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Blog posts tagged Advice
Ten signs that you could do with strategic marketing advice
February 01, 2012
There are hundreds of potential marketing advisors for a small business owner. From design agencies, PR specialists, telemarketers, SEO experts, social media bods, media planners, and on, and on. It’s difficult to know who to talk, when and why.
Here are ten signs that you could do with some proper strategic marketing input:
- You’re not 100% sure where new business actually comes from – how do they find your site? What prompts them to pick up the phone, etc?
- You’ve done some work with an agency, but you weren’t too chuffed with the output – what was the brief?
- You get lots of leads, but they don’t seem to convert – what is the sales journey, and how well supported is it with powerful marketing content?
- You get enquiries for work that you don’t really like doing – is your business clear about what it does best?
- You’re always screwed down on price – does your brand and messaging set your business apart?
- When asked what your business does, your people all say something different – is your team clear on what you’re about?
- You rarely get repeat business or referrals – is your customer marketing and networking strategy creating advocates for your business?
- If one big customer left you’d be in trouble – is your business over reliant on one customer, or one market?
- You’ve tried telemarketing, PR, advertising or another tactic and it hasn’t delivered – do you have an integrated plan with momentum that all fits together and ties into your sales process?
- You’ve read the books and been to some courses – do you know that you need to give marketing some attention, but never quite get around to it when you’re back at the office?
These are all real scenarios that we’ve heard from small business owners in the last 18 months. Small businesses often make do with a ‘marketing-come-reception’ set-up, working with the marketing suppliers run by friends of friends, or the people down the road. And, there’s nothing wrong with that…if you know exactly what you’re doing on the marketing front. If you have an effective strategy clearly mapped-out, and a good grasp of the interplay of the key marketing tactics, you can indeed put together a top notch freelance team to deliver against your sales and marketing objectives. If, however, you’re feeling your way through the discipline, working it out as you go, then you’ll probably find that each supplier you speak to seems to sound pretty sensible.
You may struggle to find your way through all the ‘good ideas’ that they come up with to configure a watertight marketing operation that supports every step of your sales funnel.
In larger organisations it’s the job of the marketing director to pull all this together. Coming in on salaries upwards of £65k, most small business owners we meet simply can’t afford to have a hard-hitting marketing director on their team. So, what do you do? If you find yourself nodding in recognition at any of the statements above, it would be sensible to find yourself a strategic marketing partner who can be your marketing brain – working out what you need to say, to whom, when and through what channel.
- Article originally appeared on Clear-Thought.co.uk
Top six tips to better business blogging
July 30, 2010
OK, so you’re blogging away, producing content regularly and starting to enjoy the writing process.
Visitor numbers are rising, albeit slowly, and you’re starting to deliver useful content. But something isn’t quite right, something doesn’t add up. There’s still a stilted edge about your blogging, something mechanical and clunky. Want to know what it is?
It’s probably due to my Number One of these quick six tips to better business blogging. If it resonates, you know you’ve got some changing to do. Nothing worse than that niggling internal voice telling you to change what you’re doing. Here goes:
1. Be authentic
Lose the corporate, parental, unemotional writing style. It’s dull, boring and your readers won’t engage. Try dropping your barriers and opening up. Write with passion, authenticity. Listen to yourself.
2. Be confident
There’s nothing worse than a safe, anodyne, sterile blog. Open up, be confident in your knowledge and expertise. Now share it!
3. Be challenging
Do you accept everything you see, read or hear? No? Thought not. So challenge what you see, hear and read out there, too. And highlight your challenging nature in your blog. Ask questions to make your readers stop and think. You can challenge anything.
4. Be humble
Not sure what this means? For me, it means there will always be better, smarter, faster, richer people blogging out there. And I am grateful that they share their mistakes, so I don’t have to make the same ones. Be humble for the wise old coots who exist.
5. Be funny
Nothing worse than a corporate blog which is totally devoid of humour. Boardroom bores. The antidote? Try humour, flex your funny bone, and engage with some witty banter online. Lightness, fun, and frivolity can get powerful messages across very well.
6. Be passionate
Are you passionate about your areas of expertise? Yes? Well, why hide it? Too many business blogs are devoid of passion. With so much competition out there, one of the best ways to stand out is to demonstrate your passion. Get emotional. Fight your corner.
Extra tip: just to keep you on your toes. Final nugget – ignore the critics, cynics and emotional drains in business. They are too many to count.
Wish them well, ask the gods that be for their success and happiness, and send them on their way. Ignore it and focus on the positive elements to your blogging instead.
There will always be a critic in the background. Usually an unhappy one.
- This article orignally appeared at BristolEditor.co.uk
Coming in August: great IT advice for businesses
May 25, 2010
I’m pleased to report that the wraps are off: The IT Donut, a new website for small businesses, will be launching the week of 23 August.
The IT Donut will be the fourth in a family of websites. You might already have seen the Marketing, Law and Start-Up Donuts. Its aim will be to demystify every aspect of business technology.
Expect heaps of advice about choosing, using and generally not getting totally frustrated with IT in your business.
I’ve taken on the role of editor (the next few months are looking to be very busy), but thankfully there’s a whole team of great people from BHP Information Solutions working hard on the site too. And because you can’t substitute for first-hand knowledge and experience, we’re on the hunt for experts who know all about IT at the sharp end of business.
You see, when businesses use IT, there’s an ideal world, and there’s what actually happens. The two often differ quite considerably.
The IT Donut isn’t going to live in the plain sailing, smooth running and largely theoretical ideal world. It will acknowledge the situations and challenges businesses face every day with their IT.
Although the team behind the website is packed with experience (I’ve been writing about small businesses and IT for years now), we need people who’ve been there and done it to help us cover every area. These IT experts are the people who’ll really bring the site to life.
So if you know a bit about IT in business, I want to hear from you. You might be an expert in web hosting, networking or accounting software. Or you might be a business that’s experimented with cloud computing, open source software – or gained some other knowledge that you’d like to share.
Whatever your expertise, give me a shout. It’s your chance to be involved in one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever worked on – and to get some great PR while you’re at it.
John McGarvey is the editor of the forthcoming IT Donut and is happy to discuss ideas and opportunities with you.
Perhaps it's time to pimp your PowerPoint?
November 06, 2009
If you make presentations frequently, or are likely to need to, take a few moments to hear some very useful advice from some world class experts who know how to make PowerPoints really work.
What do you think? Could some of these techniques help you add life your PowerPoint game?
At the Risk of Sounding Cheesy... Please Smile
July 13, 2009
Is this a blog from a professional marketer, or a thinly disguised rant from a miffed customer? I don't know, but after a visit to my local coffee shop this morning, I felt compelled to share a few thoughts on the subject of... smiling.
I've read no end of marketing books over the years and always taken some great advice from each one, in addition to some cracking statements that I use when training small businesses in the art of marketing on a shoestring. Most recently, the line: "the process is as important as the outcome" about the delivery of a product or service, really stuck out. And this morning, it was in at the front of my mind when being served by the owner of the coffee shop. She did the right things, albeit in an efficient manner that was bordering on brusque. However, she didn't make eye contact with me and she failed to smile even though I gave her a big beam. What made it worse was that she became animated and smiling when talking to her colleague.
It got me thinking that in our zeal to find the big marketing miracle at the end of the rainbow, we can often overlook the fact that the smallest things make the biggest difference. It's not simply what we actually deliver - whether we sell cakes and coffee or build websites, it is how we actually deliver and whether we make our customers feel fabulous. In my experience, many small businesses can get caught up in searching high and low for their unique selling point when in fact what makes them unique in a sea of "me too" products and services is how they interact with their customers.
So, a warm and genuine smile can go a long way, especially if we deliver products and services face to face. But, if we are not within an arm's-length of our customers, the words we use to describe what we deliver should communicate passion, warmth and enthusiasm. I believe that relevance, simplicity and humanity will define the successful brands of the future and not just the clever use of technology. Now will someone put the kettle on!
Marketing Donut to host Twitter Conference - Tuesday 30, June #mydonut
June 26, 2009
On Tuesday, 30 June at 0930 GMT, this will be the day that Marketing Donut, more pertinently @marketingdonut, will make use of the power of Twitter in all its real-time networking glory. We’ve decided to host a “conversation conference” on Twitter so that small businesses, entrepreneurs, marketing experts and anyone who wants to be a part of this online event can chat about all things marketing.
There will be a concentrated burst of activity between 0930 GMT and 1100 GMT. To get things going, we will be discussing topics and articles from the Marketing Donut. There will also be opportunities for small businesses to raise their issues or queries with our marketing experts. We also want to connect small businesses with fellow small businesses. It will be a simple conversation about your marketing activities in an online forum full of those who want to help you. This is not an exclusive invitation only event; we welcome the insight of anyone with a Twitter account.
There are a number of ways to get involved:
Tweet comments about something you have seen on Marketing Donut
Ask a marketing related question. You could be the one person who starts off a great debate or pose that marketing question you always wanted to ask.
Engage in a one-on-one conversation. It could be with one of our experts, a fellow entrepreneur, or a complete stranger.
You could Retweet a tweet that appears as part of the flow of ideas that you find useful, funny or of interest to your followers.
Following the event
Following the event is easy too, it may be that you don’t want to jump right in and that monitoring the event is all you want to take from the online conversation conference. If you use desktop Twitter applications, such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic, it is possible to set up search windows which will feed the whole flow of the conversations in real-time. Simply search for the hashtag topic of “#mydonut”
This will be a great opportunity to get involved with small businesses and marketing experts alike. Look out for #mydonut come Tuesday 30th June and be a part of what is hoped to be a fun and worthwhile Twitter event hosted by Marketing Donut.
Join in, use the #mydonut Hashtag, and let’s have some fun!
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