Category Archives for "Marketing"

When to Choose Brand or Direct Marketing

Brand or direct marketing are two distinct approaches and some marketers claim they’re polar opposites.  They say you can do both but not at the same time.

Outreach or Targeting?

I prefer to think of these approaches as outreach or targeting.  They are distinct roles within your marketing strategy.

Outreach or brand marketing aims to raise awareness of your business.  This approach to marketing raises awareness by telling stories.  People tell stories through public speaking, videos, audio, text (online and off) and images such as logos.

Mostly outreach is free.  You put your message out there and hope people get in touch.  Sometimes people describe this approach to finding prospects as organic.  If you create a video that goes viral, it is free marketing as it raises the profile of your brand.

However, it is not strictly true this approach is free.  You may have paid to create the video that goes viral.  The real point is you cannot measure how successful the video is at creating customers.  Yes, you can ask customers why they came to you but you don’t really know how much exposure to your brand they had.

Targeting is direct marketing to a specific group of people.   Facebook Pay-per-Click ads are an example.  You target the ad using Facebook’s famous database, so that your ad appears on the screens of only those you wish to target.  You pay Facebook for access to their database.

Facebook offers Analytics with its database.  You can work out how many people see your ad, how many click on it and then respond to your call to action.  You know how much you paid Facebook (plus anyone else) to develop your ad.  Divide this into the spend by customers who respond to the ad and you know how much it costs to get that level of income.  If the number is greater than 1, you can afford to repeat the ad.

Measuring Success

1. What do you measure? Do you know your return on investment in targeted marketing?
2. How do you know your brand marketing is worthwhile? You may know how much it costs but you cannot measure its success.
3. Are you clear about what you should measure?

Can You Do Both?

Think in terms of a marketing funnel.  Or the awareness ladder.  Brand marketing works better at earlier stages.  It raises awareness of the problem and possible solutions.  Direct marketing is where you convert interested people into prospects or customers.

Think of these two approaches as complementary. Any given method is either brand or direct marketing.  If you can measure it, it is direct, otherwise it is brand.  Sometimes a method might switch if you work out how to measure or target it.

For example, one early example of direct marketing is the coupon.  It carries a code so you know which publication it came from.  So, you can measure the success of ads in several publications.

Television advertising presents a problem because it is clearly brand advertising.  People might be influenced to the extent they switch brand at the supermarket but it is impossible to know how many are so influenced.

One way round this was to add a code to the TV advert.  Ask customers to write the code on a coupon and they receive a bonus.  Apparently this worked for some businesses.

So, outreach or brand marketing usually aims to raise awareness and command attention.  It helps you find your market.  Direct marketing is about conversions, getting prospects to buy or at least commit to your sales process.  Make sure you know which you are doing, whatever you are doing!

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Marketing to Yourself

Who is your greatest critic?  Nobody cares so much about your business as you do and so you are your greatest critic. Your greatest challenge is marketing to yourself !

Your Greatest Critic

Every business owner carries around a miniature version of themselves, who sits on their shoulder and whispers criticism in their ear.  Don’t believe me?  Where do you hear things like:

Critics are famous for being negative.  So much so that critical is synonymous with being negative.  But critics do dish out praise.  We’ve all seen five-star reviews.  Why do we see criticism as essentially negative?

The trick is to turn your negative critic into a positive critic.  How?  Listen to your critic and work out the story it is telling you.

You learn a lot from marketing to the world but you must also learn to market to yourself.

What’s Your Line?

1. What is the story you tell yourself?
2. Is it helping you?
3. What story could you pay attention to that would be more helpful?

Creative Destruction

What does it mean to market to yourself?  If you do your marketing the right way, you make changes to the world.  You need to come up with something fresh because old ways change nothing.

This is why there is so much more to marketing than the latest technique.  If you have nothing new to share, you cannot change anything, whatever technique you use.

You may be a life coach and compete with a thousand other life coaches.  What makes you and your offer different?  What makes you stand out?  Nothing?  Or is that your critic speaking?

When you stumble upon the one thing that makes you different, everything changes.  It is an act of creative destruction.  The world shifts and now you have to start over again, building something new.

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From Sales Funnel to Hourglass

We’ve all heard about sales funnels and how we all have one or need one.  What does this mean, especially when starting out?

Attention Costs

Getting someone’s attention has a cost attached to it.  This is the brutal truth about business.  You have no chance of selling unless the right people pay attention.

The first thing to be aware of is costs.  Your sales must exceed costs.  Sales are easy to calculate.  However, be aware that once you have a customer, they may make more than one purchase.  So, they may have a Lifetime Value beyond your first sale.

So what are the costs?

Costs are in money and time.  Your time has value and if you put a lot of time into meeting prospects, this impacts business success.

How many steps are there between first contact and first sale?  Each step increases costs.  I normally first encounter people through networking or speaking.  I meet interested people over coffee and usually sell at that stage.  Some funnels have four or more stages and each stage adds to costs.

With a financial value to the initial cost that brings prospects into your funnel, you can calculate the overall cost of turning a prospect into a customer.  If that is less than the lifetime value of the customer, you have a business.

I’ll share some of the calculations below.  For beginners these calculations are something to be aware of but not necessarily to worry about at the stage you are at.

Your focus is on developing offers you can sell and learning how to sell them.  You need to practice selling and so a funnel with minimal steps and low success rate is what you would expect at the start.  As success increases, so will your capacity and funnel calculations become more important.

Your Funnel

1. Every business has a funnel although not every business is aware of it. So, can you describe your funnel?  How many steps must a prospect pass through before they become a customer?  What are the steps?
2. Have you any idea of the lifetime value of your customers? Do they buy once or are they likely to come back for more?
3. How likely are your customers to pass on the word to other prospects? How much of your funnel do these prospects pass through?

Calculating Costs

To make meaningful calculations, you need experience.  You need to monitor prospects and costs.  If you monitor from the start, it helps.  But it is unlikely your practices will be the same once you are established.  Early stages are likely to involve a lot of chopping and changing, so you may find these calculations make more sense once your business works to a regular pattern.

However, it is helpful to be aware of what’s going on beneath the surface, even if you don’t have monitoring in place.

You need some idea of the cost of getting someone into your funnel.  Sometimes this is straightforward, eg a pay-per-click ad has a clear cost for each click.  If you speak at an event and 10 people sign up, it is the cost of preparing for the event divided by 10.

Let’s say the cost of one person entering your funnel is £5.  Estimate the percentage of people who move to the next stage of the funnel.  Say 5 of the 10 people who sign up attend your one to one.  And 2 buy your offer.  So, 50% turn up and 40% sign up.

You divide £5 by .5 and then by .4 and this means the cost of your customer is £25.  This is actually a reasonable cost and many businesses would be envious.  What happens if the cost is £5000 or more?

Mitigating Costs

Two things mitigate costs.  The first is lifetime value.  If customers make further purchases they may exceed the initial cost over time.  This works better for some businesses than others.  It is always worth asking what else you can offer a customer who trusts you.

Second, a satisfied customer may tell their friends and this can slash the cost of your funnel, especially if customers enter your funnel towards the end and are more likely to buy because of the recommendation.

If this happens often, you have an hourglass, where as many enter your funnel towards the end as enter from the top.

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Finding Your Place in the Long Tail

Think about keywords.  These are terms people search for online.  Take the most popular keyword and place it first in line and then the next most popular and so on.  You will generate a curve which starts with very high numbers and quickly declines and tails off.  Obviously, the tail is massively long because of unlimited possible keywords.  Marketers call this the long tail.

History of the Long Tail

The same applied in the 1960s and 1970s.  Supermarkets came onto the scene and opened up shelf space to a range of products.  They could accommodate more than corner shops but shelves were finite.  They held a few products from the short head and very few from the long tail.

If you were in the long tail, your only option was to market locally.  You could try a market stall or door-to-door or even open a specialist shop.

With the Internet, the world changed.  Shelf-space online is infinite.  Amazon can always add more books.  However, there are only so many slots for businesses that accommodate everything.

How much impact does the Internet have on local businesses?  It increases opportunities for small businesses and some have a global reach.  By small business, I don’t mean to imply turnover is small.  A few do very well with a few staff from a single office anywhere in the world.

This leaves local businesses with pretty much the same challenges they had in the past.  Whilst the Internet can help them, for many it is a distraction.

Finding Your Short Head

1. What is the problem your product or service solves?
2. What restrictions do you impose on your market? (Sometimes called your niche, this is likely to be geographical plus perhaps demographics such as age or sex.)
3. Are you aware of fundamental beliefs you hold, likely to attract like-minded people?

Strategies in the Long Tail

No local traders dominate a sector of the market to embrace the long tail in its entirety.  Big business dominates the most popular products and services.

You need strategies that help you develop a short head inside the long tail.  Identify and build your own market, using whatever skills you have.  There are people out there who need your offer but they don’t know they need it or that you can meet their need.

Prices

First, don’t be deterred by the success of others.  The very best are likely to charge very high prices.    Remember these are small businesses with low capacity.

Keep your prices below the market leader’s and you can increase your prices. Then you may find a niche with those who cannot afford the market leaders.  Resist the temptation to lower your prices to undercut your competitors.  This results in a race to the bottom and hurts everyone’s business.

If you need to build your reputation, don’t expect your prices to meet those of the market leader.  The market leader is likely to have overheads you don’t have at the start of your business.

Collaboration

There is another reason you should not lower prices.  Aim not to undercut but to collaborate.  There are many opportunities and the main barrier is to think of competitors as rivals.  If they have done their work, they have a clear offer, a market and worldview different from yours.  Working with people in similar businesses can be beneficial because together you can raise awareness of the problem you solve and perhaps offer joint packages, more effective than working alone.

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Why Focus on Early Adopters?

Some time ago I wrote about Innovation Diffusion.  A new offer enters the market through early adopters and from there diffuses into the wider population.

The Rogers Curve

The shape of the Rogers Curve is the normal curve.  To understand diffusing new ideas or products into the population, you can divide it into three parts (or more).  The left hand side starts with a small percentage of people who are early adopters, they thrive on innovation.

The mirror image on the other side are the laggards who adopt late or possibly never.  The approximately 93% in the middle buy only what is tried and tested.

The temptation is to market to the middle but they are hard to reach because they are committed to their current suppliers.

Early adopters for your product, service or cause are a unique group of people.  If you sell a new software product, you attract a group of people whose tastes in food are mainstream despite their interest in your software.  You seek the enthusiasts for whatever you sell.

Why?  Because there is a chasm between early adopters and the rest.  To cross over to the mainstream is difficult, unless the mainstream get a message from early adopters that it’s worth a try.

How to Find Your Early Adopters

1. What do your early adopters want and what do they expect from you?
2. Where can you find them, in-person or online?
3. How do they differ from the early mainstream?

Crossing the Chasm

If you do cross the chasm, bear in mind you must be prepared.  With early adopters you work with small numbers of customers.  Many businesses fail when they find they cannot cope with hundreds or thousands of customers.  Capacity is possibly your biggest issue at this stage of business development.

Also, expectations are very different.  Your mainstream customers are less interested in innovation and strongly drawn to reliability.

So, do you want to cross the chasm?  If the market overall is large, you may find your business thrives with the early adopters alone.  This is especially true if your early adopters are wealthy enough to buy high-end products.

Plan your business development with the chasm in mind.  You can be viable among early adopters or among the majority but your strategy depends on which you choose.

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Epidemiology and the Spread of Ideas

Last time, I wrote about the spread of ideas and especially how your customers talk about your offers.  This post explores the spread of ideas at a deeper level. How do insights from epidemiology help?

If you want to get ahead …

Way back, the most successful UK advertising campaign took the country by storm.    Everyone quoted a slogan produced by the Hat Council: “if you want to get ahead, get a hat”.  The slogan appeared in printed media from the 1930s, into the 1940s.  Everyone was familiar with it and if you quoted the start everyone else would chorus the final phrase.  Over the lifetime of this slogan, hat sales declined.

This story illustrates the power of a well-turned phrase and that such a phrase does not necessarily increase sales!  Today with the Internet ideas, phrases, videos, etc go viral and as such their originators cannot control them.

If you succeed in getting something passed onto millions, you cannot predict how they will use it.  Certainly, such a phrase could raise several boats, possibly not including your own.

It is more helpful if you get your message circulating among your market.  Satisfied customers  may be willing to spread a good idea, which effectively communicated might go beyond your customers so that you build a tribe of supporters.

Spreading the Word

1. What is it about your idea that gets people to tell others about it?
2. Who is likely to spread it and in what context?
3. What changes could you make to your idea or context that will make people more likely to pass it on?

Insights from Epidemiology

How do parasites, viruses and bacteria spread from host to host?  This study is known as epidemiology and it offers some insights into the spread of ideas.  The parallels are not absolute because the organisms spread tend to remain the same.  The organism that changes as it spreads runs the risk of changing to such an extent it becomes less effective at spreading.

Ideas are more malleable and subject to interpretation.   Arguably, it is playing with ideas that makes us human.  Online, a video may pass unscathed but even so the further it travels the more likely it is to be interpreted in new ways.

In epidemiology, R0 measures the spread of disease.  R0=1 means everyone who catches the disease passes it on to one other person.  R0>1 means the disease will on average spread to more than one person.  R0<1 means the disease passes to fewer than 1 person; it will soon die out.

Most ideas including your offers, have R0=0.  This is the fundamental problem we all face in marketing.  Remember this is not about whether the idea is a good one.  It is about how successful you are at spreading it.

Ideas must be remarkable to spread, how can you make it happen?

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Don’t Talk About Your Business!

Is that right?   If you don’t talk about your business, how is it possible to market it?

Getting People to Talk About Your Business

No-one likes a sales person; someone who goes on about their business and tries to sell to people who are not interested.

The challenge is to use marketing to get people talking about your business.  When others speak on your behalf, it lends credibility to your business.  Mostly, this happens in slow motion, through testimonials.  But imagine people so excited about your offer, they freely discuss it with their friends.  This is hard to achieve but good marketing aims to do this, eg through networking or email lists.

Talking about your business may be out-of-bounds but you can talk about other things.  And other things can be your strategy to get others talking about your business.  Aim to get others talking and you are unlikely to come across as salesy.

Aim to get people excited about something.  Make sure your talking is considered and clear about what you want from people.  Maybe something visual will stick in peoples’ minds.

Perhaps the most effective way is to deliver something of such high quality, people naturally tell their friends about it.  These customers are satisfied.  It is harder to impress people who have not experienced your services.  But not impossible.

Talking About Your Business

1. What do you do that gets people to naturally talk about your business?
2. How do your customers benefit from talking about your business?
3. How do people who are not customers understand your business? Why should they talk about it?

Dig Deeper into Why People Talk

Some businesses and organisations naturally open up into conversations.  Someone who has a new hairstyle is much more likely to talk about it than someone who has had a massage.  Here the topic of conversation is integral to the product or service.  When people see something they are likely to ask about it.

Paying it Forward

The real challenge is getting conversations started when there is nothing to see.  Perhaps some businesses find it hard to get people talking.  For example, someone counselled for alcoholism is unlikely to talk about it.  But then again Alcoholics Anonymous is good at getting clients to talk about it – paying it forward is part of their internal discipline.

Social Pressure

This last example, illustrates another reason people talk, through social pressure.  The AA does this through generosity, its culture encourages members to be generous and spread the word.  Other examples include network marketing and some religions encourage evangelism.  Personally, I find this approach difficult but I know people in network marketing who thrive on it.

Self-Interest

A third reason people talk about you is because it furthers their goals, at least in the short-term.  You might offer an incentive.  Other reasons might include it is something they believe in and want to promote, it helps them meet a goal or contribute to something they support or it might help them make money.  There are many more such incentives. Listen to customers and prospects carefully to work out what might get them talking about your business.

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Tribes Are Not What You Think They Are

Tribes are about connection and meaning; nothing to do with demographics.

Connection and Meaning

One thing your tribe has in common is their attraction to your offer.  However, this does not mean your tribe belongs to you.  They are going somewhere and need a leader.  Perhaps you can fill that role for a period.

Worldview unites a tribe.  They don’t have to like each other but they must share a liking for something.  Sometimes they have no incentive to meet but find, if they meet they do like each other.

Your task is to discern what they like and provide it.  An opportunity to meet others who share an interest or a problem may be an incentive.

People Like Us …

1. Why this group of people and why now? What is it brings them to a common interest?
2. Who exactly are they and how will you bring them together? Online or in-person?  Do they want to be brought together?
3. What do you need to bring them together? Think about things like activities, policies, procedures, written materials, values and vision.

… Like Things Like This

You offer leadership to build a group of people who know, like and trust you and so pay for your services.  Your products and services are crucial.  You must either create things and seek out those who buy them or get to know a tribe and give them what they want (or both).

So, it is important to think about front-end and back-end activities.  Front-end activities draw the right people into your tribe.  They are things like lead-magnets online or loss-leader activities in-person.

Back-end activities take place once people sign up.  Customers pay for some and you can include bonus activities.  These help build that sense of belonging to a group that confers status.

Other activities such as blogging connect those outside to those on the inside.  Indeed, several layers of membership allows people to relate to you in a way that best suits them.

Following this twenty-sixth post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.

Does Permission Marketing Work for You?

When I started as a local marketing coach, I signed up to several email lists from online marketing and business gurus.  This means I wade through numerous emails everyday and don’t read most.  A few have my attention but most do not get a second glance.  Permission marketing is where people appreciate your material.

Understanding Permission Marketing

Permission marketing demonstrates the difference between technical and adaptive marketing solutions.  Email marketing is a technical solution.  You learn how to create, maintain and use email lists and they are a great marketing tool.

Go further and learn how to write great emails with captivating subject lines.  If you can get to emails that recipients find a pleasure to read, you are almost there.

The challenge is to find people who appreciate your efforts and look forward to seeing your emails in their inbox.  This means you are interesting and engaging to them.  You have their attention and so their permission.

Generating Loyalty

1. How do people feel when they sign up for your e-newsletter, blog or lead magnet?  How do you know?
2. What do they believe about your ability to deliver on your promises?
3. How are your messages to them different from junk mail?

How to Win Permission

This is a long game.  It takes time to win attention.  You must turn up day after day with a consistent and engaging message.  People must understand what you stand for and those who find it attractive will reach out to you.

The model most often promoted could be described as give give give take!  You give a lot away in the hope that somehow out of gratitude, your people will in time buy from you.  This can and does work but does not in and of itself build loyalty.

The reason is marketing is often about what the business owner wants.  They lack empathy with their market.  They are not tuned into the lives of their followers.

This is not an either or situation.  I suspect many of the most successful online gurus have a mixture of loyal readers and others who were initially interested.  It is complicated and success is likely to find a range of people with different needs and so different degrees of loyalty.

What makes the difference?

It is the models we use to think about business.  The most common models are confrontational.  Competition between businesses is one example but this easily spills over into relationships with customers. Attempts to motivate customers to buy more, are likely to generate a confrontational market.  But this is how we make sales, isn’t it?

Any business has to sell.  The issue here is the model we use as a context for sales.  We can use unexamined sales models based on confrontation.  Alternatively we can seek non-confrontational models.

For example, the journey or pilgrimage.  You as a business are on a journey and invite others to join in.  Everyone brings something to the journey and is responsible for their part in it.  Some aspects are held in common while others are unique to each person.  The aim is to meet both the goals held in common and those of each person.

Following this twenty-fifth post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.

Why Public Relations and Publicity Don’t Sell

Public relations and publicity don’t sell because they have more to do with your ego than your business.

Brand and Direct Marketing Redux

During the 1980s, I wrote articles about unemployment projects for the Teesside Advertiser.  This was voluntary and I did it for a local church-based organisation committed to supporting the long-term unemployed.

Mostly I wrote about woodwork shops.  They were in vogue at the time with a smattering of car mechanics, food preparation and needlecrafts.  There were a few stand out projects and I remember  foremost, a course put on by a few church leaders called “Dark Holy Ground”.  A course for long-term unemployed and of all the projects I visited, with the most profound impact on their lives.  Why?  Because they based it on listening to stories.

Inspired, I wrote one of my best articles, the only one the Advertiser refused to publish!  Why?  My best guess is that it was religious.  But most of the woodwork shops were religious too.  Going deeper it was edgy.  It was not the sort of thing the Advertiser published.

When you enter the world of Public Relations and publicity, you in effect hand your marketing to someone else.  Someone who cares about their bottom line and has no time for or interest in your message.  Win an award and they’ll be on your doorstep.  That’s safe.  Tell them what the award was for and tread on dangerous ground.

It feels good to be featured in established media but it is brand marketing and many businesses that win such publicity find it does little if anything for sales.  You can spend a lot of time and money chasing publicity but it rarely generates the results you need as a business.

Publicity Tactics

1. Can you list publications that would write about your business?
2. Which ones would write about you in a way you can share with others?
3. What is it about your business that would cause a reporter to take an interest?

Making Publicity Work for You

Some businesses are born publicised, some businesses achieve publicity and some businesses have publicity thrust upon them.  Assuming you have received publicity by some means (and it is good), what is the next step?

Remember this is brand marketing and so the costs in time and money have no relation to the benefit you receive.  An article in a publication will disappear from view in a matter of days.  So, the question is how you can give it a longer lifetime.

There are two dimensions to this.

First, you may be able to give an original or one-off article a greater lifetime.  If it is online, you can link to it on social media and your website.  If it is not online, you can still reference it: “As featured in …”.  You may be able to display the article somewhere, eg restaurants feature reviews in their windows.  Sometimes you see them in offices or some public space.

The other possibility is other media may take an interest once you break through.  Once you are a story, it is easier for other media to take up the story.  You may need to fan the flames.  If they are actively seeking you out, you may need to manage their interest.  Not every story is bound to be positive.

Remember when you hand over your story to others, they make it less edgy.  If you want people to talk about you, consider other forms of marketing.  Perhaps publicity ultimately results in trust and not so much in interest.

Following this twenty-fourth post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.