respond to clear messages and clear requests.

This post is part of a series based on the circuit questionnaire, the branding element.

0 Using Your Niche Statement

A client, a voluntary organisation, raised a concern about marketing during their session this week.  Having a clear niche statement about what you are about, a proposition or elevator pitch, doesn’t it conceal information from prospective members or supporters?  I suppose the fear is without the detail, inquirers might feel they have somehow been fooled.

Obviously, it depends on how you handle things.  Marketing is not a value free activity and can be used for dishonest purposes.  The best marketing, however, is educational.  If you are seeking allies or genuinely want to offer help with a particular problem, then you need to set out your stall.  Those who use it to exploit make it more difficult for everybody.

Take the analogy of a shop front. You might have a window display with a written statement to encourage people to enter your shop. Once inside maybe 20 out of every 100 will make a purchase.  I haven’t chosen 20 for any particular reason.  It may be many more in some shops and a lot less when considering, for example, visitors to websites.

Shop Window

These 20 would not have entered the shop had they not seen what’s in the window. They don’t see everything you offer just enough to engage their interest.  You need the other 80 visitors because you don’t know which of the 100 will make a purchase until they enter the shop.

Of the 80, some

Your Website

The same dynamic applies online. Your website home page or social media presence act as a shop front. Other pages on the website explain and educate and make offers. Online the numbers may be somewhat more adverse. Maybe only a few percent will make a purchase or sign up to your email list. These conversions are what you want to increase. Those who sign up are equivalent to those visitors who make a later purchase or refer friends to your shop.

The aim online is to engage interest through your home page or social media, for example, and then draw those who are interested into your site where you can provide more information.  This extra information is important. This morning I looked at a site where I am likely to make a purchase.  I have so far not used their offer because their site lacks the detailed information I need to decide.

It is not easy to provide all the information visitors needs a format that is accessible and usable.  It’s best to make a start and then gradually make improvements as you receive feedback or gain fresh insights.  But you won’t get feedback until people visit your site and so there is no need to fear attracting them with clear statements about what your site is about.  Those who are interested will visit and some of them may stick around.

1 The Entrepreneur Marginalised

My father was an entrepreneur.  He started as a sheet metal worker in Sheffield during the fifties for about 30 years until his health meant he had to stop climbing on roofs.

He was a problem solver and perhaps I inherited this from him.  Given a problem, he would design a solution and then make it in steel.

In the early eighties he complained whichever government was in power they neglected the welfare of small businesses.  The Labour Party (my father always voted Labour) saw employers as villains who should be taxed to provide welfare for the workers, whilst the Conservatives for all their rhetoric, support big business and have little concern for small entrepreneurs.

Marginalisation of Small Businesses Continues

Marginalisation of small business is deeply rooted in our culture.  Schooling prepares children to be employees.  Whilst many jobs have disappeared we still train children to be workers.  If you want a trade, something you can practice in your own right or at least turn your hand to when you’re out of work, then you have to work it out for yourself.

Perhaps we’re suspicious of entrepreneurs because our experience of the big ones is so negative.  Go back to the nineteenth century and whilst there were problems in the mills, eg low pay and poor health and safety, the mill owners lived near their mills and contributed to their city.  In Sheffield the names of Firth, Brown, Ward, Graves are well-known because their names are all over the buildings, parks, art galleries, etc they contributed to their city.

Compare them to the mill owners today.  They are rentiers, meaning they own businesses to make money through speculation.  They have no direct interest in the purpose of the business.  Many don’t live in this country, often living abroad for tax purposes.  They use legal tax avoidance to salt away their profits for their own benefit.

Still, there are many small traders; self-employed people making a precarious living.  They contribute to their local economy and make a greater contribution when they know their business is sustainable.

Community Development and the Economy

So why doesn’t the local economy feature in our thinking about community development?  Community audits rarely cover the local economy.  Do what I’ve just done and Google “community audit”.  Search whatever you find for mentions of economy, shops, finance …  The nearest you’re likely to find is employment.  A community audit can involve local businesses but in all the audits I’ve seen the economy is almost invisible.

Churches for example focus on the very young and very old and then wonder why the economically active don’t appear at their services.

Tesco recently opened a massive supermarket in my neighbourhood, one of the biggest in Europe.  Its local contribution is significant – I use its toilets regularly!  When it opened in November 2011, many predicted local shops would close.  So far local shops, including 4 small supermarkets within a couple of minutes’ walk are still open.  They’re struggling but survive.  How?

Because the Muslim community have put heart and soul into building their own economy.  I don’t know how they’ve done it and suspect a lot of unemployed family members work for almost nothing.  But they’re making it work.  They’re creating a community to their own model and that is an option open to all of us.

Remember not all local businesses are traders (and indeed not all are small).  How many self-employed people in your area work from home, perhaps with customers all over the world?  How do you find out about them?

Where are small businesses building the local economy in your experience?  How are they doing it?  Who is visible and who invisible?

2 The Value Triangle

I’m not going to draw a value triangle because (a) everyone knows what a triangle looks like, and (b) I don’t find it particularly helpful. The value triangle is the forced compromise many businesses have to make between three aspects of their business:

Your customer can have any two but not all three. So, sacrifice any one and this is what you get:

The point is, as a customer you can’t expect to optimise all three. If you want something of high quality and fast, expect to pay for it. If you don’t want to spend a lot of money you must sacrifice either speed or quality.

For the business owner, the challenge is to work out what their customers want. My own business provides a non-directive consultancy or coaching service. My aim is a high quality service and I expect to deliver over 3 – 6 months or longer. This may seem slow but it is right for a consultancy service. My prices are relatively low when compared with Done for You website design and offers a service that integrates online and in-person activity, which many website designers do not offer. It is certainly cheaper than employing a worker to build and maintain a website, so long as there is someone who can dedicate the time to work with me. The client who wants a high quality website tomorrow will need a Done for You service. I offer a slower more considered and eventually more effective route to being effective online.

Cost is a real pitfall for many businesses. There is a tendency to under price offers. Think it through this way, are you going to sacrifice speed or quality? If you offer a service at a low price you will need more clients to break even. This will mean you will have less time to focus on your clients and so compromise quality. Or else if quality is essential you will need to extend your contracts over a longer time.

The first thing is to explore how your service compares with others. What alternatives might your clients be looking at and how are they priced? If you can cut the time you spend on each client without compromising quality or add to your basic offer in a way that enhances quality this may enable you to adjust your price. You will normally be aiming for the highest possible price your customers will accept that enables you to provide the highest quality service.

Some business activities have various options. For example, a cupcake business may offer celebration cakes at a premium price. Something really special for a special event. This would be high-priced, for example the business I heard of recently where the owner breaks even on 6 wedding cakes a year.

Another cupcake business might produce large numbers of cheap and cheerful cupcakes that are low-cost, quick to make and tasty. So long as it’s a good product, it should be easy to sell a lot and break even on the cheaper end of the market.

The first business offers high quality at a high price. Don’t expect to order a wedding cake anything other than months in advance. The other offers something over the counter at low-cost. Their quality may actually be fine but not wedding cake standard!

If you get a chance to interview potential clients, it may be worth asking which two out of the three, they would choose first and second. They can rank them in order of importance and then discuss, the implications of discarding their third choice. Sometimes customers will be more flexible when they understand this basic dynamic.

This post is part of a sequence based on the circuit questionnaire, the branding element.

0 How to Build and Sustain Motivation

My father was a self-employed sheet metal worker for about 30 years between the 1950s and 80s.  He used to tell a story about something that happened to him, probably during the 70s.

A business contact invited him to fasten two pullies to their cellar head and use them to lower a massive boiler into the cellar.  He did his calculations and quoted them £300 for job.  They clearly weren’t expecting it to cost so much.  Do he said he’d tell them how to save some money.  “Look” he said, “why don’t you tell half a dozen of your men that they’ll get £10 extra in their pay packet if the boiler’s in the cellar by tomorrow morning.  If it isn’t give me a ring and I’ll go ahead, you’ll be no worse off.”

The next morning, my father received a phone call from his contact.  “You’re a miracle worker!  The boiler is in the cellar!  How did you know they could do it?”  This actually did my father’s business a lot of good because his contact told lots of his friends how brilliant my father was!

It seems there was a window opposite the cellar head and they put a beam across and used it to lower the boiler into the cellar.  This was a solution thought of by neither my father nor his contact.

Perhaps the extra £10 in the pay packet was an extrinsic incentive (I’m assuming you’ve watched the video) but I think this story does line up with Daniel Pink’s lecture.  The 6 men had autonomy.  No-one told them what to do.  (I suspect health and safety concerns would be an issue these days.)  Clearly they were practical men who enjoyed a challenge and the task was clear.  Even though £10 was worth more in those days I suspect the men enjoyed working out the solution to their problem.

At a recent training session, “How to build and sustain motivation in your career”, the leader, Lisa Read, a local coach, recommended the Daniel Pink video.  Lisa shared Daniel Pink’s three characteristics of intrinsic motivation; common experiences of many self-employed people and third sector volunteers.

These three are valuable attributes anyone who is working creatively needs to meet.  They apply equally for online and in-person work.  The problem many people find working online is the technical aspects of the work tend to overpower the creative dimension.  Looking after your website becomes a chore and this is often because it is actually working against your organisation’s aims.

Coaching and non-directive consultancy are pretty much the same activity; they are branches of the same tree.  My consultancy service can help you get your organisation or business and your online presence working together to increase the effectiveness of your organisation and your personal satisfaction as maintaining your site ceases to be a chore.  Once you have mastered your site and have a clear purpose, you will have the autonomy to choose how you use it.

0 Community Development and Community Activity

It is easy to forget why supporting community activity is important, when there are big plans on the table.  This post highlights some of the pitfalls.

Community Development Corporations

During the eighties, I attended a workshop about Community Development Corporations (CDCs), led by two Americans.  CDCs are similar to what we call Community Development Trusts in the UK.

I remember one American observed they were talking to the wrong people.  The room was full of community development workers, council officers and other professionals.  In the States he said he would be addressing a completely different audience.  It would be a mixture of community activists and representatives of foundations.  (Foundations are trusts set up by businesses that support community and charitable objectives and receive tax incentives.)

The representatives of foundations are business people seeking deals with local people.  The aim of a similar meeting in the US would be to help activists and foundations make business deals.

The professionals who attend this type of meeting in the UK would, in the States, be back in the office!  The local activists attend the meetings and negotiate with the foundations.

I have rarely seen anything like this in the UK.  Grants, contracts and loans fund community development,  promoted by professionals who have little at stake in the communities they claim to represent.

Social Enterprises

Social entrepreneurs are perhaps the closest we come to the US approach but many social enterprises are still grant orientated.

This has major disadvantages.  How many social enterprises have failed because they received up-front funding before they had built a customer base?  They fail when their funding runs out before they can build their own income stream.  The grant making body does not treat the grant as an investment and so has little real interest in the outcomes apart from requesting an evaluation report.

Community development must focus on developing people so they are able to raise and manage funds themselves.  Failure to this:

1. undermines the role of local activists
2. marginalises local entrepreneurs
3. denies community groups the business support they would receive with an investment
4. makes social enterprises dependent upon grants, contracts and loans, all tied to the objectives of the body that awards them.

Grants, contracts and loans have a role but when they dominate the funding scene they distort how local organisations function. Development workers need to equip local activists to take on entrepreneurial roles in community.

Can you think of examples of  social enterprises financed too soon or where finance has helped them grow?

0 Partners and Allies

Successful local businesses network. Some are natural networks of suppliers, for example. Other networks succeed because local businesses promote each other.

Sometimes businesses collaborate and form partnerships. These might be temporary, perhaps for a particular project, eg where a particularly challenging client needs co-ordinated support from more than one business. Or businesses might market a particular service jointly. Sometimes two or more local businesses form a partnership business and work together for the long haul.

Other partnerships resource businesses in a local area. So, for example, a group of otherwise unrelated traders might hire, refurbish and manage a building together.

Despite media rhetoric, businesses rarely compete. Most understand their success depends upon the success of others. Building relationships often unearths new possibilities for collaboration.

There are aggressive people who get their kicks from competition with others. They may claim to be successful but upon analysis their business will depend on others in dozens of ways. The competitive mindset is rarely effective, particularly into the long-term. People need to know, like and trust the people they do business with and fear does not help!

The idea of the niche might help us understand partners and allies. It comes from biology and shows how organisms adapt to their environment. What do you need to be successful in your niche?

All these require you to pay attention to other businesses in your locality. Asking for help, listening to potential customers or other traders who will help you find your niche. You may know what you want to do, eg cupcakes, but you need to know how your place sets the agenda. If people want celebration cakes, you may need to adjust your activities. The person who makes 6 wedding cakes a year, however, will have plenty of time to do other things. They have a niche where they can make a living through relatively little effort. The customer is not interested in how much time it takes to make and ice a cake – they care about the contribution the cake makes to their wedding.

Your place sets your agenda; an agenda dominated by its local businesses. So, your business relationships, your partners and allies, are not an afterthought, they are at the core of any local businesses’ practice.

This post is a part of the series based on the circuit questionnaire, the element about branding.

0 Who Owns the Future?

Who Owns the Future by Jaron Lanier offers two visions for the future. Like all such visions, they are incomplete.

The first is a humanistic future, where machines help people become their true selves. It is where people find “the thing they cannot not do” and if they need help machines are on hand. So, the surgeon uses machines to monitor and guide her hand. And note this is a world where all benefit. Those who are differently-abled find machines help them live a full life. The key idea is shared benefits are true benefits.  Maybe this is idealistic but some people have already chosen this future and through collective action we can choose to make this real for all.

The alternative is not, as you might expect, a machine-centred future. Machines have no purpose of their own and Artificial Intelligence is still something we’ll ever see. The alternative hierarchical future is where machines concentrate money and power into fewer hands. Again, some will argue, it is already happening.

Evidence for both futures can be seen in the present. We can choose either.  There are other possible futures, for example where there are no machines because we can no longer fuel them. My hunch is the second future is a step along the road to ecological disaster.

Our Choice

We can choose to use machines to help us become better human beings. The key word in that last sentence is “us”. Who is “us”? I could have written, “We can choose to use machines to help others become better human beings”. Perhaps I mean “those whose hands are on the levers of power can choose to use machines for the benefit of others”. If current practice is evidence of their intentions in this respect, the prospects are not encouraging.  The Volkswagen scandal suggests they have used machines to deceive; no-one believes they are the only ones.

“We can choose to use machines to help others become better human beings”. Look closely at the last sentence and ask, who is “we”? Perhaps the key to this is mutuality or self-interest. When I help others, I benefit too. The key to the future is not machines, it is collaboration. People working together for a better future for all.

Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier in his book “ Who Owns the Future?” argues the impact of machines has not been entirely benign because they have concentrated information into the hands of the few. Kodak used to employ 140 000 people and was worth $28 billion. It is now bankrupt and replaced by Instagram, worth $1 billion and employing 13 people.

Middle class people used to benefit from what Lanier calls levees. Levees are the walls built in fields to retain water and so feed the crops. It used to be possible to build levees around certain activities, where the practitioner’s expertise prevented others joining them without being accepted into the profession. Machines are used to break down these walls. For example, a few years ago you would have had to ask professional video makers to produce a video. Now you can easily do it yourself. Granted there is still a market for good videos from those who don’t have the time or patience to learn to do it well. The same applies to web design.

However, what might appear to be a process of democratisation, where people are able to do things they couldn’t a few years ago has its downside. Are those 13 Instagram employees really worth $76 million each? Compared with Kodak’s employees worth only $200K? If Instagram’s employees are really worth that much, I wonder how many of them have seen anything like $76 million.

Siren Servers

Lanier writes about “Siren Servers”; they

“gather data from the Internet, often without having to pay for it. The data is analysed using the most powerful available computers, run by the very best available technical people. The results of the analysis are kept secret, but are used to manipulate the rest of the world to advantage.”

Think of the impact of siren servers on bookshops. Siren servers practice data scraping, where they pick up bargains on rival bookshops’ websites and then they can undercut them. How do we react? We can choose to visit the local bookshop to look at books but there is always the temptation to find the online offer that undercuts their special offer. The net result is fewer bookshops. Is that what we really want?

(Yes I am a hypocrite.  I use affiliate links to a huge siren server.  I don’t do this for the money (income from my affiliation so far is zero) and I don’t believe this will significantly change.  It serves as a link to more information about the book I’m reviewing.  Where you choose to buy it is your choice.  Perhaps we need a peoples’ movement who check out online and then purchase in shops, where shops are accessible.)

Conclusion

Lanier’s book is a good explanation of the challenges we face from those who control new technologies. He suggests solutions, which certainly open up new possibilities and show how decisions sharing data online are not set in stone.

Whether his solutions are practical is another matter. My view is people need to be realistic about where the power is online and work together to create genuine alternatives. These alternatives must be rooted in our lives as we live them and we decide if machines will aid us.

We have access to information and communication unparalleled in human history. We can allow the corporations to control it and so concentrate power in their hands or we can collaborate to build our own levees, where genuine interactions can take place in our neighbourhoods, cities, towns and villages.

2 Participative Methods 6: Non-Directive Consultancy

Non-directive consultancy differs from the other participative methods because it is an arrangement between a consultant and a consultor, usually one person.  It is not usually an activity for a group, although it is possible for the consultant to work with a few people from the same organisation.    See my previous posts about consultancy for resources about this method.

Usually organisations pay consultants to do research, planning and / or design because they lack capacity to do the work.  The consultant is the person who does the work because the consultant is the expert.

Space shuttle Atlantis a booster analogy that probably breaks down if you push it too far!

With non-directive consultancy the consultor is the expert and does the work.  The consultant boosts the consultor’s brain power.  The consultor knows the situation better than any consultant and so the consultant’s role is to help the consultor think things through. This approach is sometimes called coaching.

The task might be analysis, design or problem solving.  The consultant might have specialist knowledge, although this is not essential.  So, I use non-directive consultancy as an approach to website design in a community development context.  Whilst I may know more about web design, the consultor knows more about the purpose of their organisation and their website.  The consultor is often unaware of how much they do know and the consultant’s task is to help them access and apply their knowledge.  Where I can use my specialist knowledge of website design and community development it is always to help the consultor as they work on their own task.

The project is always in the hands of the consultor and the role of the non-directive consultant is to provide the consultor with approaches to problem solving they need to complete their task.

Four Issue Types for Non-Directive Consultancy

George Lovell developed non-directive consultancy in the context of church and community work.  He identified four types of issue workers might encounter, based upon community workers’ experience.

More information about these can be found in my series of posts about non-directive consultancy.  It may seem obvious these can all be used to mentor new workers.  In practice, all workers benefit from non-directive consultancy support and many experienced workers continue with this type of support.  Similarly, development workers can use these approaches with activists in their neighbourhoods.

Have you had experience of working with or as a consultant in community development?  Why do you think your consultancy worked or failed?  Leave a comment to let me know what you think!

0 Authority

It is difficult to sell your offer if you are not known, liked and trusted. All three are essential for online authority. It is essential to tell your site visitors about yourself and provide evidence in support of your claims.

In real life, you meet with prospective clients and answer their questions. They can see and hear you. They make up their minds from what you say and how you say it; body language and other visible cues.

This is not so easy online because you are dependent solely upon your content. You can use video and this may provide some visible cues people need to decide but it is still nothing like personal encounter.

It is hard to avoid concluding online marketing is more difficult than face-to-face marketing. For larger investments, your aim is to move prospective clients from your website to a face-to-face, phone or Skype meeting. The last two are perhaps not as good as face-to-face meetings but if you are selling something people want and they cannot find anything similar closer to where they are, they do work.

So, the question is how to marshal evidence on your website that will encourage visitors to explore your offer further or for low-priced products make a first purchase.

Is your site full of useful, reliable information? People impressed by your knowledge may give your offer a try.

Closely related to this is generosity, where you provide useful information free of charge. If you can show you are the hub of an online community that exchanges ideas, so much the better. This can be difficult if you are starting out but established organisations can encourage their members to contribute to their sites. A blog can have several authors who should respond to comments on their articles. A strong community of authors and plenty of comments can do more to contribute to site authority than just about anything else.

If this does not work for you, for example if you don’t have time to blog, it is inappropriate or you are not established, what can you do?

Sources of Authority

Here are examples of things you can include on your site to increase authority. Be aware, it is better to integrate these items into your pages and not relegate them to their own page. However, if someone does want to know more about you it can be helpful to have an about page with detailed information in one place.

Authority on Your Website

You don’t want pages of tedious material. You need somewhere (and a Linked-In profile is ideal) where you can marshal this material and clear links to it on your site. Some visitors who are really interested will seek out this information, so it needs to be available.

Where you can, integrate testimonials into your copy. Mostly people need to know they are there and scan them. If someone is really interested, they will read them.

For organisations with history, the challenge is how to convey your authority on your website. If you are starting out, it will take time to grow authority but persevere; small incremental improvements can lead to a more convincing website over time.

If you are clear about what you want to convey, you can adjust some of the above items to meet your needs. For example, you can ask clients to write testimonials to a template that asks them about aspects of your work where you need evidence.

This post is a part of the series based on the circuit questionnaire, the first element about branding.